This might put an end to the madness

The entire media has spent the entire month of November cherry picking polls to paint a fictional picture of Donald Trump being in the driver’s seat and firmly on his way to magically retaking power in 2024. This has created an atmosphere of doomsday hysteria, baiting far too many of the leading voices on our side into obsessively pushing messaging along the lines of “When Trump is back in power he’ll…” This only serves to help cement the fictional narrative that Trump is going to win no matter what and we’re all doomed and there’s no point in even trying to defeat him.

When FDR said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, he wasn’t telling people to be optimists. He was reminding people that when you’re engaged in a difficult battle, if you sit there in paralyzed fear and talk about how you’re going to lose, you are increasing your odds of losing, because you’re not doing anything to try to win. FDR was telling people to get off their asses and make an effort to win the fight, because that’s the only way you increase your odds of winning.

The same concept applies today. No amount of staring at TV commentators, while they tell you you’re going to lose, is going to do anything to increase our odds of winning in 2024. No amount of doomsday tweets, about how Trump is going to win and do all these awful things, are going to do anything to increase our odds of winning in 2024. All this does is create an environment where idle hysteria is mistaken for activism – and then no one bothers to put in the work required to actually win in 2024. This kind of doomsday hysteria costs us votes, because it keeps us from putting in the work to get us the votes we need. If you’re going around talking about how you’re going to lose, you’re forfeiting.

The question is how we can put a stop to this toxically harmful vicious cycle. The more we obsessively panic over how we’re supposedly going to lose in 2024, the more the media is going to take it as a sign to feed us even more panic about how we’re supposedly going to lose in 2024. We need to stop behaving like this, so the media will decide that there are no longer any ratings to be had from this “we’re gonna lose” narrative, and move on. The catch-22 is, how do we do it?

We just saw a 2023 election cycle where the Democrats outperformed expectations and dominated (just like they did in 2022). Most of the media quickly worked to downplay those 2023 results, claiming that it was somehow not good news for Biden (Meet The Press host Kristen Welker flat out lied and called the 2023 election results “mixed”). But the general public across the nation wasn’t really paying attention to the 2023 elections to begin with, so the media knew it could get away with misrepresenting what the results meant.

If only we had another election around the corner that the nation was actually going to pay attention to, that might do the trick. If the Democrats were to dominate such an election, then the media would have a hard time selling its “Biden and the Democrats are doomed in 2024” narrative after that. The thing is, we might actually have one of those elections coming up in the next couple months.

Now that the Republican-controlled House Ethics Committee has formally recommended the expulsion of George Santos, there’s a good chance it’ll happen. It’s tricky to try to put odds on it. But there appear to be a growing number of House Republicans who worry that if Santos is still around in November 2024 the blowback against him will cost them their seats. So there’s going to be another expulsion vote soon, and this one might actually get rid of him.

If so, we’d be looking at a special election to replace him shortly after the holidays. Given that everything related to George Santos is ratings gold, the media wouldn’t be able to help but hype a special election to fill his seat even as he’s being expelled and brought to trial. If the media makes the special election into a national spectacle, and if the Democrats then win it (particularly if they win it by a nice margin), the media might then have to back down from its doomsday hysteria about how the Democrats are supposedly doomed in 2024.

So if George Santos is expelled, we need to go all out on the special election. The Democrats would have a modest advantage in that election, due to the specter of Santos hanging over it. But it could be close, so we need to get involved as comprehensively as possible. That means donating to Democratic candidate Anna Kaplan, phone banking remotely, whatever it takes. Not only would we be looking to win, we’d be looking to win by as big of a margin as possible, in order to silence the media.

We still don’t know what’s going to happen with the Santos expulsion vote. But we should be prepared for the possibility of his expulsion at any time, which would immediately start the clock on the special election. We need to be ready to gear up on a moment’s notice. Not only can we gain a House seat over it, we can also force the media to stop spending all day talking about how the Democrats are supposedly doomed. So let’s be ready.