Hold your heads high.

Dear Friends,

Last Tuesday was a hard night for Republicans. A blue wave moved across the country and across Michigan, and Oakland County did not escape it. I know many of you who knocked doors, made calls, and gave what you could are feeling the weight of it.

But a wave election is also a message, and it’s our job to read it and take it to heart. When you look closely at the results here at home, there is a lot to learn from the places where we beat the odds.

We already threw out the old playbook

This week, a lot of people are saying it’s time for the Republican Party to throw out its old playbook. That isn’t news to us.

When we took over the Oakland County Republican Party, we threw out the playbook that had been used before us, and we were transparent about the new one and how we were implementing it. We did that on purpose. Rebuilding trust with voters, with our grassroots, and with our donors was the most important thing we could do, and transparency was a small price to pay to start that process.

But executing a new playbook doesn’t mean victory arrives overnight, or even in a single election cycle. Lasting wins require permanent infrastructure: people, data, relationships, and a presence in every community that doesn’t disappear the day after an election. The party organization is the only entity that can legally build that infrastructure and coordinate with our candidates at the same time. That is why the work we are doing together matters so much.

What voters are telling us

What I hear from voters is clear. Voters don’t trust politicians, and a lot of them are angry.

People don’t only vote on policy. They vote on whether life feels harder than it should, and whether the people in charge actually understand that. Families are struggling with the price of groceries, gas, energy, and healthcare. Young people are watching the dream of owning a home move further out of reach. When a family’s kitchen table math doesn’t match what politicians are saying on TV, they stop listening. Telling people that things were worse before, or that things aren’t really that bad, doesn’t land with someone who is worried about the next bill.

Voters also told us they want results they can see. Controlling government without delivering visible progress is not success, and the actions and inactions of members of our own party gave Democrats easy arguments to make.

We also have to be honest about ourselves. Across our party, real grassroots organizing has been allowed to wither. Too much of politics has become online infighting, paid influencers, and outside voices setting the tone. The slow, essential work of one-on-one conversations with neighbors got pushed aside. Primaries became more about collecting the right endorsements and influencers than testing ideas and records. And we spent more time explaining why the other side is worse than asking voters what they want from us.

At the end of the day, people vote on whether they believe you are on their side. Our job is to earn that, one conversation at a time, by fighting for lower costs, a better shot at affordable healthcare and energy, and a real path to homeownership for the next generation.

Reaching young voters where they are

In our playbook, we forecasted that young voters would be decisive this cycle, and we used new and innovative ways to reach them. Tuesday showed that this was the right call, and it also showed that it wasn’t enough.

We need more resources dedicated to this work in the future. And we need real messengers who are present in the communities where young voters live, work, and learn, including on college campuses. We cannot rely on outside organizations that answer to no one here. Reaching the next generation of Oakland County voters has to be our responsibility, and we have to be accountable for it.