Four years of boring hard boards, slowly

Thank you all, and our plans for the future

Today is the fourth anniversary of Slow Boring and, as ever, a day for reflection, gratitude, and transparency about where we’ve been and where we’re going.

This anniversary comes at a time when I think certain events have largely confirmed the purpose of this project. But I’m cognizant of the fact that everyone tends to believe these events, and others, confirm their worldview. So thinking back to four years ago, I’m going to try to be as honest as possible about how much I didn’t know about how things would play out.

The “Stop the Steal” fiasco was already in motion in November of 2020, but I was skeptical that it would succeed in immunizing Donald Trump from the kind of intra-party scrutiny that normally follows defeat. Kamala Harris is already being raked over the coals in exactly the ways that I recall Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Mitt Romney, and Al Gore being raked over the coals. Suddenly she’s a terrible candidate with a terrible message whose choices were all terrible. Trump plunged America into constitutional crisis, but he also preempted that cycle. I don’t think it required a unique genius for the GOP 2024 nominee to beat the Democrats, given inflation and the overall global trends. But it really did require some unique genius for the 2024 GOP nominee to be the guy who blundered away 2020.

I didn’t foresee that. I didn’t foresee January 6th itself. And even though I urged Democrats to donate to and mobilize for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the Georgia runoffs, I thought the odds of them both winning were quite low.

These are a series of linked errors. Without Stop the Steal throwing the GOP into temporary disarray, it’s unlikely Ossoff and Warnock would have won. Without Stop the Steal, it’s likely Republicans themselves would have shunted Trump off to the side. Without Stop the Steal, there’s no second impeachment at which Republicans tell Democrats to leave it up to the courts, only to flipflop and declare legal processes to be outrageous lawfare. The rehabilitation of the GOP brand among rich finance and tech guys probably happens even faster without January 6, but it’s a rehabilitation in support of a different leader. We’re a country on an entirely different course.

That applies to the Biden administration, too. I thought that just by the math, Biden was going to need to pursue an extremely restrained legislative agenda because he’d be dealing with a GOP Senate. Biden proved the skeptics (including me) wrong in terms of how many bipartisan bills he could get done. He also passed two very large bills on party-line votes. But he proposed a much larger bill, the Build Back Better package, which became the defining fight of his agenda, and the whole notion of Biden as a “transformational” president is going to age poorly now that he lost. But his administration was certainly pregnant with transformational aspiration at one point — an aspiration that hinged on the Georgia elections in January.

Which is all just to say that I’m certainly not clairvoyant. But we did end up roughly where I thought we were going:

• A Republican Party that is dangerous and irresponsible.

• An American society that continues to have acute needs in improving child poverty, transportation infrastructure, and public health.

• A Democratic Party that has shrunk the tent to the point where it’s hard to see how the party achieves a sustainable governing majority without revamping its image.

• A world that is growing more dangerous thanks to the rising power of the People’s Republic of China.

• A media that does a very poor job of asking which things are objectively important.

I don’t want to be unduly grandiose, but I do think Slow Boring has a meaningful role to play in all this, and today I want to talk a little bit about the things I’m most proud of over the last year and our plans for the year to come.

Our past year

Slow Boring’s paid subscriber base has grown roughly 16 percent since our third anniversary, which I think is excellent for a mature business. Strong growth in membership means we haven’t raised prices since launch, despite inflation. Hopefully, the Trump administration won’t hit us with too many tariffs and we can keep growing.

This year we also launched the Politix podcast as a separate subscription, and we’ve been pleased with the reception. We’ll be back with a new logo for the post-Biden era soon, I promise.

I’m especially proud of everything this community has done to raise money for people who need it. Through our standing contribution to GiveWell, our Giving Tuesday projects, and our fundraising for frontline Democrats, you’ve helped us raise over $1.5 million.

As those of you who’ve been around for a while know, 10 percent of our revenue goes to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund supporting high-impact, cost-effective charities. You’ve helped us provide over $285,000 for the fight against malaria and for incentives for routine childhood vaccinations, among other programs.

More recently, we’ve also begun working with GiveDirectly. Last year’s Giving Tuesday initiative raised over $220,000 for their program providing cash to desperately poor families in Rwanda, and our partnerships with other Substackers brought in an additional $20,000.

Merry Christmas, and thank you!

We’re going to run another version of this in a few weeks and hopefully get more writers involved and raise even more money. I firmly believe that giving money away is good for the soul and that more people should do it. It’s a kind of crazy miracle of modern financial technology that it’s so easy, logistically, to put cash in the hands of people who really need it. Of course, many Americans suffer from financial hardships. But this is, on average, a very affluent society in which many reasonably comfortable people nonetheless suffer from crises of meaning and anxieties and doubts. It’s good to know that you are, in fact, empowered to do things that matter in the world.

Speaking of things that matter, we spent much of this fall urging people to give money strategically to down ballot political campaigns.

And I think this was a success! Readers of this newsletter (and/or my Twitter feed) donated over $1 million to our recommended candidates. Democrats, in general, held up better down ballot than you might expect, based on the results at the top of the ticket. A major reason for that is that Democrats generally raised more hard money contributions.

• Both of the state supreme court candidates we recommended in Michigan won their races, even while Trump carried the state.

• Katherine Bidegaray won her supreme court race in Montana (Jerry Lynch lost), which will preserve a narrow pro-choice majority on the court and ensure that the Montana abortion rights ballot initiative will be implemented properly.

• Allison Riggs appears to have come up very narrowly short in North Carolina, while running clearly ahead of Kamala Harris.

We also encouraged donations to Dan Osborn’s race in Nebraska. Part of his strategy was running as an independent, and to make this credible, he was not supported by Democratic Party super PACs or committees. That made hard-money contributions critically important. He came up short, but his well-funded race ran 14 points ahead of Harris — the best Democratic Party overperformance this cycle. Proving that Osborn-style candidates can attract enthusiasm and financial support is going to be critical going forward. Blocking a permanent Republican Senate majority is going to require running viable candidates in places like Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas that would require Osborn-like overperformances to win.

I think the decision to elevate Jamie Harrison to the DNC chair role after he wasted a ton of money running a losing Senate race in South Carolina as a conventional liberal sent a terrible signal to ambitious red-state Democrats. I think raising money for Osborn does the opposite. Potential candidates need to know there are donors who want to back pragmatists!

Speaking of pragmatists, in the House we backed 10 Democratic challengers, knowing that these would be uphill climbs. Two of them — Janelle Bynum in Oregon and John Mannion in New York — won and helped mitigate the damage of Democratic losses elsewhere.

I am especially proud of Bynum.

This is a district that used to be represented by a moderate Democrat, who was beaten by a leftist in a primary, who then lost the seat to a Republican. That same leftist ran for the seat again, and Slow Boring backed Bynum in the primary. She won the primary, she was the best candidate in the general, and she won. I’m also sad (but proud) about Rebecca Cooke, who significantly over-performed in WI-3 after winning a contested primary with a clear Blue Dog brand. Unfortunately, she lost anyway. But in a neutral national environment she would have won, and I hope she’ll run again (it’ll be easier to win in a midterm).

We also supported key state legislative races that broke a GOP supermajority in North Carolina and delivered major gains for Wisconsin Democrats. Unfortunately, Democrats lost ground in Michigan where we also directed money.

All in all, I think we did a lot of good here. But more broadly, this success sends a message that there is a big community of people who want to support moderate candidates who can win tough races.

Things that I was right about

Like most people, I am often wrong.