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.

Support Investing To Win

While we often ask you to contribute to the highest-ROI House candidates flipping Trump districts, today we are asking you to educate some of the 10 million donors who contribute to Democrats online every cycle. Read the brief on InvestingToWin.org and watch this video overview:

Then share! This is a community problem and a market problem. There are billions of dollars trading hands, and the incentives are wrong every step of the way. So money gets siphoned away from candidates by big tech companies and niche consultancies, and away from beating swing district Republicans towards padding the coffers of safe-seat Democrats.

Those are two of the Seven Deadly Sins of Democratic Fundraising detailed on InvestingToWin.org.

Money doesn’t go to beating GOP

When money does reach actual candidates, it flows disproportionately to the wrong ones. The top 8 fundraising House Democrats outside of leadership raised more than $18 million in 2024, compared to $11 million for their Republican counterparts. Sounds like an advantage, but it isn’t. Ninety-one percent of that Democratic money went to races where the presidential result was decided by 18 points or more. Meanwhile, Republicans raised money for competitive races.

The Middlemen Problem

The biggest lesson we’ve learned since we started studying swing-district Democratic overperformers: the market isn’t built for them.

Digital fundraising is controlled by the middlemen - like data brokers, who sell your email address and cell phone number, and giant companies like Meta who rake in the advertising fees. That works fine if you are in a seat that Kamala Harris won by 40 points and just take the Acela down to DC when Congress is in session. It does not work when you are a Win The Middle candidate trying to flip a rural district won by Trump.

WelcomePAC candidates can’t just pad their coffers and build up lists over time, working all those middlemen to get the best rates. They need the money now to beat MAGA.

Here’s an example of how the math works for a candidate who has $100,000 to invest in digital fundraising:

• $30,000 on a consulting firm ($5,000 a month for six months)

• $40,000 buying 400,000 phone numbers at ten cents per record.

• $30,000 sending texts at a cent and a half per send, blasting those numbers five times each.

On a good day, the first-time candidate will eventually get back $120,000 in donations. So the consulting firm made $30,000 and the data vendor made $40,000 and the texting platform made $30,000.

And the candidate has $20,000 in net profit, which they’ll be told to put back into buying more emails.

Let’s Invest to Win

We have a solution. Our due diligence process has the best record in politics: we identify the overperformers. But we needed to educate the millions of Democratic donors who want to beat MAGA, but mostly get nonsense emails from Scam PACs and safe seat progressives.

So WelcomePAC spent the last year building a database of Democratic donors, starting with someone who knows the problem. was the first candidate we ever endorsed, and became a case study of both how the market is broken and how it can be fixed. In 2022, our own was in The Bulwark and CNN and The Washington Post arguing that Adam needed just a few more bucks to beat Lauren Boebert - but the middlemen were directing more than $10 million to the challenger against the unbeatable Marjorie Taylor Greene in a deep red seat.

After losing by just a few hundred votes, Adam built one of the best digital fundraising operations with more than 300,000 donors in the 2024 cycle. And then he brought that base & expertise to WelcomePAC, giving this Investing To Win program a head start that we’ve built on over the last year.

We are building a machine that gets your money where it is needed most AND where 100% of the money goes to candidates. No middlemen allowed.

We want you to Give Smart. But today, we most want you to get smart and build this community by sharing.

Share

Responsibility to Win was the theme of WelcomeFest last June, gathering the community of leaders who deliver majorities. Digital fundraising is one area where Democrats have been flat-out irresponsible.

Deciding to Win came out in October with the most comprehensive breakdown of how Democrats alienated the majority of Americans from 2012-2024. Many of the lessons there are seen in the disastrous fundraising ecosystem.

You are responsible, and you have decided to win. Now let’s grow our community so we can Invest to Win at the level needed for this November and beyond.

Check out InvestingToWin.org

The word parents used for baseball was boring. Slow. Expensive.

Baseball was mostly dead.

But, as a former Yankee said, mostly dead is slightly alive.

I’m in The Boston Globe this morning with an essay on the lessons from our pastime’s recent comeback:

This spring, the resurgence of a storied American institution just might offer an antidote to tech doomerism. Baseball is back.

The pitch clock, instituted in 2023, shortened game lengths without cutting any of the excitement. And this season’s introduction of the robo-umpire, which is not really a robot but a system of specialized cameras set up to review challenges to umpire calls, made it the first sport to make instant replay a thrill rather than a commercial-inducing slog.

The modern renaissance of the nation’s pastime is clear in the data: The average duration of baseball’s notoriously long games has dropped by more than 30 minutes. Attendance is up three years in a row. And the last World Series game drew the largest audience in three decades.

But it was even more obvious in the stands at Worcester’s Polar Park on Opening Day of the Triple-A season, when a Red Sox minor leaguer tapped his helmet to instigate a challenge to the called strike. The crowd rose to its feet in anticipation. In 15 seconds, we got a clear call from the robo-umpire and the chance to exult in the correction of the human umpire’s mistake. It was downright exhilarating.

Read the full thing in The Boston Globe here, with the case for how lessons from baseball’s resurgence can be applied to other parts of American life.

Many American institutions are in crisis. But they have irreplaceable assets: multigenerational history and inimitable nostalgia create the opportunity for network effects that ground you.

Baseball is back.

My younger son/editor was displeased that I used that phrase in the Globe. After all, baseball never went anywhere. But it has changed - largely thanks to the rules changes shepherded through baseball’s Competition Committee by our own Theo Epstein, whose curse-breaking leadership of the Red Sox (ok, and the Cubs) was a prelude to staving off baseball’s decline.

The significant uptick in popularity and cultural cache matters!

Talking to my boys about the Sox outfield logjam is a joy. But overhearing them in February arguing with friends about whether the Sox should release Masataka Yoshida?

That is transcendent. It makes me think I’ll be talking about it with their kids one day.

Missing that was the big fear. An uncertain future, without baseball.

Bart Giamatti has one of the most well-known quotes about baseball that pops up each spring. So popular it shows up on those quote cards when you google it:

But it is actually the line following this oft-cited quote that captures what was so hard about baseball’s cultural irrelevance:

You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

We were counting on baseball. Just like we were counting on going into the office each day after grabbing the newspaper, and the kids going off to college after years of schooling and churching, and America leading the world.

Baseball’s 21st century decline was leaving us to face a larger fall alone.

Giamatti was a Renaissance scholar before becoming president of Yale and then Commissioner of Major League Baseball. The Green Fields of the Mind closes with a pitch for a deliberate immaturity:

It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.

In the climactic scene of Field of Dreams, the oracular James Earl Jones pronounces “they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as if they’d dipped themselves in magic waters.” Fewer people are getting literally baptized anymore, but walking up the Fenway ramp feels like walking into an old church where you feel preternaturally at home. It “reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

America may fall from world supremacy.

The Catholic Church may never revive.

Newspapers may stop being delivered.

Schools may just be screens.

AI may destroy humanity.

But baseball is constant.

First pitch on Saturday is 4:10pm. I’ll be at Fenway with my family and an old friend and, while the sun may hide, the green grass doesn’t know anything is different than in 1912 or 1989. For a few hours, I won’t either.

Thanks again, Theo.

Net Intensity

The intensity of these ratings is most interesting. And a good reminder of how different things were after Trump’s second inauguration.

Look at the movement between the “Strong disapprove” and “Strong approve” lines:

It may be hard for those of us who read politics newsletters to believe, but just 30% of Americans strongly disapproved of Trump two years ago. That is now up to 47%. More than the MAGA base “Strongly approved” of Trump shortly after inauguration, with 36%. It is now 23%.

Pollsters often report “Net Approval” for the difference between approve and disapprove. Let’s refer to the difference between “Strong approve” and “Strong disapprove” as Net Intensity.

Following inauguration, Trump’s Net Intensity was +2. It is now -24. And cracking 50% Strong disapprove looks possible.

Relative Popularity

Nearly half the country really dislikes Trump. And less than a quarter really likes him. This dynamic is essential to preventing what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.”

Daniel Stid had a thoughtful piece this time last year on the increasing risks from Trump. Here’s a bit from Competitive Authoritarianism Comes for Civil Society:

Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way first developed the concept of competitive authoritarianism in the early 2000s. Their goal was to describe and classify a growing number of hybrid regimes in which elements of ongoing democratic competition coincided with undeniable patterns of autocratic rule. Today, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Narendra Modi’s India, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey stand as classic examples of this type of regime.

Trump has long made no secret of his admiration for these strongman rulers. In his second term, the U.S. will come to operate more like their countries.

One optimistic take is that these leaders have been far more popular than Trump. Pew Research shows majorities of Turkish adults held favorable views of Erdogan for most of the last thirteen years, with a peak of 75%. Pew has had Orban at 56% among Hungarian adults, a majority he has sustained for a decade. Modi has been even more popular in Pew polling, reaching 88%.

MAGA’s unpopularity is key, not only for the midterms but for the long game.

Warning!

Stid’s piece has one other vital warning. Let’s not get high off the fumes from Trump’s slide into unpopularity:

It will once again be tempting for progressive philanthropists, advocates, and activists to intermingle their pre-existing policy preferences with their efforts to defend democracy. This helps them maintain their intersectional commitments and alliances on immigration, climate, DEI, trans rights, political economy, etc. But it makes it much harder to build the cross-partisan coalition of supporters that liberal democracy requires.

Civil society actors who are serious about stopping and reversing authoritarian drift should ask themselves a clarifying question: “Do the policy positions we hold currently appeal to a broad majority of Americans, including the median voter?” If the answer is “no” or “not really,” then they should either modulate the intensity with which they insist coalition partners and leaders share their policy preferences, or candidly acknowledge that they are prioritizing those preferences over the recovery of liberal democracy.

This is key. It is the dear leader’s relative popularity, not just the raw numbers, that determine who wins a competition in a two-party democracy.

Even in polls that show Trump deeply unpopular and Democrats dominating the midterms, like this one from NBC News, the opposition is still not trusted on many priority issues.

Keeping Trump unpopular - and Democrats relatively more popular - will require a lot of restraint, and not just from politicians.

Give to Candidates Most in Need

The first quarter of the year ends at midnight, which means you’ll have a tremendous amount of “urgent” emails and texts headed your way. Get ahead of that anxiety and head on over to the Welcome Win The Middle slate of candidates. 100% of your contribution goes directly to candidate campaigns who need it most, will win back Congress, and will improve the relative popularity of Democrats!

Donate to Win The Middle slate

David Broockman and Joshua Kalla’s new paper - helpfully titled “Should Moving to the Middle Win Candidates Votes? It Depends Where Voters Are" - affirms core Welcome theses: voters care about issues, and the electoral benefits of moderating are underrated.

But it wasn’t just a high-level validation. They found that the type and amount of moderation matter:

• Where the Party is Misaligned: Moderating is most effective on issues where your party is misaligned with public opinion. This is true for both parties.

• Multidimensionality Risk: Voters care about multiple issues, which presents cross-pressure risks - moderating on a single issue can pick up some votes while losing others.

• … and Aggregation Opportunity: Because voters care about multiple issues, the effects pile up as candidates move towards voters on multiple issues.

• Towards the Voter, not Other Party: Moving towards the opposition party does not have the benefit of moderating by moving towards the median voter.

Broockman captures the intraparty debates on moderation succinctly, explaining that when research shows moving towards the elite middle helps only modestly, “it is easy to look at this and say ‘voters don’t care about moderation/issues.’ But the averages masks enormous variation across people/issues.”

The Golden 4 x 9 x 10

Let’s look at this in practice, from a case study in Deciding to Win:

I'm fighting against Biden's electric car mandate while voting to increase domestic oil and gas production, working with Republicans to secure the border, and standing with law enforcement against defunding the police.

This is an excerpt of an ad for Rep. Jared Golden. In a span of 9 seconds, Golden hits four issues where he differentiates from the party. And not just any issues - on issues where the party is misaligned with voters.

Golden is the only Democrat to win a district Trump won by 10 points.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that those four aggressive moderation points in nine seconds did more than the 281 subscribers he has on YouTube.

Some in the Democratic Party think voters can be tricked by TikTok videos. They think that, when issues come up where the party is misaligned with voters, candidates should just dodge the hard questions. But as wrote this week, the Shut-Up-And-Pivot Approach Won’t Work for Democrats.

Golden’s ad hit four areas where the party was misaligned with voters. Add them up, and you have literally the only Democrat winning a Trump +10 district.

Four policy positions in nine seconds to win a district Trump won by ten.

It wasn’t pivoting away from discomfort, or dressing up like a blue-collar character in a sitcom.

It was policy, on top of policy, on top of policy. Moderation worked, and the benefits of each moderating policy aggregated.

And that’s a good thing. We live in a democracy. Let’s act like it.

Check out the full paper at this link, Yglesias in the NYT here, and a helpful Twitter thread summary from the researchers here.

This is top of mind for us - midterm primary season just kicked off and runs into September - and is clearly top of mind for many ahead of the 2028 presidential primary. There has been a flurry of research and opinion on this question in recent weeks.

So we put together this typology based on two key axes: ideology (from left to center) and prioritization (from issue purity to winning).

The easiest way to make this framework click is to see it laid out visually. We put together a short video walking through the typology and how the pieces fit together:

Here is the compelling stuff that’s come out recently:

• The Truth About Democratic Primary Voters based on a poll of 1,400 likely primary voters from Third Way

• Do Democrats Want to Be “Normal”? Survey Analysis of Today’s Democratic Coalition based on a poll of 2,593 Democrats and Kamala voters from the conservative Manhattan Institute

• Primary voters prize ideology over electability as their parties get low marks from NBC News

• Are Moderate Democrats Becoming Extinct? and The Democrats’ White Liberal Problem from The Liberal Patriot

Read them all - and also watch the related Third Way presentations from their recent Win The Middle conference.

And think about what your mental model is for the Democratic Party, primary voters, and our path forward.

Moderates are outnumbered in the Democratic Party, and that is certainly true in many congressional primaries. Roughly 55% of Democratic primary voters are progressive, liberal, or socialist. But a decent chunk of those lefties have a struggle between heart and head.

And there are enough lefties who prioritize electability over ideology to deliver moderate nominees.

Target Rate for Lefty Inflation: 1%

The trend towards a more liberal Democratic Party, chronicled in Deciding to Win, has a legitimate source: rank-and-file Democrats have gotten more liberal in recent decades.

Let’s zoom out to the big picture. The trends are nationalized: parties are increasingly sorted by ideology, and voters overall are becoming slightly more liberal.

Emphasis on slightly more liberal. This blue bar has been on the incline over a long period. Going from 18% to 25% is a significant change on a relative basis.

But that still leaves moderate and conservative as a supermajority of voters.

That used to be true within the Democratic Party as well. In 1994, 74% of Democrats were moderates and conservatives. That has been on a steady decline in the three decades since, falling on average by a point per year to its current 43%

Focusing only on moderates and conservatives, you see a slight decline (black line below) but a sharp decline among the share of Democrats who identify as conservative or moderate (blue line).

The gap between the black line (share of all voters) and the blue line (share of Democrats) tells a story. The difference (yellow bar) shows no sign of slowing down.

That chasm presents a problem in nominating candidates who can win a majority of voters.

A solution is sewn into the suit of liberal armor, however. Many progressive Democratic voters prize electability over ideology. When a chunk of them are combined with moderate-to-conservative Democrats, that’s enough to win.

Quadrant I: Majority Mods (30%)

About 30% of all Democratic primary voters are both moderate and prioritize electability. We like winning, we like candidates with mainstream views, it’s good all around.

Quadrant II: Mod or Die (15%)

Roughly 15% of all Democratic primary voters are moderate-to-conservative but are not “Electability Democrats.” They vote for the mainstream candidate, not to “win at all costs to protect democracy” but just, well, because it’s a democracy and their preferred candidate is moderate.

Quadrant III: Purity Left (30%)

Let’s get the uncompromising socialists out of the way. This group mostly loves socialism, hates compromise, and tells pollsters winning is not as important as purity.

This group is roughly 15%, but joins together with another 15% of Democrats who have the same effect on the primary: progressives who think the party needs to move to the left to win voters. A recent think tank analysis said these voters tend to be younger and live in the Northeast. I’ve met them. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably met them too.

Quadrant IV: Strategic Left (25%)

OK, on to the swing constituency. About 25% of Democratic primary voters are both progressive/liberal and prioritize electability. This is the swing constituency.

And it is relatively new.

In Fall 2015, just 36% of Democrats prioritized electability over positions on the issues and just 45% identified as liberal.

Four years later, 60% of Democrats prioritized electability and a majority identified as liberal.

Democratic voters know the country is polarized and that the party has gotten too liberal to win consistently. But that doesn’t mean they know how it is too liberal, or how to demonstrate electability.

The number-torturers on the Purity Left know this, which is why they’ve been practicing the dark arts of Electability Muddying for the last year. They want the Strategic Left voter to think that swing voters are completely unknowable, while there are millions of latent socialists just waiting to be activated from the couch. The problem is that Democrats just haven’t elected the True Progressive or held the right rally.

This is part of why the WAR WARs matter. Why amplifying political science research, like did in The New York Times yesterday, is so important. And why overperformers, like our Win The Middle slate of House candidates in Trump-won districts, can show a path forward to win both primaries and set the party on a path that wins again.

Watch TV, scroll social media or listen to politicians, and the verdict seems clear: Americans are hopelessly divided and increasingly hateful.

• It’s a ubiquitous, emphatic, verifiable ... lie.

Why it matters: Most Americans are too busy for social media, too normal for politics, too rational to tweet. They work, raise kids, coach Little League, go to a house of worship, mow their neighbor’s lawn — and never post a word about any of it.

This isn’t a small minority. It’s a monstrous, if silent, majority. Most Americans are patriotic, hardworking, neighbor-helping, America-loving, money-giving people who don’t pop off on social media or plot for power.

• The hidden truth: Most people agree on most things, most of the time. And the data validates this, time and time again.

Our entire team lives far from Washington, DC.

I live in Needham, Massachusetts. There are a few TRUMP and MAGA flags here, about on par with flags for the NFL’s Buffalo Bills (the real enemy).

Kamala Harris dominated my hometown, 75% to 22%.

A few years ago, the Democratic nominee for Governor lived in our town. He got blown out by the moderate Republican, 67% to 33%. In Massachusetts. During Trump’s first term.

Hey, the Republican was normal.

The sign outside Memorial Park, where the high school football team plays in the nation’s oldest Thanksgiving Day rivalry, says GOD BLESS AMERICA.

Our basketball team entered the state tournament ranked third, earning home court advantage a few days after the Olympics wrapped up. That home court advantage = a rambunctious student section wearing USA hockey jerseys and Uncle Sam overalls.

They stood silently for the national anthem.

Our team lives a version of this normal offline life, in Alabama and Colorado and Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Lauren lives in South Carolina. In September, she wrote about the struggles our team faced with candidates last year:

This cycle we are seeing a plethora of progressive Democrats shrouded in the “authenticity” they believe will make people like them more than Democrats in Congress.

I’ve been calling it the “progressives in sheep’s clothing” phenomenon, where a “regular guy/gal” decides to run for office to prove that normal people can be Democrats, but they espouse the same positions as those who are in the progressive caucus and are notably disagreeable with median voter sympathy.

So they’re not actually normal, aka where the median voter is. And their candidacy will just further estrange moderate-to-conservative voters from our Party.

I tell people often that Welcome was founded in 2019 to cultivate a more welcoming Democratic Party that appeals to Republican and independent voters.

But as of late, I often find that we are working to cultivate a more welcoming Democratic Party that ensures Democrats still feel welcome! Voters like myself who don’t identify as progressive and are people of color who still need a home in our politics.

Being forthright about this reality helped us build an incredible slate of candidates.

But it isn’t always easy. Most people in politics are very online, and very polarized. Back to the Axios description of The Big Lie:

Oh, but you’re so naive, so delusional and detached from reality. Everywhere I look, I see dispute and decline!

But it’s the terminally online news junkies who are detached from the actual reality.

• We’ve been manipulated by algorithms and politicians amplifying the worst of humanity. Our feeds and screens spread a twisted, inaccurate view of America.

• It makes it seem like the nation is hopelessly broken ... Political enemies are evil ... Facts are no different than fiction ... Morality, honesty and service don’t matter ... And salvation can only come from magical technologies or a powerful few.

What if we told you it’s a big lie that makes you stop believing your own two eyes?

• Every day, people battle over outrageous things said on X. Did you know that four out of five Americans don’t use X, and therefore don’t see what you see? Pew Research Center found last year that only 21% of U.S. adults use X, and just 10% visit it daily. The loudest platform in politics reaches barely one in five Americans.

• But what about the wacky claims made on cable TV? Did you know that during most hours of most prime-time nights, less than 1% of the country watches Fox News, CNN or MS NOW, combined?

Maybe, just maybe, it’s the very people on these platforms who are the crazy ones.

• Maybe, just maybe, most people are simply normal, sane, real.

• A Gallup World Poll out last week found Americans are more anxious about their political system than citizens of almost any other country — yet the data consistently shows this anxiety is driven by the noise, not the neighbors. The system feels broken. The people are not.

The first in-person meeting we had in DC, a participant said “either we’re crazy, or everybody else is.”

Five years later, it is more true than ever. We live it every day.

Believe your own two eyes.

“Most political commentary doesn’t think highly of voters” -

The first real test of 2026 is tonight, with primaries that will set the midterm tone in Texas and North Carolina.

But the headliner is not an ideological battle, as Nate Cohn demonstrates in the NYT:

Is that a good thing? Some prominent progressives think so.

Run For Something founder Amanda Litman wrote this afternoon that “the fight over “progressive vs moderate” misses the point (and is mostly a waste of time.)”

I’m sitting next to former congressional candidate Adam Frisch right now (it’s election day!), and we disagree.

We live in a democracy! Voters care about issues! They deserve a choice not only of style, but of substance.

In 2022, some Democratic candidates like Adam said we should secure the border, increase energy production, respect the Second Amendment, and tone down the culture war offensives.

Adam ran in the primary against Sol Sandoval, a progressive activist endorsed by the left-wing Working Families Party. Adam would open his primary stump speech to activists with “I know the Democratic Party isn’t looking for a straight middle-aged white Jewish guy living in Aspen. But …”

After clearing the air, the “But” would be followed by a confident and commonsense explanation of why Adam believed in these policies - and why a majority of voters would too. Before running ten points ahead of baseline in the general election, he won his primary by just 289 votes.

Voters deserved the choice.

Voters Over Pundits

How do we know the median voter is smarter than fancy political pundits? Here’s one example: there is a 20 point difference in voter approval of Trump’s border policy and his immigration policy.

Last year we told the story of MSNBC personality Chris Hayes, who as a recent Brown grad in 2004 went knocking on 1,000 doors because he could not understand “how could any halfway intelligent human remain undecided for long?”

His conclusion? Swing voters are deserving “of the derision that the political class has heaped on them.”

Hayes, ever the committed progressive, stated that “undecided voters aren’t as rational as you think” and “don’t think in terms of issues.”

Yet these three things are all true about the most contentious issue of the last five years:

1. Voters strongly disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration (-17)

2. Voters still net approve of Trump’s handling of the border (+3)

3. Voters still trust congressional Republicans more than congressional Democrats on the border (+28) and immigration (+11)

Unlike professional anti-Trumpers, the median citizen is taking that highest duty seriously enough to distinguish between “the border” and “immigration.” AND distinguishing between the executive branch and the legislature.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Back in 2021, the first article written about Welcome focused on the word ‘empathy.’ The reporter from Slate was “intrigued” that centrists would use such a liberal-coded word.

Over the last five years, the problem is worse than Democrats “lacking empathy.”

Democrats - or at least their elite tone-setters - just don’t RESPECT voters.

The journalist Gabe Fleisher recently said this pointedly: “A lot of political commentary doesn’t think highly of voters, but Americans often do a better job sitting in nuance…”

Fleisher gives a similar example to our border/immigration split:

41% of Americans oppose Trump’s immigration goals + execution. That’s the “never Trump” coalition. (Almost all Dems, about 1/3 of Independents.)

27% support Trump’s immigration goals + execution. That’s the “Trump diehard” (at least on immigration) coalition. (2/3 of GOP, about 1/5 of Independents.)

And, most interestingly, 24% support Trump’s immigration goals, but NOT his execution.

Voters are comfortable with nuance!

That’s why candidates like Mary Peltola and Jared Golden and more are able to run a dozen points ahead of the national ticket by breaking from the party on issues.

Let’s say that again: breaking with the party on issues. The thing Chris Hayes claims they don’t think about.

Voters distinguish between immigration and border security, and many prefer different parties to deal with each one. For a long time, there has been a strain in Democratic thought that denies this fundamental reality: voters know where the parties stand on issues, and vote for the party that agrees with them on the issues they find most salient.

What’s The Matter With Pundits

During the same 2004 period in which Chris Hayes was mentally demeaning swing voters at their doors, liberals were taken in with Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”

The book purported to show that working class voters were voting against their economic interests because they were tricked by Republican support for conservative social issues. He argued the way for Democrats to win back the voters of Kansas was not to move to the center, but rather to move to the left, blaming centrists for costing Democrats working class voters.

Political scientist Larry Bartels responded to Frank, finding that working class white voters had pretty conservative views on the economy. In fact, what Bartels found was that Frank had it backwards,

… contrary to Frank’s account, most of his white working-class voters see themselves as closer to the Democratic Party on social issues like abortion and gender roles but closer to the Republican Party on economic issues.

Bartels found:

Frank’s white working-class voters were neither liberal in absolute terms nor closer to the Democratic Party than to the Republican Party on economic issues. On the central issue of government spending and services, voters who saw themselves as closer to the Republican Party outnumbered those who saw themselves as closer to the Democratic Party by four percentage points. On the issues of government jobs and aid to blacks the pluralities seeing themselves as closer to the Republican Party were even larger – nine and 15 percentage points, respectively. Moreover, 60% to 85% of the voters who perceived differences between their own position and the Democratic Party’s position on each of these economic issues said the Democratic Party was too liberal, not too conservative. Thus, it is hard to see why taking even more liberal positions on these issues, or stressing them more heavily, would help the Democrats win back the white working class.

What’s The Matter With Justice Democrats?

But let's put away the polls and spreadsheets. What happens when progressives run left-wing candidates in Republican areas?

It doesn’t work. The last decade has been defined by attempts from Justice Democrats and their allies to recruit and support the types of candidates who they think would fix the problem with Kansas.

All of them have failed.

• Randy Bryce (WI-1): The union ironworker and progressive folk hero lost to Bryan Steil by double digits despite raising nearly $8 million, earning endorsements from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Bryce was touted by groups like the Working Families Party and ran as a populist, pro-Medicare for All progressive, but he still lost badly, running 10 points behind the district’s fundamentals.

• Jess King (PA-11): The progressive running on Medicare for All and debt-free college lost by 18 points (though gaining extensive media coverage in the process). Justice Democrats-aligned consultants believed they could make this district competitive by building the most extensive field operation in the district’s history, but she ran in line with the fundamentals. A local post-mortem casts doubts on the canvassing effectiveness, noting that King received fewer votes than Gov. Tom Wolf (7,000) and Bob Casey (1,376) while Smucker out-performed Republican gubernatorial nominee Scott Wagner (11,520) and Senate candidate Lou Barletta (6,321).

• Kara Eastman (NE-2): After beating DCCC-backed former Rep. Brad Ashford in the primary, Eastman lost in the general election, running 2 points behind the fundamentals. In her second attempt in 2020, she ran 6 points behind the fundamentals. Kara Eastman was the only Justice Democrats attempt in a swing district, and she lost a district Biden won running on a progressive, pro Medicare for All platform.

• Dana Balter (NY-24): Ran in a Clinton+4 competitive district and lost, underperforming Clinton by 10 points — the worst result of any Democrat running in a Clinton-Republican district that year. (Balter ran again in 2020 and lost again). Balter ran 19 points behind the fundamentals in 2018 and 16 points behind in 2020.

Justice Democrats, Working Families Party and the like have tried again and again to replicate their primary playbook with swing voters. Every time it fails.

From “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” to thinking “Tim Walz is a cheat code for white men,” Democrats want to deny that their struggles with working class voters are rooted in legitimate policy disagreements.

Maybe these voters are not just bozos lurching from one candidate to the next, but are onto something?

“Not giving voters enough credit”

A summary of the research from Anthony Fowler of the University of Chicago, via the Niskanen Center:

Anthony Fowler finds that most Americans’ political views fall between the opinions of Democratic and Republican elites. And that’s not because they don’t understand politics in the same way. Most Americans’ views fall into the ideological continuum from left to right; they’re just somewhere in the middle. These moderates matter for election outcomes. While they participate a bit less, they are the consequential swing voters. Fowler also finds that selecting candidates on policy grounds could matter more to voters than the power of partisan identity. We may not be giving voters enough credit.

Pundits often cast voters into narrow, polarized buckets. But voters demonstrate again and again that substance matters.

Fowler shows that perceptions of ideological extremism are driven by the limited response options on most surveys (e.g. do you support or oppose Medicare for All?).

Fowler changed this dynamic by offering respondents a more open set of response options. For instance, when he asked what the minimum wage should be, he simply offered an open-ended text box. Offering specific numbers or a slider to choose different numbers could anchor or artificially constrain opinion.

The results show this nuance clearly. Take the minimum wage example: when Fowler asked what the federal minimum wage should be, the median response was $12 and even 41% of Democrats prefer a minimum wage below $15, while 97% of Democrats prefer a minimum wage below $25. Democratic voters are far more moderate than their representatives (who now support a $25 to $50 minimum wage).

Fowler finds that on other issues, there is significantly less extremism than our politics implies: “only 13% of respondents say that abortion should not be legal at any point in a pregnancy, and only 9% say that it should be allowed through all 40 weeks of a pregnancy.”

Voters are capable of nuance - but too much of our research isn’t designed to measure it. Most issue polling is like measuring the 40-yard dash with a sundial.

Warning Signs

While Democrats are well-positioned for the midterms because of the significant, predictable weakness of the incumbent party, the latest Wall Street Journal polling should be a flashing warning sign for Democrats. While Trump’s approval has fallen more and more, Democrats still aren’t trusted in Congress, relative to Republicans. Congressional Democrats trail on border security (-28), immigration (-11), the economy (-6) and inflation (-5). Democrats lead on the issues where they have effectively messaged such as healthcare (+15).

Voters don’t like what Trump is doing, but Democrats need to prove they’ve moved past the extreme positions many took during 2020, like banning gas-powered cars.

“Elite Disdain”

The attitude of a twenty-something Chris Hayes and his fellow What’s The Matter With Kansas readers epitomizes the ‘elite disdain’ that progressives have towards voters.

The problem is that Chris Hayes is all grown up, but his disdainful mindset has not - and is now dominant in the Democratic ecosystem. And despite all the progressive podcast ads for online therapy services, it doesn’t seem like more empathy for the confused masses is around the corner.

We need to respect the voters.

That may be my Massachusetts bias.

In blue states like mine, it feels like Democrats have spent decades explaining why things should be more expensive.

Of course, Democrats aren’t literally saying “we will make your life more expensive.” But swing voters - despite how much pundits dismiss them as unthinking morons - are pretty quick to translate policies like “we will require childcare teachers to have bachelor’s degrees” and “we’re mandating an extra staffer on every train car” and “let’s add another line on your utility bill for the environment” as jacking up their cost of living.

That’s why I was thrilled to open1 The Boston Globe this morning to this front-page headline:

Three years of college instead of four is something that voters can translate into cost savings pretty easily!

My affordability twinge subsided even more later this morning when I caught up on the New Democratic Coalition’s Affordability Agenda, released today along with an accompanying Fox News op-ed from Reps. Nikki Budzinski and Chrissy Houlahan:

More than a year past his self-imposed "day one" deadline to lower costs, President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have not only failed to lower the cost of groceries, housing or healthcare, but are actively and intentionally making life more expensive for hardworking Americans.

This framing - also found in Third Way’s “Ending Trump’s War on the Consumer” - is powerful.

But the best part? Acknowledging tradeoffs, unlike some of the sloganeering from one wing of the party:

“Buzzy sounds good in a sound bite, but you often end up with unintended consequences or unworkable solutions,” New Democrat Coalition Chair Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., said in an interview. “We’re hearing people saying they are frustrated with the bombast, but also the hollow promises, and they want to see their government coming up with thoughtful solutions.”

Specificity - and clarity on tradeoffs - was also found in Monday’s brief from on driving down childcare costs by loosening requirements for them to be on the first floor.

The Affordability Trap

It has been cold as hell lately in Massachusetts, where the state government has given me $5,000 for driving an EV and my energy bill is going to be quite ugly this month.

Pivoting to saying “affordability” three times like Beetlejuice is not going to solve that problem. Even if we froze our electricity rates here in the birthplace of America, the cost per kWh would still be double other states for years.

Blue state voters typically only have one chance to check Democrats in these polarized times: governors. It is not really a surprise that the three states which gave Kamala Harris her highest margins in 2024 - Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland - all had GOP governors the year before.

Focusing on words alone is a trap Democrats must avoid.

Democrats are the party of the $1.7 million toilet, and it will take a lot to change that - from seemingly small ideas like daycare on the fourth floor to big state-level ideas like three-year degrees and national agendas from pragmatic groups.

I don't know what to say really. Three minutes to the biggest battle of our professional lives all comes down to today. Either we heal as a team or we crumble. Inch by inch, play by play, til we're finished. We are in hell right now, gentlemen and we can stay here and get the shit kicked out of us or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell. One inch, at a time.

There’s a comforting story Democrats tell themselves about Trump voters. It goes like this: they’re all in a cult. Brainwashed. Irredeemable. Beyond reach. This story is useful because it absolves Democrats of responsibility. You can’t reason with cultists, so why bother trying? Just energize your base and wait for demographics to save you.

A few days ago, Politico reported a new DNC outreach campaign to win over 2024 non-voters with a “listening first approach,” featuring this quote from the DNC’s Deputy Executive Director: “We didn’t lose to Donald Trump. We lost to the couch.”

New research from More in Common should shatter this delusion. After interviewing more than 10,000 Trump voters across ten months, they arrived at a conclusion that ought to reframe Democratic strategy entirely:

President Trump has built a coalition, not a cult.

Democrats need to understand that to understand how to win.

Only 38 percent of Trump’s 77 million voters say that being MAGA is important to them. More than 6 in 10 Trump voters don’t identify with the movement named after him.

The Four Flavors of Trump Voter

More in Common identifies four distinct segments within the coalition. MAGA Hardliners represent about a third of Trump voters:

MAGA Hardliners represent the fiery core of Trump’s base. They are fiercely loyal, deeply religious, and animated by a sense that America is in an existential struggle between good and evil, with God firmly on their side.

9 in 10 agree Trump is “the best leader the Republican Party has had in my lifetime,” and 6 in 10 believe he should “punish his opponents for the damage they’ve done.”

OK, so these voters aren’t flipping.

Anti-Woke Conservatives make up roughly a fifth of the coalition:

Anti-Woke Conservatives are relatively well-off, politically engaged, and deeply frustrated by the perceived takeover of schools, culture, and institutions by the progressive left.

These voters aren’t driven primarily by economics, healthcare or affordability. They are motivated by the perception that progressives have captured every institution that touches their lives. Every time a Democratic candidate is forced to answer to “the groups”, these voters get further away.

Mainline Republicans comprise another quarter:

Mainline Republicans are middle-of-the-road conservatives who play by the rules and expect others to do the same. Most do not follow politics closely. For them, Trump’s strength is that he advances familiar conservative priorities: securing the border, keeping the economy strong, and preserving cultural stability.

These are your parents’ Republicans, the Phil Scott or Charlie Baker Republicans. They’d vote for Mitt Romney in a heartbeat if he were on the ballot. Trump is their vehicle, not their religion. They want normalcy, and right now neither party is giving it to them. These voters are potentially gettable.

The Reluctant Right is a key story, with roughly 22 percent of Trump voters:

The Reluctant Right are the most ambivalent cohort of Trump’s coalition... most likely to have voted for Trump transactionally: the businessman who was ‘less bad’ than the alternative.

Only 9 percent of the Reluctant Right view Trump as the best Republican leader. Only 8 percent support punishing opponents. These voters chose Trump despite finding him distasteful because Democrats seemed worse. For roughly 17 million Americans, the chaos agent they don’t much like was still preferable to us.

The Numbers That Should Haunt You

The More in Common data reveals a gradient that should be tattooed on the forehead of every Democratic strategist:

Look at that spread. You’re telling me there’s no strategic daylight between voters who 89% agree Trump is the greatest Republican ever and voters who only 9% agree? You’re telling me the 62% who want to punish opponents and the 8% who reject that idea are equally unreachable?

What Would Mary Do?

Mary Peltola understands. In Alaska, she won voters who pulled the lever for Trump by double digits. She did it by being vocally pro-gun, pro-drilling, and pro-choice, a combination that progressive gatekeepers insist is impossible.

Peltola didn’t treat every Republican voter as a MAGA cultist. She treated them as Alaskans who wanted practical representation. The Mainline Republicans? She spoke their language on energy and the economy. The Reluctant Right? She gave them permission to split their ticket.

Democrats don’t need to flip all Trump voters. The Reluctant Right is 22% of Trump’s coalition, roughly 17 million voters. If you peel off even 10% of them, that’s 1.7 million votes. Shift 5% of the Mainline Republicans and you’re looking at another million.

But these voters have conditions. They’re not coming over because you think Trump is bad. They’re coming over if the Democratic alternative doesn’t scare them more.

That means candidates who can credibly distance themselves from progressive cultural politics. Candidates who talk about the border like it’s a real issue and not a right-wing fever dream.

All We Got

Here’s what makes Trump’s coalition sticky despite its internal contradictions:

Yet these divisions exist alongside striking agreement: America is in crisis, the political establishment has failed, and the other side holds them in contempt. Whether the coalition endures may depend on whether these shared frustrations remain strong enough to override differences about deeply-held identities and about what lines should not be crossed.

Democrats have focused a lot on the first two beliefs. America is in crisis, and the establishment has failed. That’s what the “affordability” messages are about.

But that third belief? That “the other side holds them in contempt”?

That one too many Democrats keep confirming every day. Persuadable Trump voters are all around us, and winning them over is how to climb back to the light.

Read the full report in the below:

More in Common US Newsletter

Beyond MAGA: The Four Types of Trump Voters

Summary: Today, January 20th, 2026, the first anniversary of President Trump’s second term, More in Common is releasing the most comprehensive study to date of the Americans who voted for President Trump in November 2024. Beyond MAGA: A Profile of the Trump Coalition…

Read more

4 months ago · 25 likes · 4 comments · More in Common US

On the one hand, Trump’s brief honeymoon with voters is over. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene has had enough!

On the other hand, the dark magic has returned: while Trump is repelling swing voters, he is also inflaming a reaction from the left that can make Democrats even less popular. And make MAGA electorally viable by default.

The New York Times’s masterful guest essayist, Thomas Edsall, published a major analysis of this dynamic recently. Here’s the upshot:

Trump hasn’t cleared a path for Democratic renewal — he’s possibly made one far less likely. By casting himself as the nemesis of progressive excess, he has paradoxically strengthened their hold on the Democratic imagination.

His heavy-handed assault on D.E.I. and campus speech codes hasn’t prompted soul-searching on the left; it has supplied a new grievance narrative, confirming for activists that they were right all along, that the backlash proves the threat. Victimhood, once claimed, is rarely surrendered.

It is as if, Westwood concluded, “Democrats are engineering a super-strain of progressive in a lab, purpose-built to alienate the middle of this country and the middle of the ideological spectrum.

You can read the full thing here, featuring Welcome’s Deciding to Win research along with an array of compelling perspectives - , , , , , , and more.

In some ways, Trump has made the job harder. While generic ballot polls show Democrats ahead, they are far from their 2018 highs.

But one thing does feel the same as last time: Trump is getting the left to repeat the mistakes of the Biden era.

But if this morning is any indication, 2026 will be much better. The second Monday of the year brought dueling announcements: Mary Peltola for Senate (Alaska) and Elizabeth Warren for Attention (DC).

Stuck

Will 2026 be the year Elizabeth Warren understands swing voters?

Last night, Axios reported Warren seeks to put her progressive stamp on Dems’ 2028 makeover “after largely lying low over the last year” and spending “time considering what a ‘big tent’ means for the Democratic Party.”

Last year certainly was a quiet one for Warren after a decade appealing to the liberal intelligentsia (and few others):

• 2024 cycle: spent defending Joe Biden’s re-election when 75% of voters said he was too old and urging Democrats to ignore immigration (voters’ biggest priority and a clear mandate), joining just four other Senators in voting against the bipartisan immigration bill.

• 2022 cycle: spent backing Democratic primary challengers, including one who beat an incumbent and subsequently lost a Biden district while Democrats narrowly lost the House.

• 2020 cycle: presidential campaign pushed the party left with more than 1,000 paid staffers and unpopular positions on major issues from immigration (decriminalizing the border; free healthcare for illegal immigrants) to healthcare (banning private health insurance). Her campaign sputtered to 7% in South Carolina and was mercifully ended by just 21% support in her home state.

• 2018 cycle: got fewer votes than the Republican governor of Massachusetts on the same ballot.

The political press was ready for Warren’s return, with a burst of headlines:

• CNN was at the ready with a headline with the perfectly annoying catchphrase: “Elizabeth Warren says Democrats need to ‘read the room’”.

• NBC and others stuck with the tent theme, with a piece titled “Sen. Elizabeth Warren lays out vision for a ‘big tent’ Democratic Party”

• The New York Times “With Democrats at a Crossroads, Elizabeth Warren Urges a Left Turn”

The rest of the country didn’t seem to care. As of mid-afternoon, the number YouTube views for the speech had barely surpassed the number of paid staff on her presidential campaign.1 Dozens may have even been outside DC.

This morning’s speech was heavy on critiques of Abundance, billionaires, Chuck Schumer, and those practicing big tent politics (“according to some self-described experts, Democrats lost power because we were too progressive.”2)

Warren leaned heavily on the phrase “big tent” (tent was mentioned nine times) and set up some buzzwordy false choices.3

But she was light on any specifics. As noted, Warren - sponsor of a major Abundance bill - “does not name a single abundance policy she disagrees with, just this vague guilt by association because a rich guy she doesn’t like happens to like abundance.”

Warren used to always have “a plan for that,”4 but she’ll be 81 years old when sworn into her next term and the relative unpopularity and underwhelming electoral performance we’ve seen in Massachusetts is now understood by most Democrats.

Big-money book deals5, a lucrative email list, and a willingness to attack other Democrats should keep Warren in the limelight when she seeks attention.

But her political career is stuck.

Chuck

Schumer’s decade as leader has seen a shocking decline in electoral competitiveness. When he took over in November 2016, Democrats had Senators representing Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, Missouri, Indiana, and Florida. The prior session, Democrats represented Iowa, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alaska, Louisiana, and South Dakota.

Those are 13 states Democrats no longer represent, most of which Democrats do not even seriously contest now. That’s a lot of states!

Democrats currently hold both Senate seats from 22 states, plus Tammy Baldwin, Angus King, and John Fetterman.

Schumer has been listening too much to blue-state underperformers like Warren, and the only path out is candidates who sharply break with her path for the party.

Mary

Yesterday, we wrote about how Democrats need to get out of The Helplessness Doom Loop and get “more candidates like Mary Peltola,” who in 2022 won a state that Trump had won by 20%.

Today, Schumer’s DSCC had their best tweet in years:

Elizabeth Warren’s style of politics is from an age of Twitter rage and faculty smugness that expired years ago.

We need big, structural reform to construct a tent that can welcome in a majority. That won’t come from current leadership. Don’t expect to hear Chuck Schumer talk about how an NRA-endorsed, Willow Pipeline-supporting Blue Dog won a red state. Much less reorient the Democratic Caucus to welcome more like her.

But together we can be that change.

So go to MaryPeltola.com and help make her the first-ever Native American or Alaska Native woman to serve in the United States Senate.

That has not happened at the level required.

But there is good news: candidates continue stepping up to build that winning team, and an exciting data point came out yesterday - WelcomePAC-backed Jamie Ager is trailing by only one point against incumbent Republican Chuck Edwards in NC-11.

Support Jamie Ager Here

Back to 2022, for lessons that still apply today …

Three weeks after the January 6 insurrection, a high-profile faction on the left launched an aggressive recruitment campaign looking for candidates to primary a vulnerable incumbent.

The recruitment target? Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, fresh off casting his vote to impeach President Trump.

The recruiting entity? An offshoot of Justice Democrats, the progressive group aligned with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

That’s right: The founders of Justice Democrats went on the offensive against Manchin—immediately after the insurrection—in an attempt to find a more liberal West Virginia Democrat to primary him.

West Virginia is one of the reddest states in the country, making Manchin an electoral miracle; if the group were to be successful in its effort to oust him with a left-wing primary challenger, that challenger would lose to any GOP nominee in the general. Meaning that these progressives watched the January 6 attack on democracy and decided that what America needed was . . . one more Republican senator.

The net result being that this progressive group had effectively joined forces with the GOP to hobble what could have been a movement of empathetic big-tent Democrats incentivizing red-to-blue party switching.

It’s hard to overstate just how significant an opportunity January 6 initially represented for Democrats: Donald Trump’s anti-democratic movement had, in violent and grotesque fashion, paraded its true colors in front of the nation and the world. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Republican party shed 12 points in favorability among its own voters while Democrats made a 7-point gain with independents. A disgraced Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook, his loudest megaphones. Even some of Trump’s most ardent and vocal propagandists from Fox News acknowledged in private that the president had crossed a serious line. Democrats were handed a chance to win over the middle of the country.

Instead, the biggest recruitment story in the aftermath of the insurrection was the far-left trying to recruit candidates to knock off a fellow Democrat.

Whose job was it to recruit on January 7?

An opposition party with a central command structure could have seized the moment to recruit and make lasting inroads with those conservatives and moderates who no longer recognized the GOP as their own. But “the Democrats” is more of a notional term than a real-world, central coordinating entity in the reality of present-day politics.

This truth is bigger than the old Will Rogers joke “I am not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” There are now organized political sub-parties with distinct brands. They even have their own swag — from MAGA hats to Warren Democrats mugs. In the store run by AOC’s Justice Democrats, you can buy gear that says “Time to Clean House and Senate” which is being sold at a moment when Democrats hold majorities in both.

We live in a political era defined by clear, identifiable factions. We just can’t expect “The Democrats” to be one of them—either as a brand or as an organized allocator of strategic resources that can do things like respond to January 6 with an aggressive recruitment campaign.

That work now falls to entities outside of strict party control. This reality can be leveraged to harm the party—as in the case of Justice Democrats primarying Joe Manchin—or to strengthen it.

So whose job was it to recruit those on the center and center-right who recoiled at the assault on the Capitol?

You can read the full piece in The Bulwark, and support Jamie Ager and the rest of the Win The Middle slate to make it your job to support those recruiting more voters to our side.

Support Jamie Ager Here

To be in “violent agreement” is to have alignment without harmony, to agree on facts but disagree on framing or tone.

In the eight weeks since Deciding to Win was published, critics have often been in violent agreement.

Throwback Throwdown

Legendary pollster Stan Greenberg took to the pages of The American Prospect today with a concisely titled critique: Deciding to Win is both “flawed” and will “help Democrats.”

Greenberg frames his essay as a takedown, and puts the report in context of intra-party debates going back to the 1980s and 1990s (he juxtaposes Bill Clinton’s reading of his work versus that of Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck,credited as inspiration for Deciding to Win, and that he was not called).

But strip away the personal dynamics and ideological throat-clearing, and something else emerges: agreement on the fundamentals. Over and over again.

Let’s go to the tape.

1. Democrats are losing moderates and the middle

Greenberg doesn’t hedge here. He states it plainly:

“The study’s authors are right that Democrats have to address their losses with moderate voters.”

That is the starting premise of Deciding to Win. The party has a persuasion problem, not a turnout problem, and it’s concentrated among moderates and working-class voters.

Greenberg agrees.

2. The Democratic Party is elite-captured and out of touch

This is the heart of Welcome’s longstanding argument, and Greenberg endorses it directly:

“Advocacy groups and academic and foundation elites have shaped a Democratic Party that rarely speaks about the economy, cost of living, and middle class and is deeply out of touch…”

In this context, “People vs. the Powerful” is not a critique of “move to the center”, but a rebranding for the progressive readership of The American Prospect. Which is fine!

It’s not voters dragging the party left. It’s institutions, nonprofits, funders, and professional elites reshaping Democratic priorities in ways ordinary voters do not like.

3. Voters want an economic focus, not identity primacy

Greenberg leans heavily on Deciding to Win’s survey data to make this case:

“Three-quarters or more of voters want Democrats to prioritize ‘protecting Social Security and Medicare,’ ‘lowering everyday costs,’ ‘making health care more affordable,’ and ‘creating jobs and economic growth.’”

He adds:

“Almost two-thirds say ‘cutting taxes on the middle class’ should be a priority. Over half want Democrats to prioritize ‘raising taxes on the wealthy.’”

That’s not triangulation, that is exactly what the report calls for.

4. The party is seen as ‘too liberal’, and that’s unsustainable

Again, full agreement:

“More people view Democrats as ‘too liberal’ than view Trump Republicans as ‘too conservative.’ That is not sustainable.”

You can dislike the framing. You can debate the implications. But you can’t dispute the problem, and Greenberg doesn’t.

5. Crime, immigration, gender, and America matter electorally

Greenberg restates one of the report’s most uncomfortable conclusions almost verbatim:

“You cannot win this electoral battle for the middle class if so many voters view your party as out of touch on crime, immigration, gender, and America being exceptional.”

That sentence could be lifted directly into Deciding to Win without editing.

6. The platform analysis is valid, and damning

Greenberg explicitly endorses one of the report’s most discussed methods:

“The Deciding to Win analysis of words used in the 2012 and 2024 Democratic Party platforms is a reasonable way to look at shifting national Democratic priorities.”

He then accepts the conclusion: less economy, less middle class, less responsibility—more identity, more abstraction, more elite language.

7. Biden damaged the Democratic brand

Another point of convergence:

“The report highlights Joe Biden’s historic unpopularity and impact on the party’s brand.”

No footnotes. No caveats.

So what’s the disagreement?

Not the diagnosis.

Greenberg agrees that Democrats:

• Are losing moderates

• Are out of touch

• Talk too little about the economy

• Are overly shaped by elite institutions

• Struggle on crime, immigration, and culture

• Need to fight for the middle class

The disagreement is about framing, not facts. Greenberg has been influential in the party longer than any of the report’s authors have been alive, and is known as a savvy operator. This is a classic case of “credibility transfer”. Greenberg is preemptively disparaging the source’s credibility before presenting a fact that comes from that source, specifically because the audience will reject the fact if they think it’s coming from “them.” (“Them” being Welcome centrists).

At one point, Greenberg sneers:

“Do these data rats ever get out of the basement and see that there is a worsening climate crisis?

We’ll own that one. Greenberg’s DC-based firm is entering its 46th year. No one on the Welcome team lives in DC. We are on the youth soccer sidelines, at the block parties, in the bars, and in the pews with the rest of the scurrying voters in this country who want Democrats in DC to listen. We are in the data, but also in red districts around the country listening to the voters, so Win The Middle slate candidates can represent them. And win.

This dynamic in the Texas Senate race is dominating headlines today, but it has been just one week since the special election in Tennessee.

Last week, I talked to Shane Goldmacher for a story in The New York Times about this paradox:

“It is healthy for the party to have a clear experiment of, ‘Can you get over the hump in a red district running a Brooklyn-style campaign?’” said Liam Kerr, a co-founder of Welcome PAC, a group that promotes centrist Democrats.

“She was the dream candidate — for both the online left and for Republicans, as so often happens,” Mr. Kerr said of Ms. Behn. “She is exactly who the online left wants to be the face of the Democratic Party and who Republicans wanted to be the face of the Democratic Party.”

The 13-point swing toward Democrats was actually the smallest of the five congressional special elections that were held this year outside a major election day.

Multiple Republican operatives said the party would have stronger chances in 2026 if Democrats — who are facing a large number of primaries — nominate more candidates that can be more easily caricatured.

“We need Democrats to continue to be crazy, to say crazy things and be for crazy things,” said Corry Bliss, a veteran Republican strategist who guided the party’s leading House super PAC during the 2018 midterm elections. “It helps to provide a contrast.”

Instead of persuading voters to support a candidate with moderate positions in a localized race, Democrats focused on juicing turnout for a leftist. But what excites Democratic primary voters also excites Republican ad buyers, who were quick to seize on comments Behn made about policing and support for radical policies. Behn was explicit that her campaign was focused on mobilizing “disenchanted” voters rather than persuading, and she invited Harris to campaign with her.

When Democrats lose, it’s normally best to avoid saying “The Democrats” because the party is a loose constellation of entities, not one coherent organization executing a strategic plan. But in this case, the literal Chair of the DNC said the focus was on turnout, formal party entities invested millions, there were rallies with AOC and Kamala Harris, and the candidate hit the sour spot of “willing to go on MSNBC but unwilling to answer their question about past support for defunding police.”

But this is not Aftyn Behn’s fault, or Kamala Harris’s fault, or even the fault of the formal Democratic Party entities who waded into the race.

Centrists just need to try harder to win tough races.

At some point it’s our fault

One nice thing about being a startup - and about being an outsider - is that you can critique the establishment with all your brilliant fresh ideas. Four years to the day before the TN-07 special election, WelcomePAC made its first media appearance with an interview in Slate titled How a Centrist Is Completely Rethinking How to Get Independents to Vote for Democrats.

Kanter’s Law posits “everything can look like a failure in the middle” of a new endeavor. After the excitement wears off, you enter the “messy middle” and must persevere with flexibility, adapting, and remaining focused on the long-term goal.

After a burst of energy from Bernie Sanders’ 2016 run through the 2020 presidential primary, the far-left peaked then descended. Justice Democrats started recycling candidates, Our Revolution floundered, and founders left for other startups which have mostly failed to break through.

Centrist political entrepreneurs need to avoid the same fate.

In the four years since we were “completely rethinking” how to win red districts, Welcome has grown to a team of nine and has invested more than $18,000,000 towards that mission. Excitingly, we are joined by a burst of partisan centrist entrepreneurship tackling similar problems, with new entrants like the heterodox think tank Searchlight and elected official collaboration Majority Democrats, and innovative incumbent investments like PPI’s stewardship of the grassroots Center for New Liberalism and Third Way’s Moderate Venture Fund.

Growth is exciting. It also comes with responsibility.

Why no centrist nominee in Tennessee?

Welcome conducted due diligence on the TN-07 race back in June, when GOP Rep. Mark Green’s resignation triggered a special election.

Secondary source data, like election results and demographics, made it clear there was potential volatility that could be harnessed for a shock upset. Favorable macro conditions made it possible, with Trump favorability and other special election results putting a Trump +22 district firmly in play. Three months earlier, Trump withdrew the UN nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik due to concerns over losing a similar district.

Our investment thesis required us to consider what level of candidate differentiation would be required. And based on all case studies (and common sense!) we thought it was a lot. The last two special election surprises, Conor Lamb and Mary Peltola, both took conservative positions on guns and energy production. You have to go back to 2008 to find similar upsets, with winners in Louisiana and Mississippi touting conservative positions on guns, abortion, and illegal immigration.

A “moderate Democrat” wouldn’t be enough. We’d need a conservative Democrat, or at least a Democrat who held enough conservative positions to reflect the opinions of voters.

Which brought us to our primary research. We engaged partners to get an on-the-ground understanding of the potential candidates. Our due diligence process in the potential special election in Stefanik’s district yielded a candidate we thought could win and hold the seat.

But not so in Tennessee. After much internal deliberation, we could not justify the significant investment it would take to impact the primary enough to make the race winnable.

That may have been the wrong call.

A Muscle, Not a Battery

One of our favorite lines is from Elizabeth Warren. At a 2017 college event, she was asked about the political infeasibility of proposed battles like student debt cancellation. Warren replied:

“Getting into these fights is not like draining a battery. It’s like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets.”

Over the past decade, progressive entrepreneurs spotted upside in everything, building a community through line from campaign to campaign.

There are no total losses when every conflict yields assets that carry over into the next round. Leftists leveraged their fights to build power and connective tissue, jumping into issues with an energy that drove progressive narratives and built community.

Centrists have typically approached fights the way WelcomePAC’s due diligence process did: a rational exercise in understanding the opportunity cost of a certain investment. More like strategically nursing an iPhone battery at 8% than building muscles.

This venture approach to electoral politics has identified overperformers at a higher clip than any other major Democratic (or Republican) entity over the past four years (as The Argument’s Lakshya Jain showed).

But we don’t need better bar charts. For a commonsense Democratic Party to win consistently, the centrist community needs to try harder to win races in a way that builds muscle.

Missing Muscle

While we give progressive entrepreneurs a ton of credit for moving the party so far left, there is a hidden reason driving the dearth of centrist power: the would-be leaders lost their races in 2010 and 2014. Why don’t Democrats contest right-leaning voters, districts, and states more aggressively?

Stefan Smith has a compelling thesis that we have a “missing generation of campaign operative and political staffers who should be in powerful positions in the party right now but their members were defeated in wave elections in 2010 and 2014. If it feels like the people in charge aren’t up for this moment, it’s because they’re largely the staff of safe district Democrats who survived that moment. And that has some benefits, but it’s also a filter for a certain type of politics.”

In 2010 alone, Democrats lost 6 governorships, 6 Senate seats, 63 House seats, and more than 680 state legislative seats. That is thousands of elected officials, chiefs of staff, communications directors, policy directors, legislative aides, and field organizers.

And it is not a random sampling of talent: these staffers were, by definition, engaging the realities of swing districts at every level.

Red waves in 2010 and 2014 didn’t just cost seats, it decimated the ecosystem of operatives and junior staff who should, by now, be in senior strategic positions. Survivor bias is rampant: operatives who did succeed in that era were “disproportionately clustered in safe districts, and built their political instincts in low-risk environments. That’s who got promoted. So now, the dominant strategic class was filtered by structural insulation … the problem isn’t just who’s missing, it’s what mindsets, urgencies, and adaptive instincts were never formed.”

Now we need to do the opposite.

In the debates following the Tennessee special election, the founder of Run For Something said the “reply guys” arguing Democrats need to get in the game: “Got a theory of the case? Recruit the candidates & prove it or shut the fuck up.”

She’s right. In a very real way, it doesn’t matter that centrists have the facts. Organizing beats debating. Centrists need to try harder to win tough races1, even if it is tougher in the middle. It is the best way to build muscle, and we’ll need some big muscles to win.

That is surely the case in Tennessee’s 7th congressional district, where Democratic Socialist state legislator Aftyn Behn just lost a high-profile race in a district Donald Trump won by 22 points.

Behn focused on affordability, but Republicans focused on her past calls for abolishing the police and video of her stating “I am a radical.” Media amplified her leftist background - and even on the friendly confines of MSNBC Behn did not walk back or condemn her past approval of burning down a police station.

With Democrats in 2025 special elections running an average of more than 20 points ahead of presidential margin, the seat was squarely in play. As recently as 2018, this district was deadlocked in the ticket-topping Senate race, and national Democrats put millions into making sure it was competitive.

Progressive Behn endorsers like AOC1 and far-left groups like DSA, Justice Democrats, and Our Revolution had never flipped a seat from red-to-blue. Breaking that streak in such a red seat would have demonstrated new possibilities.

As wrote in The Bulwark, “her success (or failure) is going to be closely studied for which voters are activated and why.”

Turn Out For What

Few strategic debates roil the Democratic Party like polarizing an election by appealing to an ideological base. And Egan shows that is explicitly what Democrats are pitching here:

Democrats in the state insist that a base-turnout strategy could work. In my conversation with (DNC Chair Ken) Martin, he stated plainly that the race was “not about persuading voters, it’s about turning them out.” And at a canvass launch I attended last week, organizers for the Behn campaign told volunteers that they would be knocking only on the doors of Democratic voters and likely wouldn’t encounter any Republicans.

In the past twenty years, Democrats have flipped four seats of R+15 or more. All of the Democrats who flipped these seats held at least some conservative positions, and explicitly sought to persuade voters instead of just firing up the base.

In 2022, Alaska’s ranked choice voting system shows that 29% of voters whose first choice was Republican Nick Begich ranked Blue Dog Democrat Mary Peltola second over the other GOP candidate.

In 2018, an R+22 seat in Pennsylvania flipped after headlines like this one:

Since then, it has become widely accepted that Democrats have gone from being the party of sporadic voters to the party of high-propensity voters.

Persuasion Matters

Still, our hypothesis is that the “instead of persuading voters just go left to fire up the base” strategy does not work. As noted in Deciding to Win, the effects of changes in how people vote (persuasion) and the effects of changes in which people vote (turnout) tend to point in the same direction—but the effects of persuasion are usually larger.

But hey, we’re always learning. And this live case study holds more lessons than just these basics:

1. reminding us Democrats can’t just “focus on affordability” because elections occur in a dynamic environment where Republicans & media can inject other issues

2. being on tape stating radical positions will end up in TV attack ads from Republicans during every NFL commercial … so if you think that past radical positions aren’t a problem, take it up with whoever does the GOP ad testing

3. affirming persuasion is essential to winning in red districts and, ya know, democracy

One additional lesson to note is considering the negative externalities of campaigns like this. Back to Egan:

Local Democratic officials whom I spoke with last week are increasingly bullish about a good showing in the election. But in typical party fashion, they also said that they worry some of their colleagues in the state will take the wrong lesson from a close race—that the best way to regain power is to amp up their economic populism to overcome their progressive cultural views, rather than running old-school Blue Dog Democrats in the mold of former Rep. Cooper.

“If Aftyn comes within 10 points, I absolutely think most Democrats in Tennessee will see this as ammunition to run further to the left in all races,” said a local elected official.

Like Republicans in Massachusetts, red state Democrats can get pulled into a reinforcing cycle of irrelevance and extremism. When the social media clicks and national dollars move on from Nashville next week, the remnants of a left-wing campaign will remain.

And on that front, learning from these case studies has its limits. We will never really win the argument within the party until we out-organize them.

Don’t Wanna Know

Besides Mary Peltola and Conor Lamb, the only other two Democrats to flip seats at least 15 points Republican-leaning were from 2008. Progressives did a good job looking the other way for Lamb and Peltola’s conservative stances on issues like climate, energy and guns so we are putting the messages from those Democrats behind a paywall to make it easier to look away.

Read more

There is one piece of research nugget about that topic worth pondering, though. Turns out that the surest way to avoid a political argument at Thanksgiving is … traffic.

Distance traveled for Thanksgiving is negatively correlated with familial political disagreements, which means that people who travel the longest for Thanksgiving fight the least.

Sacrifice has a way of sharpening priorities.

Travel time serves as a reminder of what’s important. Those hours in traffic or pulling your laptop out at a TSA line primes you to savor time with family more than partisan point-scoring.

A similar dynamic is at work in Congress. Those who sacrificed the most to get there seem most focused on getting the most important things done.

What is Jared Golden worth?

We have been asking that question for four years as a thought experiment to understand how to get more Democrats in Trump districts.

Dollars are what we had in mind: Figure out how much it’s worth to have a candidate who holds a district Trump wins (by ten points, in Golden’s case) and you know what you’d be willing to invest for a program that delivers a 10% greater chance of yielding one.

In 2022’s Are Democrats Conceding Democracy, we asked if Democrats were giving up in the “Golden Zone:”

These slightly-red districts — salmon or light coral colored on the partisan rainbow — are important because Democrats like Jared Golden (ME-02) have proven them winnable by building independent brands that appeal to center-right swing voters. With the right candidates and resources, Democrats can win in the “Golden Zone”: districts where Trump got less than 54% and Jared Golden-level over-performance would deliver a win.

As years pass, we have made progress in answering that question to understand how Democrats can stretch the map.

But a more basic question looms.

What is it worth to Jared Golden?

Golden’s resignation op-ed is worth reading in full, via The Bangor Daily News. The most consistent winner of the past decade saw the rising cost of winning:

I don’t fear losing. What has become apparent to me is that I now dread the prospect of winning. Simply put, what I could accomplish in this increasingly unproductive Congress pales in comparison to what I could do in that time as a husband, a father and a son.

To get more Jared Goldens, people like Jared Golden - selfless, humble public servants with their priorities in order - need to view the sacrifice as worth it. And things are trending in the opposite direction.

Back to Golden:

Whoever wins will have a tough road ahead. I have spent almost eight years in Congress opposing the forces of polarization. This is critical to fair leadership in a district like Maine’s 2nd, where robust ideological diversity requires elected officials who are willing to represent the district as it truly exists — not as their party’s most vocal extremes might wish it did.

It’s also a moral imperative, because polarization tends to move in only one direction …

I fear Democrats are going down the same path. We’re allowing the most extreme, pugilistic elements of our party to call the shots. Just look again at the shutdown. For as long as I can remember, we have opposed shutting down the government over policy disputes. We criticized Republicans for taking hostages this way. But this year, reeling from the losses of the last election, too many Democrats have given into demands that we use the same no-holds barred, obstructionary tactics as the GOP.

All of this is a symptom of the larger challenge of our political culture, where social media algorithms fuel division and turn it into corporate profits; public figures weaponize our disagreements and vilify their fellow Americans; and gerrymandered districts leave most politicians more beholden to their out-of-touch base than to the average family.

Luckily, while powerful special interests are pushing us further apart, most Americans are not hyperpartisans. In this district, as competitive as it is, it remains true that most people are neither diehard right-wingers or resistance progressives.

Running for office in a swing district is far more costly to human beings than coasting to re-election in a safe seat. That is true not only for the candidate but for their family and staff. The most wrenching part of Golden’s op-ed is a reminder that his family spent last Thanksgiving in a hotel after a death threat.

I still believe, perhaps more than ever, that politics can be a positive force. But having devoted decades of my life to service, I look forward to my next chapter: raising my young daughters with Izzy — who has shouldered more than her fair share of caring for our family and our home for years — and spending more time with our family and friends.

Thanks, Jared

Days after Jared’s announcement, his roommate Rep. Jake Auchincloss took to The Boston Globe to shake his fellow Democrats to understand why this was such a big deal:

It’s the right decision for him and his family, but it’s a loss for Congress and the country. Democrats should be seeking out more candidates like Jared to run for office at all levels. His emotional connection to disengaged voters, his authentic approach, and, most of all, his willingness to buck party orthodoxy make him a model for Democrats in districts that the party needs to win back.

But that requires Democratic activists and elites to stop deriding his Blue Dog approach. Blue Dogs are Democrats who tend to be debt and defense hawks, social moderates, and, increasingly, economic populists. There are few in Congress. But they win.

Like spending more time in traffic for a healthier family holiday, these candidates who win in Trump districts behold a counterintuitive truth. Candidates with the right priorities and willingness to sacrifice are appealing enough to voters to win, but those same attributes make public service less alluring in an era of toxic polarization.

So what is Jared Golden worth?

As a candidate, hundreds of millions of dollars.

As an exemplar and wakeup call, he’s priceless.

The system must change, and, for that, Jared Golden is both a model and a motivator.

I hope the Goldens had a much better Thanksgiving this year.

And hope the distance we’re willing to travel — in politics and in life — extends far enough to give us the right priorities. And to get us back in the Golden Zone.

In NYC tomorrow afternoon, Wednesday Nov 12? Give a shout for conversation and a beverage!

A left-right pincer movement has New York’s 3rd congressional district, stretching from New York City eastward into Long Island, getting pulled in opposite directions.

The national news out of New York was that a Democratic Socialist won the mayoralty. But here was the local news:

Nassau County Republicans romped at the polls Tuesday partly because a strategy to tie local Democrats to Zohran Mamdani “clearly worked” because his socialist agenda has “no allure in the suburbs,” insiders claimed.

Mamdani’s progressive policies fueled his victory in the city Tuesday as Democratic candidates won in high-profile races in New Jersey and elsewhere

Last year, 209 congressional districts voted for Donald Trump by at least 5%. Democrats won just 5 of those 209.

One of those 5 was NY-3, and the reason is Tom Suozzi.

Suozzi has also been elected to Congress five times, building a track record and earning a reputation for getting things done. His electoral success is due in part to his willingness to buck his own party when necessary. During the special election in February 2024, following the expulsion of George Santos, Rep. Suozzi went on offense and took the issue of immigration head-on instead of pivoting, ignoring it, or downplaying the matter.

Consultants told him immigration was a “Republican issue,” but Suozzi knew this was a real issue Democrats must address head-on. Being grounded in his community and principles gave him the wisdom to ignore that advice.

While other Democrats tip-toed around the issue throughout the 2024 election cycle, Suozzi called for investments in border security and criticized Republicans for scuttling bipartisan border security legislation. That message resonated, and the voters of NY-3 sent Suozzi back to Congress with a four-point victory.

If five more candidates listened to him, Democrats would have won the House.

Earlier this week, Suozzi shared important lessons on the path forward in Newsday:

Redefine the Democratic Party, Return to Our Roots

Democrats celebrated major victories nationally this week, yet we lost in my own congressional district, a diverse area that includes a small part of New York City and Long Island.

I represent a swing district. In 2024, my constituents chose both me, a Democrat, and President Donald Trump. Voters here, like many across America, care less about party and more about who will make life affordable, safe and fair.

If Democrats want to keep winning in purple areas in 2026 and beyond, they need to address people’s real concerns. Leaders like Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, Zohran Mamdani and even Trump in 2024 spoke to the central issue people face: affordability.

Governors-elect Spanberger and Sherrill offered pragmatic solutions. While Mamdani and Trump also tapped into real frustration about economic insecurity and political alienation, their extreme populism, be it socialist or MAGA, offers the wrong answers. Both promise simple cures: Tear down the system and punish the elites.

But tearing down is easy. Building something takes real work.

To sustain our momentum, Democrats must put forward a positive platform that works in liberal strongholds like New York City, but also in other cities, suburbs and rural communities. That platform should stand on the principles that built our party: government must ensure hard work is rewarded and no one is left out of our journey toward a more perfect union. America has enjoyed extraordinary growth and prosperity. That success should be applauded, yet too many have been left out of the deal.

Populism is rising because Americans are disillusioned. It’s easy to see why. Polls show top concerns are affordability, immigration, taxes, crime and health care. When asked what Democrats stand for, the same polls cite choice, LGBT protections, health care, saving democracy and climate change. While these issues are important, they are not what most Americans worry about daily.

Republicans, too, are failing. Reckless tariffs, rolled-back energy projects, high health care costs, and spiraling interest rates from the “Big Beautiful Bill” have driven up prices.

If Democrats don’t return to our roots, populists from both extremes will keep filling the void. We urgently need to redefine mainstream Democratic principles: we are capitalist, not socialist; mainstream, not extreme; for safety, not lawlessness; for reform, not the status quo; proud, not ashamed of our country.

Our middle-class platform is built around five main points:

Reward hard work with higher wages, employee profit sharing, and expanded trade schools and entrepreneurial incentives. Capitalism must work for everyone, and the excess of concentrated wealth must be tempered with fairness. A full-time job should enable a person to own a home, educate their kids, pay for health care and retire without fear. Policy must favor workers.

Drive down the cost of living. Let Medicare and Medicaid negotiate with Big Pharma for lower prices. Break up monopolies that gouge consumers. Expand affordable housing, childcare and health care. Lower energy and housing costs by increasing supply to meet demand. Help relieve medical debt.

Support secure borders, safe neighborhoods and the rule of law, guided by economic interests and moral principles, not masked agents creating chaos.

We must confront isolation. From teens lost in screens to seniors living alone, we face an epidemic of loneliness, depression and addiction. We must hold digital platforms accountable for addictive and destructive content while rebuilding civic institutions, patriotism and shared national pride.

Lastly, let’s reform government. Government must earn back trust by confronting inefficiency, waste, and debt — using a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. We need less gerrymandering, which currently forces officials to pander to their political bases.

If Democrats hope to lead a restless nation, we must lay out a clear platform rooted in a commitment to the middle class and those aspiring to it, based on the ideals of our party’s past, yet envisioned for a new age. We must fight for those who work hard, raise families and build communities. To strengthen our country and restore faith in its promise, those I call New Kinds of Old-Fashioned Democrats must lead the way.

Learn more about Rep. Tom Suozzi here