First We Win, Then We Build

Walking away isn’t a strategy. If you want better candidates, the real work starts on November 4th.

We keep hearing the same thing lately, and it usually comes in two parts. First: the Democrats aren’t doing enough. Second: so I’m done — I’m going to stop showing up, stop giving, stop volunteering. We understand the frustration behind both halves. We share a good deal of it. But we want to be candid, because this is exactly the wrong attitude at exactly the wrong moment.

We have an election to win. Stopping Trump and MAGA is the single most important thing in front of us, and it is not a problem we get to solve next year or the year after. It is on the ballot now. Walking away from the only political vehicle capable of beating them does not punish the party, and it does not send a message anyone in power will feel. It simply hands more ground to the people doing the most damage to this country. We are not interested in moral victories that arrive with a worse government attached.

So let us take the complaint seriously, because underneath it is a fair demand: people want better candidates. Good. We want them too. Here is the question we would ask in return: what is your plan for November 4th — the day after the election? Because that is when the work of electing the people you actually want begins. Not the rally, not the repost, not the primary you will start paying attention to six weeks before it happens. The day after.

It is not enough to vote. We will say that plainly, even though it cuts against everything we are trained to repeat between now and election day. Voting is the floor, not the ceiling. If you want different choices on your ballot, you have to organize. You have to talk with voters who do not already agree with you. You have to build a foundation of support that lasts longer than one news cycle. Better candidates do not appear out of nowhere. They are recruited, trained, mentored, and backed by people who did the unglamorous work for years before anyone was paying attention.

That work has a name and an address: your state and local party. The party is the machinery that recruits candidates, runs the field program, registers voters, and wins races up and down the ballot. It is also, frankly, where most of the complaining stops and most of the building never starts. If you want your candidates of choice to win, that is precisely where your time, your money, and your energy belong.

We want to point you to someone who actually lives this. Simon Rosenberg and his Hopium Chronicles community have spent the last several years organizing and raising real money to rebuild Democratic parties in red and purple states. He is not narrating the decline from the sidelines. He is doing the work — funding state parties in places the national conversation usually writes off, and making the case that we can compete everywhere if we are willing to invest everywhere.

In his latest post, Rosenberg highlights reporting from NBC News by Natasha Korecki on exactly this strategy. The piece lays out what investing in state parties is really for: building durable infrastructure, developing a deep bench of talent, and creating what Rosenberg calls a farm team for governor, Congress, and the Senate. Read that again, because it is the answer to the better-candidates question. You do not conjure strong nominees in an election year. You grow them — through school board seats, city council races, county posts, and the multiyear plans state parties are finally being funded to build. The architect of much of this approach at the national level, as Korecki reports, is DNC Chair Ken Martin, who once chaired our own Minnesota DFL.

This is the part the frustrated voice needs to hear most clearly: the time for all of it — the candidate fights, the internal reform, the rebuilding — is after the election. That is not an excuse to ignore those fights. It is a sequence. Right now, we focus on electing the people we have and winning back the House and the Senate, because nearly everything else we want becomes possible only if we do.

First we win. Then we build. In that order — or we lose both.

If you are angry enough to quit, you are angry enough to organize. Choose the second one. Show up on November 3rd, and the day after that. That is how the candidates you are waiting for actually get elected.

To find out more about how you can get involved in ITC’s election defense and campaigning work, join us on June 11th at 7:00pm on Zoom for our next All Member Meeting.