From where I sit, the Democratic Party let the GOP define the election discourse. They let Republican candidates and Republican ads demonize queer people, stir up hatred, invent an issue most voters don't care about ...

while providing almost zero counter-narrative and no discourse leadership of their own.

Tim Waltz tried, but he took a back seat to Harris, who remained almost entirely silent, providing almost no leadership. And so it went down the ballot.

Republicans demonized us, Democrats tried to change the subject. That's what it's like, what it's always been like, to be a political scapegoat.

I've lived through it too many times, especially during the AIDS crisis when political leaders (and not always Republicans!) publicly proclaimed that we deserved to die.

That's what the GOP is fighting to drag us back to. And that's what Democratic leadership is barely resisting.