HEADS: 5 core values for long-term democratic success in NH

1. Humility - In New Hampshire politics, the moment you think you are hot stuff, you start heading downhill. It is also when the ability to accept constructive criticism - to acknowledge failure - declines.  When the public sees a party and its leaders as humble, it greatly increases our credibility when we criticize the GOP's leaders and policies. The Democratic brand has become synonymous with claiming the moral high ground - our party would never accept somebody like Trump.  Furthermore, many in our party have suggested that those who support him have been fooled, or are selfish.  We made the decision in 2024 to focus on threading the electoral needle by trying to get the sliver of anti-Trump Republicans to be so indignant about Trump's character that they would vote for us - explicitly asking them to ignore differences on policy, self-interest, and even identity.  It didn't work, in part because a growing number of people don't want the association with the Democratic brand at least as much as they dislike the Trump brand.

2. Entertaining - You could make the "E" in HEADS "engaging" or "exciting", but entertaining puts a finer point on it.  Upcoming elections will be increasingly decided by the new swing voters.  They're not people in the ideological center; they're people who are undecided about whether or not they want to participate, and whose brand they find more personally appealing. Trump, of course, understands this better than most (you could argue that his team decided they had no choice but to focus on low-engagement voters, but this trend has been underway for several years now).  Here in NH, it is not simply that Democrats have not prioritized candidates' and leaders' ability to engage and entertain; charisma has overtly been seen as a bug, rather than a feature. In a state media landscape which is emaciated, and a national landscape of increasingly diffused media, we must make being engaging, exciting, and entertaining a stated priority.

3.  Accountable - New Hampshire's political structure currently provides little in the way of a feedback loop that would allow "the market" to "communicate" approval or disapproval.  How is success being defined? How are results being measured? This has direct long-term impact on (for example) fundraising, which is largely raised from a handful of vulnerable pools (First In The Nation status, a stagnant circle of established, in-state individual "superdonors", and national political entities whose contributions hinge on our viability to compete and win state-level elections).  In this context, accountability means identifying the types of spending that have the most causal relationship to improving outcomes, and then measuring what happened against those assumptions. The old saying from my auditing days: "If you count it, you can measure it. If you measure it, you can improve it.  But if you don't count it, you can't improve it." In this context, I'd add: And show your work.

4.  Detail-oriented - Let me be clear:  I am not saying that candidates or the party should be putting lots of additional detail into their policies while they're running for office.  It is not like the problem is that we just don't offer enough five-point plans!  This is about the construction of campaigns, and the application of strategies and tactics to match the specific contours of each downballot race.  Because we have more downballot seats than any state in the country, it is seen as too unwieldy to treat each campaign as its own organism.  However, the microscopic nature of most of our downballot races compared to the rest of the country actually means surgery has the greatest potential payoff. The current political consultant industrial complex encourages election committees and state parties to spend most of their money on broad messaging, often based on dated polling. This partly explains why mail pieces about abortion were dominant, as compared to specific messages about specific strengths and weaknesses of the district-level candidates. Having fewer mail pieces, at a higher rate per piece, that allows for localized messaging may be a better way of communicating through the mailbox, for example, than what we've been doing recently.  Using data (PAECO scores are but one example) to build optimal local candidate profiles, and help shape our recruitment efforts, is more detailed than our current processes.  Thinking of door-to-door work as two-way communication (where we get legit feedback from actual voters about what they want to see prioritized, and how they receive information, rather than us telling them what matters) is a detail-oriented approach of constantly refining our campaigns. 

5.  "Saying No" - Jony Ive was the Chief Design Officer for Apple during Steve Jobs' second run as its CEO.  After Jobs passed away, Ive, who was known as the person who had lunch with Jobs almost every day, was asked about key lessons Jobs taught him.  This is what he said:

"Steve was the most remarkably focused person I've ever met in my life. And the thing with focus is, it's not sort of this thing you aspire to, you decide on Monday, 'You know what, I'm going to be focused.' It is an every minute, a 'why are we going to talk about this [he points in one direction]. This is what we are working on [points in the other direction].' You can achieve so much, when you are truly focused.  And one of the things Steve would say is...'How many things have you said no to?'  What focus means is saying no to something that, with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it, because you're focusing on something else."

Jobs (like many entrepreneurial types) was neurodivergent, and likely developed this commitment to single-minded focus as a means of succeeding with undiagnosed ADHD. But it really gets at a mindset that, as a party, we will need to develop from top to grassroots: Focusing on one master goal, and then seeing everything through the question of, "Is this moving us towards achieving our goal?" At the most basic level, the political goal is for NH Democrats to build a sustainable system that consistently wins trifecta control.  In sports, we'd describe this as building a "clubhouse culture", where when you walk into the clubhouse or locker room, there is a set of expectations, and established leaders mentoring new leaders to sustain that culture.