Today is election day for the primaries in Illinois, and the end of my campaign for the Democratic nomination in my congressional district.
For some campaigns, tonight will be a nail-biter. The candidates will wait into the night with their teams, holding both victory and defeat in their hearts until the moment one of them comes out on top.
Not my campaign. We’re not going to win tonight, but we also won’t lose; that happened a long time ago. We lost over the course of months, not a photo-finish but a ship sinking gently into the sea. The family will go out to dinner to celebrate an end to campaign events and fundraising calls, and then we’ll get the kids to bed on time on a school night.
This campaign was based on three premises:
Americans feel drift and decline in the country and want a bold vision for renewal. Donald Trump won in large part because he offered that, even if it was a lie. Democrats, left and center, haven’t put one on the table. We will keep losing until we do.
There is an audience in my district, and around the country, that would respond to the vision I put forward. If we could reach them, we’d find a path to win in this first-past-the-post primary.
There is a donor base, in the Chicago area and nationally, interested in a progressive, pro-innovation, pro-business candidate and particularly someone with significant experience in technology and AI.
The basic theory was to raise money (3) to have the resources to deliver the message (1) to the voters we needed to reach (2).
We failed hard on #3. I’ve spent hours, including many literally sleepless nights, wondering why, and have lots of thoughts. Some of them have to do with the strangeness of this race, one that attracted inordinate national attention and huge sums of money from across the country (including millions in dark money) and got ugly in the last few months (one of the mercies of falling behind is that I was spared that). I want to say more about it with some distance.
For #2, it’s hard to say; you can’t know if the audience is there if you never really had a chance to find them. But, anecdotally, the conversations I’ve had with voters over the last nine months make me believe we were right.
I have more conviction in #1 than ever.
Public office should be instrumental, not a prize in itself but a way to accomplish work you’d be trying to do anyway. I’ve started a few projects aimed at #1. They might work and they might not, but they won’t be my last efforts either way.
This was an extraordinary learning experience in the way attention and persuasion work in this era. I’ve been involved in campaigns before, but nothing is the same as being the candidate, believing in something, wanting others to hear, and not breaking through. The work ahead is not only to advocate for a set of ideas, but to think about how to pass this experience to other activists and candidates.
To quote Rep. Crockett (after losing her own primary): the work continues. The end of the campaign is a relief. It is not the finish line.