Winning from a loss
a proposal for how Democrats move forward
About three weeks ago, I lost a race for Congress in Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District. Like any loss, it hurts, especially as it was not the result that our dedicated staff and over 1,000 volunteers worked incredibly hard to achieve for over 13 months. Since Election Day, I’ve poorly grown a beard and reflected. In every loss I’ve ever experienced, there has been something I’ve gained. In a hard 2006 combat tour in Iraq, I gained the wisdom to endure another. In the loss of friends in combat and afterwards, I gained purpose to give my life meaning through service. And in losing by just 1,315 votes in 2018, we gained an understanding of how a Democrat can win in greater Minnesota (and elsewhere), unfortunately just not in 2020.
Winning is the first step to ensure we have affordable, accessible, and high-quality healthcare for everyone. Winning is the first step to ensure all of our communities are safe and just. Winning is the first step to ensure that we end the existential threat of climate change which, yes, puts people living along the coasts at-risk, but also harms our rural communities right here in the Upper Midwest. Winning is the means to these ends, which are the broad goals of the Democratic Party, but we must win in districts like ours to make them a reality. To win, we learned through our loss that you have to both increase your turn out and persuade voters through the tough conversations that many want to give up on, knowing that every persuadable voter should be viewed in the context that over the course of their lives they’ve likely voted for Republicans and Democrats.
The results of the 2020 election sparked an important national debate. On the one hand, record turnout and a convincing, historic win from President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Harris. On the other, over 70 million turned out strongly to support President Trump and the GOP ticket in statewide races across the country that contributed to a loss of seats in the U.S. House and uncertain control of the U.S. Senate when there were hopes of gains in each.
Here in Minnesota’s 1st District, President-Elect Biden lost by ten points and we lost by three, one of the few districts where a challenger ran ahead of the top of the ticket. Of many factors in this over-performance both within and outside of our control was the concentrated effort we made, through Election Day, to persuade independent, Republican leaning, and even Trump voters to support our race, even while they voted for GOP candidates elsewhere on the ticket.
In Georgia, Democrats won by focusing our efforts on Democratic-leaning, low propensity voters. At the center of this is former Democratic candidate for Governor Stacey Abrams, who said, “We spend a lot of money, and a lot of time, trying to persuade atheists to become Catholics. What we have to do is get Baptists to go to church.” Undoubtedly, Abrams efforts paid off as Georgia flipped blue buoyed by voter turnout — 67% of eligible Georgians voted in 2020 compared to just 59% in 2016 .
The challenge, however, in places like Minnesota, is that people are largely already at their church. 80% of eligible Minnesotans voted in 2020. It can of course be higher, but this high turnout shows it’s just as important to make sure voters know what other churches exist, or that they can hold beliefs of multiple churches. Persuasion is still possible, even in a country as divided as this. In fact, persuasion may be the only way we chart a path beyond division.
I very much worry that the GOP is going to convince people to go to their church when Donald Trump is not on the ticket in 2022 and beyond. There are flashing red lights from the 2020 results across Minnesota masked by Biden’s 7 point victory. We saw DFL candidates in the suburbs and greater Minnesota weather 2016 with Trump on the ballot only to lose by wide margins in 2020. We saw DFL candidates run behind President-Elect Biden in the suburbs and in the heart of Hennepin County, an indicator that many Biden voters here in MN were not so much Democratic voters, but anti-Trump ones.
In our campaign, we didn’t run away from the need for change in Washington, in particular from the Trump administration. Or the need to achieve universal health care coverage. Or the need to fight climate change. But we did it in a way that spoke to the district and focused on persuading people one at a time through relational organizing and trying to de-nationalize our race, knowing that while southern Minnesota reflects the same needs of the country for health, economic, climate, and racial justice, the lens through which they are viewed can look very different. We had a goal in our relational organizing — that anyone open to voting for me would be at most one degree removed from me. Either they’d met me or knew someone that had. The theory was that in the wake of the nearly $5 million spent against me to portray me as something I am not, the relational organizing would be the resilience for our support to endure. Ultimately, our efforts fell short, but the humility of learning from loss drives me forward.
It is critical in 2020 that we re-elect Governor Walz and all statewide officials, that the DFL win the Minnesota State Senate, and that we expand their majority in the State House. It is critical that Democrats win the U.S. Senate, expand our House majority, and win Governorships and State Houses all across the country. But we can only win when we combine all our efforts — turn out lower propensity voters, energize progressive voters, and persuade those who may be at a different church service one candidate and campaign at a time.
Democrats must win in urban, suburban, and rural communities, all of which are becoming more diverse, to achieve effective state and federal governance. I believe that with the values of inclusivity and the pursuit of justice in all forms, the Democratic Party is the only party that can achieve the vision that either everyone matters, or no one does. But we have to begin the work to do so, in every part of this state and country, with campaigns and candidates that each speak to those values for the communities they seek to represent. And this isn’t a new idea. Organizations like Faith in Minnesota understand this, and should be celebrated as a path ahead in their critical relational organizing and persuasion focused on the race/class narrative that is at the heart of the challenges Minnesota and our country face.
Politics is defined in wins and losses, but each win and loss is the fruit of the work that came before, sometimes even years before. Every Democrat should be asking what work is being done now to shape the wins that deliver change.
