How to Decide to Win

A new report has good advice for Democrats on how to stop alienating the electorate.

Dear readers,

The good people at Welcome¹ have put out their “Deciding to Win” report, consolidating their opinion research-driven advice on how the party can effectively moderate in a way that will win over voters who have decided the Democratic Party has grown too extreme and out of touch.

If you’re a reader of this newsletter, you’re probably already bought in on the idea that the recommendations in the report are worth following. Their advice breaks down into five main recommendations, listed in the report’s executive summary, but I want to focus today on the third recommendation: “Convince voters that we share their priorities by focusing more on issues voters do not think our party prioritizes highly enough (the economy, the cost of living, health care, border security, public safety), and focusing less on issues voters think we place too much emphasis on (climate change, democracy, abortion, identity and cultural issues).”

Democratic candidates, of course, do not generally go into elections saying “we think climate change and cultural issues are more important than the cost of living and public safety.” Paid media (candidate- or PAC-funded ads) in Democratic campaigns tends to focus heavily on issues voters rate as highly important and urgent, like the economy and health care. In the New York area, successful Democratic congressional candidates in 2024 ran ads touting their get-tough positions on crime and immigration. But Democrats generally (and Kamala Harris specifically) have been dogged by the perception that, with the exception of health care, they’re not focused on the same issues Americans are, and instead are fixated on climate change and L.G.B.T. issues, which voters rate as low-priority.

It is already going to be a challenge for Democrats to change voters’ views about where the party stands on issues. But convincing voters to change their perception of which issues are important to Democrats seems even harder. If I’m a Democrat running for office, I can control how much I talk about certain issues, but I can’t necessarily control how much voters hear me talking about certain issues, and I can’t control how much my supporters talk about certain issues.

So to change perceptions of issue emphasis, candidates will need to wholly commit to the project, regardless of whether they are the type of candidate who has publicly expressed fringe stances on fringe issues. But politicians talk about a lot of things, prompted and un-prompted, so let’s start with the category of candidates who have said weird things in the past. If you expressed an unpopular idea a few times several years ago — perhaps during the 2020 Democratic primary about whether the government should provide sex changes to inmates and detained migrants² — what can you do to stop your opponent from using the sound of your voice to cultivate the impression that it’s one of the main things you think about today, when you have not in fact made it a priority?

One obvious answer is, never say you want the government to provide sex changes to prisoners. And I agree: the government shouldn’t do that,³ Kamala Harris shouldn’t have said they should do it, and more broadly, it was destructive to the party’s image for the Democratic candidates in the 2020 primary to be in a contest to see who could take the most ludicrously left-wing positions (also, no Democratic politician should fill out another ACLU questionnaire ever again). But nothing I’ve said in this paragraph is about issue emphasis; it’s just a number of different ways of saying don’t propose unpopular things.

The somewhat-unsatisfying answer, I think — and as we discussed this week on Central Air with Liam Kerr, one of the co-authors of the Welcome report — is about making message discipline a consistent practice across an entire political career. You cannot control what your opponent says about you, and if you’ve said something on tape, you cannot control who replays it. But you can control what you talk about day-to-day, and the image you cultivate through your own free and paid media. Before she became vice president, Harris intentionally cultivated an image of herself as one of the most left-wing members of the U.S. Senate, running away from her past record as a tough-on-crime prosecutor and attacking Joe Biden from the left during the primary debates. Answers like the confident one she gave on trans inmate health care were part of a concerted strategy to sculpt a progressive image, and while it didn’t win her the nomination, it did indelibly affect public perception of her. This made it easy to paint her in ads as left-wing and out of touch. But this perception of her political reinvention, fringe stances, and new priorities eviscerated her credibility as a tough-on-crime career prosecutor who also cared about economic issues and the cost of living.

For comparison, look at Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic former congresswoman who appears set to cruise to election as governor of Virginia. Spanberger’s Republican opponent is leaning heavily on messaging about trans issues in that race, and it’s not working, even though Spanberger has taken a mealy-mouthed⁴ position on trans participation in girls’ sports and school bathroom restrictions that doesn’t conform with the public’s view.

As we discuss with Liam on Central Air: because Spanberger, an ex-CIA officer, has spent years cultivating a moderate image, harping on the relatively low-salience trans sports issue has not been an effective way to paint her as extreme. Even if voters don’t necessarily agree with the exact stance Spanberger has taken on the specific issue, they don’t perceive her as overly focused on the issue. The idea of Spanberger as a gender radical doesn’t pass a gut-check against her record and her resume; if anything, it’s her opponent who either appears obsessed with the issue, or too obviously trying to re-run a playbook, or both.

So I think that’s the boring slog of the answer: candidates need to show voters they care about what they care about, and wake up every morning and talk about what they care about. And in an important race, it’s best to nominate the candidate who has committed to that daily practice. As the Welcome report says, Democrats should “focus the bulk of our opposition on issues where public support is on our side”:

Deciding to Win does not advocate for giving up our party’s core values or for refusing to stand up for disadvantaged groups. Nor does Deciding to Win advocate for being feckless or weak. Democrats should stand firm against Trump and the Republican Party’s extreme agenda. But we should also be disciplined and strategic in which fights we pick, and how we pick them, by focusing the bulk of our opposition on issues where public support is most on our side (like protecting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, opposing tax cuts for the wealthy, and opposing Trump’s tariffs).

There is a lot of material available here. I think the shutdown has been somewhat effective at drawing attention to the issue of health insurance premiums and subsidies — not just getting voters to notice insurance is getting more expensive, but to understand that the price of insurance is a public policy question where Democrats are on the side of making it cheaper. But there are other opportunities. The tariffs, in particular, have been under-exploited as a salient policy issue where Democrats are on the side of lower consumer prices.

But maintaining this perception also requires discipline about what you don’t say. In fact, I think Democrats don’t realize how much discipline will be required to convince voters that no, actually, our party’s focus isn’t on a weird, niche, identity-politics thing that a slim segment of our base cares deeply about; we’re actually focused on the economy, just like you (and most other people) are. To that point, I want to complain about a particularly annoying identity-politics trap: the four-paragraph land acknowledgement at the top of the 2024 Democratic Party platform.

“The Democratic National Committee wishes to acknowledge that we gather together to state our values on lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since time immemorial,” declared our party’s official policy document for the 2024 election, before saying anything about inflation, jobs, immigration, crime or health care. The DNC routinely opens its meetings with land acknowledgments, too, before conducting business.⁵

The party platform used to lead with core pocketbook issues like job creation. But the entire point of the practice of land acknowledgements is that, whatever issue you’re gathering to discuss, a vague discussion of the importance of indigineity must come first. It literally must always be placed at the top of the agenda. Ask yourself: Does this serve to combat the image of the Democratic Party as overly focused on identity issues rather than substantive economic issues? Or does it compound that image?

Of course, most voters aren’t reading the party platform, and they’re definitely not watching credentials committee meetings. But this choice to “center” indigenous identity is indicative of the environments in which the party’s insiders and operatives marinate: one where endless identity navel-gazing is considered a valid important part of any policy analysis; one where a former White House press secretary can offer these kinds of answers with a straight face to a reporter, when asked why she thought Kamala Harris deserved an uncontested path to the nomination even though she also “never” believed Harris could win:

Isaac Chotiner: [W]hen I talked to people about whether Harris should be the nominee or there should be an open convention, I found people split. And one reason some people thought that Harris should not be the nominee is that they did not think she could win, which is why I was surprised to read in your book, a little later on, that “the truth was, I never really believed Harris could win.” That’s why I’m a little confused when you say it was an insult to try to get her off the ticket.

Karine Jean-Pierre: But two things should be true, right? The thing that I say the second time actually proves the thing that I said the first time, right? Because it’s a feeling that we have. The reason I felt that is because of how we’re treated as Black women. We’re not elevated, we’re not protected, we’re not taken seriously. She was the Vice-President for heaven’s sake. But the reality of it is that being a Black woman, being Black and being a woman, it’s just tough. It’s hard. It makes it harder. And she ran a fantastic campaign, but it wasn’t good enough for some people. That is heartbreaking.

Isaac Chotiner: Shouldn’t you extend the same generosity to other people, who didn’t think she could win or that she was the best candidate?

Karine Jean-Pierre: This is a book about my experience.

Isaac Chotiner: … I was confused by was you saying that you didn’t think Harris could win, but then you attack other people who didn’t seem to think Harris could win by saying they were insulting her.

Karine Jean-Pierre: Yes. Well, again, I wish you could walk in my body and live my life, and then I think you could understand what I’m saying. I really do, because I think any other Black woman would understand what I’m saying. What it truly is is that it wasn’t just an open primary or a brokered convention. There was disrespect to her as well. It was discounting her and her position and who she was. That’s what it felt like. This is a very unique thing that I don’t think anyone would understand unless you walked in our bodies and lived our lives. My feeling was not about her not being qualified. It was about people not being able to see past her being Black and a woman. It’s not that confusing for us because we live this life day in and day out.

Democrats are unified in laughing at Jean-Pierre now, but I think Jim Geraghty of National Review has a fair point: she’s playing by ground rules that Democrats spent years setting, where it’s not supposed to be a punchline to talk about being a black lesbian like it’s a job qualification, and where you get to be taken seriously when you use this kind of contradictory logic, in which you assert that Harris’s sex and race made it harder for her to win over voters and yet also insist that it was sexist and racist to be worried that she wasn’t the party’s strongest available candidate. Those were the ground rules that made it possible for her to be hired into a press secretary job that Democrats now openly say she was obviously, laughably bad at.

Not very long ago, talking like this was normal for a Democratic operative, and it is one of the reasons voters came to believe Democrats were obsessed with group-based identity issues.

Maybe the laughter at Jean-Pierre is a sign that things are changing, and that Democrats will not be permitted to obsess internally over identity and cultural issues, all toward a goal of convincing voters that the party really does care about the things voters actually care too. I’ll believe the change is taking hold if the DNC decides to ditch the land acknowledgements.

Very seriously,

Josh

P.S. Here’s that episode with Liam Kerr.

Deciding to Win, with Liam Kerr

1. You know, the centrist factional organizers in the Democratic Party who put on the Welcomefest conference, where this year Rep. Ritchie Torres and I got protested by Gaza-climate-LGBT protesters and I annoyed the left by pointing out that unions are often an unhelpful political force in New York politics.

2. Obviously, it’s hard to talk about this phenomenon without talking about the “Kamala is for they/them” ad, which appeared to play a key role in solidifying the impression of Harris as both favoring unpopular left-wing ideas and being excessively focused on those ideas. Despite the ad, I do not believe that Kamala Harris was in fact obsessed with making sure that convicted criminals could get sex changes in prison. Certainly, if she was obsessed with it, she didn’t do a good job delivering on her obsession — as I wrote last year, the grand total number of federal inmates who appeared to have received sex changes (under federal policies that have allowed them since a 2020 court order) appeared to be two, with no sex changes apparently being performed on migrants in immigration detention, whom Harris also promised to make eligible for such care in a 2019 ACLU questionnaire. This goes to show the peril of talking about a niche issue in a niche context and assuming what you had to say wouldn’t escape containment.

3. Why not? Because convicts are people who have violated the social contract, and while we have medical obligations to them while they are in prison, those obligations do not necessarily extend to the alleviation of every kind of dysphoria — prison, after all, is itself dysphoric. Medical necessity, like gender, is a social construct, and it depends on the normative views held by people in society about what medicine is for and who should be entitled to what; it is not up to a medical board to decide that sex changes are as necessary as chemotherapy. It seems to me — and apparently to most of the public, and to the American government in practice, even under Democratic Party rule — that if you entered prison having spent your entire life with a particular set of sex characteristics, your surgical transition was not an emergency, and it can wait until you’re released. Of course, if a court orders you to pay for something, you pay for it, but you don’t go out and brag about paying for it. And if you’re a Democrat and you don’t feel this way, I suggest you try to find a way to feel that way, because “I’m worried inmates aren’t getting the sex changes they need” is exactly the sort of sentiment that signals to voters our party is less than laser-focused on the daily concerns of law-abiding Americans — there’s a reason this somewhat esoteric topic was the focus of the most effective attack ad against us in the last election.

4. Here’s her answer.

5. See for example the August general meeting or even the May meeting of the credentials committee, where the credentials committee co-chair offered a land acknowledgment before the committee voted to void David Hogg’s election as a DNC vice chair.