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“This Land” is a joint production of 24sight News by and by Reed Galen, with a focus on America’s people and the world beyond the Washington Beltway.

Support our independent journalism, now more than ever. Please join us at 1:30p ET for a Substack Live discussing this piece and more. Find us on the Substack app.

- Tom L., Editor, 24sight News

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A year from now, the 2026 midterms will be well under way (God willing.*) Last year’s results require an honest, open, and painful review. The donor community is demanding it. The activists are demanding it. 

But two groups that most need to understand what happened, candidates and their consultants, are stuck deep in “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” hoping to keep their jobs and their commissions.

We must get back to political basics. 

Between now and when active campaigns ramp up, we must remember the great Bull Durham: “Baseball is a simple game: You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.”

Politics, like the National Pastime, need not be complicated. You find the voter. You talk to the voter. You ask the voter to show up on Election Day. The rest is logistics.

The Goal

There is one goal: Win elections. That’s it. Anything that distracts from the goal needs to be stripped away in this moment. We don’t have time to wrestle over “high roads” and “low roads.” American politics has always been a rough and tumble endeavor. If you don’t have the stomach for it, step aside.

The Fundamentals

If you’ve played any sport at any level, you’ve had a coach stress the fundamentals. You’ve done endless, boring drills long after you’d proven you could shag a fly ball, complete a flawless kick-turn, or make a free throw. Only after proving to the coaches that we knew the basics could we get to the fun part: Playing the game.

The first best way to win a contest, any contest, is to be the best team we can be. 

Understanding our goals and objectives, doing our jobs as an efficient, well-oiled machine will make going up against the Republican Party (which I grew up in and in which I worked for many years) a winnable endeavor. 

The GOP has no compunction about doing what it takes to win. They will assemble competent campaigns and provide them the resources they need to win. If we’re not at our best, as we’ve seen, how can we expect to defeat them?

The Team

Team Democracy has some bona fide Hall of Famers. And it’s time they put in for their plaques.

We have too many people on the backside of their careers, too many who’ve risen far beyond their skill level, and too few star recruits. The movement must identify and rapidly promote up-and-coming talent even if that means passing over others that have been working in politics longer.

We must put star players on the field and ensure those players fit. Someone ideal for North Carolina may not be suited to campaigning in Massachusetts. Those that excel should be given more responsibility. Those not succeeding should be given opportunities to succeed in a different place, but not at the expense of the entire endeavor.

I’ve personally witnessed dozens of individuals and numerous groups doing incredible work in states across the country; all of them outside the official party structure. Far too often, when they do well, or innovate, entrenched interests make their lives and work more difficult. This turf-guarding must be exorcised.

If a team member has a fundamental problem with the way the campaign is operating or a stance the candidate has taken, appropriate outlets should be available. The answer is not to post open letters in Politico. Campaigns are about electing candidates. If you want to be the candidate and make the decisions, put your name on the ballot.

Please RSVP here, we look forward to seeing you.

Leadership

Not everyone will get along. This isn’t a Montessori School. There are multiple theories of leadership.

Some believe fervently in the “No Asshole Rule.” Others believe that teams have no time for or space for prima donnas. There is no perfect mix, nor will we know the right collection of skills and personalities immediately. Teams have to work together, know each other, and run gauntlets together.

The effort will determine what’s working and what isn’t. If it works, even if it’s something new to the lineup, do more of it. If we try something and it fails, stop doing it.

Leadership ultimately devolves to making decisions. If you’re unwilling to make a decision because of an uncertain outcome, you can’t be the boss. Perhaps my most concerning observation is how few people are willing to take risks or deploy a new tactic out of fear.

We passed the exit for Indecision miles ago.

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Being the boss is not a popularity contest. It is a responsibility, either as a candidate or a campaign manager, to all the people working for the campaign, all the donors, all the volunteers, and ultimately the voters you wish to convince. It means doing what’s in the best interest of the overall, even if it’s not popular.

High expectations are not unfair, they’re essential. Discipline is not mean, it’s critical.

Ticking Clocks

The first filing deadlines for 2026 arrive this December ahead of Texas’ March primary. We have a short window to do this work and no time for reindeer games. If the Trump Administration is as dangerous to individual Americans, our country, and the entire world, it’s high time we start acting like it.

All of the work above, and so much more that I haven’t, is well within our capabilities. The question now is one of will: Do we have the constitution to what’s necessary? Or will too many of us once again hope that fickle American voters deliver a narrow-band victory?

Why We Do This

Politics is a means to an end. At its best, democracy is a system that elects those truly dedicated to serving their constituents and doing the best for the largest number of people. At its worst, it’s zero-sum game of self-interested groups, interests, and cyncial politicians looking to do nothing but secure their own reelection.

If we’re going to be the better option for American, we have to better. That starts with the basics. Who runs for office? How do we run their campaigns. How do we organize? How do we maximize efficiency and minimize bureaucracy? How do we insure that the right messages get to the right people in the most effective way, because they work, not because they ‘test well.’

There are a bunch of sacred cows on the chopping block. Unpleasant? Yes. Essential? Absolutely.

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I was blinded by enthusiasm.

In the context of 2024, I was operating as a Democrat, not as an independent. I was caught up in the idea of seeing the rallies for then-Vice President Kamala Harris, having been to the Democratic convention, I felt the same energy as everyone else. 

My own belief that Trump’s coalition was older, whiter, smaller, was wrong, I missed the movement of Black and Latino voters, and the Democratic voters who stayed home. 

The other part I missed on the micro level – the 24/7, 365 news grind – was the power of rightwing media. It would be interesting to quantify how much the rightwing media machine is worth. Is it 1 percentage point, is it a half a point?

I was heartened by the idea these people exist and still do, the Todd Allbaughs, the Wonderstate Coffees, and all the great Wisconsinites I met last fall.

But we shouldn't be under any illusion – we and the other volunteers of Join The Union stopped by on a bus. The podcasts, the YouTubers, are on a constant loop, it never stops. When they get tripped up, it amps up, it doubles down, it triples down. 

In 2023, I didn’t think that Trump could win, but I did think Biden could lose. And that’s what happened, Democratic voters stayed home. That was part of the collective blindness, the collective over-optimism and the collective willingness to believe that Trump was so bad people wouldn’t vote for him.

The problem was there was no countervailing message, there was no countervailing force. I underestimated the populist anti-establishment message.

Tomorrow, voters return to the polls in Wisconsin to decide who will control the state’s Supreme Court, almost five months after they narrowly voted in favor of Trump, J.D. Vance and, whether they were aware or not, Elon Musk.

My original piece, with some light edits to adjust for timing follows. My original sentiment believing in the goodness of Americans holds. 

Reed

First and America

I have a confession to make. I’ve fallen in love. Her name is America, and I’m besotted. Not with her politics, of course, but with her people. Last fall I got to see my country up close and she rekindled my spirit, my adoration, and my belief that the seeds of our renewal, our community, and our future have already been sown, they’re just waiting for someone to come along and water them.

My last trip of the fall campaign started in Madison, Wisconsin. If you haven’t visited, you should. It’s a great town. We did a meet and greet with the Wisconsin Democratic Party on the University of Wisconsin campus. About a dozen volunteers showed up and deployed, handing out information. The college Republicans had a table across from our friends. There were only two: A young woman and a guy. And the guy was dressed up in an elephant costume. They were lonely. The vegans had more people talking to them.

Great to meet Kelly and all the young folks deployed to Madison on behalf of the Harris/Walz campaign.

Headed north, we first stopped in Viroqua, Wisconsin on Tuesday, one of the first stops on our Join The Union Bus Tour around the Badger State. Wisconsin is, at its heart, a small town. Everywhere we went, my Cheesehead-native busmates ran into friends, old colleagues, or family. It’s the Kevin Bacon game for the Upper Midwest.

Those are the kind of connections and relationships that make a state of five million people feel cozy.

Viroqua is an hour north of Madison, down byways, through rolling fields, and farmland, warmed by a breezy late October heatwave. The sign at the AmericInn where we stayed wished Roy good luck. I’m not sure if he’d moved spiritually or temporally, but wherever you are Roy, Godspeed.

Emily and the folks at WDRT raised $1,200 for folks in Asheville, NC for hurricane relief.

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Tuesday morning, as we were loading up our bus, Nancy appeared asking what we were up to. She and her colleagues had been watching us out the window of their office and her curiosity was piqued.

Nancy told us she worked for a local agency responsible for helping with in-home visits to sick patients. Before that, she’d been a nurse in town for 40 years. She retired that Friday. Your friends, your neighbors, and community are blessed to have you; though I bet you’re not going far.

Thanks to TJ and the team at Wonderstate Coffee for hosting us.

We partnered on our tour with Civic Media and recorded The Todd Allbaugh Show live from 12-2 pm Central everyday. We set up shop outside Wonderstate Coffee (2025 Roaster of the Year!) on Main Street in Viroqua. Across the street to our left was the Technical College. Directly ahead is 91.9 WDRT the community radio station.

Please RSVP here, we look forward to seeing you.

During our two hours on air each day, we spoke with local business owners and community leaders; each of them dedicated to make their town, their state, their country in their own ways. Try the pecan fudge pie at the Norske Nook, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

National political news and social media convinces us that our problems are intractable, insolvable, and leave open a path for carnival barkers like Donald Trump to claim ‘he alone can solve it.’

He can’t, he won’t, and he doesn’t want to. Trump called the United States of America ‘a garbage can.’ He wouldn’t dain to spend time in the small towns I visited that week. They can do nothing for him, therefore, to him, the towns and the good people are not worthy of time, attention or consideration.

Recent posts from The Home Front by Reed Galen:

Congrats, you held a Town Hall. Now what?

Keeping it Real w/ The Red Letter, Tara Palmeri

Olson’s Rules for Dealing with Autocrats, Part V: Practice Zero-Sum Judo

Four days later, the US will faced its most existential election since 1860, and we took the dark path. The differences between the two parties weren’t enough to save us. For too many people ‘democracy’ wasn’t an idea, but a pipedream.

Existence, in fact, is a matter of perception, perspective, and propaganda. Half the country believes we live in an occupied state; steadily poisoned against the place that has provided so many of us the opportunities to live lives too many of our own people still can’t achieve, let alone those around the globe who still see the US as the ‘shining city on the hill.’

I thought that if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were elected that next Tuesday, it would not simply be the changing of presidents, or a change in generations, but the first tangible opportunity we’ve had in a decade to push MAGA and its broken, noxious beliefs back into the woods where they belong.

I’ve been in this fight a long time, and even after all these years, I don’t think I hate any of my political opponents. Expending that kind of mental and emotional energy leads only toward darkness. I do, however, understand who and what they are: People who believe their fellow citizens, and most of their supporters, are suckers and losers.

My week in Wisconsin, like my days in Michigan, North Carolina, and Florida, have reminded me that we all need to get outside our bubbles more often. Making contact with those not of your place is a good thing; maybe one of the best things.

So many of us took those first few small steps toward a better tomorrow; texting or calling voters, or getting out and knocking on doors. It wasn’t enough. But now is not the time to give up on this complicated country we call America. No, it is the time to redouble our efforts, so that the good people of this country can look forward to creating better worlds for themselves and their families. The communities that have been left behind are waiting for someone to stop by and say hello.

If you need me, I’ll be at the corner of First and America. Come by and say hello.

Reed Galen, is president of Join The Union, author and host of “The Homefront” and a veteran political staffer. He co-founded The Lincoln Project and has worked on numerous presidential campaigns, including John McCain’s 2008 race for the White House. He writes “This Land” regularly for 24sight News, with an eye on the stories of the American people written from the ground up.

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Editor’s note: I’m happy to be launching ’s latest offering, “This Land”, a regular column on the people of America, reported from the ground, across the nation, in a John Steinbeck style. Veteran watchers probably know Galen from his searing insights and refusal to parse language regarding this period in American history, particularly over at his Substack and podcast “The Home Front”. This column, which grew out of talks we had while he was traversing the country last year with his group The Union, reflects more salt-of-the-earth stories he heard from voters throughout the country. I hope you enjoy his dispatches as much as I do.

Cheers,

Tom LoBianco

Editor, 24sight News

I’m a National Parks person.

I’m not sure how many I’ve visited, but each of my trips has provided lifelong memories from the hilarious to the ridiculous to the flat-out bizarre. Each of the nation’s 63 National Parks has its own story to tell, as do the millions of people from all over the country and the world who visit them each year.

The park employees, from the Rangers to the guys maintaining the trails, to the volunteers have been, to a person, incredible. The Park Service does an incredible job getting kids excited about nature, swearing them in as Jr. Rangers, providing a workbook to complete, and rewarding them with a small wooden badge featuring the park’s name, logo, and the like. We have many of these around our house and the kids loved collecting them.

Our most recent visit was two weeks ago, right before thousands of National Park Service and Forest Service employees were laid off with no reason and less warning. Even with a record number of tourists visiting America’s national parks, the massive firings could stall out everything from collecting entry fees to cleaning the toilets.

When driving through Death Valley, the reason behind its name is impossible to miss.

From the salt flats to the Mars-like surface, to the endless sand dunes that served as Tatooine in Star Wars, it is a desolate, forbidding, unwelcoming place.

Where else can you race your daughters up and down those same sandy hills? Where else would you hear faint strains of, who is that? Enya? There atop one of the sandy hills is a group of several dozen Korean-Americans, part of a line dancing troupe from Los Angeles, all in matching shirts, holding up their banner and swaying along to the ethereal rhythm of “Sail Away.”

Last summer, we spent the 4^th of July in Montana’s Glacier National Park. I’ve been to a lot of places, but Glacier is, for my money, the most beautiful place on Earth. iPhone photos don’t do it justice.

We took the path over to Avalanche Lake, which has five (5!) waterfalls flowing. Most trails are accessible to folks of all ages and are a veritable United Nations as folks and families from all over make their way through the damp forest.

On our way back from Avalanche Lake, a woman told us all to stop because of a grizzly bear on the trail up ahead. Anyone with bear spray should come to the front, anyone without should move back to safety.

I proudly unhooked the can from my pack and joined the skirmish line. There about 100 yards ahead of us, the old bear ambled along, not worrying about us or much of anything.

One gentleman, though, excited by the sighting, squeezed off a quick burst of repellent. Two things happened: 1) The bear didn’t notice as the mist only travelled about 10 feet and 2) we were downwind and got a face full of pepper spray. Coughing, crying, and laughing out of the way, Glenn the Grizzly moved off and we went on our way.

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Driving up Going-to-the-Sun Road raises your blood pressure both with its vistas and its narrow track (it’s just barely wide enough for two regular cars to pass one another.)

At the top, we hiked a glacier in shorts and tennis shoes, though some folks wore their Birkenstocks which didn’t make much sense then and less in retrospect. We came face to face with some mountain goats who didn’t seem to mind our presence.

My most memorable story, from Yellowstone, didn’t even happen inside the gates of the park. In the fall of 2019, we made our way up from Utah, through Jackson and into the park. It was the end of the season and right on cue, a blizzard dumped feet of snow from one end of Yellowstone to the other. We’d come in through the southern gate, but due to the snowfall, only the East Gate was open. The Rangers informed us that only those with snow tires or chains could travel on the roads. Luckily, I’d forgotten to take my snow tires off the previous spring, so off to Cody, Wyoming we drove.

The drive from Yellowstone to Cody is all things Wyoming: Simultaneously beautiful, breathtaking, and desolate. Along the 50 or so miles we saw ravaged forests, mountainsides stripped bare by avalanches eons ago, and mountain goats having their midday snack.

Cody is an incredible town. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West is five museums in one. Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, the Plains Indium Museum, the Cody Firearms Museum, the Draper Natural History Museum and the Whitney Western Art Museum. Each of them is worth a day all by themselves.

The real event was that evening, though. We ate at one of the two steakhouses in town (the new one, we were told.) We stuck out from the locals (Wranglers and snap button shirts) with our Patagonia puffies, beanies, and Blundstones. My wife made the discovery of the trip, though, when she saw none other than Kanye West, Ye himself, walk in and make his way to the bar in the back, accompanied by only an older white guy.

I must have a picture, I thought! But how? I employed my younger daughter, with the promise of dessert. She agreed despite (this is 2019 remember) still being upset about how West treated Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs (before she was born.) “Mr. West,” she said as I stood by, “My dad is a big fan of your music, would you take a picture with him?”

“Okay, little girl,” was Ye’s answer. This is before 2020. This is before Nick Fuentes. This was before Kanye had gone full National Socialist.

As you can see, he was thrilled.

We made our way home the next day, as we have on so many of these adventures. The trips to these gems, these national treasures, are worth all the time in the car, all the gas, all the screaming about who gets the iPad next, or who has to go to the bathroom (again.) It’s worth the sharing a bedroom at whatever small hotel or on-park inn is available. It’s worth the twisted ankles, the heat, being attacked by the cacti that jumped out and got me, all of it.

Our National Parks are incredible because they give us the chance to return to nature, with our family and friends (furry and otherwise) with people we didn’t know and will never see again, with our phones being good for only taking pictures, and the time together that all parents know goes far too fast.

This spring and summer, choose a park and get out and see it (while you can.) What we’re seeing in some places, like Zion National Park in Southern Utah, are the results of bad choices made by bad people. We cannot and must not let them take these magical places away from us, our families, and those who visit from all over. These lands are our lands and we must never forget it.

Reed Galen, is president of Join The Union, author and host of “The Homefront” and a veteran political staffer. He co-founded The Lincoln Project and has worked on numerous presidential campaigns, including John McCain’s 2008 race for the White House. He writes “This Land” regularly for 24sight News, with an eye on the stories of the American people written from the ground up.

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