I get just as frustrated with the Democratic party as anyone, but more than that I am sick of everyone piling on like high school.

Democrats didn’t cause our current situation.  If our party is guilty of anything it’s of underestimating the Republicans’ bad intent.  We’re guilty of not being clear-eyed enough about them, about MAGA, about Trump in particular, about their propaganda, and now we are coming to understand we weren’t clear-eyed enough about our own Republicans in congress and in Des Moines.

Democrats are on the right side of the issues and history while Trump tries to destroy everything. Our party has been guilty of not knowing how to cope with Republican money, media, power, aggressiveness and corruption. Seems like when the going gets tough we usually stand down and hope to survive the next contest. So many problems, so little cardboard…

Lately, Ken Martin, our current chair has been blasted for not releasing the report of mistakes made in 2024.  The DNC under Ken Martin’s leadership is heading in the right direction, correcting the things that we have done wrong over time.  Many have no idea what the DNC has been doing that is helping our campaigns since he became chair.

But it’s not that hard to find out.  The DNC now has a weekly update from the DNC Grassroots team called the Blue Print and a YouTube channel. Find out for yourself what Dems are doing. Rita Hart has been talking about it. State party chairs are talking about it. Here is Jane Kleeb discussing investment in Democratic party infrastructure.

Ken Martin has acknowledged his mistake in not releasing the report. (Has anyone in the Republican party ever done that?)  You can read Ken’s statement about it here on the Blue Print substack.

As Simon Rosenberg says, “Everyone in Washington is not a corrupt piece of shit.” 

 Btw, the false narrative that everyone in DC is a corrupt piece of shit is helpful to Republicans because they need us to believe everyone is as bad as they are.

Below is an excerpt from a piece published on The Hill balancing some of the one-sided crapping on Democrats that has been out there. You can read the entire piece here.

“Just look at what Martin is actually building. The DNC, in partnership with the Association of State Democratic Committees, is delivering more than $1 million every month to all 57 state and territorial parties — the largest sustained investment in state parties in our history.

And Red-state parties are receiving an additional $5,000 per month through the Red State Fund. State parties from Mississippi to Alaska are growing their staff and infrastructure for the first time in years. This is the strategy Howard Dean used to deliver the 2006 and 2008 wave elections. It works.

It also happens to be the strategy we desperately need. The Clinton campaign in 1992 contested more than two dozen states. In 2024, we played in just seven.

In other words, we spent three decades surrendering the map, and the math is now closing in on us. Population projections for the 2030 Census show between eight and 12 electoral votes shifting from blue states to red states ahead of the 2032 presidential election. If we keep writing off Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and the rest of the Sun Belt, we will lose the Electoral College permanently.

Martin understands this. His critics, evidently, do not.

Meanwhile, the actual results keep coming in. Democrats have won or at least over performed in hundreds of special elections under Martin’s leadership. We swept Virginia and New Jersey in November 2025. Grassroots fundraising hit record levels in his first months as chair — more than any DNC chair raised in his first four months, ever — and continues at an historic pace. Small-dollar donors are responding to the strategy because they understand what it is for: building Democratic power in places where Democrats have not shown up in a generation.”

more

Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles is one of my few paid memberships as one of the most reliable sources of information on the current electoral environment. He gave some advice to the Hopium community on his substack platform this week.  I think it is realistic.

“This is going to be a brual election and we have to brace ourselves for it. 

“Spend time watching the way they are attacking James Tavarico and come to a place of understanding about what we’re going to be up against this year everywhere in every single race.”

There’s going to be AI generated images of [candidates] having the equivalent of dinner with the devil, every day throughout the entire general election. Which is why we need to provide them the resources required to be able to anticipate all of this and get out ahead of it.

With Talarico they’ve signaled in the last 24 hours the way they’re going to play the game. It’s why we need candidates who can survive the unbelievably brutal kind of attacks that are going to come against them.”

Happy Friday everyone!