Democrats Can Look for Solutions or Pick Fights With Each Other

More new reports are out on what we need to do

There are two thick new reports out on what Democrats need to do to win elections in the future.

One of them is from a group called Project Enduring Majority, and their report is called A Roadmap to Win America. I give this report a lot of credit for diagnosing the Democratic Party’s culture and communications delivery problems. If you are a reader of this Substack page and Will Robinson’s you will find many similar critiques. A lot of good data and a lot of good ideas here. I didn’t think the what-we-should-do-to-solve-things part of the report was as strong as the diagnostics, and I thought a couple of their state analysis decisions were strange (one example: they had Mississippi at the bottom of the states in terms of places we should target even though Democrats came within three points of winning the Governor’s race in 2023, and is 38% Black), but I strongly recommend you all taking a look.

But the document I want to talk about in a lot more detail today is the new report from a new PAC called the Welcome PAC, so named because they think more voters and candidates in red states should feel more welcome in the Democratic Party – an admirable goal for sure, and one I strongly share.

As I will detail below, I agreed with some of the big ideas in the piece, and disagreed with some as well, but there are two big points I want to say at the start.

The first is that I dearly wish the factions in the Democratic Party wouldn’t immediately look to frame everything as a big fight within the party between liberals and centrists. The entire frame of this otherwise interesting document, pounded into your head over and over again with a two by four, is that liberals lose and centrists win.

Look, if you just want to have the same argument Democrats have been having since FDR died in 1945, with the same talking points (turnout of base voters alone isn’t enough! More voters say they are moderate than liberal!), you can do that but it doesn’t really get us very far.

Framed differently, as an in-depth, more nuanced think and research piece about what is really working and not working right now in the Democratic Party, it might have gotten them less press since reporters love these internal fights, or maybe raised you less money from wealthy donors who don’t like liberals, but it would have allowed a lot more genuine dialogue within the party.

The second point, which I will talk about more below, is that the standard liberal vs moderate narrative doesn’t speak to what I think is the main point that Democrats need to grapple with right now, which I call the which side are you on issue. For me, Democrats winning back voters is a whole lot less about where they position themselves on the moderate to liberal spectrum, and a whole lot more about whether they look like they are insiders or outsiders. Do we side with the big money establishment and big donors or do we side with working people, fighting for regular folks in their daily lives or playing footsie with corporate power? This report glides by that central defining narrative fight within the party, and that is its biggest flaw.

(Created with Gemini AI)

What I liked about the report

1. Make economic issues the priority.

The report’s argument that economic issues need to be the number one priority issue for Democrats is exactly what I believe and have been writing about for years. All of the polling research we have done in our Factory Towns work makes clear that the reason working class voters are turning away from Democrats is that they are hurting economically and don’t think we care. They believe that we prioritize every other issue and every other constituency above the central economic realities that make their lives harder. They want someone to fight for them again, the way Democrats used to.

The way I put it when talking to candidates: talk about economics first, last, and in the middle. If you want to talk about other things, feel free; if you get asked about other things, answer the question straightforwardly; but always either tie those issues to an economic narrative, or pivot back to economics when you finish.

As the report says, we talk too much about other things. Its research about the words Democrats use felt on target to me, and the increasing amount of time we tend to talk about other things, hit the mark for me.

2. The salience thing.

Voters do agree with Democrats on a wide range of issues, but I think the report is right that their instinct is to agree with Republicans on big picture issues that matter the most to them, the ones that determine who they vote for. And the broader the issue is described the more likely they are to agree with Republicans: in other words, they agree with us on whether the minimum wage should be increased and on family and medical leave, but they have been tending to agree with the Republicans on “the economy”. We definitely need to be focused on how to turn this problem around.

3. Their understanding that corporate centrism is not the way to go.

The most refreshing and surprising thing in this report was that it called out that corporate centrism is not the way to go. For as long as I have been involved in national politics (about 40 years now), centrist groups like the DLC and Third Way have gotten most of their money from Wall Street, Big Tech, and other corporate interests, so have tended to shy away from talking about some issues corporate America didn’t like, and have advocated for policies like NAFTA and going easy on Wall Street even when the polling was pretty damn clear that was the opposite of what working class voters wanted.

This report actually calls out the problem with corporate centrism by name, and some of the issues they are urging Democrats to embrace are more populist in nature – increasing taxes on the wealthy, lowering prescription drug prices, raising the minimum wage.

4. The false tradeoff between swing voters and turnout voters.

Their point about the false tradeoff between swing voters and those we need to turn out is also correct. I am continually struck by how much the swing working class voters we are surveying in the factory towns polls agree with the voters who turned out for Biden in 2020 but did not turn out for Harris in 2024 agree with each other. I think the report misses out on some key things about this agreement, which I will get to below, but I agree with them that the tradeoff is way overblown in conventional wisdom.

5. The acknowledgement that some left Democrats like Bernie and Mamdani know how to talk effectively about economics.

For a group and report driven by the central mission of saying Democrats needed to move to the “middle” (whatever that might be) to say what they did about leftist politicians speaking effectively about economic issues is a sign to me of two things. First, that populist economics is finally being acknowledged as a good thing to be talking about by the establishment wing of the party. And second, it is a sign that this report is more thoughtful than the knee jerk, run of the mill pro-moderate harangues of the last four decades. Good on them.

6. The key point that Democrats can’t sound like stereotypical liberals when they are running in red or purple districts and states.

This might seem like an obvious point, but I will admit that not all of my progressive friends necessarily accept this idea. But being from Nebraska and spending much of my political career working on races in places like Iowa, Ohio, and South Dakota, I know you can’t win in tough districts and states by sounding like a conventional liberal – or, the phrase a lot of people are using these days, a “national Democrat”. I always tell candidates: you have to sound like you are independent from the national Democratic brand, which is so damaged in red and rural places right now. You have to be willing to criticize party leaders; you have to take a stand on at least a couple of issues that sounds different than the national party.

My preferred way for doing that is to go more populist – for example, criticize Clinton and Obama for bad trade deals, or for going soft on Wall Street. But one way or another, candidates in rural, red, and purple places are well advised to show some gutsy independence.

The flaws in the Welcome PAC report

The flaws I saw in the Deciding To Win report were mostly a function of the obsessive desire to show how most or all of the problems in the Democratic Party came from being too liberal. Here are some examples:

1. The strange mix of policies showing that Democrats are moving to the left too much.

The opening chart in the report shows how a higher percentage of Democrats are co-sponsoring certain liberal bills than was the case a decade ago, therefore the party is moving to the left. Okay, but it was a pretty confusing list given their point is that being more liberal makes our party more unpopular. Some of the bills they list, like Medicare for All and Reparations, are more unpopular. However, several of the bills they list are quite popular: paid family leave, affordable child care for all, the Democracy Restoration Act (which includes a mix of voting rights and campaign finance provisions), the assault weapons ban, reproductive rights, stopping discrimination against LGBT people.

Just because something is more “liberal” does not automatically make it more unpopular.

2. The strange description of the Republicans moving to the middle.

Seriously, you are going to give the Republicans credit for moving to the middle after they just passed the Big Ugly Bill and are taking a wrecking ball to the rule of law? I would grant that some Republicans have moderated their rhetoric on some issues, but their budget bill was the single most radical rollback of the gains of the last century than any piece of legislation in American history, and their radical moves toward shredding democracy, civil rights, voting rights, and the rule of law are as far right as any sane person could possibly imagine.

Again, Welcome PAC is straining so hard to make the argument that we should move to the center (“see the Republicans did it, and they won”) that it damages their credibility.

3. The claim that voter support for progressive positions are overstated in traditional polling is not backed by serious data.

There is an odd little section in Part 5 where they have a small paragraph laying out a big dramatic claim that traditional polling overstates support for liberal issues, and then goes on to tout how their vastly superior new methodology of polling will solve that problem.

I looked at the methodology they describe as their great new way of doing the polling, and honestly I didn’t see much difference between it and the methodology the pollsters I know are already using. More importantly, though, in terms of their claim that traditional polling substantially overstates support for liberal positions is based on one study of the difference between polling and ballot initiative results, with much of that analysis based on the gun issue (which is an extremely quirky issue).

I co-founded the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, so have a lot of experience on those kinds of elections. Ballot initiative campaigns tend to be hard fought, with confusing legalistic ballot language and none of the usual electoral markers like partisan identification that candidate elections have. The results are based on many different factors, including the tens of millions of dollars often spent, the quality of campaigns, the strength of the groups fighting pro and con in the campaigns, and a wide variety of local factors. When in doubt, voters’ tendency is to vote no because they are risk averse, but that is as true of conservative ballot measures as it is of progressive ones.

To make the claim that voter support is overstated for progressive issues based on ballot initiative results is an absurd proposition, and by the way, one at odds with the hundreds of ballot measures passed in the last couple of decades on abortion rights, the minimum wage, family and medical leave, school voucher fights, pot legalization, and many other progressive issues that have won.

Again, to my friends at Welcome PAC: don’t be so desperate to make your case that you undermine your own credibility.

4. The definition of the word moderate.

The report does attempt to define the term moderate, which they say is being willing to take popular positions and break with the party orthodoxy.

Hey, I’m for taking popular positions. While stunningly bold and controversial, I endorse that idea. Okay, maybe I’m overstating the bold and controversial thing. The problem for the only moderation-can-win team is that a lot of popular positions are actually pretty damn progressive, including many of the things this report cited in their very first chart as examples of the party moving to the left, which I noted above. Other issue positions which are simultaneously popular (according to recent polls I have seen) and progressive include breaking up monopolistic corporations, being tougher on Wall Street oversight, taking steps to reduce out-sourcing jobs, stopping trade deals that reduce American jobs, a wealth tax, rent control, increasing Social Security benefits, and a $25 minimum wage.

Those things are all pretty far left on at least in the DC version of the left to moderate spectrum, but poll above 60%.

Look, moderate is a nice sounding word. Americans don’t like the idea that they are extremists, and so when you ask them to self-identify where they are on the political scale, they have a natural tendency to call themselves moderate. But if you asked the people who call themselves moderate where they were on specific issues, they would be all over the map. It is one of those amorphous, pleasant sounding words that no one really knows what it means. It’s like asking people if they have common sense (they’ll say yes) or asking people if they are extremists (they’ll say no). But to draw broad conclusions about political strategy based on the fact that 10% more voters in a poll describe themselves as moderate vs liberal is overly simplistic.

The big thing the Deciding to Win report misses

My last point above leads directly into this one: what reports like the Deciding to Win document miss is that elections right now are won and lost not on a left-right spectrum, but on a which-side-are-you-on spectrum. That was the genius of the Trump “she’ll fight for they/them, he’ll fight for you” ad: it had a whole lot less to do with discomfort about trans people than it did with the priorities issue, in other words who will Democrats fight for.

This is a populist country. Voters are pissed off at the establishment, the elitists, the rich and powerful, the people who look down at them. They want politicians who will fight for them against the powers that be. The Deciding to Win report circles around and brushes up against that idea, but it was so busy picking the liberal vs moderate fight that it forgot about this bigger truth.

There were a lot of references in the report to the Obama re-elect in 2012, because in their minds Obama was a moderate. And he did govern as one. But the only reason Obama won that race was because Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital background and 47% tape made him the perfect foil for the kind of strongly populist campaign that Obama needed to run after four years of a flat economy and being tagged as too close to Wall Street. Trump, on the other hand, won precisely because he was a populist candidate, flipping the bird at the establishment and telling the elitists to go fuck themselves.

The one path for Democrats to become a majority political party again is by becoming the party of working class families again, and they will only do that if voters perceive them as populist fighters for those working class voters.