One simple trick to fix the Democratic Party

...does not exist!

An important disclaimer before I get into any of this: All of this is just from me — not the org. It is just *my* opinion, as a person who’s been working in professional politics for nearly 15 years and who knows exactly how hard all this shit is.

In the last six months since the election — and ramping up more in the last few weeks as we have a better sense of what really happened in 2024 thanks to updated voter files — there have been a steady stream of stories and debates about how to fix the Democratic Party.

I gotta be honest: My reaction to most of them is just a simple “LOL.”

LOL, sure, $20 million on research for how to talk to men.

LOL, okay, try and create “a Joe Rogan for the left.”

LOL, more ads, LOL, more polling, LOL, LOL, LOL.

It’s all just so silly, and so clearly chasing shiny, flashy objects.

But more than that, it’s all just so small. Too many people are trying to win the last election instead of trying to win the next ten.

FWIW, I get why they’re doing that. The shiny objects tend to get the cash, and there is simply not that much cash to go around, relatively speaking.

Of the top 25 donors in 2024 who gave money we can relatively easily track, the top 7 alone gave over $1 billion exclusively to Republicans — Elon Musk, the biggest political donor of 2024, gave 4.5x more than the biggest Democratic donor, Michael Bloomberg.

And consider that Republicans can go hard on “the elite” because “the elite” who fund them know it’s all bullshit — that when given power, the GOP will make rich people even richer.

There are simply fewer billionaires who are excited to give money to people who, if they win, will then make life harder for them.

You can and arguably should have very strong negative feelings about the role of the super-wealthy in our political process — but in order to fix that process, we have to first win elections, and in order to win elections, we need to do a bunch of things, and doing things costs money.

Anyway! Because “LOL” is not constructive to this conversation, I want to throw out some thoughts on how to rebuild the Democratic Party and set us up to win not just in 2025 and 2026 but hopefully far beyond, too.

My number one suggestion always and forever is to recruit and support young diverse leaders to run for local office. (Like what Run for Something does!)

I suggest this both because it’s my job to — chip in at runforsomething.net/donate !! — but also because I genuinely believe it.

Better candidates who can communicate authentically and who know what they believe make everything else better.

The ads are more effective, the organizing is more exciting, the media is more engaging — if an election is a metaphorical meal, candidates are the core ingredient, and everything else is the kitchen tools, the chef, the plating, etc.

It all helps and it all matters, but when you’ve got the best possible ingredients, you’re starting at an advantage.

And in particular, I think electing great people locally to offices like city council, school board, and state legislature can transform people’s lived reality in concrete material ways. (I wrote about this a bunch in my post on the NYC mayoral election.)

Voters don’t vote for ideas — they vote for people. Who the person is matters and whether a voter can like them, connect with them, and thinks they like the voters in return is just as important as the policies they advocate for. Message does not exist in a vacuum distinct from messenger, especially in a personality-driven attention environment.

What Run for Something does in the form of broad candidate recruitment combined with personal candidate support is cost-effective, proven to work (see: the 1,500+ people we’ve helped elect in 49 states), and I believe it’s more important than ever, especially when the party is in desperate need of big generational change.

But I also believe we need to “yes, and…” all of this.

It would be absolutely transformative for Run for Something to have the same amount of money as, say, one of the top senate races in 2024 (that Democrats mostly lost…).

But even if we did, our work alone is not enough.

That’s part of what makes this debate about the future of the party so messy.

There is no silver bullet, no “that was easy” button we can press. No single tactic or strategy — not one ad, nor message frame, nor media project — will win any single election or sustain that win beyond it.

We need to do lots of things and we need to do them for decades.

A non-exhaustive list of what I mean:

On communications: We need media, yes, and we need partisan creators who can yell at us sometimes but mostly yell at the GOP, and we need cultural/entertainment creators who can talk about everything but politics but can serve as a Trojan horse of sorts for our values. We need it for all kinds of communities, in all kinds of languages, across the full ideological spectrum, and across every platform. We also need candidates who can leverage those media spaces, who know how to create spectacle when the moment calls for it, and who are unafraid to be themselves.

On governing: In the places we do win, we need to do everything we can to make college more affordable and accessible (because more education helps us win!) and housing more plentiful (so people can afford to stay in blue states!). We need to think of “ending isolation” as a political problem because isolation is the breeding ground for fascism — and to fix it, among other things, we need better public transit to help reduce car culture, a federally-established four day work week so people have more time for family and friends, stronger unions, paid family leave and universal childcare, and again, more affordable housing. (I really do believe housing is everything!)

On opposition: When we’ve got the power to do it, we need to hold Trump and the GOP accountable — which is its own separate body of work that experts much smarter than me have lots of thoughts on, but broadly speaking, we need to show that actions actually do have consequences.

You’ll notice I’m not laying out specific ideological markers for campaigns. You can disagree with me on this, that’s fine, but I think demanding or declaring a specific set of policy priorities as “what we need to campaign on to win” runs counter to the need for candidates to be authentic communicators. (It also ignores the changing thermostatic nature of public opinion — both events and compelling leaders can change how people feel about the issues; what is popular today may be disqualifying tomorrow. Plus, we need to be able to win in lots of different places! While there are certainly things I want the politicians that *I* vote for to believe, I’m not going to suggest every Democrat needs to hold my exact ideological preferences.)

More than any specific policy agenda, we need leaders who know themselves, know what they believe, and who will hold true to those core values, even it might make some people or interest groups mad.

Voters don’t need to agree with a candidate on every issue to like them, respect them, and vote for them.

However, I do have a few specific projects in mind though…

Because I can only be who I am, I do have a few specific tactical ideas that, if funded with sufficient start-up capital at the beginning and if sustained for a decade+ could make a difference in ways big and small.

But to be clear: I am not raising money for any of this. I am not starting any side projects. (I have enough on my plate, thanks.)

I am not doing anything except throwing these ideas out to start a conversation — to to illustrate what I mean when I say that we can and must think bigger than just what would have won 2024, and ask what might help us win in 2028 or 2032 or 2040.

With all that in mind, these fall under two categories of work…

Fixing our brand (and building community in the process):

We should take cues from companies who do experiential marketing — think, brand trips to Tahiti, or on-site activations — and ask: How can we give people IRL experiences (both explicitly political ones but also just good-vibes ones) that change how they feel about the party and about each other?

Lots of people throw out the idea of community centers or third spaces. I think those are right, but I have more specific thoughts…

I think we should open extremely low-cost (like $15 or less low-cost) or even free indoor play-spaces with hours that actually reflect how kids live — so open 8am-7pm, especially on days school or childcare is usually closed, on holidays, and when the weather sucks.

The logistics and insurance on this would be hard, but imagine how transformative it would be for anyone with kids under the age of 6 to be able to associate “Democrats” with “the people who give me a very affordable place to take my kids when it’s raining, school is closed for the holiday, and I’ve already run out of toys to play with by 8am.” (And what if that indoor playground welcomed candidates for office, or had voter registration tables, or hosted 9am candidate forums?)

Here’s another idea: Much like some religious organizations do, what if we give people money to have others over for dinner? I speak from personal experience on this one: while it hasn’t been underwritten by any non-profit or religious org, we’ve been hosting dinner for friends every Saturday in 2025 — and I gotta say, while this year has been challenging in other ways, I haven’t once felt lonely.

Giving people grocery (or food delivery) giftcards with the specific intention to gather with others would be cool as hell.

Similarly, we should run a low-cost babysitters club that enables parents to be more civically engaged. Pay for childcare at city council and school board meetings, or to volunteer on campaigns, among other things.

More broadly, it’s worth asking: What can we do to prove that we give a shit about making people’s lives better and create trust that we’ll do what we say we want to do — especially when we don’t have governing power to pass legislation?

To get information in front of people:

Funding the media outlets and creators directly is good, but they still have to find audiences. So what if we went to the other side of the equation and funded the audience?

Cover the cost of local news subscriptions for people — maybe it’s some amount of money a year per household to use specifically for paying for local media outlets (broadly defined), maybe it’s a perk of “party membership” (again, broadly defined), maybe there’s another entry-point — but the goal is (1) help combat the cost barrier that keeps people from engaging in local outlets and (2) support local news by giving them both money and subscribers.

Downstream effects would include more news readers (good for democracy, and also for the outlets, who could sell ads against those guaranteed eyes!), more outlets for candidates to get their message out (good for candidates!), and better government (stronger local news outlets means more accountability which tends to mean less corruption/bad actors).

Then keep asking: How else can we get information in front of people in a way that breaks through?

Is it mailing print papers to people every day, old-school style? Is it underwriting local news outlets holding events that foster community? Is it bringing back local alt-weeklies? (Is it all of the above?)

There are some really interesting one-off models out there — I’m obsessed with the Midcoast Villager in Maine, a newspaper that also runs a community coffee shop — but we need more of them and we need them everywhere.

OK, yeah, good ideas in theory, but those are all really expensive; some of them (like childcare or local news) are what government should be doing; and none of it will stop Trump today.

That’s basically what my husband said to me when I described these ideas to him this week as we pushed our kids in the swings at the playground.

He’s not wrong. (Annoyingly, he rarely is.)

But here’s the thing: Everything we’ve been trying up until this point has gotten us to this point.

So why not throw some big ideas at the wall?

Why not try stuff that can’t be measured in cost per vote or gross rating points or a clearly defined ROI?

Why not make big ambitious long-term investments?

Last year Democrats alone spent nearly $6.7 billion on campaigns, and my guess is that’s undercounting it.

If we spent even a small portion of that — let’s say $1 billion — on upfront capital for all kinds of community-building and communications projects (plus, ahem, candidate recruitment, which we spend basically peanuts on) maybe the next campaign won’t require us to spend as much.

I’ve been saying it in nearly every interview and everything else I’ve been doing for my new book: What happened yesterday does not have to dictate what happens tomorrow.

Arguably our party has hit rock bottom. (I hope.)

We get a chance to start anew and reimagine what can come next. That’s scary. It’s also freeing. Embrace it.

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The long weekend with the kids plus some chaotic repair work happening in our apartment has limited my book reading, but I do have a few other links for you:

• I appreciate the ongoing discourse about male loneliness and the political ramifications of that — and I thought this was very well-written — but everytime I read stuff about this, all I can think is: Everyone is lonely! [The NYT]

• Similarly: Is the problem we don’t have enough young men getting famous writing literary fiction? Or is the problem that no one — male or female — gets famous writing literary fiction anymore? [Vox]

• There used to be a clear path to a publicity campaign. Now there are 1 million paths, none of them are obvious, and no one knows what works. A problem for Hollywood, a problem for politics, a problem for anyone trying to sell anything. [New York magazine]

• “We've made "work" synonymous with suffering, when it should be synonymous with building. Tending a garden requires effort, but you get to eat the tomatoes. Raising children is exhausting, but you get to watch them become themselves. Creating something meaningful will drain you, but you get to point at it and say, "I made that."“ {Maalvika on Substack]

• Not to be that person saying “listen to me more!!” but I loved having this conversation with Samantha Bee — we covered a whole range of topics, from motherhood to the gerontocracy to what we would do if we were 30% braver. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube.

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