I Became an Anarchist While Working for the Democratic Party
From It's Going Down
A critical and personal account of working inside of and attempting to organize within the Democratic Party in Nevada.
by Jesse M.
There are three places in Las Vegas I truly liked: two of them were bars, and the third was Writer’s Block, a wonderful bookstore shaped like a literal block. It was here, a couple days into a job with the Nevada State Democratic Party, that I picked up Chomsky’s “On Anarchism” to get an introduction to the ideology.
It’s a terrible introduction to the ideology. Great bookstore, best ideology, not a very good book.
I start with this because I don’t want to mislead you. If I was a pure propagandist, I would say that this experience of working for the state Dems made me into an anarchist, when the truth is that I was thinking about it almost from the very start. Becoming an anarchist, however, helped me interpret what I was experiencing while I had the job.
I had worked in electoral politics before: fresh out of high school, age 18, I got a job on the Obama campaign, mostly because I wasn’t finding other jobs, and showing up to the Obama office to volunteer seemed a better use of time than trying in vain to get a job at Best Buy. So, I wasn’t a complete novice… but in 2008, I was mostly working with the IT department. Organizing was all new to me.
Backstory
Nevada’s caucus in 2016 went poorly. More accurately, the state convention went poorly, which you can go down a whole rabbit hole reading about, if you want. What’s important to establish is that the Hillary and Bernie sides absolutely hated each other. The Hillary side thought the Bernie Bros were violent, rampaging sexists who had threatened to kill the state party chairwoman; the Bernie side thought the whole process had been rigged against them in 2016. Because of all that, the most important thing was for 2020’s caucus to go smoothly: no one threatening to throw any chairs (if you mention “chair throwing” to anyone involved with Nevada electoral politics, you will get a long explanation of how this did or did not really happen), no one accusing anyone of fraud, just a simple, transparent process with a clear winner.
The Job
It was both a campaign job and it wasn’t: it was for a political party, and we were doing the same work (phonebanking, planning events, managing volunteers) that any political campaign would do. The difference was that this organizing for the 2020 Nevada Democratic Caucus wasn’t for any of the candidates, it was the neutral, referee-like logistical work to set up the volunteers running the caucus.
The most important thing to know about caucuses is that they suck and everyone hates them. Seriously, everyone. The progressive wing of the Democrats hate them because they’re undemocratic, forcing people to show up in person to a specific place at a specific time to participate, thus suppressing turnout (especially among the working class); the establishment wing of the party hate them because candidates like Bernie, with an extremely enthusiastic base who will do real voter-to-voter organizing, have a huge advantage.
The main difference between a caucus and a primary is that primaries are Official Elections: you go and vote in an election run by the government. A caucus is entirely party-run, and election rules (to my non-lawyer knowledge) essentially don’t apply to it, because it’s not technically an election. You can make them as accessible or inaccessible as you want, they’re events run by a political party to the rules of that political party. So, that means that the entirety of planning two of the first three elections in the primary cycle (up through 2020) was done on a shoestring by the state political parties. And that means they were organized by first-time political workers working way too many hours for not very much money, in way over our heads.
That’s me! I worked for the Nevada Dems from August 2019 through March 2020, making $3,250 a month. I had to find over a hundred people to volunteer to chair their precincts, spread across more than 20 locations across Nevada (my turf was basically everything south and east of Vegas).
Because paying people enough that they’d be able to afford housing would cost campaigns a lot more money, they instead rely on “supporter housing.” That means instead of your own place to live, some nice person or family lets you sleep in their guest bedroom for a while. On the one hand, it’s a great way for scrappy campaigns to get organizers on the ground with little cost, but even bigger campaigns have come to rely on it. It puts added pressure on the organizer to not act up and jeopardize your job: it’s one thing to not have paychecks in and risk getting evicted, but this isn’t even a formal living arrangement with a lease, it’s just some guy letting you sleep there because he wants to help the Democrats. And if you’re not with the Democrats any more, what then?
The hours for the job started off bad and got worse. At the beginning of the job, we worked five and a half days a week. With seven weeks until the election, our schedule changed: ten hour days, seven days a week.
There’s a certain amount of hours one can devote to something in a week before it takes over every other part of the brain. If you’ve ever played a video game so much that you can still see it when you’re trying to go to sleep, you’ve probably felt this; it’s called the “Tetris effect” in that sense. But it’s even worse when it happens with a job; in our case as electoral organizers, a job involving politics. Even when we would go out to the bar to drink after working 70 hours, there’s no way we could talk about anything else, because we hadn’t done anything else to think about. (I had a Tinder date with a gorgeous Bernie organizer, and I asked “can we talk about something else” at one point. I don’t think we did.)
So what did we spend those endless hours doing? A lot of phone calls. Early on, it was basically taking a shotgun approach and calling through our lists (at least 200 dials a day) of previous volunteers for the party or people our data had otherwise tagged as being potential volunteers (based on voting patterns, etc). Later on, once we had a good network of volunteers to rely on, we could set up phonebanks with them and otherwise outsource the work of recruiting more precinct chairs to those volunteers.
Especially early, calling people to get them to volunteer really sucked. Because of all the 2016 drama, the former Hillary supporters didn’t want anything to do with it because they thought a gang of Bernard Brothers would tear them limb from limb, and the Bernie supporters thought it would be rigged from the start. I was calling through a list of people to try to get them to run the caucus, and people were telling me they didn’t even want to participate.
In addition to our volunteer recruitment, we were required to get a certain number of new Democrats registered to vote per week; something about this got us money from the national DNC. My true “welcome to Vegas” moment was standing on the asphalt outside a Wal-Mart when it was close to 100 degrees registering people to vote. Being a Seattleite, I didn’t put on any sunscreen, and got a glorious sunburn followed by a farmers’ tan in about two days. (Wal-Mart kicked us out of their parking lot. I found that the two best spots were at UNLV and outside a 99-cent store. UNLV was great because it had plenty of shade; the 99-cent store’s security not only didn’t kick me out, I registered one of them to vote.)
Our job was mostly self-directed, with metrics we had to hit that were based around results: this many precinct chairs, etc. We had trackers upon trackers in Google docs. Because I had pretty easy turf, I was hitting all my numbers without making their recommended/required phone calls per day, but since I was getting results, hey, no one cared.
This was interrupted by what I started calling “HQ Freakout Days,” when HQ staff went nuts over organizers not making enough phone calls, and we needed to stop all other work and just make X number of dials. Not any tangible result from them, just make that many phone calls. Basically, stop the actual work you’re doing and hit our made-up metrics instead, because we’re your boss. For those days, I made what I euphemistically called my “youth vote outreach” list, which was people 29 and under who we’d never contacted before. Because I knew none of them would ever pick up, and we only had to let it ring four times and hang up without leaving a message, I could get through over 100 of those in an hour, easily. That’s what they get for valuing input metrics over output ones.
I Hate our Electoral System
If you’re like most people, when you think of people who work in politics other than politicians, you think of morons like David Axelrod or James Carville who at one time had real jobs on campaigns, and now collect paychecks going on TV while a title like “Democratic strategist” appears under them. This infuriates me, firstly because that’s not a job. Watching them has made every media consumer think they, too, could be a “strategist” for their political party, like video game fans think they can be in charge of a video game developer as an “ideas guy” without being able to make anything.
Part of what makes our electoral system so terrible is its system of what jobs do exist. Most people who work in politics do so for very short stretches of time, like I did. If you make it through one campaign cycle and work into the next one, you’re an aged, rugged veteran. The person who hired me, two levels of experience above me, was 21 years old at the time.
When I say “our electoral system,” I don’t just mean the laws around how elections work. I mean the broader system of our two parties, the massive industry of consultants and pollsters either supporting or grifting them, and our news media treating the election like a two-year leadup to its Super Bowl.
When a campaign cycle starts up, like for the 2020 cycle, all the campaigns hire at once. There’s not nearly enough locals to hire to staff up every campaign’s offices across the state, so campaigns hire from wherever. It ends up being a lot of recent political science graduates who just want to Work In Politics for a bit. So, these 21 year-olds are airdropped in from New York, California, and Massachusetts to organize in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina for six months. Then their job ends and they go back home. (Talking to one Buttigieg organizer, she sent resumes to every Democratic candidate and took the job with Buttigieg because that’s who got back to her first. We’re supposed to take seriously these people saying that democracy is at risk if we don’t vote, but they’re so apathetic about who wins that they’ll help any Democrat become president who pays them? Mind-boggling. “Blue no matter who,” truly.)
The electoral system is so focused on the specific immediate task at hand, the election these people were hired to win (and working people to the bone doing it), that there’s never any room to step back and build something long-term. No one is planning for the Democratic party five or ten years from now (at least, not in a way that affects local organizing) because that’s ten or twenty times as long as the average staffer is expected to last. The feeling seems to be that every minute spent planning for something further out than the next election is a minute not spent working on winning the next election.
So, when I get on my anarchist high horse now and talk about how we need to spend our time, energy, and money on something other than electoral politics, it’s not the voting part that upsets me. It’s all this bullshit. Every election, we have to burn out all our most promising organizers in six months because there was no infrastructure for them to build on, and they have to make it all from scratch every time. It’s like we’re working extra hard to pay off our last payday loan, then taking out a new payday loan at the end, ensuring we’ll have to do the same thing over again next time.
Classism in the Democratic Party
The “HQ staff,” the higher-paid people with the campaign, worked out of a building in a little office that housed some other campaigns. The field staff, such as myself, got to work there for maybe a few days of training, and then off to our new office: Panera Bread.
For about a month, despite constant promises that it was just around the corner, we didn’t have a field office. In the pre-COVID times when “work from home” was an alien concept, that meant that instead of doing our work from wherever, we all had to meet up at a local Panera Bread together at 9am six days a week and make calls there together. Five years later, I still can’t walk by a Panera Bread without shuddering.
When we did get our own field office, it wasn’t in the nice upscale office park that HQ was. I don’t mind that they found something outside of a white neighborhood–I’ll organize anywhere, and if it was my money, I’d certainly save money on rent that way–but it’s worth noting that the HQ staff didn’t choose to put themselves there. It was in what seemed to be an abandoned doctor’s or dentist’s office, and it didn’t have modern conveniences like “drinkable running water.” We had to carry jugs of water over from the gas station every day just to have something to drink, and if you’ve lived in Vegas without dying, you know you have to drink a lot of water.
Having a physical separation, by around a 15-minute drive, is a perfect metaphor for how the professional class of the Democratic Party sees themselves compared to the ordinary people of the field staff. We weren’t let in on any strategy discussions, we weren’t told any inside information (because they were certain we’d leak it), we weren’t even allowed to physically be around them.
Trying to Unionize
From the start, I was far more interested in trying to unionize the job than the job itself. I had developed a big interest in unions since I had gotten a union job at an AT&T store, gone on strike with CWA, joined DSA, gotten fired from AT&T, gotten my job reinstated through a grievance, and became a union steward. I had sent off a couple resumes to become an organizer at SEIU, to no success.
There was no shortage of issues to organize around: our pay sucked, with the next-lowest pay from a campaign being Bernie’s at $3,500 a month (they may have, ironically, suffered from unionizing first). Our mileage reimbursement was awful, which was a big deal for people like me who had to drive to rural areas of the state. Above all that, there was an overall feeling that the HQ staff just didn’t care about us at all.
I got my first organizing lesson when I reached out to a couple of the more senior field organizers on the campaign: what someone says their political beliefs are doesn’t mean shit when it comes to workplace organizing.
These two people were who, when I was first thinking of the idea of organizing, I assumed would be onboard. They were both Bernie-supporting DSA members. I called them up, and the response I got was some variation of, “I really need to maintain a good relationship with management because I need a promotion/letter of recommendation.” (They both left the campaign fairly quickly anyway.)
This would have been a small unit, around a dozen people, so every card signed mattered a lot. (In organizing electoral campaigns, unlike most others, voluntary recognition is assumed; forcing the workers to go through an NLRB process would be political suicide when your bosses are trying to keep leadership of various unions happy.) I reached out to Campaign Workers Guild, a scrappy independent union that represents some political campaign workers, including, most relevantly, some state parties. (Checking their website, Biden for President Harris for President organized with CWG! Great job, y’all.)
Because we were split between Vegas and Reno staff, the hardest part was getting anyone in Reno onboard. If it had just been a vote in Vegas, we would’ve won handily, but the only person to ever join up from Reno flamed out from the job within a week or two. (You should be getting the idea by now that people come and go from these organizing jobs very quickly.)
I thought we had a majority at one point: another organizer in Vegas, a local, someone I thought I was developing a good relationship with, a self-described anarchist, told me that they wouldn’t sign up first for fear of retaliation, but that they’d be the final card we needed. Okay, fine. So we got the other six cards, and I came to them to get the seventh card needed. Instead, they gave me a lot of objections that made it clear they never intended on signing in the first place. I went to my car and cried.
Our union attempt stalled, but with real pressing issues, the card-signing and non-card-signing people came to a separate course of action: we would draft a letter to management of things we wanted to change. Not a list of demands, but of requests. Things like more car mileage reimbursement, cell phone reimbursement, more pay, drinkable water, and even basic things like a weekly meeting with HQ staff so we could check in.
I took the letter to the HQ office and sat down the the Caucus Director and Executive Director of the party. First, they wanted to let me know how much they appreciated that it was requests and not demands. Then, we went down the list of everything: no, no, no, no, no. The only thing they agreed to was the weekly meeting, and I think we ended up having that all of once.
Knowing what I know now about organizing, this would have been a key step in an escalation plan: I could have gotten the non-card-signers to buy into a plan of, “okay, if this letter doesn’t get a serious response, what do we do next?”, but instead, it didn’t go anywhere. It was too close to the caucus to leave us time to make any change by that point.
Talking with a staffer who was there after I left, I heard they did end up unionizing with IBEW 2320.
The App
Like the essay equivalent of a Godard film, seven pages in I’ll start telling something resembling a story.
Part of the way the 2020 caucuses would be better than 2016, we were told, was that instead of an old-fashioned hotline to call in the results from each precinct, we would be using The App. Not just to report the results, but to run the caucus itself. Everything that happened in the caucus would be put into The App, which would guide you the whole way.
The problem we had was that this app didn’t exist. In our training presentation for how to be a precinct chair, only a few months before the caucus, we had essentially placeholder slides for “this is what you will be doing with the app, when we have it. Which we will. Just not now.”
Then, closer to the election, The App materialized. First, you had to download some extremely sketchy-seeming other app that seemed like a dev tool for testing apps that aren’t finished yet. Then, through that system, you had to download this caucus app.
As I had mentioned, I worked retail selling cell phones for about four years total, including a lot of senior citizens. Getting them onto their Facebook was hard enough. But for The App, we had to have a guide telling Android owners how to enable developer options so that they could download this app-before-you-download-The App. And then, one day in February, they’d have to use this app all on their own in a room full of potentially angry people, and this would have an impact on who would be the next president.
Why did they have to download some other app as a platform to download The App? Because it wasn’t finished yet. Not just in a way that it had a couple kinks to work out, it was blatantly, comically unfinished using it. Pressing the wrong button on nearly any screen would crash it. We weren’t just buying some off-the-shelf app to use, or maybe tweak a little bit; this company was making The App at the exact same time as we were training people how they’d be using it.
We had an event for all our precinct chairs where we were supposed to debut The App for the first time, and get them all to download it, and then run mock caucuses using it. This was, without exaggeration, the worst day I’ve ever had at a job in my life. No one could figure out how to get it on their phones, let alone run a caucus with it. There was too little support for too many people who needed help, and the help they needed, none of the staff knew how to help with. This had been the event we’d been building for, that we recruited all our best volunteers to all come to, and instead of teaching them how they’d run the caucus, we looked incompetent, understaffed, and scared.
It was at this point that the HQ staff could have seen that result, heard the feedback, and made the reasonable decision that The App was clearly not going to work. Instead, they just shrugged it off as something that would get better. The App is a work-in-progress, after all. (And we were just field organizers, what did we know?)
Then, February 3rd, 2020, the best possible thing for Nevada happened: Iowa stepped on the rake before we could. Maybe HQ staff could ignore their precinct chairs and the field organizers, but they couldn’t ignore that.
Overnight, everything changed. The state party that had no money to pay us for cell phone reimbursements had someone who was clearly a crisis communications consultant telling us extremely obvious shit in a conference call the next morning. Our digital media person told us very specifically not only were we not to talk about anything related to The App on social media, we couldn’t even “like” anything related to it, and they would be checking. (To see if they really would, I went and made my Twitter likes all dril tweets to see if anyone would notice. No one said anything.) While publicly, we were insisting that we had extremely real backup plans we were happy to use, in every video call with HQ it was obvious from the bags under their eyes that they had been working on coming up with a new plan instead of sleeping. The class separation of HQ from everyone else didn’t just hurt us in the lower class, it put way too much of a burden on the class exclusively allowed to make decisions.
A whole new group of people arrived: in the same office park as the HQ, a dozen or so people from the DNC came to… I don’t know what they did, exactly, but they were at their laptops and seemed very serious about it. All their food was catered for them.
Soon, we had a new plan: instead of The App, we now had a digital tool WHICH IS NOT AN APP on iPads to help precinct chairs report their results. The “tool” was a Google Form. We were told specifically not to tell anyone that it was a Google Form, but when one of my precinct chairs asked me straight up, “is this a Google Form?” I said… yeah. He responded, “oh, great! That’s just how I would have set it up. Thanks!” It was honestly pretty easy to use. Even the smartphone-averse could fill out a form on one of the iPads we provided.
Early Vote and the Caucus
Our job so far had focused not on the four-day early vote window, where people could “caucus” by filling out a form, but on the day-of caucus itself. When early vote came around, though, it was clear that everyone wanted to vote early instead of participate in another shitshow like 2016.
The field staff spent the day filling in at early vote sites that needed extra hands. At one library, I helped people cast their early vote ballots who had waited in line for five and a half hours.
The enormous volume of people who voted early meant that all the weight was taken off the day-of caucus, in terms of managing huge crowds of people. While we were working sixteen hours days during early vote, to get people through the lines, open and close sites, and then drive the ballots around, the caucus itself was smooth. I went to a small site with three precincts that only had one person there who wanted to be a precinct captain, so I ran one precinct as another one waited a bit over an hour for me to be done. They didn’t seem upset at all; if anything, they were grateful that it was just a little waiting around, and that someone who knew the process was running it.
After driving the final caucus boxes back to HQ, I spent time with the caucus director doing my favorite task of the entire six months: puzzling through the “problem precincts,” the ones with results that didn’t make any sense or that the precinct chair had clearly messed up. It was a fun bit of problem-solving, working through what it seemed like the precinct captain was trying to do, and essentially re-doing their work for them.
One thing I can say confidently is that I didn’t see any anti-Bernie foul play from anyone on the campaign. Everyone at HQ was firmly in the establishment Democratic camp, to be sure (as will come up soon), but they were first and foremost about covering their own asses and not having another 2016-like disaster on their hands. They just wanted a caucus where the story about it afterword would be about who finished in what place, not what a mess it was.
Fortunately for everyone’s asses being covered, the bottom-line result from the caucus was clear: Bernie won in a landslide, more than twice as many votes and delegates as runner-up Biden. Because it was such a blowout, none of the candidates were going to sue the party over this or that delegate being wrong.
For people following Bernie, you might remember this moment: probably the high point of morale for any reformist socialist or social democrat in the United States in many years. It’s hard not to connect Bernie’s impending doom with that other impending doom hanging over us at the end of February 2020.
The Stench
After all the votes were cast, it was time to clean up. The email-sending squad from the DNC had all left, and no one had been in their office for a couple days. They had left all their trash, including uneaten food, such as an entire chicken carcass from one of their catered meals. The field staff wasn’t allowed to be in the office nearby HQ, but we were required to go there to clean up after the more important people who were using it.
I was probably 20 feet from the door when our supervisor opened it and I got hit with a physical wave of stench. A childhood full of sinus infections leave me with a weakened sense of smell, but this wasn’t so much an odor as a steamroller, or a targeted command telling my body to retch.
Leaving
It was early March 2020, and I was convinced I never wanted to work in electoral politics again. I wanted to be a union organizer. With plenty of postings at union-jobs.com, I thought it would be pretty easy to find a position, so I declined the bosses’ invitations to stay on.
I ended up staying with my parents and collecting unemployment until I moved back to Seattle in 2021 instead.
After I Left
You might have heard about the entire staff of the party quitting, giving themselves a severance payment for doing so. If not, you should have, because I think it’s rather instructive.
Basically, someone from DSA (and it’s important to emphasize it was just “someone,” not a democratically-decided-upon DSA project) won the leadership of the party, so the Dems, instead of handing over the infrastructure, torched it instead. The same party that didn’t have the money to pay us handed over $450k that they just had sitting around to Cortez Masto’s fund.
State parties often run something called a “coordinated campaign:” basically, it doesn’t make sense to have entirely separate campaign structures for all these different Democrats in a state, so you’d have one campaign that would turn people out for all your candidates, whether they’re Governor, Senator, Representative, etc. Makes sense. The NV Dems always ran this in off-cycle elections. In 2022, though, that power was taken away from the state party, and given to Washoe County (where Reno is, about seven hours north of Vegas). But, with no staff, how was Washoe County, of all places, going to run this? By hiring a company of all the former NV Dems staff to do it, of course. (And I’d be surprised if they were unionized this time around, like they were before.)
Which leads me to some conclusions.
Conclusion I: Taking over the Infrastructure of the Democratic Party will not Work
Don’t try to take over the Democratic party like that, they’ll never just hand it over to you. Some people might protest that Trump’s bootlickers have successfully taken over local Republican parties from more establishment Republicans, but it’s a totally different scenario: none of the Republican officials want to piss off Trump, whereas Democratic ones would gladly piss off Bernie just because they hate him. The Republican party basically gets taken over by a new upstart wing every decade, from Nixon to Reagan’s hard-right to the neo-conservatives to Trump, but there’s no similar history for the Democrats.
Establishment Democrats will not weigh the pros and cons of socialist organizers and reasonably conclude that while they disagree on some economic issues, at least they’re on the same page about things like abortion rights and protecting LGBT people. They hate socialists with nearly the same passion that they hate Trump, and probably more than they hate pre-Trump conservatives. They will salt the earth and burn the infrastructure rather than hand it over to socialists.
Conclusion II: Electoral-Campaign-by-Electoral-Campaign Union Organizing isn’t a Long-Term Strategy
For those non-union-nerds out there, you might not realize how different the structure of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA are from other unions. I’m not an expert on them, but my basic understanding is that you don’t show up to a movie set non-union, and then organize it, go through the NLRB, and hope you get a contract before the movie finishes; people join the unions, which already have contracts with the studios covering the entire industry, and each production signs onto the existing union contracts. Then, those union members go to work for those productions that have agreed to the unions’ rules. Movies don’t use non-union labor because they’d get boycotted by all the other workers.
Campaign workers desperately need a similar system. Under the current (non-)system, only a minority of political campaigns are going to be unionized, and it’ll be a hodgepodge of wildly different contracts and pay rates, each negotiated individually. No one is covered on day one of a new campaign; you have to spend half your time fighting for the union while trying to do your actual job simultaneously.
How I’d imagine it working is that CWG forms an alliance with traditional large unions, and makes a demand of the DNC and other big organizations that every Democratic or “progressive” political campaign in the country needs to only use union labor, or else [insert thing the unions could threaten the DNC with here, use your imagination]. They negotiate a sector-wide contract. Then, anyone who gets a job on a campaign has to join the union and is covered under the contract from day one.
It’s not a perfect solution (and any anarchist reading this will certainly have reasonable objections about how top-down and not bottom-up it is), but as long as we’re running electoral campaigns, I can’t think of a better way to protect the workers.
Conclusion III: Electoral Politics is a Massive Sink of Resources and is Rewiring our Brains
Just like as workers, we worked such long hours that we lost the ability to talk or think about anything other than our jobs in electoral politics, as a country, we’ve focused so much on electoral campaigns that we’ve lost the ability to do or even think about non-electoral ways to make political change.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with voting, or registering other people to vote, but the all-encompassing focus on it means that everything else gets filtered through a vision where the only pathway is electoral changes. Imagine a conservative and a liberal see a news story about a strike on the docks by longshoremen. Conservatives are going to filter it through their Fox News propaganda and somehow link it to, “this must be because of DEI programs somehow.” Liberals are going to wonder how the strike impacts the election, and maybe whether it’s a ploy by a pro-Trump union to support him by tanking the economy. Neither is analyzing it as a political action on its own terms, without some external filter applied to it.
It’s not even that people are burning themselves out on electoral organizing (though some are); it’s just their focus, their news consumption. Liberals are reading the news and scrolling through five hours of takes on the election and the latest polls every day and feel exhausted from all the energy they’ve just put into politics, despite not doing anything productive.
It doesn’t even get better once the election ends: those people burned themselves out on electoral politics, and get hit with a wave of post-election exhaustion, like D&D characters after a Haste spell. Even if they were successful, once they’re done celebrating a win, they don’t put that same time into non-electoral work. They just go do something other than politics, and save up their time and attention for the next election cycle.
Conclusion IV: Anarchism!
We have to break the loop of stumbling in an exhausted haze from one election to another, over and over. We have to get people organizing, not for or against one candidate or party, but in ways unrelated to elections. Some people might argue that we need to devote some energy toward electoral politics, that we can’t just abandon it entirely. Maybe that’s true. But it feels like about 99% of our political energy is spent on electoralism. We have to move that balance toward everything else: organizing our workplaces into labor unions, our buildings into tenants’ unions, our neighborhoods into communities that will fight for each other when we have to. We have to do organizing that I, a straight white guy focused on workplace organizing, can’t even conceive of, because it’s outside of my personal experiences.
What ended up making me an anarchist was not just realizing that I didn’t think electoral politics was going to win us socialism, but seeing how it sapped resources that could be going into things that, just maybe, could. It was seeing not just that the Democrats are bad, but that the entire hierarchical structure that mandates some people make all the decisions and some people blindly follow orders is ineffective.
Control what you can control. You can’t decide the next president by yourself, so start small and build from there: talk to your immediate neighbors, your coworkers. We’re at a time uniquely deprived of community. We have to build community ourselves.