The days between Thanksgiving and New Years are always filled with reflection. The act of giving thanks requires us to reflect on the goodness in our lives. December is full of personal and professional reviews of the past year.
In years in which national elections are held, this process takes on additional importance and meaning. When you win, the lessons and direction always seem clear. When you lose, you strive to figure out what went wrong and what needs to be changed.
For those of us in the Democratic Party and the pro-democracy movement, this was a year of losses. We lost the presidential election. We lost control of the U.S. Senate. We failed to regain the House. The losses could have been worse, but they are defeats, nonetheless.
While it is important to learn from the last election, I worry that we are often too quick to assign blame or insist on simple answers to the complexity of voting behavior in a highly heterogeneous country. Relatedly, there is a near primal desire to insist that everything that was done must have been wrong, every decision was dumb and every dollar misspent.
Take, for instance, the recent fixation on the Harris’ campaign’s concert events. There are good reasons to have these events. They motivate some voters and help capture the attention of many others. Yes, they are expensive, but no one can credibly say the Harris campaign lost due to lack of money.
If your takeaway from the 2024 election was that the problem was concerts, campaigning with Liz Cheney or the response to a specific advertisement, you are missing the forest for the trees. No one campaign tactic decided this election. No one change will solve the problems in the future.
We will also hamper ourselves if we do not reflect on what went well, what worked and what was improved from past campaigns. For my part, I am proud of the work my law firm did in preparing for potential recounts and election contests. Though it was not needed, I can confidently say we were better organized for a close election in 2024 than when we defeated Trump and his allies more than 60 times in 2020.
In fact, the entire pro-democracy movement was more organized and more effective in protecting voting rights and preventing voter suppression and election subversion in 2024 than ever before.
This is not to excuse what went wrong or ignore the enormous damage Donald Trump will do to the country and democracy. Rather, it is to remind us, in this time of reflection, to celebrate the good things we accomplished and build on them for the future.
As we look back on what worked and what did not, I offer you a few of the articles I think have stood the test of time and are worth looking at anew as we give thanks, look back and plan for the future…
