Midterm Pre-Mortem CliffsNotes
Exploding political spending, a volatile electorate driving uncertainty, and big-tent Democrats overcoming the toxic party brand. Here's the macro picture as we work until the California polls close.
For the last 50 weeks, this Substack has allowed our team to reflect on our work in the context of broader trends. As we play through the whistle on election day, here is our pre-mortem outline on WelcomePAC races, Democrats nationally, and on the political marketplace:
Our macro forecast has been correct on spending, volatility, and underinvestment:
Spending continues to skyrocket, up more than 3x the last midterm, to $17 billion.
The electorate is volatile, with Cook Political Report noting “there are just a lot of really close races this year — with higher uncertainty than past cycles.”
Democrats are underinvesting in the center-right districts required for a majority, with less than one third of one percent of that $17B in political spending going towards Democrats in Lean/Likely GOP seats down the stretch.
For Democrats, two major problems persist:
The Democratic brand stinks
Too few Democrats accept that reality and act like change is needed (or act like they really believe democracy is at stake)
We partnered with Third Way on a pre-election poll with Impact Research, and their memo sums up the situation:
Yes, Democratic candidates who succeed in the midterms will be those who distinguished themselves as mainstream. They will win in spite of the party’s brand, not because of it. How can that change?
The steps towards changing that are straightforward (and will be fun to implement!):
Listen to the people who actually tried to win.
Organize the pragmatists into a stronger, more distinct faction to win the middle. “The Democrats” cannot and will not do it.
Strengthening a center-left faction does not mean cookie-cutter, milquetoast politicians – as Lis Smith wrote this weekend in the New York Times, “there is no one way, no right way to be a Democrat.” But there are certainly wrong paths. And the problems are big: The Democratic brand stinks — and too few Democrats accept that reality.
In the meantime, we are back to texting voters to get out on behalf of candidates like former Schwarzenegger aide Will Rollins. In an interview over the weekend, Will called for “a new generation of moderates”:
More on why that is so badly needed below — and much more to come after results are known.
1. The Democratic brand has gone toxic.
Tl;DR: The far-left brand has tarnished the Democratic Party’s image, giving voters the damaging impression that the party is out of touch and almost as extreme as Donald Trump’s radicalized GOP.
WelcomePAC partnered with Third Way and Impact Research to conduct a poll of 800 likely voters, with an oversample of 200 swing voters. The findings, released today, are bleak: Democrats are out of touch with voters when it comes to issues, ideology, and core values.
This is especially true of the swing voters who decide close elections. The poll found:
Democrats get low marks on the issues that matter most to voters. Inflation and the economy is voters’ top issue by a massive margin. Their #2 issue? Immigration and the border. Unfortunately for Democrats, voters overwhelmingly trust Republicans on these top issues of concern. While voters give Democrats high marks on other issues, they are not nearly as focused on those issues as priorities.
Few data points capture the Democratic conundrum like education: independent voters give Democrats a 25-point edge on “funding education.” But they favor Republicans by 28-points on “improving education.”
Just 1% of white liberals are strongly opposed to the student debt relief package. Persuadable voters? 57% opposed.
Voters also see Democrats as being ideologically extreme — and view the GOP as closer to their own ideology. While voters also believe the GOP has grown more extreme, they are inclined to view Democrats as being nearly as extreme, limiting the efficacy of “Republicans are radicals” appeals and messages. And voters place themselves closer ideologically to Republicans than to Democrats.
2. Democrats haven’t accepted these inconvenient truths —or acted like it.
In his famous “Serenity Prayer,” President Obama’s favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, asked God for “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Democrats will need that serenity, courage, and wisdom if they are going to defeat the Trumpist onslaught before it's too late.
The party’s far-left, out-of-the-mainstream public perception is causing it to hemorrhage support from the rainbow coalition that has historically formed its base. As Ruy Teixeira put it in The Atlantic over the weekend:
“America’s historical party of the working class keeps losing working-class support. And not just among white voters. Not only has the emerging Democratic majority I once predicted failed to materialize, but many of the nonwhite voters who were supposed to deliver it are instead voting for Republicans.”
As we wrote in NBC THINK almost two years ago, the far-left is “whiter, richer and more educated” than everyone else in the Democratic coalition — and is at serious risk of alienating them.
But a consistent refrain among the activist wing of the Democratic Party is the denial that the far-left brand cost Democrats in 2020 (it did) and an uncritical reliance on the mythical power of turnout as an alternative to having to actually persuade swing voters (they’re wrong).
As Matt Yglesias has noted, Democrats are not actually “acting like they believe the future of democracy is at stake.” This is often for fear of alienating the same far-left leaders and advocacy groups who shifted the party brand in the first place.
3. Democrats should listen to the data and the candidates who tried to win — and ignore those who did not.
Given how high the stakes are, Democrats cannot afford a misinterpretation of the 2022 midterms. In order to discern the best path forward for winning swing races and saving our democracy, Democrats should look at the historical record, follow polling, and learn from those who made efforts to win the middle.
The results of the last few election cycles show very clearly that mainstream, pragmatic candidates outperform extremists. As Third Way pointed out in its post-mortem of 2018’s “blue wave”, moderate, New Democrat-endorsed candidates won 79% of all red-to-blue seats that year, while the far-left groups Justice Democrats and Our Revolution didn’t win a single one. In fact, those groups have never flipped a single swing seat — ever. The sole Justice Democrats-backed candidate to run in a swing district, Kara Eastman, underperformed Joe Biden by 12 points in 2020 and lost in a district that he won handily on the same ballot.
On the polling front, our survey with Third Way and Impact Research is only the latest in a string of proof points that the Democratic brand is underwater with voters (especially swing voters). Anyone who has worked on a swing race in recent months can tell you this. Anyone who has puzzled over why Democrats lost seats in the House and underperformed expectations in the Senate while winning the presidency in 2020 understands this. Anyone who has followed the San Francisco DA recall or the Oregon Governor’s race (in which “a pro-life, pro-gun rights Republican best known for fighting a state climate-change bill” is neck and neck with the Democratic nominee) knows it.
Finally, when it comes to who we should listen to as to what went right and wrong in the midterms, let’s listen to the Democrats who went out and actually tried to win swing districts and states. Joe Biden won AOC’s deep-blue Queens district with more than 73% of the vote in 2020. There’s no reason the media should be asking her to opine about why swing district Democrats won or lost this fall. Instead of the far-left, Democrats should be learning their lessons and taking their cues from those who run ahead in the districts required to win a majority.
4. “The Democrats” cannot do this. Organized moderates must.
There’s no such thing as “The Democrats, Inc.” with a CEO or board of directors who can snap their fingers and order a party-wide rebrand. “The Democratic Party” is little more than a loose-knit ecosystem of candidates, committees, activists, and interest groups.
This means that repairing the Democratic Brand must happen at the level of intra-party factions. The far-left owes much of its success in changing the brand of the Democratic Party to the fact that a savvy group of political entrepreneurs built a coherent and well-organized faction. Moderates should take a page out of the same playbook and organize to win the middle.
Pro-democracy centrists, moderate Democrats, and empathetic pragmatists of all stripes must roll up their sleeves and organize. It will take an independently-branded moderate faction to change the brand of the party and offer voters a genuinely mainstream alternative to the radical right.
Our Learnings
These Substack reflections are driven by experiences engaging independent voters, supporting big-tent Democrats, and elevating party-switchers and ticket-splitters in swing races across the country.
Victories tonight will be driven by volatility — voters demonstrating the reality that there is a winnable middle and candidates showing that investing in brand-differentiation and outreach to the middle can make the difference.
Losses will be impacted not only by the party’s brand, but by disinvestment and shortcomings — as a party, but also for WelcomePAC in this first cycle — in communicating that differentiation to voters.
Center-right voters may “go home” to the GOP column tonight for any number of reasons, but many still feel politically homeless. There remains much learning (and even more work) to build a more welcoming big-tent in the only party that can save democracy.
Thanks for reading,
The Welcome Party & WelcomePAC Team
Great analysis. Agree with every word. We all know this. But the main question is "WHY" - why are the democrats so out of touch, why don't they run to win, why? I think we miss the cause too often - and that's the grift inside of the dem fundraising/consultant industry. When we lose, we don't change tactics or change horses - we stay with the same people running the same losing efforts . . . why?