So much has already been written and no doubt there’ll be countless volumes to come. The talking heads have been out in full force—TV, radio, podcasts, X—and every other media outlet on Earth. There’s been a mix of commentary, depending on where you tune in, that ranges from joy to despair. Yes, the 2024 election is over, but the burning question remains: “Where do we go from here?”

All sides of the aisle have offered advice, speculation and arguments made.

For example, David French, a New York Times columnist recently wrote: “The election is over, but our democracy endures. The end of the campaign signaled the beginning of the next phase of the fight to preserve the American experiment. We can grieve the loss, but the period of mourning should be short. There is work to be done.” And, Peggie Noonan, the renowned speech writer for Republican President Ronald Reagon, and currently a Wall Street Journal columnist wrote recently: “All defeat carries a gift. You get to figure out what you’re getting wrong.”

So, again, there’s the question: Where do we go from here?

To help figure that out, a good place to start might be to look at an item that is already receiving a great deal of attention in this time of election postmortems: How could so many professional pollsters get it so wrong? Their findings were supposed to not just predict who would win, but also to identify what voters cared about that would deliver the win. Campaigns pay millions of dollars for their findings and more millions are paid to those individuals tasked with developing and implementing strategies based on that information. Clearly, there’s no shortage of excuses to offer disappointed voters, but there’s surely a simple warning for everyone to keep in mind. It was found in a study by psychologist Philip Tetlock. He evaluated several decades of predictions about political and economic events, and he summed up his findings best: “The average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” It’s too easy to conclude that “people lie to pollsters” and therefore their findings are often flawed. Maybe the better conclusion is to not rely heavily on polls but instead, find better ways to know what’s on voters’ minds…and what really matters to them.

Another idea that was pursued, but maybe not to its fullest during the election, and should not be dropped now or minimized going forward in the quest to engage, grow and preserve voter participation—is the importance of reaching out to new and first-time voters. The voting population in America is changing. Baby Boomers used to make up the largest voting bloc in the nation. Today, it’s people under 30 who made up 16% of the vote, while in 2020, they were only at 13% of the vote. And there is another group that has skyrocketed in voter numbers: 36.2 million Hispanics are now eligible to vote which more than doubled their numbers from 14.3 million in 2020. Of course, the challenge becomes how to appeal to these groups—and many more emerging voter groups, as well as the huge number angry voters who decide to just sit this one out. Some have pointed blame on the expansion of concern to what has been termed: “cultural boutique issues” while at the same time, concerns of perhaps more hard-core, “can’t-live-without” issues from housing to hunger seem on the backburner.

What’s there to do…where do we go from here?

Charles Blow, New York Times opinion columnist, in one of his takeaways from this election, suggested that we go back to the concept of Martin Luther King Jr. before he was assassinated. He had already embarked on the Poor People’s Campaign, which he called “the beginning of a new cooperation, understanding and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity.” Although it’s a question if that title would be welcomed without controversy today, the coalition concept does have merit. Certainly, unifying in common interests for common gains is something that working people—and union members-understand and subscribe to. Blow ends his column with wisdom and advice: “It’s hard not to think that some Americans don’t see others’ oppression as their problem”. And there’s something more to consider: When we look in the mirror, is ours the only image we see? Maybe part of the way to find the answer to “Where do we go from here?” is to unify and in so doing, the image in the mirror is not just of one person, but of many.