The 2025 "Heads, we win!" listening tour

 It has been a tough stretch for Democrats at the state level - five consecutive GOP gubernatorial wins, and the 4th time in the last five elections that Republicans will have the majorities in the Senate, House, and Executive Council.

I've spent much of the last few months doing the quantitative work of analyzing results in every one of New Hampshire's 320+ electoral precincts, in order to begin answering three questions over the course of the next several months:
 

What happened?
Why did it happen?
How do we do win durable, governing majorities in a sustainable way?

Some of you may know that I'm an MPA by training who used to audit city, county, and state governments for a living. 

That auditing background is useful with the work of Move The Goalposts, because it trains the mind to think in the frame of the three questions at the top of today's email.

The last few months have been spent figuring out exactly what happened - the quantitative work.  I've got updated PVIs and PAECO scores, as well as new analytical tools I'll roll out in 2025.  I can tell you what happened, as well as the patterns that help explain why things happened the way they did. 

(This work has already informed the values needed to succeed in 2026 and beyond, which make up the name of this project.  "HEADS" stands for Humility, Excitement, Accountability, Detail-oriented, and "Saying No" when necessary. Click here to learn more about these five overarching values!)

But just as I used to sit down for many hours in each auditing project to interview the people behind the data, I want to sit down with dozens of local, regional, and county Democratic committees - including candidates, volunteers, and activists - to get the qualitative understanding of what happened in 2024.  

These events take different forms, but consistently include:

• A high-level review of what happened statewide
• A specific look at the analytics for the local community and downballot districts
• A facilitated discussion about how the data compare with the local experience on the ground - what confirmed your experience, what surprised you, & what might the quantitative work be missing?
• Constructive evaluation of what seemed to work and not work - with the benefit of hindsight, what could we have done better?
• How might we "operationalize" this insight soon, with an eye on 2026 and beyond?

I'm anticipating several dozen events over the course of this winter and spring across the state.  This is going to be an intense next 4+ months!

I would love to organize a Listening Tour session with your community.  Please send me an email at steve@movethegoalpostsnh.com if you'd like to do:

• An event for your local town committee
• A combo event with multiple towns representing a State House district
• A regional or countywide event
  

At the end of this phase of the process, Move The Goalposts will convene a daylong workshop for activists statewide to convene.  We'll do plenary sessions to review the findings from both the quantitative and qualitative work described above, as well as prescriptions for how we can use this knowledge to build durable, sustainable, governing Democratic majorities.

As part of the conference, we'll have numerous breakout sessions designed to get into the nitty-gritty of strategic and tactical questions which come up over the course of the next 4+ months. The goal is to help our candidates, activists, and grassroots leaders feel informed, empowered, and confident.