Left unsaid - by the DNC and the media - is that the changes may drastically change the ideological and partisan composition of the primary electorate. Caucuses are out, and independent voters are allowed in everywhere.

We just released Party Crashers, a report analyzing this new presidential primary lineup.

READ THE FULL REPORT, first seen in this POLITICO story by Lisa Kashinsky.

I. New Calendar

Iowa is out, Nevada is swapping the caucus out for a primary, and three newbies (Michigan, New Mexico, Virginia) join South Carolina and New Hampshire. All six allow independents to vote in primaries, and none hold a caucus.

The cadence will be much different, with a week between each primary. Imagine the nation watching Survivor: Democratic Presidential Candidates in primetime nearly every Tuesday evening for nearly two months. This replaces the mad-dash three days between South Carolina and Super Tuesday, and the goofy vote-counting marathons in Iowa that reduced the 2020 primary to just a pair of major momentum-changing moments.

II. 100 Friends, 0 Caucuses

How much did the old caucus system skew towards activists?

Here’s a useful mental model: picture 100 representative eligible voters. Picture them in your mind. And then think of the 5 or 7 of those people most likely to spend hours participating in a Democratic caucus. That matches the ~5% of eligible voters in Nevada and ~7% in Iowa who participated in 2020. Meanwhile, 28% of eligible voters participated in the New Hampshire primary that featured a late surge in support for moderate candidates who had previously lagged in the polls.

III. Unpredictable

Campaigns have become clinically efficient in recent decades, and the predictability of caucus turnout allowed campaigns to fine-tune outreach to an insane degree. Obama and Sanders ran vaunted Iowa operations. Both forecast ~170,000 caucusgoers in a state of 3 million people.

That sort of early-state inundation won’t work quite as well with 23 million eligible voters across six early states that vote in a primary system.

Remember Michigan & Wisconsin this summer? Twice in eight days, pollsters mistook nail-biters for progressive blowouts in a Midwestern Democratic primary. They may have missed something obvious: independent voters in open primary states.

In Michigan, the final five public Senate polls showed Abdul El-Sayed with leads of 10, 13, 14, 15, and 16 points over Haley Stevens. He won by less than a point. We analyzed the voter file and found that 29% of Democratic primary voters hadn’t voted in either the 2022 or 2024 primary.

In Wisconsin, the final five gubernatorial polls had Democratic Socialist Fran Hong with leads of 11, 13, 18, 20, and 22 points over David Crowley. She lost.

Expect more volatility in the six early primary states, all of which allow independents to vote and offer mail or absentee voting. Five of the six also offer early in-person voting.

IV. Good for Dems & Democracy

More is better!

Welcome was founded in 2020 to focus on independent voters in the presidential primaries: the voters everyone was talking about but not talking with.

It is good for democracy when campaigns bring more people into the process. But the incentives and the narrative still point towards campaigns saturating the most-likely primary voters.

It’s also good for the Democratic Party. A nominating electorate that looks more like a general election strengthens the party. A nominee will likely engage more with independents and swing voters for whom party politics is not part of their identity. And enter the general election stronger for it.

An electorate which look much more like South Carolina and New Hampshire, where moderate voters boosted moderate candidates:

For Welcome, it’s an opportunity for us to return to our 2020 roots, engaging with independent voters in early primary states.

More on that to come! The party crashers are coming.

Read the full report

Catchy headline, but you may not find his blend of responsibility and ideas boring.

Auchincloss describes a quest sure to excite many readers: “a path for liberals between the ascendant populist left on one side and the sclerotic party establishment on the other.” One that can reach the “morally serious, market-oriented, exhausted majority of Americans who feel increasingly orphaned by both parties.”

A path forward with compelling policy ideas is not surprising from the Massachusetts congressman, whose Simple But Not Easy newsletter we’ve recommended before.

But “Morally serious” sounds like bullshit, right?

Only if you forget when Auchincloss stood nearly alone in the Democratic Party calling out the dangers of Graham Platner last year. The politics of that stance seemed bad, leading every other elected Democrat to land on a spectrum between crass opportunism and uncomfortably looking away. It worked out politically for the party in the end, as Maine’s Senate seat was flipped by Platner’s successor. And it should remain top of mind as Democrats consider who to listen to when balancing enthusiasm with responsibility moving forward. Read the full Atlantic piece by Russell Berman here.

Serious Fun

There has been a joyous energy in DC the last few days - just look at the Blue Dog class photos - with a strong undertone of seriousness mixed in.

I was moved by Adam Hamilton’s description of his first days of Senate orientation:

At times it felt like drinking from a firehose. At other times I found myself deeply moved … I could feel the beginnings of productive, friendly relationships. On the Senate floor, I sat at a desk where generations of remarkable men and women have sat before me. I am humbled that God, and the people of Kansas, have given me this privilege.

That blend of joy and responsibility was present at the Promise to America celebration on Tuesday, where leaders from around the country made it clear both that America is going to be more fun AND pay our bills.

What Centrists Should Read Today

1. Do moderates still have an electability advantage? New WAR scores for ideological caucuses from .

2. To answer the question … yes (although smaller than in prior cycles). More on that from in The Atlantic on The Left’s Election Denial.

3. The Democrat who wants to Make Politics Boring Again - Russell Berman on Rep. Jake Auchincloss in The Atlantic.

4. Get a sneak peek at our new Party Crashers report on how the early-state presidential primary electorate will be far larger and more moderate than in 2020, as first reported by Politico’s Lisa Kashinsky. More on this tomorrow.

Quick Hits

• Scranton Mayor & Rep-elect declared that Democrats have Directive, not a Mandate. Spoken like an executive representing a Trump district.

• NewDems inaugurated its largest-ever class of 40 into a total of 142 members, the largest in the 30 year history of the moderate caucus … and elected Nikki Budzinksi as Chair.

• Blue Dogs returned its leadership team, with Marie Gluesenkamp Perez chairing the Coalition and Rep. Adam Gray chairing the Blue Dog PAC … and slightly shifted its composition: in exciting news, Kristen McDonald Rivet - a top overperformer representing a Trump-district in Michigan - has joined the Blue Dogs … and more incumbents may be on the way into the “suddenly popular centrist faction” … meanwhile, Rep-elect Brian Poindexter, a “Bernie Dog” endorsed by both the Progressive Caucus and Blue Dogs, is no longer affiliated with either. There are still two overlapping members, Montana’s Sam Forstag and Pennsylvania’s Bob Brooks.

• Caucuses have taken opposing stands on the permitting bill: Progressives against with Blue Dogs & NewDems in favor.

• Data from The Economist “suggests that a moderate Democratic nominee would probably stand a better chance of winning back the White House than a DSA-backed one.”

436 days until the first presidential primary!

But he’s in denial about the tension between what helps Democrats win and what his audience wants to hear.

Back in July, on a podcast episode titled “The Search for an Exciting Moderate,” Favreau shared that interviews with leftists like Zohran Mamdani get far more attention than interviews with moderates like Cait Conley, even though the latter win majorities. This creates a natural tension for booking guests, but that seemed to ebb into denial when discussing actual policy moderation. Here’s Favreau:

Though, importantly, in all six of the states where they polled, the six Senate states that are pick up opportunities for Democrats, voters were less likely to describe the Democratic candidate as too far left than they were the Democratic Party itself. Do you attribute that to specific moderate positions taken by Mary Peltola, Josh Turek, Sherrod Brown, Roy Cooper, James Talarico? Because, and I don’t know about all of their positions on everything, but it doesn’t seem like, at least, I know Sherrod’s been around long enough, it doesn’t seem like they have moderated on any of the issues or you might think the Democrats need to moderate on.”

The idea that Mary Peltola had no positions on which she moderated is the type of fact that drives home just how much this has to be denial, and not any sort of intentional profit-seeking. It is an insane thing to say! She was “more conservative than 99% of Democrats” in the House. There are charts!

Her ads are about fighting Biden to build an oil pipeline! She was co-chair of the Blue Dogs! David Hogg famously said “good riddance” to Peltola when she lost because of her stance on guns!

Civility vs “Hate”

Favreau’s post today shows frustration about the concept of audience capture & profitability, and bemoans the uncivil nature of social media compared to the vibe of Crooked’s conference this week:

People debated and disagreed. No one was nasty to each other in person … People at opposite ends of the spectrum were friendly and respectful to each other.

But the same day, Favreau released his post-election interview with the leftist strategist Morris Katz. A clip from the interview went viral, featuring Katz telling Favreau “I hate Josh Shapiro.”

Favreau didn’t follow up on that statement. It was, as noted, weird:

Shapiro, of course, just won the quintessential swing state by twenty points with coattails that drastically change both state-level governing and the state’s delegation to Congress.

Saying “I disagree with Josh Shapiro” obviously doesn’t get as many clicks as “I hate Josh Shapiro.” For a new media business to grow the top of the audience funnel, “hate” is helpful.

Of many laudable traits of Yglesias, a fun one is that he openly shares that people angrily disagreeing with his post-election takes is good for his business!

Favreau seems stuck on this point.

Audience Capture & Profitability

Back to his rebuttal, on how nice it was at Crooked Con:

No one accused anyone of being motivated by audience or profit or donors like they do here (on Twitter) every day.

Of course the audience that paid $250 to go to Crooked Con was not going to complain that the speakers were pandering to them!

Or rue the fact that someone, somewhere may be making money off them. They were happy to pay! It looked like fun and they got what they paid for.

This is easy to comprehend in any non-politics setting. If I showed up at the game watch party for my favorite Red Sox podcast Section 10, then complained their takes were too hard on Cam Schlittler and the statistics were cherry-picked to what I wanted to hear … that’d be weird!!

I’m just there to have fun, hear some interesting stuff that vibes with my baseball worldview, and maybe hear a host-read sponsorship advertisement for weight loss or male pattern baldness with promo code SECTION10.

But if I was betting something important on that podcast’s objectivity and positive impact on the Red Sox … that’d be a problem.

And I’ll be honest, if I kept hearing things I didn’t like then I’d switch to one of the many other Red Sox podcasts out there. Which is what all of new media is afraid of. Because they may end up like Glenn Beck when he told his audience that Donald Trump & conspiracies were actually bad: losing 68% of the audience.

That’s just the reality of the business. Which is not a problem on its own. And Crooked’s founders are so successful that I do doubt it makes a meaningful difference in their own minds.

But denying that reality is a problem.

Faux Factional Diversity

New media has to pull off a trick: say stuff to keep the audience happy AND maintain a veil of objectivity. The audience doesn’t want to hear what it doesn’t like, but it also wants to pretend it’s hearing everything.

Back to Favreau:

Every faction of the Democratic Party was at Crooked Con - moderate and leftist politicians, strategists and policy wonks from Fight Agency and Majority Dems and DSA and Blue Dogs and Bernie Dogs and JStreet and the Bulwark and on and on.

There were seven members of the House on the speaking slate at Crooked Con, plus two candidates who won. Eight of the nine are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The median district represented was won by Kamala Harris by 40 points.

“Addicted like the rest of us”

One of our earliest newsletters was titled “Why does Ron Klain tweet?”

As newcomers to national politics, we were legit boggled that President Biden’s chief of staff - possibly one of the busiest jobs on the planet - still found time to regularly scroll social media and engage with posters.

A commentator at the time noted “the chief of staff to the president is addicted like the rest of us and impacts his thinking. It’s incredibly important …”

Favreau addresses this addiction towards the end of his note:

Will try hard to practice what I preach. May also mute a whole bunch of people who just can’t seem to be constructive. And probably best to take X off my phone again and just use it on desktop.

Back in 2022, I thought it was a big problem that Ron Klain’s brain was shaped by Twitter. And I think its a problem if Favreau can see the addiction to social media feeds, but not the audience capture.

I do not, however, believe profit directly impacts his behavior. I think other progressive media stars are profit-driven - like Jennifer Welch, who yesterday was issuing an apology for assassination jokes after losing sponsors, and , who we wrote about yesterday - but not the Pod Save guys.

Friend(ly critic) of the Pod

At the end of the day, those of us who are critical of progressive media in general, and Pod Save in particular, just need to organize ourselves. Would I like it if Favreau pushed back against Katz?

Sure. But we should have agency and build more rather than try to tear them down.

Amplify leaders like .

Subscribe to newsletters like Slow Boring and and and with , and .

And get ready for a Save the Date to WelcomeFest IV in June. The first three have featured the majority of overperforming House candidates in Trump districts. Better to try building than up than tearing something else down!

But sometimes that choice is real. And sometimes what the “exciting” people are saying is bad!

The share of the Democratic ecosystem dedicated to extracting money from progressive political hobbyists has increased in recent years, and with it the incentive for denying the reality that clicks =/= majorities.

There may be no better example than dunking on Roy Cooper this morning at the Crooked Con gathering put on by Pod Save America, where “Friends of the Pod” ($9.99/mo) tickets were discounted to $169.1

Senator-elect Roy Cooper not only flipped a seat by twenty points, his coattails broke the GOP gerrymander of North Carolina, ushering in a half-dozen members of Congress and the state House of Representatives for the first time since 2010.

But readers of Mehdi’s Zeteo newsletter ($12/mo) can disregard that, because Cooper is boooooooooring. Ignore the millions of Tar Heel lives that will be improved, let’s focus on the adoring progressive crowd of people who paid good money to cheer former Crooked Media podcast host Abdul El-Sayed on a weekday morning in DC.

Excitement vs. Winning

This is not a one-off thing. Let’s take a look at Pod Save America founder Jon Favreau’s critique of Welcome from August:

Favreau, to his credit, later admitted that he did find some of our Win The Middle slate candidates exciting and that he and Pod Save put time & money into helping those candidates.

But then brought up a sore point: my point that Democrats who win swing districts can be bad for Crooked’s business. He said “aside from being offensive is not in any way true, we’ve had many of those candidates on the pod.”

Excitement vs. Profitability

The attention economy rewards conflict, and Roy Cooper’s style of leadership is not especially conflict-driven or “exciting.” Same with many moderate elected officials who win swing districts.

Excitement is different than likeability. There is an old trope about voters preferring the candidate they’d “want to have a beer with.” Earlier this cycle, progressives went all-in on the idea that voters wanted someone that would be in a bar fight with them. They breathlessly heralded tough guy candidates like Graham Platner as the future.

But when the dust settled after the election, the big winners were James Talarico and Josh Turek and Adam Hamilton. Forget bar fights, its not clear these guys have ever been in a bar or been in a fight. Civility won!

But less conflict and less excitement mean fewer clicks, fewer shares, fewer new subscribers, and less ad revenue.

In an interview with , Favreau discussed this conundrum between highly profitable leftist podcast guests like Zohran Mamdani and the lower-engagement swing district winner Cait Conley:

As someone who runs a media company who we try to have everyone on. And a lot of this is the attention that the person ends up commanding with audiences, right?

Like we’ve talked to Mamdani a bunch of times, very popular, right? Not just with our audience, but like those clips travel beyond our audience, right? And we will have Cait Conley, who’s in a much more important to the future of the country district to win when she’s in town.

And who knows, maybe it’ll also be an incredibly viral clip, but our experience has been a lot of these candidates were in really important races that we ended up talking to, like it doesn’t go anywhere because people are like, well, I don’t really want to, I’m not as excited about that.

Yglesias was much more blunt the following day, stating “there are very strong financial incentives throughout the media to tell an unrepresentative group of highly engaged, educated, younger progressives what they want to hear.”

Yglesias reiterated that point today, saying “it’s unquestionably true that Cooper-type nominees are worse for the business model of progressive media outlets.”

Things Will Get Worse

If the frame was just about policy - say, “Medicare For All is exciting” - then it would be one thing. But the audience demands something far more than policy.

When was on The Bulwark pod2 last year soon after the killing of the United Healthcare CEO, said:

Lot of discussion this week about the assassination of a healthcare executive on the street. People do not like it when you say that you think vigilante assassinations are bad, so I’m not going to do that again … well, I’m not going to do it again on this podcast.

It was kind of a joke - the guests laughed, and Yglesias mocked “Neutral on vigilante assassinations!” … but when you go back and look at the comments on the previous show where Miller did say that murdering people on the street was bad, its pretty ugly! These (profitably) progressive political hobbyists are crazy.

As a paid subscriber to The Bulwark who found their team fantastic when writing for them, I'm happy for their success!

This is not only a leftist thing, obviously.

Here’s something I’m not proud of: the most popular writing we’ve done on WelcomeStack is exactly the sort of thing Favreau asks us not to do (bashing the left in aggressive terms). The incentives are pretty clear!

We are about to enter a presidential primary where the modern progressive attention economy will command a premium. Even if it does not impact voters greatly - it turns out that the primary electorate will likely be much larger and less hobbyist in 2028 than in 2020 (we’ll have more on that soon!) - this dynamic will still shape how elites shape the presidential primary. Which in turn determines the future of the party.

Favreau and Miller seem like great guys - like they’d be good dads and would make good neighbors, and are sharp political observers with highly credible careers as operatives. (Mehdi seems like a jerk, but let’s leave that aside for now).

This is not a personal indictment on them3 - in fact, I think both of them making it explicit on their shows is a healthy thing to do. They run media businesses! They’re being honest!

For the rest of us, trying to to find a better blend of excitement and pragmatism will be a challenge over the next two years. And while people always say that leftists are more “exciting” than moderates, their true advantage is having community.

The Liberal Patriot —> WelcomeStack

Democrats can’t count on “Democratic media” to signal what’s healthy and effective for the party. Lawmakers should be wary to concede points to crowds inspired by these shows. Operatives should spend less time listening to these shows and more time doing what Roy Cooper - and Jamie Ager & Bobby Pulido and Paige Cognetti do: create community on the ground and through local press, without the pressures to go viral or feed red meat to the activists in blue dots around the country. Philanthropy needs to step in and support common sense media so that they don’t need to profit from mob mentality.

Because the best way to make “Exciting community” or “moderate winners” a false choice is to join up with others who share your values.

We were devastated earlier this year when The Liberal Patriot closed up shop. While the newsletter was by most counts a success, with more than 50,000 subscribers and a large intellectual footprint, its did not have the paid hobbyist base of an ideologically ‘exciting’ outlet.

Two of its leading writers, & , have brought their unique perspective to WelcomeStack.org with The Long View newsletter. As we venture into the next era of American politics, the community build up around their patriotic pragmatism needs a home. And to grow. Please support their work and ours by becoming a paid subscriber - no cheering vigilante assassins required!

Subscribe now

You’ll be joining a team, from our colleagues to the thirteen exciting winners supported this cycle, and the thousands who have been to events like WelcomeFest. Here’s to winning, and our own type of excitement.

Adam Frisch was in a recount against Lauren Boebert in a Trump district that got $0.00 from the national party. Four years later, Adam - now on the Welcome team - was texting from a victory party in a Trump +10 district:

Four LONG years later - with many lessons learned, ten colleagues from around the country, and more than $25 million invested from more than 11,931 financial supporters - our two earliest endorsements of 2026 are again in the top-three of overperformance.

But this time, they are wins.

Welcome candidates rolled on Tuesday: 13 of 14 Win The Middle slate candidates won, all in Trump districts. Longtime readers saw core theories fulfilled: harnessing volatility, meeting voters where they are ideologically, embracing a Big Tent, and placing smart bets deep into red districts.

Attendees of WelcomeFest 2025 may recall Lakshya Jain giving a presentation focused on the stretch seats. A majority of districts that Lakshya highlighted 17 months ago flipped. Attendees in 2026 saw Bobby Pulido & Jamie Ager on the main stage - two of the three biggest overperformers in Trump districts. Never a bad time to re-watch our Battleground mini-docs on Jamie and Bobby.

This is a time to take The Long View, the aptly titled new newsletter on WelcomeStack from and , formerly of The Liberal Patriot. I’ll be joining Ruy & Michael on Substack Live at 4pm EST today to put electoral results in the context and discuss where we go from here. Join us on Substack or at WelcomeStack.org

Also check out our collaboration out yesterday with Third Way.

Moderate Data Hub

Center-Left Democrats Overperformed and Delivered the Majority

Welcome and Third Way collaborated to take a look at who the majority makers were in 2026—who overperformed on Election Night and who ran behind. Results through Wednesday night show that center-left Democrats outran Harris, overperformed their leftier counterparts, and delivered a durable majority in the House and Senate…

Read more

10 days ago · 9 likes · Data Hub and The Welcome Party

Big Tent + Strong Factions = Healthy Party

Progressives also won several swing districts, despite underperforming relative to the overall wave (see our memo from yesterday, with Third Way’s , for more on how Center-Left Democrats Overperformed and Delivered the Majority).

The left will also likely win the narrative battle in the ensuing weeks, like they did after 2018.

Progressives are still far more organized than centrists, even combining us with the pragmatic progressives advocating for a big tent.

We need more people to join the team! Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to fuel this work, and elevate the voices, stories, and leaders who can strengthen a community that keeps on winning. You’ll get everything that & & guests put out on The Long View, with much more to come on the front page of the center-left.

Subscribe now

We’ve spent much of the last two years immersed in numbers, from analyzing new gerrymandered districts to the $2.5m that thousands of you contributed directly to candidates on our Win The Middle slate. From the cost-per-point of television ads to the latest poll results on the millions more we invested in outside support for candidates.

The coming hours and days will focus greatly on a metric we have long focused on: performance relative to expectations for candidates representing different ideological factions of the Democratic Party.

We are proud that our candidates have overperformed so significantly over the last two cycles. We are encouraged to see more groups across the party use similar benchmarks. And our democracy is greatly benefitting from the type of expanded competition we have long called for.

But this is about more than numbers. In part because, as a British economist said, “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”

Spinning Left

The post-election spin from the left has started early, previewing a faction ready for a big narrative battle to define 2028.

All the big progressive acronyms (CPC, WFP, AOC) put out memos today. The Congressional Progressive Caucus took a shot at the Blue Dogs, bragging about their earlier endorsements of “Bernie Dogs.” AOC touted raising $3 million for other candidates (while raising $38 million into her campaign account), backing up her midterm marker that “if Abdul can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere.”

Centrist Crutch is Gone

While a quick perusal of Deciding to Win will disabuse a rational reader of the idea that any leftist can win anywhere, there is almost certain to be a left-wing win in a swing district tonight. Which relieves centrists of argument-killing facts like “Justice Democrats and Bernie’s Our Revolution have never flipped a seat from red to blue,” which we have cited many times.

It will be healthy for everyone to retire that line, because we should sound much more like the Working Families Party memo:

We don’t measure our impact by a single race or election cycle, but by how we build our wins, year after year. Because that’s how we will create a third force in American politics capable of fulfilling the promise of a government by and for working people. That’s our north star, and I have a feeling that tomorrow will bring us much closer to realizing that goal.

The measure of success has more to do with human beings in our community than with any single metric. That’s why organizing beats debating.

Community Wins

Our community gets stronger every year because of smart politics and strong investments. But mostly because of you. Yes, you - the reader, the amplifier, the donor, the encourager.

My favorite part of Election Day so far is that last night I realized somehow Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet had fewer than 7,000 followers on X. The whole weekend was spent talking about a different Michigan congresswoman, not the only one who won a Trump district. So I tweeted to follow her, and amplified it to his million followers, and now she has more than 7,000. If you’re not one of them, follow her!

I also noticed Jamie Ager has just over 2,000. Follow him on X! And on Substack! Actually follow all of them - they’ll need the support.

Because these Trump-district winners will face a tough time when they get to DC - like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, they’ll likely face middle school harassment - and we can’t repeat what happened after the last Blue Wave in 2018.

Remember The Humans

The leader of DFP (yet another progressive acronym, Data for Progress) today challenged Welcome to put out a memo on Haley Stevens. So here it is:

The Haley Stevens saga is a reminder that despite all our polls and message testing and forecasts, the many millions raised and spent, politics is (for now, anyway) driven by real, live, complicated human beings.

I’ve never had occasion to meet Stevens - she does not represent anything close to a Trump district (Harris won hers by more than 16 points), and is not particularly centrist (last session she was rated as more liberal than 40% of the House Democratic Caucus). She is not an electoral overperformer, with her last three WAR scores rounding to zero.

She is a human being, though. Affected by antagonistic behavior from other humans - from perceived slights to high-profile verbal assaults. Public reporting over the last two years makes it clear that, unlike most humans, she is an especially frequent target of ridicule and manipulation.

I’ve heard enough firsthand experiences from other candidates to get a directional sense of what that can do to someone. In the months before we launched WelcomePAC in 2021, we conducted dozens of interviews with different political stakeholders to understand what programs would be most effective. A Democratic member of Congress from a blue district said that leftist “psychological warfare” was incredibly effective. That it was effective even when the target rationally understood it and expected it. That you could be a successful, well-adjusted adult and still be affected by it.

That it would make you do things you normally wouldn’t do - and make you far less likely to stay in politics.

Political science research backs this up. Andy Hall’s 2019 book Who Wants to Run? How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization showed how the personal cost of campaigning and holding elected office increased while the benefits decreased. This weeded out moderates in favor of ideologues.

It has taken us years to understand just how sharply the costs have increased to the humans we are asking to win majority-making seats.

I am in awe of those who are able to accept this all-consuming vocation. Criss-crossing the country to raise money and criss-crossing districts to win votes all so that you can take unholy hell from both MAGA and DSA and - if you’re lucky - commute to a second full-time job in Washington, DC, where you’ll be expected to STFU about the promises you made to voters while you press the vote button when told to and dial for dollars to do it all over again in two years.

The two candidates we wrote most about back then were Joe Manchin and Jared Golden. Manchin had activist groups attacking him nonstop. Golden had that AND a primary challenger from the left. Both have endorsed Republicans this cycle, which the press secretary for the Working Families Party reminded me of today.

“The Democrats” will win tonight. And many groups will claim credit, with data thrown around all over the internet. But remember that behind each big win is a human being, and they will need a community to support them.

That’s why we’re building this community now, so tonight’s winners don’t face it alone.

So follow the Win The Middle slate on social, send them congratulations, be there for them when it’s hard, and bring more people along.

What will the Blue Wave leave behind after the election? Midterm history and the newly re-gerrymandered reality show us just how much a few points - and overperforming candidates - can impact House results.

After the last midterm in 2022, I wrote in The Bulwark about the funky wave that hit the incumbent party:

The odd truth about these midterms is that there actually was a red wave, both in who showed up (there were more Republican voters than Democrats) and in how people voted overall (Republicans will probably win the House popular vote by about 4 3 points).

But not all waves break the same. There’s a type of wave called—seriously—a dumper. You get dumpers when waves go from deep to shallow water, and so curl and crash down without running up on shore. The 2022 red wave was bigger than expected—but it took a big dump when it hit moderate Democrats focused on persuasion …

The best way to picture this dumper wave was circling the moderate Democratic outliers on this scatterplot chart from Patrick Ruffini, which showed an overwhelming number of districts voted more Republican for House in 2022 than they had in the previous presidential election in 2020. EXCEPT for a half-dozen outliers bunched right around the closest districts, contested by aggressive moderates like Jared Golden in ME-02 and Adam Frisch in CO-03 and Elissa Slotkin in MI-07.

For this midterm, the wave faces a different structure. GOP gerrymandering has reduced the share of seats that are narrowly contested and built a bulge of 62 districts favoring Republicans by 10 to 20 points. You can see it in this bar chart, again from Patrick Ruffini, which shows how many districts are at each level of partisanship from left (favoring Democrats by 80 points) to the right (favoring Republicans by 60 points).

This has the visual bonus of literally looking like a medium-sized blue wave on the left coming up against a large red wall. The star on PA-10 (which was WelcomePAC’s top new target to put on the map last cycle) indicates the tipping point seat, at which Democrats would have a majority. Having a district that Trump won by 5.2% as the tipping point shows how advantageous the House map is for Republicans.

But the downside of the gerrymandering - stacking 62 usually-safe districts between R+10 and R+20 - is that if the waterline reaches that high, previously safe areas could get totally flooded.

How rare is that situation? Political hobbyists have been conditioned to view modern American politics as completely and utterly polarized. But the truth is that, as Nate Silver shows in this chart, this is not a hundred-year flood. Midterms have averaged 7.4 point swings, and at least 5 points every single midterm for the last two decades:

2026 may be a bigger blue wave than expected, but we’ve been calling out the potential for gerrymandering to backfire - a “dummymander” - for more than a year. And Republicans have already spent more than $70 million in their newly drawn districts.

As Marc Novicoff writes in The Atlantic, the same cliff that could flood Republicans means that a relatively normal systematic polling error could still turn back Democrats. Forecasters and markets have Democrats at roughly a 90% chance. But that’s where the 10% chance comes from. And why Democrats have to play through the tape.

The House battleground map is increasingly filled with alluring possibilities for Democrats as President Trump’s support has cratered. But with their financial resources limited, one question keeps coming up as Democratic strategists puzzle over where to invest during the crucial final four weeks of the campaign.

Do they seek to rent — or own?

National political correspondent Shane Goldmacher goes on to break down those options for the party committees and PACs working to maximize Democratic gains:

Democrats are trying to figure out where their money goes furthest. Are they better off seeking to run up their numbers by competing in less expensive races or for open seats in Republican areas? If they do, they might struggle to hold onto many of those seats in a couple of years, when there is less likelihood of a blue wave.

Or is it a better bet to spend more and go all-in to try to oust a handful of entrenched Republican incumbents who represent more Democratic areas, a difficult path that, if successful, could put those seats in the Democratic column for a longer time.

We offer a third option: back the most valuable candidate - the next Mary Peltola.

The Empty Bench

Do Democrats have a strong bench? We often hear that optimism.

But for the most important candidates - candidates with a proven track record of winning swing voters states with GOP Senators - the pipeline is practically empty.

Republicans hold Senate seats in 27 states, and there are 214 Democrats in the House.

But zero of those 214 Democrats meet the following criteria: under 55 and running for reelection, and represent a Trump district in a state with a Republican Senator.

Zero!

It should not be a surprise that a new organization literally called The Bench is backing two senate candidates in red states who come from state legislatures and one from the pulpit. And then Mary Peltola.

Donate Directly to the Candidates

Peltola’s Value

By now, you are likely familiar with the concept of WAR. Borrowed from baseball analytics, Wins Above Replacement seeks to capture the value of a player in terms of the number of wins he delivers beyond the baseline replacement player. WelcomePAC-backed candidates have had the highest WAR of any group over our first two cycles.

But to capture the value of Mary Peltola, who in 2022 at the age of 49, captured the statewide House seat between 10 and 13 point victories by Trump, we cannot look at a single cycle. It is not enough to know that Peltola put up WAR scores of 22 points and 9 points in her House races. Because, as The New York Times articulated, the choice is also about the future.

We have to think like a baseball team allocating resources between different players at different stages. We have to determine the Future Value (FV).

Candidate Quality is Still Underrated

Recent senate polling shows that Democrats are closer in Alaska and Texas - states that Trump won by more than 13 points - than in Maine, which Harris won by 7 points. Candidate quality is clearly very important.

But given the billions of dollars flowing into the late stages of elections, it is still wildly undervalued.

In the Senate, Nate Silver gives Democrats a 63% chance to flip Alaska but just a 14% chance to flip Florida. There is a 50% gap despite both states both voting for Trump by 13 points in 2024.

That 50% - effectively half a Senate seat - is worth many hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 1918, the Red Sox had two corner outfielders who ended the season with similar WAR scores. Harry Hooper, a 31 year old star right fielder, finished with 4.8 WAR. The team’s 23 year old left fielder, who also pitched, finished with 4.7 WAR.

Some winners this cycle will be like Harry Hooper. Others will be like Babe Ruth - and Mary Peltola.

Rent or Buy … or Flip?

There are 50 Senate seats in states that Trump won three times. Democrats currently hold 0 of those 60 seats. The majority of Democrats who won have competitive Senate seats previously held federal or statewide office, building a brand distinct from the national party.

All nine challengers backed by WelcomePAC this cycle are in Trump-won districts in states with a Republican Senator. These are candidates whose value may be in the billions in future cycles, raising the odds of Democratic flips in Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Iowa.

Your most effective dollars are to these candidates - directly to their campaigns, which you can do here.

That district’s CBS affiliate recently started a news segment with “This week, Congressman Don Davis announced that he signed the ‘Promise to America’ pledge, making it clear he’s putting eastern North Carolina first …”

Similar news stories stretch to the westernmost district in North Carolina, where Jamie Ager2 is running, and thousands of miles farther west in Rep. Susie Lee’s Nevada. And up to New Hampshire, where even prominent GOP operatives admit that Rep. Maggie Goodlander “embraced the principles in ‘The Promise to America’ with sincerity, and it is also the smart move politically.”

Sincerity & Smart Politics

Today is the 100th day of the Promise to America, which launched on June 3 at WelcomeFest with a concise shared vision for commonsense Democrats. After introductions from the team of fellows who launched this initiative, the only two Democrats to flip Trump districts last cycle, founding signers Rep. Adam Gray & Rep. Tom Suozzi, discussed the need for such specificity & organizing energy with .

Yes, it is smart politics. And yes, moderate Democrats who make majorities in Trump districts have to be for something and not just against high-profile movements, whether it be DSA or MAGA.

But the sincerity is what pops. The key principles of the Promise - growth, competition and broad prosperity; safety, security and human dignity; fiscal discipline; government that works; free speech, respect, and common purpose; patriotism - may be good politics for candidates.

And a succinct common denominator across those over-performing candidates, who typically build individual brands distinct from the party, may also be good politics for moderates.

But it only really works because those beliefs are sincerely held.

You can watch that conversation here:

Substack Live at 2pm

If you’ve opened quickly and read this far, join a conversation on Substack Live shortly with a Promise signer. It is not just members of Congress signing on; it is dozens of state & local elected officials from Maryland to Maine to South Dakota.

One of those leaders, Massachusetts state Senator John Velis, will join PTA Director for a Substack Live starting in a few minutes at 2:00pm ET. You can join on the Substack app or at WelcomeStack.org to submit a question (or watch later!)

"You have been hearing all of your life that this occasion is a big step into what is called the real world. What, you may ask, is that real world all about? What is this new life? Ladies and gentlemen ... real life is not college; real life is not high school.

Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high.

The world that you're about to enter is filled with junior high adolescent pettiness, pubescent rivalries, the insecurities of 13-year-olds, and the false bravado of 14-year-olds."

A photo from a Politico reporter brought that harsh reality to mind on Wednesday.

Rep. Jim McGovern, the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, turned his back on Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez during her testimony:

You can read about the preceding drama in this story from The New York Times.

McGovern has been in the game a long time, starting to work in politics shortly after junior high (a presidential campaign while still at boarding school in 1972). He then moved to DC for college while working in Congress. He started working for a Massachusetts congressman in 1981, a role he held until winning election to the House himself in 1996.

When Marie Gluesenkamp Perez won her 2022 longshot race in a Trump-won district with little support from national Democrats, McGovern was cruising to re-election in a district Trump lost by 32 points.

He explained his anger toward Perez by saying “In a week when we should be talking about affordability, because of their votes we have to talk about bullshit stuff like socialism and, you know, all these other nonbinding resolutions that mean nothing.”

The Biggest Winner in Massachusetts

Speaking of affordability, that buzzword was the biggest warning issued by in our Substack Live conversation the morning after the primary election. The longtime political strategist and author of How the Democrats Lost America was the biggest winner in Tuesday’s Massachusetts primary.

Ferson advises candidates across the political spectrum, as evidenced by his primary wins with both moderate-to-conservative Rep. Steve Lynch beating back a David Hogg-backed progressive AND progressive darling Sen. Ed Markey, among multiple downballot candidates.

Check out our conversation here for more on the risks of “affordability” as a magical word, what Markey did right, and how David Hogg’s big-money spending backfired on the candidate he supported.

The Progressive Establishment

National media is running with the “progressives surge” narrative focused on Markey, with little mention of the other more moderate Massachusetts incumbents who beat back left-wing challenges.

Much like how they focus on Rep. Jared Golden dropping out of the election after a primary challenger, but not Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez dominating her leftwing opponent in Washington’s primary last month.

Leftists are playing a Heads-I-Win, Tails-You-Lose game to perfection. Always the outsiders, never the insiders.

has framed part of this phenomenon as “the progressive establishment.” As the leftist faction has taken over much of the Democratic Party, it can wield more power. But it has yet to take on the corresponding baggage.

Stalemate

Spending the next eight weeks arguing over which faction is “winning” is pointless for centrists, who have been winning the argument on the merits but failing on the organizing.

Here’s what I told Politico for this story on progressives’ primary capstone, and the bigger test in November:

Progressives “have the advantage now of leveraging both institutional heft and outsider brands,” said Liam Kerr, who co-founded the centrist group WelcomePAC. Still, he said, the party’s ideological war remains “a stalemate until Nov. 4, when the progressive swing district nominees test their theory of the case.”

Gotta just focus on winning, then organizing.

Checking in on Riverdale

Following up on our primary prediction on Tuesday, the working-class bellwether precinct in the Riverdale section of Dedham, MA almost exactly predicted the outcome again.

The lesson is often the same listen to the winners - like MGP and the rest of our Win The Middle slate - and the voters in neighborhoods like Riverdale around the country.

For The Weekend

on The Folly of Court-Packing

in conversation on leadership & depolarization with the dynamic Red-to-Blue candidate Cait Conley on Winner Winner.

Happy Labor Day weekend!

It is primary day in the country’s biggest blue heavyweight, which for decades has played an outsized role in directing the future of the party. Massachusetts has more political operatives, donors, and presidential candidates per capita than anywhere else in America. The run-up to primary day has been no different, featuring local progressive titans like Elizabeth Warren & Ayanna Pressley, along with national leaders from Bernie Sanders to David Hogg plugging their preferred candidates.

Incumbents are under threat up and down the ballot in the Commonwealth, from Senator Ed Markey and Congressman Stephen Lynch to state Senators facing challengers backed by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.

We’ve written about the role of Massachusetts before, but the story of tonight can be found in just two precincts.

Podville vs. Riverdale

Dedham is a town of 25,000 directly southwest of Boston. The suburb’s Precinct 2 is an eerily accurate predictor of elections and, along with its wealthy neighboring precinct, tells the story of two paths for the Democratic Party.

In March 2020, presidential primary results in the precinct, comprising the Riverdale neighborhood that directly abuts Boston, mirrored the state overall: Joe Biden 33%, Bernie Sanders 27%, Elizabeth Warren 21%.

Six months later, it happened again in the competitive primary challenges to its members of Congress. The precinct, comprising the Riverdale neighborhood, was again exactly spot-on with the overall results: Senator Ed Markey 55% against Joe Kennedy, and Rep. Stephen Lynch 67% against left-wing challenger Robbie Goldstein, the same as overall results. And it is not just true in lower-turnout primary elections - Riverdale matches the state in general elections as well.1

The dense suburban flavor of Riverdale gives way rather suddenly when one drives through Dedham Center, famous for the salacious trial of Karen Read. The divisiveness inspired by that trial is a good analogy for the jarring scene outside your car window as you enter the Town & Country magazine shoot that is Precinct 1.

Zillow maps give a clear sense: in the upper right are Precinct 2 homes going for $695k and $749k, with $599k and $399k in another precinct at the bottom right. And then there are Precinct 1 homes: $2.85m, $3.15m, $5.50m, etc.

Pod Save America founder Tommy Vietor grew up in Dedham and, while I have no idea where his house was, I’d bet a decent amount that the product of the Dedham Country Day School lived in Precinct 1.

You can probably guess which precinct votes more for the progressive-coded candidates. Let’s call Precinct 2 by its neighborhood name of Riverdale and rename Precinct 1 to Podville:

As results come in tonight, if you want to know the winner, look at Precinct 2. If you want to know where the progressive political podcast audience is going, look at Precinct 1.

Join us live tomorrow at 9am EST

And if you want to understand what really happened, and what it means for the future, tune into our Substack Live tomorrow with friends including inimitable , advisor to both Senator Markey and Rep. Lynch, and author of the compelling How the Democrats Lost America: Making Sense of the 2024 Election and the Future of American Politics.

The morning after competitive primaries are filled with hot takes, hastily compiled data, and good humor. Join us!

In Michigan, the final five public Senate polls showed Abdul El-Sayed with leads of 10, 13, 14, 15, and 16 points over Haley Stevens. He won by less than a point.

In Wisconsin, the final five gubernatorial polls had Democratic Socialist Fran Hong with leads of 11, 13, 18, 20, and 22 points over David Crowley. She lost.

Debates rage over the implications of these primaries for the intra-party factions in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary. Naturally, most focus on Democrats. But voters are increasingly not registered with either party. Including those who vote in primary elections. In Massachusetts, which has an upcoming primary, independents made up 41% of Democratic primary turnout in 2018 and 45% in 2022.

In 2019, Welcome began by engaging independent voters ahead of the 2020 presidential primary. Our first report, an analysis of the New Hampshire voter file titled 50/50 in 2020: Trends Point to Half of Democratic Voters Being Independents, identified the basic drivers:

• Share of voters registered as independent was going up

• Share of primary-voting independents choosing a Democratic ballot would go up

As in Massachusetts primary elections, increases in New Hampshire presidential primary turnout are strongly correlated with increases in the share of Democratic primary voters who are registered as Independent:

On Wisconsin

Back to the Midwest. In Wisconsin, turnout surged in the Democratic primary - from less than 540,000 in each of the last two gubernatorial primaries to nearly 800,000 in 2026. That’s an increase of 47% from 2018 and 58% from 2022. At the same time, turnout in the Republican primary (orange bar) decreased by 20%.

The story in the last three Michigan midterms is similar: increasing turnout, increasing share in the Democratic primary (blue bar), and Trump-era lows in GOP turnout (orange bar) in 2026.

All the punditry this week was about Democrats. But it is a safe bet that the difference-makers were Independents, many of whom pulled a mix of Democratic and Republican ballots in past elections or were simply roused by the fear of extremism.

After Michigan, the surge story was partially about Democrats (and partially about interest group SuperPAC spending). But Wisconsin - like South Carolina in the 2020 presidential primary - looks more like a quiet revolt from Independents.

Recall 2020

Back to New Hampshire, and the 2020 presidential primary. In the final polling average, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren combined for 39% of the vote while Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar combined for 33%.

The result was flipped from the polling averages: Pete+Amy at 44% and Bernie+Warren at 35%.

In South Carolina a few days later, Bernie again performed well below his polling average as Biden ran 9 points ahead of his polling average.

New Hampshire and South Carolina had similar dynamics in the 2020 presidential primary that Wisconsin and Michigan had last week:

• Primary laws allowing Independents to participate

• Little competition for attention and ballot-casting from the GOP primary

• A surge of attention on leftwing momentum in the week leading up to voting

2028 (Weak) Tea Leaves

Discussion on the 2028 presidential primary calendar, has focused on racial dynamics, with snow white Iowa and New Hampshire getting bumped.

But the real news is that the activist-dominated caucuses are gone, replaced by early voting states where primaries are open to independent voters.

That is a huge difference!

Check out the share of the Citizen Voting Age Population that participated in the 2020 nominating process, where higher on the chart indicates a higher participation share, with states moving chronologically from left to right:

This had clear ideological implications: Bernie’s highest vote shares were in the bottom states, where voter participation was lowest. Leaving aside his home state of VT and neighboring NH, Bernie won Iowa (<8% participation), then cracked 40% vote share in Nevada (<5% participation), Idaho (<9%), and North Dakota (<3%).2

Each of those states had less than one-third the participation of New Hampshire voters.

Such low-participation states were far more common in 2016, when more states held caucuses (14, vs just 3 in 2020) and there was also a competitive Republican primary to attract independent voters.

Bad News for Progressives & Pollsters

Progressive pollster Adam Carlson wrote a nice reflection3 on why his results were so off in Michigan. It begins with “Michigan has open primaries, so it is very difficult to gauge the electorate.”

Look at the 2028 presidential primary calendar. Independent voters are banned from the Democratic primary in exactly zero. The number of caucuses is also zero.

That is good news for democracy, and good news for the Democratic Party selecting the strongest nominee.

But it is likely bad news for pollsters - and for the type of progressive who prefers low-turnout elections favoring extreme nominees.

That Democratic optimism is from Graham Platner withdrawing from the Senate race. Which he has to do by Monday at 5pm. But has not done yet. At 8pm Wednesday, Graham Platner released a fiery 11 minute video. He reportedly demanded to post the video in exchange for acquiescing to his advisors’ calls to drop out (the man has leverage on everyone!). He rejected their calls for him to be gracious in the video.

It may have been “tense” but it was not the “final hours.” Thursday afternoon, reported Platner had not filed his withdrawal with the Secretary of State yet.

He is in fact waiting until the last possible time: “Graham Platner privately told staff that he is planning to officially file paperwork to end his Senate campaign on Monday — the drop-dead deadline for him to exit the race.

Bellows was endorsed for governor by The Maine People’s Alliance, a state-based progressive umbrella group. It is structured like the the groups we covered in Centrist School on the entrepreneurial ecosystem pushing Democrats far to the left. Maine People’s Alliance is one such hub for “The Movement” that the Platner camp keeps talking about. The umbrella group raises and spends millions of dollars each year, with funding from Soros and others - including a recent $600,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and $500,000 from the federal government for “a community-led program to invest in the workforce development necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” This isn’t hidden stuff. You can find it in public databases on the Inflation Reduction Act or the Ford Foundation grantee database:

You can see a copy of their candidate questionnaire here, which includes decriminalizing drug possession.

Read more

1. Graham Platner’s mother told me two disturbing things the night of his campaign launch last August. The first was that she was part of an effort to “blank Jared Golden” in November 2024.

   By voting for Kamala Harris, but not for Jared Golden, a small group of leftwing activists in Maine’s 2nd congressional district were deploying a type of Factional Total Warfare, dubbed Murder-Suicide Politics by .

2. Jared Golden won more than 25,000 Trump voters en route to victory in a district Trump won by 10 points. makes the Golden for Senate case succinctly, saying Mainers should Replace Platner with a Man of Honor.

   “He is everything that Platner is not, starting with humble—which is why you may not know his name. He’s not a presence on cable news; he’s not at all flashy. I’ve not interviewed him, not even off the record, though I’ve tried …. But I’ve heard him speak, movingly, about his service and his fallen comrades. I’m also aware of his courage and moral rigor … He has been a splendid member of Congress. He would be a splendid Senator. His family runs a modest public golf course in Maine; he claims he is retiring to service the fairways and greens.

   I’ve got a better idea: Serve us.”

   Amen to that.

3. It has been 48 hours since the Politico story posted on Monday, causing all major Platner supporters to rescind their endorsement. But Platner has not dropped out, and the Maine Democratic Party has confirmed reporting that Platner is using his leverage to influence the selection of a nominee:

   

4. Platner’s leverage is real: according to Maine law, he cannot be forced out and must voluntarily withdraw by 5pm on Monday July 13.

5. The day after Maine’s June 9th primary, The Boston Globe published my op-ed making the case for Maine Democrats to prepare a write-in campaign in advance of the August 25 deadline.

   This is outside the bounds of what I’d normally do. But it was clear that this campaign was a ticking time bomb. It could have exploded after the July 13 deadline to be replaced, but before the August 25 deadline for a write-in to declare.

   Or it could have exploded after that deadline.

   But it was going to explode before the November election.

   

6. Many leading Democratic operatives and pundits are claiming that Platner has no leverage. That is a tragic misreading of the situation, of Platner, and of Total Factional Warfare Left.

   Not only does Platner have significant formal leverage - he’s literally the only person who can trigger the process to pick a nominee - he has significant informal leverage, and an army with a proven track record of prioritizing beating ‘the establishment’ over beating Republicans.

   And they are hard at work - just in the last few hours, it was reported that his campaign is polling replacements, and also that the campaign is doing a survey of their volunteers (would be a shame if you filled it out with a fun fake name).

7. Most Democrats and anti-MAGA Americans assume they share a ‘Big Tent’ with the left, where the main goal is beating Republicans. This is a mirage.

   It is difficult to comprehend that so many people who say they’re “fighting” Republicans are in fact helping Republicans. As notes:

   “Anti-MAGA Trump-focused resistance types keep getting played for suckers by hard-left factionalists who don’t actually care about beating Republicans” … “it’s the hard left that is taking advantage of the Democratic Party’s current weakened state to advance all-out factional warfare as their top priority, above fighting Trump.”

8. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and their affiliated organizations may have rescinded their endorsements of Platner, but they appear all-in on dragging out the factional war. said it well:

   

9. Platner also has a significant stake in the how this ends. According to Axios, “As of May 20, Platner's campaign had spent over $14 million. Much of it went to LLCs with little public information.”

   He is running a massive business, has an email list in the millions, and is positioned to flip the campaign assets into any number of businesses in new media or advocacy.

10. Back to the ‘blank Jared Golden’ thing … you think someone who would work to deliver a House seat to Republicans in 2024 wouldn’t use a Senate nomination as leverage?

    After leaving Ironbound, the Platner family restaurant, the night of his announcement, I sat in my car for a half-hour in the drive-thru lane of a closed Dunkin’ Donuts in Ellsworth to use the WiFi.

    It felt like I’d hallucinated. Or seen a ghost. Platner was incredibly charismatic, but also incredibly scary.

    After about 45 seconds of talking to Graham, it felt like a connecting moment with an old college friend. We were joking about the GAA All-Ireland football final - already had an inside joke! This guy is smart and fun and engaging!

    45 minutes later, I was sitting in my car staring into the clear, dark Maine sky struggling to adequately describe the encounter to colleagues.

    In the preceding years, I’d met more than 100 candidates. None made me so disturbed. He seemed like a narcissistic sociopath with enough talent - and enough talent around him - to pull the thing off.

    Yesterday, I half-jokingly asked AI about one of the many “Platner has no leverage” statements out there:

    

11. In recent hours, Platner’s key advisor flew up from New York to discuss his withdrawal. But, according to The Washington Post, Platner “has struggled with the decision … and has said he would like input on the replacement process, leaving the timing of any announcement unclear.” … “It is him who is wanting to hold on … He is having to come to terms that his dream is dead.”

12. People who previously defended Platner have sought to cast some of the blame on Schumer, or to simply claim that Platner “lied” to them. But as points out, it was OBVIOUS many weeks ago (and imo months ago) what you were signing up for.

    

13. They are right to blame us centrists, though. At 10:58pm that night, from the Dunkin’ drive-thru, I published this post on political parties becoming “unbundled.” Here’s the key quote, from :

    “So often people have blamed the most conservative Republicans and most progressive Democrats for creating the conditions where it is hard to govern. But in the logic of unbundled parties, it’s the moderates and the party establishments who haven’t figured out how to work in this new world. It could well be that the way to make political parties strong (again?) is through stronger factions and more politics.”

14. I feel awful. This is serious shit. This is not “I told you so” for fun, or even “we have to talk about it to learn from it.”

    This is “we knew and haven’t built enough to fix it”.

    There’s nothing worse than half-assing something important. Which I feel like we did. In the fall, I had a brief conversation with Janet Mills to encourage her to debate Platner early. In the spring, I briefly tried and failed to get a candidate to run as an Independent and caucus with Democrats (as Maine’s other Senator does). And readied that Boston Globe op-ed. Classic centrist stuff.

    Things are very different on the left, as wrote about the recruiter of Platner: “To use a term popular with the Silicon Valley types whom he doubtless hates, he is high agency. He saw a void and moved into it.”

    We have high agency … sometimes. In small batches. But nowhere near enough.

15. It really is delusional to think we can just try to beat Republicans and be effective simply coexisting in a “Big Tent” with these people, as they take potshots all day with little pushback.

    There’s nothing we can do to kick them out, even if we wanted to. So in a way, we must accept the Big Tent premise (despite its changing definition). But the course we’re on will lead to losing to the Total Factional Warfare Left AND increase our odds of losing to MAGA. We can’t give up the tent, or give in to its current dynamics.

16. Moderates are typically risk-averse. Slow to use leverage. And it is costing not only our faction but our party and our country.

    More than five years ago, in NBC News, I wrote that Democrats cannot afford to take the risks progressives can:

    

    Democratic primary voters nominated Joe Biden, whose moderate brand led them to see him as the most electable candidate — a view confirmed by general election voters, which allowed Democrats to reclaim the White House.

    Meanwhile, a small but vocal group on the far left has differentiated itself not only through electorally questionable dogmatism, but also through Silicon Valley-like disruption that embraces risk: “Move fast and break things.” Except it isn’t looking to disrupt business models and consumer goods, but the Democratic Party.

    In just a few short years, an interlocking group of political entrepreneurs has launched more than a half-dozen related nonprofits, PACs, LLCs, think tanks and polling outfits aimed at mounting primary challenges against mainstream House and Senate Democrats and influencing local races. As outlined in their “Future of the Party“ report, they believe the Democratic Party “simply cannot move to the center” on policies and must win without the “mushy middle.”

17. Five years later, the inverse is true. We need to take more risks to match the arsonists in the tent.

    As I was walking out of the Ironbound restaurant, his mom was standing at the door. She had one last comment: “You know, he’ll be president one day.”

    Graham Platner won’t be president. But another risk-taker will. And if we keep playing it safe, the whole party will blow up.

Mark Twain popularized the saying that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

As a lame centrist, I decided to actually look at the MU Law poll in the source note.

Here are the favorables for DSA:

For those who are more visually inclined, here is a chart showing it broken out by intensity: just 5% of Americans are “Very Favorable” towards DSA.

The image is from a crowd of honky yuppies at a DSA election night party chanting “You’re Next” at Hakeem Jeffries.

The economist Ronald Coase said “If you torture the data enough, it will confess to anything.” It is technically true that “among Democrats, the net favorability of DSA is higher than the net favorability of Democrats in Congress. But that torturous.

Socialism remains toxic to American voters. DSA remains toxic to the Democratic Party’s path to durable majorities. This is a worthy topic of attention.

’s recent Why I Write About the DSA Left So Much is that “I think they are wackos of import”:

I take the question of whether we need to change course as a given. I’m much more interested in how to change course, and to where. And that’s why I focus on the fight between normie Democrats and DSA Democrats: I think that’s currently the most relevant ideological rift in the country. If sane, solution-oriented Democrats win this factional fight, then I think we can turn the tide against MAGA and elect a competent government. But if we lose, then I think that will be good for MAGA and very bad for sanity, generally.

Last night was good for MAGA and the DSA. Expect to see that chart more from both, and be ready to fight back.

1. Party organs continue weakening as power shifts to outside entities like PACs & advocacy nonprofits. This shift heightens factional conflict.

2. Factional conflicts advantage high-agency actors with tolerance for risk. That disproportionately favors leftists today, not centrists.

3. Changes in technology, media, and campaign finance laws allow Republicans to aid leftists in amplifying intraparty tensions and hurting the most electable Democrats.

4. Racial dynamics of intra-Democratic Party factional conflict has flipped since the 1990s. Minority voters are disproportionately moderate and a bulwark keeping the party from following highly-educated white leftists “off the rails.”

1. Weak Parties & Strong Partisanship

Via CNN, here is How the 2026 primaries are reshaping the Democratic Party:

The struggle over control of the Democratic Party’s direction has roared to new heights this year, with New York’s primary on Tuesday looming as the next major battlefield between left and center.

From Maine to California, progressive and centrist forces have collided in an unusual, even unprecedented, number of primaries for local, state and congressional offices that have divided the party along ideological, and often generational, lines.

“The formal party structure is getting weaker and outside groups are getting stronger,” said Liam Kerr, co-founder of Welcome, a group working to support Democratic centrists, in a judgment echoed by many progressive activists. “We have not been in a place (before) where entire ecosystems of groups are effectively running parties within the parties in explicit, direct, factional warfare.”

We are in an era of “weak parties and strong partisanship”. The latter - the phenomenon by which the country, communities, and even families are torn apart by toxic polarization and deeply held partisan identities - is well-documented.

The former is both counterintuitive and rarely stated. The literal parties themselves - formal infrastructure like the DNC - are increasingly weakened relative to the interlocking nonprofits, PACs, firms, and influencers who profit off division to the tune of billions each cycle.

After the 2024 election, there was a widespread recognition that the party has moved too far left. But “The Democrats” are not a single empowered entity that can make such a change.

The incentives have not changed.

Read How the 2026 primaries are reshaping the Democratic Party here on CNN.

2. High Agency & Conflict

In The New York Times last week, wrote about the (suddenly) much-profiled recruiter of Maine senate candidate Graham Platner:

Mr. Moraff is not a Democratic insider or a strategist. To use a term popular with the Silicon Valley types whom he doubtless hates, he is high agency. He saw a void and moved into it. He doesn’t accept the view that good candidates need to have traditional résumés or that to be the guy behind the guy in a critical Senate race, you need to pay your dues by managing House campaigns or toiling for multiple cycles at the national party committees.

Yglesias highlights efforts to recruit nontraditional candidates from across the ideological spectrum, including by our friends at The Bench and several WelcomePAC-supported candidates. He notes that while it is possible to eschew ideological divisions - candidates are endorsed by both leftists and more pragmatic groups - factional conflict in modern politics is unavoidable and will likely increase:

For the most part, though, moving in the direction of fresher faces is going to necessarily mean more ideological conflict rather than less. The process will be contentious and will make existing party leaders uncomfortable.

In seeking out something better, Democrats will also run the risk of ending up with something worse. But they can no longer argue that their fundamental problem is Mr. Trump or the Republicans — at least not only them. It is the low regard in which they themselves are held by the American people. So even if it gets messy, the Democratic Party needs this process.

Read all of The Democrats Need a Candidate Shake-Up in The New York Times here, and a companion piece in The Wall Street Journal from , titled Meet the Political Bosses Who Brought You Graham Platner: The Democratic Party’s New Establishment is less interested in winning than in remaking the party.

3. Off The Rails

“The New Establishment” of upscale leftists face one clear obstacle in taking over the Democratic Party. As Tom Edsall writes in The New York Times on The Voters Who Can Keep Democrats From Going Off the Rails, the left vs. center factional battle has reversed since the rise of the DLC in the 1990s:

40 years later, the racial and ideological split in the Democratic Party has been flipped on its head.

White, well-educated liberals are the leading proponents of cultural and identity policies that often alienate swing middle-class voters. Black and other minority Democrats are a strong force for moderation.

Edsall quotes from Third Way:

Today’s white Democratic voters bear little resemblance to the white Democrats of Jesse Jackson’s era. They are wealthier, more highly educated and more socially liberal. Meanwhile, the Black voters who make up the consistent base of the party have held steady while the rest of the coalition has shifted around them.

Jackson used to say that parties need two wings to fly. He was right, but it turns out that voters of color are now leading the moderate wing of the modern Democratic Party.

And Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute:

the nonwhite working class has emerged as a force for moderation in U.S. politics. They are leery of the left’s cultural agenda — open borders, permissive prosecutors, the obsession with identity politics and “equity.” They express higher levels of national pride and patriotism. And they aren’t agitating for the replacement of a market economy with democratic socialism.

4. GOP Meddling Helps TNE

The New Establishment has risen with help from its symbiotic relationship with the GOP, who benefits from both internal division and the rise of a leftism that damages the Democratic Party brand. Such mutual assistance has broken new ground this election cycle, with Republican SuperPACs running campaigns amplifying candidates backed by Bernie Sanders, Justice Democrats, and the Working Families Party.

In CA-22, mailers sent by GOP groups were virtually indistinguishable from those sent by David Hogg’s PAC.

Many Ways To Lose

There are three levels of conflict in modern American politics:

• Can Democrats beat Republicans?

• Can factional leftists win enough primaries to take over the Democratic Party?

• Can factional leftists dominate the perception of the Democratic Party?

All three are intertwined, but distinct. Each has evolved over the past decade. In this cycle’s primaries and beyond, some trends benefitting The New Establishment are accelerating - weakening parties, stronger partisanship, more factional conflict, more opportunities for high-upside risk-taking from high-agency people, and more direct intervention from meddling Republicans.

Admitting this uneven terrain is the first step to changing it. Centrists can win the majority of primaries and flip nearly all the majority-making seats, but leftists - working with the GOP - will still claim momentum.

That is the lesson of the first half of primary season. Democrats cannot rely on “the party” to save itself, because the party does not have the capability. The choice is not between unity and conflict. The conflict is already here. The choice is whether the centrist side of the conflict has the agency and risk tolerance to empower voters who can keep this thing from going off the rails.

What To Watch For Tonight

The NYC-centric media will focus on candidates in districts where Harris got 65% (NY-14), 71% (NY-7), and 80% (NY-12) of the vote. While there will be some lessons in those, particularly regarding the strength of the Democratic Socialists of America, we suggest looking at two other races tonight:

NY-17: Cait Conley is running in a GOP-held seat, and has faced GOP meddling. This is the type of NewDem & Bench supported candidate who will determine if Democrats win durable majorities - and the GOP knows it.

UT-01: as this now-blue seat was being redistricted last year, we made a big push for former Rep. Ben McAdams, a top-1% overperformer in 2018 and 2020. He has been under relentless attack from a(nother) Bernie Sanders endorsed boarding school alum, but holds the potential to defend a tougher redraw when the GOP redistricts again.

Good luck to everyone participating in our democracy today, especially the centrist candidates getting whacked from both sides.

Many of the findings validate our Deciding to Win report, the defining autopsy of 2024.

Reid Epstein reported:

The first potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate to weigh in on the D.N.C. draft report is Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and ambassador to Japan.

“It’s not worth the paper it’s written on,” Emanuel said in a brief interview. “The New York Times poll on Democratic primary voters showed that two to one believe the party should move center and avoid the culture wars and embrace policies that move families forward on firmer footing.”

Interestingly, the autopsy actually says a lot of that! Maybe too much for the DNC to handle!

Here are three:

1. Explicitly invokes the 1989 course correction led by moderate and conservative Democrats to “reclaim the vital center” and be “less about race” and less about “pie-in-the-sky narratives.”1

2. Called for more separation from Biden on immigration. Page 72

The report elevates pollster concerns that Kamala Harris needed “breaks” with the Biden Administration to win, and that “attempted differentiation on immigration” was “too little, too late.

3. Cited a rejection of “identity politics” as key factor for successful candidates in case studies on North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada. Page 22; Page 38

The DNC report, titled Build to Win, echoes many of the themes of Welcome’s Deciding To Win postmortem and upcoming WelcomeFest, the largest annual gathering of centrists themed Building to Win. The echoes may have been too loud.

Most Democrats now admit voters distrust the party on both cultural issues and the basics of government, like immigration and public safety. But most won’t admit that voters have good reason not to trust the party: Democrats ran to the left on every measure since 2012, from bill sponsorship to the party platform. Voters noticed, and didn’t like it. That’s the key takeaway from Deciding to Win, and possibly a reason the DNC’s own autopsy was not released.

Let’s bump a few dynamics of the Hungarian election, given their implications for American politics.

First, authoritarians lose when they become unpopular AND the opposition is more popular (as we wrote in Relative Popularity). That means neutralizing attacks, not mobilizing the base. The leader of the opposition, Péter Magyar, vowed to take a hard line on immigration and did not adopt progressive positions on culture issues. You won’t be shocked to learn that “some liberal voters remain wary of his … conservative views.”

Second, it seems like Orbán may have done what we warned MAGA about: changing the rules for short-term gain that backfired into a Dummymander. Here’s Yascha Mounk:

There is a delicious irony to how lop-sided Magyar’s victory is. During his 16 years in power, Orbán repeatedly changed the electoral system to tip the balance in his party’s favor. Because the opposition was divided and he counted on always retaining the most votes of any single party, he adopted an electoral system which strongly boosts parliamentary representation for the numerical victor. Now that Hungarian voters have finally turned on Orbán, he is a victim of his own machinations. Despite winning about 40 percent of the vote, his party will hold less than a third of seats in parliament.

Third, how’s this for a medium-term take on populism? Via CNN:

One reason that Orbán’s campaign focused so heavily on foreign policy is that his domestic record was so poor. This is another lesson of his defeat: Populism is about winning the day, the week, the news cycle. To function, this one-battle-after-another mode of governance needs a steady stream of enemies. Orbán found plenty: NGOs, liberal universities, George Soros, the LGBTQ movement, the European Union.

But eventually you run out of dragons to slay. Much of Orbán’s campaign vilified neighboring Ukraine. Budapest is plastered with posters of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Some read: “Danger!” Others read: “Don’t let him have the last laugh.”

Without a thriving economy, or a well-run healthcare system, or other policy achievements to point to, Orbán’s campaign instead aimed to scare Hungarians into voting for Fidesz by posing as the “safe choice” to protect Hungary from threats allegedly posed by Ukraine. “He is always talking about sovereignty, but to believe that the major threat to Hungarian sovereignty in Ukraine (became) comical,” said Krastev.

To counter Orbán’s vague warnings of danger from abroad, Magyar simply had to point to his record at home – with which Hungarians were less than impressed.

Fourth, opposition leaders have varied backgrounds:

the sharpest message from Budapest should be for the Democrats, strange as that may sound.

That is because Orbán’s ouster represents a new triumph for a particular brand of disruptive politics: one defined by reformist candidates who launch new parties and blow up old ones, winning elections by rendering traditional political structures obsolete. Hungary’s Peter Magyar, the leader of the anti-Orbán Tisza party, is the latest victor in this mold. There is no equivalent figure among Trump’s American opponents …

What these politicians have in common is a path to power. And it is one that Democrats have resisted for a decade since Trump became the dominant figure in American politics, killing off the traditional Republican Party along the way.

The American party system is heavily armored against disruption. It would be all but impossible to replicate here what Magyar has done in Hungary — or what France’s Emmanuel Macron and Argentina’s Javier Milei did before him — and turn a fledgling political organization into a personal vehicle and bring it to national power in a flash. We do not have secondary political parties that can surge to prominence in a single campaign, like Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia or Rob Jetten’s D66 in the Netherlands.

Yet as Trump himself has shown, it is possible to devour a major party from the inside — commandeering an old institution with grassroots support, casting aside its entrenched leaders, remaking it in a new image and earning a fresh look from voters who didn’t like the old version. Mark Carney has done something similar in Canada, with a very different political agenda. So has Lee Jae Myung in South Korea.

It takes a special kind of candidate to carry a political project like this, and probably not one likely to win popularity contests with members of a conventional party committee or legislative caucus. Magyar… is viewed by his peers as stubborn, imperious and self-absorbed, and also manifestly the most lethal rival Orbán ever faced. I remember hearing from a senior Canadian lawmaker that Carney was an academic stiff sure to flop in electoral politics, only a few months before he freed the Liberal Party from Justin Trudeau’s shadow and led it to an astonishing upset.

If Democrats want to take the hint, they’ll give a closer look to the leaders frustrating their peers in Washington and defying their home-state political bosses, and less time measuring the applause meter at various special-interest conventions and donor retreats.

Like the Democrats frustrating their peers in DC? Check out the Win The Middle slate of reformist disruptors.

I wrote, then deleted, two thousand words on the topic. Instead, I want to share this:

There is a debate on what messages can best repair a Democratic brand that’s gone toxic with too many swing voters: communicate popular mainstream messages to voters, especially swing voters (“popularism”) or go to ideological extremes to fire up the base.

But this argument, unfolding in upscale media outlets and online, is relatively low stakes because Democratic message discipline is not available at the party level.

If message discipline were possible at the party level — if there were a Board Chair for The Democrats, Inc. who could approve a multi-year strategic plan enforceable for a range of party actors (from candidates to advocacy groups to media outlets) — then this debate might be worthwhile. But no such structure exists.

…

While enforcing message discipline on high-profile far-left leaders is impossible, the good news is that pragmatic Democrats focused on winning swing districts can achieve message discipline (focused on popular issues) at the faction level.

The “popularism debate” is a waste of time. Even if it is possible to win, there is no payoff — the benefits accrue to those who organize.

We don’t need better facts, we just need to organize.

We wrote this exactly four years ago, in our April 10, 2022 newsletter.

318 people got it by email. It gained 52 more subscribers, a record at the time (thanks to a laudatory tweet from ).

Two years later, more than 318 people were gathered *together in person* for the first WelcomeFest. And then it doubled in year two.

My natural instinct is to write 2,000 words about Hasan Piker. To argue on the internet.

There is some value there. We can’t have zero people explaining how “going on a show” is different than “campaigning with” someone. It would be bad if no one pointed out that hyping the nasty in your own base is different than bridge-building into the opposite tent.

But as an individual1, and as a faction, every 1 unit of energy spent arguing should be paired with 10 units of organizing. Party-level message discipline is not available - there is no “Democrats should do X” button to push.

But faction-level community building is available, and it can get things moving. But only when you get involved!

Here are a few things you can do:

• Join us on June 3 for WelcomeFest III: Building to Win - registration now open for our readers

• We have more fellowship-type opportunities than ever before, so drop a line with interest or recommendations

• Spread the word on Investing to Win to make sure dollars go where they’re needed most

• For anyone who needs the 101 on how Democrats can win again, it’s always a good time to share Deciding to Win

• And please, share this newsletter to get likeminded people in the game

Share

It is so tempting to debate for the sake of it.

We are four years into preaching organizing. And we still have to repeat it to ourselves because, like most worthwhile things, it takes more effort to build community than to get sucked into a screen (there is someone in your pocket right now saying something outrageous on the internet, and you could be arguing with them!).

But if you must debate, then debate as a tactic for organizing. And do 10 things to build community.

Full piece below for a refresher.

Hope to see you soon.

In most elections, the votes “roll-off” as you move down the ballot. Marquee races that appear at the top of the ballot ticket, like President, Senate and Governor, typically get the most votes while “Down-ballot races,” like county and local offices, typically get much fewer votes.

But in South Texas this year, something unusual happened: there was a reverse roll-off on the ballot.

In both Texas’s 15th congressional district and Texas’s 28th congressional district, more votes were cast in the U.S. House race than in the U.S. Senate race, by thousands of ballots.

At the topline, both districts show the same dynamic:

• TX-15: 50,935 House votes vs. 48,557 Senate votes (+2,378)

• TX-28: 58,058 House votes vs. 55,646 Senate votes (+2,412)

Specifically in Texas’s 28th congressional district:

• Starr County (98% Hispanic): +11% more votes in House

• Zapata County (94% Hispanic): +13%

• Webb County (95% Hispanic): +3%

The relationship is pretty clear: the more Hispanic the county, the more likely voters were to participate in the House race relative to the Senate race. Why?

High Turnout, Low Enthusiasm

Turnout numbers also tell an enthusiasm story. Nate Cohn noted:

Take Starr County, a heavily Hispanic county along the Rio Grande. It was ground zero for the Trump surge among Hispanic voters: He won the county by 16 points in 2024; Hillary Clinton won it, 79 to 19, just eight years earlier. The turnout was enormous, leading some to highlight the surge as a sign of a Democratic rebound. Well, about half of Democratic primary voters left their ballots blank in the Senate race and left their ballots blank for most races, other than the county judge election. And among those who did vote in the Senate race, 8 percent voted for Mr. Hassan.

So yes, turnout was high. But participation in the Senate race wasn’t as high. Nearly half of the people who turned out to vote only voted for one race: the primary for county judge.

That distinction matters because it helps explain what we’re seeing in the congressional and Senate data.

If this were a simple turnout and enthusiasm story, more Hispanic voters showing up, more engagement, a rebound for Democrats, you would expect that to show up consistently across the ballot. You’d expect Senate participation to rise alongside House participation. You’d expect Democratic candidates to benefit in the most heavily Hispanic areas.

That’s not what happened.

Instead, voters showed up and then made decisions about where to engage. They’re voting in the House race, but not the Senate race. They’re participating in local contests, but not completing the ballot. And when they do vote, their choices don’t line up cleanly with ideology or party expectations.

What does this mean?

The simplest way to understand what’s happening in South Texas is that voters are becoming more selective.

They’re showing up to vote, but they’re not treating the ballot as a single, partisan decision. They’re deciding which races and candidates matter to them, which races they feel informed enough to vote in, and which ones to skip entirely. And those choices don’t neatly track with party, ideology, or traditional measures of engagement.

That’s what “reverse roll-off” is capturing.

It’s evidence that a meaningful share of the electorate is no longer participating uniformly across the ballot. Because if voters are opting out of certain races altogether, then turnout and vote share alone aren’t enough to explain what’s happening.

Don’t Call It An Autopsy

Democrats have finally released their autopsy - er - “Playbook.” While the party isn’t focusing on what went wrong, there are some nuggets in the report, for instance:

“Over the past decade, the Democratic campaign industry and its funders have become obsessed with massive, shiny output numbers from traditional tactics: Millions of calls made and hundreds of thousands of doors knocked,” the playbook writes. “Despite making 300+ million phone calls in 2024—more than any campaign in history—only 3% of the calls the Harris campaign made actually resulted in a contact with a voter.”

Only 3%!

It’s worth a read, but it’s important to remember that every position is a communication with a voter. Organizing can’t make up for ignoring the positions of the median voter.

Fundraising Eve

Your phone probably exploded last week, the end Q1.

“FINAL NOTICE.” “Account status: LAPSED.” “We’re BEGGING.” Language designed to mimic debt collectors, targeted disproportionately at seniors. Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica found that 95% of the money raised through these churn-and-burn operations comes from donors 65 and older, with a significant share from people over 80. This is elder fraud dressed up as democracy.

Before you tap that button, here’s where the money actually goes.

Ninety-one percent of top Democratic House fundraising went to races decided by 18 points or more. Safe seats. Our own Lauren Harper Pope documented this in The Bulwark: Democratic donors are getting bamboozled by fantasy campaigns. Marcus Flowers raised $10.8 million to unseat Marjorie Taylor Greene in a district Trump won by 48 points. He lost in a landslide. Meanwhile, 16 of 21 actually winnable districts had Democratic challengers who started the year with less than $100,000.

As Lauren told CNN: “We get so caught up on the super villains that we don’t focus on the villains.”

Our “Conceding Democracy” analysis (now Congressional Competition Index) has tracked this for years. In 2022, Democratic nominees had raised less than $100,000 across the entire cycle in 8 of 29 GOP-held districts where Trump received 50-54% of the vote. No Democratic candidate even filed in 19 of 45 competitive districts by mid-2023. Winnable races go uncontested or barely contested with candidates raising paltry sums. The party concedes before a single vote is cast.

Tomorrow, when the texts hit, remember: the machine doesn’t need your money. The candidates in winnable districts do.

Our 2024 slate over-performed Kamala Harris in Trump-won districts by an average of nearly six points. Independent analysis confirmed the highest “Wins Above Replacement” among Democratic groups that cycle. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Vicente Gonzalez, Jamie Ager. These are the candidates who win by differentiating, who compete in districts the national party has written off.

So while you spend your day unsubscribing from the emails and replying Stop2End the texts consider giving through our Investing to Win project to support differentiated Democrats running in districts Trump won.

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