No Gold Stars for Losing
When I started Project Battleground, I mostly wanted a place to work through something that had been bothering me about politics for a long time.
There is a huge gap between the way we talk about winning elections and the way winning actually happens.
I see it in good candidates running bad campaigns. In organizations full of people who care deeply but have gotten comfortable doing things the way they have always done them. In Democrats who have the better argument and somehow manage to communicate it in the least persuasive way imaginable. In communities we wrote off as unwinnable so long ago that nobody remembers who decided we should stop trying in the first place.
I wanted somewhere to dig into those things.
I am a Democratic organizer in Tennessee. I spend an unreasonable amount of my life inside the machinery: campaigns, party organizations, election returns, turnout, volunteer recruitment, candidate conversations, government meetings, messaging, and all the deeply unsexy work that eventually determines who gets to stand on a stage and give a victory speech.
And I care about whether we are good at it because I believe the stakes are exactly as high as we keep telling people they are.
Sooner or later, politics becomes consequence. Somebody wins. Somebody governs. A campaign decision becomes an election result, and an election result becomes somebody’s school, healthcare, paycheck, rights, taxes, library, neighborhood or future.
If I really believe that, then making everybody feel good about how we are doing cannot be the job. There is too much on the line for flattery.
If you want somebody to tell you how good you’re doing, go to a church potluck.
Project Battleground has also grown well beyond the little corner of the internet I imagined when I started it. This bloghas reached readers in every state except Idaho and in multiple countries. Some pieces begin with something happening down the road from me. Others begin with a campaign, argument or political movement a thousand miles away.
That clarifies what I think this project is supposed to do.
Where things are happening is rarely the interesting part. The interesting part (at least to me) is what becomes visible when you look closely enough.
And because I am openly a Democrat, openly an organizer and very obviously a person with opinions, there are five rules I try to hold myself to.
1. Is it true?
Everything starts there.
Whether a fact helps my argument comes later. So does whether it helps Democrats, hurts Republicans, irritates somebody I like or completely wrecks the conclusion I thought I was heading toward.
Politics makes working backward incredibly tempting. Pick the conclusion, collect the evidence that supports it, squint generously at anything inconvenient and move on.
Every side does it. Every one of us is capable of it. My job is to resist that urge.
If I tell you how people voted, what somebody said, where campaign money went or what a public record shows, I should be able to back it up. What I think those facts mean is analysis. You can look at the same evidence and decide I have lost my mind.
Good. Argue with me.
But we should at least be arguing about the same reality.
Sometimes the evidence supports the candidate I preferred. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes somebody I usually disagree with is right. Occasionally the facts murder a perfectly good paragraph.
So be it.
I would rather lose an argument than win it dishonestly. And when I get a factual claim wrong, I owe you a correction.
That is the price of asking you to trust the next thing I write.
2. The standard does not change because I know you.
It is remarkably easy to have strong opinions about politicians you will never meet.
Give me a congressional race in Minnesota and I can look at the campaign, the money, the message, the field operationand the result and tell you exactly what I think went right or wrong. Nobody worries that I was too harsh because I might bump into the candidate buying groceries Saturday morning.
Then politics can get closer to where we live.
You know people. You have worked together. You have mutual friends. Their number may be sitting in your phone while you are writing about a decision they made.
That changes the social consequences of criticism. It cannot change the standard.
A bad campaign tactic does not become a good one because somebody I like used it. Judgment I would question three states away does not become untouchable because I know the person responsible for it.
Familiarity cannot become immunity.
Otherwise friendship, geography and social comfort start deciding who gets scrutiny.
And that is not fair.
3. I do not punch down.
This rule matters more as the audience around my work grows.
The immediate readership of any individual Project Battleground piece is one thing. The platforms where I share that work are another. In an average 28-day period, my Facebook content alone receives roughly 1.75 to 2.2 million views.
I think about that when I point the microphone at somebody.
A private citizen who leaves a dumb comment does not need a newsletter written about them. Neither does a volunteer who irritated me, somebody sitting quietly in a public meeting, or a person whose greatest political power is having a Facebook account and an opinion.
A large audience creates power of its own. Using it just because you can is not accountability. Political power changes the calculation.
If you hold office, seek office, control public resources, make decisions for other people or ask voters to give you authority, then your public record, statements, campaign, judgment, strategy and use of that power are legitimate subjects of scrutiny.
That still leaves boundaries. Your children are not suddenly relevant. Your marriage does not become public property. Filing paperwork to run for office is not consent to my cruelty.
But there is a basic relationship between power and accountability that I think we have backward far too often:
The more power you ask people to give you, the more scrutiny you should expect.
4. My own side does not get a pass.
I am a Democrat because I believe Democrats should be governing this country.
That is exactly why I have no interest in pretending we are doing better than we are.
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Drive through parts of coal country and you can see one piece of the story. You will meet hardcore MAGA Republicanswhose parents or grandparents were Democrats, whose families belonged to unions deeply tied to the Democratic Party, and whose communities once formed part of the backbone of our coalition.
It is easy to look at those voters now and ask what happened to them.
At some point though, Democrats also have to ask what happened to us.
We stopped organizing in places. We stopped seriously competing in places. Whole communities heard a conservative political argument every day while hearing from Democrats around election season, if they heard from us at all. Then, after enough losing, we started treating the margins themselves as proof that competing there had always been impossible.
Those voters made choices. They are responsible for those choices.
Y’all, our retreat from those communities was a choice too. That part belongs to us.
The same instinct shows up inside campaigns and political organizations. Blaming the electorate is easier than interrogating the campaign. Saying voters did not understand the message is easier than asking whether the message was any good. Keeping the same meeting, the same circle of people and the same habits is easier than admitting that something comfortable stopped working years ago.
Democrats have never suffered from a shortage of meetings where everybody leaves convinced we did a great job.
I am more interested in the scoreboard.
If the only people I am allowed to criticize are Republicans, then our problem is one a public relations issue.
I criticize Democrats because I think Democrats matter enormously. I want this party stronger, more competitive, more welcoming, more disciplined and considerably better at winning elections.
That means saying when a campaign was bad. It means noticing when an organization has grown complacent. It means putting responsibility where I think it belongs even when the answer points toward people I like, institutions I belong to, or decisions I helped make.
If I believe this party matters, I owe it something more useful than applause.
There is too much on the line for anything less.
5. The story may be specific. The lesson should not be.
There is an old rule for writers: write what you know.
For political writing, I would tweak it.
Pay attention to what you can actually see.
This past weekend, I walked into a candidate event hosted by a local Democratic organization in South Carolina. It had been forever since I had attended something like that without being involved in planning it.
For once, I was simply the new person walking through the door.
And immediately I saw the room differently.
There was no greeter. No obvious explanation of what was happening or where I was supposed to go. Everyone who already belonged understood the rhythm of the event perfectly. I was standing there trying to figure out whether I should sit down, sign something, introduce myself or simply become one with the paint on the wall.
My first instinct could have been to critique their event.
The more useful thought came about thirty seconds later: Oh. We do some of this too.
That is Project Battleground in miniature.
The interesting story is not that one Democratic organization forgot to put somebody at the door. It is how easily organizations become accustomed to themselves. We know everyone’s name. We know where everything is. We know what happens after the speaker finishes and why the meeting never really starts at the time printed on the flyer.
Eventually we stop seeing the room through the eyes of the person who had enough courage or curiosity to walk into it for the first time.
That lesson travels.
So does a lesson about turnout. Or messaging. Or candidate recruitment. Or how institutions accumulate power. Or why a campaign that looked great on paper collapsed when actual voters got involved.
Sometimes seeing something elsewhere exposes a problem at home that you had simply gotten too close to notice.
Sometimes the thing in my backyard is a miniature version of something happening all over the country.
Sometimes the subject is national from the first sentence.
What matters is whether there is something underneath the story worth carrying somewhere else.
That is the bargain I want Project Battleground to make with you.
I will tell you what I think. I will have candidates I prefer and outcomes I want. Sometimes the conclusion will irritate people I know. Sometimes it will irritate me. When I get the facts wrong, I will fix them.
But being right for the pleasure of being right is not the point. The whole point is getting better at what we’re trying to do.
The first-time volunteer should walk into the room and know they belong there. The candidate with the right valuesshould also have a campaign capable of winning. We should be competing in communities we abandoned years ago instead of congratulating ourselves for explaining why they cannot be won. Our organizations should be able to recognize when the old way stopped working.
And we should be able to identify a bad strategy in July instead of paying full price for the lesson on Election Night in November.
Because if the stakes are really as high as we say they are, there is no room for bullshit about how we are doing.
There is no prize for being the most encouraging organization that keeps losing.
We have to look at what is actually happening, tell the truth about it, figure out what it means and then do something with what we learned.
Get better. Organize better. Compete harder. Win more.
That is what Project Battleground is for.
If this is your kind of political conversation, follow me here on Medium. Project Battleground is also available free by email on Substack, with paid subscriptions for readers who want to support the work. And if there’s something happening in your community, campaign, or corner of politics that deserves a closer look, leave a response. I want to know what you’re seeing.
