THIS BOOK IS AN argument, not a prophecy. I am apolitical fundraiser and strategist, not a pollster, andeverything in these pages is my own view, offered in thespirit of a memo to colleagues rather than a verdicthanded down. Where I predict, I am predicting. Wherethe evidence cuts against me, I have tried to say soplainly and in the same voice.Portions of this book began as opinion columns inNew India Abroad, as essays on my Substack, and asletters and memoranda to friends and colleagues inDemocratic politics. They have been rewritten, expanded, and in several places corrected. Any errorsthat survive are mine.One correction deserves its own paragraph, becauseI have made the claim myself in print and want therecord straight. I have written that eighty-nine millionregistered voters stayed home in 2024, and that most ofthem were Harris registrations from the hundred-and-seven-day campaign. The defensible number is differentand, I think, more powerful: roughly ninety millioneligible Americans did not cast a ballot in 2024. Howmany of them registered during the Harris campaign, and how they would have voted, is not something anydataset can tell us. I make the argument in this book onthe honest number.I have also, throughout, tried to separate what Ibelieve will happen from what I believe should happen.They are not the same book. Chapter Seven is devotedentirely to the strongest case against my own thesis,2THE COMEBACKand I would ask any reader inclined to dismiss this asadvocacy to begin there.- D.S., San Francisc