Category: Democratic Party

“Win Everywhere”: A Virtuous Cycle for American Politics

The Rivera report on the Democrats’ 2024 loss is an odd document.

It appears to contain some useful insights. It also appears unfinished, poorly rolled out, and only grudgingly released. The Democratic National Committee held the report for months before releasing it under internal pressure. DNC Chair Ken Martin then distanced himself from it, saying he was “not proud” of the product and that it did not meet his standards. The DNC also attached a disclaimer saying it could not verify many of the report’s claims because it had not received the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data.

That is not how a serious political party should handle a serious post-election review.

Still, buried inside the Rivera report is an idea that both parties should take seriously: Democrats need to organize everywhere to win everywhere.

That phrase matters.

In fact, it may be the key to a healthier American politics.

What “Win Everywhere” Should Mean

I would take “win everywhere” more literally than political consultants usually do.

Obviously, no party will actually win every race. Politics is competitive. If one party improves, the other party will adapt. Some districts are deeply Republican. Others are deeply Democratic. Not every race is polled, and not every race can realistically be close in any given cycle.

But the aspiration should be clear:

A healthy political party should try to make every election genuinely contestable.

Conceptually, every serious party should want to nominate candidates who could poll within the margin of error before Election Day if voters were paying attention and both parties were competing seriously.

That is not because every candidate will win. They will not.

It is because the discipline of trying to win everywhere would force both parties to become better.

A Democrat running in rural Georgia should not sound like a faculty-lounge progressive from Brooklyn. A Republican running in suburban Maryland should not sound like he is auditioning for a Trump rally. Candidates should fit their communities while still reflecting their party’s broad principles.

That is what political parties are supposed to do.

They are supposed to persuade.

Why the Impossibility Is the Point

The reason “win everywhere” cannot fully succeed is also the reason it is so important.

If Democrats became more competitive in rural America, small towns, the South, and working-class communities, Republicans would have to adapt. They could not rely as easily on Trump loyalty, cultural resentment, and the assumption that Democrats are unacceptable by default.

If Republicans became more competitive in cities, suburbs, college towns, and diverse metropolitan areas, Democrats would have to adapt too. They could not rely as easily on progressive cultural shorthand, demographic assumptions, or opposition to Trump as a substitute for persuasion.

That competitive response is exactly what the country needs.

The goal is not permanent one-party dominance. The goal is healthier competition.

When both parties have to compete everywhere, both parties have to listen. They have to recruit better candidates. They have to moderate their language. They have to understand local concerns. They have to stop treating entire categories of voters as either deplorable or morally superior.

In short, both parties would have to become less obnoxious.

That may be the best argument for “win everywhere.”

Democrats’ Bad Habit: “Failure to Communicate”

The Rivera report appears more reasonable than the progressive response to it because it recognizes real Democratic weaknesses with men, rural voters, non-college voters, Latino voters, irregular voters, and voters in Middle America and the South. AP reported that the report criticized Democrats’ focus on identity politics and said Harris “wrote off rural America.” Reuters similarly reported that the report faulted Democrats for failing to engage men, rural voters, non-college-educated voters, and irregular voters.

That is useful.

But Democrats often make the same mistake after losing: they describe the defeat as a failure to communicate.

Sometimes that is true. Sometimes the message was unclear, the candidate was poorly defined, the campaign failed to respond, or the party did not show up.

But sometimes voters heard the message clearly enough and did not like it.

That distinction matters.

Immigration was not merely a communication problem. Inflation was not merely a communication problem. DEI rhetoric was not merely a communication problem. Cultural overreach was not merely a communication problem. The Trump campaign’s “they/them” ad was effective not simply because Democrats failed to answer it, but because many voters already suspected the party had become too willing to indulge the cultural left.

A party that wants to win everywhere cannot treat every voter disagreement as a misunderstanding.

It has to ask whether voters understood the party’s priorities and rejected them.

The Democratic Lesson

For Democrats, “win everywhere” means more than opening field offices in red counties.

It means becoming plausible to voters outside deep-blue cultural environments.

That does not mean becoming Republican. It does not mean abandoning civil rights, immigration reform, climate policy, abortion rights, or concern for vulnerable groups.

It means learning to speak about those issues in a way that does not sound contemptuous of ordinary people.

Democrats need to stop assuming that voters who dislike immigration disorder are xenophobes. They need to stop assuming that voters who dislike DEI rhetoric are racists. They need to stop assuming that voters who reject progressive language about gender are bigots. They need to stop confusing academic vocabulary with moral seriousness.

People of good will can address the real concerns of transgender people without appearing so open-minded that their brains fell out.

A party that wants to win everywhere has to be able to say that.

It also has to be honest about inflation. Biden-era transfers were politically understandable during COVID, but in retrospect the additional fiscal stimulus was poorly timed. When supply chains were still broken and production capacity was constrained, aggressive transfers increased demand faster than supply could respond. That made inflation more likely, and Democrats then paid the political price for seeming surprised by a result that should have been easier to anticipate.

That is not a messaging problem.

It is a judgment problem.

The Republican Lesson

Republicans need the same discipline.

A Republican Party that wants to win everywhere cannot define “Republican” as “loyal to Donald Trump.”

It cannot treat every dissenting conservative as a RINO. It cannot indulge election denial, cruelty, corruption, or authoritarian rhetoric and then wonder why it struggles in suburbs, cities, college towns, and diverse communities.

A serious Republican Party should have room for fiscal conservatives, libertarians, national-security conservatives, business conservatives, social conservatives, moderates, and populists. Those factions will disagree. That is what political parties are for.

But when loyalty to one man becomes the organizing principle, a party stops being a coalition and becomes a personal vehicle.

That is bad for Republicans. It is also bad for the country.

If Republicans wanted to win everywhere, they would need candidates who could speak to voters who care about fiscal discipline but reject chaos. They would need candidates who can talk about crime without sounding cruel, immigration without sounding bigoted, religion without sounding theocratic, and patriotism without sounding authoritarian.

That would make the Republican Party better.

The Virtuous Cycle

Here is the point that matters most.

If one party seriously tried to win everywhere, the other party would have to respond.

That response would create a virtuous cycle.

If Democrats competed seriously in rural and working-class districts, Republicans would have to stop taking those voters for granted. If Republicans competed seriously in urban and suburban districts, Democrats would have to stop taking those voters for granted.

More races would become real contests. More candidates would have to persuade. More voters would matter. Fewer politicians could survive by appealing only to activists, donors, cable-news audiences, or primary electorates.

That is how American politics could improve.

Not because one party becomes dominant.

Because both parties become less complacent.

A healthy democracy does not require one party to win everywhere. It requires both parties to believe they should try.

Why This Matters to CIVPAC

CIVPAC’s interest is not in helping Democrats win for the sake of Democrats, or Republicans win for the sake of Republicans.

Our interest is in making both parties better.

The country benefits when Democrats are forced to understand rural, religious, working-class, culturally moderate, and non-college voters. The country also benefits when Republicans are forced to understand urban, suburban, secular, immigrant, educated, and racially diverse voters.

Both parties need to compete for voters who are not already on their side.

That is how parties become less ideological, less arrogant, and less captured by their loudest activists.

It is also how voters get better choices.

Too many Americans are politically homeless because each party has learned to survive by making the other party unacceptable. Democrats rely on fear of Trump. Republicans rely on fear of the cultural left. Both strategies can work electorally. Neither strategy produces a healthy democracy.

“Win everywhere” offers a better discipline.

It says: do not write off voters. Do not caricature communities. Do not nominate candidates who can only speak to the converted. Do not assume that the other party’s failures are enough to excuse your own.

The Right Lesson From Rivera

The Rivera report may be unfinished. It may be poorly sourced. It may be incomplete. It reportedly sidesteps some of the hardest questions, including Biden’s decision to seek reelection, and the rushed elevation of Harris after Biden withdrew.

But the “win everywhere” idea is right.

The Democrats need it. Republicans need it too.

A party that wants to govern the whole country should try to understand the whole country. It should put forward candidates who can compete in places where the party usually loses. It should want every voter to believe that their vote matters and that both parties are capable of speaking to them.

That is not naïve. It is the competitive logic democracy is supposed to produce.

The country does not need one party to win everywhere.

It needs both parties to try.

That effort would force each party to listen more, preach less, and nominate candidates who can appeal beyond their own base.

That is the virtuous cycle American politics badly needs.

Of course, not everyone would welcome this. The activist wings of both parties benefit from safe-seat politics. Progressive activists have more power when Democrats only need to win deep-blue primaries. MAGA activists have more power when Republicans only need to win deep-red primaries. A genuine effort to win everywhere would weaken both groups because it would force candidates to persuade voters outside the ideological comfort zone. That is one reason the strategy is so attractive. It would return power from activists to voters.

The Progressive Democratic Autopsy Does Not Go Far Enough

The progressive left has produced its own autopsy of the Democrats’ 2024 presidential loss. Some of it is useful. Much of it is predictable.

This post is about the progressive RootsAction autopsy, not the separate DNC/Rivera report later released by the Democratic National Committee. The RootsAction response was more progressive and self-confirming than the Rivera report.

The Rivera report appears more serious on voter groups Democrats lost and on the party’s failure to listen. But both reports still leave important questions underdeveloped, especially inflation, immigration, Biden’s governing coalition, Gaza cross-pressures, and the cultural alienation of working- and middle-class voters.

The RootsAction report is right that Democrats paid a price for President Biden’s decision to seek reelection and then withdraw only very late in the process. Biden ended his campaign on July 21, 2024, after a debate performance that intensified existing doubts about his age and capacity, leaving Democrats only a few months to define a new nominee and make the case against Donald Trump.

The report is also right that Democrats had a problem with younger voters. The RootsAction autopsy identifies “losing young voters,” “voter disenchantment,” Biden’s late withdrawal, working-class erosion, and Gaza as central reasons for Harris’s defeat. Tufts’ CIRCLE analysis found that young voters still favored Harris overall, but shifted right compared with 2020. AP reported that young men moved significantly toward Trump after a campaign that deliberately appealed to masculine identity through podcasts, sports, and nontraditional media.

So the progressive autopsy is not wrong about everything.

But it still seems to confirm progressive priors more than it confronts the hardest lessons of the election.

It wants Democrats to conclude that they lost because they were not progressive enough, not populist enough, not aggressive enough on Gaza, and not sufficiently mobilizing of the party’s base. Even if some of that were true, which I doubt, it does not explain the whole story. Most importantly, it ignores the issues that many working- and middle-class voters were actually reacting to: immigration disorder, inflation, cultural alienation, and the sense that Democrats were more comfortable speaking the language of elite progressivism than the language of ordinary Americans.

Biden’s Late Withdrawal Hurt Democrats

I agree with the progressive critique on this point: Biden’s decision not to withdraw earlier hurt Democrats.

Voters had serious doubts about his age and capacity long before the debate made those doubts impossible to dismiss. By waiting so long, Biden denied his party a normal primary process, denied voters a real choice among alternatives, and denied the eventual nominee the time needed to build a durable campaign identity.

The RootsAction report calls Biden’s decision to run again, and his refusal to step aside until late in the process, one of the central causes of the Democratic loss. That is fair.

But that explanation has limits. Biden’s late withdrawal hurt Democrats. It did not create all of the underlying problems Democrats faced. A stronger nominee might have performed better, but even a stronger nominee would have had to defend the record and rhetoric of the Democratic Party as voters experienced it.

That is where the progressive autopsy becomes much less persuasive.

The Young Male Problem Democrats Need to Understand

Democrats also appear to have a real problem with young men.

This should not be reduced to a crude claim that all young men are reactionary or that Democrats should imitate the online right. But the problem is real enough to deserve more serious attention than it often receives.

Many young men hear progressive rhetoric about privilege, identity, and DEI less as a call for fairness than as an accusation aimed at them personally. They are told they are beneficiaries of an unjust system at the same time many of them are struggling economically, socially, educationally, and professionally. That is not a recipe for political loyalty.

A healthy political party should be able to say two things at once: discrimination is real, and alienated young men are not all villains.

Too often, progressive rhetoric leaves no room for the second half of that sentence.

This does not mean Democrats should abandon equal opportunity or stop opposing discrimination. It does mean they should rethink language that sounds less like fairness and more like collective blame. A party that talks constantly about inclusion cannot afford to make a large group of voters feel preemptively excluded.

Trump exploited that opening. Democrats should ask why the opening existed.

Gaza Was Not the Main Problem for Most Voters

The progressive left is especially focused on Gaza. There is no question that Gaza mattered deeply to some voters, especially younger voters, progressive activists, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and some voters in Michigan. More than 100,000 Michigan Democratic primary voters cast ballots for “uncommitted,” a protest vote widely understood as a rebuke of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

But it is much harder to believe that the central lesson of 2024 is that Democrats failed because they did not tilt far enough toward Gaza activism.

That claim may be emotionally satisfying to parts of the progressive left. It is not a convincing explanation of the broader working-class and middle-class erosion Democrats experienced. Most voters were not living politically in foreign-policy protest politics. They were living with grocery bills, rent, immigration anxiety, cultural conflict, and frustration with a party that seemed surprised by voter concerns it should have seen coming.

Nor is it obvious that more pro-Gaza rhetoric would have been a net political winner. Democrats may have lost some voters because the Biden administration was too supportive of Israel for their taste. But they also risked losing other voters, including Jewish voters, pro-Israel Democrats, moderates, and voters alarmed by the tone of some campus protests, if the party had moved further in the other direction. A Forward poll taken during the campaign found that Jewish voters trusted Harris more than Trump to handle the Israel-Hamas war, but also saw Trump as more supportive of Israelis. That captures the tension Democrats faced.

In other words, Gaza was not a one-way political problem.

The progressive left counts the voters Democrats lost over Gaza. It is much less interested in counting the voters Democrats might have lost by sounding naïve, hostile, or morally confused about Israel.

For most Americans, the question was not whether Democrats had adopted the correct activist position on Gaza. The question was whether Democrats understood the country they were governing.

Immigration Was a Self-Inflicted Wound

Immigration is one of the most obvious issues the progressive autopsy underplays.

Working-class voters are not wrong to want a humane immigration system and a secure border. Those goals are not contradictory. They are the basic requirements of a functioning country.

Democrats spent too long treating border concerns as if they were merely a cover for xenophobia. That was politically foolish and substantively wrong. A country that cannot credibly manage its border will lose public trust, including trust among voters who support legal immigration and humane treatment of migrants.

AP VoteCast found that Trump tapped into deep economic anxiety among voters, and AP’s broader VoteCast work showed immigration and the economy were central issues in the 2024 electorate. That should not have shocked anyone. When voters believe the governing party has lost control of a basic function of government, they tend to punish that party.

Democrats can object to Trump’s cruelty, dishonesty, and demagoguery on immigration. They should. But opposing Trump is not enough. They also need a policy that persuades ordinary voters that the government can be compassionate without being naïve. They needed to come to that conclusion before it became politically obvious that they were only doing it because they had to do something.

That failure helps explain why Democrats lost in 2024.

The “They/Them” Ad Worked Because It Hit a Real Vulnerability

One of Trump’s most effective attacks was the “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” ad. The ad was ugly. It was designed to exploit cultural resentment. But Democrats should resist the temptation to dismiss its effectiveness as merely evidence of voter bigotry.

The ad worked because it told a simple story: Democrats are focused on a narrow set of elite cultural concerns; Trump is focused on you.

That story was unfair in many ways. It was also politically potent.

PBS reported during the campaign that anti-transgender political ads were dominating the airwaves, with ads supporting Trump attacking Harris over transgender issues. Some postelection analysis, including discussion of Democratic super PAC testing, suggested the “they/them” attack was among Trump’s more effective ads, though there was disagreement about how large its effect was.

The point is not that transgender Americans should be treated as political scapegoats. They should not be. The point is that Democrats had no clear answer when Republicans framed them as more concerned with the language and priorities of progressive activists than with the everyday concerns of ordinary voters.

That is a political problem.

The right answer is not cruelty. It is clarity. People of good will can address the real concerns of transgender Americans without appearing so open-minded that their brains fell out. The deeper problem is that progressives are often so busy signaling virtue to one another that they forget there are potential allies who can be persuaded if their concerns are treated with respect rather than derision. Democrats should defend the equal dignity of every American while also being willing to say no to unpopular, poorly defended, or symbolically extreme positions that most voters do not share.

This is where Democrats often confuse moral seriousness with activist maximalism. A humane society should protect vulnerable people from harassment, discrimination, and cruelty. But voters are also entitled to expect boundaries, prudence, and ordinary language. When Democrats cannot make those distinctions clearly, Republicans will make the distinctions for them — and not kindly.

A party that cannot make those distinctions will keep giving Republicans material for ads like that.

The Inflation Mistake Democrats Don’t Want to Own

The progressive autopsy is especially weak on inflation.

It is right that inflation badly hurt working- and middle-class voters. But it largely treats inflation as something Democrats failed to message properly or failed to blame sufficiently on others. That is too convenient.

Supply-chain disruptions mattered. Energy markets mattered. The war in Ukraine mattered. Federal Reserve policy mattered. But Democrats should also admit that Biden-era fiscal policy helped increase inflationary pressure. I have seen little persuasive evidence that inflation was caused by corporate pricing policies, as the RootsAction report asserts, that cannot be explained by ordinary market conditions. The simpler explanation is also the more economically plausible one: demand was pushed up while supply was still constrained.

The impulse behind the transfers was politically understandable. The country had just been through a pandemic. Millions of households had experienced economic disruption. Democrats wanted to prevent hardship, sustain demand, and avoid repeating the too-slow recovery that followed the Great Recession.

But policy has to be judged not only by its intentions, but by its timing and consequences.

By 2021, the problem was no longer simply inadequate demand. Supply chains were still disrupted. Production capacity was constrained. Labor markets were unsettled. In that environment, aggressive transfers risked increasing demand faster than the economy could increase supply. More dollars were chasing goods and services that could not be produced or delivered quickly enough.

That is a classic recipe for inflation.

Federal Reserve research has emphasized that post-pandemic inflation reflected the interaction of supply and demand forces. A 2025 Federal Reserve paper summarized the evidence by noting that demand factors became more relevant in 2021 and 2022, while supply factors also remained important. New York Fed research likewise estimated that aggregate demand shocks explained a large share of model-based inflation from late 2019 through mid-2022, with fiscal stimulus contributing significantly to that demand effect. San Francisco Fed research found that global supply-chain disruptions also contributed substantially to the run-up in inflation.

This does not mean that every dollar of inflation was caused by Biden’s policies. It was not. But Democrats too often spoke as if inflation were something that happened to them, rather than something their own policy choices helped aggravate.

Voters noticed the prices. They noticed the explanations. And they were not wrong to conclude that the people in power seemed surprised by an outcome that should have been easier to anticipate.

Inflation is not an abstract statistic to most voters. It is the grocery bill. It is rent. It is a car payment. It is the feeling that even a decent raise does not get you ahead. For working- and middle-class voters, inflation feels like betrayal by the governing class, especially when that class appears to dismiss their concerns as temporary, technical, or exaggerated.

Pointing to lower inflation numbers as success only exacerbated the political problem. People were upset because prices were so much higher than they had been, not merely because the current rate of inflation remained too high. Bringing the rate of inflation down was a real success, but failing to realize that was not what people were upset about was politically obtuse.

That is why the inflation mistake matters so much. It was not just an economic problem. It was a trust problem.

Biden Ran as a Moderate but Governed with the Progressive Coalition

Another issue the progressive autopsy avoids is the gap between Biden’s 2020 campaign image and the governing coalition that emerged afterward.

Biden won in 2020 largely as a reassuring, experienced, moderate Democrat. Many voters did not choose him because they wanted a progressive transformation of American politics. They chose him because they wanted Trump gone and because Biden seemed normal, decent, and comparatively centrist.

But once in office, Biden often governed as if the progressive wing had to be appeased at every turn. That does not mean every Biden policy was progressive or that progressives got everything they wanted. They did not. But the administration’s language, staffing, and policy instincts often seemed more aligned with activist priorities than with the moderate image Biden had projected in 2020.

That created a problem of expectations.

Some voters who supported Biden as a stabilizing centrist felt they had instead gotten a party preoccupied with immigration permissiveness, DEI rhetoric, aggressive spending, and cultural issues they did not understand or share.

The progressive autopsy treats this as a failure to mobilize the base. Centrists and independents should see something else: a failure to respect the voters who gave Biden his winning coalition in the first place.

The Working-Class Message Democrats Missed

The common thread is not that Democrats should become Republicans. They should not. Trumpism remains reckless, dishonest, divisive, and institutionally dangerous.

The lesson is that Democrats need to stop assuming every loss proves they should move further left.

Working-class voters did not need a lecture on ideological purity. They needed a party that understood their daily pressures. Many concluded that Democrats had been foolish on immigration, overly absorbed in DEI rhetoric, culturally distant, and at least partly responsible for inflation that hurt them badly.

AP VoteCast found that voters focused on the economy broke strongly for Trump, reflecting deep anxiety about an economy that, despite growth, many voters felt was not meeting the needs of the middle class. That finding should discipline every post-election theory. If an autopsy does not take inflation, affordability, immigration, and cultural alienation seriously, it is not really an autopsy. It is a factional argument.

That is the problem with the progressive report. It identifies some real wounds, but it avoids others because those wounds implicate progressive assumptions.

What a Serious Autopsy Would Say

A serious Democratic autopsy would say something like this:

Biden should have stepped aside earlier.

Democrats had a real problem with young voters, especially young men.

Gaza mattered to some voters, but it was not a significant reason most working- and middle-class voters moved away from Democrats.

Immigration disorder badly damaged the party’s credibility.

The “they/them” ad worked because Democrats had allowed themselves to be defined by unpopular cultural signals.

Biden-era fiscal stimulus was understandable in motive but excessive or poorly timed given supply constraints, and it contributed to inflationary pressure.

Biden ran as a moderate but governed too often as the head of a coalition trying to placate progressives.

And working-class voters concluded, not irrationally, that Democrats did not understand their lives.

That is the autopsy Democrats need. It is also the autopsy many progressives do not want.

The Centrist Lesson

For centrists and independents, the lesson is simple: voters are not ideological props.

They are allowed to have mixed views. They are allowed to want legal immigration and border security. They are allowed to support equal rights while resisting cultural coercion. They are allowed to appreciate government help during a crisis while objecting to inflation afterward. They are allowed to worry about discrimination and also dislike DEI rhetoric that sounds accusatory or unfair.

Good policy must be economically efficient, fair, respectful of personal freedom, and politically realistic. That standard is harder than slogans. It requires tradeoffs. It requires listening. It requires admitting when your own side made mistakes.

Trump has been a terrible president across so many different dimensions, and his personal conduct should have made him easy to defeat. Democrats’ failure to do so says something very powerful about the Democratic Party.

The progressive autopsy asks Democrats to believe that the party mostly failed because it lacked the courage to move left.

The evidence suggests a more uncomfortable conclusion: Democrats lost many voters because they stopped hearing them.

And a politics that cannot hear voters clearly will keep misunderstanding the country.