Rachel Pritzker, wife of Illinois' rabidly anti-Trump Gov. J.B. Pritzker, recently observed, “It is shocking how little reassessment the party and its leadership has done" about the Democratic Party's failures in 2024.
The reason no one wants to revisit the Democrats' fiasco in 2024 is that the two principals most responsible, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, are basically untouchable.
Unlike the GOP's 2012 "autopsy" that examined in brutal detail what party members, consultants, and candidates thought went wrong in the party's defeat, Democrats don't want to know what went wrong. Blaming a black woman and a half-senile old man who should have been told to resign the presidency would cast too much blame on too many important people.
However, one non-profit group called Welcome just finished conducting a massive survey of Democrats. They consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months, and their findings are about what you'd expect.
Thank God the Democratic leadership is going to dismiss Welcome's findings. Otherwise, they might become more competitive sooner than anyone believes.
"Most voters, the group found, believe the party over-prioritizes issues like 'protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,' and 'fighting climate change' while not caring about 'securing the border' or 'lowering the rate of crime,'" reports Semafor, which got a sneak peek of the report prior to its release later today. The group recommends the nomination of more candidates willing to vote with Republicans "on conservative immigration and crime bills," says Semafor.
Inspired by The Politics of Evasion, an influential 1989 paper that inspired the party’s more centrist shift under Bill Clinton, the 70-page Deciding to Win document argues that Democrats must be “willing to break with unpopular party orthodoxies.” Its prescription for getting the party out of its current wilderness isn’t simple: avoidance of “both a pivot to corporate centrism and the pursuit of progressive ideology purity.”
Greg Schultz, who managed Joe Biden’s 2020 primary campaign but was replaced for the general election, worked with Welcome to shape the report.
“For the last 20 years, Democrats have just misunderstood how you actually win elections,” he told Semafor. “I thought Biden had proven in the 2020 primary that the base of the Democratic Party is a 58-year-old woman without a college degree. But when you hear people in DC say ‘the base,’ they mean white intellectuals that live in a few coastal cities.”
"Voter attitudes toward the government’s handling of immigration are shifting—but not evenly. While support for some of President Trump’s and Congressional Republicans’ immigration policies has softened, views on border security remain largely unchanged," says The Third Way, an old "centrist" Democratic group begun during the Clinton years.
Trust in Republicans on immigration has fallen from 62% in March to 56% in September. Democrats have not benefitted from the slight slackening of support, as just 36% trust them more than the GOP on the issue. However, Republicans still hold a massive edge in which party would better protect the border: 66% - 25%.
Related: There’s About to Be a Huge Shake-Up at ICE — and the Left Is Gonna Be Furious
“I felt like there had been a real lack of reckoning among what actually happened,” said Simon Bazelon, the principal author of the Welcome report. “A lot of what we’re arguing for is a return to Obama-era positioning on issues like immigration and crime, and prioritization of the economy over cultural issues,” he explained.
The risk they see is in Democrats moving left on other progressive policies, which even some in the party establishment have done while criticizing Mamdani and other democratic socialists. From 2013 to 2024, between the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term and the end of Joe Biden’s sole term, the report offers clear metrics to show how the party changed its language and gave support to left-wing bills that had little chance of passage.
Over those 11 years, the share of congressional Democratic co-sponsors of a bill to study reparations for the descendents of slaves rose from 1% to 57%. Support for assault weapons ban legislation grew from 41% to 88%; support for giving federal prisoners full voting rights grew from 4% to 41%; and support for legislation that would wipe out state abortion limits went from two-thirds of the Democratic caucus to 98%.
Meanwhile, the public perception of Democrats as being "too liberal" rose from 47% to 55%, according to an average of public polls conducted by Welcome. Significantly, the percentage of voters who see the GOP as “too conservative” fell from 47% to 44%.
It's all right there in black and white. Democrats are being told in no uncertain terms that their focus on kooky social issues may play well with affluent, college-educated voters, but it falls flat with the rest of the country.
