Be Afraid of Winning
Resolving to see the big picture
Merry “checking back in after the holidays” day!
We are now closer to the year 2050 than to Y2K.
And it seems like we are closer to Democrats winning the midterms than building a majoritarian coalition.
The hottest conversation on political Twitter over New Years was a thread from Lakshya Jain that earned more than 2.5 million views. Starting with “I’m personally absolutely, completely disgusted with the Democratic Party”, the Split-Ticket founder touched on a wide range of ills and drew spirited engagement from pundits like Ezra Klein.
But it was his final takeaway that we need to marinate on:
This ended up getting more attention than I imagined. This isn't really electoral advice for Democrats. It's just my own frustrations. It's not a diagnosis of why they lost, and they don't technically *need* to change much to win 2026, but that doesn't mean I like what exists.
Most Democrats might not actually need to change. For themselves, anyway.
My Biggest Fear
Most Democrats are afraid of getting yelled at by activists, but Lis Smith is afraid of an easy midterm win. The pragmatic Democratic communications maestro was one of several experts who weighed in on the future of the party to The New York Times. This comment from her jumped out:
“My biggest fear is that Trump overreaches, Democrats win big in 2025 and 2026, and nothing changes. This is our best opportunity in 20 years to fix our party.”
As Lakshya noted, Democrats can probably ride the traditional midterm backlash to regaining the House.
Because 90% of Democrats are in safe seats, including nearly all of leadership, fear of activists is often more present than the need to build a coalition that consistently wins majorities. And so for those of us focused on flipping seats in Trump-won districts required for a majority, fear of winning is real.
After the midterms, we told The New York Times “it kind of feels like Democrats are celebrating in the locker room because we lost by four”.
Many treat politics like sports these days. But beating the point spread isn’t enough. Keeping that goal top of mind is a worthy resolution for 2025.
Don’t spread false hopium heading into 2028. And keep your eyes on the prize.
Attention, Please
The Democratic marketplace is bad at allocating resources. It is straightforward to quantify such inefficiency in dollars, but there’s an even scarcer resource that the marketplace does a bad job allocating: our attention.
As we’ve written before, there are several drivers of this inefficient marketplace:
The party lacks a centralized decision-making apparatus: there’s no CEO or board of directors for “The Democrats” that can step in and make informed, executable calls on how to best allocate limited resources.
There’s an insatiable appetite on the far-left for policies and slogans that make winning harder for Democrats and direct resources intra-party fights instead of beating Republicans.
And then there’s the supercharged 21st century challenge of attention scarcity.
In many ways, this dynamic is an inevitable byproduct of our modern reality. With an unlimited stream of information available to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, attention is scarce — and incredibly valuable to those who manage to get it.
Academics even have a fancy term for it: Attention Economics.
For more on this, check out Interrupting the Rage Cycle. And thanks for sharing your valuable attention with us this year. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber so we can invest more in returning our collective attention where it is needed.