Democrats need to move right to win back voters in 2026 and 2028—that’s the conventional wisdom from a slew of Democratic think tanks and Beltway strategists. To make their case, they’ve released reports and polling trying to prove that voters are more moderate on many social and cultural issues—like trans athletes in school sports and immigration—than the party’s far-left activists. But an exhaustive new report, made available exclusively to The New Republic, makes a convincing counterargument. More importantly, it provides a road map for Democratic candidates that doesn’t require throwing vulnerable members of their coalition under the bus.
The report comes from Way to Win, a left-leaning “strategic donor collaborative and strategy hub” founded after the 2016 election. The report, a compilation and analysis of the surveys and focus groups they’ve done since the 2024 election, looks not just at swing voters but the entire coalition, including those who voted for President Biden in 2020 and then sat out the 2024 election. This presents a fuller picture than analyses that simply conclude the electorate swung right last November. While some Biden 2020 voters did vote for Trump last year, a substantial number stayed home. This changed the composition of the electorate, and made it look more Republican than it really was. Those who sat it out in November are much more politically aligned with Democrats but weren’t motivated to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris and downballot Democrats. Determining what they want from future candidates tells a different story than centrists might hope.
Way to Win pointed to three main problems that cost Democrats last year: Voters were upset not just about rising prices but about longer-term economic trends, and wanted change; Republicans and the far right have a built-in media advantage, thanks to years of investments, which made it harder for Democrats to break through; and movements on the left around issues like Gaza, racial and economic justice, and immigration weren’t aligned with the party.
Fundamental to the report is an important corrective. While many observers have argued that Democrats lost last year because the party had moved too far left, Way to Win makes the case that voters don’t actually apply neatly defined ideological frames when they evaluate candidates’ policies and choose whom to vote for. Their decisions are more complex and filtered through their social, family, and work lives—a conclusion supported by much political science research. “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 report says.
This suggests a different path forward from moderating on some issues, like immigration, the environment, or trans rights. While it might be true that the party’s positions are to the left of the majority on some specific issues, there’s no evidence that those are the issues that drove most voters to make their decisions last November. It’s not that these issues don’t matter at all, but they aren’t decisive, and there’s room to persuade voters, as well. “When we actually talk to voters and listen to them, which we did over the course of this year, it’s that the other issues that we highlight in our report are just much bigger factors,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder and vice president of Way to Win.
This was especially true of those who skipped voting in 2024. In the important Sunbelt states, these voters were 13 percent of the 2020 coalition, and a majority said they would have voted for Harris if they’d voted in 2024 rather than sitting out. These voters didn’t want Democrats to moderate. They wanted a stronger economic message and wanted Democrats to fight for them. But they often felt like they’d been supporting Democrats for years and hadn’t gotten results.
In fact, moderating on some positions was more likely to reinforce Republican talking points and make Democrats seem weak, according to the report. “If we want to build a bigger coalition, it’s actually going to make it worse if we keep trying to look more like Republicans, or we keep trying to go in this triangulation direction,” Fernandez Ancona said. “It’s not that we’re not saying we need to move more left and be more socialist.… We’re really saying we need to actually go towards strength, which is what we define in the report as basically standing for what you believe in.”
The perception of Democrats as weak was partly shaped by Republican attacks rather than Democratic messages themselves. As an example, voters surveyed by Way to Win said that Harris’s campaign was mostly concerned with trans issues. In reality, it wasn’t a big part of her campaign, Fernandez Ancona said. But trans issues played a starring role in ads from the opposition.
Harris didn’t work to counter that impression—and her actual campaign messages didn’t break through, either. Voters didn’t hear her messages on the economy as much. They also want Democrats in general to talk more about the bigger issues facing the economy, like inequality. “One of the top performing policies or issues that were motivating for the skippers was strengthening enforcement against wealthy tax cheats and making the wealthy pay what they owe,” Fernandez Ancona said. “It’s making the case that the system is not working for a lot of people because of this inequality and this imbalance, and we have to make that more fair.”
Too often, Democratic messages end up reinforcing the story that Republicans are telling, Way to Win says. The report pointed to the losing campaigns of Senators Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, who touted their support of conservative immigration policies. Instead, Democrats need to tell their own story when it comes to immigration, one that highlights the contributions immigrants make and argues that legal immigration should be easier.
This report is in line with other work from researchers across the left showing that moderation doesn’t necessarily win Democrats more seats. G. Elliott Morris (a former colleague of mine from 538, the now-defunct political analysis site), published a post on his Substack analyzing moderate candidate performance when compared to candidates further to the left. “I estimate that strategic moderation in 2024 could have increased a Democrat’s vote share by 1-1.5 points and their chance of winning by just 10%—not enough to overcome the uncertainty driven by other factors in the election. This is not to say that moderation doesn’t matter, but lots of other factors matter more,” he wrote.
And Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political strategist and messaging consultant, has made the same arguments. She says Democrats need to embrace “magnetism,” which is similar to the “strength” that Way to Win advocates: staking out forceful positions that risk pushing some voters away but are also much more likely to attract voters than simply taking whatever positions the polls suggest.
These arguments are strengthened by the wins of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. Those candidates all had ideological differences, but they shared an approach to politics that was combative on behalf of their constituents, one that promised to tackle big issues like affordability and work hard to deliver without ceding ideological ground to Republicans. “They actually went after it head-on by standing up for their values and who they were,” said Fernandez Ancona. “The playbook going forward is, name it, call it out for what it is—because the voters also don’t like this fear and division. We hear that from them a lot. They’re tired of it.”
This could also help motivate the Democratic base, which performs an important function: When grassroots movements and reliable voters align with the party, they help build excitement and spread the word on behalf of candidates. Granted, the havoc and wreckage of the second Trump administration is sufficiently motivating voters to come out for Democrats, as we saw in the November elections and this past Tuesday. That may well remain true in 2026 and 2028. But to win big and, more importantly, hold onto power, the Democrats need to work harder to build a party brand that answers voters’ real concerns and differentiates them from Republicans. That doesn’t mean behaving like a weather vane, turning in whichever direction the political winds blow. It means having the courage and strength to make your own weather.
