Written by Josh Ishimatsu, Deputy Director of Strategy
The Wednesday after the election earlier this month, when I was moping around the house, Jolynn asked me, “Hey, how come you’re not happier? Everything went the right way.”
“I don’t know,” I said then and I still don’t fully know right now.
I should be happier than I am. Locally here (hurray for Measure A!) and across the country, there were lots of positive signs. For e.g., in New Jersey, Virginia, and California, in counties where Trump had gained significant proportions of the Latino vote in 2025, Latinos turned out strongly in favor of Sherrill, Spanberger, and Prop 50. A good sign that Trump’s 2024 inroads with working-class people of color is still shallow/fragile. And more than positive signs – there were actual victories, and not just in the big name races referenced above. For e.g., in Georgia Democrats beat Republican incumbents for a couple statewide offices. Albeit not for the highest profile offices, but this is something that typically does not happen in an off-year election in Georgia.
And yet, I still feel the same anxiety and apprehension that I felt going into the election.
I do not want to be a killjoy. I want to be happier than I am. I want to be able to more deeply and completely celebrate these victories. There’s probably something unhealthy about what I am feeling. So, in the interest of trying to transmute my unease into something productive, I am going try to distill some lessons from my anxiety:
- We can’t let up. The things we’ve been doing, we need to keep doing. We can’t feel like a single election earlier this month assures us of anything in the future.
- Take no one for granted. This is in the vein of “we can’t let up” but specifically naming that we can’t take any group of people for granted. 2024 flipped a lot of conventional wisdom on its head. Prior to 2024, high turnout elections were supposed to be good for Democrats and low turnout elections were supposed to be good for Republicans. But Trump has broken this presumption, winning the majority of low propensity voters in 2024. Democrats’ support had eroded among working class people of all backgrounds, people of color (especially men of color), young people – groups that have traditionally been a part of the base of the Democratic party. The 2025 election showed movement from most of these groups back to the Democratic party. But the underlying problem is not fixed. The Democratic party has been bleeding support because people feel that the party doesn’t feel their pain, that the party has become more interested in maintaining the status quo than addressing systemic problems, that the party’s commitment to its diverse base is transactional and fragile – the party’s agenda feels like a checklist of small, unrelated, non-strategic giveaways to maintain power by keeping special interest groups just happy enough rather than a true commitment to transformative change that uplifts everybody. As the 2025 elections show, as more people realized that Trump didn’t lower prices on day 1, more people have realized that Trump has no interest in helping everyday people beyond his grift and grievances. But these Trump-curious voters are also still not convinced that Democrats will fight for them or truly believe in them.
- “Affordability” needs to be more than the hot message of the moment. As someone whose priority issues list has housing affordability near the top, I should be happier that everybody is buzzing about how affordability is a winning message. And I do very much appreciate the lessons of Zohran Mamdani and his relentless focus on cost of living. But a lot of the punditry about affordability post-election feels shallow and short-term. It frames affordability concerns as something temporary – a by-product of our current, temporary economic problems and something that can be fixed by fixing our current crisis. Rather than framing it as something systemic and on-going that will need substantial, on-going attention and investment. Not that we need all the big words that I’m addicted to using, not that our messaging should be how/what I write when writing to an audience of newsletter subscribers. I just want us and our political leadership to be honest about the scale and depth of our problems and what it will take to make progress in the face of them. And I want our political leadership to make clear and unequivocal commitments to take up the long term fight that everybody should have an affordable, high-quality home in a safe, thriving, diverse community with universal access to health care, childcare, meaningful work, recreation, education, etc. I don’t want crisis management, I want a better world.
- We need a Politics of the Heart, not of the head. I am a person who likes numbers and data. I also like analysis and meta-analysis. I spend a lot of time in my head and I write that way. But, even as a person with deeply-seeded egghead/policy nerd tendencies, I believe that heart matters more than the head. And this is especially true when it comes to changing the unconscious beliefs underneath our policy decisions. So, all of my habits and training, everything that I’m used to doing – this is not what is most important right now. And like me, our entire social/political ecosystem is not set up to do what I believe is most important. I felt we were on the cusp of making this hard realization after 2024. This is a transformation that we continue to need and we can’t let up on this, even if 2025 went well.