How To Win (Or Lose) an Election

Democrats Have a Clear Road Map to Victory, but Will They Use It?

Blunting a midterm effect is hard.

In fact, its so hard that when I set out in the winter of 2021 to teach Democrats how they might do it, I assumed it was an impossible task we’d ultimately fail at.

And we well might have, if not for Dobbs.

The day the Dobbs memo leaked I knew that Democrats now had a powerful wedge issue they could use in the midterms to potentially disrupt one of the most reliable patterns in American politics, the midterm effect.

Believe it or not though, it was not easy to convince top tier campaigns that wedging Roe/Dobbs was the only path to victory in 2022. That rather than doing what their traditional strategists were privately and publicly telling them to do (play defense on crime and inflation), Democrats who wanted to actually win needed to go hard on offense on abortion.

At the end of the day those old school consultants had far more access to top tier campaigns than an outsider like me. As such, some of the most important races of that cycle, especially the 4 marquee senate races and the House races in both NY and CA played defense and predictably lost.

Meanwhile individual campaigns like Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s in Michigan wedged Dobbs and cruised to a victory that was not even in question by September. Against a midterm effect, no less!

Wedging freedom (abortion) also delivered big wins in Arizona with Katie Hobbes’ close win against extremist Kari Lake and with Adrian Fontes, who used a “Protect Democracy” frame to build a massive bipartisan coalition to outperform even Mark Kelly in some precincts in his race for Secretary of State.

We will see free and fair elections in Arizona in 2024 because of those victories.

It took awhile to get the ad data from 2022, but once it came in, it told a tale of two strategies.

In one strategy, Republicans set the terms of the debate on two issues most damaging to Democrats and let the Democratic campaigns do a purely defensive dance that focused on “correcting the record” and touting both their superior biographical qualifications and their deep, abiding love of bipartisanship and “standing up to their own party.”

They all lost, as I knew they would.

Meanwhile, a few races like Whitmer’s went all-in on abortion overreach. The combined result produced an over all rate of abortion-focused ads of about 31% of the total ads aired by Democrats that cycle.

Sadly though, most swing race Democrats never ran an ad on abortion, let alone the multiple ads they would need to create a successful referendum effect against their Republican opponent. Yes, Whitmer benefited from an abortion initiative on the Michigan ballot, but she did so because she explicitly tied it to her Republican opponent Tudor Dixon. Voters will not make that connection on their own. Absent a strategy to link the abortion initiative to Republican candidates, we will see voters in state’s like Arizona, Nevada, Missouri, Montana, and Florida, all of which have abortion initiatives on the ballot this cycle, vote to save abortion access while simultaneously sending abortion-banning Republicans back to the Senate and the House.

We can not let this happen in 2024, especially not in the senate races where there is no room for error!

So, it was with baited breath that I’ve been waiting for Ad Impact to drop the abortion ad numbers thus far for the 2024 cycle. Although some top tier campaigns have adjusted strategy and are running hard on reproductive freedom, the data makes clear that many more still have not.

Dobbs has created a powerful effect which will benefit Democrats across the board to a small extent, but to really benefit from it, the campaigns must centralize their strategies around abortion by defining their Republican opponents, incumbents to challengers, as dangerous abortion extremists.

When the chips fall on November 5th both the House and Senate majorities will be determined by strategy.

The Ad Impact data from 2023 makes it clear that Democrat’s victories both in the Wisconsin state supreme court race and the Virginia House of delegates races, wedging abortion and centralizing strategy around it produced big wins with fundamentals that should have favored Republicans (a Democrat in the White House).

Source: Ad Impact Report

Whether you’re in a pure swing race or a lean red senate state, your pathway to victory is the same: you must push swing voters and moderate Republican independent “leaners” away from their brand allegiance to the Republican Party.

You can not outrun the D next to your name on the ballot. That R and D determines vote choice for about 95% of the electorate and is so powerful that even when you combine “independent leaners” with admitted partisans in the data, virtually everyone voted for the candidate from their own “team.”

Like it or not, the party label on the ballot is by far the most powerful thing on that ballot. It is far more powerful than the candidate themselves.

Like Republicans did to working class voters via wedging grievance “culture war” issues, Democrats MUST break the (growing) brand allegiance voters have to the Republican Party in states like Montana and Ohio.

The Republicans have already showed us how to do it. They have managed to wedge issues like trans people and BLM so effectively, they have millions of working class people voting for a union-busting billionaire who shits into a gold toilet.

Their message was “Democrats have left you behind” and they pounded it so effectively, Democrats repeat it as a fact too!!!

Your 2024 strategy must bring the electorate in your state up to speed on the modern Republican Party’s extremism and the threat it poses to them, personally, not to outgroups only liberals care about. Voters are ill—informed and uninterested. Millions of swing voters still have no idea abortion is illegal, let alone how it ended up so.

Governor Beshear showed folks exactly how to do this in a Red state. He crushed his Republican opponent in 2022 in Kentucky against a midterm effect by defining his race around Hadley Duvall, telling the story of how Kentucky’s barbaric abortion law would have forced her to have her rapist’s baby at age 12.

These are the stories your voters need to hear and the campaigns are the only people with the money to tell them. The Harris/Walz campaign gets this, and it is part of why I feel bullish they will ultimately carry the swing states.

If you don’t tell your voters their freedom is under assault, they will never know. You must tell them.