We don't know anything!!

A rant about hubris

I wasn’t originally going to regularly write about the Democratic Party again this week, but I’m deeply irritated about a combination of hubris and stupidity that keeps bubbling up in conversations, so, here we are.

Some background: In my capacity at Run for Something, I am in pretty regular conversation with candidates and elected officials at all levels of the Democratic Party — this is not a humble-brag; it’s just part of the job. (Our incredible team is talking to even more people on an even-more regular basis; I see weekly report-outs from those convos, too.)

A thing I’ve been hearing a lot over the last few weeks — especially from some of our alumni who are considering runs for higher office, but also from folks lower down the ballot — is making me deeply furious:

As they explain their decision making process and talk through the factors, they’re telling me: “The party doesn’t want me to run.”

When I probe a little more, I’m told variations of “the party doesn’t want this to be a competitive primary,” “the party thinks I could win the primary but not the general, and “the party wants a different kind of candidate here.”

I’m hearing rumors (or have literally seen) threats against staff or consultants who decide to jump into primaries, oppo being shopped around to try and discourage competitive races, and promises to withhold funding from a state if a particular candidate gets in.

Let me be abundantly clear:

These are empty threats because the official party institutions (and even most of the affiliated super PACs which basically function as official arms) are not as powerful as they’d like to be.

This is stupid strategy.

And most importantly: They don’t know shit about shit.

How many times do we have to learn this lesson over the last decade?

When we have had competitive primaries — see: 2018 midterm races or the 2020 presidential primary as two big recent examples — we come out ahead. We are stronger because our base voters were able to pick the candidate that excited them and the candidates and campaigns themselves were more battle-tested and ready for a fight.

When we’ve failed to do competitive primaries — see: the 2024 presidential election as the most recent big-time whoopsie — we’ve fucked up.

Competitive primaries are not a ~waste of resources~. They are how both organizers and candidates build experience, how we decide what we as a party believe, and how we bring new leaders into the fold.

I get why avoiding competitive primaries might make sense for the GOP (if they had the muscle to enforce it) because their primary voters seem to be absolutely batshit. But Democratic primary voters aren’t as loony! (Literally, there is data about this!)

It’s just dumb. It’s also the height of hubris. We have no idea what voters want beyond “leaders they can connect with.”

Voters are people and people are whacky.

We — the “we” here being professional political operatives who spend ungodly amounts of time and effort deep in this work, but also basically anyone else — don’t know who can win. We don’t know who will break through. We don’t know where public opinion will go; we don’t know what events might happen that wildly change the outcome of the election; we don’t know how candidates will respond under pressure. We just don’t know.

We can try and influence things, sure, but to pretend we know the outcome before the campaigns have even begun is foolishness.

I know this might sound bananas coming from someone who runs an org that makes endorsements. But we have always made it clear — literally, it’s in our first strategic plan from 2017, where we noted that no one would have recruited Trump to run for office but hey here we are. Our role is to open the door to lots of kinds of people to run, and then empower campaigns to make the best possible arguments to voters. Voters decide, not us — as scary as that may be.

So if you are thinking about running for office for the first time, or you’re currently thinking about running for higher office and hearing “no,” I want to say explicitly:

Fuck ‘em.

The official party orgs are not as powerful as they imagine themselves to be (or as the conspiracy theorists claim them to be.) The threats are mostly confidence games; they are bluffing.

Yes, they can make life a little bit harder for you, but not in the ways they think they can, and not in ways you can’t overcome. And especially if you’re in a red state or a tough district, I promise, if you win the primary and make the general competitive, people will find a way to get involved (and if you win, you can be sure they’ll take credit for it after.)

If you work for or lead one of this party organizations, gut check yourself for even a second and ask: Have I been right, or have I gotten lucky? And is doing this undermining trust in my institution?

One of my hotter takes that may surprise you is that I think it’s really important for the official party operations to be neutral arbiters.

Their job is to set up the primary process in a way that respects voters and allows for full input. To put their finger on the scale (or even be perceived as such, even if it’s not grounded in reality) undermines the goal of establishing trust and credibility.

This is important now; it’ll be even more important going into the 2028 presidential primary process, which will require everyone to trust the proverbial referees — because if voters feel like the party is forcing a candidate down their throats again, we’re fucked.

I say all this as someone who loves primaries: If you want to engage in one or influence one, do it from an outside group, ideally with a point of view — an ideology, an identity, an issue, whatever. (“Because I think this is who can win the general” is not a point of view I personally find defensible or compelling, but if that’s your point of view, fine.)

And if you’re on the inside, stop being a bully before folks even get in the race. It’s shitty, it’s not going to work, and it will come back to bite you.

End of rant. Let me know what you think.

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Only one book rec this week:

• The Love Haters by Katherine Center: I really like Katherine Center’s backlist of rom-coms. This one about Katie the filmmaker who gets dispatched to Key West to make a documentary about handsome rescue diver Hutch (the brother of Katie’s boss, Cole) and ends up falling for him while she learns to love herself again is not quiiiiite as good as some of her other books but it’s definitely charming. If you need to turn your brain off, this will do!

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Other reading/listening recs:

• I did a Q&A about When We’re in Charge with

  Anne Helen Petersen
  for her newsletter — this is one of my favorites of the book press tour yet. [Culture Study]

• “Despite the circumstances, despite the unknown, we are approaching an extremely Millennial summer.” [The Trend Report]

• How millennials are freaking out about being halfway to death, when everyone’s broke and already in therapy. {Vox.com]

• If you’re interested, on June 11th at 12pm PT/3pm ET, I’m doing a virtual convo with Juliet Schor, one of the nation’s foremost experts on the sociology of work, all about four day work weeks. [RSVP, hosted by 4 Day Week Studio]

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“It’s a vision of leadership in a post-Boomer era: one that prioritizes listening, boundaries, and follow-through. It challenges us to move past performative DEI statements and into the messy, necessary work of real accountability. For every burnt-out nonprofit staffer, every emerging leader who’s been told to “wait their turn,” and every Millennial or Gen Z team member quietly rewriting the rules from the inside: this book is a battle cry.”

That’s what people are saying about When We’re in Charge.

You can order it in any format you’d like — hardcover, e-book, or audio book (narrated by yours truly) anywhere you get books, including Amazon or Bookshop.org or literally anywhere else.

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