I am on my flight back home from Kansas, where I spent the last ten days with the field team. I came out to help Adam Hamilton in the Senate race but I’m really proud that the organizing team helped to bring both the Kansas Governor and AG races over the line. Those were real field margin wins and shows that when field matters, it really matters.
Some scattered thoughts on election night, campaigns, and what we should think about in the future below:
Campaigns are a real mix of type 1, 2, 3, and 4 fun. The kind of person who keeps going back to campaigns has a healthy and unhealthy need for all four.
Image source Yinon Weiss.
Adam Hamilton was one of the best stump speakers I have seen and I think will be a fantastic senator for the state of Kansas. His riff on the Wizard of Oz museum and the U.S. Senate needing more heart, courage, and brains was pitch perfect.
That said, I am never working on a campaign again where I share the same first name as the candidate. Staff zooms were terrifying experiences where I would not be paying attention and just randomly be surprised when I’d hear “Adam has to be in Wichita tomorrow at 9am.”
Democrats had a great night last night, a generational night, and it was extra special because in 2006 I was late help on one of the few swing house races that lost that year. So winning this year was a bit sweeter having missed the experience twenty years ago. It was also cathartic after losing in 2024.
Across America, in a lot of states where the Democratic brand was given up for dead, voters expressed their anger with Trump and the Republican Party by giving Democrats a chance. I don’t think it was an affirmation of the party but the chance to prove ourselves. That’s why capturing so many governorships is so exciting. While we will have divided government at the federal level, states can deliver real results sooner to voters.
For 2028, Democrats need to think about having a campaign and a candidate who can compete across all these states that we won last night and look at these 392 electoral votes (plus 7 more in Vermont and New Hampshire) instead of just 270 EVs and a blue wall that will no longer get to 270 after the 2030 census.
The day after the election is a moment where everyone claims victory and that it is validation for their priors. I think a map that looks so different from what we expected at the beginning of the year should cause us to reexamine our priors and learn from this.
In the Democratic Party organizing probably needs to change but GOTV will always remain relatively the same. That means you can show up at the end and find yourself plugged into the field machine with a bunch of strangers like you never left.
The kind of people who volunteer to come in as campaign late help for GOTV are the best kind of people and are my people. I am eternally grateful how many of my former campaign colleagues dropped everything to come to Kansas to help out this week.
The NRSC Supreme Court campaign finance decision has led to some new campaign experiments the results of which will be interesting to discuss, some of which should be replicated and some of which should absolutely not be replicated.
Because of the NRSC decision I think there’s an opportunity now to make generational long-term investments in how we think about investing in permanent organizing, field, and late-help outside of the national and state parties but that the party can tap into.
AI has not made its way to organizing and field but I did use Codex to automate all my reports which mostly meant having AI use browser control to go an manually look up our event RSVPs, shifts, and MINIVAN activity in VAN and google spreadsheets. The kind of metrics we want reports on from the organizing team are not optimized to be easy to find and we should think about how to make that easier and less manual for all.
The 2028 presidential campaigns should be looking at building AI native campaigns from Day 1 (but more on that later).
Look, I want to complain about how campaigns run everything out of Google Docs but the honest truth is that we do it because it’s so easy to share with everyone like me who comes in at the end and doesn’t have a campaign email address.
VAN remains the same, this is both good (I can use VAN again after not using it for two years) and bad (why is VAN the same after two years).
Mea culpa, the VAN auto turf cutter sucks. Though it is slightly better if you give it a number of turfs to output than just giving it a door range. As punishment for my hubris and substack post, man did we end up cutting a lot of turf manually at the last minute
Call me old fashioned but I don’t think we have to run campaigns now solely from 9,000 signal chats. We should go back to email for more things.
Kansas only had one ballot initiative and the messaging was literally just “Vote No” and it was beautiful (sadly no lost).
Everyone should knock. I did five bullshit turfs in the rain yesterday afternoon and it is the best way to spend an election day.
I almost did knock a door that had two dog gates up on the porch, but it was 5pm on election day so I decided to roll the dice, step over them, knock, and then retreat back over them. I am glad I did because I got a door that’ll fuel me for the rest of my life.
I am excited to see what this crop of 2026 campaign folks does as they go out into the 2028 presidential primary, I think the fierce competition will result in a lot of good innovation.
For now, back to my family, my five-year-old who misses me, and my day job.
Thanks to the campaign and the organizing team for making me feel welcome in Kansas. Rock Chalk Jayhawk.