WA02 Scheel Campaign Retrospective
#Preamble First off, I want to thank every supporter, big or small. The failure to reach the general was mine alone, no one else's. You all did more than I could have ever asked for.
This is not meant to be an all-encompassing retrospective. It is simply meant to provide a high-level review and start a dialog.
Any vote numbers/percents are based on the totals listed as of 12PM Aug 7 2026. I will update the date here if I update the numbers to reflect updated vote counts.
#Primary Results In total, I think progressive candidates did well. In addition, I think this goes without saying, but it was from a combination of distaste with Larsen and our campaigning efforts. Where the share of responsibility lies, that's anyone's guess.
##Progressives Combined, Hermanson and I amassed 46,432 votes. This is ~11k more than the previous high of all left-leaning challengers combined (35,554 in 2024). By percentage, this was 24.75% vs. the previous high of 16.10% of all left-leaning challengers combined. Left-leaning challengers combined are trending upwards too. From 2016, it has gone 10.58%, 11.87%, 13.88%, 14.55%, 16.10%, and finally 24.75%.
##Conservatives Republicans performed poorly. Feller received 60,591 votes (32.29%), which is the lowest ever achieved by conservatives in aggregate with the 2020 district map. Looking back as far as 2008, this was the 2nd worst showing by conservatives. The only election that was worse for them was 2018, when they achieved 23.27%. To me, this is to be expected since Feller was not really campaigning at all. The conservative share of the vote has been on a downward trend since 2022 as well. From 2022, it has gone 39.18%, 35.67%, and finally 32.29%.
##Larsen This was Larsen's worst showing by percentage since 2010, his worst showing by numbers since 2016, and his worst showing by numbers with the 2020 district map. His overall percent of the total vote has wavered somewhat, but his percentage of the liberal vote has been steadily declining since 2018 and generally declining since 2012. From 2018, he has gone 84.52%, 77.75%, 75.88%, 74.93%, and finally 63.41%.
##Overall Race Obviously, the largest issue we face is overcoming that built-in Republican vote and multiple progressives on the ballot splitting the ticket. In 2028, if we get multiple Republican candidates and a single progressive candidate, it is incredibly likely we will see a general election with Larsen vs. Progressive Challenger. Conversely, if we do a repeat of a single Republican candidate and multiple progressives, I think his seat will be safe unless we can manage to coalesce around one option.
I have reached out to Hermanson about his plans for '28 and have yet to hear back. He has failed to be the leading progressive challenger twice now and does not even live in the district, so I, personally, hope he will choose to sit out in '28. As for myself, I intend on attempting this again in '28 and hope anyone else who has thoughts on doing so will reach out to me in advance so we can discuss who should put their name on the ballot since it needs to be one sole progressive challenger.
To be clear, I am not above stepping aside should someone better suited yet equally principled stand up to do it. Simply put, I would hate a repeat of this election where I put my name on the ballot in the first few minutes of eligibility and a challenger like Hermanson puts their name on the ballot in the last few hours of eligibility, without ever discussing it between us at all.
Note: In case you were wondering, 2020 was with the 2010s map but had an unusually high turnout of 54.44% in the primary vs. the usual ~40% for most races.
#Our Campaign My evaluation of our campaign is that there was too little time/manhours to do everything we planned, not enough focus on carving voters away from Larsen, and too little funding to meet the demands of the campaign.
##Time / Manpower I, personally, devoted between 10 to 16 hours, almost every day, from January to August 4th. Yet there is far more work to be done than one person can do alone. Even with that time investment, I should have begun working on this months before January. Nothing to be said here other than it has to begin earlier for '28.
We only really started to hit our manpower needs in July, and even then we were struggling to meet the demands. It was a failure on my part to not effectively activate our volunteers until the summer, and instead I should have been activating them as much as possible earlier in the campaign. The issue stemmed from not having tasks to give them, but in retrospect, I could have/should have found tasks. In addition, on the administrative side, we needed more in leadership earlier to help shoulder that burden and more in leadership in general.
##Focus We lacked the data to effectively target households early on and only were able to do so in June/July. For that reason, we elected to use a strategy of attempting to gather votes from across the spectrum. We have that data now, and even if we do not update it between now and two years from now, it will not go stale enough to warrant returning to the broad spectrum approach. This, coupled with more manpower earlier, will enable us to hyper-target voters who are both likely to vote in the primary AND likely to support us, multiplying the result of that effort.
I believe that this will be the key to getting to the general in '28, especially if we have another primary with a single Republican candidate. So long as we do not have multiple progressive challengers, there is no risk of losing the seat to a Republican on accident by peeling off Larsen's voters for us (i.e., accidentally enabling two Republicans to advance to the general election).
##Funding This is my biggest failure, in my opinion. I attempted to fund this campaign primarily out of my personal funds, looking to avoid fundraising as much as possible since one of the goals of this campaign was to get money out of politics. In doing so, I put my own finances under considerable strain, and it was a detriment to the campaign.
Regardless, I will not violate my principles: I will still not accept corporate or foreign lobby PAC money. Ideally, I would like to forego all PAC money in general as we did for this campaign. My ideal campaign is one completely funded by people's donations and no other sources, and I am going to attempt that. Also, I will continue to refuse to host events where there is not a free/essentially free option to attend since I believe it is important that money shouldn't grant you more access to your representative.
Instead, I will actively fundraise harder from individuals and do so much earlier. Additionally, we will incorporate ideas from Kat Abughazaleh's campaign, effectively leveraging the campaign as a mutual aid group. It will be a lot easier for me personally to ask for donations when they are going to a larger cause than simply the campaign. We were looking for methods to do something similar to this but didn't have the information early enough to take advantage of it.
#Path Forward I believe it is important that the state of our politics, local and federal, isn't something we think about only every two years, and it is instead something we as a community continue to be involved in year-round. The focus for now is on the general, but we must begin preparing for the '27 election before long and the '28 election afterward.
##General Election In the immediate future, I am asking everyone who supported me to please vote for Larsen in the general. I loathe to do it, but Feller is a much worse option. I would rather have a representative who fails to live up to my standards for two years than one who is diametrically opposed to everything I believe in. Feller regurgitates every disgusting right-wing conspiracy, and I would hate for him to accidentally get into the seat due to protest votes. That being said, voting is a deeply personal decision, and I will completely understand anyone being unwilling/unable to continue supporting Larsen.
##2027 Election I have been reached out to by local leadership regarding helping to remove the "Moms for Liberty"-esque candidates from school boards around WA02 in the '27 election. This, to me, seems like a great goal for the next year. My current plan is to scout candidates for each district in question before January '27, prepare potentials before Mar '27, and then begin actively campaigning for/with them in Apr/May '27.
This accomplishes a few goals that support our '28 efforts:
- It keeps volunteers activated and involved
- It builds a larger fundraising base
- It provides more practice/opportunities to learn from our mistakes before '28
More to come on this effort in the next few months, but for now I would appreciate help identifying seats to target. In the short to medium term, we will also need people going to their local meetings to help scout individuals who would be willing to take this on.
##Personally I will have to focus on myself for a bit to recuperate from this campaign, both financially and personally. I intend to help with the above endeavor over the course of the next year while also building out more free-to-use campaign tools like the ones I developed for our campaign. There is work with the DSA to build their own versions of Democratic Party tools, and what I built has considerable overlap with their tools, so hopefully what I developed can be put to use there too. I am still up in the air if I want to set up a non-profit focused on maintaining/supporting those tools so that future challengers will not be gate-kept by the Democratic or Republican party withholding necessary tools.
Outside of politics, I am going to try and find time to get back to volunteer firefighting. It's fun, and I miss the camaraderie, plus it wouldn't hurt to keep physically fit for '28. In addition, I will use my 9/11 GI Bill to test out of the classes I need for a bachelor's degree. I have hundreds of credit hours to my name (~300 to 400 iirc), but I never cared to actually get a bachelor's because I never needed the piece of paper, instead opting to just take classes that interested me. I noticed some people thought I was "under educated" because all I have to prove my education is an associate's degree, so I intend on fixing that before '28.
#Conclusion I think I will end it there. If you made it this far, give yourself a gold star. I didn't want this to be too long, yet I didn't want to leave out any obvious major gaps. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.