The Scoop
Democrats have badly weakened their party with left-leaning ideas and rhetoric, growing only with self-described “white liberals” while losing ground with other voters, according to a new center-left group’s report shared first with Semafor.
The group, called Welcome, consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months for its broad findings, including that 70% of voters think the Democratic Party is “out of touch.” 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.” (Welcome began as a PAC in 2022, then founded a nonprofit with the same name for political research.)
Elected Democrats will receive copies of the report after its Monday publication, followed by events to promote it in DC and New York. The report urges party members to abandon some of the progressive language about race, abortion, and LGBTQ issues that Democrats began using after the 2012 election — and recommends the nomination of more candidates willing to vote with Republicans on conservative immigration and crime bills.
“The Democratic Party had better listen — for the good of our nation,” former Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, who ran the party’s House campaign committee when it lost seats in 2020, wrote in her endorsement of the report.
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.”
The report directly challenges Democrats’ predilection for the interests of “highly educated and affluent voters,” arguing that their influence “may be responsible” for the party’s closer association with left-wing politics.
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Know More
Deciding to Win grew out of discussions centrist Democrats had last December, after their loss to President Donald Trump and a rush of panicky takes about what the party did wrong.
While embarking on its long-term polling project, the group also consulted an array of Democrats, including Schultz, former Biden White House spokesman Andrew Bates, and House Majority PAC founder Alixandria Lapp.
“I felt like there had been a real lack of reckoning among what actually happened,” said Simon Bazelon, the principal author of the 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 report doesn’t urge Democrats to move fully to the right, reserving vocal praise for several progressive stars in the party with a more direct appeal to economic opportunity and lower cost of living.
“We have much to learn from the relentless focus of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani” on those fronts, the authors write.
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%.
During the same time period, the perception of the party as “too liberal” rose from around 47% to 55%, in an average of public polls conducted by the group. Perception of the GOP as “too conservative” fell from 47% to 44%, though the authors note that that number has moved back up in Trump’s second term.
The defeat or retirement of some conservative Democrats explain some of the shift, but not all of it. The report’s study of national Democratic Party platforms from 2012 to 2024 found a surge in language about specific racial groups (up 828%), about “environmental justice” (up 333%), and about LGBTQ rights (up 1044%). Mentions of “men” fell by 63%, of “fathers” by 100%, and “responsibility” by 83%.
In 2020 and 2024, the party platform began with land acknowledgments for the Native American tribes that had previously inhabited their convention sites.
Those shifts didn’t win votes. The report’s analysis of voter data from Catalist, a Democratic data firm, showed Democrats losing some ground with non-college-educated white voters since 2012, but far more with non-white voters, no matter their education level.
Progressive language and policies meant to win those non-white voters simply didn’t work.
Room for Disagreement
Progressives have their own theories of why Democrats started losing. At Persuasion 2025, a one-day conference organized by Way to Win and Swayable last month, strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio argued that Democrats were beset by “polling-ism” which told them that voters had static opinions and responded to messages they agreed with.
Democrats didn’t need to move to the center or use more centrist language, she said; they needed to re-frame issues. One idea: Instead of calling the GOP’s tax reform package a “big ugly bill,” they might call it “the MAGA murder law.”
David’s view
Deciding to Win is a major addition to the library of Where Dems Went Wrong literature. Democrats are anticipating a decent off-year election for the party; it’s favored to win back the governor’s office in Virginia, hold the New Jersey governorship, and get California voters to wipe out five Republican-held congressional seats via referendum.
That would build on the Democratic optimism created by their special election wins and strong margins this year.
Welcome’s response: Don’t get cocky. Democrats’ newer coalition is wealthier, more educated, and turns out far more easily than MAGA’s — but in the meantime, it keeps losing ground with less affluent voters and with unions. Those unions’ rank and file, increasingly, see Democrats as cultural elitists who look down on them and want to replace their jobs.
The progressive response to that drift has been economic populism, promising new jobs and telling voters that Republicans use cultural wedge issues to distract them from tax cuts for the rich. Welcome’s report sees that remedy as ineffective, and the collapse in split-ticket voting in recent elections suggests the group may be right.
Culturally conservative voters are also correct that Democrats have moved left over the last several elections. The best way for that bloc to not be distracted by right-leaning coverage of a reparations bill might be for fewer Democrats to endorse a reparations bill.
And in fact, a shift may be happening inside the party that aligns with what Welcome’s report is looking for. Sanders told podcaster Tim Dillon (a conservative favorite) in an appearance last week that “we should have a secure border” and that Trump did a better job of protecting it than previous presidents.
That was how Sanders talked for much of his career, before the Democratic Party’s leftward move, when he embraced an immigration plan that would have decriminalized illegal border crossings. He seems to have moved back to where he was on Trump’s signature issue.
Notable
- In The Argument, Lakshya Jain looks at the national favorable ratings of the highest-profile progressive Democrats, from Gavin Newsom to Mamdani, all of them underwater. “Everyone knows that what works in New York City doesn’t necessarily work nationally.”
- On his Substack, progressive strategist Waleed Shahid argues that Democrats have already tried taking moderate stances, setting them apart from the left, and not gotten much for it. “‘Don’t scare the middle’ works until the middle itself is being remade.”