What Is a Daffodil For?
The Democrats don’t have a messaging problem. They have a gardening problem.
The first snow of winter finally arrived here in Utah in the second week of February. It stayed on the ground almost a week, which felt like a minor miracle, and then it melted the way everything melts now — quickly, apologetically, as though it knew it was late to a party that had already moved on without it.
Utah. It used to snow here. That sentence contains a whole climate grief that I don’t have the bandwidth to unpack right now, so I’ll just leave it sitting there in the cold.
But here’s the thing: the daffodils didn’t wait for a proper winter before deciding to wake up. Neither did the poppies. They’re already pushing through the mulch leaves at the edges of the beds, small green fingers testing the air, reading signals in the soil that have nothing to do with anyone’s political strategy. They don’t have a position on the absence of snow. They aren’t organized in opposition to the frost. They’re just — unambiguously, constitutionally, without apology — for spring.
I’ve been thinking about those daffodils while reading a new poll from The New Republic and Embold Research, a survey of 2,421 committed Democratic voters conducted in January. The numbers are striking in their consistency. Ninety-three percent want to raise taxes on the rich. Ninety-one percent want corporations to pay more. Eighty percent believe in strong government oversight of business. Sixty-nine percent say the system is rigged against people like them, and when asked who’s doing the rigging, nearly two-thirds point at corporations and the wealthy. The base knows exactly what it thinks. The diagnosis is clear. The signal is unambiguous.
And yet sixty-nine percent of those same voters — the most committed, most reliable Democrats in the country — describe their own party as “weak.”
I work in systems diagnostics for a living, monitoring large institutional facilities, reading sensor data and fault logs, trying to understand why complex systems fail to do what they were designed to do. When a system receives a clear control signal and doesn’t respond, you don’t blame the thermostat. You trace the circuit. You find where the signal is dying before it reaches the actuators. Something between the base’s clearly stated intentions and the party’s actual behavior is eating the signal, and I’d argue it’s been doing so for most of four decades.
The conventional diagnosis — offered by commentators ranging from The American Prospect to Bill (who?) Maher and James (who?) Carville— is that the Democrats have a “brand problem.” This framing is both correct and almost entirely useless, because it locates the failure in the marketing department when the actual breakdown is structural. You cannot brand your way out of a thermodynamic problem. You can put a very attractive ‘out of order’ sign on a heat pump that isn’t pumping heat, but the house will still be cold.
Here is what I think the data is actually telling us, if we’re willing to read it as systems analysts rather than campaign strategists: the Democratic Party has spent a generation practicing what I’d call glyphosate politics. Spray everything that’s growing wrong. Apply the herbicide broadly. The beds look clean for a season, the optics are good, and the consultants get paid. But glyphosate doesn’t enrich the soil. It doesn’t establish anything. It kills indiscriminately, including things you needed, and after enough cycles the weeds develop resistance and come back harder than before. You end up with superweeds, dead soil biology, and ground that can’t support the things you actually want to grow.
Being “against Republicans” is glyphosate politics. Running campaigns focused on being “against Republicans” is like putting down that nasty plastic fabric weed barrier — a satisfying act of covering the ground with visible effort that looks like doing something while the Bermuda grass rhizomes spread cheerfully underneath it, gathering strength in the dark, unbothered. Anyone who has actually gardened through a Utah summer knows this. You do not solve a weed problem by arguing against weeds. You solve it by building soil healthy enough to grow things that outcompete them.
What does a permaculture approach to Democratic politics look like? It starts with a different question. Not “how do we defeat Republicans?” but “what are we actually trying to grow, and what conditions does it need?” The poll data suggests the base already knows the answer to that question with considerable clarity: a society where corporations and the wealthy don’t get to write the rules for everyone else, where government actually builds and regulates and invests, where working people have enough leverage to negotiate the terms of their own lives. That’s not a radical vision. It’s essentially the New Deal coalition’s greatest hits, updated for the present century. It doesn’t require rebranding. It requires doing.
There’s a historical template for this, and it comes from the Republican Party’s own tradition — which is either ironic or clarifying depending on your disposition. Theodore Roosevelt didn’t run against the trusts by positioning himself as one-third less monopolistic than the other guy. He ran toward something: a square deal, a specific set of conditions he intended to build. He didn’t just rebrand; he picked up the wrench.
The base hunger that this poll reveals — the 46 percent who want a progressive nominee in 2028, a number higher than the 32 percent who self-identify as progressive — isn’t really an ideological preference. It’s a demand for agency. For someone who will pick up the wrench and use it.
The 75-25 split on “fight Republicans versus work with Republicans” gets misread as a temperament question, a demand for performative aggression. I don’t think that’s what it is. These voters have spent years watching asymmetric warfare play out in real time — one party treating politics as a contact sport while the other brought a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order to a knife fight. They’ve updated their threat model. The Democrat base is polling from rationality, not bloodlust.
What gives me something like hope in these numbers — and I don’t distribute hope carelessly — is the 90 percent who still believe government can make lives better. That belief has survived everything: the 2008 financial crisis response, the ACA’s tortured birth, the 2021 Build Back Better collapse, the daily ambient assault of the current administration. These people have not given up on the project. They’ve given up on the current management’s willingness to execute it.
They’re still rooted in the soil. They’re still reading the signs of spring. They’re still pushing through the mulch.
The daffodils in my backyard didn’t get a memo about what kind of winter this was going to be. They didn’t focus-group the frost. They just knew what they were for, and when the conditions were even marginally sufficient, they got to work. There is a politics that operates the same way — not reactive, not defensive, not organized primarily around the negative space of what it opposes — but generative, rooted in a clear answer to the question every voter is unconsciously asking every time they consider giving a party their trust and their time and their hope.
What are you for?
The base is waiting. The soil is ready. Someone needs to plant something.
Consider sharing this with someone who’s still trying to figure out what they’re growing.
Spring 🌼 🌱 growth. Brings hope! 🤞