Democrats Deserve to Lose
I have a lot of political hot takes that can land me in hot water. Some of them are related to policy, but the vast majority are related to process.
I’ve been involved in politics in some form or fashion for almost 12 years, and I’ve done a little bit of everything: managing, field, communications, community organizing. Sometimes I have been paid for it, but mostly I haven’t been. I don’t actively seek out political work anymore, and I’m not singularly obsessed with the workings of the Democratic Party like I once was, but I’m a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none type. All of this is to say I am not a leading authority on campaigns but I know what I’m talking about.
So here’s the hot take: candidates who lose, by and large, deserve to lose. I am saying this from a place of love, and because I think a lot of people need to hear it before running in 2026.
Let me be clear: there is absolutely no competitive race that you can effectively run in without a professional campaign, including a campaign manager. You may run and stumble into winning without a professional campaign, but it will be in a city or district with a partisan makeup that makes your winning likely anyway. Without a real operation, you are not running to win – and it shows.
Let’s talk about what makes a campaign professional. I will outline four elements that I think are essential:
The candidate cannot run the operations of their own campaign. The candidate is the talent; they are supposed to know what they believe in, be able to talk about it, raise some money, and show up to events on time and looking half-decent. That’s it!
There has to be some semblance of a campaign structure, with a campaign manager at its head. Ideally, there are at least two more people dedicated to field and comms, but this isn’t strictly necessary. Ideally, they should be paid, but they can be volunteer in campaigns with a shoe-string budget.
The campaign must have a message that resonates with voters and aligns with what the candidate believes. Whether a message resonates has a lot to do with voters’ own hopes and dreams, but it also has a lot to do with how the candidate talks about it.
Voters must be reached with a combination of direct voter contact (canvassing and phonebanking for sure – the efficacy of textbanking and postcards is highly questionable) and paid media. A campaign without a presence in the community and on social media is as good as a ghost.
There are plenty of strategies and best-practices other than these, but these are the skeleton. You can stand a campaign up with them. You can do all of them and still lose, but you will probably not win without doing them all.
I will explore a use case that I know well. In 2019, there was a special election in Port Orange to fill a vacancy left by a council member who died. The election was held in an odd-numbered year, and there were no other elections on the ballot. After no candidate garnered more than 50% of the vote in the April election, there was a runoff with the two top-vote-getters in June. A little-known Democrat ran – if we’re calling it that – and lost, with 34.38% of the vote. This vote share was significantly below the number of Democrats who lived in the city at the time (and even below the number of likely Democratic voters in the city, if I recall correctly.)
It was an abysmal showing, but not altogether surprising given that the candidate had virtually no campaign. His single-largest expenditure was for yard signs. Over $1,500 was spent on newspaper ads. $238 was spent on “souvenir combs” – something I am learning now for the first time, holy shit! – which is more than was spent on digital ads (about $175). You could ask a fairly bright sixth grader whether this is a recipe for electoral success and get the right answer, let alone someone with campaign experience.
I promise this is not just a roast of this guy, who is, by all accounts, very nice. I want to compare it to a similar race in 2021. That year, a special election for the same seat was triggered due to the council member stepping down. The circumstances were almost the same as 2019: off-year election, only race on the ballot, taking place in the early part of the year. I worked for the Democrat, Marcey Kinney, in a quasi-management/field director role on a volunteer basis (as we all did – shoutout to Matt and Patrick Burnette, Sarah Jones, and Emily Humphrey for all doing a similar thing.)
Marcey’s campaign was very different. For one, Marcey Kinney is a very smart person who needed no help deciding what she believed in. That helps. But whereas the 2019 Democrat spent heavily on yard signs, newspaper ads, and things that might have made him successful in 1976, we invested in communications that would actually reach voters, including $400 on peer-to-peer texting, $732 on direct mail, and more than $1,000 on digital ads (more than any municipal Democratic candidate had spent on digital in the county at that time.)
It wasn’t all spending either. We canvassed and phonebanked. Real canvassing. We actually knocked on the door or called the phone of someone we targeted through data analytics, had a conversation with them, and didn’t just sheepishly drop a leaflet on their door. If you’re thinking “that’s campaigning 101, everyone does that” – no they don’t! Hardly anyone at the municipal level in almost any county in Florida does field organizing at anywhere near the level needed to make a difference. It is like pulling teeth to get the candidates – let alone their volunteers – to do it. We did it.
And none of that would have mattered without the right message. The 2019 Democrat said this about their platform: “I believe with the proper management of factors that influence the quality of the water in our neighborhoods, we can enjoy this beautiful city for years to come.” Hard to argue with, but what a yawn. Marcey’s message came from the same place of concern about sprawl and environmental degradation, but we just plastered these words across Facebook feeds: “End overdevelopment. End the traffic nightmare.” People don’t know what surface water quality is or how it affects them. They know what clear-cutting a forest looks like. They know how it feels to spend 25 minutes driving to go three miles. Basic, emotional, easy to repeat.
In the end, we lost. Port Orange is a bedroom community without much in the way of culture or things going on, and those are almost always Republican bastions. But because it’s possible to do a one-to-one comparison of these two races, we know that Marcey overperformed the 2019 Democrat by 11 percentage points. Do you know how hard it is to get a double digit swing without external factors changing at all? Like I said, candidate quality played a role. But what was just, if not more, important was that we ran a professional campaign. The reason the 2019 Democrat ran newspaper ads instead of digital, didn’t send any direct mail, and ceded the field game entirely is because he didn’t know what to do, and he didn’t surround himself with anyone who knew what to do. This happens over and over and over again.†
You might think that after a Democrat does so much better than replacement level that other candidates might take note and try to replicate success. You would be wrong. By and large, not a single Democrat running for a county or municipal seat in Volusia has adopted our basic framework in the years since 2021. To the extent any have tried, it’s mostly been farmed out to the Young Dems to handle. Young people are not inherently better at digital and field, by the way, just because me and my friends were.
The results are as dismal as you’d expect. In the 2024 general election, every single Democrat lost in a county or municipal race, often by double digits, if we even bothered to contest it. And don’t get me wrong: a lot of these races are really tough just because of the partisan lean of the city or district, and it’s hard to recruit a decent candidate in any race they aren’t basically guaranteed to win. But if Democrats are ever going to reverse their fortunes in Volusia – and in thousands of counties across the country that are just like it – we have to demand that, at the very least, our candidates are serious about running professional campaigns. It can’t be amateur hour anymore.
There are hundreds of talented, experienced campaign operatives waiting in the wings, some of whom are willing to break their backs for the cause, so there’s no excuse for not hiring them. There’s no excuse for treating the internet like it isn’t “real life” – because it is now. And there is not, and has never been, a substitute for going and talking to people face to face and convincing them to vote for you. There never will be!
Like I said, these are the basics. You can’t shirk on these and hope it works out. But once you have the fundamentals, know this: in most races it is going to take way more. As the information ecosystem grows more cluttered by national scandal and disinformation, campaigns need to be creative. It isn’t enough to publish a website, visit a few local clubs, and hope for the best. Those days are long over. A professional campaign has to be agile and creative. A professional campaign has to be singularly obsessed with winning, at any (legal) cost. The candidate should be everywhere, everyday. They should work themselves until they’re bone-tired. The campaign staff needs to be rabid, risk-tolerant, and unafraid to push the limits. But that’s for another essay.
If you’re a former or future candidate – most people around here are both – and these elements are not familiar to you, it’s not entirely your fault (a little common sense goes a long way but whatever.) Who would have told you? Certainly not the Florida Democratic Party. The campaign veterans who know how to run successful campaigns largely operate outside the formal structure of the party, for a variety of good reasons. That means that FDP and your local DEC are likely run by well-meaning but totally inexperienced volunteers. That is what they should be to you – volunteers – not a professional campaign staff. To find a staff, start by calling one of the Democrats who recently notched a competitive win within 100 miles of you, and ask them who they used. It will be a short list so it shouldn’t take long.
If you’re an active Democrat, it is really up to you to hold candidates accountable for this. When election season kicks up again and you’re asked for a donation or to volunteer, find out if they are running a professional campaign. Is it a one-man show? Do they know how to run an Instagram ad? Are they cutting turf and knocking on a few hundred doors a week? And if they’re not running a professional campaign, don’t give them a goddamn dime or second of your time, because they’re probably going to lose. And they deserve to lose!
If you’re gonna run for office, run like you mean it.
Thanks for reading.
Devon
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† I do have to flag a caveat here: in the 2023 Port Orange election, Sarah Jones ran for City Council and came within 3 points of winning having not adopted all elements outlined here. I wasn’t involved in that race, but I know Sarah is a prolific phonebanker, and field makes a huge difference in low turnout races. Her opponent was also a complete unknown who barely ran a campaign. It’s not a great use case. In other Port Orange races since, non-Republican candidates have lost by up to 38 points.
