Towards Strength: Way to Win Post-2024 Research Summary
Voters wanted change in 2024 and still do. An alternative perspective on the losses of 2024, chronic Democratic underperformance, and what voters are thinking as we head into 2026.
Executive Summary
In the year since Democrats faced devastating electoral losses in 2024, Way to Win has been exploring a number of research questions with key audiences across the country, with the goal of gaining a clearer understanding of what happened with Democratic defectors1 and how best to persuade them back into our coalition. With Trump’s popularity at an all-time low, we also explored current voter attitudes in 2026 battlegrounds on issues that will be central to campaigns going forward, from economics to immigration. This series of ten research projects—which included a focus on 2020 Biden voters who skipped voting in 2024—has given us a comprehensive understanding of what went wrong in the last cycle, but it also points to deeper issues that have led to persistent Democratic underperformance.
Democrats have steadily lost vote share among key demographic groups, as some voters have switched sides and others have stayed home, and the party recently reached an all-time low of a 66% disapproval rating among all voters. The research we’ve done this year—building on our previous three cycles of deep research and reinforced by lessons we derived from 2025 electoral wins—leads us to conclude that the 2024 losses were the result of far more than a simplistic view that Democrats had gone too far left. Instead, it points to these longer-term, underlying dynamics:
Chronic and Acute Economic Frustrations: It wasn’t just rising prices. It was that prices rose on top of five decades of uniformly increasing inequality, as the richest 1% rigged the rules of our system to take $79 trillion in wealth from the other 90% of Americans. Inflation turned simmering inequality into an acute affordability crisis. Even to voters who feel more secure, the economy feels unstable, precarious, and unsustainable.
Cumulative Right-Wing Media Advantage: Conservatives have invested heavily in media and persuasion for decades, and recently have adapted much more aggressively to a fragmented media environment than Democrats and the left, resulting in durable and outsized advantages on all kinds of campaigns.
Movement Alignment: Recent cycles have shown that Democrats are much more likely to win when campaigns are aligned with movement forces and energy. That alignment was dampened in 2024, when the top of the ticket took a very different approach than Biden’s 2020 effort and offered little to activists with concerns about Gaza, racial and economic justice, and immigration.
These specific signals are the condensed learnings from our post-2024 research:
Signal 1
Voters really wanted change in 2024, and they still do. An October 2024 poll replicated a result we’d seen in numerous studies both before then and since: voters agreeing at a rate of 96 to 2 that “the political and economic system in America needs changes.” But they didn’t think Harris would deliver it, in part because when asked what would change, her answer was that she couldn’t think of anything.
Signal 2
Voters did not find the 2024 Democratic message broadly persuasive, particularly regarding the economy. Trying to move right on cultural issues won Democrats a few skirmishes, but lost the war. This strategy failed both politically and substantively, particularly with regard to immigration, as it created more space for subsequent abuses of power by Trump.
Signal 3
Democrats are far from doomed. Voters are searingly frustrated, but the extreme unpopularity of Trump following his actions in 2025 has at least temporarily arrested the realignment that was predicted in the immediate aftermath of the election.
Signal 4
Barriers to Democratic success include cynicism, the media environment, widespread beliefs in unchallenged right-wing economic narratives and frames, and perceptions of Democratic Party weakness. Moving right on cultural issues will do nothing to address these problems and will likely make them worse.
Signal 5
Ideology is a limited framework for understanding these challenges. Stronger offense on the affordability-inequality crisis, for example, would have provided better defense on right-wing use of fear, division, and status threat. The coalition that wants change is still out there, and they largely already agree with inclusive populism: an economically populist agenda and narrative that also refutes cultural attacks.
On Charting the Way Forward in April of this year, strategist and Crooked Media founder Dan Pfeiffer summarized what Democrats need to do in three words: Go. On. Offense. Or, as we found in our first round of talking to voters who voted for Biden in 2020, then sat out 2024: fight, don’t fold. Everything in these studies backs this up as the correct approach. Democrats don’t need to move left or right. They need to learn the lessons and adopt some of the principles from the playbook Republicans and conservatives have been using for decades, and move towards strength.2
Background
Way to Win’s research encompassed projects both small and large in scope and employed diverse methodologies, working with some of the most respected researchers in the Democratic-aligned ecosystem. To the extent possible, we approached this research with true curiosity and no pre-set ideological goals.
Broader Democratic family research is often susceptible to a few patterns of deficiencies and challenges. It frequently rests on faulty, unexamined assumptions rooted in groupthink, and it is often aimed at specific sets of voters (particularly white swing voters) at the expense of understanding the breadth of the diverse coalition. It is overly focused on the idea that issue-position-taking and perceived ideology drive persuasion and voter decisions, instead of how voters truly understand and decide (i.e., narratives and strength of argument—please see Appendix II for an overview of this). Overreliance on quantitative methods, lack of accountability, and broken incentive structures that lead to actions motivated more by money and upholding the status quo than actually winning have created a situation where Democrats attempt to listen to voters but don’t hear what they’re actually saying. Democratic underperformance across many segments has roots in these structural research failures.
We believe the studies we conducted and supported across different research methods help address these issues. As a result, they fill significant gaps in our understanding of the 2024 outcome and how voters are responding to the Trump agenda in 2025, and they are a stronger foundation from which Democrats can evolve their thinking going forward. Way to Win was founded in 2017 on the belief that the pro-democracy coalition was multigenerational, multiethnic, and ideologically diverse, and that we needed to embrace that fact to win. Given Democrats’ persistent challenges with Black, Latino, and young voters, the blinking alerts we saw then have since turned into full-blown alarms.
There is also an information environment problem across the broader Democratic-aligned ecosystem of groups and operatives. Too often, research findings that reaffirm the prior beliefs of the status quo take hold across independent Democratic group chats, podcasts, and substacks, as well as among elected officials and staff, while findings that challenge these beliefs do not benefit from similar amplification. Although our approach and some of the results below absolutely challenge the status quo, we believe establishment and more centrist-minded Democrats should find significant areas of agreement and even hope here. The Democratic Party is still, according to the best data available, numerically very much the party that moderate voters choose (see Appendix I). Democrats can return to an approach based on core beliefs in swift and effective government as a means toward upward mobility and economic security—objectives and principles that animated presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt (but this time, inclusive of all Americans)—in order to reclaim their electoral ascendance. They don’t need to reject their core beliefs or even parts of their coalition in order to prevail among a broad ideological spectrum of voters from moderates to reformers.
For the past three cycles, we have studied campaign ad spending through our TV Congress project because it is the single best proxy for what candidates and campaign principals want to say and want their elections to be about. (Note that this is different from what voters think or the messages that get through, which is a far more complicated question—although we do frequently find voters are familiar with the content of ads, sometimes even repeating language from paid media nearly verbatim.) We believe paid media data is a far stronger indicator of intended candidate and party positioning than patterns of legislative co-sponsorship or party platform text, of which only a handful of insiders are aware. Combined inside and outside campaigns spent $1.9B in the 2024 cycle based on a strategy and theory of politics that proved unsuccessful. The ad with the most Democratic money behind it, For Regular People, was about a Republican, and it featured the conservative anti-tax, and anti-government frame of “keeping more of your hard-earned money.” Republicans spent $730 million and Democrats spent another $137 million on immigration ads, and the messaging in Democratic ads was roughly identical to the Republican ads. This approach fails to persuade because it’s not how voters think about issues, ideology or politics, as explained in more detail in Appendix II.
Democrats do need strong policies and arguments on issues that voters care about—from economy, affordability, and safety, to the wedge issues that the right uses like crime, transgender rights, and immigration—but they also need a clear understanding of how right-wing owned and social media manipulates the broader information environment and warps issue salience:
Democrats also need to take the disengagement and stark economic concerns of younger voters more seriously. Particularly after Trump, young people should be stampeding to join the Democrats, but they aren’t. This stems from a cynicism that runs much deeper than the perception few hold that Democrats are too woke. The 18–29 Dem vote share cratered in 2024, down to +4 from +25 in 2020, while turnout went from 50 to 47%. It’s absolutely crucial to understand this in a 3D-land sense: recent analysis has shown that the supposed “rightward shift” among Gen Z was actually turnout shift and compositional effects masquerading as ideological transformation. (this was very well supported by our qualitative studies, and see also the data on this in Appendix I)
What Happened in 2024
Chronic Economic and Democratic Challenges Slammed into Inflation, a Broken Media Environment, and Demoralized Activists
The current DC establishment thinking is that Democrats’ problems stem from unreasonable leftist demands and lefty groups forcing Democrats to take unpopular positions. We do not believe the evidence supports this set of beliefs. While it’s true that statements can always be taken out of context and turned into an attack ad if hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to do so (we’ll talk more about the ‘Harris is for they/them’ ad specifically later), the effectiveness of such ads is far more tied to our inability to counter them with a more compelling argument than it is to the statement’s position on an ideological spectrum. Our conversations with voters and extensive political science research all suggest voters largely do not see the world on a left to moderate to right axis. Persistent Democratic underperformance is instead the result of three related trends: first, widespread frustration and cynicism driven by the ever-worsening affordability and inequality crises, and second, cumulative right-wing advantages in media and persuasion. A third factor—alignment with movement energy—often determines whether Dems in a given cycle can overcome these longer-term ongoing challenges:
Chronic and Acute Economic Frustrations +
Cumulative Right-Wing Media Advantage +
Movement Alignment
In our research, frustration at perceptions of the economy and inflation was the most significant challenge Democrats faced. The context is important: it wasn’t just that prices suddenly increased, it was that this happened on top of decades of the affordability crisis that is a direct result of increasingly extreme right-wing ideas and governance: inequality, austerity, supply-side tax cuts, deregulation, predatory capitalism, risk shifted to individuals, and increased precarity. Almost no voter looks at our economy and thinks it’s going well, even if they personally feel like they are doing okay financially. Even though the macro indicators of the economy improved and Biden’s policies specifically helped workers farther down the wage scale, the pain was sharp, real, and particularly concentrated and frustrating to non-college-educated voters. If Dems and the Harris campaign thought their message was addressing this broader context, that effort did not effectively reach voters according to our post-election voter listening.
Voters generally want the kind of change Democrats endlessly refer to as kitchen-table issues, but they are profoundly cynical about Democrats’ ability to deliver on these promises and create change. The part of the Abundance diagnosis that says we have failed state capacity across many sectors is correct, although they don’t often apply that insight to the root of the problem, that the affordability crisis is the inequality crisis. Voters are cynical that Democrats have not only failed to prevent the richest fraction of the 1% from draining $79 trillion from the other 90% of Americans over the past few decades, but they’ve also too often made arguments for and voted in favor of these policies. One of the most common and heartbreaking refrains we heard from voters repeatedly over this past year, as well as a throughline in previous studies (see slide 13), is that they’ve voted for Democrats for years, but nothing changes.
The second challenge is that while this economic pain and frustration were entirely real, voters’ economic pain and the singular focus on it were greatly amplified by right-wing and pliable corporate media. The extraordinarily rich have invested significantly in media. Right-wing and Republican efforts and their focus on marketing have created significant, long-term, and cumulative advantages in persuasion. Since right-wing ideas are wildly unpopular—lowering taxes on the rich polls routinely in single digits—the right has had no alternative but to make these investments. Voters are awash in right-wing information and disinformation, and mainstream and corporate news is increasingly shaped by the right. In focus groups, we often hear right-wing talking points seep into the conversation, even among participants who aren’t otherwise Trump/MAGA curious in any way. Worse, these investments in persuasion collided with the recent fracturing in the media landscape to provide them with an advantage that has been both outsized and lasting. The result was this:
A third factor, movement alignment, plays a significant role in Democratic electoral outcomes. The historical pattern is clear: when broader left movements are aligned with Democrats, Democrats fare better in the election. Frustration over the Iraq war helped propel an unknown Senator to the Presidency in 2008. Anger at police killings of Black people, which one study found was even more mobilizing than Trump’s COVID failures, helped power Biden’s victory in 2020. Horror at the abrupt repeal of Roe powered Democrats to perform much better than anticipated in the 2022 midterms. But in 2024, both movement activists and many ordinary voters were horrified by the Biden White House’s shockingly ineffective and callous approach to Gaza, combined with the equally shocking unwillingness of the party apparatus to even engage with reasonable critics. While post-election polling varied, this issue came up repeatedly in discussions with voters and in reports from community organizations as a symbol of how far out of touch with reality Democrats had become. Voters make decisions based on narratives, not by triangulating on individual issue positions. While it didn’t pop consistently in individual salience poll questions, the frequency with which Gaza was mentioned in focus groups and among field organizers indicates the role it played in illustrating what felt like the systemic failure of our country—part of the narrative that led to the 21-point drop in 18–29 Dem vote share between 2020 and 2024.
The constant, horrible news in Gaza (and a right-wing approach on immigration) had another effect: it greatly demoralized and suppressed activists who ordinarily would have campaigned for Biden and later Harris into (at best) quieter support. To be clear, we are not arguing that it’s possible to win simply by mobilizing a left-wing or progressive base. We believe people across the entire universe of gettable voters need persuasion. But having a base of supporters who will argue for your candidate does matter, particularly in the fragmented social media landscape.
The extent to which the party and Democratic candidates are aligned with the prevailing movements over the election cycle—and the headwinds or tailwinds they provide—has a significant impact on their electoral performance. A full understanding of the true “3D land” nature of the electorate is necessary to understand the necessity of taking the concerns of the party’s more regular supporters seriously. Vote share and turnout both matter, but even taken together, they don’t capture the whole picture of the different groups of voters who move in and out of the electorate each cycle.
While it’s true that some groups of voters do perceive Democrats as being more left or more extreme, along with out of touch and having the wrong priorities, these beliefs are largely driven by a combination of right-wing media narratives and the relentless drumbeat of very vocal, public, factional arguments that many Democrats and Democratic Party-aligned groups repeatedly make. But in our studies, and particularly the qualitative research, we found that ideological perceptions were not a frequently cited or decisive factor for most voters, particularly compared to cynicism and frustration about the economy. Please see Signal 2 below for more detail.
The bottom line is clear enough: Harris ran to the right on a gamut of issues, and her campaign did not tell a clear story that addressed people’s frustrations. As a result, voters did not view her as an agent of the change they wanted, and this stopped her from assembling a winning coalition.
Ten Studies, Five Signals
Here are the top 5 signals we derived from this research series:
Signal 1.
Voters really wanted change in 2024, and they still do. An October 2024 poll replicated a result we’d seen in numerous studies both before then and since: voters agreeing at a rate of 96 to 2 that “the political and economic system in America needs changes.” But they didn’t think Harris would deliver it, in part because when asked what would change, her answer was that she couldn’t think of anything.
This particularly demotivated key youth, Black, and Latino voter segments, which proved decisive. In 2025, these voters still want change, but not the kind Trump is delivering. What we heard repeatedly was that voters generally liked what Democrats stood for, even if it was a somewhat vague sense of being inclusive, fighting for justice, and treating people with dignity. However, they were also overwhelmingly skeptical of Democrats’ ability to deliver progress. A common refrain was, “I’ve voted for Dems for decades, and nothing has changed, so maybe the system needs to be shaken up.” There is certainly a lot of room for improvement for Democrats to sharpen their story about their principles and values, why things feel so broken in our country, and the reality that when they govern, it leads to more material prosperity for everyone.
The misunderstanding of the underlying narrative held by so many voters is directly tied to the effectiveness of the “She’s for They/Them” ads in the 2024 election. The effectiveness of the ad was broadly overstated across the establishment and used to blame advocacy groups for the election loss, based largely on a single data point: a widely publicized RCT result. In reality the ad was less about transgender rights and more of an economic priorities argument, part of a narrative the right-wing media ecosystem had been pushing for over two years, particularly with Latino voters. According to responses from voters, the Harris campaign took far more damage from their lack of a story about change, and this was amplified by Trump and MAGA, Inc. ads that repeated Harris’s line from her appearance on The View in early October, when she said she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently from Biden. The clip went viral on its own, and it was further amplified in two ads: Insanity, with $13.6M in spending behind it, and Nothing Will Change, with $12.0M. Voters found this statement particularly demobilizing as it reinforced their frustration at the lack of a primary process and cited it as far more disqualifying than issue positions she took in 2019 (positions they apparently did not find disqualifying in 2020).
Signal 2.
Voters did not find the 2024 Democratic message broadly persuasive, particularly regarding the economy. Trying to move right on cultural issues won Democrats a few skirmishes but lost the war. This strategy failed both politically and substantively, particularly with regard to immigration, as it created more space for subsequent abuses of power by Trump.
Voters hold all sorts of contradictory and internally inconsistent beliefs about partisanship and parties. They usually make decisions on participation and vote choice in terms of narratives and arguments, not in terms of issue positions or a coherent understanding of how issues and partisanship relate. This incorrect understanding of how voters make decisions was coined “the strategists’ fallacy” by G. Elliott Morris, but any good strategist should understand and operate within this baseline. We found no evidence, particularly among the millions of voters who skipped voting in 2024, that moderating on issue positions would do anything to improve the beliefs that voters hold about Democratic candidates or their willingness to support them. In fact, this course of action would likely make the challenges worse.
While some voters do express concern that Democrats may have gone “too far left,” many believe (even now) that both parties are the same in terms of being tied to billionaires and not fighting for working people and the disadvantaged. In previous studies, many have also expressed the belief that Democrats are extreme because of their complicity and failure to properly fight Republicans and right-wing overreach, or even that stronger left-wing “extremism” would be good for the country! Part of why Harris’s economic message didn’t land was that even voters who felt more economically secure didn’t see her addressing larger structural issues in the economy, like poverty and inequality. This failure to resonate led to lower levels of motivation to vote across key segments (see the chart below from our post-election polling).
The Trump campaign’s attack on Harris’s trans position is a clear instance of this dynamic. Many voters thought Harris was too focused on trans issues—and therefore not focused enough on their core issues—entirely due to the Trump attack, while her campaign spent exactly $0 on LGBTQ and trans issue ads and spent little to no time or energy talking about trans issues in the campaign. A strong, clear response could have blunted this attack far better than either Harris’s attempts to ignore it or weak capitulation, as more recent campaigns like the 2025 Spanberger victory in Virginia demonstrated.
Signal 3.
Democrats are far from doomed. Voters are searingly frustrated, but the extreme unpopularity of Trump following his actions in 2025 has at least temporarily arrested the realignment that was predicted in the immediate aftermath of the election.
This signal was clear before the November 2025 results in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York City. It’s even clearer now. Roughly 16 million Biden 2020 voters skipped 2024, and as we saw in our Sunbelt Skippers study, Black, Latino, and young voters skipped at higher rates. But the preponderance of evidence suggests these voters were largely not realigning permanently towards Republicans in 2024, and they seem even less inclined to do so now. The Biden skippers overwhelmingly detest Elon Musk, Trump, and MAGA; they admire Bernie Sanders and AOC; and they are largely aligned with Democrats in terms of values and objectives, even while skeptical of Democratic capacity to deliver and frustrated by the pace of change. Crucial issue trust gaps have persisted (and even grown) around economics, immigration, and crime, because Democrats have, with very few exceptions, failed to even attempt to defend their ideas or create any sense of contrast, particularly with immigration. This has resulted in a landscape where voters often seem to understand what Democrats are supposed to be for better than Democratic candidates and officeholders do. That froth of frustration and uncertainty is a driving energy for primary challenges in 2026.
Signal 4.
Barriers to Democratic success include cynicism, the media environment, widespread beliefs in unchallenged right-wing economic narratives and frames, and perceptions of Democratic Party weakness. Moving right on cultural issues will do nothing to address these problems and will likely make them worse.
From our extensive qualitative research and voter listening, it’s clear that cynicism, a weak narrative about why the country and economy feel like they’re falling apart (even when economic indicators improve), and the illusion voters have of separation from our democracy are the biggest barriers to building a more sustainable Democratic coalition. Many voters report feeling like bystanders to democracy. In interviews, they describe democracy as something they are watching play out on TV and social media, not as a system they are part of, can affect, or have even a minimal role in.
Democrats have to overcome the drag of “bothsidesism”—the incorrect belief that both parties are essentially the same—by being clearer about the reasons why things are broken and not afraid to call out the right-wing ideas that underlie the affordability-inequality crisis. The Trump/MAGA story of blaming a rotating set of enemies (Democrats, immigrants, trans people, government workers, people on benefits, etc) is crude but effective, and it has been enabled by Democrats failing to provide a strong alternative story. Gettable voters lack a clear sense of why things are so broken, so they blame polarization or a lack of bipartisanship, and they are more vulnerable to the right-wing story: the othering, status-threat-based attacks used extensively by Trump and MAGA.
Moving right on these issues is then doubly ineffective. Not only does each message reinforcing right-wing ideas strengthen those beliefs in voters’ minds, but it also represents an opportunity cost. Every dollar spent on an ad to voters agreeing that immigrants are an existential threat is a dollar not spent unwinding the beliefs that lead to lingering support for predatory capitalism.
Signal 5.
Ideology is a limited framework for understanding these challenges. Stronger offense on the affordability-inequality crisis, for example, would have provided better defense on right-wing use of fear, division, and status threat. The coalition that wants change is still out there, and they largely already agree with inclusive populism: an economically populist agenda and narrative that also refutes cultural attacks.
Democrats have an opportunity to tap into the backlash of the current moment and build something powerful and durable. Inclusive populism is a worldview that makes it clear where the real problems in the country are coming from: a wealthy class leveraging a rigged economy that has taken $79 trillion from the bottom 90%, vs. too many immigrants coming here or trans rights going too far. Democrats can go on offense on numerous issues, from the economy to immigration, and tell a strong and persuasive overarching story that can animate and drive a winning coalition. And this strong narrative can absolutely combine economic and social issues—James Talarico, Zohran Mamdani, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Abdul el Sayed, and Mallory McMorrow are all doing variations of this message very well. We saw traces of it in Spanberger and Sherrill’s messages, too. And this lane is open to moderately positioned candidates as well, since it’s less a move towards the left and much more a move towards strength. We believe that inclusive populism can become the center of gravity for a new common-sense story that resonates across the pro-democracy coalition, and even brings over some Trump voters (many of whom already agree with the basic contours).
The Ten Studies
These are the details on the ten studies, including links to BlueSky threads, decks, substack posts, and any related Charting the Way Forward podcast episodes.
1. Post-Election Poll
David Binder Research, November 2024
2. Options for Offense Quick Poll
Via Pollfish. February 2025
3. Sunbelt Skippers Voter File Study
Based on Catalist data. April 2025.
4. Comprehensive Study of 2024 Biden Skippers
With Lake Research. Focus groups June 2025. Poll July 2025
5. TV Congress
In-house. June 2025
6. Immigration Poll
With Impact Research. May–June 2025
7. Economic Narrative Ad + Test Results
In-house. June 2025.
8. Nevada/Arizona Democratic Defectors Focus Groups
With Impact Research. August 2025
9. Opinion Lift Study of Anti-ICE Raids Ads
In-house. October 2025
10. The New Swing Voters: Men of Color
Way to Win partnered with HIT Strategies to do an exploration of Black voter attitudes throughout 2025. While that work is still ongoing, our analysis is also deeply informed by HIT Strategies’ work understanding the new swing voters of young voters and men of color, including this summary released in the Fall of 2025.
Conclusions
If there’s good news, it’s that this analysis is a map to the trailhead of the path out of the wilderness for Democrats. This framework of what happened in 2024—that it was due to inequality/affordability/inflation, media effects, and lack of movement alignment—has far more powerful explanatory and strategic value than the theory that Democrats have been too far left. To combat the affordability-inequality crisis, Democrats need to take affordability seriously. To combat media advantages, Dems need to sharpen their persuasion game and tell a stronger story about how right-wing ideas broke the country and how better ideas can fix it. That means investing in media sources to combat the long-term disadvantages, but evidence from our studies strongly suggests that Democrats have the means to get their message out with existing resources. And, at least through 2026 and 2028, negative polarization will align movement energy with Democrats.
While the focus of this report is on paid media and the message development of candidate and party positioning, Democrats absolutely need to deliver substantively on policies that will start to reverse the past few decades of grinding predatory capitalism. These issues are interrelated: many Dems vote for bad legislation (like the Laken Riley Act), or they do not vote for good legislation out of fear that it will create communications or funding problems for them during their campaigns. But if Democrats learn nothing else from the Mamdani victory, it at least showed them a way to beat a more than 10:1 spending advantage. Stronger communications strategies are possible for Democrats. They’re just going to take focus and an openness to trying new tactics.
There’s a good reason the past two decades of US elections have all been change elections. Voters have an acute sense that something has gone wrong, and the reason for that is that we’ve been living through five decades of an increasingly extreme right-wing economic experiment that has proceeded even while the culture has generally grown more liberal. Our problems aren’t due to generic polarization or the structure of our political system; they’re due to right-wing ideas, and for too long, Democrats have actively aided and abetted this agenda, too.
For the time being, we still have a democracy. We can still change this. It’s our system. The rules, since around 1980, have been set up only to concentrate wealth. It’s up to us to change them. This is a moment for thinking big. The decisions we make now will shape whether we tinker around the edges or whether we use the momentum from MAGA backlash to take on the big problems.
And governing really matters. Whether the objective is stopping the richest fraction of a percent from taking all the money, or building sufficient housing, or adequately funding schools and transit systems, or creating better labor conditions, the root of all these problems is a failure of state capacity to govern and deliver. It’s not hard to see the potential areas of significant alignment between Abundance ideas and Terrance Woodbury of HIT Strategies’ recommendations:
As Terrance put it at our Persuasion 2025 event, the previous system is gone. It was failing for large numbers of Americans anyway, and now Trump and MAGA have shredded what was left. We can only go forward and rebuild a new, more functional system from the ground up. We cannot let the right wing distract us into a divisive, counterproductive obsession with ideology that ignores the concerns of voters and misunderstands how they make decisions about their democracy. If we are to succeed, the singular focus of Democrats across the political spectrum must be responding to voters’ desire for change by taking their concerns seriously, and imagining, fighting for, and building a better world.
Acknowledgements
This report was the result of a massive amount of work from the Way to Win team, especially Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Tory Gavito, Eboni Speight, Joe Hamill, Ariel Reyes, Kerry Eleveld, Ben Bosis, Elise Pyo, and Kimi Lung. Particular thanks go to our research partners: Lake Research Partners, HIT Strategies, David Binder Research, Impact Research, and Swayable. Dan Ancona led in the organizing, synthesizing data, and writing of this report.
We believe we all have a responsibility for the outcomes of our research. This work matters, and the trajectories of the lives of millions of people are at stake. None of us are “just a numbers person.” As such, we are very grateful to the following individuals for their detailed criticism and feedback.
We’re grateful to the following people (and so many others) for their efforts in trying to understand and build a more effective left and Democratic Party, and to get the strategy across the coalition right. These people have helped shape our thinking. Their inclusion here does not imply their endorsement of or participation in this report.
And thank you, above all, to all organizers everywhere!
Appendices
Appendix I
The Big Picture on Moderates, and Democratic Voter Registration and 18–29 Party Identification Challenges
According to 2024 ANES data, the Democratic Party has more than 1.5X as large a share of moderates (26%) as the Republican Party (16%), and that trend has mostly increased over the past few cycles. Republicans have a MUCH bigger problem attracting moderates than Democrats, yet for some reason have been able to prevail in recent elections and avoid endless media cycles of stories about how Republicans have moved Too Far Right:
Far more concerning are recent trends in voter registration and partisan identification. According to ANES, the recent trend on this is very bad, with both men and women 18–29 trending upwards significantly in identifying as Republican. Tradeoffs are real, and efforts at appearing moderate run at cross purposes with efforts to be seen as a vigorous party with good ideas and clear principles that fights for people and gets stuff done.
Democratic voter registration numbers have been on a terrifying slide, particularly since 2020:
It seems clear that understanding candidate appeal like Mamdani’s has to be part of how we fix this. Spanberger and Sherril had increases of 7% and 9%, respectively, but Mamdani moved the youth turnout for the NYC Mayor race from 11% in 2021 to 41% in 2025, an almost 4x increase.
Appendix II
How Most Voters Understand and Make Decisions About Politics
The single biggest thing those arguing for moderation as a strategy for addressing chronic Democratic underperformance are getting wrong is that persuadable voters, which is roughly more than half of the voting population, depending on how exactly it’s measured, do not primarily understand politics through a stable, coherent ideological framework. This finding is very well documented and traces through The nature of belief systems in mass publics (Converse 1964) and The nature and origins of mass opinion (Zaller 1992). We recommend Kalmoe and Kinder’s charming and accessible 2017 book on the topic, Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public.
While we write as practitioners and organizers, not political scientists, this finding aligns with near total congruence with our experience as organizers. When you go knock on doors, you hear all kinds of stories, but they almost never have to do with detailed policies or ideological framing.
The hypothesis that voters will be persuaded by candidates who take more right-wing issue positions was not supported by what we found in the studies included in this summary report. Voters make decisions based on a complex mix of personal narratives, media narratives, arguments, and social belonging, as well as simply their general sense of things and the comparative strengths of the competing worldviews they hold. It’s not that issue positions don’t matter; they absolutely do, as do the arguments that candidates make around them. Oversimplifying it as some kind of linear equation, however, where moving right = more voters, is a proven disastrous strategic approach for Democrats.
Immigration is probably the most glaring example of how the attempt to move right has been disastrous both politically and substantively. Voters hold all kinds of beliefs about immigrants simultaneously:
It’s not unusual for a voter to bring up some part of Great Replacement Theory and also say the path for legal immigration should be made easier, even in the same conversation. The strength of these beliefs is part of what shapes the likelihood that a voter will vote for a Democrat, vote for a Republican, or give up trying to figure it out and stay home.
Democrats spent $137M on anti-immigrant ads, mostly at the Senate level. This approach failed completely. Sherrod Brown, in particular, spent $6M alone on one ad proclaiming his support for the most conservative immigration bill possible. It would be strange to see a Coke ad proclaiming the superiority of Pepsi, but this is an approach Dems spent millions on in 2024.
We had evidence all through 2024 that the immigration approach Tester and Brown were taking was failing. The last immigration related ad we produced and ran, Playbook, was one of the strongest ads we tested all cycle while also fitting inside the Harris/Dem immigration policy approach. This ad shows the limitations of ideology as a frame for understanding an issue-level argument. Saying “Donald Trump is going to waste your money on horrific policies” isn’t necessarily a further-left argument; it’s just a different choice of emphasis than promoting conservative approaches. Again, reprising our definition of strength: “making decisions based on core values and principles, explaining choices with clear and persuasive arguments, drawing a contrast with one’s opponents, and making it clear why your approach is the better one,” the Playbook ad took the stronger approach.
Aside from the political failures of the tough on immigration approach, it’s also been a moral disaster. Every dollar spent on anti-immigrant ads by a Democrat helped smooth the path for the ICE raids and abuses occurring today. These are not just questions of political wins or losses. Real people’s lives are on the line.
Related to this are two truths about voters that we have found in our work:
Voters are smart. We frequently see the sentiment that voters are dumb in response to our research on social media, but in our experience, this is generally untrue. Voters are distracted and busy with their lives, and they are caught in extremely broken information environments where they are inundated with hard-to-process (and sometimes deliberately confusing) information. They’re smarter about their own lives and what they need than they are about politics, for sure. But, overwhelmingly, people are not dumb.
Voters are paying attention. Of course, not all of them are, but many voters are paying more attention than you’d think. In one of Nathan Kalmoe’s studies, active news avoiders were around 40%. But even those news avoiders are getting news through social media. We were repeatedly surprised by the occasional depths of insight and detailed understanding voters would sometimes express in our focus groups. It’s not that American voters aren’t trying. The deck is just stacked against them.
Voters aren’t dumb. They’re paying attention. The information environment is a mess, but if we are strong and clear, Democrats can get their message through. We just need to take a stronger approach.
Appendix III
Related Readings
German far right setting agenda as opponents amplify its ideas, study finds
The New York Times’ “Moderation Advantage” Is a Statistical Illusion
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We define Democratic defectors as voters who have voted for Democrats in past elections, particularly 2018 and 2020, who didn’t vote in 2024, voted third party, or voted for Trump.
What exactly is strength? As the Supreme Court’s famous approach would suggest: “you know it when you see it.” But as a working definition: political strength is making decisions based on core values and principles, explaining choices with clear and persuasive arguments, drawing a contrast with one’s opponents, and making it clear why your approach is the better one.
Wow! This is by far the bestmsummation of where things stand. Inclusive populism for real change feels right to me. I only hope the Democratic Party internalizes this work and puts it to good use. Thank you
It took me a while to get through everything (grassroots organizing fueled AADD taking over too much of my days...), but hugely grateful for all the work you've all done to produce this really important report.
I'll be doing my best to push it out through my networks.
PS It would be helpful if you could bridge your Bluesky accounts with Mastodon by following the @ap.brid.gy Bluesky account. Doing so will allow me to follow you from Mastodon and share your content there. I don't have a huge following, but some of my 800+followers do...