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The amount of snow on my driveway yesterday wasn’t enough to justify breaking out my brand new snowblower, but the length of my hair was enough to justify an emergency trip to the barber shop. “Emergency” may sound hyperbolic when applied to a haircut, but of all my neuroses, the one where I am incapable of completing any task while my hair is this long is the worst.
Once I got in the chair, the barber asked how the weather was out there—a great conversation opener even when you are a mere ten feet from an all-glass storefront and exterior door. It gave me the opportunity to deliver a road report—16th Street Bridge icy, as usual—and complain that if Mother Nature was going to annoy us with snow, the least she could do is drop enough of it so that I could take my new snowblower out of the garage without looking like a kid desperate to play with his new toy.
(It is snowing as I type. It might be just enough this time.)
The barber, who I really should be calling a hair stylist, considering the type of establishment it was, then told me about her snowblower that seized up over a year ago when her ex ran it without “like, ever” checking the oil and about her friend who got rear-ended by a kid in a Jeep Wrangler on the 16th Street Bridge. I was about to ask whether the seized snowblower was the last straw for the relationship when one of the other stylists walked up and asked how my “election thing” had gone.
I told her that I had lost badly, and she said, “Well, I voted for you.” She had also cut my hair a few times during the campaign and had shared some of her election-related thoughts, which I will get to a little later. I thanked her for her vote. She said I should run again, and I gave my standard answer about how she would have to take that up with my wife and how I would end up in a shallow grave like so many people in my wife’s favorite podcasts if I didn’t become independently wealthy before becoming a candidate again.
When you read that the stylist had asked about my “election thing,” you likely thought, this is a person who did not vote. You were wrong, but I totally understand. I mean, who knew there were some people who voted but never bothered to see whether their candidates had won? There are not just some people like that; there are many. They don’t consume much news before or after elections. Probably, they are even less plugged in during non-election years. One thing is certain: they are impervious to nuanced messaging.
Now, this is not a why-Democrats-lost piece. I think we have all seen enough of those. I am not against introspection or reflection, and I firmly believe there should be a lessons-learned discussion after every campaign, win or lose. Here, I am merely sharing what I have observed about a significant subset of voters and what squeezed through their semipermeable information membranes. (This is not a put-down. Everyone’s information membrane is semipermeable to some extent.)
I am also not opposed to nuance. If anything, I am addicted to it. Given a black-or-white statement, I will find the gray areas. I know that a true/false question that contains “always” or “never” is always usually false. There was even a time when I felt compelled to point out the exceptions to every political meme my friends shared on social media. It was not my most popular habit. People did not say, “Thank you for pointing that out.”
The thing about nuance is that it creates large information molecules full of polar “however” and “consider this” bonds that just can’t penetrate that semipermeable membrane. Meanwhile, tiny molecules of cruder messaging diffuse right through. Nuance can be overcomplicated, just like the biology metaphor you are now praying will end without mention of the phospholipid bilayer.
What got through to that stylist at the hair salon was not complicated at all:
Prices are high, and it’s all Joe Biden’s fault.
Millions of immigrants are pouring over our open border.
Kamala Harris is not smart and hasn’t accomplished anything.
The knee-jerk Democratic response to those arguments is to explain and defend. Explaining and defending take time and attention, two things that a majority of voters won’t spend much of on politics. Also, defending is a reaction to the other side, which puts you in a cycle that they control.
In my race, I did a lot of explaining. I talked about the Farm Bill and protecting Social Security and access to affordable child care and reducing the deficit and a dozen other things. Voters, for the most part, didn’t care. The election wasn’t about policy. It wasn’t about who better articulated the issues. It was mostly a default to the Republican label. I did too much explaining and not nearly enough attacking, a mistake I wouldn’t make again.
That mistake was apparent at the first post-election meeting of our local Democratic-NPL group. At one point in the meeting, I mentioned Ray Holmberg, a longtime (45 years) Republican state senator who pleaded guilty [ [link removed] ] to child sex tourism charges in Federal court last August. One of the first-time attendees at the meeting had to ask who Holmberg was. He had never heard of State Senator Holmberg or the case against him, the details of which are even seedier than the charges imply. (No one was too surprised to learn that the state footed the bill for some of that child sex tourism.)
The person who asked about Holmberg wasn’t a low-information voter. He watched the news and was informed on the issues and current events, but like most North Dakota voters, he was unaware of that scandal. Most North Dakota voters were also unaware that a Republican state representative was found guilty [ [link removed] ] in May of violating a conflict-of-interest law concerning property he owned being leased to the state attorney general’s office. Some voters may have heard about the state attorney general’s emails being deleted [ [link removed] ] after he died, but most were unaware. Even fewer voters knew that my opponent was on the Public Service Commission when both a Republican Federal judge and the Fargo Forum admonished [ [link removed] ] commissioners for taking campaign contributions from PACs closely associated with companies they regulated. She subsequently ignored those silly lectures from people who didn’t matter to her and took those corrupt donations anyway. She wouldn’t call them corrupt, of course, because she is part of a culture that feels entitled to those things.
Looking at what got through to the hair stylist, it is clear that simple, repeated, and predominantly negative messaging prevailed. On the first point, I was fortunate in this last cycle to have my wife as a keep-it-simple adviser. I would run my answers to hypothetical campaign trail questions past her. “Okay, now explain it like no one in the room understands what ‘basis’ means for corn and soybean prices,” she would say. Or she might ask, “Did you really think comparing Congress to the hydrophobic middle layer of a cell membrane would make that answer clearer?”
My wife can’t help with my aversion to being repetitious or predominantly negative. If I were to run again, I would just have to get over it, I guess. At least I could be relentlessly negative and constantly on the attack without even having to to exaggerate the casual corruption of the North Dakota GOP. The main message from the beginning of my 2024 campaign should have been that my opponent was a corrupt cog in a corrupt wheel.
Even that makes me uncomfortable. I’m applying the “corrupt” label to people rather than their actions, which conflicts with my (perhaps overly) optimistic view of human nature and my tendency to just slightly overthink things. This discomfort is so very Democratic of me. So is the overthinking.
At his campaign rallies, Trump said Kamala Harris was “not smart.” It was among the least offensive things he said. Should Democrats have sunk to that level? I am reluctantly leaning toward “yes,” at least in part. (The moral mouse in my head is squeaking that two wrongs don’t make a right.) Once the battlefield was set—a thing Republicans influenced well and what I originally intended to write about today—it was time to go on the attack. I feel unqualified to suggest exact messaging, but when it comes to that guy insulting Kamala Harris’s intelligence at campaign rallies, I think Rex Tillerson had it right: He’s a moron. He would probably fail to check the oil in his snowblower.

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