Because Saturday and Sunday, we’ll be on the move both days with campaign events. Still relatively local, but in a few weeks the travel will kick into high gear. We’ll hit some big cities first for the money nights, like Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, Indianapolis New York, Dallas, Seattle, Chicago, Miami, and Atlanta. Then the plan is to work in secondary cities before we start setting up surgical operations in smaller money markets.
The third wave will be after we’ve seen where we’re getting the most combined small-dollar donations—and the worst. Then we’ll plan a series of small town halls, invite-only so we can control the crowds, but they’re great optics. By then we’ll have a better view of our ground game and our local campaign teams. The more money we can bring in from an area, the more resources we can dedicate there.
And by then we’ll have more local regions pulling in enough money we can open more offices and hire more staff.
All of that, of course, works hand-in-hand with a bull’s-eye painted on Iowa.
The caucuses.
The Holy Grail.
Well, them, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The unholy trifecta of early voting.
California is a given, of course, and we’ve got a lot of surrogates we can send out there in the early days. Shae can help with Florida. We’ve got a Dem senator in Ohio now who will also help us there, and Pennsylvania is pretty damned blue. Comfortably so. We might lose Michigan, but if we get all the others, that’s fine.
I’d really love to carry Texas, but they’re unpredictable. I’ve started studying maps from Shae’s last election, comparing them to the latest midterm and the midterm before her election, to give me a better idea of voting trends and see what districts we need to focus efforts on to possibly tip the scales blue.
Not that weneedIowa, or any of the others, for the primaries. Elliot’s the presumptive candidate. No one’s been stupid enough yet to say they’ll try to primary him, because Shae’s popular, and so’s Elliot. There haven’t been any scandals to drag them down. On the contrary, Shae’s still riding a bump from her family’s personal tragedies and the attempt on Kev’s life. But with all that sympathetic attention, and with the GOP already eviscerating each other, Elliot’s calm and steady message is a startling positive contrast that won’t easily be overlooked by voters fatigued by dark-money ads running candidates into the mud. So far, they’re focusing their ad buys on each other, not Elliot.
Also, Elliot can’tnotdo his fucking job as a candidate because he expects to win the election. People need to see he isn’t assuming anything. That he’sworkingto win them over or to keep them on his side, if they were already planning on voting for him.
All this mental scheming, of course, is to distract me from the fact that Leo won’t pay any attention to me. If this was some cunning plan of his to make me come crawling to him and beg him to notice me? Well, guess what?
He’s fucking wrong.
Was he always like this and I never saw it before? I don’t remember him ever acting punitive like this. If anything, Leo always wanted to talk things over, practically to a tedious degree. The psychologist always had that control over the Dom and the sadist and the former Secret Service agent. That’s why he insisted on consent, because he knew damned well he can easily talk me or Elliot into anything in a matter of minutes.
Sure, he and Elliot didn’t do much talking the other night, but they’d been apart for over a month, hadn’t slept together for far longer than that, and I know they both probably needed the bonding time.
But…this?
If this is some new aspect to Leo’s personality, or something I just never noticed before?
No thanks. Hard fucking pass.
I’ll focus on my boy and taking care of him. I’ll treat Leo like the annoying third-wheel friend who never knows when to go away, but you can’t quite make yourself order him to leave because you feel sorry for him.
Or so I’ll tell myself until I finally drive that lesson home deep within my soul.
