First, let’s start with the obvious. A party should always run a good candidate. Here, I should add a caveat that a flawed person can be a good candidate and a flawed candidate can be a good person. When I ran for office, I was far from the stereotype of a political candidate after serving eight years in prison. Voters still placed their trust in me. Why? From my conversations with voters, I’ve been told is because of what I did after getting released, because of my ideas, and my experience. With that in mind, it is hard to understand why someone like Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia lost after her disastrous debates. Or, why Cuomo, a sexual harasser who sent many elders to their death during the COVID pandemic, lost to the charismatic, disciplined Mayor-Elect Mamdani? If you’re a party leader, you should consider supporting candidates who are willing to put in the work to improve themselves and are committed to public service over special interests.

Affordability has been front and center since the pandemic, but in urban areas and the Rust Belt communities, the pain was there before the pandemic. Trump was able to capitalize on that festering wound, resulting in gains in blue areas in 2024. Those gains seem to have been reversed. Over the next few weeks, we’ll see more data, but in places like Virginia, every county shifted blue. Online, there are folks on the Democratic and Dem-adjacent side arguing over whether a Democratic Socialist like Mamdani or a moderate like Spanberger is the model for future Dems. The truth is that the issues that impact the country have localized impacts, and candidates need to connect to the district they’re running in. Labels don’t matter as much as the solutions you have for the voters’ problems.

The problem for Democrats is not who you model in 2026 or 2028 or what issue you will message on; it’s how you will govern today to address problems in your community. We have an affordability crisis in housing because the places where jobs are located and people want to live, like big cities, have not been building enough housing. Starting a family is expensive because people have to move from their families and pay for child care. Parents are confronted with daycare costing $2,000 a child or more. Healthcare is expensive because the field is captured by the insurance industry, which prefers to shut down facilities to improve its bottom line.

Most troublesome is that the gains made by California’s redistricting effort through Prop 50 will be wiped away after the 2030 apportionment. California has been losing population due to its housing shortage and related high cost of living. The problem with many of these challenges is that some are rooted in local politics. Local government, in my opinion, should focus on bread-and-butter issues, but in this case, city council members and mayors can drastically shape the future of the federal government. In states like California and New York, it’s time to ask local elected officials and state legislators, not only how you will fix our local issues, but also how you will ensure we maintain and grow our congressional representation.

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Thanks for reading, talk soon!

-Victor Flores

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