This Vote Matters More Than You Think

Endless Urgency is free to read—thanks to our paid subscribers. If this work has been useful to you, please help keep it available to everyone by becoming a paid subscriber. Just $8/month makes a huge difference:

Upgrade to paid

Something important just happened in Washington, D.C. — and the reaction to it tells you almost everything you need to know about where American politics actually is right now.

Every Senate Democrat just voted to block a Department of Homeland Security funding package because it included money for ICE and CBP without meaningful reforms following the murder of Alex Pretti this weekend. The vote failed 45–55. Funding runs out this week. A partial government shutdown is looking more and more likely.

Immediately, the panic set in.

You can feel it coming from the White House, from Republican leadership, from the usual chorus of pundits who rush in anytime Democrats show the slightest willingness to use power effectively. The same voices always show up in moments like this. The ones who say Democrats need to be “responsible,” need to “de-escalate,” need to “govern like adults.” The ones who treat the possibility of any shutdown like a moral failing instead of what it actually is: leverage.

Here’s the part people shouldn’t miss: this wasn’t a handful of protest votes. This wasn’t some fringe faction making noise. Every single Senate Democrat — including John Fetterman and seven Republican senators — said no.

And that didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened after Pretti’s murder. After intense public outcry. After people like you and me called our representatives nonstop, took to the streets, and made our voices heard. And after seven House Democrats voted for this same package the week before — and caught hell for it.

The politics shifted fast — and the Senate responded. They did their job.

Not because it was politically convenient, although I would argue it is. Not simple because it polls well. But because at some point, refusing to fund broken and corrupt systems without accountability has to mean something.

You don’t have to agree with every tactic to understand that something important shifted here. Today, Democrats didn’t blink first.

Endless Urgency is free to read—thanks to our paid subscribers. If this work has been useful to you, please help keep it available to everyone by becoming a paid subscriber. Just $8/month makes a huge difference:

Upgrade to paid

And that matters, because it speaks directly to the anxiety a lot of Democrats are feeling right now — anxiety that I think is completely rational.

If you’re paying attention, you’re not just worried about the next election. You’re worried about whether this party is even capable of holding power long enough to actually change anything. You’re looking at a system that feels rigged: a rigged Supreme Court loaded with Republican operatives instead of jurists, a Congress that’s wildly malapportioned, and a media ecosystem that rewards bad faith and outrage porn.

Meanwhile, Republicans don’t want to build anything. They want stasis or destruction — both of which are easier than governing. They benefit from a system that lets them punch above their weight, and they play it ruthlessly. Gerrymandering. Court-packing in all but name. Weaponized outrage. No apologies.

So when people ask me, “How are we not just completely screwed?” — I get it. I really do.

But here’s the pivot point almost every one of these conversations misses.

The biggest problem Democrats have isn’t that the odds are stacked against us. It’s what we do after we win.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: Democrats actually know how to win elections. We’re pretty good at it — I’d argue we should have lost more in 2024, but we ran better campaigns and candidates than the Republicans did and were running against terrible headwinds (Biden and the economy.)

When the stakes are clear and the contrast is sharp, we win, and our policies are vastly better than the alternative IMHO. Remember: Trump is underwater on nearly every major issue and is more unpopular now than Biden ever was at this point in his term.

Electorates aren’t static. They never have been. Bill Clinton won Louisiana. Barack Obama won Iowa, Indiana, Florida, and North Carolina. States that feel impossible today won’t feel impossible forever — especially in an economy where 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and we’ll have new nominees for president from both political parties in 2028.

Yes, the map is hard. Yes, the rules are rigged. But that’s not what keeps me up at night.

What keeps me up at night is this: what happens when Democrats actually get power again?

Too often, the answer from Democratic strategists (of which, I am one) is predictable. Restore the norms. Move slowly. Don’t scare donors. Don’t upset the editorial boards. Don’t look “too political” while holding political power.

That mindset is a losing governing strategy in an asymmetric fight.

Republicans understand power. They use it like they might never get it again — because sometimes they don’t. They move fast. They stack courts. They rewrite rules. They create outcomes that are hard to reverse.

Democrats, by contrast, don’t treat power like something to wield — they treat it like something that needs to be justified. Like it’s inherently temporary. Like using it too aggressively might somehow disqualify them from holding it at all.

That’s why this DHS funding vote matters.

Not because ICE is the whole fight. Not because a shutdown is inherently good. But because withholding power is still power — and today, Democrats acted like they understand that.

If Democrats want to win power back and actually keep it, governing has to look fundamentally different next time. Structural reform can’t be an afterthought. It has to happen immediately. Day one, not year two. Kill the filibuster. Expand the Supreme Court. Add D.C. and Puerto Rico as states. Not because it’s provocative, but because Republicans have been playing unfair for decades, and pretending otherwise is malpractice. It’s time to use power the way they use power, except we’ll use it to save our democracy and improve your life.

And it can’t stop there. Economic populism has to be real — and it has to be big. Not tinkering. Not pilot programs. Real material changes that let people afford housing, raise a family on one income if they choose, get sick without going broke, retire with dignity, and take a goddamn vacation every now and again. If people can’t feel the difference in their daily lives, nothing else we do is going to matter.

At the same time, Democrats have to get serious about corruption in America. We cannot keep living in a country where members of Congress can trade stocks using nonpublic information, where presidents pardon their friends and family, where crypto scams flourish, and where lobbyists effectively write the laws. That means investigations. Public accountability. Consequences. Real laws with real enforcement. Not out of revenge, but because letting corruption go unpunished is how democracies rot from the inside.

And while we’re at it, Democrats need to stop being afraid of the fight.

The right-wing media ecosystem is going to lose its mind no matter what we do. So stop governing like Fox News approval is attainable. Go on Fox. Go on Joe Rogan. Argue for hours. Explain the choices. Defend the outcomes. Sell the fight everywhere, all the time.

Because the one question Democrats can never allow again is this: “What have you actually done for me lately?” That question should be impossible to ask with a straight face.

That’s why this moment matters. This vote isn’t the whole story — but it is a signal. It says we’re done reflexively funding broken systems. It says we’re willing to take political heat. It says we understand leverage. It says we’re not blinking first anymore.

Hope doesn’t come from pretending the odds are even. Hope comes from deciding to fight like the stakes are real — because they are.

If Democrats win in 2026 or 2028 and go right back to cautious, technocratic, “let’s not rock the boat” governance, we will lose again — and we’ll deserve it.

But if we take power with urgency, if we move fast, if we’re bold, if we’re annoying about our wins, if we actually help people and make it impossible to ignore — then this moment won’t be remembered as chaos.

It’ll be remembered as the point where Democrats finally decided to act like they understand how to wield power effectively.

And that’s how you build a future worth hoping for.

Upgrade to paid