When Did I Know I Was Going to Lose?

The moment I knew Democrats were really in trouble and how to avoid it in 2026

In the midst of the current chaos, and staring down some of the worst legislation in history, it’s more important than ever to look back at the last election for some clues as to what happened. After all, this messy Trump-Musk coalition that we are watching break up was always messy, and the pro-corporate pro-billionaire legislation is basically just what they always promised to do. And we still lost to them.

We can’t let that happen again.

Sometimes, people ask me at what point I knew I was going to lose my senate election against Josh Hawley. I remember the exact moment, so today I’ll tell you about it along with some insight into why that was the moment of realization for me (this will include information on why polling is so all over the place).

Even more importantly, I’ll talk about an earlier moment in the campaign when I knew Democrats as a whole were in trouble, and how we can avoid the mistakes of the past going forward.

Before I dive in, I just want to say thank you for everyone who follows this substack and especially everyone who shares it and supports financially. It’s very difficult financially for a normal person to run in these elections like I did (back to back) and your willingness to support those of us who put it all on the line is the only way we can continue to do it.

Obviously, my election was an uphill battle. My home state is red and Donald Trump was on the ticket. But I always believed I had a chance to win. The incumbent was uniquely unpopular and unlikeable in a way that we knew we would outperform the top of the ticket. We just didn’t know by how much for two reasons: (1) we didn’t know what the money would look like and (2) Trump voters overwhelmingly wanted a Trump ally in the Senate, so we needed a good national year for Democrats if we didn’t have the money advantage.

The money was important because, as you can see below, Democrats overperforming the presidential ticket in red states directly correlates to the D:R spending ratio. Yes, your donations really do make a difference.

As you can see here, Democrats overperforming the presidential ticket in red states directly correlates to the D:R spending ratio. Your donations and support to candidates in red states really do make a difference.

Unfortunately, by the end of October it became clear that Josh and his Super PAC would be able to spend significantly more money than us. We were outspent on the airwaves, and we were only able to compete in four of Missouri’s ten media markets.

We knew early on that with a spending advantage we could outperform the top of the ticket by between 10 and 15%, depending on the size of that spending advantage. Even without that, we knew that, since the incumbent was weak, we could outperform the top of the ticket by 4-10% on just the strength, rather than the volume, of my message. So we could still win depending on the performance of the national ticket.

I held out hope through election night that Harris could keep it closer than she did.

One of the reasons we were still hopeful until election night has to do with polling. Polling isn’t as random as people think it is. What happens in Missouri, where people don’t register by party, is that pollsters call a bunch of people, who then self-report as independent, Republican, Democrat, Trump-Voter, Kamala-Voter, whatever the pollster asks. Then they ask them the poll questions.

Once they have all the raw data, the pollster “balances” the poll. This means that they estimate what percentage of the electorate will be D/R/Ind, or what percentage will be Trump/Kamala, and use that as an anchor point for all of the down-ballot races. So, for example, if they used the Cook report rating benchmark of Missouri being a +11 Republican state, out of all the people who picked up the phone or answered texts or emails, they would build a final poll population that was +11 Republican (often using Trump/Kamala as a proxy for D/R), and then the down-ballot races like the US Senate race would shake out using that adjusting polling population (not the raw numbers from everyone who answered).

Because of this, polls that used the standard Cook benchmark for Missouri showed us within mid-single digits (since we were outperforming Kamala by 5-10% depending on the poll), some of which put us within the margin of error. This meant we could still be in the race despite being outspent as long as the Cook projections or others weren’t too far off.

Of course, they weren’t.

The moment I saw the first couple batches of election returns come in on election night (which ironically showed us ahead or close and created hope for a lot of people), I knew that I had lost. Kamala was performing significantly worse in those areas than needed her to. And despite doing better than her in those initial returns, it wasn’t by a large enough margin to overcome what clearly was going to be a terrible night for her in Missouri, and what ended up being a terrible night for Democrats across the country.

There was just no way to overcome that kind of negative national performance, which we saw in senate races across the country. Democratic senate candidates in red states outperformed the presidential ticket by quite a lot, and we all still lost.

So how did we get here?

When you’re running a senate race, your focus is very heavily on your own state and your opponent, so I didn’t have a lot of time to think about the national picture or what national polling or issues were like outside of Missouri. But there was a moment, a couple of months before the election, where I really worried that it was going to be a bad year.

It wasn’t the Trump assassination attempt, one of the conventions, a debate, a gaffe, or anything like that.

It was the moment that Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris and, rather than wholeheartedly reject that endorsement, her team embraced it and then started bragging about it.

Our country is in the midst of a decade long political revolution centered on everyday people lashing out against the institutions and systems that they believe are broken and corrupt. Over and over again on the campaign trail I heard from all types of people how mad they are at the system, how it’s failed them, and how the people in control are all the same regardless of party. I heard about it in heavily right leaning veterans groups. I heard about it in heavily left leaning black community meetings. Everywhere. The parties are the same. Politicians are the same. They are all colluding to sell us all out for their own power. They stand for nothing but themselves.

And, in the midst of this, the Democratic Presidential candidate proved exactly that: by warmly embracing an endorsement from the embodiment of evil, Dick Cheney. Like, come on guys. There are plenty of Republicans you can brag about without going full on evil. But it almost seemed like they thought “the more evil the better.”

Tim Walz awkwardly tried to explain the endorsement to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show by claiming that it gave Republicans and libertarians a “permission structure” to cross over.

Folks, Dick Cheney had a 13% approval rating when he left office.

I’m all about permission structures. I have written about them, and we built our campaign on them. But the only permission this endorsement gave people was permission to confirm that the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket is exactly what Fox News had been telling them it was for months: the ticket of the uni-party that had been screwing them for the last few decades.

A lot of guys I know and work with are long-time George Bush neo-cons. Do you know what they have to say about the Iraq War and all the things they used to love if you ask them now? “God-damn neo-cons. Ruined America.”

Not even the neo-cons like neo-cons anymore!

And people who are persuadable are looking for something different.

Yet all they saw with the Democratic Party was more of the same. A nominee anointed by the insider donor class embracing uni-party politics. It was 2016 all over again.

I get the irony here. And it hurts even more when you look at the greatest-transfer-of-wealth-in-American-history bill making its way through Congress right now.

But our job isn’t to point out hypocrisy (that’s actually the opposite of building permission structure, which I go deeper into here), our job is to do better in future elections.

With every potential future Dick Cheney endorsement, that should be an “F no, that guy can go to hell for destroying America” type response.

Which brings me to something that worries me even more deeply: the so-called “abundance agenda” that I keep hearing about.

First of all, the concept is confusing. It’s hard to understand what the “abundance agenda” means even after you read a little bit about it, which raises red flags for the average person. Red flags that are already triggered by the fairy-tale like name of “abundance agenda.” It feels fake.

Also, to the average viewer, the “deregulation” and “rising tide will raise all boats” aspects feel a lot like a re-run of bad policy that they don’t want to watch again. Reagan-omics. Trickle down theory. Supply side economics. Etc.

The thing is, I get the idea that regulation can be bad. I worked in procurement at the Pentagon, where regulations were used by industry to block out small and innovative companies and steal from the taxpayer. So the concept that regulation can serve the opposite of its intended purpose is not foreign to me.

But the “abundance agenda” sounds as uni-party as anything has ever sounded.

And in a time when the guys in power are claiming to raise all boats by transferring vast amounts of wealth upward through tax breaks for the corporations and the mega-rich, I really think that Democrats are giving away the massive advantage we have been handed if we embrace the “abundance agenda,” as it is currently packaged, as the central theme of the Democratic platform. That doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong policy-wise, just that I believe, based on my experience running in a red state that was a bell-weather ten years ago, that it’s not going to be an electoral winner.

Democrats have a real opportunity to shift the narrative. Frankly, the Republicans are doing it for us by doing exactly what they said they were going to do and exposing themselves as the same as they ever were. And now is not the time to give up the advantage by adopting a liberal-think-tank branded variation of the same thing.

One of the things we found in our campaign testing was that, when in doubt, the best thing to do was to lean on corruption and anti-corporate messaging. Identify the villain, and hammer away. That’s how you capitalize on an advantage. It’s how we swung key rural and exurban areas 10+ points in our favor despite being outspent in them. And it’s likely the key to Democratic electoral success over the next few years.

As always, please share this with anyone you think might be interested in it! Thank you all for everything!

Lucas