"It doesn't matter if Democratic senators or members of Congress put out TikTok videos or bring influencers for special hearings. Ultimately, if it's not in their bones that they want to fight with everything they have, the people will see right through it."

Murshed Zaheed has more than 30 years of experience as a leader, organizer, and advocate in a career stretching from D.C. to San Francisco. He’s the founder of Pacifica Strategies, a boutique public affairs firm working with prominent organizations engaged in policy and politics.

He served as the Political Director of CREDO Mobile, empowering its over five million members to fight for progressive change in Washington, D.C., and in state capitols across the country.

He also served as Director of New Media for then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in a senior leadership role and was a member of Gov. Howard Dean’s groundbreaking digital team during Dean’s presidential campaign.

He has watched the Democratic Party cycle through the same conversations about tactics — from blogs in 2006 to TikTok in 2026 — and he's tired of it.

Not because tactics don't matter. But because tactics without strategy are just noise.

We covered a lot of ground — from what Harry Reid's war room actually looked like from the inside, to why Congressional staffers quitting Bluesky is exactly the wrong response to getting yelled at online, to how the Dean campaign's approach to email was the soul of what we've since lost.

Some top takeaways:

• Strategy first, always. You cannot layer better tactics on top of a weak political position and expect people not to notice.
• Democratic leaders need to stop treating their email lists as ATMs and start treating them as communities worth actually communicating with.
• Getting yelled at online is not a reason to log off. It's a reason to show up more and listen harder.
• The Dean campaign raised $55 million with a blend of communications, organizing, and fundraising anchored in a real political position. That model exists. We abandoned it.
• Indivisible is one of the only progressive organizations whose emails Murshed actually reads. Pretty sure he's not the only one.

Find links, transcript and more at HelloMergeTag.com.