A few quick notes while we strategize

MVP friends,

While we sort through the electoral wreckage and strategize our comeback, I wanted to share a few quick thoughts. (Want some bright spots? See our preliminary post-election read-out.)

The MVP team and our partners are in an intensive period of strategic reflection. We are reading, listening, making sure we learn all the lessons from 2024.

What we know so far: 

We got creamed in the global anti-incumbent blow-out. Working-class and young voters are angry and turned off. The right-wing disinfo media swarm is killing us. Right-wing billionaires are investing strategically and laughing their way to the bank — while millions of liberals give billions of dollars to apolitical charities and ad-driven candidate campaigns that vanish as quickly as they came. (This is a tough pill to swallow but also a cause for hope: The money is there!) And, Democratic Party campaigning models are outdated and broken.

[Here is an (anonymous) donor survey on political giving that we encourage you to take – we’re launching it with our national allies to help Democratic and left-leaning organizations improve the political giving process.]

It boggles the mind that over $1,000,000,000 was raised for a campaign that was ephemeral by design – and that billions more were sunk into TV ads that are now nothing more than a memory.

In a cycle in which billions were spent on purely short-term tactics, MVP is proud to have supported hundreds of year-round voter organizations that engaged tens of thousands of staff and volunteers to contact tens of millions of voters — and whose impact will extend long after Election Day. 

That said, let me be clear: We are humbled by our losses. MVP is committed to facing hard truths, so we can turn this massive breakdown into an equally massive breakthrough. We are determined to use “political Jiu-Jitsu” to break the MAGA movement’s stranglehold on our country. One way or another, we will catalyze a broad-based, strategic, and nonviolent movement to bring Trumpism to an end. 

Our #1 job is to create a viable alternative movement that resonates and brings genuine hope to the millions of working-class and young voters the Democratic Party has lost. Winning back power will require a special alchemy: a compelling candidate; a galvanizing vision; and a highly-motivated movement of young and working-class organizers (online and in thousands of local communities). 

MVP will be working with our hundreds of partners to give birth to this new movement. We already have many of the building blocks in the neighborhoods, communities, and workplaces our partners have been organizing across the country for years. It’s going to take a lot of money, innovation, and patience to turn the people-power we have now into the political power we need.

In the meantime, a few things:

Here is MVP’s post-election briefing, in case you missed it. We’ll also be inviting you soon to our next briefing in December to talk about the future.

Here’s our preliminary post-election read-out, which details some of the elections we won from Congress to ballot measures and state and local races — all of which will help us mitigate the harm of Trump’s second term, improve millions of lives at the state level, and win back power in 2026 and 2028. Reading this won’t make the Presidential loss sting less, but it will give you dozens of proof points that what we and our local partners did absolutely mattered. 

Based on early indications, local organizing saved us from far worse outcomes in 2024. It was a much better investment than TV ads. But honestly, we’ve only seen a fraction of our local partners’ true potential. It will take a lot of work to help them upgrade and do their best work in 2025-2028.

We must be courageous enough to interrogate our assumptions, try new approaches, and build a movement strong enough, savvy enough, and credible enough to win durable majorities in 2026, 2028, and beyond. We need to invest in bold leaders and ideas, scale up what works, and have the guts to change where we need to change.

One harsh reality: No one is coming to save us. The leaders of the Democratic Party do not have the answers. It’s very unclear who Democratic Party leadership even is right now. If this country is to be saved, we’re going to have to roll up our sleeves and save it with our bare hands. We need to do things we’ve never done before. This moment calls for bravery, creativity, agility, and wise leadership – from each and every one of us. 

Thank you for all your thoughtful notes – and your amazing support over these past two weeks. We are proud of our work together. Thank you for everything you’ve done. We look forward to turning the country around together in this next phase.

Billy Wimsatt, MVP Executive Director
(On behalf of the MVP team)

ps. – If you’re looking for things to do… 

• You can sign up to volunteer with MVP – our sole focus is raising money for our local organizing partners around the country.
• You can become a monthly sustainer to support MVP’s local partners to block Trump in 2025, win state progress, and lay the groundwork for 2026 and 2028. 
• You can join our allies and attend or host a local gathering organized by our partners at MoveOn, Working Families Party, Indivisible, and others – to rebuild a progressive movement in local communities everywhere.
• A cool new feature: You can write a Letter to the Editor about the need to invest in year-round organizing — not just billion-dollar candidate campaigns that rise up every four years and then disappear. You can customize our template and use our tool to automatically send it to the ten publications closest to you!
• Finally, you can take the Progressive Donor Survey, which we’re co-sponsoring in partnership with Blue Tent and many allies to learn more about progressive donors’ experience, and how we can improve as a field.