So let's talk about #ElectionNight (or Election Next Night, or Election Several Weeks Later) speeches — and the need for a Plan B speech.

For campaigns that never had a shot in the first place, the concession speech may be the only one you bother writing. (Maybe you'll write a private, never-to-be-delivered victory speech just to cheer yourself and a few of your colleagues up.)

But if winning's possible, you're writing two speeches: Plan A (victory) and Plan B (defeat). Each will have bracketed sections for various contingencies (e.g. narrow/overwhelming outcome, results from other races your supporters care about). But those are the two main speeches.

Writing the victory speech is FUN. You're one of the few campaign staffers with the privilege of counting pre-hatched chickens. You spend your writing time in that victory-night mindset of your campaign and its supporters. Enjoy that! Soak it up!

But Plan B... that's a lot less fun to write. You channel the disappointment of your campaign's staff and volunteers, and anticipating your own. If you have a strong rapport with your candidate, you're feeling their pain too.

You're digging deep to find some kind of comfort to offer all of them, maybe in the face of overwhelming heartbreak. This is something people who don't work in politics can't always grasp: This isn't a game for us. We believe these outcomes matter profoundly.

I imagine what it would be like to be drafting that speech for a Democratic speechwriter, knowing that a Trump victory could be an extinction-level event for American democracy. You'd be going to some pretty dark places.

I've found after I've written one of these for a campaign I poured my heart into, I've needed some recovery time. (If I ever do that kind of campaign again, I think I'll do a rough Plan A, then write Plan B start to finish, and then recuperate by returning to Plan A.)

But writing Plan B does some good, too... and not just because you're crafting it ahead of time, instead of while the wreckage of defeat is crashing down around your ears. (Figuratively, for most campaigns.)

To write a good Plan B speech, you don't just have to imagine the worst: You have to imagine a response to it. And the work of facing the darkness and finding light to share with others builds resilience... and makes you doubly appreciative if you come out ahead after all.

And look, a lot of North American elections aren't like the U.S. presidential elections of 2016 and 2020; they're a *little* less Manichean than that. But when you believe strongly in a cause, victory or defeat still have real-world consequences.

In one campaign I worked on, it became clear not long after the polls closed that it was going to be a Plan B night. So the comms director and I shut ourselves in a room and started tweaking that speech. Tears were shed. It was shaping up to be a really good speech—