Politics is the struggle for power and the allocation of resources. Elections are about storytelling. In this year’s presidential election, we saw Trump tell the story tying his personal persecution to the persecution of downtrodden, aggrieved Americans. He linked in people’s minds that their suffering was his suffering, that the same corrupt elites who were putting him through show trial after show trial were the same elites who were forcing them to live harder lives than they remembered living thirty years ago. In contrast, Kamala Harris offered a narrative that things are going perfectly fine, that nothing would fundamentally change, and that we should only be feeling joy about the current state of the country. Take a deep breath, and be honest with yourself: who had the better story this election?

I want you to consider some very clear, stark facts about the 2024 presidential election. 51% of people who make less than $100k a year voted for Donald Trump, he made gains among people without college degrees across every demographic. 70% of the people who thought the economy is doing poorly voted for Donald Trump. The story of this election is, to put it bluntly, the story of class war. If you are a person living anywhere in this country scraping by on less than $100k a year, somewhere deep in your bones you know this economy is rigged and that you are being squeezed to the breaking point by your landlord, your boss, and oligarchic corporations. In the absence of a robust labor party offering common sense checks on the excesses of capital, can’t you understand voting for the guy who is most hated by the establishment? If you have felt the strain over the last four years of working your ass off only to have negative money in your bank account after the first of the month, can’t you understand where a Trump voter is coming from?

I am asking you to walk your way through empathizing with a Trump voter because we are going to have to do a lot of that over the next four years. I don’t really care if you currently find yourself too consumed with disdain to imagine ever talking to a Trump voter, eventually you’re going to have to if we want to dig our way out of this mess. Maybe since you live in West LA, you’re thinking “well, there’s no Trump supporters in my neighborhood, my house is in order!” But I want you to consider how many RFK Jr signs we’ve seen around the westside in the last year, and ask yourself if you really think those people voted for Harris. I want you to think about how red Beverly Hills is. I want you to think about the fact that LA just elected a Republican district attorney who has promised to bring back the death penalty. California just failed to pass a proposition abolishing slavery in our prisons, something voters in Alabama did two years ago. We also passed Prop 36, pretty much guaranteeing the return of mass incarceration to California. Think about the fact that we currently have a city councilmember with deep, deep ties to the right. It is easy in California to delude ourselves that we are insulated from the worst impulses of the right-wing, but the sobering reality of this election shows us otherwise.

Part of the reason California may have trended right-ward this election is that we are a state of extreme wealth abutting extreme poverty. In Los Angeles, we have some of the wealthiest enclaves in the world adjacent to neighborhoods where the median income is way below the Federal poverty line. I’ve laid out the case why a working class person might vote for Trump, but let’s be honest, we all know wealthy people tend to vote Republican purely for tax breaks and for help busting unions. When you consider all of this, it’s really not so shocking that this is the state that gave us Nixon and Reagan.

I have spent hundreds of hours over the years knocking doors across LA county talking to people about the need for reform in our jail system. As you can imagine, many people are instantly wary, and occasionally openly hostile. I’ve had these conversations with Republicans in McMansions Santa Clarita, with hippie grandmas in Long Beach, with people living in public housing. When I ask them to consider having empathy for incarcerated people they are rarely receptive at first. It’s not easy to have vulnerable conversations about violence and harm, and how we might better utilize resources to prevent harm and heal from it when it does occur, but over the years I’ve gotten good at pulling out people’s stories and deep-seated beliefs about punishment and restoration. I have felt the unadulterated magic of feeling a person’s cognition shifting, of something clicking into place behind their eyes that never has quite fit for them before. People are changeable, we’re all adapting all the time, and you have to believe this if you’re serious about overcoming fascism.

Over the years I’ve learned how to tune out talking points and slogans and keep asking questions until people start speaking authentically as themselves and not as avatars for their political party. One of the best conversations I’ve had was with a retired cop and lifelong Republican. One of the worst was with a woman with a lawn sign for a Democrat running for senate in her front yard. I don’t expect anyone I talk to to be a prison abolitionist like me, I start from the assumption that my politics are unpopular, and I try my best to tell a story in ways that connect with people’s immediate lived experience until we can reach a point of mutual understanding.

There’s a real tendency in presidential election cycles to whip people into a frenzy of believing that the other half of the country is irredeemably evil, but I want you to remember that the biggest voting block this election cycle was people who did not vote. What are their stories? What were the things neither candidate was offering to them that made them not vote this time? Kamala Harris got eight million less votes than Joe Biden did in 2020. Yes, that election was unique and bizarre for a myriad of reasons, but Trump gained almost two million voters compared to 2020. Where were the four million or so people who could’ve turned around the results of this election? How did the Democrats fail to tell a convincing story to those people?

I know if you are reading this newsletter, you’re already a community minded progressive, which is great! But I want you to really sit with yourself in the wake of this election and ask how you can be most effective at telling a story that asserts our politics into the world. We make our values a reality not by clinging to our smartphones and scrolling through algorithms designed by billionaires to pacify us, we assert them by finding like minded people and building tangible things in the world of flesh, blood, and concrete. Not everyone’s lane is canvassing and talking to strangers, there are a multitude of ways to make our politics a reality, but now is the time to commit to it and commit to it hard. Whether it’s packing survival kits for a mutual aid project, or doing research to get social housing built in your neighborhood, or fighting for a union in your workplace, it takes many hands to make the better world we all deserve.

As conditions invariably get harsher for all of us over the coming years, we are going to need the defenses of our neighbors to survive. There is a very real possibility that an atmospheric river could hit LA like it hit Spain earlier this month and force us all to help each other survive devastating floods. Life will absolutely get more precarious and unaffordable in the coming years, many of our neighbors could face evictions as the economic crisis deepens. We don’t get to pick and choose who we live next door to in an emergency. All we can do is strengthen our bonds with the people in our immediate vicinity to take care of each other when the shit really hits the fan. Now is not the time to despair, all we have is each other.

I’ll end with a quote by the titan of the LA Left, Mike Davis, from shortly before he died:

“For someone my age who was in the civil rights movement, and in other struggles of the 1960s, I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resistors, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless…

What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.”