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Democrats Need to Quit Worrying About Winning and Start Leading
Why the party needs to lean into its values and focus on the future
Two years ago on Halloween, I was staring down the final week of a punishing campaign cycle and anticipating a painful victory. I wrote a piece about how we were about to learn the wrong lessons from the 2016 Presidential election cycle. At the time, I was focused on the misinterpretation of the real and profound angst in the American electorate on both the Left and Right. Unfortunately, two years later, nearly everything I said still feels deeply true: Our leaders need to focus on progress over power and most citizens feel ignored by political parties more interested in point-scoring than leadership.
Now I worry that we’re about to misinterpret the results of another election cycle, furthering (and perhaps accelerating) the downward spiral of our politics. What was missing then, and is still needed now, is a more explicit prescription for how we, as a country, begin to walk away from what seems like an inexorable downward slide and move toward a future in which we can reclaim our “only in America” story for everyone.
Current conventional wisdom is focused on just how big the Blue Wave of 2018 is going to be. Will Democrats claim the Senate? The House? By how much? Who will…
