Wherever you live, you deserve to fall in love with a candidate for a change

A few thoughts, in advance of an insufferable wave of discourse about "what kind of Democrats can win in what kind of places"

Last night, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. It wasn’t close. You’ve already heard, no doubt, plenty of commentary as to why this victory was so miraculous. Young, socialist, Muslim State Representatives aren’t supposed to win elections like this. But he did. In the wake of this kind of political earthquake, any smart political party would be asking “what about this guy was so galvanizing to so many, and how do we support candidates who can do the same in their communities?”

I hope that happens, but I’m nervous (and with good reason, given the Democratic establishment’s timidity and/or hostility in response to the campaign). Ever since Mamdani’s stunning primary victory this summer, there have been efforts to explain away his popularity. Maybe he only won because Cuomo was such a terrible candidate. Or maybe it was TikTok, or trust fund gentrifiers, or because Gen Z is lonely and wanted something to do. The most common explanation, though, has been that New York City is different from the rest of the country. More woke. More affluent. More educated. That was essentially the case that Ezra Klein made in his video op-ed in advance of the election (as an aside— I truly don’t intend to keep writing about the guy, but for now I just can’t quit him). Democrats can run candidates like Zohran in New York, the argument goes, but not the heartland.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I suspect we’re about to be crushed by wave after wave of prognostication of this sort. As an actual resident of the heartland, I’m preemptively exhausted by all the furrowed coastal brows about to be directed my way. Who knows me and my neighbors in Milwaukee the best? Manhattan-based opinion writers for the New York Times and The Atlantic, of course. It is they, not me, who understand what animates myself and my fellow flyover simpletons (girls high school athletics, I am told).

To be fair, I understand our shared fear. We need to defeat Trump. We can't afford to lose the midterms. I get the importance of not tilting at windmills but instead running effective campaigns everywhere. I’m not even opposed to good faith ideological debates about the future of the party. Isn’t that why we have primaries? Let dreamy socialists like me make our case. Let centrists make theirs. Repeat that process in thousands of fair races across the country. May the most galvanizing and inspiring ideas win, truly.

But please, speaking as a resident of one of those states where we’re told that we have to settle for more “electable,” less inspiring candidates because we’re supposedly all chickenhearted, bigoted reactionaries, let me make one simple request.

Let’s support candidates that actually excite people.

Everywhere.

Let’s support candidates everywhere that inspire us to love without exception, who won’t allow some of us to be thrown under the bus.

Let’s support candidates everywhere that actively tell their supporters to get to know their neighbors. On canvassing shifts, yes, but also at parties and scavenger hunts and community meet-ups.

Let’s support candidates everywhere that aren’t afraid to believe in something, even if that belief isn’t perfectly focus grouped or optimized by an army of consultants to best appeal to multiple quadrants of voters.

Let’s support candidates everywhere that don’t sand down the most salient parts of their identity to appear less threatening to an imagined voter’s most hateful instincts.

Let’s support candidates everywhere that think like organizers rather than MBAs, who actually love regular people, who implore their supporters to join them in loving wildly and tirelessly.

Let’s support candidates who would stand up to an ICE agent threatening an undocumented neighbor, or a Guardsman terrorizing a homeless neighbor.

Let’s support candidates who will inevitably be outspent and smeared by entrenched power brokers, but who don’t quit.

Let’s support candidates who aren’t afraid to name big things that government can do to help us all thrive, and then stick to their guns when those ideas are attacked for being overly quixotic.

Speaking of big ideas, do you know who isn’t actually afraid of free buses, universal childcare and publicly run grocery stores? Residents of the heartland. Across flyover country, there are communities actively experimenting with each and every one of those polices. I mean, my goodness, North Dakota still has a state run bank. My city, Milwaukee, kept electing socialist mayors in the midst of Mcarthyism (and we’re still deeply proud of the institutions those socialists built). Virtually every time a red state is given the opportunity to vote for a social democratic policy (like Medicaid expansion) through direct referendum, it passes easily. The problem isn’t that my neighbors are too racist and sexist and addicted to “voting against their interests” to deserve nice things. It’s that, when it comes time for high stakes elections, those nice things are rarely on offer. In fact, in many rural areas, there aren’t even any Democrats on offer at all. The party just doesn’t bother contesting seats.

Can socialists win in red states? I mean, it’s not inevitable. They can’t win if they run terrible campaigns. They can’t win if they’re wooden and distant and aren’t actually curious about their neighbors. They can’t win if they’re narcissists in love with the sound of their own voice. They can’t win if they talk like robots and spam our elders with manipulative text messages and then spend that money on clown cars packed with K Street hucksters. They can’t win if they don’t actually mean it. But that’s true for centrists, too.

When coastal pundits faintly praise a candidate like Mamdani “for New York,” but in the same breath caution that we need to “be realistic” in Wyoming or Iowa or Wisconsin or Mississippi, they think they’re being pragmatic, but what they’re really being is paternalistic. They’re saying, in essence, that there’s something broken about me and my neighbors, that we’re not smart or sophisticated enough for a candidate who actually appeals to our shared humanity.

Again, I’m a purple state socialist. Name a woke policy, and I’m all for it. And yes, I’d love for candidates everywhere who share my ideology. But I don’t want my broader message here to get lost in one of those tiresome “abundance vs. DSA” debates. Honestly, believe what you believe, prospective candidates. Make your pitch. Like so many Americans, I might vote for you, even if we don’t agree on everything, if you make me believe again in the power of collective care. Just treat me like a friend you want to inspire, not a spreadsheet cell around which you need to triangulate.

Here’s what I really want, if I’m being honest. For the last six months, I’ve gotten to watch friends in New York fall in love with a political candidate that actually made them feel something again. Less alone. More hopeful. More able take those annoying steps that we say we should do but avoid in practice (meet our neighbors, go to meetings, knock on doors, actually listen).

I want candidates who make me feel that way in Wisconsin. I want candidates that make my parents feel that way in Montana. I want candidates that make my friends feel that way in Alabama and Ohio and Missouri and Utah and Alaska. I want all of us, a year from now, to feel so fired up about the candidacy of a genuine human being who loves our community that even after a long day at work we’re still willing to trudge down to a dimly lit church basement and sit in uncomfortable folding chairs and eat lemon bars and organize with our neighbors and love every second of it.

There’s a lot of big talk these days about saving democracy. I feel that in my bones. But I hope we really believe what we’re saying, not just as an abstract idea. I hope we’re talking about people. About our love for one another. About what we could build together. About our hope that even if our country has never truly gotten this “liberty and justice for all” thing right in practice, that we can still try. All of us. All the time. In all the places.

End notes:

1. As I was finishing this piece last night, I saw that my friend Lyz Lenz had shared this. As usual, she’s correct and you should listen to her.

   

2. How would I summarize everything I said above, but shorter? Like this, probably

3. Want to know two “heartland” races that excite me in that same Zohran way?

   Rep. Aftyn Behn’s special election campaign for Congress in Tennessee (this month, friends!) and Francesca Hong’s campaign for Governor here in Wisconsin (a 2026 race with a very contested primary).

4. I do think that the piece I published yesterday (about how campaigns like Zohran’s work because they give people something to do) is a nice companion piece. Here it is, in case you missed it.

5. I shared this in yesterday’s end notes, but it’s worth repeating. I always make a little pitch about how I’m a working dad and that writing this newsletter (and running those trainings) is my day job and that I can only keep it all together thanks to those of you who say yes to a paid subscription. Right now, though, we’re in one of those moments when new subscriptions would be particularly meaningful. Fun fact- one of the least sustainable moments for a newsletter is the one year anniversary of when you got a new influx of readers. Why? Because a lot of people who opt into an annual subscription once aren’t able to continue (understandably!) Last year, a lot of you came my way around Election Day (oh, for no particular reason, I’m sure). That means that some portion of the November 2024 crew is pausing their subscriptions and looking to pass the baton to new White Pages supporters. Would you mind picking it up? (There are perks, like merch, see yesterday’s piece for more details).

6. Oh, and this too: If you’re the kind of person who reads these emails and are like “well that’s very cute, Garrett, but HOW do I actually build something in my community,” I’m offering free, virtual Barnraisers classes on that exact topic as we speak. Read all about them here and enroll here.