1,000 Days

South Carolina's presidential primary is the clearest battle for The Groups vs Combative Centrists

There are thousands of skirmishes over the future of the Democratic Party. But parties are defined by presidential nominations more than anything else, and we are 1,000 days from the clearest foreseeable defining point.

If the DNC defaults to the same presidential primary calendar for 2028 that it used last year, South Carolina will go first.

Last time, SC held the primary on the first Saturday in February. That would make February 5, 2028 the first primary, with polls closing at 7 p.m. EST.

Which gives us exactly 1,000 days to put our spades in the ground to shift the path toward more wins.

That nice round number - and my first day back from three weeks of paternity leave - provided some healthy motivation to put the day-to-day into context.

Because those skirmishes are important when they build to something bigger.

That’s why our work focused on congressional districts is done in the context of our view that “Organizing Beats Debating,” and going to Centrist School to learn the most applicable lessons from the stunning rise (and fall) of the progressive left over the past decade.

Democrats focused on winning cannot simply copy a playbook from “The Groups” on the left. But there are instructive lessons for groups focused on winning.

Welcome got our start in the 2020 South Carolina primary, and a recent piece from

Stef Feldman

is a must-read as we consider how to spend the 1,000 days before the next one. The lengthy title sums up her credibility: I was Biden's national policy director for his winning 2020 presidential campaign. Here's my advice for 2026 and 2028 Democratic candidates navigating "the groups" and hot-button social issues.

Feldman focuses on five lessons, many of which we’ve observed from studying and supporting over-performing candidates, including mapping policies to your values, leaning into candidate quirks, and saying no to groups if you disagree¹.

Here are some key excerpts, and read the whole thing here:

Compared to the rest of the field, Biden was generally more centrist. We stuck with his centrist positions despite the fact that most of the Democratic primary candidates tried to chase Sanders to the left…

Candidates who don’t know why they are running and what they are willing to lose over can get overwhelmed by message testing and advice from political advisors. These candidates are ultimately swayed by the loudest voices. The loudest voices probably do not represent the candidate or the American electorate. You need to know your values before you enter the race and don’t lose sight of them.

—

We’ve now arrived at the portion of this post where we finally get to talk about the infamous American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) questionnaire that the organization asked Democratic presidential candidates to complete in 2019. I received the questionnaire at the Biden campaign, read it, and decided that we did not need to fill it out. Biden’s answer was “no” to a lot of the questions. I firmly believed he should stick with his views (see lesson 1 and 4 above). We could have returned the questionnaire with a bunch of “no” answers, but we did not see much value in doing so.

Fast forward a couple of months and some of the political team on the Biden campaign learned that the ACLU was sending out mail to South Carolina voters about the fact that he had not responded to the questionnaire. My campaign colleagues asked me why we had not responded. The senior advisors thought my explanation made sense.

During the general election, the ACLU made another attempt at securing a response from Biden. Some advisors from other presidential campaigns had joined the Biden team at this point. They strongly pushed for Biden to fill out the questionnaire. I maintained that his answers were “no,” we were not going to and should not try to change his answers, and we had nothing to gain from submitting the questionnaire. We never did submit it.

The words that jump out here are “Some advisors from other presidential campaigns had joined the Biden team at this point.”

Biden was winning with Feldman’s strategy, but too often in Democratic politics, the losers get the final word. As

Lauren Harper Pope

has noted, The Revolution Failed Up.

Bernie & Co. still have not flipped a single red state blue. But they did build a dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem, putting the Elizabeth Warren Rule in practice: organizing is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets.²

999 days in the gym ahead.

1. Getting to No

2. As noted in Combative Centrism Comes For Chuck, centrist too often view conflict like a battery - using it drains power. Progressives show that it is more like a muscle.