Taking on the Biggest Challenge in American Politics

The pro-democracy majority has been losing the imagination battle. Way to Win is fighting on the battlegrounds of media and persuasion and starting to turn this around.

Sep 05, 2025

Despite the convenience of this narrative to those who benefit from and would like to maintain the status quo, the electoral dysfunction of the pro-democracy coalition is not a consequence of an unreasonable left making demands of Democrats. The actual challenges are twofold:

First, voters have a perception—one that is entirely understandable and not entirely incorrect—that Democrats have failed in their one job: keeping the right wing from using division and fear (and more recently, full-blown white nationalism and authoritarianism) to take all our money.

The second problem is that since right-wing austerity and market fundamentalist ideas stink and have terrible outcomes -- and when stated plainly, nearly everyone outside of the very, very rich hates them -- the right has poured money and effort into persuasion and media. This was their only option. They’ve been at this for decades and the advantages are cumulative, and lately these cumulative advantages have collided catastrophically with technology driven fragmentation of the media lanndscape. The big problem in 2024 wasn’t the details of what kind of health care for prisoners Harris supported: it was that right-wing media dominance let them plug her answer into a larger false narrative — the big lie of 2024, that Democrats had done nothing to help ordinary Americans — and turn it into a decisive issue for a national election.

The top fraction of a percent of the rich have taken $79T from the rest of America over the past few decades, according to the recently updated 2025 RAND Corp study, Measuring the Income Gap from 1975 to 2023. The billions they’ve collectively poured into right-wing infrastructure seem like outrageous, overwhelming sums. To them, it’s couch cushion change.

And while Democrats don’t need to match spending 1:1 or anything like it to push back on terrible right-wing candidates and ideas (c.f. Zohran Mamdani’s primary win despite getting outspent 16:1 by Cuomo aligned independent expenditures), there’s a big obstacle to vigorous opposition to the right-wing project: the tensions between the DC insider and Democratic Party factions and establishments and left movements. These tensions range from uneasy and unstable truces to, at times, outright mutual hostility. Movement organizations and leaders feel like their job is to push candidates and officeholders on issues, while conversely, Democrats feel like those issues make them unelectable, or at least make it harder to raise the amounts of money they believe they need to be competitive.

But in cycles where movement and electoral vectors align, i.e., Black Lives Matter and Biden in 2020, or Iraq war opposition and Obama in 2008, Democrats do better. When the vectors are at odds, i.e., Kerry and the Iraq war in 2004, and Gaza and Biden/Harris twenty years later, Democratic electoral outcomes tend to go worse.

To try to address the root causes of these assorted hot messes, Way to Win’s strategy has been to move resources to groups building real political and electoral power in states, and to look for leverage points to help the broader Democratic family close the gap in media and persuasion. The entire Way to Win team, with leadership from President Tory Gavito and Chief Strategy Officer Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, has analyzed these leverage points, designed programs to attack them, and fundraised to execute the plans. One of those leverage points is around storytelling and imagination, something that has been sadly lacking from left, Democratic Party and Dem aligned media. The four short storytelling-based “tentpole” viral videos below are one part of our strategy to attack this problem.

Emotion is at the heart of effective storytelling, organizing, and persuasion. All of these went viral to varying degrees; Fight Different less so, but Freedom for All went viral with 1M+ views on two separate occasions). And we ran both a 60-second edit of What’s Possible and Every Vote Counts with small paid buys in 2020. But the true objective for these is simply to shift thinking. It’s roughly impossible to quantify and measure, but we know it when we see it, like when Chris Hayes did a segment on his show a few days after he had shared What’s Possible that echoed some of the themes.

Turing around the rock-bottom, historic Dem party approval is going to take enormous effort from many quarters. “Moderating on cultural issues” does not work and won’t fix the much larger perceptual, substantive and media environment issues the coalition faces. (Nor will unsubtle attempts at shaming people for personal, often painful decisions they’ve had to make on disconnecting with family.)

It’s going to take new leadership and a new story. These four videos are one part of our attempts to move the story of the American pro-democracy coalition forward. Winning elections takes more than math. It takes imagination. Way to Win is helping the pro-democracy coalition tell a story bigger, bolder, and stronger than the fear, division, weakness and greed we’re up against.

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