I'll be Good-er?

A purely personal post on what a career in marketing and communications teaches me about this election.

Like more than a few of the lefty folks that I know, I’ve spent more than a healthy slice of the past week trying to wrap my head around the results of last Tuesday’s election and, more importantly, what that means for me over the next four years; so here, and worth exactly nothing, is where I’ve landed.        

With the caveat that I realize that I’m probably going to p*** a lot of you off, I figured that I’d start by discussing all the folks whom I blame for the loss.

It’s not Vice-President Kamala Harris or her campaign.

She did a remarkable job running a fairly error-free campaign. She was dropped into the last few miles of a marathon and burdened by the weight of a pretty successful presidency that was nonetheless perceived badly by the majority of Americans who do not think about politics all that much.

It’s not President Joe Biden or his administration, at least not really.

I am still annoyed by the hubris of his decision to run again, but I am, nonetheless, able to rationalize it:

I don’t think that Biden did Harris or the Democratic Party any favors by deciding to run, and I certainly don’t think that his team (who absolutely understood the realities of his visual and verbal diminishment (utterly normal for a man of his age)) helped either.

But, having spent a lot of my life around powerful people and the people around them, I understand the time-space bending power of ‘reality distortion fields’ around principals affect the folks in their orbit, but in the end, I don’t think that his decision particularly cost us the election; it wasn’t helpful, but I don’t think it was decisive.

It wasn’t all the folks who put their backs into canvassing and writing postcards, talking to their neighbors, putting out yard signs, and raising money.

They left it all on the field. They worked their butts off. No blame or shame attaches to them in my view of the world. I am and will always be deeply proud and grateful for all the work we did to support each other and try to get our candidate over the line.

It wasn’t Putin, or a Starlink conspiracy, or voter fraud, or rat-f***ery, or miscellaneous shenanigans.

Most of us on the left heaped well-deserved criticism on those on the right who refused to accept the results of the last election because they didn’t match their expectations. We should do our best to innoculate ourselves from this particularly odious strain of nonsense, which is deeply corrosive to democratic norms.

It wasn’t the media, Joe Rogan, or 'the billionaires.'

Once again, I don’t think they helped, but I don’t think that this was the decisive factor. There’s much stuff that I am deeply disappointed in from those in corporate media. Still, media is (at least in a capitalist ‘free-speech’ democracy) a reflection of who we are and what we are interested in.

In this omniverse of omnichannels, there’s something for everyone, and the reasons that the NYT or CNN (or whoever) says or frames things a certain way are a complicated equation that includes us (the public writ large).

That we on the left didn’t like this view for being too dismissive of our concerns about the then-candidate-now-President-elect (on the left) is indicative less, to my mind, of our media and more of our misunderstanding (fatal to our hopes, as it turned out) of the mood and perspectives in the country.

And finally, it wasn’t Hispanics, or Arabs, or women, or Black men, or Jews, or LGBTQIA+ people, or immigrants, or working-class folks, or Gen-Xers, or Boomers, or White people.

There’s been a lot of this online, and it bugs the ever-living s*** out of me.

It is deeply ironic that people whose roots run deep through a fertile liberal and anti-racist soil (etc., etc., etc.) quickly manage to uproot themselves and plant tendrils into a wasteland of generalization and tropes about others to explain behaviors or decisions that we do not agree with.

People vote their interests.

All people do.

Not just ‘educated’ people, or liberals, or ‘Awesome People I Agree With’™… all people.

The problem is that THEIR interests, as THEY see them, may not actually be THEIR interests as WE see them.

Everyone who voted voted for their interests. Regardless of how misguided you, me, or our super-blue neighbors think they are, that is what they did.

We may not… actually… we definitely don’t agree that THEIR votes were in THEIR interest… but they believed that they were, and in the end, that’s what matters when you are getting ready to make your selections.

Sometimes, interests are driven by fear, pride, grievance, happiness, sadness, disgust, agreement, denial, or any combination of these and a million other reasons. However, whether we want to validate those reasons or not, every voter votes for their interests.

So who do I blame then?

No one.

I know. It sucks.

This would be easier if I could blame someone.

Scapegoats are useful, psychologically speaking, as a heatsink for disappointment, anger, and sadness; I know that if I could blame and focus my feelings on an external someone or something that betrayed us and ‘cost’ us (dearly) the election, I would feel ‘better.’ But it’s not a net-positive better. It’s a crutch.

Democrats lost this election because a plurality of our fellow citizens did not see THEIR interests as bound up with OUR intentions and visions.

This includes the set of folks who voted against us by voting affirmatively for President-elect Trump, but, more decisively, it also includes the voters who selected the candidate that best represented THEIR interests. By far, the largest segment of US voters picked ‘None of the Above.’

That’s the problem.

And, for the avoidance of confusion, that’s not a THEM problem; they literally didn’t care enough to show up… AND THAT IS NOT ON THEM!

I deeply understand that goes against a lot of what we are feeling as we marinate in our bitter and caustic but comfortingly piquant disappointment.

It’s hard for me to acknowledge this to myself, but my ability, and yours, to come to terms with this is neither here nor there when it comes to whether it’s true or not.

It just is.

The vast majority of my professional life has been spent in marketing and advertising, which doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot in the grand scheme of things. Still, it does mean that I know a little bit about the utterly critical sine-qua-non connection between ‘the message’ and the people that the message is intended to reach.

There is a brutally harsh reality about the world we operate in, and it’s this: when people don’t buy what you’re selling, it’s not because they’re ignorant or unwilling; it’s because you didn’t manage to persuade them that choosing what you're selling is in their interests.

And you can, if you want, blame them for not “getting” what you’re selling… but in the end, it’s not their problem.

To my mind, this election wasn’t lost on policy, values, or facts. It was lost on connection and resonance.

If we want people to feel a stake in what we’re fighting for, we have to show them, not tell them, why it’s in their interest—why it’s real, personal, and life-altering.

You can blame apathy if you want, but apathy is a symptom. It’s not the disease.

You can blame people for being uninformed or cynical, but more honestly, it’s all about reach, relevance, and resonance.

We’re a nation of over-stimulated, hyper-individualized consumers bombarded with information—and if our message didn’t cut through that, it’s on us.

So what’s the lesson?

I don’t think this is the moment to decide that we need to be shouting louder or cranking up the volume on fear.

For me, this is a moment to fundamentally rethink how we on the left speak to people, how we acknowledge their experiences, and how we connect our values to theirs without assuming that they’d be “stupid” not to agree with us and be ‘naturally’ aligned with our vision of the world.

While I realize that this is a little ‘on-the-nose’ for my brand, I think that what’s needed is acknowledgment, empathy, and compassion.

We need to resist the deeply attractive urge to talk down to those who don’t agree with us and dismiss their lack of connection with our message as their failure, as opposed to ours.

To be clear, I am not delivering a message of blame or shame for our efforts in this campaign.

It is what it is: we missed the mark.

I am a big believer in the power of iterative improvement on the journey to ‘beautiful.’

I think it’s a time to think about how we can be better at bridging the gap between how we say what we want to say about our vision for America and how we make that vision resonate with people who do not (unlike most of the folks I engage with online) particularly give a crap about politics and view it as a somewhat insular and self-dealing game that doesn’t particularly hurt or improve their lives.

This is a moment for deep self-reflection and honesty about our own efforts.

If we want to lead, we can’t assume people are misled or ‘wrong’ for not seeing the world our way.

And we do do exactly that.

Not just us on the left but those on the right as well.

Politics is a passionate tribal sport fuelled by fervently-held conviction for those who care about it, but it’s useless noise to those who don’t see it as relevant to them.

To win, we need to listen as much as we talk. We need to build trust, and we need to make the people we are talking to believe that we care about the things that matter to them (without complaining that they don’t care about the things that matter to us). If we’re serious about progress, we must realize that connecting with people on their terms isn’t selling out; it’s just selling.

Because that’s what you are doing in an election campaign: you are selling your brand, your vision, your candidate, your story… whatever it is… you’re selling it.

When people don’t buy the product, you need to think about why they don’t believe that your product is solving their problems and what you need to change on your side to get them to believe that.

They say you have to meet people where they are, not where you think they should be. That’s true in marketing, and it is just as true in politics, too.

So that’s what I think.

And before I get to what that all means for me, I think it’s important to make clear that I’m not being Pollyanna-ish: I believe that the next four years (or the next two years till the mid-terms if I’m being optimistic) are going to suck. I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect that I'm not.

It will suck for lots of folks—minorities, women, our trans siblings, those who voted for Vice President Harris, many who voted for President-elect Trump, and, yes, those who decided they didn’t care enough to vote.

I will still care for all of them. I will still fight for them, support them, comfort them, and help.

I will still listen and try however I can to make it better.

Because my feelings for them, my support for them, and my vision of America aren’t transactional.

They aren’t based on supporting me or my ideals.

They’re based on the secure knowledge that we are all in this stupid and all-too-often-off-course boat together and my deep and ever-constant belief in this country’s ability to heal itself and course correct itself towards better.

Politically and personally, my goal, as always, is to help us all move toward a vision of America that is more just, inclusive, and united.

And I think that means stepping outside MY bubbles and finding ways to communicate MY values in ways that resonate with those who don’t see the world as I do.

I am forcing myself to center the reality that the largest (non-)voting group of people are trying to live their lives, and to them, politics feels like background noise.

If I want them to care, I have to figure out how to make it matter.

And that’s about listening, reaching out, and showing up not just for issues I care about but also for others.

It’s about empathy, allowing myself to be uncomfortable, and finding ways to connect and create a bridge between my vision and the reality of others.

Most importantly, it’s about staying in the fight without validation.

In the coming months, I suspect that there will be moments that feel like gut punches, and that people I love and care about will bear the brunt. Still, I refuse to let that near-certain reality push me into isolation, apathy, resignation, or bitterness.

I refuse to tolerate intolerance. I refuse to look back and wish that I had spoken up.

I’m choosing to dig in, keep believing a different America is possible, and stay open, compassionate, and hopeful.

I’m choosing to dig in and reaffirm that my support, advocacy, and empathy don’t depend on people agreeing with me or voting the way I want. Rather, they rely only on my sense of morality, humanism, ethics, and an ardent desire always to help move the world to a fairer, kinder, more compassionate, and more understanding version of itself.

So, onward to the quiet, sustained work of reaching out, building trust, and fostering shared purpose.

To getting deeper, being uncomfortable, and engaging with folks who may not have felt seen or understood.

I am committed to meeting people where they are and doing whatever I can to help design and articulate a vision that aligns their goals with mine in ways that resonate and excite us both.

That’s where I’ll be.

And I’ll keep showing up there—for those who voted like me, for those who didn’t, and for those who didn’t vote at all.

It’s going to take all of us—the voters, activists, and those who feel that politics is distant, esoteric noise.

I still believe it’s possible. Because if there’s one thing I know about America, it’s that even at its messiest, it has a knack for finding its way.

Hope is a verb.