Deciding to Win

Before their intra-party fracture over ending the government shutdown, Democrats seem to have regained a little spring in their step following the off-cycle elections in multiple states earlier this month, as they should.   

Most pollsters predicted wins for the Democrats, but their margins of victory in Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and California took most by surprise, particularly in the down-ballot races that didn’t get as much attention. 

For example, in Virginia, Democrats picked up five districts won by President Trump in 2024, giving the party its largest governing majority since the 1980s. In New Jersey, Democrats flipped five seats in the state’s General Assembly, in districts comfortably won by President Trump in 2024, giving the party a supermajority in the state. 

The New York mayoral race, which yielded a win for Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, despite President Trump’s endorsement of his leading rival in the race, had many Republican strategists licking their chops at the prospect of tying all Democrats to the far-left swing in America’s biggest urban city. Time will tell, but New York isn’t America, thankfully.    

As usual, the pundits chimed in to debate what this all means for the mid-term elections in 2026 and how Republicans in general fare in elections when President Trump isn’t on the ballot.   

I’ll leave that to smarter people than I to determine, and ultimately, it’s the voters who will decide. 

But putting aside the New York and California races, which aren’t really representative of the issues facing most Americans, it seems clearthat the Democrats who took a more pragmatic, common sense approach to how they’d govern, versus focusing on the polarizing social issues that have animated the party in recent years, is key to the Democrats finding a way out of their current wilderness. 

A great roadmap for this approach was released in late October by a nonprofit group of centrist Democrats called Welcome. Their in-depth analysis, titled “Deciding to Win,” provides an unvarnished take on how Democrats lost their way with vast swaths of the American electorate and how they can find a firmer footing going forward.   

Google it. It’s worth a read regardless of your party affiliation, if you have one, as it shows there’s a path forward for the country to focus on real issues that impact real people, not the divisive clickbait that drives social media algorithms. 

On how Democrats got here, the takeaways in the report are kind of obvious, as I’ve outlined in this column previously. To sum it up, the report states: “In comparison with the Democratic Party of 2012, today’s Democratic Party is more focused on issues like climate change, democracy, abortion, and identity and cultural concerns and less focused on the economy and the middle class.” 

I agree, and Deciding to Win provides a ton of data and analysis to support the point, in particularabout the Biden presidency.   

Under the chapter titled “Joe Biden governed from the left – and voters noticed,” they cite a composite of polls that shows the percentage of voters who viewed Biden as “too liberal” climbed from the mid-30s during the 2020 campaign to more than 60 percent by 2024.   

More importantly than the deep dive on the past, their in-depth analysis and polling about where Democrats need to go in the future is most telling and aligned with how Democrats have successfully run and won recently. 

Specifically, it says that Democrats need to “focus more on issues voters do not think we prioritize enough,” citing cost of living, health care, border security, and public safety. Conversely, it says Democrats should focus less on the issues voters think they’ve been overly focused on in recent years, as noted above, and moderate their positions on agenda issues that are unpopular, specifically immigration, energy production, and some cultural issues. 

Most of that is “noduh” analysis for anyone paying attention to things other than their social media feeds, but the data they use to back it up is rock solid. I guess we’ll see how much of a stomach the Democrats have to shift their focus to things voters really care about.   

Of all the quotes praising the Deciding to Win plan, I was most struck by one from Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and strategist. He said:  

“If Democrats decide to follow the guidance in Deciding to Win, it would make my job a lot harder. Luckily, they probably won’t. “ 

For all our sakes, I hope they do.