Picking Up the Pieces from the Election Results

My optimism in the final days before Election Day was clearly misplaced. I was not prepared for a Trump sweep of the battleground states, as many as 54 or 55 GOP senators and well, we’ll see what happens with the House. 

In the days ahead, my hope is we don’t descend into bitter recriminations about the Harris campaign and what they should have done. They ran a stellar campaign, period. No single action or decision by the Vice President or her team would have changed the outcome. 

The fundamentals were just working hard against her. Anti-incumbent sentiment is prevalent globally. Inflation has normalized but the narrative was set in stone for most voters a long time ago. And generally, as a country, we like switching back and forth which party controls the White House every four years. It’s an imperfect way of providing seeming balance to the country. These factors were decisive in this election. 

So here we are. And while we may be exhausted by nearly a decade of Trump in our lives, we are not helpless to prevent some of the otherwise terrible things that could happen over the coming four years. As I told my team this morning, in the weeks ahead, we’ll get more clarity as to opportunities we have through our work to play a role to protect the progress that’s been made and perhaps even push forward.

As my former boss, Senator Cory Booker, said on Monday when asked about a potential Trump victory, “We need to get up the next morning and forge forward. I told my staff how much I don’t like hearing people say, ’Oh, if so-and-so wins, I’m going to go to Canada. That’s just not our history. We’ve seen really bad outcomes out of bad historical events in our country, and we’re here because of the resiliency, the toughness, the strength of our country — and people even in the worst of times dug in and tried to do the best for our country.”

Too many people will be hurt by this next Trump administration, and in ways that cannot be undone. It’s going to take a ton of work from all of us to minimize this damage and ensure our country will endure.