We are digesting a wave of studies on why Democrats lost in 2024 and what they should do now. Deciding to Win, by Simon Bazelon, Lauren Harper Pope, and Liam Kerr, argues that Democrats must move to the center to succeed. It’s getting a lot of attention; after all, its findings seemed to be endorsed by Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and my partner, James Carville.
So, is the answer to eschew the left, to moderate and move to the center?
The study’s authors are right that Democrats have to address their losses with moderate voters, eschew the elite’s identity politics in favor of economic issues, and address fundamental doubts on crime, immigration, gender identity, and American exceptionalism.
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But they divide the political world crudely into a bad camp on the “left” and a good one composed of “moderates” and centrists. Their ideological blinders block out results favorable to progressives. Their failure to take account of Donald Trump polarizing our politics leads the authors to misread why Democrats and their strong partisans are prioritizing certain issues. And they just ignore the finding that the most effective candidate is running as an economic populist and battling the wealthy.
Most important, they diagnose the Democrats’ deep problems without any clear ideas on how to fix them. Grabbing the top-testing items in a table or looking at case studies of candidates who ran ahead of other Democrats is unserious.
Many postmortem discussions focus on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, which elected a Democratic president at a moment when the Democratic brand was even more toxic. The authors of Deciding to Win say they were inspired by Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston’s 1989 report, The Politics of Evasion. That was a key building block for the intellectual framework offered by the Democratic Leadership Council, which Clinton chaired.
The authors of Deciding to Win did not interview me or cite my October 1991 review, “From Crisis to Working Majority,” in The American Prospect. The review catalogued the Democratic Party’s toxic brand. I wrote about the opportunity to battle for the “forgotten middle class.” Democrats needed to get whole on welfare and crime, respect hard work and responsibility, cut middle-class taxes, advocate for universal social programs, and align with “middle-class America’s deep frustration with the ascendancy of the wealthy and the corporations.”
You cannot win this electoral battle for the middle class if so many voters view your party as out of touch on crime, immigration, gender, and America being exceptional.
Many looking to a Clinton-esque reinvention of the Democratic Party forget that he ran as an economic populist—but Clinton did not. He read my review three times.
Clinton appealed to voters who saw the Democratic Party as “too liberal” and “out of touch” by moderating the party’s stand on cultural issues and battling for the working class against big business. This report points to a very similar formula, but fails to connect all the dots.
I do think their analysis of changing Democratic Party platforms, legislation sponsored by members, and models showing where candidates under- and overperform get us to the right fundamental problems. And their own survey of 3,552 respondents, combined with prior surveys, allow breakouts of critical groups. It is maddening, however, to write a review where I agree with the authors on the fundamental problems created by the Democrats’ elites, but where their ideological bias leads them to block out important results or make recommendations that are wrong.
They are right that the small groups of House members backed by Justice Democrats or in the Squad underperform the average Democrat, and those backed by the WelcomePAC and Blue Dogs overperform. But their own results refute their big conclusion that “moderate Democrats tend to outperform electoral expectations, while progressive Democrats tend to underperform.”
They do not signify that members of the two main ideological groups in the House of Representatives—the New Democrat Coalition and the Progressive Caucus—score no better or worse than the average Democrat.
Moderates and progressives running no better than the average Democrat is surely not good enough. Deciding to Win correctly focuses on the growing number of voters who view Democrats as “out of touch.” More people view Democrats as “too liberal” than view Trump Republicans as “too conservative.” That is not sustainable.
But the report provides no guidance on how Democrats get back to fighting for the forgotten middle class. I will use the review to address that challenge.
Crash With Moderate Voters
Democrats crashed with moderates because voters want Democrats to talk about economic issues, as I have been pressing for so long. In the Deciding to Win survey, three-quarters or more of voters want Democrats to prioritize “protecting Social Security and Medicare,” “lowering everyday costs,” “making health care more affordable,” and “creating jobs and economic growth.” Almost two-thirds say “cutting taxes on the middle class” should be a priority. Over half want Democrats to prioritize “raising taxes on the wealthy.”
The public, however, also wanted to hear other priorities, such as lowering “the rate of crime” and “securing the border.” At the very bottom are “protecting the rights of undocumented immigrants” and “protecting the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.”
The Deciding to Win analysis of words used in the 2012 and 2024 Democratic Party platforms is a reasonable way to look at shifting national Democratic priorities. It depicts a party less concerned with the economy, the middle class, and middle-class values. It is a party less interested in tax cuts and crime. It is a party consumed with identity and racial politics.
Here are the words that saw a surge of mentions:
- White/Black/Latino/Latina: up 1,137 percent
- Hate: up 1,323 percent
- LGBT/LGBTQI+: up 1,044 percent
- Reproductive: up 766 percent
- Equity: up 766 percent
- Gun/Guns: up 725 percent
- Environmental justice: up 333 percent
- Criminal justice: up 271 percent
And here are those that got much fewer mentions:
- Father/fathers: down 100 percent
- Responsibility: down 83 percent
- Middle class: down 79 percent
- Tax cuts: down 67 percent
- Economy: down 50 percent
- Economic: down 48 percent
I agree with one of the main findings of the report. Advocacy groups and academic and foundation elites have shaped a Democratic Party that rarely speaks about the economy, cost of living, and middle class and is deeply out of touch on crime, immigration, gender, and racial justice. And the report highlights Joe Biden’s historic unpopularity and impact on the party’s brand.
The study compares how much highly educated Democrats prioritize an issue, compared to working-class Democrats and all voters. Those educated elite are about 20 points less likely than working-class voters to prioritize border security, immigration, terrorism, and crime. The gap on border security is 33 points.
Those data add up to the Democratic Party being “out of touch.” But the report gets many other Democratic priorities wrong.
Missing the Trump Polarization
Donald Trump is the elephant in the room when it comes to all our priorities. Failing to see how Donald Trump is increasingly polarizing our politics leads the authors to misread why Democrats and their strong partisans are prioritizing certain issues. Abortion and climate are good examples.
The authors report the dramatic increase in mentions of “reproductive rights” in the party platform but claim that “protecting abortion rights” does not get into the top tiers of what voters want as Democratic priorities. That narrow read leads them to conclude abortion is hurting Democrats, and they should not be talking about the issue.
But when the issue is set in the context of MAGA’s efforts to make abortion illegal, the results are entirely different. They do not write in their report that one of the most popular Democratic policies is “protecting access to abortion,” and one of the least popular Republican policies is “take Mifepristone off the market.” That is why “abortion” was one of the most important reasons for voting Democratic in my 2022 post-election poll. That is also one of the reasons women are playing such a huge role in driving midterm-level turnout in the 2025 off-year elections.
The authors would have us think that the Democrats are too feminine and not speaking to young men and fathers. But one of the biases in the report is they do not break out the results by men and women. Why is that?
Did they notice that Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey won with 62 percent of the women’s vote, and Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia with 65 percent? Women are producing the big victories, a result unnoticed by the authors. James Carville should take notice too.
The report also shows that Democratic platform references to climate change increased by 150 percent. How do we explain that? It must be the power of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, right?
Do these data rats ever get out of the basement and see that there is a worsening climate crisis, creating historic storms and other forms of extreme weather? Did they notice that Donald Trump has jumped in to politicize the issue and reverse America’s climate progress?
The government working to prevent climate change is popular, particularly when you mention that the new laws lower the cost of energy. Fossil fuels are more expensive and less secure. The authors assert climate policies are not popular, showing weak results for “subsidies for electric vehicles” that Trump repealed. But they make no mention of their own results that show the popularity of providing “additional tax credits for clean energy investment,” which Biden advanced and Trump also repealed in the Big Beautiful Bill.
Before suggesting that Democrats avoid the issue, they should have looked at my post-election poll, which showed how Trump promising to exploit oil, gas, and coal was not even close to being a top reason to support Trump. In fact, Trump was vulnerable over soliciting billions from the oil industry to roll back efforts to address climate change.
Certain words and issues are surging with Democrats because Trump and Republicans in the states are moving to make abortion illegal, limit voting rights, and reverse popular plans to battle climate change. Trump is also slashing health insurance programs and weakening the Affordable Care Act. He is cutting taxes for billionaires and freeing monopolies from regulation.
This polarization and Democratic priorities are helping Democrats win right now.
Addressing the Democrats’ Fundamental Problems
One thing is clear: You cannot win this electoral battle for the middle class if so many voters view your party as out of touch on crime, immigration, gender, and America being exceptional.
Let me build on my work in working-class communities, my own surveys for Democracy Corps, and my articles in The American Prospect.
Crime. In white, Black, and Hispanic working-class communities, public safety is always a consuming concern. Clinton supported and carried out the death penalty during the 1992 campaign. He passed his anti-crime law, banned assault weapons, and used “three strikes” to extend jail time.
In recent polls for Reuters/Ipsos and Pew Research, Republicans enjoy an over 20-point advantage on crime. That is double the advantage Trump enjoyed over Biden in 2020. In my polls since 2022, Black and Hispanic voters have chosen Republicans to battle crime. And Black voters have sometimes put crime as high as the cost of living as the top problem for them.
Democratic mayors presided over years of rising crime and growing homelessness coming out of the pandemic. Voters believe they tolerated violent protests in response to the George Floyd murder and attacks on police. With a lot of help from Republican campaign ads, they believe Democrats want to defund the police.
The biggest worry if Kamala Harris won in our post-election survey was the “border being wide open to millions of impoverished immigrants, many are criminals and drug dealers who are overwhelming America’s cities.”
After George Floyd, Democrats advanced reforms that included more training, body cameras, and holding police accountable for misconduct. But my surveys showed Black and Hispanic voters worried much more about violent crime than police abuse. In my focus groups, Blacks wanted a better trained but bigger police force. They respect the police and are proud when their kids join the force.
Police and fire unions no longer endorsing Democrats hurts.
To win back support, working-class voters need to believe public safety is something Democrats care about, and that they see policing as a tough job where police must get more respect. Our surveys show that a message that includes police training, criticizes Democrats who championed defunding the police, and advocates for more police provides a lot of reassurance.
Border and immigration. President Biden was under tremendous pressure from immigrant rights groups and the Hispanic Caucus to lift COVID-era restrictions that effectively barred entry at the border, and to increase the number of legal refugees. He gave in after an intense internal debate and immediately lost control of the border and immigration.
The vast flood of humanity at the border associated Biden indelibly with out-of-control open borders. And when border-state Republican governors transported millions of “illegals” to cities in the North, the new arrivals competed for housing and rentals, used hospitals and health services, and sometimes swamped public schools.
In my post-election survey, “open borders and illegal immigrants in all our cities” was the top reason for voting against Harris. That was particularly true for Hispanics, Blacks, and white working-class men and women. I briefed the Harris team many times, and it never understood that Hispanic voters wanted tougher policies, not comprehensive immigration reform. That is the reason she ran so poorly in Arizona and Nevada.
Every Democratic candidate who performed well in the 2022 midterms attacked Joe Biden and his change in border policy. And in my surveys in 2024, strong Democratic messages described the border as out of control and promised to sign and implement the bipartisan control-first immigration bill.
The country has watched in horror ICE detaining and jailing thousands of longtime, hardworking undocumented immigrants and citizens in communities across the country. Trump’s approval on immigration has dropped in the polls, to 38 percent in the latest AP/NORC poll, and Gallup found over the summer that 80 percent think immigration is good for the country. Does that mean voters regret making immigration so central to their vote for Trump?
No, they think Trump got control of the border, as he promised. Half the voters still approve of Trump’s handling of “border security.” And Democrats still trailed Republicans by about ten points on immigration policy, unchanged from 2023.
The refreshing reaction against Trump’s immigration policy only highlights the distance Democrats have to travel to be trusted on the border and immigration.
Gender as identity. One can and should support the rights of transgender Americans without making it your highest priority. Treating gender as an identity rather than a biological fact makes people think Democrats lack common sense.
The Biden administration changed official government policy to treat gender as an identity. That became visible to people in the requirement that public institutions and schools have gender-neutral bathrooms. They ran into public anger when they required that transgender athletes be able to take part in women’s sports. In my post-election survey, 70 percent opposed “transgender participating in women’s sports.” Over 60 percent of white working-class women and men and over 50 percent of Hispanics were intensely opposed.
Trump finished his campaign attacking Harris supporting state funding for prisoners getting sex change operations. And that resulted in Blacks, Hispanics, millennials, and college women putting that as one of the main reasons they voted against Harris.
Democrats should get back to promoting gay marriage and equal employment in the battle for LGBTQ+ rights.
Racial justice. The searing events following the murder of George Floyd, ongoing police excess, and massive protests chanting “Black Lives Matter” changed American politics. It changed how Joe Biden and other Democrats see America. The Congressional Black Caucus, many civil rights leaders, academics, and foundations concluded America was systemically racist. Slavery was a profound enduring legacy that put Blacks in a position matched only by Native Americans. Politics had to address that legacy of the past and achieve justice. Biden ran pre-election ads declaring “Black Lives Matter,” and committed to prioritizing racial justice when in government.
But it turns out that is not the change Black and Hispanic voters were looking for. Since Biden’s election, I have tested his impressive efforts to reverse decades of discrimination, but they tested badly. And with Blacks and Hispanics, they tested well below policies to empower workers, raise the minimum wage, and expand the monthly child tax credit.
Blacks and Hispanics rallied to attacks on the rigged political economy, rather than attacks on systemic racism and police abuse. They wanted greater equality and for their kids to have a better shot at the American dream, but they were more optimistic about America than the elites.
Not for Hispanics. Biden crudely declared that Black voters and Black women got him to the presidency and went ahead to reward them accordingly. He changed the order of the primaries to put Black voters first and Hispanics last. Democrats’ effort to address racial justice did not include any serious work for Hispanics. And their view of America as a racist country conflicted with Hispanics’ positive view of America as an amazing, immigrant nation. A majority of Hispanics disapproved of Biden and punished Democrats in 2024.
With exit polls giving Democrats two-thirds of the Hispanic vote in both Virginia and New Jersey, there is good reason to believe the Biden period is behind us. Democrats may get back to the margins won by Hillary Clinton with Hispanic voters. The elections in Miami may be a harbinger of new times.
America, the Exceptional Nation
All national Democratic leaders—including Clinton, Obama, Biden earlier, and Harris—looked at their moments of great electoral triumph and reminded voters humbly that “only in America” would this day be possible. They all saw America as an exceptional nation, starting with its unprecedented Revolution.
The affirmation in the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—was established and accepted as an aspiration forever to be realized as a nation.
America was shaped by centuries of new immigrants who aspired for their children to be middle-class and realize the American dream. That equality is challenged by each period’s nativism, growing inequality, and concentrated political power that each generation of progressives battled to overcome.
Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration, along with so many Founders shaped by enlightened thinkers looking to establish a basis for governance based on the consent of the governed, not rule by a monarch or inherited wealth. Jefferson’s draft described the slave trade as “a cruel war against human nature” and condemned King George III for imposing slavery on the colonies. Jefferson called for the end of the slave trade with Africa. He successfully blocked expansion of slavery to the first new states and tried in the Louisiana Territory. And he tried to give grants of land that would give all white landowners the right to vote.
That 41 of the 56 signers owned slaves, and that slavery was legal in the 13 colonies, should put us more in awe of their historic actions.
For the current elites, the Founders were forever tainted by being slaveowners, particularly Jefferson. He only freed his children born to Sally Hemings when compelled by a contract he signed with her, and continued to live hypocritically in great comfort at Monticello after his presidency.
Biden, championing The 1619 Project, rightly pointed out that slavery formed a fundamental part of the American story. But the U.S. Department of Education’s civic education also required reading that asserted maintaining slavery was a primary reason for the American Revolution.
As a result, the Democratic Party no longer hailed Jefferson as its founding president. Democrats will get back to winning working people when they recognize, as President Franklin Roosevelt did, that Jefferson’s party battled for the “working masses,” and Alexander Hamilton, “the moneyed class.”
Deciding to Win has compelling findings on the cost of identity politics, but does not provide guidance beyond that. I have made recommendations on how Democrats can get to commonsense positions on crime, immigration, gender identity, and American exceptionalism. That allows candidates to quiet the culture wars as they fight for the embattled working and middle class against the concentrated power of big business.