This is hard. Writing this is hard.
Many people poured their hearts and souls into the Wisconsin recall efforts, and we came up short. In many races, we got our butts kicked. I'm sorry, but when you've worked all-out for six months, the polls tell you you're within the margin of error, you have the most massive GOTV ever, and your candidate loses by 16 points - that's a butt-kicking. With all due respect to kos, I'm not going to declare victory.
But this is just one battle. We've built a network. We've had political action where there never was any before. We've brought people into the process who've never been here before. We're setting the stage for future victories.
But for now, today, it hurts.
We'll take a few days to mourn, to lick our wounds. Then we'll pick ourselves back up, analyze what happened, and decide what we need to do differently. That will be Part 2. But we can't do that yet. It's too raw.
We need to take a few days.
No Quarter, No Surrender - We're not going to give up, and we're not going to give in. We're still in this to win. We didn't win yesterday, but we'll keep fighting. We're not going away.
No Apologies, No Regrets - We didn't succeed, for now. We came really close statewide. We knew this was going to be hard. The only sure way to fail is not to try, and we tried. We have no crystal ball. We did what we needed to do, when we needed to do it. I have no regrets, I make no apologies.
I was at the Shelly Moore HQ party last night. The beer and the tears both flowed freely. But there were smiles, and laughter, and hugs. One media person said that he'd "never seen such a bunch of happy losers".
Well, he's half-right. We're happy people who lost this race. We're not losers.
Shelly was fantastic. She came in and gave a wonderful, cheerful, inspiring speech. She had every right to be down, but she was smiling and laughing and vowing that we'll continue to work together. Hell, her concession speech was better than many victory speeches I've seen at the federal level. She would have been a great senator, and still might be...
One woman who's really thrown her heart and soul into this effort went through the crowd telling others who worked that "We didn't lose - I found you!". I'd like to repeat that to everyone here that's worked hard on this - we didn't lose. To Puddytat, to Giles, to ruleoflaw, to noise of rain, to buckybadger1998, to everyone else I'm not naming 'cuz the list is too long, so many others here from Wisconsin who have worked SO HARD... to all of you who worked so hard, honorary Wisconsinites... to Chris Bowers and Kos, who've helped keep this going...
That is the positive story from our little corner of Wisconsin today. We've built a network and we're going to keep it going. We're going to take a few days, once this isn't so raw, and we're going to try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better.
Yes, there are lots of questions. How could the polls have been off so much? Why did so many people vote republican? Was this a GOTV failure (I don't think so)? How do we work better, smarter for 2012, and who will our candidates be? But these are questions for the next week and month, which I hope to diary in "Part 2". These are not questions for today.
For now, I just want to express my thanks to all of the wonderful people who have been, and hopefully will continue to be, part of this movement.
Notes - I'll be checking this diary intermittently during the day, I've got some "mental health" manual labor to do.
And to anyone who writes a "Ha! sucks to be you, Wisconsin!" comment - you don't poke a stick at a wounded badger.