Proud Of All Of You

Morning everyone. We did not have the election we all wanted to have, and the road ahead is going to be hard.

There will be plenty of time to assess what happened and where we go from here. I am going to go slow and take my time. I suggest you do the same. Take care of yourself and your friends. Take long walks, spend a little more time with your kids, call an old buddy. Return to a hobby you miss. Enjoy life. Enjoy it. Take your time, now, and avoid diving into a world of half-baked hot takes, bad faith commentary, angry Tweets and crowing MAGAs.

I wake up this morning with one overarching sentiment - pride in all that you did this election to fight for your democracy and your freedoms. Our family left it all out there on the playing field. We gave more money than has ever been given. We built the biggest grassroots machine that’s ever been built. We wrote more postcards, made more calls, whipped off more texts and knocked on more doors than ever before. I wake up this morning with no regrets, knowing I worked as hard as I could over these few few years. I know many of you feel the same way, and I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. It is has been an honor of a lifetime to be in community with all of you these last 20 months, doing more and worrying less, together.

While I am going to go slow, listen, and take my time I do have a few initial thoughts this morning about where we are now and where we are going, together……

Over the past few years we, our country, our leaders, Merrick Garland, the Harris SuperPAC and many, many others failed to adequately indict Trump and explain what an unprecedented threat he was. A rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon was just elected President. The relentless normalization of his extremism, madness and ugliness, the legacy media’s complicit in reporting on the race not the stakes, was a collective failure of enormous consequence.

Related to point one, I still think many on our side and in the establishment simply do not understand the nature of the conflict America finds itself in today. Trump and his global allies are playing a different game than we are used to. They have invented a whole new deeply illiberal game with all sorts of new pieces and rules. We have been slow, dangerously and recklessly, slow in recognizing how the rules of the game have changed.

It’s why whatever happens next, it is time for the Democratic Party’s generational wheel to turn and for new leaders who are not steeped in and hobbled by old ways to take the helm. We are facing a new battlefield, and more contemporary strategies, tactics, alliances and leaders are required in this next stage of the fight. Now is a time for re-invention, re-imagination, and risk-taking. We need to build a new politics for the American center-left, a more modern one, one more suited to the opportunities and challenges in front of us, a more “networked” one as my friend Joe Trippi would say.

I also want to thank all the Republicans and former Republicans who joined us in this remarkable campaign this year. They’ve shown extraordinary courage, acted like true patriots. They are part of our family now and we need to make space in our politics for them in the coming days. While our pro-democracy coalition lost last night, keeping it together will be necessary in this coming period of opposition.

Finally, I want to thank Vice President Kamala Harris. She was given a tough assessment in July, and she too left it all out there on the playing field. I am so profoundly proud of her, and am grateful for the joy, love of country, optimism and fight she brought to the campaign. She is a proud patriot who has lived the American Dream, and she brought that every day to all of us - and we are better for it.

With boundless gratitude and unyielding belief in the promise of America - Simon