John,
I think one of the hardest parts of watching the pundits and folks on social media discuss the election results these past few weeks is the refusal of many to take accountability. We (including myself) made mistakes and it’s time to learn to do better.
I’ll start by taking some personal accountability: I met with President Biden one-on-one in the Oval Office fourteen months ago. I distinctly remember him asking me how he could win the youth vote in the election. Looking back, I realize now that I should have told President Biden to drop out of the race then and there.
Instead, I told the president what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to hear. If I had the courage to say what I should have said, I might’ve been kicked out of the meeting. And even if I weren’t, it’s unlikely he’d have listened to me.
What made it hard to say that is what I think many also felt, which is that President Biden had so many significant accomplishments under his belt. He was the most pro-labor president in history, passed the first gun law at the federal level in 30 years and spearheaded the largest investment in climate action ever. He was handed a pandemic-era economy and did everything he could to turn it around.
But just because President Biden was successful didn’t mean he could win the election, and Democrats should have reckoned with that fact far sooner – including myself.
There were serious concerns about whether President Biden was up to the job. We should have been honest about that long before the disastrous June debate.
The truth of the matter is that, even during our meeting, I had some unspoken fears about the youth vote, especially young men. I knew that President Biden and Democrats were largely losing this group. We needed a new message – and a new messenger throughout the campaign – if we were going to reach them. The consultant class didn’t want to hear about that, but I should’ve been more forceful about voicing my concerns and pushing for change. I should have pushed even harder to make sure we focused more on young voters when I was yelled at by 45+ year old consultants who insisted the youth vote was fine after I raised these concerns publicly prior to the election.
In retrospect, that meeting with President Biden that I was so excited about will be a permanent nightmare for me. But it’s also a clear lesson on how I can do better. This is only one piece of the puzzle about why we lost, but it’s a piece I can own.
I’m done with telling people what they want to hear, no matter how powerful they are. As Democrats, we should be honest and hold each other accountable.
I’ve seen just how important the work we’re doing here at Leaders We Deserve really is. We aren’t going to win the youth vote with the old guard of Democratic establishment politicians from yesterday. We need to lift up the future of our movement and support the next generation of bold, progressive leaders.
If Democrats want to win with young people, we can no longer represent the status quo. We need to support the leaders who understand our struggles and are willing to stand up and fight for us. Leaders who understand that while institutions are important we also need to do the real work to improve them rather than sending the signal to voters that all is fine even as our government gets hollowed out by the billionaires like Elon Musk who want to starve the middle class by crushing unions and poison us by cutting environmental regulations.
We need to give young people a real reason to vote for Democrats – otherwise, we’ll continue to lose like we did in this election.
Thank you for staying in the fight, John.
David Hogg
Leaders We Deserve
