“This is a cheap shot.”
Yesterday, I posted a video about a confrontation between Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, one of the frontrunners in this congressional race, and the Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino. This morning, I sent an email to my campaign list on the same theme. In both, I argued that the confrontation seemed to be about creating a viral moment rather than any concrete action that would stop the abuses in our communities.
In response, one recipient of the mail replied that what I’d said was a cheap shot. I can imagine why: politics is as much about attention as it is about policy, and criticizing a candidate for bringing attention to his candidacy and an issue seems unfair.
But I’m doubling down: this is not a small point, and it’s not a cheap shot. It’s at the heart of why I’m running and why I’m worried about the future of the country.
But first, to be clear: this is not personally about Daniel Biss. In my experience, Biss is a decent guy who believes what he says and puts in the work, and he did a real service to the community by refusing to allow Evanston’s government to cooperate with ICE and Border Patrol. He’s a prominent candidate in this race and this incident crystallized the point, but what I’m talking about is happening across the Democratic Party.
So why does this matter?
Before joining this race, I worked in strategy at Microsoft. It’s a job that’s hard to explain, but a big part of it was asking: is this really going to work? The technology industry is complex and evolves quickly, and things that work—which products to build, what customers want—can quickly stop working, leading capable people to make bad decisions. My job was to look at the industry landscape and make sure our plans made sense. When you have thousands of people working on products that reach billions of people, it’s worth having one or two take a broader, independent view. In that job, you have to tell very successful people when they’re wrong, as directly as possible and confrontationally if needed.
That’s how I looked at the Democratic Party in the wake of our 2024 loss, months before I considered running. Here’s what I saw:
We’re losing. Aside from losing to Trump again, we’ve been bleeding support from core Democratic constituencies and failing to register new voters. Trump is engineering a political realignment, and it’s working against us. Americans agree with us and still vote against us. That should be more alarming than our actions show.
We aren’t adapting. In response, Democrats have retreated into our favorite issues and our base, and we’re repackaging the same ideas we’ve been talking about for decades. I don’t want us to win votes by selling out our values, because it’s wrong and it won’t work. But if the platform we’ve been running on is losing, we need something new to offer. Think of the Democrats leading the party, and ask: how many of them are saying anything new?
Our systems support the status quo. I watched Democrats joining races around the country with nothing new to offer, but they were getting traction. How? The two systems we have for supporting candidates are designed for conformity. There’s the institutional route: wealthy donors, a network of endorsements, and interest groups that all want to get to consensus on a safe bet. There’s the viral route: if you can generate buzz, you can break free of the establishment but probably not the base. In a polarized country, it’s easier to build support as a partisan than to try to reach out and persuade new people to join. Both routes lead to political inertia, and that’s bad news when you’re losing.
A Democrat will win this seat, but if this pattern plays out across the country—if we stock every seat with candidates who play to the base and aren’t even thinking about how to bring new people in—we will go into 2028 the same party that lost in 2024, or worse. We will lose again, and we’ll deserve it.
That brings us back to performance. Attention is everything in American politics, and always has been: Paine’s pamphlets, Lincoln’s oration, FDR on the radio, Kennedy on TV. I don’t begrudge someone finding a moment and using it to land a point.
Grabbing attention is necessary, but it becomes performance when there’s no plan alongside it. This administration sidelines Congress, ignores court orders, and trolls protesters, and the Supreme Court rubber stamps all of it. State and local officials can refuse to cooperate, like the mayor thankfully has, but they can’t stop federal agents. And attacking immigrant communities is non-negotiable for MAGA. They might sell some issues out to the highest bidder, but not this one.
That’s the hard truth we have to start with: immigrant communities will be under attack until Trump and MAGA are kicked out of the White House. We might push back and slow them down, but we will not be safe until we win back the Oval Office, and win big enough to put MAGA away for a generation. To the points above, that won’t happen until we learn to adapt and break out of the status quo platform that has been losing.
So when I see anyone using the raids as a political opportunity, I want to know: if you care about immigrant communities—or any community under siege today—what are you doing to build toward that victory? Are you introducing new ideas? Are you finding new voters? Are you working towards a Democratic Party that can inspire and win back the country? Or are you performing resistance as red meat for the base?
This is not a small point. It’s what we have to reckon with if we want to win. It’s the difference between safety and fear for our communities, between opportunity and economic despair for workers, between the rule of law and democratic decay for all of us. Performance without a plan can win a Democratic primary, but it will lose the country.
In the past, I’ve ended these pieces without an ask, but there’s no time for that. Now, I need to recruit you. If you feel the same urgency I do to bring new ideas and new leadership to the party so we can build a winning majority, take back the country, and start taking care of people again, I need you to share this. If you’re getting the email, please forward it. If you are reading on the web, post it, text it, whatever. I am going to keep pushing every day to change the conversation and put us on course, but without your help I will come up short.
Thank you for reading and for your support.