Democrats Warned to Ditch Progressive Language After New Report Shows Party Drift

By: David Weigel | Semafor

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.

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.

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