They Beat Me. Properly.

I lost my race yesterday for re-election as a Democratic Committee Person, 5th Ward, 13th Division. Congratulations to Jenny Zhang and Max Meshaka, the people who beat me. They earned it the only way you can really earn it — by knocking on doors, by working weekends, by getting ballots into drop boxes over a Saturday and a Sunday while my campaign was still admiring its mail-ballot efforts through mail. Jenny is going places, she is the brains behind this operation, I enjoyed talking to her at the polls most of yesterday. We found out we had more in common than we thought. I also knew shortly into the day that I would be standing there all day in the heat to lose. But, that’s what elections are for.

Mike Boyle, who has been the leader of the 5th Ward since I first ran for office in 2007 also lost his election to Committeeperson.

For those who don’t know, a Ward Executive Committee is the lowest level elected official in the Democratic Party, it is not a state or city office but a party office. It is unpaid. I ran to help Mike stay ward leader not to do the work. “Committeepeople” are the on the ground organizers for the party, they also elect their Ward Leader. Ward leaders elect the Chairperson of the Democratic City Committee. And City Committee has really outsourced its ground game to paid get out the vote “professionals”. City Committee really only influences low turn out or low information elections, think Judge, Row Offices, low dollar races. Candidates, not the party, are the ones pay for and organize the ground campaign as the party is not effective in high stakes, high information races. This race proves the party could be much more effective if it focused its dollars and fundraising and organizing and created accountability within its ranks. It’s much easier to run a machine if everyone has a patronage job that will be lost if their division does not produce the results the party wants.

The mechanics are worth saying out loud, because they are the entire point of what comes next. Monday night I was calling super voters the city’s records said hadn’t voted. A lot of them had. The records were stale because the ballots had been dropped over the weekend and hadn’t been logged yet. That is what organizing actually looks like when it’s done by people who know what they’re doing — not a vibe, not a hashtag, not an op-ed. A volunteer at a door. A clipboard. Another. Another. The work the party should have been doing. The work I should have been doing for this race. I wasn’t. They were. That’s why the result is what it is.

I want to use this moment for more than a concession, because the race I just lost is a small instance of a much larger fight, and the larger fight is the one I’ve been writing about for months.

The architecture of the wealth transfer — deficits run to fund tax cuts whose gains capitalized into asset prices held by households already old enough to own assets; an estate-and-gift regime that lightly touches accumulated fortunes and a step-up trick that wipes the income-tax slate clean at death; trust structures that extend ownership horizons across centuries — is not somebody else’s problem and it is not abstract. The bill for that architecture was mailed forward to the same generation that is now told, by both parties, that the system is too big to touch and that their best option is to wait for an AI-funded basic income administered by the same class of people who built the extraction in the first place. That is the cage Tocqueville warned about, modernized: a tutelary state that provides selectively, monitors automatically, withdraws discretionarily, and shapes behavior by the credible threat of suspension pending review. A republic of conditional dependents is not a republic. That insight is older than the country.

Here is the part the people knocking on doors this weekend understood and the party didn’t. None of that architecture is locked yet. The donor networks have funded most of it. The judiciary is one vote from constitutionalizing, incorrectly, the realization rule that would foreclose a federal wealth tax. The AI labs are training the labor displacement. The UBI proposal is drafted in PowerPoint. But the last bolts haven’t been tightened, and the only force in American politics that has ever, in living memory, beaten the convergence of money and institutions is organized human turnout. Not theory. Not posting. Turnout, built by hand, one door at a time, over weekends. Exhibit A, Hungary.

Look at where it’s already working. Under 56 years old in the Massie race, strongly Massie. Over 56, strongly his challenger. Tens of millions of outside dollars poured in to dislodge a sitting congressman, and the generational split is the story — older voters took the cue from the spending; younger ones didn’t. I’m confident a serious review of the Rabb–Stanford–Street race here will show the same generational pattern and the same on-the-ground explanation: more doors knocked, more weekends worked. The rule the cycle just confirmed, including in my own race, is the one worth repeating: organizing beats money unless the money is extreme. The exceptions — a handful of overwhelming-money districts — are exceptions. In the broad middle of American politics, the side that puts more people at more doors wins.

Councilman Brian O’Neill, a Republican, has been showing for 40 years that shoe leather works. He has probably knocked in every door in his district, one-tenth of the City, multiple times. Jenny asked me how he holds on, the answer is simple, he fights for it, just like she is.

That matters because the architecture I’ve been describing is structural, not conspiratorial — convergent self-interest, not a coordinated plot — but it has now entered a new phase. The earlier stages emerged from incentive alignment that nobody had to design. The current stage, the AI stage, is the first one whose principal beneficiaries are conscious enough of the trajectory to be designing it on purpose, in real time, in front of us, for themselves—so they stay the top .01%. They are writing the rules of the post-labor economy while the people who will live inside it are told to wait for the check. The window in which any of that can be unbuilt is the window we are in. It doesn’t close in 2028. It narrows considerably by 2028. The 2026 midterms and 2028 election are existential to voters under 56, and they know it, and they are pissed. I’m glad Jenny and Max will be working my division in those races.

This is yours to claim. The wealth transfer was engineered above your heads and the bill was mailed to you. You don’t have to write a Substack about it. You don’t have to wait for a candidate. You don’t have to be in the room where the donor networks meet, because that room is already lost. You have to knock on doors. The people who beat me did. They didn’t need permission. Neither do you.

"Get off this estate."
"What for?"
"Because it’s mine."
"Where did you get it?"
"From my father."
"Where did he get it?"
"From his father."
"And where did he get it?"
"He fought for it."
"Well, I’ll fight you for it."

Those words from Carl Sandburg, written in 1936 in his book long poem, “The People, Yes”, I learned at my Dad’s knee. That’s the energy the party needs and it needs to be directed outward.

Congratulations again to my opponents. I mean it. Now let’s go!