Standing Up for Authentic Beliefs and Convictions Actually Works

“I’m not saying that all of the Democrats need to be yelling about this all of the time, but can we have at least one who takes anti-Trump duty every day? It could be a rotating assignment. As Joe posted the other day, we need to be running to daylight or whatever sports metaphor you want to use.”

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.”

…

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.

During a debate in my first campaign, my main opponent made a major gaff. The race included me as a Democrat, the incumbent Republican and a third-party Libertarian with multiple sclerosis who was in a wheelchair (who ultimately screwed me over big time). The Libertarian accused the Republican of taking money from a disgraced conservative supporter, but he got the name of the person wrong. I leaned over and whispered to him the correct name, and in a rebuttal, he corrected himself, pushing the point that the Republican had taken dirty money. When the debate ended, the republican walked past me, confronted the Libertarian and told him if she wasn’t in a wheelchair, she would have smacked him in the face. True quote. Unfortunately for the Republican, the moderator’s mike was still hot and everybody heard her threat. So far, so good for me. I immediately spoke to my team and told them we needed to make hay by showing voters this is who she was. My team counseled restraint, using the dictum that “you don’t get in front of a freight train when its careening down the tracks out of control”. While the Republican‘s actions made national news, in an election that I lost by the slimmest of margins, I regret not heeding to my gut and following my own strategy of acting from strength and conviction. Did it matter in the end? We’ll never know. But I should have pushed not only my advantage, but the view that my main opponent did not share voters’ values and was not worthy of their vote.