Folks, it’s FEC day again today. Just like last quarter, I’m writing to you all today to further prove my hypothesis: Hot people win elections. Sex sells, baby, and it all starts with the money.

Let’s start by checking on the hotties I cited last quarter.

Beau Bayh, or as I like to call him, BEAUtiful Bayh, is the absolute babe running to be Indiana’s Secretary of State. He’s still fundraising circles around his Republican opponent, rocking a smooth $2.4 million since launching. Chicken tender baron Chris Pappas outraised both his Republican opponents combined.

If your plan was to argue with me, let me end it here. Jon Ossoff broke records by raising a mind-blowing $14mil. He has —and I am not joking— $31 MILLION cash-on-hand right now.

Case closed. Moving on.

Now, let’s me break down some of the gorgeous and incredible candidates who raked it in during Q1 that I didn’t get to mention in Q4:

• James Talarico in Texas with $27mil (!!!)

• Sherrod Brown in Ohio with $12.5mil

• Mary Peltola in Alaska with $8.9mil

• Mallory McMorrow in Michigan with $3mil

• Abdul El-Sayed, also in Michigan, with $2.2mil

• Chaz Molder in TN-05 with $600k — 4x as much as his Republican opponent

• Paige Cognetti in PA-08 with $1.5mil

• Rebecca Cooke in WI-03 with $2.4mil

These races are at very levels of competitiveness with a mix of incumbents, challengers, and deep primaries. But do you know what they all have in common They’re HOT.

Another quarter of vindication for yours truly.

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Thanks for clicking. If you don’t care about my thoughts and just want to look at hot people, @BFsWeDeserve on Twitter and @BoyfriendsWeDeserve on Instagram and TikTok are for you. This SubStack is a work in progress, but I’m excited to give it a swing. I have big plans and even bigger dreams, so thanks for being here.

In Case You Missed It— USA Today’s Jay Stahl wrote a profile about me, and more specifically, Boyfriends We Deserve.

I screamed.

Here’s the highlights:

• John F. Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, fired off a flirty fundraising text on Valentine’s Day about someone suggesting he’d be a good partner in an effort to woo potential donors to his New York City congressional campaign.

• The colorful graphic was made by Boyfriends We Deserve, the pet project of little-known Democratic strategist Monica Venzke that boasts a dedicated following in Washington as she advocates for attractive political candidates.

• Venzke, 28, wants her party to embrace their deep bench of male political hopefuls who can properly bench press — and objectively beautiful women — as they seek to win back broader support in November.

• Venzke told USA TODAY she feels she has a unique opportunity to “try to make it sexy to be a Democrat again,” demonstrating that people can be “hypermasculine and also, like, think that people deserve health care.”

• Raised in the DC area during the Obama years, Venzke had a front row seat to history. After graduating from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, she found her own seat at the table in politics. She took a traditional route for wide-eyed politicos, working first on Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential bid and then Joe Biden’s winning campaign the same year. Venzke’s career in political communications brought her to the New Hampshire Democratic Party before she joined opposition research group American Bridge 21st Century as a press secretary, later rising to the organization’s House communications director.

• But in September, she jokingly launched Boyfriends We Deserve on social media to prop up political candidates with manicured hair — and biographies. Her endorsees include Scranton, Pennsylvania, mayor Paige Cognetti, union-leading smokejumper Sam Forstag in Montana and Tejano singer turned congressional candidate Bobby Pulido.

• Boyfriends We Deserve borrows its name from David Hogg’s controversial fundraising arm of a similar name, Leaders We Deserve.

• “I would love for it to become a thing one day,” Venzke said of her future ambitions. “But for now, I just think for like the 2026 cycle at least, I’m just trying to get attention to people who deserve it.”
  

• Venzke has seized on a common theme in the wake of the 2024 election that pitted former Vice President Kamala Harris against now-President Donald Trump: What and who is considered “normal” or “cool.”

• “She’s kind of got that, like, suburban mom hot thing going on,” Venzke said of Judge Taylor.

• “I think Democrats can tap into the fun side again,” she said, pointing to former President Barack Obama as a blueprint.

• While Venzke noted that nobody can “outdo the doer,” no other Democratic politician has embraced fun like Obama, making the presidency feel more accessible to everyday Americans.

• Venzke hopes other Democrats will let loose now, too. “I don’t think my account with 2,000 followers is going to be the future of elections, but ... I thought this was funny, so I tried it and I’m having fun,” she said.

Read the full piece in USA Today here.

Was getting a USA Today profile based on my thirst account with 2,000 followers on my 2026 Bingo card? No. Am I really fucking excited about it? Yes. Am I ever going to shut about it? No.

So infinite shoutouts to the gorgeous candidates who don’t complain when I sexualize them online, Jack Schlossberg for making me newsy in the first place, and David Hogg for not making me stop.

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Thanks for clicking. If you don’t care about my thoughts and just want to look at hot people, @BFsWeDeserve on Twitter and @BoyfriendsWeDeserve on Instagram and TikTok are for you. This SubStack is a work in progress, but I’m excited to give it a swing. I have big plans and even bigger dreams, so thanks for being here.

I have read it, and I have never been more vindicated in my life.

To be clear, I loved this piece and I totally clickbaited you with this title (gotcha)! It does a much better job of articulating everything I have ever tried to with my SubStack (and Twitter, and Instagram, and TikTok, and BlueSky, and carrier pigeon…)

I get a lot of flack from my fellow Democratic operatives for my “the key to success is running hot Democrats” bit, but it’s clear that I’m neither alone nor wrong.

I’m not the first, last, or even best person pushing this idea. My source material, Leaders We Deserve, was founded with the mission of electing younger Democrats to beat our gerontocracy party problem. This is my— albeit roundabout and unhinged— way of pushing the same thing. Stefan Smith, one of my favorite Twitter personalities, has been talking about running hot Democrats for months. My favorite account on Twitter, which is included in the article, Qondi “Senator Boo” Ntini, has a whole campaign she coined “Thirst for Democracy.” Everyone is talking about this!

The sex appeal of successful politicians has long been addressed. JFK, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were all lauded for their good looks and charisma, and pundits of the day talked about it ad nauseam. They may not have been so crass about it, but if social media existed the way it does now, I’m sure they’d all have gotten real time thirst edits. Their good looks and charm nabbed voters’ attention, specifically in the voting blocs we as Democrats need.

As I discussed in my inaugural SubStack post, hotness is what separates really good candidates from great ones. It’s not a substitute for policy or character— if you’re a disaster, being hot won’t save you— but it is what makes you stand out. It gets people (and money) in the door. The same way a male candidate can be a celebrity crush for a suburban mom, they can prove to the male voter that being a Democratic is cool and sexy again— a point we’re struggling to prove right now.

The Bulwark cites Gavin Newsom, who I have already yapped about plenty. As I’ve said before: “He exudes that manliness, that raw power, and that drip that is so appealing to the electorate. It’s his swagger, it’s his BDE. He gets your attention and he keeps it.”

As a reminder— which many of you really need— I’m telling jokes. This is a bit. I have lots of goals here, but primarily, the goal is to be funny.

That being said, my comedic approach does not mean I’m wrong. I’m not wrong. I’m never wrong.

So watch this space.

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Thanks for clicking. If you don’t care about my thoughts and just want to look at hot people, @BFsWeDeserve on Twitter and @BoyfriendsWeDeserve on Instagram and TikTok are for you. This SubStack is a work in progress, but I’m excited to give it a swing. I have big plans and even bigger dreams, so thanks for being here.

(And if you haven’t read Laura Egan’s piece in The Bulwark, you need to do that. “The hotness election is upon us, whether we’re turned on by it or not,” is perhaps one of the best endings to a story I’ve ever read).

To put it plainly, we need to make it cool to be a Democrat again.

Republicans are absolutely winning the culture war. They are losing, and will continue to lose, on lots of other things— making the American Dream completely unaffordable, protecting pedophiles, corruption, what have you— but they still have us beat on culture when it comes to straight white guys. They have painted being a Democrat as inherently uncool, not masculine, and frankly unsexy.

There’s lots of ways to go about changing this that go well out of my realm for this SubStack, and they get talked about all the time by much smarter people. My realm is hot people, so that is what I will stick to. Here’s my take:

The perfect Democratic candidate right now is also the perfect romantic comedy love interest. Stay with me!

Jack Schlossberg’s fundraising text of my endorsement (separately, oh my god how have we not talked about that??) inspired me. He compares being a good boyfriend to a good member of Congress. I may be biased, but I genuinely believe he’s onto something.

If you are not an avid Hallmark movie or romcom watcher, or Emily Henry reader, there are a few concrete ways someone can be a swoony love interest. They are pretty clear and concise.

The most popular is, without a doubt, the blue collar, small-town working guy that the cold, workaholic city girl (a self insert for me, I’ll admit that now) falls for.

The prime example of this— Sam Forstag. He’s a smokejumper running for Congress in MT-01, and is the most “man written by a woman” political candidate I’ve ever seen. He has a bad ass job. He’s in Montana— second only to Wyoming in the Hallmark setting location hall of fame.

Besides the fact that he had perhaps the sickest announcement video I’ve ever seen, he’s a union leader with the most manly vibe anyone can have. He has mastered the duality of being swoon-worthy for the ladies and really fucking cool for the men.

He’s running on what, in my opinion, all Democrats should be running on: affordability. He’s doing it in a way that is so unbelievably relatable and just outright cool. Think “grumpy sunshine,” but he’s not even really serving grumpy. He’s just super manly and awesome.

He’s the perfect cultural shift of Democrats being cool again that I’m referring to and that I think we desperately need.

Another example, but with a different romcom archetype— Kyle Blomquist. He’s an architect running in MI-01 with an emphasis on housing and health care affordability. He has the extremely rare modern political trait of seeming like a person who already existed before deciding to run for office. He is also the total package of candidate and romcom character, but in a completely different film from Sam’s. He’s the sweet, bleeding heart family man.

He’s absolutely JACKED, which certainly helps in the cool department, but he is without a doubt the relatable family man that every romance reader loses her mind over. He worked for his family business, has a beautiful wife and kids, the whole lot. His entire vibe is just “I want to make life for other people better,” and he gives it off with an unmatched and unfakeable authenticity. You believe he wants things to be affordable because he is someone who personally cares that they weren’t. It affects his family the same way it affects your family.

He’s the character that the female protagonist is constantly blushing over, but more importantly, he’s the “everyman” candidate that you completely believe has your best interest at heart. His family is like your family. Think “friends to lovers” archetype, but in the same vain as “politician I’d get a beer with.”

One more style of guy— Mark Moran. He’s running for U.S. Senate from Virginia in albeit underdog primary, and he perfectly encapsulates the last style of masculine love interest: bro.

He’s a reality TV star (if Republicans can have theirs as president, we can certainly have ours). He’s a finance and crypto guy. He’s a shit poster. And by the way, he’s a former male model.

He is the cool, nonchalant business guy with a secret heart of gold. He’s the white collar love interest, so sub him in for the hot shot lawyer or CEO character in whatever Tessa Bailey book you’re thinking of. He’s the guy that your friends misjudged and have to circle around about at the climax of the film to tell you to go for it.

Similarly, he’s the “cultural Republican” that can help make being a Democrat cool again. Democrats have lost a lot of the Wall Street guy vote, but he’s the kind of candidate that I think can help bring that back. He’s on the opposite side of the coin of a Sam Forstag type, but that’s a good thing. There’s a place, and I’d argue, a need, for both of them. We have a wide tent party, and folks like this make it wider.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is the same thing I’ve said a million times over— running attractive people works. The parallels between the kind of Democrat who can win back the respect of this key voting bloc and a swoon-worthy love interest are uncanny. As always, it’s not the only factor that matters when it comes to candidate quality, but I think it matters quite a lot more than many operatives care to admit.

When we’re thinking about what kind of candidates we should be running, we should be thinking like the Hallmark channel casting department.

*An obvious but important disclaimer— I don’t work for or with any of these people. I’ve never met or talked to any of them (besides Mark, hi Mark), and these are my honest but admittedly intentionally comedic opinions. They are not reflections on any of their campaigns. Legalize comedy! :)

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Thanks for clicking. If you don’t care about my thoughts and just want to look at hot people, @BFsWeDeserve on Twitter and @BoyfriendsWeDeserve on Instagram and TikTok are for you. This SubStack is a work in progress, but I’m excited to give it a swing. I have big plans and even bigger dreams, so thanks for being here.

Let’s start with the extremely obvious — Jon Ossoff. He was the highest fundraiser for a Senate candidate on either side of the aisle. He is also, undoubtedly, the hottest Senate candidate on either side of the aisle.

Current cutie congressman soon-to-be cutie senator, Chris Pappas, raised more than $2.27 million in Q4, with 96% of donations being less than $100.

Beau Bayh, who is the absolute babe running to be Indiana’s Secretary of State, outraised his Republican opponent by a WIDE margin. He’s sitting on just under $2 million, with donors from every single county in Indiana.

Iowa gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand (who is HOT) literally broke records for raising almost $10 million last year, also with donors in every single county in the state.

Moving onto Congress— would you like to guess who the highest fundraiser was? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not only one the most stunning members of Congress, but one of the most stunning women on earth. Chris Deluzio, my newly discovered crush, raised a whopping $635k in Q4 alone. Sam Forstag, the smoking-hot smokejumper running in MT-01, raised an ungodly amount of money in just his first 48 hours of candidacy.

Why am I just yelling names and numbers at you guys? It’s simple: Hot people raise money. Money wins elections.

We should be running hot people.

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Thanks for clicking. If you don’t care about my thoughts and just want to look at hot people, @BFsWeDeserve on Twitter and @BoyfriendsWeDeserve on Instagram and TikTok are for you. This SubStack is a work in progress, but I’m excited to give it a swing. I have big plans and even bigger dreams, so thanks for being here.

In short: once again, I am vindicated.

After Mark Green resigned in disgrace, Democrat Aftyn Behn came within swinging distance of his up-for-grabs seat. There’s a lot of— with all due respect— stupid fucking discourse online about why she lost, and I’d like to debunk it.

I think implying that a R+22 district was inherently winnable and that somehow this was Aftyn’s to lose is absurd, yet lots of Democratic operatives are having a field day spewing that. Lots of Twitterheads think a moderate candidate would’ve fared better. Obviously, I couldn’t disagree with that more.

What Aftyn brings to the table, that I think a lot of old school Democrats in my ideological bubble are ignoring, is energy. She gave us that “hopium,” that “libbing out” feeling that voters foam at the mouth for. She’s exciting. She gets Trump and Democratic base voters out the door, which can be especially hard in a special election. She won a primary against, respectfully, a bunch of boring people. Those aren’t the kind of candidates that get voters to the polls. They don’t even get their full attention during their Sunday show hits.

There is, undeniably, a large faction of Trump-Behn voters. Denying that is futile. She may not have pulled it off, but the fact that there’s even a conversation to be had about these results shows that she did something extraordinary.

Insert now, my internal test subject, Chaz Molder.

Besides the obvious appeals of Chaz Molder, (successful mayor, 6’4”, dreamy, incredible accent) he has that same spark to him that I think only young, likable, good-looking people do.

He’s already proven he has the “it” factor. He’s a Democratic mayor in an extremely conservative city. He’s running circles around his incumbent Republican opponent fundraising wise.

Like Aftyn, there will be a large faction of Trump-Molder voters. Perhaps even enough to pull it off. And they’re not exactly ideological twins. He’s seemingly considerably more moderate than her.

For the sake of full transparency, I will reveal that my personal politics are not as progressive as Aftyn’s. I am a moderate Democrat— a Joe Biden 2020 primary voter. She is probably not my ideological match in terms of policy.

My point being, that’s not exactly what it’s all about. That’s why people like Aftyn and people like Chaz can be categorized together. It’s about energy, electability. There’s more to that than policy specifics.

Everyone talks about policy, because at the end of the day, that’s the job. That’s what we’re sending you to Washington to do, and that should be what people vote on. I’m not an idiot, I get that.

But what they’re voting for and what gets them out the door to vote— what gets them listening in the first place— are not the same thing. When we’re looking at candidate quality, we can’t ignore the intangible, the impossible to poll.

Aftyn Behn has it. Chaz Molder has it. So let’s keep our eyes on Tennessee next year, and let’s keep running hot Democrats.

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Thanks for clicking. If you don’t care about my thoughts and just want to look at hot people, @BFsWeDeserve on Twitter and @BoyfriendsWeDeserve on Instagram and TikTok are for you. This SubStack is a work in progress, but I’m excited to give it a swing. I have big plans and even bigger dreams, so thanks for being here.

Say what you want about Jack Schlossberg (and I do constantly, it is quite literally why I started BFWD in the first place), but he is a really, really good candidate.

The Influencer Candidate

He has absolutely perfected the art of the internet, which Democrats desperately need to do. He’s the original rage baiter, not just as chaos, but as strategy. To name a few infamous instances, he: claimed to be Justin Baldoni’s lawyer, said Usha Vance was hotter than his grandmother, and hosted a TikTok live where he explained why he’s Team Lana in the Lana Del Rey/Ethel Cain drama. He takes chronically online to the next level, which is undeniably relatable to a huge chunk of the electorate.

As he so brilliantly puts it, “It’s the game the other side has been playing really well, which is flipping people out and getting a reaction.”

Take, for example, his initial fundraising email that made Twitter lose its mind:

Anyone who knows anything about digital fundraising knows that clickbait is your greatest weapon. Donors’ inboxes are flooded with these, and standing out in the sea of them is your only chance of actually benefiting from them. Jack’s millennial exclamation points and his signature capitalization is, if nothing else, on brand and unique in the digital fundraising space. And there’s very little else you can be that’s better than being unique.

They say that all press is good press, and I think the truer statement is “all clicks are good clicks.” The internet at-large is losing their minds over a nepo-baby, influencer, cringe online candidate. But what are they doing? Clicking. He’s garnering clicks, and in a race like that, that’s the dream. That’s where earned media comes from, that’s where donors come from, and yes, that’s where votes come from.

Sex Humanity Sells

The other reason Jack Schlossberg is such a good candidate is his authenticity and complete humanization.

Obviously, as I’ve rhapsodized about already, he says things he does not mean for attention. Duh. Still, he is so inexplicably human and approachable.

His posts that aren’t ridiculous (though fun), are raw and real. We’ve seen him practice ballet, get drinks with his friends, ride a bike through the city, and goof off. We’ve seen him hurt that someone would mock the murder of his grandfather with a Halloween costume. We’ve seen him talk about pop culture. We’ve seen, what at least believably appears to be, the real man behind the candidate. So few candidates pull that off.

What Dems Should Learn

NY-12 is the most Democratic congressional district in the country. I’m not trying to say that Jack Schlossberg and Zohran Mamdani’s campaign blueprints are always the way to win in swing districts. New York City is not Maricopa County.

However, I am saying that Democrats need to evolve a lot quicker than we are. Republicans have already learned that lesson, and so has Jack Schlossberg.

There has been a lot of chatter about finding the liberal Joe Rogan. I’m not sure if Jack Schlossberg exactly fits that bill, but he’s exactly what we need in our “Make Being a Democrat Cool Again” campaign.

Some of the people in the world that are most susceptible to falling into the red-pilled, MAHA pipeline are exactly the kind of people who can latch onto a Jack Schlossberg instead of someone dangerous. To the same point as my last post, Jack Schlossberg has the qualities that Democratic candidates should have moving forward — energizing, subtly but respectably masculine, and, without a doubt… hot.

Yeah, he’s absurdly attractive. It doesn’t hurt.

He can speak to his own policies and plans, and I’m sure he will. Again, I am not saying that these aforementioned qualities about him will win him this election. I’m saying that, as long as Democrats are losing the culture war, the voters we need are not voting for us.

If we want to win again, we have to meet people where they are — online, ironic, messy, and human. Jack Schlossberg is the exact direction I believe we need to go.

Thanks for clicking. If you don’t care about my thoughts and just want to look at hot people, @BFsWeDeserve on Twitter and @BoyfriendsWeDeserve on Instagram and TikTok are for you. This SubStack is a work in progress, but I’m excited to give it a swing. I have big plans and even bigger dreams, so thanks for being here.

It seems, however, besides our new governors-elect, the biggest winners of the night are universally understood to be Zohran Mamdani and Gavin Newsom.

I’ve never been more vindicated.

These two have an energy behind them that I don’t think anyone else in the party has yet. It’s a perfect mix of chronically onlineness, aura, and, frankly, sex appeal. They’re both fucking hot.

My hypothesis in starting this “project,” if you will, is that hot candidates energize potential voters. They get the attention of white women and the respect of white men— voting blocs that Democrats desperately need back.

I’ve been calling it the “Gavin Newsom-ification” of our party, and I think it’s a good thing. It’s in the same vein as “Dark Woke,” where Democrats are embracing the Trump-centric online theatrics, pettiness, and pugnacity. Gavin Newsom’s merch, AI videos, and all-caps posts have genuinely opened my eyes to why MAGA folks are so endeared and so willing to follow the leader, even though their bank accounts and qualities of life have taken a nose dive for it. I hate to say it, but I get it now.

But a key element in “Gavin Newsom-ification” is aesthetic appeal. He exudes that manliness, that raw power, and that drip that is so appealing to the electorate. It’s his swagger, it’s his BDE. He gets your attention and he keeps it. When I call him, or any of these other candidates I talk about “hot,” it is a severe underclassification of what I actually mean here.

And Zohran has it, too. He has already been credited with completely changing the future of campaigning in this growing social media landscape. Though his approach was less on-the-nose Trump than Gavin Newsom, I think it has that same vibe to it. There is obviously much more to it, like policy, campaign strategy, geography, and national landscape. That’s the candidates’ job— not mine. I’m here to prove a point: this is our ticket to winning again. These are the kind of candidates we should risk it all for.

So I can (and will later, don’t worry) list out the good looking people that won their elections last night, my purpose here is not just to objectify them publicly and disappoint my father. My purpose is to win elections again.

Thanks for clicking. If you don’t care about my thoughts and just want to look at hot people, @BFsWeDeserve on Twitter and @BoyfriendsWeDeserve on Instagram and TikTok are for you. This SubStack is a work in progress, but I’m excited to give it a swing. I have big plans and even bigger dreams, so thanks for being here.