Jesus Christ, Not Again
Evanston's terrible governance is a prime example of why we got hosed on Tuesday
Note: Edited 11/7 to remove some of the cussing (sorry!) and cleaned up some of my phrasing. Apologies to anyone with the title - it’s not meant to offend Christian readers, I love you guys. It was meant to capture the feeling of waking up on Wednesday morning.
Note: 11/8 comments are disabled because I am not interested in moderating fights about Gaza and Israel. If you have a problem with this email me: tom@foiasgras.com. Every post after this will return to the regularly scheduled moderation policy.
I am going to write on post on the election and for this one time, I am lifting the policy that you’re not allowed to get into national political fights in the comment section. So have at it - but if your comment is non-constructive, I’m just going to delete it.
First, let me start off - I’m a lifelong Democrat1. I voted for Harris. I think Trump is a rapist, a racist, and an autocratic strong man. I think he is surrounded by deeply un-serious charlatans, like Elon Musk and RFK Jr. and that scares me. I think January 6th was the most humiliating thing to happen to the United States since the British burning down the White House in the War of 1812.
There are no fewer than 8 billion places online where you can read Democratic takes on the election. Here’s a few that make different arguments:
November 6, 2024 by Heather Cox Richardson
A tale of two machines by Matt Yglesias
Trump Didn't Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose by Josh Barro
Kamala Did Not Represent the Center by Tracing Woodgrains
The story of Trump's win was foretold in New York City by Nate Silver
What Kamala Harris’s Loss Means To Black Women by New York Times
The data is still coming in, but the general story seems to be that Trump’s coalition consisted of the same red-pilled white people that always vote for him, plus he was able to peel off enough Black and Hispanic voters from the Democratic coalition to win.
Even as whites have declined as a share of the population, the Emerging Democratic Majority is neither emerging nor a majority. Instead, Trump will almost certainly win Republicans the popular vote and perhaps an outright majority for just the second time since 1988. And he’s gained the most support among the fastest-growing ethnic groups — in particular, Hispanic voters, according to both exit polls and the ecological evidence.
I don’t yet have precinct or demographic level information yet for 2024, but you can look at the total Suburban Cook County results for this cycle and see a continued swing to Trump since 2016.
You can shake your fists and blame the people of Barrington2, but I suspect that once we can pull the numbers, we’ll find a shift rightwards everywhere, including Evanston.
And just to be clear, I’m not blaming Hispanic or Black voters - the vast majority of Trump voters are rural white voters and/or Barrington residents. He absolutely runs up the numbers in mostly white rural areas, like downstate Illinois or northern Michigan. Trust me, I don’t doubt for a second that racism is prevalent in much of the United States. But these places aren’t growing - if anything the voter base there is shrinking.
All the evidence suggests that we (Democrats) are losing people from our coalition. For instance, it’s currently up in the air whether Harris will get as many absolute votes as Biden did four years ago.3 This is really bad!
If we want to fight Trump-ism over the next four years, we need to come up with a plan to get those folks back into our coalition ASAP.
We’ve done this before, guys.
Evanston: The Lighthouse District
Evanston has always on the bleeding edge of political innovation. It goes back 100+ years to emancipation, women’s liberation, prohibition, civil rights, and up to the present day. I wrote about this before: For instance, Simpson Street is named after the Bishop Simpson who pressured President Lincoln on Emancipation. There is a house downtown and a brewery named after an early prohibition proponent (and virulent racist) Frances Willard, which serves as a reminder that political innovation doesn’t always work!
Let’s do a thought experiment - Imagine it is 2017 and you are a middle-class Hispanic family. You move to Evanston because it wasn’t full of anti-immigrant white people, housing prices are relatively affordable, and as an added bonus, the school district just opened Bessie Rhodes - a school that both celebrates your heritage and offers wall-to-wall Spanish language support.
Or imagine you’re a middle class Black family living in Rogers Park. The schools in CPS are a mess but you can move north of Howard (Evanston’s 8th Ward) and get your kids into Evanston Public Schools. They look great! New funding, good teachers, engaged parents, diverse schools, and affordable rent.
On top of that, in 2017, voters just approved a referendum 80-20 to fund the schools and we had an election full of candidates (Tanyavutti, Kartha, Hailpern) promising additional political innovation - closing the achievement gap was a priority.
Fast forward a mere 8 years - what have Evanston taxpayers delivered to these folks?
The achievement gap has not closed and has gotten worse. However, more than a million dollars have flowed to consultants, such as the Pacific Education Group.4
The District 65 School Board voted to close Bessie Rhodes in 2023, a mere 6 years after opening the school without funding any kind of replacement. Hispanic Parents complained to the board who, for the most part, sat silently while they closed the school for seemingly no good reason. They then screwed parents of 7th and 8th graders, again, for seemingly no good reason.
District 65 promised to build a school in the Fifth Ward, for the Black kids that were still being bussed. They bungled the whole operation, making promises that they knew from day 1 that they couldn’t keep (they didn’t even have enough money for construction, when they took out the money!)
During COVID: District 65 stayed closed longer than any District around us, citing white supremacy but the people most screwed by this were the working class folks who have jobs they need to go to. Those of us with “email jobs” were all fine, but what about working class people who need the support during the day?
Lack of basic governance created a budgetary mess so bad, that they may end up having to close some of the very schools that support kids in the 8th ward, for example. The District promises to keep equity in mind with the budget deficit program - but they didn’t do that with Bessie Rhodes - why would they do it here?
Over 8 years things have gotten worse and the future doesn’t look good. Our policies are not working for Black and Hispanic families. They weren’t great before, but they are objectively worse now.
Let’s be clear, I don’t think Trump is the solution to this problem, that’s like hiring a chimp to do your taxes. But who can blame voters for being angry at Democratic policies and wanting something different? Evanston is one example in a sea of blue - similar things are happening everywhere in blue states: look at the mess in Chicago or what Nate Silver wrote about in New York.
Where was Jan Schakowsky or Daniel Biss during the whole Bessie Rhodes debacle? Why wasn’t a single elected official marching with those Bessie Rhodes parents to support them?
Why should local Black or Hispanic folks trust any Democratic elected officials who talks a big game about supporting their community yet sit idly by while things get objectively worse? You can say - “Well Tom, Jan Schakowsky or Biss don’t have any statutory authority over these things - nothing they can do.” I say sure, but they have political authority over this stuff and the blame moves upstream .. all the way to the White House.
It’s Time to Kick Ass Again
If we’re going to fight Trump, we need to offer a vision that includes a brighter future for the families of this country. Right now, we’re failing. What you saw on Tuesday, especially the popular vote, is a representation of that.
With Trump voters, I put them into one of three categories:
Racist and Misogynist People
Uninformed People
People with legitimate grievances over bad Democratic governance5
You can’t fix stupid but you can fix the other two categories. One is a fight against mis-information. I don’t mean Russian Twitter or Substack bots - those bots fight with me not with generic voters. I mean the way we talk to each other on a personal level. We need to hold each other accountable for propagating dumb conspiracy theories. It’s time to move past the era of being so passive aggressive with the Trumpers in our lives.
The biggest problem to me, is the last category. We need to keep those people in our coalition. Period. The way to do that is to offer a meaningful vision that includes their families and isn’t just empty promises, like it has been the last decade. Obama offered this vision and even Biden did in 2020 - it can win elections - but we’ve lost the edge.6
You can say, “we’re responsible for doing all this work and if we fail, everyone votes for Trump, who isn’t going to do anything but try to take away rights!” and I say, yes this is 100% accurate. It’s completely backwards that the two parties are held to completely different standards - but that’s the world we live in. I’d love to not be in that world too but we have to live in reality if we’re going to win.
We’ve done this before, guys, literally 8 years ago. Let’s be smart this time instead of emotional. There’s work to be done and this is a wake-up call that it’s time to do that work.
I leave you with some pop punk for this Thursday - the real work starts today.
If you don’t believe me (and I’ve been accused of being MAGA) - go pull my voting records from the County and you will find that my entire life I’ve pulled the democratic ballot in primary elections.
Barrington has only produced only one good thing
Biden 2020 = 81,283,501
Harris 2024 = 67,978,265 (but not everything is in yet, including 45% of California)
There is a very real equivalent here in the National Democratic Party, which has poured billions into various political consultants and useless GOTV operations with very little to show for it. We’re only going to get further screwed if we don’t clean house on the state and national levels of the party.
There are a whole range of grievances beyond just the ones I cover in this story, which relate to schools.
I think a real democratic primary certainly would’ve helped hammer down this vision. Harris wasn’t a bad candidate, but the primaries are where the candidates cut their teeth and optimize on messaging. Biden totally screwed the party here.
Thank you for your reporting, Tom, and for so thoughtfully expressing your anger and frustration and channeling it so productively. Sadly, your critique rings very true. It's simply not enough for Evanston's leaders to espouse progressive ideals and launch progressive programs. If those programs are not implemented in a careful, sustainable way, then the result becomes self-defeating. Worst of all, the most vulnerable in our community -- often the ones these programs are claiming to try to help -- are the ones who will be hurt the most when they fail.
In my view, there are far too many signs that local leaders are using talking points to bolster their own ambitions or sense of self instead of seeing things through. When their inattentiveness and cronyism leads to predictably messy consequences, these leaders then distance themselves for fear of public criticism and political fallout. Which might partly explain the absence of Biss as any kind of reliable on-the-ground presence in the Bessie Rhodes travesty -- he can co-sign a letter, but it seems he doesn't want to actually get near the situation for fear of damage to his public standing. (Disclosure: I have had personal disappointment with his sporadic engagement on another community issue.)
When talk isn't enough, because IT IS NOT ENOUGH . . .
When government transparency is all too limited . . .
When community feedback is more often used to bolster an agenda rather than to build on it or re-work it . . .
And when progressive programs and initiatives falter due to lack of sustainable implementation . . .
...then those who oppose these measures and ideals, locally and nationally, will try to claim that they don't and cannot work. They can work, and they must. It's not the intention at fault here, it's the implementation.
It is time for a genuine reconsideration and reckoning to ensure that our government is actually working for the people who need it most, not just the people who are running it.
Tom, thank you for the bait.
In no world is this comparison real, this comparing Evanston's school elections in 2017/2018 and this election really lets me know you didn't get enough data from Wisconsin or Michigan or even from GOP voters in Illinois.
Lots of people are annoyed that Democrats nationally didn't do what we promised (student loans, reverse anti-choice moves, protect the environment) and we look feckless and silly. However, years of political organizing and working campaigns has also taught me to never try to broad strokes any of this because you cannot be correct.
I can tell you locally that not only has the state and county and even parts of the city done a TON since 2016 and Trump 45, but that Evanston's schools screwups don't need a larger analogy. Jan Schakowsky cares a ton about D65, Robyn Gabel's granddaughter is about to enter next year with my kid too, D65 is all everyone has ever talked about when we got past the national race (a thing about Evanston Democrats that everyone around the county and state know is that we are utterly pillar to post, we go from hyperlocal to national and we have a hard time thinking about much in between.)
We had (have? had) terrible governance because we had terrible governance. We aren't going to get our spending down by more than 8% by analogizing to a national political movement. We aren't going to close our achievement gap with just Evanston and the President either.
Nobody got hosed Tuesday, the DCCC/DSCC/DNC didn't do their jobs nationwide, and DPI was focused elsewhere, JB was running pro-choice amendments in 10 states, and then (I know this sounds dumb) but we'll have a bunch of mail-in ballots, something like over 360,000 that will come in 4:1 blue in Illinois and then it rained in the afternoon/evening of election day in a state and region that everyone "knew" it was already going one way.
Looking forward, a major part of our state-level education agenda is expanding preK. The state will also be dealing with a $3.1 billion-ish budget deficit and a transit reform package that needs funding. There was talk of a statewide school infrastructure bill, a la Build Illinois Bond style, but thats likely delayed. Clearly we can expect little to no help from a Trump DoE (if they keep one). We'll have to dig us out ourselves and thats gonna take the better part of a decade.
D65's current situation is way more analogous to digging out of Blago/Rauner budget holes than it is to Democratic politics of the 2024 cycle. We let charisma and an incomplete vision that most of the body politic agreed with become the north star. It happened, now it is time to dig out. Pretending that anyone could have stopped this from happening that wasn't in the room at the time is not anywhere near close to reality.