How to Misread An Election

In the Harris Campaign, we ditched the exact principles we now need to save everything

In war, like in politics, it’s often not how you start but how you finish. In Fall 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the UK and France declared war. But for eight months they launched no major military action. The Allies thought they could defeat the Nazis with a naval blockade, economic warfare, and a small British Expeditionary Force defending France. Scholars now call this, “The Phony War.”

Germany plowed through Belgium and Holland, and by May, had trapped 400,000 troops, including the entire BEF, at the French port of Dunkirk. The UK had to scramble 800 boats to rescue them.

The Dunkirk evacuation was a historic success - and a 2017 film depiction won three Oscars - but Winston Churchill called the situation, “a colossal military disaster.” By Summer 1940, Churchill had ended The Phony War and roused resolve in the free world to defeat an illiberal maniac, ending the deadliest half-decade in human history.

The 2024 Kamala Harris campaign was a phony war. Its strategy was unserious. Its leaders misread the enemy and his power, ignored changes to the battlefield, and publicly embraced principles they privately scuttled. A paralyzing fear of small mistakes torpedoed the courage needed for victory.

I was in a platoon of phony war soldiers just outside Pittsburgh. We executed our superiors’ orders with verve and precision. But when we lost, no leader offered an explanation or a mea culpa. We returned to our homes, left to make sense of the senseless on our own. No Churchill came to save us. At least not yet.

Like in 1939, an authoritarian swarm has taken power and threatened the idea that laws matter more than the whims of the powerful. The old Democratic guard will mount an opposition. But another faction will consolidate, one more bold, principled, and dedicated to the burdens of the non-wealthy. I will be joining this faction because combatting Trumpian illiberalism will be the greatest fight of the 21st century. It will rescue human liberty from its newest usurpers. And when victory comes, its soldiers will be called the new “greatest generation.”

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McCandless is 30 minutes straight north of Pittsburgh. It’s a handsome suburb where wide lots on rolling hills house the country’s most elderly residents outside of Miami-Dade. I’d left a mental health job in Los Angeles for exactly these people, suburbanites of a major city in the election’s most powerful state. I told a room of McCandless Democratic Committee members one night I believed they were the most powerful voters in human history. Historical leaders with anything close to the global reach of an American president - Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Ghengis Khan, the King of England - none were popularly elected.

When I first interviewed for the job, Joe Biden was the candidate. By my last interview, it was Kamala. I knew she was imperfect, the word salads, the thin VP resume, rumors of staff turnover. But I was ecstatic. Her penchant to smile and laugh easily was such a relieving contrast to Trump. Her mere personality and easy reasonableness felt like a tonic to the mindless rancor defining our generation. What marginally-informed voter could resist? I knew we’d win and enjoy doing it.

Each day, local Harris voters flooded our strip mall office wearing “Childless Cat Lady” t-shirts and “I’m With Her” pins. We papered our office walls with “Pennsylvania for Harris” signs and American flags. We served Chipotle and charcuterie to debate-watch attendees who listened to Kamala promise new homebuyers $25,000 each, to expand the Affordable Care Act, and build millions of new homes.

No one remembers exactly how she’d build those homes, or where, or how 330 million Americans might benefit. The New York Times interviewed an undecided couple unmoved by Harris’ housing plan because it would not benefit them. We railed at their selfishness and believed far more swing voters would find their better angels.

After long days, we rallied to nearby dive bars and, over cheap margaritas, discussed the administration jobs we wanted next. We were joyful warriors crucial to rescuing the country. October polls showed Harris and Trump tied. But all things equal, the math was on our side: we had an expansive ground game + they had a faltering Elon Musk scam = We win. But all things were not equal.

We were shrink-wrapped in our own propaganda, and victims of the brutal irony that campaigns - by their nature - drag staffers far out of touch with voters they most need to understand. Those voters could feel things we couldn’t. For every joyful warrior who sauntered in wearing Kamala-blue, ten slunk in, pulled one of us close, and whispered, “I’m scared.”

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On day one, we were handed laptops on which a young-looking woman trained us. On day two, we were introduced to the ground game strategy. That’s when my spirits plunged. For this unprecedented election, we were using a very precedented plan:

Nudge swing voters toward Harris through “direct voter contact.” In-person was the best, but the phone works, too. Two and a half “touches” could swing a voter. How do we contact them?

Call every phone number and knock on every door in our database. Ask them questions to identify if they’re undecided and worth our time. If not, move on. If so, read them a long, awkward screed on Harris’ policies. Recruit Harris voters to call and knock with us. No answer? Call them back. Not home? Mark them “not home” so someone comes back to knock later.

“Call time” lasted four hours, every day, and was to be treated as “sacred,” not derailed by anyone or anything. If our call metrics were low, our campaign phone would ring and someone we never met would say, “Hey, you’ve only made 40 calls. What’s going on?”

It felt inefficient. We’d make 100 calls and talk to six people. Most of those six did not sound happy to hear from us. I couldn’t bear to read the pro-Harris spiel to anyone. We all invented our own pitches. Our call logs often showed me the next person on my list had been called over ten times. I called anyway. My coworker once mused, “What we’re doing to these people is a form of terrorism.”

I complained to higher-ups that I didn’t feel like a joyful warrior and that our time might be better spent visiting local Dem clubs, organizing events, coaxing reporters, and establishing a presence in the community. I was reprimanded.

The strategy - derisively called “spray and pray” - was designed for a society that no longer existed. In 2024, Americans were pelted with spam calls. So, they no longer answered the phone. They were inundated with news of crime and murder. Public perception of the crime rate was comically higher than the actual rate. So, few people answered their door. When they did, our 30-second pitch had to compete with the hundreds of hours of TV, radio, and YouTube they were choosing to consume.

I was regularly hung up on, yelled at, and had doors slammed in my face. We had to console volunteers who’d been screamed at by strangers or knocked on 30 doors but spoke to one person. While canvassing one night, a father yelled obscenities at me in front of his young daughters and physically chased me off his lawn while his wife cheered him on. Whether it was anger, fear, or apathy, it felt like our strategy was helpless against a roiling collective anxiety.

Before the campaign, I was on a mental health crisis response team: When someone in LA County had a bout of psychosis, mania, suicidality, screaming at their neighbors, or drinking themselves to death, we’d show up, stabilize them, coax them into an ambulance, then guide the family through a new treatment plan.

I’d seen everything, from the sad to the hilarious to the heartbreaking. But no matter the diagnosis, the effects of anxiety on humans are remarkably consistent: The deeply anxious lose the bandwidth to care for others, so they appear selfish and dismissive of others’ concerns. They lose a handle on granularity, nuance, and ambiguity, so their worlds appear black and white and good vs. evil, perceptions they hold with unshakable confidence.

Through all my interactions - in the community or on calls to the 988 suicide hotline - no sufferer ever complained that politics was driving their problems, that a good president who could fix society would also fix them. Their external problems were always relational.

As campaign workers, we could not invest in relationships. Instead of taking voters out for lunch, taking volunteers out for drinks, courting local organizations, or inviting the media to events, we were ordered to cold-call, get our questions asked and answered, move on to the next caller, keep conversations short, and ignore Trump supporters.

My team and others broke the rules. My teammates and I sat and listened to anxious visitors unload their distress about loved ones voting for Trump. Colleagues in Philadelphia went around their supervisors’ backs to meet voters of color at a Dunkin’ Donuts, which they called Operation Dunkin’kirk. Back in Pittsburgh, we befriended a happy horde of amazing volunteers whose passion raised our spirits, and whose problems and victories became our own. Into 2025, our group still meets. But this is not the norm.

Though hard to detect, things had changed inside people, their situations, and their media by 2024. Everyone had endured and climbed out of a once-a-century pandemic. Inflation had sprayed gasoline on the cost of living crisis. In 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter and turned the world’s major source for political narrative into a firehose of Trumpian propaganda. Though newly convicted of felonies, these changes made Trump electorally more popular than ever.

Harris’ people detected none of it and fought hard to not adjust or evolve. As a soldier on the ground far from the chain of command, my sympathy remains thin. The costs were too high to miss broad trends gnawing at all of society.

Self-reflection takes not just perception, but ingenuity and courage. The easiest choice was to rerun an old plan and hope for the best. But we demurred on the very virtues that brought me to the campaign: compassion, respectability, and joy. Instead, the myopia and fear that rendered our ground game feckless also ruined our candidate.

Most pundits agree Harris’ messaging was weak on what to say and strong on what not to. In interviews, she could feel like Neo from The Matrix dodging bullets instead of firing them.

She refused to distance herself from an unpopular Biden. It would have been awkward and risky, but it would have made mainstream news and built trust. She tiptoed around implicating the powerful companies exploding our cost of living. Being more explicit would have drawn criticism and hurt funding, but could have convinced many of the unconvinced she was no longer the wilting flower of her Vice-Presidency.

Instead, she browbeat Trump - a strategy that famously failed Mrs. Clinton. One night, my team assembled in the bullpen to watch Harris in a town hall while I stayed in my office to work. Sean opened the door and asked if I’d be joining. I said I couldn’t listen. I then heard her slowly describe January 6th: “Donald Trump. Summoned. A mob. Of thousands. To the Capitol…” My whole body cringed.

It was the opposite of the bold, brash economic recovery plan that polls throughout 2024 said people wanted. My heart sank thinking about how not one of the swing voters we’d been courting 12 hours a day, seven days a week, would be nodding at the TV thinking, “Okay, now I’ll vote for her.”

Our strategy would have worked in Walter Cronkite’s America. In 2024, everyone had two or three favorite news outlets and that’s it. Nothing else got in. The only stuff that grabbed national attention was bombastic, often absurdly so.

While Harris mightily avoided rhetorical missteps, every night, Donald Trump climbed a stage, looked to the cameras, and lit himself on fire. He accused Haitian immigrants of eating their neighbors' dogs. He said Kamala was beautiful, then a bitch, that she had turned black, and then belonged in jail. He publicly trashed his own VP pick, and once stopped a town hall to sway to music for 40 minutes like a mad king. At every opportunity, he blurted fake information about the Capitol Attack, the most documented crime in human history.

We felt in our bones this had to be bad for his chances, and that swing voters, one by one, would abandon this dangerously unserious performance artist. But his polls never budged.

Instead of imploding, he was gobbling up finite media attention. Anxious voters cannot be relied on to dig too deep, to capture true and balanced information and reasonably weigh the social goods two candidates might bring through complex government systems. To the anxious, if it doesn’t grab us by the lapels and shake us, it doesn’t exist. For purposes of electoral victory in 2024, Kamala Harris didn’t exist. On election night, internet watchers had detected a spike in searches for the question, “Did Joe Biden drop out?”

Harris’ people thought Trump was America’s anxiety. This was less than half correct. Amateur psychologists know that though the effects of anxiety may be predictable, human responses vary widely. Some of us are yellers. Some are criers. Some burrow in our rooms. Some drink, dance, and snort drugs til the sun comes up. Moral Foundations Theory advances that about half of humans respond to anxiety tribally: their subconscious identifies a scapegoat and recasts them as an enemy. Digital media deluged sufferers with easy options - immigrants, wokeness, the trans agenda. For these people, the pugilistic Trump wasn’t their curse. He was their cure.

For non-partisan voters, the source of their anxiety was society, the one broiling around them with its ungratifying jobs at immoral companies that paid crappy salaries and charged high prices for addictive products after lobbying good laws away and stoking media mayhem to turn its anxious consumers into addicts. You could hardly design a system to infuriate people more. The Bill of Rights guarantees us the redress of grievances. However, we still struggle to explain how Luigi Mangione - with his generational wealth, vicious back pain, and a stack of rejected insurance claims - was exactly supposed to have his grievances redressed.

Swing voters in 2024 were much maligned for being uninformed, but they knew something we all forgot: Democrats were complicit in this situation. When Elon Musk became the first person in history to have $100 billion, then 200, then 300, now 400, I heard no Democrat harken John Adams’ warning, that “political liberty…depended on economic equality…[and that a] concentration of wealth at the top would doom it.” In other words, those who capture too much financial power eventually come for the political kind.

If some Democrat uttered this now-painfully prophetic warning, no one heard them.

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Principles are only principles if they extract a toll from the holder. During WWII, the U.S. helped defeat the Nazis by telling big businesses what to do. Ford made B-24 Bombers. Alcoa made airplanes. Chrysler made fuselages. Equally unimaginable today, the government forced citizens to sacrifice. Commodities were rationed because troops needed sugar, meat, coffee, butter, lard, oils, gasoline, tires, cars, coal, shoes, rubber bands, zippers, and chewing gum.

Churchill secured his legacy by embracing sacrifice in trying times:

“...the House should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings. I have only to add that nothing which may happen in this battle can in any way relieve us of our duty to defend the world cause to which we have vowed ourselves.”

In 2024, the Democratic party wanted a win over Trump without pain, sacrifice, or acknowledging hard truths. They coddled Biden’s ego. They played nice with corporations. Thereby, they tanked any chance of an anxious nation seeing Kamala Harris as more trustworthy than Donald J. Trump to alleviate its collective pain.

A Harris win would have required taking the scary but benevolent risk of aligning its values. For example, Democrats claim to value democracy and hearing the voice of the voiceless. But the Harris campaign was autocratic. It dismissed our concerns that a cold, corporate nature was extinguishing our joy. It demanded we ignore the struggles and dreams of voters it deemed “ungettable.” A machine gun of fundraising text messages proved to all Americans that they cared more about money than anyone’s feelings of annoyance, privacy invasion, or exhaustion.

Political parties only cringe at value misalignment in their opponents, not in themselves. When we hear a Trump voter say, “I don’t like his behavior, but I like his policies,” the logical incongruity is deafening. Policies are behaviors. Both spring from a singular moral compass. President Trump’s policies have always contained the same cruelty he uses on everyone around him.

The fact that most Americans believed neither political party was honest enough to align their values was an immense opportunity for Democrats to transcend modern cynicism and morally isolate Trump. Instead, we scuttled it for a robotic and soulless convenience.

But now we know.

Today’s Democratic party is top-heavy and spiritually hollow. Famed strategist James Carville made clear he doesn’t give a fuck what any 22-year-old thinks about what works in campaigns. This attitude will thwart new thinking and hobble the fight against Trumpian illiberalism.

President Trump will overstep. He’ll make pronouncements and actions that offend most people’s sensibilities. His constitution all but guarantees it. The old guard of the Democratic party will come to the defense of abstruse pet issues involving identity and language. But a new guard will also rally - made up of economic progressives, rational centrists, and others - and pounce on how Trump’s pro-billionaire mangling of our economy devastates the experience of life in this country for the 300 million non-wealthy.

I plan to join this group because I believe we must rescue our moral character before the next election, rather than after. It’s the only thing that can reasonably defeat Trumpism. You should join, too. Even the best army needs reinforcements.