Good News: Progressive Advocacy Groups Have Been Found Not Guilty By A Progressive Advocacy Group
Case closed?
“Paulie said he wants it known: It’s on him, he takes full responsibility, but that he didn’t do nothin.’ ” —Silvio Dante telling Tony Soprano about a major blunder
Do you want Democrats to win and Republicans to lose? If so, you might be curious about a new report from a group called Way to Win, which bills itself as “a donor collaborative that invests in data-driven strategies to fund new media and grassroots efforts to win long-term political change.” “Towards Strength: Way to Win Post-2024 Research Summary” contains some supposedly important news for Democrats and those who want them to win elections in the future: According to The New Republic (which got exclusive access to an early copy), the report reveals “the Real Reason Democrats Lost in 2024.”
Let me go ahead and spoil that part immediately. Most of the report’s arguments about why Harris lost consist of what is now the conventional wisdom: Kamala Harris didn’t have a clear message, she didn’t present herself as a “change” candidate during a “change” election, and so on. (As the authors note, she couldn’t name a single thing she’d have done differently from Joe Biden, the flailing and unpopular incumbent to whom she was tethered.) All true, but all well-trod terrain. Even the document’s working definition of “strength,” a word that appears in its very title, doesn’t really say much that’s new: “What exactly is strength? As the Supreme Court’s famous approach would suggest: ‘you know it when you see it.’ But as a working definition: political strength is making decisions based on core values and principles, explaining choices with clear and persuasive arguments, drawing a contrast with one’s opponents, and making it clear why your approach is the better one.”
What are those core values and principles? What are those arguments? This is where things go off the rails. This document is useful less as a strategy blueprint and more as an example of a delusional — and condescending — mindset that has unfortunately taken hold among a subset of professional progressives.
Let’s Get Inclusive and Populist
According to Way to Win, there’s no need for Democrats to moderate on any hot-button issue, and in fact doing so could only help Trump. There’s a better way: “inclusive populism,” a messaging strategy that focuses on the true causes of voters’ ills — parasitic rich people and the Republican policies that coddle them — and that doesn’t budge an inch on fraught issues like trans rights and immigration.
No report like this is produced in a vacuum. Way to Win is embedded in a network of “the groups” Adam Jentleson mentioned (albeit hypocritically) in his Times column published shortly after the 2024 election. They “tend to be nonprofit organizations dedicated to advancing a single issue or set of related issues that they often hope to get on the Democrats’ agenda,” he wrote. “At their best, these groups can be productive partners in building power and legislating. But many have grown too big, adopted overly expansive mandates and become disastrously cavalier about the basic realities of American politics in ways that end up undermining their own goals.” Jentleson’s thesis was simply that Democrats need to learn to say no to these groups because they “impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.”
There is a very interesting subplot here involving Jentleson that I might lay out in a separate piece. (It involves this column he co-authored with Tory Gavito, one of the founders of Way to Win.) But for now, I just want to flag this broader context: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Way to Win produced a report that concluded Hey, turns out Democrats don’t need to moderate on anything important or say no to any of the groups. This is a “result” that is likely to be very convenient and flattering to both Way to Win itself and everyone in its immediate orbit, donors and groups included.
Here’s Way to Win’s basic theory of the case:
Democrats have an opportunity to tap into the backlash of the current moment and build something powerful and durable. Inclusive populism is a worldview that makes it clear where the real problems in the country are coming from: a wealthy class leveraging a rigged economy that has taken $79 trillion from the bottom 90%, vs. too many immigrants coming here or trans rights going too far.
Some warning alarms went off in my head as I read this. This is exactly how lefty weirdos on Bluesky discuss these issues. It’s the laziest, most transparent attempt at derailing. It usually goes down like this. I’ll use trans issues as an example but insert your own favorite hotly contested national debate:
A: Wait, so the proposed policy is full self-ID in prisons? Like, males in female units?
B: Oh, so you’re saying trans people are the real threat here, not Trump’s deportation policies?
B thinks he is being wildly clever, and will win many likes and reskeets from like-minded social media posters. But in fact, if A is actually concerned by self-ID in prisons (or whatever), and has genuine questions about this policy, he will recognize this as the cheap rhetorical tactic it is.
We’re more concerned with the broad set of potentially persuadable voters than with social media denizens. It feels safe to say that this is not the sort of framing real-life voters use to think through issues. As in, does any decided voter think, “To decide who to vote for, I need to decide whether my problems stem from a wealthy class leveraging a rigged economy that has taken $79 trillion from the bottom 90%, vs. too many immigrants coming here or trans rights going too far.” Of course not. As Way to Win itself notes in this report, people have all sorts of overlapping, sometimes conflicting-seeming views.
Let’s take the border, an issue which, as we’ll see, Way to Win tries desperately to pretend doesn’t really exist. If you live in a border county where there have been a lot of illegal crossings, this is likely to be a salient issue. The idea that some expert can swing your views on this by simply telling you a version of “Don’t wealthy people take too much from us? Aren’t they the real problem, not immigrants?” is Bluesky logic. It is the logic of people who have college degrees and almost exclusively spend time with other people with college degrees and the exact same politics. It does not reflect a reality-based understanding of how issues pop up in real life, in real races.
The Way to Win report really thinks talking about rich people and their negative effects on America is some sort of cheat code: If voters are thinking about an issue that gives the Dems trouble, just spam the B button to launch your inequality-frame missiles.
Inequality is a major concern in the U.S. I’m sympathetic to a lot of these arguments. But voters’ relationship to wealthy people and corporations is really complicated. If you ask them via polling if they think rich people get too much of the pie, they’ll often shrug and say “Sure, that seems unfair.” And they have a general sense that the system is rigged in certain ways. But at the same time, they probably also look up to certain rich people for being rich and have positive views about Amazon, which is perhaps the company most synonymous with “evil oligarchic elites destroying America” among liberal and educated folks (who also constantly use it). So the idea that you can just keep trying to redirect people’s attention from some issue to the billionaires and the oligarchs. . . I’m skeptical.
I think part of the reason Way to Win is motivated to think that spamming the B button will work is that it is deeply committed to the idea that there’s no such thing as Democrats genuinely going too far on a left-coded issue, and there’s no such thing as Democrats genuinely having failed to sufficiently respond to voters on a right-coded issue. So there is no border problem. The problem is rich people.
Where’s the evidence this sort of approach works? Way to Win presents us with a survey question based on a panel of voters who went for Biden in 2020 and who then sat out in 2024. They were asked
Now you will read two statements. Please indicate which one comes closest to your views, even if neither is exactly right.
Most of the problems in this country come from:
Having an economic system where the richest 1% have taken $50 trillion in wealth from 90% of Americans over the past few decades through tax cuts, privatized health care, squashing unions, and dividing us by our differences.
Out of control government spending, too many immigrants coming here, going too far with wokeness, and DEI and rights for transgender people.
Not sure
In this forced-choice scenario, far more of them picked the inequality answer than the wokeness answer:
THIS DOESN’T TELL US ANYTHING.
Seriously! Respondents were presented with two options, both larded to the gills with partisan buzzwords. One option was the “lefty” choice and one was the “righty” choice. That’s a major confound, especially if the respondents’ political beliefs lean left or right relative to a nationally representative sample. And the Biden skippers appear to be a very left-leaning group, as this analysis of them reveals: Asked who they would have voted for if they had voted, they picked Harris over Trump by a more than two-to-one margin. They also “hold a more favorable view of Democrats, including Democrats in Congress (+40%), than general population surveys might suggest.”
This is obviously an important group to study. Why did they stay home? How could they be remobilized? But if you offer them this sort of forced-choice survey item, of course they’re going to choose the “left” option rather than the “right” option. The fact that Way to Win thinks you can extrapolate anything meaningful from this result is really worrisome.
So why does Way to Win think you can effectively tell voters “these aren’t the droids you are looking for” when they seem to be upset about an issue that lies in an area of GOP strength? What argument do they make that might defeat my skepticism?
Time for the misinformation cope.
The Problem with Using Misinformation Claims as a Crutch
Just to be clear: Misinformation is bad. There is a lot of it. I still think it’s worse on the right, overall (Candace Owens generates about $10 million a year!), though I think the left has closed the gap. It is bad when people believe things that aren’t true, and to the extent misinformation nudges them toward false or questionable beliefs, that’s all bad too.
But it’s one thing to acknowledge that misinformation is a concern, and it’s another to use it as an excuse to not have difficult or inconvenient discussions. And this Way to Win report is a master class in the misinformation cope. Its treatment of the border stands out as particularly remarkable.
At this point it is well established that the Biden administration was disastrously lead-footed when it came to the U.S.-Mexico border. Way to Win published its report about a week after the publication of a long New York Times investigation that starts with the foreboding sentence “In the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president, advisers delivered a warning: His approach to immigration could prove disastrous.”
Biden’s stance didn’t come out of nowhere: It was a response to the harsh enforcement policies of the first administration (policies that have only gotten harsher, of course). But Biden’s own preferred policies were likely to cause problems of their own, according to some of his advisers. They “threatened to drastically increase border crossings, experts advising his transition team warned in a Zoom briefing in the final weeks of 2020, according to people with direct knowledge of that briefing. That jump, they said, could provoke a political crisis.” Final weeks of 2020! Before he was even inaugurated!
We all know what happened next, as captured dramatically by this chart Axios put together:
After Biden was elected, there was a massive spike in Border Patrol apprehensions (I believe this is generally seen as the best proxy we have for successful illegal crossings since those aren’t directly trackable). Overall, the Times found that Biden “and his closest advisers repeatedly rebuffed recommendations that could have addressed the border crisis faster, and eased what became a potent issue for Mr. Trump as he sought to return to the White House and justify the aggressive tactics roiling American cities today.”
In early January of 2024, the Times reported on the spillover effects of this surge of migrants. “Publicly, the Democratic politicians have described mounting crises in their cities,” the article noted. They “want help with overflowing migrant encampments, packed shelters, and busted budgets.”
In other words, this clearly led to a genuine political crisis that had ramifications for the Democratic Party. To say so is to simply be in touch with reality. It does not mean you lack sympathy for the migrants in question or prefer Trump’s monstrous and fearmongering approach.
A healthy progressive movement will recognize obvious mistakes like Biden’s and respond to them with updated policy ideas and messaging, if only to prevent outcomes like our present ICE hell from happening again in the future.
So how does the Way to Win report handle the border crisis? By pretending it didn’t really happen.
