US Senate:

Angie Nixon won because she flat hustled.

Much has been made of the money difference, but in reality, these were two candidates who had virtually no statewide presence. Neither candidate was spending enough to build a statewide brand, and in the end, the candidate who put more effort into it personally won.

Most of Vindman spending was on list acquisition and digital fundraising, and as of the last FEC report, he still had 7-8 million in the bank. Had he spent his cash on hand, the result might have been different. But the made a bet that they needed to lean into the general, and it was a bet that they lost.

I think she has a very uphill battle - Ashley Moody is underrated - in every election she’s run, including tonight, she’s been the state’s top vote getter. But tonight Angie showed that some times, grit can be enough.

US House Races:

For the most part here, there were no big surprises.

In the races that got the most attention, Jared Moscowitz easily defeated his DSA opponent, which should surprise exactly no one who knows anything about Florida.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz winning should also surprise no one, given the nature of that field. The DSA candidate there, despite the noise, finished a very distant third.

Randy Fine beat his opponent who ran an ad that praised Hitler.

And Cory Mills lost to former local TV personality Ryan Elijah, in a race where Governor DeSantis made it clear that he did not support Mills and Trump stopped talking about him. Personally, I am less surprised that Mills loss than I am by the margin that he lost by. Good riddance.

Austin Rogers in FL 2 (GOP), Joe Strada in FL 11 (GOP), Jim Schwartzel in FL 19 (GOP), and Oliver Gilbert in FL-24 (Dem), all won their open seat primaries for Congress and are heavily favorites to win their generals and go to Congress.

And Alan Grayson lost his seventh consecutive campaign. Again, good riddance.

Looking ahead, there are a bunch of interesting match-ups going into the general.

FL 7: Bale Dalton easily dispatched his DSA aligned Dem opponent, setting up a race with Ryan Elijah. For Dems, this race is almost surely harder than it would have been with Mills, but Dalton is a strong candidate and gives Dems a real shot.

FL 9: Republicans chose Dan Green, a Navy veteran from Indian River County to take on Darren Soto in a newly drawn district. Of the 4 Dem incumbents impacted by redistricting, Darren will have the hardest race.

FL 13: Democrats chose retired Army Brigadier General Leela Gray to take on Anna Paulina Luna in a redrawn Pinellas County based seat. The seat leans Republican, but Gray is a great candidate.

FL 14: Republicans chose Mike Beltran, a former State House member, to take on Kathy Castor. This is a seat the GOP drew to be lean Republican, but in this cycle, especially with Castor’s strong record in the district, this will be very much a toss-up.

FL 16: Republicans chose Sydney Gruters, the wife of current RNC Chairman Joe Gruters, while Democrats chose former Sarasota Mayor Kelly Kirschner in this seat that in a normal cycle would be predictably Republican, but whose large base in St. Pete gives Democrats a shot.

FL 22: This could be the most interesting open seat of the cycle, with Republicans choosing Casey Askar to take on the Dem primary winner, Pia Dandiya. Quite simply, Pia has been one of the stars of the cycle nationally for Dems, and in this cycle, I’d argue starts out as the favorite to win this seat.

FL 25: Jared Moscowitz easily defeated his socialist primary opponent, setting up a match with Scott Singer, the GOP Mayor of Boca Raton. Jared should be considered the favorite here.

FL 27: Democrats chose Eliot Rodriguez, a long time local TV personality to take on Maria Salazar. Whether Rodriguez can make this race competitive or not, this is the kind of seat that Democrats have to be able to win going forward to have a real shot in Florida.

The math is this - Dems currently hold 8 seats. To not lose seat, they really need to win FL 14, FL 22, and FL 25 — and then, unless Soto can hold on, at least one of the others above.

Governor’s Race

To be honest, I expected Donalds to win with a larger margin (I had taken him at 61 in a pool), so his 48% was a little surprising. Frankly, I had Jolly a little higher in the pool as well.

I will write a longer piece about this going forward, but the math for Jolly to win is basically this: ensure Dem turnout is higher than Republican turnout to reduce GOP registration advantages (tonight the percentage of R’s and D’s who voted in their Gov primary was about 30%), win independents by 20 or so, and win 4-5% more Republicans than Donalds wins of Democrats. Hard? Yes. Impossible? Not if Jolly has the money.

On paper, Donalds has a cleaner path to 50 and a large war chest, but he also has a more divided field to build from. And Jolly needs donors to step up in a big way to help him compete. But this is not a race that is over tonight by any means.

Other notes:

No incumbents in the Florida Legislature lost their primary tonight, which is the first time this has happened in a few cycles. I’ll write a longer piece on this later.

Susan Collins has always been — and always will be — a tough out. But she’s never faced an environment like 2026, and if there was ever a state to settle in on a competent candidate early, its a state like Maine.

I wasn’t excited about a Janet Mills candidacy, so when I saw the first Graham Platner video, it definitely got my attention. His politics aren’t necessarily mine, but I am open to the idea that there are different ways to win. But after that initial boomlet, it didn’t take much scratching of the surface to realize this thing was going to be a disaster in the making.

The problem was obvious quickly. Platner, who at times felt like a guy whose candidacy was created inside a lab, was recruited by a couple Ivy League elites, who thought he looked and sounded like what they thought a tough, working class guy would look and sound like.

But as the days went by, it became clear there hadn’t been an ounce of serious vetting of his life. Hell, the guy who recruited him, Dan Moraff, basically patted himself on the back in an interview when questioned about this vetting by suggesting that what little they did find, “none of this will or should stop him from being a US Senator.”

But then the stuff came out…

His comments about cops.

His comments about African Americans.

His comments about guys he served with.

His conduct as a soldier.

The Nazi tattoo.

Frankly, any one or two of these things should have been reason to move on,

Many of us raised concerns. Many of us suggested there were red lines we shouldn’t cross. Many suggested we shouldn’t put our entire Senate fortunes in the hands of a guy that no one had heard of two months before any of this shit broke. Many suggested that maybe, just maybe, we should consider other people.

There were other options. Dan Kleban for one, the founder of Maine Beer Company, who actually lived the progressive values that so many of the institutional progressives claimed they wanted to see. I am sure there were others out there.

But there was no space for this conversation. Supporting Platner became a litmus test for the institutional left. To raise questions meant you were a ‘tool of the establishment’, or ‘didn’t understand working people’ — or as I saw on twitter more than once, raising concerns about Platner somehow made one a tool of Israel and/or AIPAC.

We were also told we didn’t believe in redemption, or in the terms of a prominent member of the institutional left, we were just “censorious hall monitors” engaging in what another one called just more “cancel culture,” because we wouldn’t continue to excuse away Platner’s increasing issues. And we were told that Trump’s personal failings justified supporting Platner regardless of these issues, because it was simply about power.

And sadly a lot of people in my party gave in to this pressure.

And this was before women started to talk.

Yet even after all of this, the attacks on those who wouldn’t get on board continued. Bernie Sanders continued to suggest that to oppose Platner meant you were on the side of the oligarchy, or Ro Khanna, who said that to oppose Platner was to oppose his “moral clarity,” or Hasan Piker who called Congressman Jake Auchincloss as a “straight up Israel first Democrat” because the Congressman said the Nazi tattoo was a red line.

I mean again - how did this even get past that tattoo?

And yet after all of that, it took another woman speaking out finally get the institutional left to finally acknowledge that their guy needed to step aside.

I mean, let’s go back a bit - again, how did we even get past the Nazi tattoo? This was a guy who two months before the tattoo, no one in politics really knew. There were plenty of chances to move on, plenty of chances to find a better candidate (who wasn’t Janet Mills), and plenty of chances to admit mistakes. But no - their plan was simple: attack anyone who didn’t see Platner as Moses who could lead Democrats to a new prized land.

There are a few things that need to be said:

It is easy for me to say that war is awful - I’ve never faced a bullet in anger - and I have no doubt that war impacted Platner in unthinkably horrible ways. I hate this for him, and I hate it for every veteran who raised their hand and went to war, who are now navigating a system that too often leaves them less than whole following their service to our country.

I also agree we need more relatable candidates, but being relatable isn’t an excuse for not being honest. People have faults, and people who have lived real lives, made mistakes and comeback from those mistakes are the type of people we need more of in public life.

I am not saying I would have felt 100% better about it, but had Platner on Day 1 just laid it all out there in his announcement, acknowledged his own shortcomings and leaned into his redemption arc as a reason for running, I could make an argument he might have gotten past it. But he didn’t. And he’s had nearly a year to do that. Instead they attacked people who weren’t 100% loyal.`This isn’t on Washington. This ending is squarely on the candidate, and his campaign.

Three: For all the criticism, often quite fair, about how DC-insiders weigh in where they shouldn’t, the institutional left absolutely shouted down every effort to suggest maybe we should think about another option. Their behavior was just as bad as the worst behavior of DC insiders.

And finally, it should have never gotten to this point. I mean, what are we doing here? If the institutional left wants to go to war against a bunch of safe seat Members of Congress who should have left 15 years ago, have at it.

But the problem is most of these people have never worked in a competitive state - have never beaten a Republican, don’t actually know any legitimate median voters, and certainly have never had to persuade moderate and conservative voters. They believed, wrongly, that any Dem would beat Susan Collins, so they decided to fight to turn Maine into their social political experiment.

I get what drove interest in the guy. I get the frustration with the “establishment” - whatever that means (its hard to take that word seriously when elected and activists have lived and worked in DC for 20-30-40 years complain about the establishment).

I also get being tired of Washington, DC group think - trust me, I live and work in a state where Democrats have paid a terrible price because of DC group think. But none of this is an excuse for turning a blind eye to all of this, or worse yet, shouting down or bullying people for raising legitimate concerns about a candidate that one year ago, not a single one of us knew.

And for those who showed the courage to not bend to the mob, folks like Ritchie Torres, Jake Auchincloss, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and many others who took incoming for using their voice - I hope those folks will get their due respect.

But mostly, I am angry that this entire enterprise has made it harder to win a majority in the United States Senate.

And going forward, we need to stop chasing the bright shiny object. I know everyone wants to find that “next Obama” or “movement candidate” that inspires them, but here’s the truth: in competitive states, competent, normal, on-message campaigns win. As a longtime friend of mine who happens to be a GOP operative, Kevin Sweeny, likes to say about elections: The secret is there is no secret.

Look at every other competitive race in America — Democratic candidates for the US Senate are over-performing the generic ballot. They aren’t all “establishment” moderates, but they are all, largely normal. They all meet the basic test. You don’t have to “look past” things to support them. Will they all win? Probably not. But every one of them is running in a Trump state, and some of them will win.

And the other thing about those other candidates - they and their teams aren’t running to “take it to the Democratic establishment” or whatever drove this candidacy - they are running to make people’s lives better.

That should always be our North Star.

Most of my Sewanee friends headed off to Atlanta or Nashville to start figuring out life, but I didn’t join them. My final week in college went something like this: turning in my college golf bag, passing my final comprehensive exams, and actually graduating, followed by packing up my 1980-something Honda Accord and pointing it south towards home.

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I had a vague idea of next steps. I wanted to work on a political campaign, and following that campaign, I’d sign up for the Peace Corps, or take the Foreign Service Officer Test, or go to Africa or Asia and teach English — but until that opportunity to go try to change the world showed up, it was back to what I had done each of the last six or seven summers of my life: pumping diesel, cleaning waste oil facilities, and manning the docks at the family marina.

What campaign would I work on? No clue, and really no leads. I had sent letters (yes, I am old) and resumes to a bunch of campaigns, but no responses.

My current state representative, Tracy Upchurch, was a family friend, and he had been helping me meet people in Florida politics, but nothing yet had popped. Then about two weeks after my graduation, Tracy called to tell me he wasn’t running for re-election, but he had recruited Doug Wiles, a local business and community leader to run for his seat, and that I should call him. I did, and he agreed to see me.

So 30 years ago this week, I got in that aforementioned Honda Accord, and drove over to his office, wearing only one proper shoe. Thanks to a busted Achilles, I walked into my one shot at a campaign wearing a flip-fop on the other that carried my bandaged foot. Like that, I hobbled into this first floor office, and asked if I could help. Thankfully, he put didn’t call the cops, and instead put me to work.

I was lucky. My parents were fine letting me live at home, meaning I had a home, a bed, and the ability to get hours at the marina, so I didn’t need a pay check. I didn’t really have a plan other than just keep showing up, try to make myself useful, and maybe it would lead to something. No promises, Doug was very clear about this, because at some point, the Florida Democratic Party would likely bring someone into run the campaign.

So I started by organizing his life for political purposes - taking Christmas card lists, alumni lists, really any list he head and plowed it into semi-useful data base. We turned an upstairs conference room into an office, and I basically lived there. One of Doug’s National Guard friends had previously run for office as a Republican, and had gone to a candidate training put on by the GOP group GOPAC, and he gave us the GOPAC “how to run for office” manual. I just used it as a bible (funny thing - my republican buddies helped get my career started), mapping out how we would win, what precincts were important, all while organizing walk lists and going out with Doug’s father to put up signs.

Eventually, the party gave me a contract: $2,000 a month for the last two months to run the race. I had a job and my first title.

Doug was like a lot of first time candidates. He was learning to navigate his family, the job, his military duty, and the actual campaign. But he was a good fit in the district - the classic hometown boy who did well, who was widely admired as the decent community man that he is.

Honestly, I think if I had actually known just how GOP our seat was, I probably would have quit. But fortunately, we didn’t. Nor did we know what didn’t even know. Our North Star was 50%+1 - and we ranked the precincts we worked on and voters we started with that singular goal in mind.

Therefore, when our first poll came out and had the generic GOP vote at 49R-31D, I was excited. 49 wasn’t 50, and my first thought was “well, that means we can win 51-49.” A mix of luck, hard work, and that pure optimism that comes with naïveté, and we pulled off that first race. He asked me to come to Tallahassee with him, and for next eight years of my life, I got to grow up with one of the finest possible examples of how to carry yourself in public life.

Doug was born into a family that viewed public service as a responsibility of life. Both his father and grandfather served in local government, and while this was his first time on the ballot, he was already a fixture in town. I remember one of our earliest volunteers saying to me one day as we were stuffing envelopes: “You know, Doug has been running for office his entire life - he just never knew it,” meaning that he had lived his life in such a way that putting his name on a ballot was just a logical step in a career of saying yes to his community.

We went to Tallahassee in a legislature that gave the GOP a two seat majority, and Doug quickly learned that every vote, and every relationship mattered. He never took a tough vote lightly, made time to hear people who had different perspectives, and understood his vote on issues could be currency to help deliver for the community.

And as a boss, he gave me space — space to learn, space to succeed, and more importantly, space to fail.

I remember once, in the first year of his first term, Doug was in a big fight with one of the most powerful GOP legislators in the House over a policy that would significantly impact the vocational school in our district. A reporter called to understand the issue better, and thinking this reporter was a friend, I was very direct, saying that other member was out to kill the school. Not clarifying that we weren’t on the record, the next day those were on the front page of the local paper, which were then repeated on the House floor in debate, as I tried to hide under my desk.

Sure I was going to be fired or reprimanded, Doug - himself a journalism major in college - just looked at me and said, “well, you won’t do that again.”

We plowed through two very tough re-elections together - one of which we did while Doug was called to active duty for six weeks. We won each of these races by about a 1,000 votes in an increasingly GOP district - a testament to Doug’s connection to the community. Either loss would have ended both his career, and probably sent me back to the docks.

After his final re-election, Doug went on to serve two years as the Democratic Leader of the Florida House, and Nikole and I moved to Tallahassee permanently, so I could work full time in his leadership office.

Doug had no real power as Democratic Leader. Elected to the job by a very narrow margin, he came to the office leading a super minority, meaning he had no carrots — nor sticks — to force unity. What he made was time — and an ear for other Democrats to come talk. I watched him spend hours, listening to members who had been adversaries, slowly bringing people back in the tent. I saw him step back from the microphone to give others a chance to shine. His style took one of the most divided caucus I’ve seen and made it one of the most unified.

At the same time, I watched him work with his Republican colleagues to maintain stability in a chamber that was facing a serious crisis of leadership. He could have chosen the road of burning the place down, but instead understood his responsibility was first to the institution.

And taking his citizen legislator role seriously, when his eight years were up, he went home, and I moved on to new jobs as well. I will say, one of the proudest days of my life was just four years later, when I got to introduce my first boss to my then current boss, the day before the latter became the President-Elect of the United States.

More than anything, Doug taught me how to be a professional, and how to be a decent human. He taught me that every person has dignity. He always seemed to find the time to take an extra second to greet someone on the street, or take a moment listen to someone who just needs an ear. I never saw the title go this head, showing me that you can lead effectively, and still do so with humility, all the while maintaining a sense of honor, even when operating in a den of thieves.

I look back at my career, fully aware that kids who grew up on the west side of Kankakee, IL and/or St. Augustine, FL, don’t often get to help elect Presidents, something I’ve had the honor of doing three times. But all of that, and everything else I’ve done in my life — and everything I will do going forward was because thirty-years ago this week, Doug took a chance on a 21-year old kid, and helped set me on the path of career that I could have never could dreamed possible.

(Doug and I on the last day of session of his last term, in May of 2004)

I grew up in state party politics, and early in my career, I saw first-hand how the DNC could be a vital piece of the party infrastructure. The big party committees focus on federal races, meaning a strong DNC has its biggest impacts down the ballot. I saw it first hand in 2006, when thanks to Howard Dean’s DNC 50-state plan, I had competent staff who could manage state legislative races.

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In fact, now Congressman Darren Soto is a direct line to Dean’s plan. Darren’s first win, a special election where we flipped a GOP state-house seat, was managed by a young Florida Man named Nate Jenkins, one of Florida’s 50-state staffers. Nate himself went on to work in the Obama White House, and to this day, remains one of the most talented people I’ve ever known.

So when Martin was elected, every media chance I had, I tried to validate what they were doing, to say that even in the face of a lack of donor confidence, we still very much needed a robust DNC. For me, 2026 symbolizes a lot more than a one cycle wave - it is potentially a generational opportunity to rebuilt trust in parts of the country, and with constituencies who have left us. Trump has opened a massive door, and it is on us to take advantage. A strong DNC helps with this.

I participated in the autopsy. My perspective was one who had been intimately involved in the lead up to the launch of the eventual nominee, and then going off months later and running an IE for that raised and spent just under $100 million for him. I never worked in the Biden White House (heck, I never even went to the Biden White House), then ran the same IE in 2024 under a very different outside effort set-up. The DNC autopsy team wanted to know best practices from 2020 and 2024 in terms of how the independent efforts worked, and they were curious how our data either agreed with, or contradicted the data they got from elsewhere. I have a lot of opinions on this that I shared with the autopsy folks. You can read some of them in the piece I wrote for Bulwark about the election in the winter of 2024.

While the conversation, for entirely personal reasons, was cathartic, I was honestly skeptical it would lead to anything. I’ve never worked on a campaign that read the after-action report of the previous losing race, and in the end, how the DNC and IEs are set up will fall to the eventual 2028 nominee, and while I would hope they learn from the previous cycles, it will be their call, and largely their call alone.

In the end, despite the desire by some to see blood in the streets, the autopsy was never really about ascribing blame, or laying out things that are obvious. Rather, I saw the autopsy as having one goal: closure.

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Activists, donors, and everyday Democrats leaned in hard in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and fair or unfair, particularly a lot of donors I’ve spoken to felt misled this last cycle about just how rough the situation was out in the states as they were urged to keep writing checks with lots of zeroes. But in the end, we all know why 2024 was bad, and the autopsy had no reason to be complicated. Frankly, a simple document that said: “Here is what the polling showed, here are the decisions that were made, and here are some best and worst practices” would have sufficed. The DNC needed to check a box - albeit for some, a very important box.

An autopsy done in the spring of 2025 would have created a bunch of bad news stories. People would have complained it didn’t go far enough, but it would have been over. Even if the DNC had dropped this incomplete product in December, we’d be living this exact media cycle, but eventually everyone would have moved on. But the fact we are still talking about as we are about to go to June in 2026 is why we need change. This week’s news is entirely a self-manufactured, self-imposed crisis.

A few weeks ago, I pointed out something extremely obvious to a reporter, that the DNC paid a “penalty” with many donors and activists for not finishing the autopsy. Martin’s response was pure gaslighting (just go watch that PodSave interview if you want to see what he said).

And this has been the experience for many who have dared even suggest anything about the DNC for month, while anyone with any kind of comms-brain knew one obvious point: Until the autopsy came out, it was going to repeatedly bubble up as a story. Every time it predictably did, the Martin response was defensive and dismissive. No wonder the operation is in debt.

I appreciate Martin’s desire to lean into state parties (and his own personal commitment to his own state party). This is the right call. But it is hard to do that in a meaningful way when you have a negative balance sheet. And everything that has happened at his DNC in the last 24 hours — the last 2 weeks — the last 2 months — and frankly, the last 2 years has made it easier to solve that problem. There are two choices now: stay the course and make the best of it, or find someone with real political stature to step up.

My hope is someone of stature would step up. A former Governor or Member of Congress (or even sitting one), or even someone like a Rahm or Joe Kennedy III (or asking Howard Dean to come back for a few months), would be ideal, as would a well-regarded operative. When you don’t control the White House, winning elections is the only job of the DNC Chair, and there are any number of highly competent and trusted operatives who could do this job (looking at you !).

In a perfect world, someone would be willing to carry the mantle for six months, then oversee more thorough conversation about who can lead the institution through the primary process in 2027 and 2028. Given that person is going to have a huge impact on the primary calendar, debate schedule, and early investments in the 2028 map, having a leader who has the confidence of everyone running will be vital.

As for 2024, in the end, it was a really shitty environment for dems. Combine this with the fact our coalition has been shrinking since 2012, and losing was the most likely outcome. President Biden, who I am proud to have helped in 2020, had no business running again (and I still believe had he announced this on day one in 2019, he would have won by a much larger margin in 2020). The economy was (and remains) shit. Voters are rightfully mad. It was a change cycle, and we didn’t offer change - and swing voters thought we had lost our ideological minds. It doesn’t take a 200 page unfinished document to say that.

There are a lot of things the DNC has traditionally done that other groups can do, but there are things really only the DNC and state parties can do. I’ve lived in a state where the decision was made to outsource much of the basic party building operations to outside groups, and well, you tell me if the Florida experiment has worked. We need a strong DNC, and the fact is to get one, we need to move forward. A new leader would give us the chance to do just that.

I got a bunch of calls on the Change Poll yesterday. Figured I’d take it on here.

First, Change is a pretty decent polling shop. I’ve used them in the past. I will use them in the future. I do worry polling largely done online, as this one was, will miss less engaged voters, but that isn’t a problem unique to Change - all polling suffers from this issue because well, no one answers their phone anymore. Nearly every poll these days will deal with some self-selection issues. Doesn’t mean it is wrong or should be discounted, but just a reality.

Change didn’t release cross tabs (or I couldn’t find them), so I tried to reverse engineer the poll based on facts they did release: the partisan breakdown of the sample (+12 R, which is reasonable), and the NPA margin. One other thing, I used the Gov race numbers in here, but honestly, you can apply the math to any of the races measured.

One last disclosure: I am not working on any of these races.

So with that…

The poll has Jolly at 46, and Donalds at 42. The poll has Jolly up roughly 20 among NPA voters, which means for Jolly to be up four, three things would need to be real:

• Jolly getting double digits among GOP

• More GOP voters are undecided/not disclosing

• The Dem vote is already highly consolidated.

So lets take those out of order:

1. Democratic Vote is consolidated. Jolly would need to have about 90% of the Dems in the poll saying they are with him. Frankly, given the atmospherics of the moment, this isn’t a huge jump. Plus, given the new state law that has weeded a lot of Dems to “inactive” status, the Dems left on the file are the most loyal.

2. GOP has a larger set of undecideds. When I reverse engineer the data available, you’d need to have Donalds at 78-80 among GOP voters to hold him to 42 - meaning there are a lot more Republicans than Dems saying they are undecided.

If you look back at polling in 2023-2024, this was a semi-regular feature of Biden polling, as Dems were frustrated by the environment and showing it by not committing in polls. Add to this that Donalds has been hanging around 46-50 in GOP primary voters, meaning 50% of GOP voters aren’t there yet, likely leading to less than consolidated partisan vote at this point. But just as happened when Dems came home by Election Day, Dems have to assume those voters will end up with Donalds, even if not saying it today - and if you were to allocate the Republican voters that I assume did not pick a candidate in this poll to Donalds, the race is a statistical tie.

3. Jolly is getting double digits with GOP. Possible? Sure. We saw it in the special elections in Florida. Keeping it that way until November? That’s the hard part. But if you run out the scenario - a Dem more than likely will need double digit GOP support to get to a win with a reasonable, defensible NPA vote margin.

What could impact all this?

The poll assumes that Dems and Republicans will turn out at similar rates, and NPA votes will turn out at a lower rate. The first hasn’t happened since Obama - and the latter is probably reasonable. But any change to that changes the math - more NPA voters showing up helps the Dem this cycle - but if the GOP turns out at higher rates than Dems, the math gets harder. With so many Dems and like-minded NPA voters being moved from “active” to “inactive” status (which in many ways is an accounting difference more than a real one), if Dems can motivate some share of those “inactive” voters to show up, that would help. But given there is basically no Dem infrastructure in Florida, driving real turnout is a challenge.

I don’t say this to be a downer - I say it to be a realist. I can defend my own math to have Jolly at 46 and Donalds at 42, and still think the GOP has an easier path to 50, simply by consolidation. If you just ran a math equation that has both parties turning out the same percentage of their voters, both parties splitting the partisan vote exactly the same, and NPA voters going +20 for the D, Donalds would win by roughly 6 points. Therefore, if you showed me a poll tomorrow that had Donalds up 5 or 6 or 7, I could believe that too.

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All of these things are a function of how they are modeled and how hard they are pushing voters to choose a candidate. We can nitpick sampling variances, survey design, pollster bias, etc., but alas it is May, and some of that stuff will level out as these races get more engaged.

Go back to DeSantis in 2022, and you saw NPA voters flipped, which is what allowed him to run up the margin he did. Just to explain this math in visual terms - as I said above, if both parties splitting the partisan vote exactly the same - let’s call it 95-5 for argument’s sake, and NPA voters going +20 for the D, Donalds would win by roughly 6-7 points. Flip the NPA voters to +20 R, and Donalds wins by 15. A smart operative buddy of mine often points out this is as much about the type of NPA deciding to vote as it is a question of NPA voters jumping around.

Any Dem win requires winning double digits of GOP voters. Again, we saw that in special elections. And we’ve seen that in reverse among Dems in GOP wave years. But with MAGA Republican loyalty to Trump as high as it has ever been and a large concretion of those types of Republicans in Florida to activate, that’s going to be a hard hill to climb. It will be important to watch how many GOP voters are self-identifying “MAGA” in the months to come. As this number goes down, Jolly’s odds go up.

I might write something in the future that lays out more granularly what has to happen to make that real. And as I said to a few reporters, there is an argument that investing in Florida makes sense. The statewide will drive aa ton of marginal Congressional races, and with even more coming in a few cycles when Florida gains more districts, Democrats can’t ignore Florida.

The math is just the math - and there is no silver bullet to get around the math - the math is just hard. I think my Florida GOP pollster buddy Ryan Tyson said it best when he said it was “statistically improbable” that Dems win statewide this cycle, but “not impossible.” It is also fair to say that most people (probably me included) six months ago would have just said it is impossible and completely counted Jolly out. Donalds is very much the favorite, but funny things happen in wave years - trust me, I’ve lived both sides of that equation.

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First, as a campaign hack, I always enjoyed the challenge of legislative special elections. You can’t hide in a special – it is often the only (or one of just a few things) on the ballot, and the wins/loses are thus quite public. If you are the kind of person who wants the pressure of the ball late in the game, you will be the kind of person who likes special elections.

But because they are the only game in town, the outcomes get magnified. Stories get written, news pundits offer “lessons learned” or “takeaways,” and everyone wants to read tea leaves from the types of races that are largely media afterthoughts in a normal cycle. As a result, I often tell reporters, special elections never mean all the things that people think – and sometimes they don’t mean anything at all – but typically they do offer a few hints about where things are.

Secondly – just for disclosure reasons, I didn’t work on either one of these.

So, with that, a few of my thoughts.

Losing sucks, and Winning is way more fun. As a Florida Democrat and a Jaguars fan, trust me, I have felt more of the former than I wish, so for Democrats in Florida, winning might be the most important outcome. Winning encourages others to run, makes fundraising easier, and just gives a little pep in the step. Both the House and Senate Democratic caucuses will celebrate having to bring in another chair for their meetings when the legislature reconvenes in a few weeks. It will be a fun day when both of them walk in their respective caucus rooms.

Independent voters remain mad. My side felt this anger in 2022 and 2024, and Republicans are feeling it now. In the two races that flipped on Tuesday, if every Democratic voter voted for the Democrat, and every Republican voter voted for the Republican, Independents would have broken by roughly 80-20 for the Democrat. More likely, a few more Republicans flaked on their party than Dems, and the Independent vote was closer to 2:1.

One of these days, one of the parties is going to figure out that these NPAs aren’t flipping back and forth because they are endorsing the extremes, but because they are tired and just want government to make their lives better — or at least not make it worse, and the only message they can send is to vote against whoever is in charge. Until then, expect the roller coaster to continue onward. This cycle, thats good for my side.

Candidates really do matter. I don’ t personally know either Dem candidate, but if you google them, they scream normal. Brian Nathan, who won the State Senate seat in Tampa, is a veteran and electrical worker. Emily Gregory, who won the State House seat in Palm Beach, a small business owner with a background in public health who works with new Moms.

Both were talking about issues that matter to mainstream voters. If you were a voter looking to send a message to President Trump, but maybe aren’t enamored with or typically don’t vote for Democrats, and you googled either one of them or saw any of their campaign efforts, they both gave off very normal vibes. They were acceptable alternatives and no one was going to be ‘afraid” of either of them in office – and in swing/lean red districts, the Democrat must be acceptable to non-Dem voters.

Hispanics, at least in Tampa, moved back towards the mean. There is a largely Hispanic State House seat inside the State Senate seat that was up for grabs on Tuesday. Trump won the common precincts by 4 points. Nathan won them by 10. The latter is closer to what one would have expected pre-2024. Based on what happened in Miami Mayor’s race, I think it is fair to say that 2024 Trump was the high water mark for Hispanics and Republicans, and now it is up my party to decide if we are going to make a real case for them to come back to us.

Few other things to keep in mind:

Special elections are snapshots in time in very specific regions. They tell us that Independent voters, at least those that are motivated to vote, are acting like partisans (keep in mind, Democrats were on the other side of this in 2022 and 2024). These weren’t statewide races – and they certainly do not serve as representative samples of every group that Democrats struggle with.

Republicans are still extremely good at turning out voters. Frankly, much better than our side. In both races, GOP turnout was robust. In the State Senate race, the Republicans turnout edge was higher than it was in 2024. These races weren’t about Democrats showing up in droves – they were more about some Republicans and a lot of Independents voting for a Democrat. But it also means come 2026, Democratic candidates are going to have lean into turning out their own vote too.

Republicans were ready in both races and will be ready in November. They weren’t caught by surprise in the elections. They won’t be caught by surprise in November, or 2028, or 2030, or 2032. They have tremendous spending advantages in Florida, and in these races, they invested and leaned heavily into their base to turnout. In elections, wins aren’t given. You must win the right to serve people, and in Florida, the GOP is very good at winning elections. All this to say Dems can’t expect their opponent to roll over.

Competing broadly matters. In years that can turn into ‘waves” there is a bonus for being on the ballot. You still must have good candidates, and you still must run races, but the mood can blunt some of the spending disadvantage Democrats faced. Frankly, we saw that in Tampa, where the Dem candidate probably got outspent 10-15:1. While I don’t believe lightning strikes in a bottle, the national mood will keep more seat in play deeper into the cycle.

These two wins are both difficult seats in November. Both are going to have massive battles in just a few months. Celebrate the win, but the work continues. That being said, the road out of the wilderness starts with being able to win seats like this with some regularity.

Looking down the road.

As I told a few reporters, the opportunity in 2026 is less about 2026 than it about the future. The Democratic brand has taken an absolute beating the last few cycles, largely thanks to national trends and some stupid messaging from national Democrats. That’s not going to get fixed overnight.

But running good candidates and investing in those candidates can start to change that. Look at Miami-Dade – a county that has moved over 40 points from 2012 to 2024. For Democrats to win statewide, getting back into the high 50s to 60 in Dade is an absolute requirement, but that isn’t going to happen when the face of the brand of the party, in the eyes of voters, is DSA-style socialism. In Miami, Democrats are still recovering from all the socialism and Defund crap from 2020.

That only changes by candidates on the ground running good races. Look only to NC where successful Democrats have created a brand that is unique to their state and is different than the national brand. Investing in strong local candidates is one way to do this.

In 2032, Florida will gain 3-4 Congressional seats, and Democrats will have to win more places in Florida for the purposes of winning a majority in Congress. Using 2026 to build towards those 2032 challenges would be an excellent use of resources. I hope national Democrats will see the state as an opportunity for this.

We didn’t get in the wilderness overnight. Use the cycle to elect more Mayors and elect more people like Emily Gregory and Brian Nathan. That’s how you start the climb back to relevance.

Last night, driving home from an out of town dinner, I kept going back to a little segment where I talked about how during the debate over the legislation we passed here in Florida after the Parkland tragedy, a good Republican friend of mine offered some wise counsel on how to talk about gun issues in a way that made it clear the you can support common sense reforms in a way that also stresses that you respect and trust law-abiding and trustworthy gun owners. It was a conversation I’ve thought about often when talking about difficult issues.

In his response, to paraphrase David - who has written a book about learning to find common ground through learning to surf with his brother-in-law, commented about me using the phrase “Republican friend” to lean into a point about how few of us in the business have genuine friends across the aisle.

And it is sadly very true.

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I saw a troubling clip this week from a poll done by Pew Research. The slide, from their global attitude survey work, asked citizens of a number of countries whether they viewed their fellow citizens as morally good.

Of the 25 countries polled, nearly all developed nations, the mean score was in the low 70s - meaning roughly 70% of people said their fellow countrymen were moral people. Places like Canada, Australia, Japan and Indonesia saw that number rise to the high 80s to the low 90s.

The US? Only 47% of Americans saw their fellow Americans as morally good. That ranked last.

That should rattle us all.

America is unique among all of the nations because our sense of place is rooted, not in geography or ethnic lineage, but instead, rooted in an idea — a covenant that to be American is to be born free, with rights enshrined from our founding, and a shared responsibility to protect those rights. We are a nation of laws, not men. And through those shared values, there is no country on Earth where people can change their station in life as rapidly as in America.

But when we have coarsened ourselves to the point that more than half of Americans believe their fellow countrymen are not morally good, we are truly edge of putting the entire enterprise at risk.

When I started in politics, I worked for a Democratic member of the Florida House who represented the most GOP district in Florida held by a Democrat. Working together for us wasn’t an option — it was required for basic political survival. And we did big things, at a time when big things done collectively were still possible.

When was the last major problem in this country that we solved in a collective way? I am not even sure we can solve small problems collectively anymore.

Which goes back to the conversation I had with David — a conversation I wish we had lingered on longer.

About 15 years ago, I came back from visiting the beaches of Normandy wondering (and likely know the answer) if the guys who died on that beach would be proud of the way all of us in politics handle ourselves.

So, I made an effort to make friends across the aisle - for three reasons. One, it just seemed like the right thing to do. But secondly, on a higher level, I thought it would help me be a better strategist if I more regularly tested my own priors by talking to people who disagreed with me. There was an intellectual challenge to learning how to listen more, how to have holes poked in my own beliefs, and to better understand how others thought. Plus it was fun to spar about basic political hackery and strategy.

Finally, on a more practical level, I got into politics to do things, and in my home state of Florida, doing things as a Democrat requires persuading a GOP legislature, and that means finding people who are willing to carry the mantle of change with you.

To this day, I believe if I sit down with any Republican, we can find something to agree on. It might only one thing out of a hundred — but it will be one thing — and if we commit to working on it, we can make change on that one thing.

And here’s the thing, when you do things together, not only do you learn about each other, you get to celebrate the joy that uniquely comes from success that was driven by teamwork.

One of my favorite people who serves in the legislature is also the most unlikely of friends, Ileana Garcia. I worked for Obama and Biden. She chaired Latinas for Trump, and worked in the first Trump administration. I am a white dude from North Florida. She is a Cuban woman from Miami. There are any number of things where I am confident we think the other is crazy. But a few years ago, we learned we had suffered with a similar form of childhood epilepsy, and over five years of working together, we’ve passed two laws together, and increased funding for epilepsy services by more than 5 million dollars.

And a long the way, we found out we genuinely like each other, and we’ve since then, we have found other things to work on together. Today, Ileana is my friend in every sense of that word.

Perspective is important. My buddy, Chip LaMarca, a state legislator buddy from Fort Lauderdale who was also Chair of his county GOP party, once said to me (paraphrasing) “I am a Republican in Florida’s bluest county, and you are a Democrat working in a Republican state. We kind of have to do the same thing.” And as Chip has become a truly genuine friend, I also now better understand why that perspective is important in governing. Decisions are easy when everyone around you agrees with you - but real leadership comes from finding a path forward when that path forward requires persuasion.

I mentor a young man in the Philippines, Lord Arnel Ruanto, known locally as “LA.” LA inspires me. He grew up in a working class family with a mother who taught school in Dubai to pay for her kids to go to school. LA was a young activist who fought the political establishment in his town to get elected to the town council, and even when threatened by the nation’s former President, LA kept grinding, building an organization that recruits and trains young people to run for office, and last year, toppling a 33-year family dynasty to become Mayor of his hometown.

When I visit him, we will travel the country together and talk to young people about getting involved in politics, which inevitably leads to 20 questions about America — questions about sports, politics, life — everything you can imagine. I love doing this more than almost anything I do in my life because it serves to offer perspective. See, when you talk about America in this way from outside of the borders of America, you realize we agree on way more than we don’t.

Things like freedom of speech, freedom of press, due process in law, the rights of girls to go to school and thrive, and the opportunity to change your own station in life — they aren’t a given in most developing world countries. They other thing you see is how people view our nation — not necessarily our politics — but America as the idea. I often come home as revitalized by my own pride in this country as I am rejuvenated by being around LA and his infectious spirit. I wish more Americans could experience this.

I am an optimist and an idealist at heart. I believe as fully today as I did when I was protesting apartheid in South African as a teenager that I can help change the world. But that world view doesn’t shroud the fact that nation isn’t in a great place. And here’s the thing — we are all the only ones that can change that, and treating every interaction with the other political party like it is a death match for the soul of the nation isn’t the way out.

I believe most Americans want the same thing, even if the road to get there is different, and I believe even on the most intractable of issues, if the political will exists, common ground of some kind can be found. Take abortion — surely in the midst of this debate, most Americans on both sides of this issue agree that it should be easier, cheaper, and quicker to adopt children. I am not saying the core argument isn’t important — it absolutely is — but so would be making it easier for children without a home to be adopted into one.

But to do this takes initiative. Progress is harder than bitching about the lack of progress. It is far easier to blame the other than to figure out how to work with the other to solve a problem. It takes a lot longer to learn the art of persuasion than it does to craft a clever tweet.

In the end, we are all only responsible for ourselves - yet collectively, we are all responsible for the larger endeavor. Building genuine friendships and finding ways to make this country a better place, even in the smallest of ways, is vital if we are going to start rebuilding the trust in each other to get this train back on track.

Not sure how to start? I wasn’t either 15 years ago.

So, I sent a DM on twitter to a guy named Kirk Pepper, a Republican operative in Florida who is from rural Mississippi. We met a few days later for lunch, and again a few days later over bourbon. On paper, we were about as different as two humans in politics could be.

Today, he’s one of my best friends on the planet.

Quick background: Of the nearly 770 counties that make up the 10 states that have been battleground states over the last four Presidential (2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024), Dems have lost ground

I was a part of a ton of focus groups after the 2024 election to understand why.

The message was clear and consistent: Dems have lost their way, and people were willing to put up with all of Trump’s nonsense because they believed that he would make their personal economy better.

They believed that our party was way more focused on shit they didn’t care about. They thought Trump would make their lives better.

I remember one particular group in suburban Detroit. It was cold, and this was the end of the second group of the night. These were voters who had almost exclusively voted for Obama, probably half had voted for Biden, and they all voted for Trump.

The last question of the night: What would it take for Dems to win you back?

The truth: They didn’t want to get won back. They, frankly, thought we sucked.

But one guy says: If Trump doesn’t keep his promises, and the Democrats can start talking to my actual life, I am open to it.

And the majority of people nodded.

Better jobs were mentioned. Health care costs. Cutting taxes for working families. Real simple bread and butter issues.

To be clear: these voters didn’t think Trump would fail, and they didn’t think we could stop focusing on stuff that had no impact on their lives.

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The Economist Magazine has tracked Trump approval on the economy every two weeks since the inaugural. And if you look at the poll right after the inauguration, you can see this optimism among his Americans — not just with all voters, but with voters who had moved significantly towards Trump in 2024.

Trump Approval on Economy (1/28/2025):

All voters: ` 49:37 (+12)

Hispanics: 41-36 (+5)

Voters 18-29: 51-33 (+18)

Moderates: 50-34 (+16)

NPA voters: 37-30 (+7)

But as the economy’s struggles have only intensified, and it as voters believe Trump is focused on everything BUT the economy, these numbers have tanked:

Trump Approval on Economy (3/2/2026):

All voters: 37-58 (-21) Shift: -33 points

Hispanics: 34-60 (-26) Shift: -31 points

Voters 18-29: 20-69 (-49) Shift: -67 points

Moderates: 26-66 (-40) Shift: -56 points

NPA Voters: 25-64 (-39) Shift: -46 points

That same poll from 3/2 is a warning — and a roadmap

When asked which party voters trusted more on these issues, notwithstanding Trump’s abysmal approval on the economy, voters trust Republicans more on the economy (39-36). We are also -1 on immigration (and when I have seen it asked as Border Security, the GOP advantage is often north of 20 points), -9 on crime, -5 on national defense, and -23 on overall effectiveness.

And keep in mind, to win the Senate — and to win many of the House seats in play this cycle, the median voter will be at this point — or further to the right.

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So don’t be stupid.

I helped lead a study of 21 counties in battleground states last summer to understand better what voters want from us, and it isn’t complicated: new leaders, focused on basic American values, who are willing to take on the corruption of Washington, push back against the extremes of the right and left, and very simply, try to help make their lives a little better.

I guarantee those voters in suburban Detroit would tell us today that they are open to Dems again, and might even vote for us out of protest, but we haven’t even begun to build trust. Things like “defund ICE” might play well on twitter, but I can guarantee you is the kind of rhetoric that will make a voter who is very open to changing their mind on Trump solidify back into the GOP camp on races when Trump isn’t on the ballot.

Moreover the rhetoric coming out of some of these Dem primaries for Congress is so far from the median voter that it will hurt Democrats who are trying to win places where they actually have to persuade Republicans and right-leaning NPAs to vote for them. And if you don’t believe me, I encourage you to travel to places where your ideological view is in the minority and talk to voters.

The goal here is to win majorities and the path forward isn’t complicated. This jobs report will only reinforce what voters already believe: Trump has hurt their economy. At the same time, these voters still think we are woke, weak, out of touch, and focused on shit they don’t care about. This is why for all of the Trump issues, voters aren’t loving us either right now.

If we want to win in 2026 and build a new coalition going forward, take the above issues off the table. Rather than reinforcing how voters think of us, talk to voters in ways they don’t expect. Lean into common sense immigration plans that secure the border and deports criminals, but also give folks who are here a path. Don’t be afraid to talk about cutting middle class taxes. Lean into health care costs. Use your brain on social issues, and talk in a language that isn’t so damn DC-coded. Talk about your pride in America, and the place it can be.

This is a good reminder that no one did this better than Obama. He talked about cracking down on employers who knowingly hired illegals. He was anti-war, but talked about finding the terrorists wherever they lived. He offered the largest middle class tax cut in American history. He took on Washington. He didn’t take the bait on social issues. And he won the largest mandate in recent American history.

And as my friend and fellow political hack Lis Smith likes to say, “just be normal.”

Do that, and we will win a lot of places in 2026.

I was at Sundae’s, a little diner at Sewanee my sophomore year in college, eating a very late lunch. On the TV, then NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue stepped to the microphone and announced the NFL had chosen Jacksonville as the home of its new franchise.

Jacksonville Fucking Florida.

I literally jumped out of my chair pumping my fists, much to the confusion of the 10-12 others in the restaurant, all surely wondering if I was having some kind of episode.

Because I was - growing up in Jacksonville those days was to grow up living in — and literally breathing — the city’s Imposter Syndrome. We were never as cool as Miami, never as nice as Tampa, or have something like Disney World in Orlando. We were the state’s unloved stepchild, home to bad crime, shitty roads, and that paper mill smell that seeped into every corner of town (and God help you if you got downwind one of the days of the paper mill/maxwell house fumes combined). It was a tough and gritty place, home to tough and gritty people. Nice things didn’t often happen in or to Jacksonville.

All the smart people said Baltimore or St. Louis would get this team. Hell, most of us thought they would too. Nevertheless, my family, like so many others, continued to dutifully participate in all the efforts to help bring an NFL team to the First Coast, showing up for rallies, and “buying” tickets in advance to show we would support our team.

But we all kinda thought in our hearts that Lucy would once again hide the preverbal football. Then Tagliabue started talking...the 32nd team was ours.

My school pictures growing up spoke to my loyalty as a Bears fan, but overnight my loyalty changed: our town had a team. Football couldn’t come fast enough to Duval.

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My Dad and I went to the first preseason game in Florida, a game in Miami that was also the team’s first ever win of any kind. For Miami it was an absolutely meaningless preseason game, but for the few thousand Jags fans who made the journey to see the team play for the first time in the state, when Scott Sisson kicked the walk off game winner, it might as well have been our Super Bowl.

And just two weeks later, after two years of waiting, we got our first game in our city’s new stadium.

I remember like it was yesterday. My father and I had tickets to the Thursday evening game against the Rams. After years of games in the Gator Bowl, with its dark corridors, horrible bathrooms, and uncomfortable metal bench seats, the new Jacksonville station was football Shangri La – big, bright, clean, loud, and new.

That night the city partied in that stadium. The Jaguars didn’t win the game, but 70,000 people sang and danced to the music, at one point with the entire stadium doing “YMCA.” It was amazing. My town had a football team. I was a fan for life.

For the next five years of my life, my life each fall revolved around what happened in that stadium. And those early years were amazing.

Mike Hollis with the walk off game winner on Christmas Eve in 1995…

The magical run in 96 capped off with the Morten Andersen miss & the wild playoff run culminating with 40k fans in the stadium at 2am…

The blocked FG for a TD to win the first ever Monday night game at home…

Fred Taylor taking this first snap to the house after replacing an injured James Stewart, and our first ever home playoff game - and first ever home playoff win in 1998...

Beating the living shit out of Steve Young and Jerry Rice in 1999 – then beating the living shit out of Dan Marino in the playoffs…

And a big part of what made that window of life so special was my partner in this fandom was my Dad.

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Like many, my father and I had gotten a little sideways when I was a teenager. I didn’t agree with all of his life choices, and while he supported me, he kind of rolled his eyes at my career choices. But the Jaguars became our common ground, home Sunday games had a rhythm – he’d pick me up wherever I was living, and we’d drive up to the game. Some weeks we’d grill a burger or two in the parking lot, but most weeks, we just got a hot dog and a beer in the stadium.

Besides cheering on the home team, we talked about all the things that Dads and their sons talk about. Our relationship wasn’t perfect, but for 3 hours on Sunday, sitting in section 220, row DD of the stadium, it was more than good enough.

And after that epic Dolphins playoff game, we looked ahead to Jacksonville’s first ever home AFC Championship. Earlier in the week, he had told me if they won, we’d go to the Super Bowl. Just needed one more win.

That AFC Championship game day started like so many, him picking me up at my little townhouse. We drove up early for that game to grill some food. It was a cold morning, and I didn’t feel great about the game — we had to get past Tennessee, the only team they had lost to all year.

I think a lot of us felt it in our gut this game might be a hill too high to climb. Even with a halftime lead, history had told us that good things don’t happen to Jacksonville. The second half was a nightmare, and as the clock ticked towards zero, like most of us still in the facility, I was despondent.

Consoling me, he leaned over and said “they’ll be back – and we’ll be back too.”

That was the last time my Dad and I went to a Jaguars game.

______________________

Everyone who has lost a parent understands that a little part of you dies with them. This idea that the grief gets easier with time is bullshit. My father essentially missed all of my adult life, and while I am blessed to have an amazing mother and stepfather, there is a part of me that has always felt cheated by his early departure. I certainly never got great closure.

As time passes, you do get used to them being gone, and you find places where the lost parent feels close. For some it is a restaurant, or an old family home. But for me, it became that stadium.

As a result, every time I go to a game, I get a little emotional, even if just for a moment. The fcaility at 1 Stadium place isn’t just a place my favorite team calls home, it quite literally served as the catalyst for my adult relationship with my father. And after he passed, it remained a place where I could feel a bit of his presence, or at least smile for a second about the time we spent there together.

After he passed, there were some rough decades there.

The Blaine Gabbert era.

The Blake Bortles years.

Urban Meyer. Gus Bradley. Mike Mularkey.

Going to games in those days, I could hear him in my head bitching about play calls, complaining about the endless boneheaded plays on the field, yelling at the refs, and generally losing his mind watching the tragic comedy that was the Jaguars for most of the last 25 years. There wasn’t a lot of hope in those days, though in 2021, hope came back to town in the package of a long-haired kid from Georgia, and the very next year, magic started to happen. Dad would have been a Trevor fan.

The 2022 season was similar to that 1996 season - the first year my Dad & I never missed a game together. Just like that young 96 team, it took the Jags some time to figure out how to win – but once they did, they went on a roll. From four games back in the division a month earlier, they went into a cold Sunday night in January with one mission: win the game and punch a ticket to the playoffs.

The opponent that Sunday night: Tennessee - the team I hated for ruining my last game with Dad.

The symbolism of the moment was too much, I couldn’t go. I didn’t want to watch them lose to Tennessee again - almost 23 years to the day after that terrible game - and regardless of the outcome, I knew my emotions would get the best of me. 70,000 people didn’t need to see me, a grown man, cry.

The Jacksonville Mayor at the time, Lenny Curry, knew I’d been having this inner struggle, and texted me late the night before the game with a link to a ticket and said “Steve, your Dad would want you to go.” Me and a buddy made our way east, to watch the Jags struggle, and it looked like once again, the Titans would kill the dream. Damn Dad, not again.

But grief shows up in strange places, and when Josh Allen took that recovered fumble back for a touchdown to win the game, a lot of it poured out. Finally, a moment of vengeance for that final game.

Dad was there. I could feel it.

Hell, he probably caused the fumble. He hated the Titans too.

—---------------------------

Facing an incredibly busy week, I didn’t decide to go to the Buffalo game until the last minute, and it didn’t dawn on me until the clock ticked down to zero that with the loss, this was the last time I would stand in that stadium with a full crowd.

Sure, they will play there next year, but it won’t be the same, with half the facility torn down, and only 40,000 fans in the bowl, as the old concrete lady comes down to prepare the ground for the next generation stadium.

In those decades since my Dad and I walked out of that place together for the last time, the place has changed. Our old seats are now where the iconic pools live, and in our parking lot now rises Jacksonville’s first Four Seasons hotel.

Like the stadium, my own life is very different. Twenty-year-old me is now not much younger than my own father when we walked though Gate 1 on that first night in 1995. I’ve lived a remarkable life in his absence, yet that building has remained a living embodiment of my relationship with my father. It’s the place where I’m always 21 with him.

But as the demolition continues, that final tie will be severed for good. The old building, like my relationship with my Dad, will only live on in pictures and memories. Time marches on.

Don’t get me wrong, I am excited for the new place. I believe the new stadium will mark not only the continued ascendency of the Jaguars, but of the city itself. Jacksonville is finally poised to step into the shoes of that Bold New City of the South, and hopefully the Jags have finally killed off the demons of the last 20 years. I can’t wait to see – and be a part of the future of both.

But after last Sunday, a little part of that experience will never be the same. For that reason, I took one last look before walking out, and gave her one last nod before pointing the car towards home.

Thanks Dad.

My older sister colleen was well into high school by the time I have full memories of her. I was really blessed that both my older siblings were incredibly kind to their annoying little brother, but Colleen would always go out of her way. From taking me to run errands (“that’s my baby brother - do you think I am old enough to have a 4/5/6/7 year old”) to letting me hang around when she was out with her high school friends. Let’s just say my love for classic 70s rock probably had something to do with the fact I went to parties at the age of 7 that I probably shouldn’t have.

But let’s not linger on that…

Outside of my parents and Nikole, Colleen has been the singular fixture in my life.

She moved to Florida to go to college and never looked back. She got married right out of college, had a couple kids quickly, and thus, I became Uncle Steve at 15. Even at that age - when I was more of an older brother to them than any kind of older authority - she would encourage me to be a part of her kid’s life. Many of my core memories as an older teenager and young adult are from spending time with her kids. I treasure my relationship with her kids — all adults now — and it is a relationship that was only possible because of her.

In the immediate days after college, when I was trying to figure out what it meant to be an adult, I spent probably 50% of my weekends at Colleen’s house, where she let me my own life. Then over the last 25 years, she’s allowed me to call her home my own home any time that I needed - often on the shortest of notice. There have been years of my life (namely 2008 and 2012/2014) where I probably spent more nights in their guest room than in my own home.

But more importantly than all of that, through all of those journeys, she’s always been there - first as big sister, and now as big sister and one of my closest friends. If I was working on a campaign, she jumped in with both feet. In fact, in 2008 she became so integral to our operation that she was essentially another staff person, jumping in to staff events, playing “Office Mom” to our field team, and remaining friends with many of them to this day. And when I’ve been in windows where I was struggling with life, she was always there with a life preserver.

Colleen has juggled all of these responsibilities while also being a mother to three kids of her own, a wife, caretaker for my father after he had his stroke, all while spending 30 years as an emergency room birth and delivery nurse. And today, she is largely the family head coach, maintaining the role she’s played for all of us for as long as she’s been around: the one who watches out for all of us.

Happy Birthday to the best big sister on the planet: Colleen Jones.

You can read more about the research here and here.

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This project had two goals: One, to understand how voters viewed both the Republican and Democratic brands, as well as their views on the ideal characteristics of a political party; and Two, to begin looking at what voters want to hear from Democratic candidates going forward. You can read more about the counties we polled (and why), as well as the more generalized findings, above.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to dive more into the data from this survey, but today I want to focus on the second goal: How do voters react to the different arguments Democrats are making about our pathway forward?

Setting the Stage

Going into the 2024 election, the trend-lines over the previous three Presidential elections all pointed in one direction: Republicans. Yes, Joe Biden won in 2020, but the Biden results were more like a speed bump on the trajectory of Republican gains than they were in a reversal. And 2024 just confirmed this.

Between 2012 and 2024, of the over 767 counties that make up the 10 states that have been competitive in all or most of the last four Presidential elections, the GOP has improved its margins in 703 of them. If you are a Democrat, regardless of your views in the center vs left debates inside the party, those numbers scream one thing: there is no sustainable path to victory without changing the math.

So after the 2024 elections, we set out to understand both what had happened — and what needed to change to reverse it. And we started in a county emblematic of this trend: Macomb County, Michigan — a place that voted for Obama twice and Trump three times. While we (in this case me) had a few very strong hypothesis, we built a guide that was broad, and focused on listening more than testing, and after two nights of focus groups (and trudging through the snow): the findings were pretty stark. Voters there saw us a weak, ineffective, and more focused on niche social issues than on the economic realities of their lives. They also gave us some breadcrumbs toward a path out of the wilderness.

I would have loved to have replicated these groups in a number of other counties, but alas, given the reality of cost we took another path: Building a qualitative poll that looked at a diverse set of important counties and to test the findings we learned from those dark, cold nights in Macomb.

One of the exercises we used in Macomb was asking focus groups to rate four different arguments that Democrats were making to voters. In this poll, we made a few small revisions to those four, and added a fifth — to take a look at the Abundance argument (the idea that Democrats should lean into making it easier to do things - making it easier to build housing, for example) being suggested by Ezra Klein and others. As you will see from the findings below, a few arguments stood out.

But this time added another step. After rating the arguments, we gave voters a virtual highlighter and asked them to highlight what they liked the best about the Dem messaging — and what phrases turned them off the most, from each of the five arguments. In these findings, we see voters picking bits and pieces from each — bits and pieces that weave together in some very common sense ways — and in my view, offer some real helpful advice.

The Message Tests

The five messages we tested were an attempt to crystalize the debate inside the Democratic Party about the pathway forward. In a nutshell, we tested a generic “change” argument, two economic-focused frames, the “abundance” frame, and a bit of a both-sides debate.

The specific language is below:

First, the toplines:

The “Change” narrative was found persuasive by 66% of voters (40% very convincing) in the survey (keep in mind, the overall survey was 49 Trump - 49 Harris). It was stronger in counties that have moved more towards Democrats since 2012 (69%) than it was in counties that have moved towards Republicans (64%).

The “Economic Populism” frame was found persuasive by 55% of voters (36% very convincing) - and rated the same in the two buckets of counties (towards Dems/towards Republicans)

The “Working Class” frame was found persuasive by 58% of voters (28% very convincing) — and slightly more popular in counties that are trending Democratic (60%) than those moving away from us (58%)

The “Abundance” argument landed at 56% (23% very convincing) — and equal between the two subgroups of counties.

And the “Triangulation” argument landed at 51% (25% very) — and slightly more popular, 53% among counties moving towards Democrats.

Our amazing pollster, Elizabeth Sena, created an index to better compare these arguments across different subgroups - basically adding the “very convincing” number to the “total convincing” number, which would give a bit more weight to the arguments with more intense support. This is where we see a few things pop - particularly among some key movable subgroups:

None of this should be particularly surprising, given that four of the last five Presidential elections have been “change” elections, and economic issues drove the top concerns in the poll, and that inside the poll, voters both had a remarkable disdain for Washington politicians, and saw both parties, first and foremost, as corrupt.

However, it does harken back to those groups we did in Macomb County, where voters didn’t necessarily think Democrats were wrong on any number of issues, simply they thought were mis-prioritized, and largely dismissive of the economic concerns driving their lives. We also saw in those groups a desire to hear Democrats all about issues that impacted them directly: lowering health care costs, and lowering middle class taxes.

But when we get to that exercise where we asked voters to highlight language from each message that they liked - what we see is that voters do view these things more nuanced than we often give them credit for.

Take the “Triangulation” frame, arguably the weakest of the five frames we tested, and we find some of the strongest support for parts of this frame as we saw in any of the five (the darker the highlight, the more support).

And when we look at that same frame in the exercise where we ask votes to highlight the things that give them a negative feeling towards Democrats, regardless of whether it is a voter from a county moving towards or against Democrats, we see a pretty clear pattern:

I wanted to point these out to demonstrate that the pathway forward isn’t as simple as one poll-tested message. Voters do, for example, want to see bold change, and strong economic populism, but also react well to Democrats being a moderate party again, and do tend to view us negatively when given a GOP frame around being woke and out of touch.

Below I am going to paste all the positive highlighting tests, and as you will see, there are elements of each argument that demonstrate real intensity (it is a lot of data, will summarize below, but wanted to let everyone see it for themselves):

As you can read on your own — several things jump out in each — and in there are some consistent themes.

Voters want a new generation of leaders. Voters want us to take on Washington, and partisan corruption. Voters respond well to us talking about being the party of working people. But as we see across each of these, they also embrace real common sense ideas that will help the working class and middle class. Ideas like providing loans for people to learn a trade, tax cuts for working families, and unleashing manufacturing all tested well.

I’ve long been in the camp that many voters could easily vote for Obama and Trump because they saw them in the same light: guys who would take on the ruling class. talks about this a lot - that Democrats need not always be so reflexively defensive of government.

For example, earlier the poll (more on this in another post), we asked voters to rate a few statements about Trump and the DOGE cuts, and we found, particularly in counties moving away from Democrats, that Trump’s DOGE arguments are some of this strongest with voters. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight cuts that hurt people - but it does mean we should not reflexively defend every government initiative, or not propose our own common-sense reforms. With “Washington politicians” having a 9% approval rating in our poll, there is nothing but upside to being the candidate seen as willing to reform government and taking on the perceived corruption of the town.

Furthermore, I would argue that in this data, Democrats have a lot of room to not only oppose the Trump OBBB, but to offer a full-throated alternative — one that focuses tax cuts on working families and delivers real relief on health care costs. This becomes apparent when in the “Change” frame above, where voters highlight that “Democrats can’t just be the party that opposes Donald Trump.” If I was advising someone looking at 2028, I would be starting to talk about the terrain of an alternative plan, just as if I was thinking about running for Congress, I would be leaning hard into common sense reforms.

The upside of all of this is voters did move our way after reading all these options, particularly in southern and sunbelt states, where we will need the biggest gains over the next decade.

The real challenge now is finding the candidates who have the credibility to make these arguments.

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We need a clearer path - not just for 2026, but for 2032.

Of all the things keeping me up at night, the national demographic changes that will significantly change the national political map in 2032 are at the top.

Projections of a 12-15 seat shift from blue and “blue wall” states to a series of southern states that Trump won in 2024 has the potential to radically change the landscape. Not only will winning the White House require winning states like NC, GA, and AZ on a more regular basis, the pathway to majorities in Congress will require winning seats with GOP majorities drawing the Congressional lines.

Moreover, any chance we have of winning a majority in the US Senate will require us to do something we have not done since 2018: Win a Senate seat in a state that Joe Biden lost in 2020.

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Expanding our coalition of a party isn’t just a nice talking point - it is a mathematical requirement for survival, and understanding how we navigate this challenge over the next few years is key to being prepared for it.

Over the last month, Unite the Country, working with Elizabeth Sena from GQR Research, has been surveying voters in twenty-one counties spread across the ten states that have been considered battleground states during all or some of the last four Presidential elections.

Most of the counties we chose are places that have gone a bit sideways for Democrats over the last four cycles, however, they are not monolithic. For example, the sample includes traditional base counties like Wayne County, Michigan and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, along with swing counties, like Bucks County, PA, and Hillsborough County, FL. We also included a number of fast-growing red counties that are only getting redder, places like Pinal County, AZ, and Cherokee County, GA.

The goal of this research is simple: to understand the state of the brand of both political parties across a wide sample of key counties, to learn what advantages Republicans might have in places that are trending more GOP, and to test a number of the theories out there for how Democrats move forward.

Over 25% of the counties we included were in states President Obama won twice but have gone for Trump three cycles in a row – with increased margins. Adding voices from FL, IA, and OH was important because we need to understand why these communities have trended away from us at warp speed if we hope to win back some elements of voters we have lost.

The new Democratic national coalition that gets us back above 50% will look different than the last one, but the math question remains the same: It is hard to see us winning without increasing our appeal beyond the voters who supported Harris in 2024.

This poll is not about quick fixes, nor is it designed to dump on Democrats, rather, the goal here is a sober assessment from the types of communities where we need to do better – not just to succeed in 2026 and 2028, but where winning will be imperative in the world that we will see in just six years.

TOPLINES:

While every attempt was made to balance the sample inside each of the counties, there is not a super easy baseline for this audience.

With that caveat, the 2024 Presidential vote for these twenty-one counties was:

Trump 49. Harris 49.

Current State of Play

Trump Approval: Approve: 46% Disapprove: 54%

JD Vance Approve: 45% Disapprove: 52%

Republican Party: Approve: 42% Disapprove: 55%

Democratic Party: Approve: 36% Disapprove: 61%

We also tested a number of Democratic office holders, representing the spectrum of the party. They are ordered by their net favorable (with full fav/unfav in parenthesis) Keep in mind, these are not national numbers - these are their ratings in a sample of key counties in key states.

Andy Beshear: +5 (23:18)

Mark Kelly: +3 (36:33)

Pete Buttigieg: +1 (42:41)

Bernie Sanders: -2 (46:48)

Gretchen Whitmer: -3 (34:37)

Alexandra Ocasio Cortez: -11 (39:50)

In terms of the 26 and 28 ballot, we looked at generic numbers, and find a battleground very similar to the electorate in 2024.

2026 Congressional: Democratic: 46% Republican: 45%

2028 Presidential: Democratic: 46% Republican: 45%

The Research

This research has a tremendous amount of data but boil it down to its essence: While there are issues that Democrats hold edges on, the GOP holds the issue advantage on the issues that are currently driving the vote – and perhaps more importantly, are seen more favorably among the character traits voters want to see in a party or candidate.

When we asked voters in both parties to rate which party they trusted on a variety of issues, and traits, Democrats led on a number of fronts including Protecting Social Security and Medicare (+15), Reducing the cost of health care (+9), and standing up against corporations (+11).

Republicans hold an edge on a broader set of issues, and namely, traits. The GOP holds an edge on “Will Improve the Economy” (+6), “represents my views on the immigration issue” (+10) and “will protect America from foreign enemies” (+19).

Which boils down to one key point. While voters are more likely to use the word “extreme” to define Republicans (GOP +7), they give their party a 33-point edge when asked which party is “strong” and by 39-points, say Democrats are “weak” compared to the GOP.

Views of the Two Parties Individually

The above plays out when we ask all voters to respond to the same list of character traits and respond which five, they think of when looking at Republicans or Democrats.

For Democrats, four of the top five responses were negative. Top of the list was “woke” followed by “corrupt,” “weak,” and “out of touch.” The only positive in the top five “fight for democracy” was driven entirely by Democrats. It is important to note that these traits are not just being driven by partisan Republican responses. Among people of color under the age of 50 – a key demographic going forward for both parties, the words “woke,” “corrupt,” “weak,” “divisive,” and “elitist,” were all in the top six.

Before the Republicans reading this get too excited, the top five words chosen to describe the GOP: “corrupt,” “racist,” “bullies,” “conservative,” and “out of touch.”

We also asked voters they wanted to see in an ideal political party. The phrases that popped are not surprising: “common sense,” “competent,” “trustworthy,” “fighting for working families,” and “fighting for the middle class.”

Comparing the two parties, more than twice as many voters ranked “common sense” as a trait they would ascribe to the GOP than they did Democrats – and twice as many did the same with the word competent. In a world where most voters have few kind things to say about either party, the fact where voters ascribe these traits more to the GOP is a challenge. This also lines up with focus groups in Macomb County earlier in the year, where voters felt Democrats were more interested in social issues than the economic issues driving the voters’ concerns.

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Carving Out a Pathway Forward

At their core, campaigns are math problems – and for Democrats, outside of some very blue pockets, our available coalition does not add up to 50%. Not only is this an issue to elect a President and win statewide elections, but it is increasingly an issue to win a majority in Congress.

And this is the problem that looks really ugly in 2032, when we will have to win more seats, in states we currently lose more often than win, in districts drawn by the GOP.

We cannot start working on this problem soon enough.

The goal of the poll was both to shine a light on the issues in key counties, and to illuminate a pathway forward.

To the second goal, we undertook a series of messaging exercises. Voters read a number of statements, both positive and negative about the party, and were asked to rate them. At the same time, they were asked to highlight which part of each statement helped drive their view, either positively, or negatively.

Voters moved back to Democrats on frames around embracing change - highlighting terms like “new generation of leaders,” and “fighting to revive the American dream,” while “taking on the corruption of Washington.” and economic populism, drawn to phrases like "working people pay the most taxes, and spend more on health care” and “we need to be the party of working Americans.”

Other issue ideas that were highlighted included: a party that fights for “providing tax cuts for working families instead of the wealthy,” and “believes that those who work with their hands deserve the same shot at the middle class as anyone else.”

The frame that did not work as well: contrasting GOP extremism or Democratic wokeism. Voters did not care because these issues are already baked into their minds. What they did highlight however was “The Democratic Party needs to become a moderate party again who can represent the common-sense majority of Americans who believe in the values of hard work, accountability and compassion.”

Putting this Research in Play

It is extremely hard to condense this survey into a five-page memo. The pollster’s deck is fifty pages, and the cross tabs themselves run more than 1,000 pages deep.

That being said the findings here are not complicated:

● The political mood in these battleground counties has not changed much, and the 2024 election, which was very close in these twenty-one counties is very close looking ahead to 2026.

● The GOP maintains an edge on economic and immigration issues, though Trump is seeing some negative impact on his economic messaging from the chaos of the trade wars.

● Fair or unfair, voters have decided that Democrats are woke, weak, and out of touch. And while they do not like Republicans much better, among the traits they do care about, the GOP has an edge.

● When we leaned into messaging about new leaders, fighting for working voters, leaning into common sense values, tax cuts for the middle class, and reviving the American Dream – moderate voters, younger voters and particularly, younger voters of color come racing back to our corner.

It is important to remember, this is not a poll of all voters. These are voters from a sample of counties that are key to Democratic success. By nature, the politics in these counties will be more competitive than the nation-at-large. At the same time, getting it right here is critical to any long-term success.

The issues we have highlighted, and the solutions for going forward are not a quick fix. In sixteen of the twenty-one counties we polled, the electorate has been moving away from Democrats for 12 years - and that will not turn around on a dime, nor are we likely to see real movement until we have a nominee.

But there are real lessons, particularly for candidates who want to run in competitive and lean red areas – and for statewide candidates looking to reduce GOP margins in lean GOP areas:

● Be the change agent - be strong in calling out the Washington BS, offer a different vision. To this end, I wish Democrats in Congress had offered a robust alternative vision for the Trump OBBB. There is a hunger for something other than just opposing Trump.

● Lean into American values. Do not be afraid to lean into the American Dream - offer a substantive vision that is rooted in common-sense ideas that will provide real impact to voters. Don’t just remind them whose side you are on - show them.

At the same time, there is a roadmap here for starting to invest in suburban and exurban communities where Congressional seats are going to be in play in a few years. The real upside of the poll - voters' views of Democrats after messaging moved most significantly in sunbelt states, including Florida, which is likely to have 3-4 new Congressional seats in 2032. There is an opportunity to support down ballot candidates in these areas seeing robust growth and build a real farm team looking forward to 2032.

We also plan to stress test these theories in lean red counties in Virginia and New Jersey in 2025, giving voters a different argument for voting for the Democratic candidates, and to test what we can learn.

Thank you for taking the time. I look forward to sharing more from this project.

1. Cuomo is terrible. Everything about his candidacy was a horrible idea, ill-conceived as some kind of comeback tour from behavior for which he has no business getting a pass for. Furthermore he ran, by all outside appearances, an abysmal campaign that offered nothing of any real substance to voters. We live in a moment where every election is a seemingly a referendum on change, and in that environment, you couldn’t draw up a better opponent than Cuomo.

2. Mamdani ran a great campaign. Good campaigns are engaging, and speak directly to the issues voters care about. There are a lot of positions he took in the past that frankly I find abhorrent, I can’t see myself getting past, but it is clear he and his campaign did a great job centering the campaign on the affordability crisis that all of America is facing. I don’t want to take anything away from that.

Regardless of who won, there was going to be an absurd amount of commentary. It is the nature of anything that happens in New York. And because we live in a New York-centric media environment, there are plenty of takes arguing this race is a national sign we all need to learn from.

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We need to hit the pause button on all that.

To restate - I am not here to suggest Mamdani didn’t run a great race. He did. I am here to suggest that New York might be one of the worst microcosm from which to make broad takeaways, and this race, like all big moments in New York, will get more attention than it deserves.

I get it: Most of the loudest media voices, and frankly, many of the loudest political pundit voices come from DC and New York. Aa result, our national media often overstate the importance of everyday things that happen there, as if it is the only place in the world anyone lives.

I don’t live in New York, but God knows I know when the weather is bad there (who can forget the 2-day, 24-hour CNN coverage of Don Lemon driving around in a NYC blizzard in 2015). In the same breath, when something significant politically happens there, we all know about it.

Take AOC’s win in the primary in 2018. Big deal? Of course. But had she knocked off an incumbent in say, St. Louis, like Rep. Wesley Bell did in 2024, it would have been a one-day story instead of leading political news for a weeks and weeks. The truth is, this primary win for Mamdani is a way bigger deal because of so much of the media is centered in New York. But that doesn't mean it is actually a big deal outside of the five boroughs.

This is not to say there aren’t lessons — or probably more accurately, reminders of what good candidates should always do, and creative tactics that should find their way into more races.

Focusing on core economic issues and less on niche social issues is the right thing to do, as is running a campaign that authentically makes a pitch to every voter. For example, I appreciate Mamdani going on platforms that were (are) run by critics and skeptics. If these are what Democrats takeaway from this race, that is a good thing.

But again, taking nothing away from the win, this is what good campaigns should always do. To the point about going directly to your skeptics, in 2008, Barack Obama held one of his largest rallies in a county in Florida that John Kerry lost by nearly 20 points — not because he was going to win there, but because every vote counts the same, regardless of where you find it. Shitty candidates, like Cuomo, retreat. Good campaigns expand their electorate.

This isn’t a new model. This is how good campaigns win. It is how progressive candidates have won in more progressive areas. It is also how more normie Democrats, like Haley Stevens and Mikie Sherrill in more swingy states, or how Andy Beshear has managed to win 3 statewide races in the red state of Kentucky. Or last night in Florida, in a primary no pundit or national media source will ever think about, a bright young candidate named RaShon Young — described to me by one friend as “aggressively normal” won a State House primary by banging on doors and talking about pocketbook issues with his voters. (Remember RaShon’s name - I think he will be around).

This race also feels uniquely New York. First of all, I don’t think that in many places, Cuomo would have been given the pass he was given by other pols. I said to more than one friend over the last week, I really don’t understand why other candidates didn’t emerge, or what the fear was of Cuomo. Cuomo deserved to lose - and I am glad New York voters were right to send him home.

At the same time, New York is set up for the modern progressive coalition. The City has a higher median income, and higher educational attainment than most — two areas where more progressive politics tend to do better. For example, on the latter, New York City’s college attainment share among Dem primary voters are 10-20 points higher than Democratic primary voters in swing states such as Michigan and North Carolina - and maybe 30 points higher than the general electorate. Looking at the Emerson Poll (the one poll that seemingly got it right), Mamdani struggled against an exceptionally flawed candidate with a lot of the same demographics that my party is currently struggling with - voters with lower incomes and voters with lower educational attainment.

And this is one of the main reasons I struggle to see the larger, transferrable meaning of Mamdani to the future of the party at large. I might see it if he had flipped the switch with voters who have turned away from us, but that isn’t what he did.

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Conversely, there are Democrats who have found ways to make inroads with such voters. Successful Democrats such as the aforementioned Andy Beshear in Kentucky, or Josh Stein in North Carolina, or other interesting mayors, like Donna Deegan, who won despite a significant GOP turnout edge in Jacksonville, or even my buddy Zeb Smathers, a Democratic Mayor in a rural Republican North Carolina town all won by connecting with voters who have been rejecting Democrats.

In doing so, each won in an area where Republicans traditionally win, and we typically lose. Taken a step further, I doubt all but the most ardent of Mamdani supporters would argue - even if his campaign tactics were transferrable, that a candidate of his ideology would do as well in any of those places, just as it is fair to say, someone like Haley Stevens might struggle running in a Democratic primary in New York City.

As a hack, notwithstanding my issues with Mamdani’s worldview on a lot of issues (For one, unlike him, I think Obama was a good President), I can still admire the solid and creative race he ran.

I loved the walk through the city, their use of comedy in videos, the grassroots organizing, the interesting ads, the free-wheeling nature of the candidate, and mostly, the laser focus on actual issues that impact every day voters. For the life of me, I don’t know why more candidates don’t do these things. For example, there is a reason why Michigan Governor Whitmer ran on “fix the damn roads,” and did cute ads around potholes — stuff that voters see and feel every day matter. Mamdani leaned into it, both wisely and well.

But let us all be cautious before ascribing too much to a race where only about 14% of registered NYC Democrats actually voted for the winner, or suggesting generalized lessons on how his primary win helps the party build a broader electoral coalition come November (and beyond). When it comes to these lessons, I am far more interested in the lessons from candidates who have won partisan races in lean-red and red areas than I am what happened in Brooklyn (no offense to my friends who live in Brooklyn!).

For me, politics is just math.  You win elections by convincing 50% of people who show up to vote for you, and add one more.  Do that, and you win.  Fail to do that, and you lose.  It is pretty simple stuff. 

About a week ago, The New York Times published a piece laying out the extent of the Democratic collapse since 2014.  Of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties, Trump has increased his vote share in nearly 1500 in each of his 3 elections.   By comparison, Democrats have less than 60 counties they can say the same about.    

Between 2012 and 2024, there are ten states that have been categorized as a “battleground state” for some or all of those Presidential cycles.   In the 767 counties that make up these states, Democrats have lost ground in more than 90% of counties.

Another way of looking at it:  In those over 700 counties where the GOP gained ground, Trump did over 5 million votes better than Romney when it comes to the margin.   On the flip-side, in the 60 or so where Harris did better than Obama, my side picked up just about a million votes.  

Just as 2020 was, any and every 2024 path to victory required threading a perfect needle, and catching most of the breaks.  That may be a cycle to cycle plan, but it isn’t any kind of strategy for long term success.  

Now is the time for honest reflection on how we got here.   In the same way that Trump won over Obama voters, the truth is that in addition to expanding our own electorate, we have to win some of these Trump voters back if we plan on winning in the future.  

This isn’t my opinion. It is just math. 

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The Research

If a donor gave me a million dollars tomorrow, I would fund focus groups in the 15-20 counties that have seen the most movement - not only in battleground states, but in both Republican and Democratic base states.   The goal would be to listen:    

• What do voters think of our brand?  

• Why did they vote for Trump – then in many cases Biden – then Trump again?   

• What do they want to see from Democrats?  Who are Democrats they like?

• What is it about the GOP that won their support?

• Where and how are they getting their information?  

• And what does the bridge to winning a few voters back look like?

A few months ago, a donor gave Unite the Country, the SuperPAC we started back in 2019, a contribution to help towards this goal, and thanks to their support, we headed to Macomb County, a suburban county just outside of Detroit.

I am not going to rehash all those findings (you can read that piece here), but the choice of Macomb wasn’t hard:  Macomb voted for Obama twice, and Trump three times.  

In fact, in 2024, Trump’s 14-point win in Macomb netted him a 70,000 vote margin, roughly the same size as his statewide margin.   Compare that to Obama carrying the county by 14,000 votes in 2012, and it isn’t hard to see the problems.

Winning in places like Michigan doesn’t necessarily mean winning places like Macomb again, but it does mean losing them by less.  Biden, in carrying the state in 2020,  lost the county by a narrower 8 points, or 40,000 votes.    Elections in battleground states are all about margins: Big ones in the places you need to win — and keeping your opponent’s margins down in the places they want to run up the score

It really is just math.

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Building Off of Macomb - The Next Survey

As I write this, we are in the field with a large quantitative project building off of what we learned listening to voters in Macomb.   

We wanted to take what they told us, their perceptions of Democrats and Republicans, their thoughts on different issues, and most importantly, their hopes and dreams for America, and put them to a more robust test.

Working with Elizabeth Sena, who is on year six of doing these projects with me, we are currently polling voters in 21 counties - with at least one in each of the 10 states that have been in play since 2012.

19 of these 21 counties got more Republican between 2020 and 2024 – though 9 of the 21 have actually gotten better for Democrats since 2016 – and another 3 are reliably Democratic urban counties where our vote share has steadily – and increasingly decreased.

In other words, these are largely places where we bled voters in 2024 who have either historically – or at least occasionally (2020) been with us.

The goal here is to find the similarities across different places.  What are the through lines between a place like Wayne County, MI (Detroit) and Clark County (Las Vegas) or Hillsborough County (Tampa)?  All three counties are urban, but that is where most of the similarities end.  Yet, all three have seen Republicans gain 8-10 points on the margin since 2016.   

Or places like Duval County (Jacksonville) and Scranton, PA, where Republicans have improved their margins by 5.3% and 5.5% respectively since 2016.  

All 21 counties are from states that Democrats have won at least once in 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024, or North Carolina, a state that has been competitive and is critical for Democrats in the post 2030 census Presidential map. 

Six counties are from states that Obama won twice, but Trump has won three times (Florida, Iowa, Ohio).  Florida is highly represented (four counties), and no, it is not because I live here.  Rather, Florida is home to some of the most stunning changes.  Like it or not, understanding Florida is important to understanding how we get back to 270.

There are also a few counties where Democrats are improving.  We wanted to understand what are both the differences and the similarities between these counties and the ones where we are bleeding voters. 

There are lots of ways to group these counties, but for the sake of ease, here are three buckets:

RELIABLY DEMOCRATIC COUNTIES: 

• Cuyahoga County, Ohio 

• Fulton County, Georgia

• Oakland County, Michigan

• Orange County, Florida

• Polk County, Iowa

• Wake County, North Carolina

• Wayne County, North Carolina

SWING COUNTIES

• Bucks County, Pennsylvania

• Clark County, Nevada

• Duval County, Florida 

• Eau Claire County, Wisconsin

• Hillsborough County, Florida

• Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania

• Macomb County, Michigan

• Maricopa County, Arizona

• Miami-Dade County, Florida

GOP BASE COUNTIES

• Brunswick County, North Carolina

• Cherokee County, Georgia

• Iredell County, North Carolina

• Pinal County, Arizona

• York County, Pennsylvania 

The survey is extensive, and has both quantitative and qualitative components.  There are several open-ended exercises around the brand, and we are testing both proactive Democratic framing, as well as how voters are reacting to both Trump’s policies and my side’s responses. 

We aren’t looking for “poll numbers” here - there isn’t a real baseline from which we can compare, other than previous results. In these 21 counties, Democratic vote share has decreased from 55% in 2012 to 51% in 2024, while GOP share has increased from 43% to 47%.

We all instinctively know there are patterns between different communities - what we are hoping to do is identify them in clear and transparent ways. And just like the Macomb project informed this survey, the plan is and go back out and do more focus groups to drill down on what we learn in this survey.  

I can’t wait to see what we learn, and I look forward to sharing it with you.   Hopefully this is just another puzzle piece in helping us solve that basic math question going forward. 

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I am not breaking any news here – long time followers of mine know I’ve always been intrigued by the possibility of a third-party candidacy. At a very conceptual level, there is no doubt voters are open to the idea, and having sat in two days of focus groups since the 2024 election, I do believe voters want less rank partisanship and more action on core issues that impact their lives and their wallets.

But thinking about a third-party candidacy in concept, and building a pathway for one to win, especially in a state like Florida, are two entirely different conversations.

OG readers of my steveschale.com blog may remember that one of my first ever pieces was an analysis of then Governor Charlie Crist’s independent bid for the United States Senate in 2010. In that piece, a piece I wrote to think through my own curiosity about the race, I argued that despite Crist’s near universal, and largely positive name recognition, his odds of winning were low, given the partisan voting habits of Florida voters. You can read those two 2010 pieces here if you are interested (Sorry Charlie, and More on Crist's Steep Climb).

It is fair to say I took a lot of shit at the time from certain corners of the political punditocracy for those pieces, but history proved those models to be correct. Any way you slice it, for a third party candidacy to succeed, you are asking a significant share of partisans to dump their habits and vote for something different. Moreover, you likely need one of the two party nominees to have the bottom fall out, since any independent candidate will be required to take a position or two (or 20) that will make them unacceptable to a broad reach of the other side. Any successful third party candidate will likely need their vote goal based in one of the two parties.

John Morgan’s toying with a candidacy already had me thinking it was time to update that 2010 piece, but now that widely talked about 2026 candidate State Senator Jason Pizzo has decided to become an independent, now is as good of a time as any. If you haven't heard Morgan talk about his potential run with Florida Man Chuck Todd, it is very much worth your time: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-chuck-toddcast-220098/episodes/im-controversial-john-morgan-t-235284933

What does a 2026 Path to Victory Look like?

Couple of caveats to begin.

This isn’t what I think will happen. I am sure some dude banging away on a 2013 Dell desktop computer from his mother’s basement is going to tweet “that moron Schale just said he thinks X…” after reading this – and to be clear, what I will write below are just numbers off an excel spreadsheet that lay out what would have to happen. This is a model, not a prediction.

I also have no beef with either John Morgan or Jason Pizzo. I am not writing this to shit on either one of their potential candidacies. In fact, I like them both personally, and I appreciate both have tried to carve a path towards the median voter. I would be intrigued by either one of them running (though I think both have a hard road).

I do not have a candidate in this race (the other rumor I heard this week), nor am I looking for one. I started this exercise because someone asked me the other day what I thought it would take for Pizzo to win as a Democrat.

And finally, I love the Travis Hunter pick. Absolutely love it, and you should too. We’ve screwed up so many drafts that I appreciate the Jaguars being aggressive. (Sorry, I had to get a Jaguars aside in here)

So, let’s start with some assumptions.

Today there are about 14.1 million registered voters. In terms of assumptions, I am going to assume that this number won’t change much between now and 2026. I think this is reasonable for a few reasons: between 2020 and 2022, the total number of registered voters was nearly identical – and between 2022 and 2024, the total number declined.

Maybe it goes up a few hundred thousand – maybe it goes down, but 14.1 million voters is a decent place to start for this exercise.

Let’s peg voter turnout at 55%. 52.5% is the average of the last seven but given that the state has increased the speed at which voters are removed from the active rolls, a larger share of the active voter roll are likely voters.

Let’s also assume some of the partisan national mood favors Dems a little – so at that 55%, we can assume Republican turnout is down a bit (let’s say 65% compared to 67% in 2022), and thanks to Trump, Democrats are up (58% from 51%). We’ll keep NPA at the 38% that it was in 2022.

Let’s also assume the Jaguars beat the Colts in Jacksonville in 2025…something that’s happened every year since the middle of Barack Obama’s presidency…

But I digress.

Assuming the current partisan make-up holds steady – GOP with a +9% registration edge (apropos of nothing, would note that when I left the Florida Democratic Party payroll, the Dem advantage was like +4.5% and we held 14 more seats in the State House, but alas, I again digress), the final electorate would look something like this?

Total voters: 7,795,136

GOP: 3,663,251 (47% of voters)

DEM: 2,566,435 (33% of voters)

NPA: 1,565.450 (20% of voters)

Now we can quibble about this, but mostly if you want to quibble, rather than being insufferable on twitter, I invite you to make your own excel spreadsheet and voter model…

Back to the exercise.

Since I first thought about this in terms of what a Democratic Jason Pizzo would have to do to win…let’s look at one possible scenario (note, I said possible, not plausible):

In a two-party race, Pizzo would need 16% of Republicans, 93% of Democrats, and 60% of NPA voters to win by a very narrow margin that is similar to DeSantis’ margin in 2018.

Now, let’s throw Morgan or Pizzo in the race.

In this scenario, let’s look at race between a Republican Byron Donalds, endorsed by President Trump. A Democratic David Jolly, and either Morgan or Pizzo.

(Yes, I know Donalds might not be the nominee. Yes, I know someone other than Jolly might run. You can call it Trevor Lawrence vs Blake Bortles. Whatever. Stop taking this stuff so seriously!)

If you assume that a Democrat with the kind of profile of Jolly, even with Morgan or Pizzo in the race, is going to win 50% of Democrats, and 20% of independents, that alone gets Jolly to just over 20% of the statewide vote, meaning the statewide win goal lands just under 40%.

How would Morgan or Pizzo get to that win?

They would need to win more than a quarter of Republicans – in this model, 27% to be exact (assuming that 2% vote for Jolly – which is probably a low assumption).

And they would need to win ¾ of the remaining NPA voters – 60% overall.

A win would look like this:

Republicans: 71% Donalds, 2% Jolly, 27% Pizzo/Morgan

Democrats: 5% Donalds, 50% Jolly, 45% Pizzo/Morgan

NPA: 20% Donalds, 20% Jolly, 60% Pizzo/Morgan

Which would lead to an outcome:

Pizzo/Morgan: 39.6%

Donalds: 39%

Jolly: 21.4%

In fairness, there are a lot of assumptions baked into all of this that are probably a reach. If the GOP increases its voter registration advantage, a third party would need a larger share of that (and same if by miracle my side got its shit fully together). Would a Trump backed Republican – even if Trump’s numbers continue to slide – get less than 80% of a GOP midterm base? That is hard to imagine.

Are independents, who tend to have partisan voting habits, likely to break by 60% for an NPA candidate? Or more than half of Democrats bailing on a plausible Democratic candidate? A lot has to happen for either to occur.

Moreover, can someone stake out a position that appeals to 30% of Republicans that doesn’t anger a big enough chunk of Democrats to make the math hard? Or vice versa? Can the Jaguars WR Gabe Davis play an entire NFL game without a stupid drop? These are all difficult questions to gauge.

Furthermore, neither John Morgan nor Jason Pizzo starts with the profile of Crist. Governor Crist started the 2010 general with the strongest positive name ID in the field. While Morgan has strong statewide name ID, he doesn’t carry early 2010 Crist numbers. And Pizzo, while well-regarded in Tallahassee, is largely unknown statewide.

I get the argument some of my center-left (and center-right) friends make that this might be the best pathway in the short term. But one rule of politics that holds firm: the best way to predict future voting behavior is to know past voting behavior. Given the partisan loyalty that exists among partisan voters, getting voters to do something they don’t normally do can be difficult.

But then again, this is Florida. And we've seen the unpredicted happen in America on a seemingly quite precedented frequency of late. I am a skeptic for sure, but it would be fun to watch.

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We had a good conversation about some of the lessons learned in 2024, how SuperPAC world should organize itself going forward, what’s happened here in Florida, the challenges posed by the 2030 census, and a bit of my dream to build a Marshall Plan like effort (more on this to come) to elect Democratic Mayors over the next 5-10 years.

You can check it out here:

As always, I appreciate your input and thoughts. Also, subscribe to Reed’s podcast — lots of good stuff there.

Several reporters asked me what I thought we should take from the two Florida Congressional races, and truthfully, I don’t think much. There is no doubt some Trump backlash played into the margin, and in both cases, there were unique local circumstances that impacted Republicans more than Democrats.

But in the end, neither race was all that close - notwithstanding a massive amount of money spent in both. And by a lot of money, I suspect when we see the final FEC reports, the total amount between the two races will fall between $20 and 25 million.

What did we get for that?

Some kind of moral victory?

As national reporters and pundits were lauding the meaning of Florida’s results, the texts from my friends in Florida were almost all identical: frustration. Fellow Florida hack Chris Mitchell opined on this last weekend, calling out the fundraising tactics and focus on the race. Another buddy said to a group of us: “we need the same enthusiasm around doing the things that matter like voter reg as we do when random R +30 districts comes “online.” I expressed this frustration last week when I called the efforts in Florida “pouring money down a rabbit hole.”

If I had to take a wild guess, the total spending in FL 1 and FL 6 was 3-4x what the Florida Democratic Party has raised for voter registration and organizing over the last decade. And that’s not a knock on the FDP — while we see donors more than happy to throw a few bucks at trying to beat Marjorie Taylor Greene, no one wants to give to boring, rote organizing efforts.

This isn't an issue unique to Florida. Most state parties deal with this problem — especially state parties in states that do not have a Democratic Governor actively raising money to support party infrastucture. As my good friend Sam Cornale, who was the ED of the DNC for many years has often said to me: we can see where there is no real and permanent state party apparatus in election results.

Not to be Debbie Downer, but for the good news that can be read out of some of the specials, there are also data points that do not paint as rosy of a picture. Here is one to give you pause: In the four states that were battlegrounds in 2024 that allow voters to register with a political party (not every state does), we’ve lost ground to the Republicans in every single one:

Arizona. Nevada. North Carolina. Pennsylvania.

All have gone the wrong way

These aren’t new trends. All four states (plus Florida) have seen real erosion over the last five years. In Pennsylvania alone, more than 50,000 more Dems have switched to the GOP since January 1, 2024 than GOP to Democrats. And overall in Pennsylvania, Democrats have seen a 666,000 vote advantage in 2020 erode to roughly 175,000 today.

And don’t get me started on Florida. As a Democratic friend of mine said to me tonight, if Democrats had raised half of that money for infrastructure in 2017, Bill Nelson would have remained in the US Senate, and Dems probably would have won the Governorship.

The truth is we are really good at getting grassroots donors jazzed up about things that are tangible — and often unachievable. Take the 2020 Senate races: Three of the 5 most expensive races that year were places that Democrats lost by 8, 10, and 19. Or as we just saw here in Florida.

But we suck at is creating interest in long term investments - organizing, research, registration, candidate recruitment, etc. — the stuff that really matters, but doesn’t come with an emotional connection.

(One place that has really done this: Wisconsin. And it showed last night)

A lot of it is incentive structure. In today’s era of online fundraising, the digital fundraising consultants live off anger, fear, and misplaced hope. Democrats today want a silver bullet - and I get it. If I thought my $25 dollars could change the trajectory of politics, heck yeah I am chipping in, so I don’t blame activists for wanting to do something tangible to fight back. But as to the incentive structure, in today’s world, the more money that is raised, the more money the people who place the fundraising ads make.

And unfortunately in these two recent races, while plenty of national voices decided to take the opportunity to show they were out there “fighting” in places like FL-1 and FL-6, there weren't enough voices saying: “hey now, let’s be real about these races.”

In the same breath, getting people fired up to fund a volunteer capacity building program, or a swing-district registration effort isn’t nearly a much fun. You aren’t gonna “stick it to Trump” or “show Elon” or whatever the next ad says by giving $10 bucks to a voter registration effort in Seminole County, FL or Macomb County, MI, or $25 bucks to pay for some focus groups to better understand what is happening with Hispanics in a place like Pima County, Arizona.

But truthfully, those things are so much more important than whether we lose FL 6 by 14 points or 17 points. Those thing create real infrastructure. Those things train the next generation of operatives and identify future leaders. Those things create the conditions to win races. The problem is, they don’t come with the immediate result of an election, don’t have an easy audience, nor do they make people in the business any real money.

I used to tell our kids on the campaigns that we can only control what we can control. We can’t change the mood of the day, but we can control what we do to each day to build a better campaign. More than ever, we need to take that approach how we think about funding longer-term organizing.

I don’t know what they answer is, but we need to real conversation about figuring it out. Yes, some good stuff happened tonight. Yes, Republicans in Florida underperformed. Yes, the Wisconsin win was resounding and positive. And yes, at the same time, Democrats continue to lose ground in places we have to win, in part because the investment isn’t there.

The one upside of Florida - we saw donors want to get engaged. That enthusiasm, even if driven by unreasonable hope, is a good thing. Now, if we can just now figure out how to channel it to truly productive efforts…

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To be honest, had Vice President Harris won, the chance this Florida Man would have been found trudging across an icy parking lot in his warmest layered hoodies towards a conference room in a corner of an eighth-floor office building suburban Detroit, on snowy and quite cold Thursday evening in late February, would be quite low.

But she didn’t win.  And in losing, the slow melt of Democratic support levels over the last decade left fully exposed a problem:  our coalition to get to 50% + 1 nationally was gone.

Over the last four Presidential elections, nine states have flipped at least once between the two major parties.  

In those 9 states, there are 667 counties.   

Out of those 667 counties, 617 of them have moved Republican over those four cycles.  

Of those nine states, we won none of them in 2024.

Unite the County was founded in 2019 for one primary reason:  Elect Joe Biden.  We believed then that he was uniquely positioned to build a coalition that included working-class voters who had slipped away from Democrats in 2016, and we focused over 80 million in 2020 to talk to these voters.  

But when we woke up the morning after the 2024 election, for me — and for us, there was a new mission – one none of us had expected – a mission to understand, in the most transparent and clear-eyed way possible, what has happened to our support among working-class voters over the last decade.  And by working-class, we don’t just mean white working-class voters.   If 2024 made one thing clear:  we have a working-class problem that bridges racial, ethnic, and geographic boundaries.

While the problem is substantial, our initial goal is simple:  Go listen to voters in places where we used to win and talk to voters who used to vote for us about why they didn’t in 2024.  

In our initial list of nine swing states of the ten counties that had the biggest raw vote shift towards the GOP from Obama 2012 to Trump 2024, there are two that flipped from supporting Obama in 2012 to supporting Trump in 2024:  Miami-Dade County in Florida, and Macomb County in Michigan.      

Of those two, only one of them was in a state that was fully contested in 2024.  So that is where our journey begins. 

Macomb County

Macomb County is located just north of Detroit and is home to just under 900,000 people.  The largest employment sector is manufacturing, and for most of the last 20 years of the 20^th century, Macomb County’s per-capita income ran marginally above the statewide number.   But since the Great Recession in 2008-9, per-capita income in Macomb County now trails the statewide number.    The county population is just under 80% white.

In 2012, the county went for President Obama by 4 points, or some 16,000 votes.

Twelve years later, Macomb County went for President Trump by 14-points, or a margin of just under 70,000 votes.    

That nearly 86,000-vote shift in the margin is the largest of any 2024 swing state county that flipped from Obama 12 to Trump 24.

Michigan itself is quite a case study.   From the 2012 election to 2024, all but 9 counties in Michigan got more Republican.  Over half of the state’s counties – 44 to exact, saw Republicans improve their margins by more than 20-points.  In 8 of the 44, the margin got more Republican by 30-points, or more.   

But the sheer impact of the Macomb County shifts made it the logical first place to start our research journey.  Had Macomb performed in 2024 as it did in 2012, Kamala Harris would have won the state. 

We did two groups of Macomb County voters that night.   

The first was a group of mixed-gender non-college white voters who had previously voted for Democratic candidates.   Of the group of nine, five had voted for Biden in 2020.  All nine voted for Trump.

The second was a group of white men under 50, all of whom had voted for Trump, but all of whom had other ideological views that would lead one to believe they could be voting for a Democrat.

The goal was simple: to have a straightforward conversation with the type of voter who was very much a part of that shift from Obama 2012 to Trump 2024.  

Our Non-Existent Brand  (And what they think of us is bad)

It wasn’t just that these voters rejected our brand, in many cases, they couldn’t identify a single positive thing when asked to think about the Democratic Party.

But when pushed, voters responded with statements like this: “I supported Democrats back when they supported unions.  I think now they are more elitist and interested in gender identification and all these things working-class people don’t care about.”  

Words most frequently used were things like “weak,” “dishonest,” “too woke,” “too focused on DEI,” “stale,” and “out of touch.”

As one voter put it succinctly: “They spend all their time focused on smaller and smaller groups of people.  What about the rest of us?”

While the economic issues, namely inflation, are real – and had a significant impact on voting behavior, the imperative for us going forward is changing some basic perceptions of our party, perceptions that are creating real challenges in moving voters from these groups – many of them who had voted for Democratic candidates in the past, to a place where they would be open to a Democrat in the future.

For example, in the mixed-gender group of former Democratic supporting non-college Trump voters, half of the group voted for Joe Biden, yet nearly all of them found themselves agreeing with this statement:

Democrats have lost their way. They used to fight for middle class families and working people, but now they just seem to focus on letting biological men compete in women’s sports, opening our borders, coddling criminals and providing benefits to illegal immigrants. Democrats seem more worried about offending people than standing up for common sense and average Americans.

And in the second group – the group of Trump supporting younger men, perceptions of Trump strength and Democratic weakness repeatedly hit the bell.   Most in the groups agreed with this statement:

Democrats are not strong enough to lead in this tough world. We need leaders who will stand up to enemies and make tough decisions. Joe Biden was too old to face down dictators and Kamala Harris would not even fight for her own positions. I may not agree with everything Trump does or the way he does it, but at least he is strong and not worried about offending anyone.

One thing to keep in mind with these voters:  They were Trump supporters, but they aren’t necessarily MAGA in their beliefs, and many of them don’t care for him personally.  

In fact, when asked to describe their views of Republicans, they criticize them for being too close-minded, too strict in their own beliefs, too focused on religion and limiting the rights of others, and they are uncertain about Elon and all that is happening now. And almost every one of them laid out a scenario where they would vote for a Democrat in 2028 (more on this in a second)

But their core frustration is that the government isn’t working for anyone anymore.  In Trump, they see action, and because of that action, they are willing to give him some time – though they are expecting real change in their personal lives.   Among Democrats today, they see a focus on issues that don’t impact their lives, and an unwillingness to take strong stands when needed.

The Big Takeaways

Information Deficit

One reason we have a real challenge with these voters:  We aren’t communicating where these voters get their news.   

None of these voters picked any of the news sources that drive coverage among residents of urban, coastal communities.  Rather, these voters get their news from social media sources, and Google/YouTube headlines. 

As a non-Beltway hack, I have long worried my DC, NY, and LA friends simply don’t understand just how bad the disparity is online, a disparity I see every day in my feeds.

The decades-long operation on the right to flood the zone with content - first over radio, and now over the internet, has left them with a substantial advantage.   We are not going to succeed unless we start to compete in this space.  

There isn’t an easy or cheap solution to this problem.

Our Problem Isn’t Trump or Oligarchs – It is Us

One of the lessons of these groups is while these voters are going to judge Trump on his actions – there isn’t a ton we can do about it if we aren’t offering a reasonable alternative.   Voters already voted Republican and Trump despite their concerns.   What these voters want to see from us is something they can support.

These voters were clear:  they want to see us offer a broader message focused on economic realities.  We do well when we talk about lowering health care costs, or cutting middle class taxes.   They wanted to see us less focused on niche social issues, and more focused on unifying the country.  

One specific thing we did test with each of these groups:  What kind of Democrat they would like to see.     We offered three nameless scenarios – a Clintonian “common-sense” and bipartisan frame – an Obama/Biden focus on working class families – and a third that was a candidate who was focused on taking on billionaires and oligarchs. Every single person in these two groups chose one of the first two.

This doesn’t mean these voters aren’t worried about disparities or the government being too focused on the whims of the wealthy – in fact, they were.  But what it does indicate is they want a Democratic candidate who is offering real solutions, who is willing to use strength and bipartisanship to get things done. 

Focus on What We Can Control

Trump is a unicorn (as was Obama – as these groups repeatedly mentioned him as what they would like to see from Democrats), and Trump is dominating the news space.

Every single day I get asked by someone what we can do about Trump, and my response is what these voters said to us in Macomb:   Win voters at the ballot box.

Voters like the ones we spoke to in Macomb County aren’t hysterical about their vote choice, nor are they regretting it, nor are they fired up about it.  They made a choice.

To provide some scale, in the 617 counties across the 9 states mentioned earlier, Republicans have gained nearly 5,000,000 votes compared to Democrats – some 86,000 alone in Macomb County.  This didn’t happen in one night, or because of one thing.  In this county alone, Trump won by 30,000 more votes than he did in 2020 – but even his 2020 election night was substantially more Republican than the county was in 2012.

Our side is living and breathing everything coming out of the 18 acres at the corner of Pennsylvania and 17^th.   We are holding up handmade signs inside the State of the Union.   These voters just want us to tell them we are going to lower their health care costs – and show that we can do it. 

As a friend of mine observed the groups summed it up more succinctly — “Hope is not dead. We just have to be smarter about how we talk about it, and who carries it.”

Going Forward

These groups are just the start.  Over the next year, we are going to look at two buckets of counties:   places like Macomb that have trended the wrong way – and places like North Carolina and Arizona, where we have had some success, but need to figure out how to move these states into a bluer column to address a changing map.

Counties/Areas we hope to take a look at over the coming months:   Miami-Dade County, the county that has moved more than any in the country towards the Republicans over the last decade or so;  Clark County, a county that used to provide Democrats a buffer to carry Nevada, but increasingly no more, and a place like Pima County, Arizona, a border county in a swing state that has trended the wrong way.  

We also want to look at places like Detroit and Philly,  where lower base turnout and GOP gains among Black Men have taken away traditional (and needed) Democratic margins, as well as places like Scranton, the Joe Biden hometown that is the poster child for the evaporation of the working-class Democratic coalition.  

And we hope these are just the start.

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And PS: Detroit is a really cool city.

Fortunately, we determined the perimeter was indeed clear, so she went back to sleep, but alas I did not. In my attempt to join her in slumber, I decided to watch last night’s DNC Chair candidate forum hosted by the Georgetown Institute for Politics.

Having read some of the twitter commentary, my hopes weren’t high. Those low expectations were met.

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Let me start by saying what I wanted to hear.

• I wanted to hear a serious conversations about how exactly we grow the party, both geographically and from a coalition stand point.

• I wanted to hear candidates talk about how we stand up real state party infrastructure, particularly in competitive and potentially competitive states where there is currently little to none.

• I wanted to hear about how we support the down-ballot, how we grow the party from the bottom up, how we would empower the voices of people who are winning elections in tough areas, and generally, how we start winning elections where we are losing.

• I wanted to hear them talk about the looming reality of the next census, how it will change not only our path to the presidency, but our path to majorities in congress.

• Basically, I wanted to hear them talk about how we lift up winning.

I don’t think more than 2 minutes was spent on any of this.

For me, Jason Paul, one of the candidates for Chair, said the one thing I wish they had spent the entire forum talking about. He noted, rightly, that in many parts of the country, there are voters who don’t have any friends who are Democrats, don’t really know anyone who is a Democrat, and don’t know any Democratic candidates or office holders that they admire. He was saying a real truth: that we, as a party, are simply irrelevant to the daily lives — and simply not a part of the community of a huge swath of America.

Not only does this have real world implications for delivering a message, it also has caused us to fall off the map electorally, even inside of states where we have invested real money. For example, if you look at the Presidential election results in the 580 counties that make up the following eight states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Democrats have lost ground since the 2012 election in all but 90 of those counties.

And we haven’t lost just a little bit of ground.

Lets look at the size and scale of the GOP gains from the 2012 margin

• More than 10 points: 364 of the 580 counties

• More than 20 points: 158 of the 580 counties.

• More than 30 points: 29 of the 580 counties.

By comparison, the Democratic gains:

• More than 30 points: 2 counties

• More than 20 points: 7 counties

• More than 10 points: 27 counties.

And just to level-set what this means. The two counties where Democrats gained 30 points since the 2012 margins added a total of 56,431 votes to our vote margins.

For sure, that is great. But, by comparison, Republicans more than made all of that up in one swing-state county, Macomb County MI, where they have gained 17+% points since 2012, costing my side 85,786 votes off the Obama 2012 margins (As an aside, I am looking forward to doing some focus groups with Unite the Country in Macomb in a few weeks).

Did the DNC forum talk about this?

Nope. In fact, I am pretty sure more time was spent talking about who would serve as at-large members of the DNC than was spent talking about any of this.

But I can promise one thing: if the DNC isn’t focused on this for the next 2-4 years, the foundation will be shaky for 2028.

During the forum that Jonathan Martin hosted in Michigan, he asked a candidate which was more important: fairness or winning. The candidate gave a word salad of an answer, but winning wasn’t really part of it. And winning is the only job of the DNC.

I think the DNC is an easy scapegoat for activists. I don’t believe the DNC wins or loses elections, rather, I think they create the environment and the toolbox for elections to be won. Further, for all the handwringing about the place, there are some really smart people at the DNC right now. For example, Sam Cornale, who currently runs the place, is easily one of the best operatives that our party has (and a genuinely nice human), and the next Chair should beg him to stay.

But that being said, the next Chair is going to enter the building with very little of the infrastructure that existed for the last Chair. There is no President to help raise money - and there are no majorities in either the House or the Senate to serve as a draw. This is why the next Chair has to be laser focused — laser focused on the things that actually grow the party, that improve our chances to win elections — that set us up for success in a post-2030 map.

Those things aren’t sexy. They don’t create viral moments, or get activists all fired up. And I honestly don’t care if I ever see the next DNC Chair on TV standing up some agenda, or pushing back on Trump. There are plenty of elected voices for that work. I want my next DNC Chair laser focused on the work.

That is what I wanted to hear this morning when I watched last night’s forum, and that is what I hope to hear from whoever wins this thing when they walk into that building on South Capitol Street, SE.

Not a single one of us can control what Donald Trump does - hell, not even the people who work for him can. But we can control what we do to build a stronger foundation for electoral success.

Just this week, data showed Republicans gained about 1,000 net voters in New Mexico in the last month, and flipped voter reg in Hillsborough County from a Dem plurality edge to a GOP one. Neither of these data points care who is on the audit committee, or who signed a pointless pledge, but both matter to whether we win or lose. That’s the forum I wanted to see.

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*Just for the record, I have never worked for the DNC in any capacity and I don’t have a dog in this fight, other than winning.