Opinion: The Danger of a Good Night

By Danielle Butterfield, Executive Director, Priorities USA

Here's something you're not supposed to say two weeks out from an election: my biggest fear this November isn't that Democrats lose. It's that we win and think that the fight is over.

When Republicans won in 2024, they didn’t just celebrate - they got right back to work building for what’s next. A couple of months ago, The Atlantic reported on an overseas operation paying subcontractors to flood TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts with pro-Republican content designed to look like grassroots support. It runs on dark money, and nothing requires it to disclose who's paying. It's deceptive, but it's also proof that coming off real wins, Republicans don't coast. 

Strip away the deception, the deepfakes and the bots and what's left is a Republican Party that keeps getting serious about new technology. We used to be that party. President Obama won the White House twice on the back of unprecedented investments in digital organizing. Democrats were first out of the gate online, but since then, we've been lapped again and again.

After losing in 2012, Republicans wrote a brutally honest post-mortem, and unlike most post-mortems in Washington, they actually acted on it. They poured money into data and digital organizing and built groups like Turning Point USA to talk to voters every month of every year, no matter who was on the ballot. Republicans won in 2016 and did the thing Democrats almost never do: they kept building. Winning the White House didn’t mean the job was done. It proved the work was paying off, so they kept working.

Democrats have the opposite reflex. Losing wakes us up, but winning gives us permission to hit snooze. 

I've watched it happen from the inside. After Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, I joined Priorities USA to help build the party's digital muscle. We secured funding to invest in audience research, training, testing and experimentation – the unglamorous infrastructure nobody notices until it's gone. We started to make real progress and Democrats started winning again. But the enthusiasm that was there to fund long term infrastructure after 2016 unfortunately dried up after 2020. It didn’t just impact Priorities, but dozens of other smart, well-intentioned orgs who were forced to downsize. 

We’re in the middle of another critical period of self-examination and re-building after the brutal loss of 2024. But we haven’t finished that work, and winning in 2026 could give us permission to stop yet again. If the road from 2024 to winning back the White House in 2028 is the full game, 2026 is just halftime. It’s our chance to check whether we’re actually on track to win the whole game, even after a good first half. But let’s remind ourselves: midterm electorates skew older and more reliable than presidential ones. A win in two weeks doesn’t tell us much about whether we can win the White House in two years.

Ahead of 2028, restoring faith in our party's brand is job #1, and we can’t do that without tapping into the full potential of the internet. Attention online is earned, not rented –  we can’t buy our way into someone’s feed six weeks out. Instead, we need year-round content, messengers voters already trust, and real research into where people actually get their information. Part of this task includes treating the internet as a source of insights, not just a vehicle for ads. And let’s be clear: campaigns can’t carry this task alone. They disappear every November, right along with their yard signs. Republicans will keep investing in year-round infrastructure – they show no signs of slowing down after this election, win or lose. They didn’t after 2016 or 2024, and they’re already mapping their plays for the second half. Every month we spend celebrating is a month they will spend building.

So let's decide now, before the results come in, that we’re going to have a strong second half, and it will be because of donors, party leaders and organizations who keep their eyes on the prize. 

I want us to win in November. And then I want us to get right back in the game.

Danielle Butterfield is the President and Executive Director of Priorities USA, the Democratic presidential Super PAC.

This week, a political polling firm named Wedgewood Polls released a statement admitting that it was, in fact, not a legitimate pollster and that all the survey data it had released this cycle was made up. The admission came a few months after one of the group’s polls in the Michigan Senate primary caused Mallory McMorrow’s campaign to basically collapse. (To be fair, other more legitimate polls also showed McMorrow trailing her opponents.)