Matters of State Strategies Head Matt Grodsky Discusses the 2024 Elections and How Democrats Need to Move Forward

Since the November 5 election, Democratic Party leaders and activists have been searching for the answer to these questions.

How?

How could American voters choose a convict over a prosecutor?

How could American voters choose the Big Lie over reality?

How could American Voters vote against an Administration that did help its best to help American workers for someone who has been regarded by historians as the worst President in history?

How did Donald Trump, despite his track record of gross economic and pandemic mismanagement, his attempted coup to overturn the 2020 election, his criminal convictions and impeachments, the fact that many in his first Administration including his own Vice President were screaming ‘buyer beware” and his selection of three Supreme Court Justices that took away a women’s reproductive freedom away nationwide, prevail?

How could the Republican Party and its leaders who over the last 35 years have put this country into three recessions, mismanaged the War on Terror and in Iraq, botched the response to COVID, blocked bipartisan attempts at immigration reform on four occasions, selected judges and justices that are ruling for a restoration of the Gilded Age where plutocrats reigned and minorities and women had less rights, and consistently opposed measures like a living wage, expanded health and child care, and measures to clean the nation’s air and water supply be seen as the party of the working class and the ones to competently manage the nation’s economy, borders, and public safety?

How could the Democratic Party, whose leaders have advanced legislation that has moved the country forward and lifted people up in a time when crime rates and illegal border crossings were dropping be seen as unappealing to the people when their policies were helping the country?

The reasons put forth have been numerous. They have included:

• The perception of Democrats, despite the legislative record, failing to connect with the working class and middle-class voters suffering with anxiety over the effects of inflation following the pandemic and show that they cared.
• The perception, however inaccurate, that the Biden/Harris Administration did not react quickly enough to the affordable housing and rental crisis.
• The perception, however inaccurate, that Democrats were the party of open borders.
• Fair weather Democrats abandoning President Joe Biden and making the party’s prospects weaker for November.
• Biden’s withdrawal came too late for Vice President Kamala Harris or any other Democratic front runner to mount a longer campaign.
• Less informed voters forgetting what happened during the Trump years and preferring the misinformation messages of Donald Trump over the actual achievements of the Biden/Harris Administration and truth messaging of the Democrats.
• Democratic branding and messaging, on their achievements and long-term vision for the American People and the Nation, has become stale and needs reinvigorating, revamping, and more ambitious goals.
• Democrats were behind on social media avenues like Tik Tok and Josh Rogan and other ways of connecting with people, especially younger voters.
• The perception that Democrats were beholden to the extremist views of their left flank.
• The Harris/Walz ground game did not do the ground game job to turn out the numbers of voters needed to prevail.
• Democratic voter registration has fallen behind Republican and Independents in some states.
• Harris should have picked Josh Shapiro over Tim Walz for Vice President.
• A media double standard in their reporting of Trump compared to Biden and Harris.
• Kamala Harris was a Black-Asian Woman who lost votes because she was a Black -Asian Woman.

Matt Grodsky, the head of Matters of State Strategies, recently penned an op-ed in Az Central, offering that the reason Democrats lost Arizona this time was due to both a voter registration disadvantage and branding/messaging issues from the campaign staffs and candidates.

Mr. Grodsky graciously took the time to discuss the 2024 elections and moving forward in the 2026 and 2028 election cycles.

The questions and his responses are below.

From your recent op-ed, please explain two reasons why Arizonans are not registering as Democrats and why 37,000 Democrats switched to Republican Party.

“There’s various reasons for why this election cycle went the way it did but I think ultimately we struggled with having an unpopular President, despite his historical achievements. When you’ve got an individual that’s at a consistent 39 percent and is the head of your party, that’s going to impact your brand. You can see that post 2020 there is a pretty steady decline of Democratic registered voters in Arizona that continued through 2024. Whether or not individual candidates are messaging perfectly and appealing to moderates, our brand as a whole is often defined by our most left flank. So at a macro level, that has ramifications for registration. When people aren’t motivated by your party, they don’t register. And if they are registered but that lack of motivation persists, they don’t vote. Frankly, we often get tagged by the right with supporting things we aren’t really championing at all. I go back to 2019 and 2020, they were trying to define us as the anti-straw party “the war on straws”. They took one thing from an activist segment of the population and branded us with it, and we had to spend to time proving why that wasn’t the case. In 2022 there was perceived animosity towards celebrating the Fourth of July. Because there was an outcry from a small population of Democrats, the entire party at the state level got branded with being Anti Fourth of July. At the time we on the Fontes Campaign actually had to come out and denounce that and it took us off message. That’s what I discuss in the op-ed. These are just a few examples but they illustrated part of why we started to hemorrhage voters after 2020.”

You said the Democratic party message had become stale. Please explain. And what are at least three issues future Democratic candidates should be emphasizing when they run again?

“Where we fell short was acknowledging people’s pain on an economic level. We had good aspirational policies but we didn’t pitch them with an acknowledgement that people were unhappy.”

“It was easy for us to do that in 2020 because we didn’t have control of the White House. We were not in control of the economy. So it was much easier for us to message on, ‘hey, people are hurting you, you shouldn’t have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, we need an economy that works for everybody.’ It’s much harder to do that when you’re trying to play defense and prop up the current administration. Biden lowered inflation. He lowered drug prices. He fixed the economy after COVID. They [the Biden/Harris Administration] did a ton of amazing things on infrastructure, on CHIPS. But it’s hard to message on that and also say, ‘but the remaining hangover that you guys are feeling in your pocket books is because of the mismanagement of the previous administration. It’s hard to thread that needle in a soundbite. Going a step further — back to the perception thing, which has as much to do with right-wing misinformation as it is intentional party messaging — we get defined by our most fringe elements. That’s something we have to address as a brand. If you were a small business with plummeting sales, you would look at how your brand was being perceived, despite what you think you’re doing right. Party politics isn’t any different.”

What are at least three issues future candidates should be emphasizing?

“Each cycle is different and time will tell but the main thing we should focus on regardless of what the issues come out to be is the concept of change. In the op-ed I discuss people have been perpetually angry and seeking change agents since the financial crash with the exception of the re-election of President Obama in 2012 (I think we may be entering a period of time when two term presidencies become a novelty vs the norm.)2008 Obama proved that you could run on a populist message without it being perceived as too far left or something that would turn off the middle of the road voter. He used it again in 2012 to fend off Romeny who was seen as out of touch and part of the problem that led to the crash.”

“Since then, there’s been constant anger in the middle class because they can’t get ahead. So, they’re constantly looking for a candidate that does not represent the status quo. In 2016, Trump did not represent the status quo. In 2020, Biden did not represent the status quo. In 2024, Trump did not represent the status quo. So when it comes to issues as Democrats, we need to package whatever we are selling in the concept of change.”

“That used to be Biden’s superpower. He could take these populist, change-centric ideas and message them in a folksy, working-class way that resonated with people from the middle out and I think the fact that he’s gotten older and he’s lost some of that ability is what contributed to him losing the messaging battle a couple years into his Presidency.”

Historically, Republicans including Donald Trump have been responsible for torpedoing immigration reform. They managed the Economy into three recessions. They mismanaged wars and pandemics. Trump almost staged a coup, and they’ve obstructed social justice programs. They are the ones that have voted against measures like a living wage, childcare, assistance and so forth. Why do why are they the ones that get perceived as the party to solve immigration, manage the economy better and the party of working class based on that track record?

“They have an incredibly disciplined right-wing media ecosystem that transcends cable television. It’s in podcasts, it’s online, it’s in these new apps, its all over radio. It’s appealing to a younger people and its attracting young males who feel that our party threatens their masculinity. I’m a girl dad, I’m proud of our fight for women’s rights. I also recognize we are losing young men and need to remedy that. We have to go and meet the people that absorb this content where they are and we need to speak in their language, not force feed them ours.”

“So you know there’s this whole debate about should Kamala Harris have gone on Joe Rogan’s show? Yes. Should we be advertising in right-wing outlets? Yes. We got lambasted in 2022 for running ads on Fox News to promote Adrian Fontes during the campaign. But guess what? It worked because it helped us get crossover Republican voters. We have to go and find these people where they are. You know, we can’t just be talking in our own bubbles, our own ecosystems and take that whole other network for granted.”

We both know President Biden and Vice President Harris repeatedly said they recognized people were suffering. I mean I heard him say it, I heard her say it. I heard them say they would do more for the people by building on the success first term. Why didn’t anyone hear them? 

“Think about where they were saying it. They had over a billion dollars. Sure, they were running ads, but were those ads fully penetrating right-wing ecosystems? I know she addressed these things at her rallies. I was there at several of them in Arizona. I was pumped up. I loved it. But I was in a crowd full of people that loved that stuff too. Were those speeches getting through in rural Arizona? Were Latino news outlets covering them and feeding them to Latino and Hispanic males? Were local news stations clipping the right parts of the speeches or just the parts that had the most antagonizing statements about Trump?”

“I believe there was an entire media ecosystem that were not getting the message because it was so convoluted by the right-wing ecosystem and Democrats were not spending dollars there. And when there is a void like that, groups like Turning Point can spend money to re-emphasize that ‘Hey, the Democratic brand is radical, it’s scary, it’s stupid. It’s wrong on the economy.’ And it just reinforces what these people have already been spoon fed. When you’ve been re-programmed like that where are you going to go to “figure out the truth They’re not going to go to a rally. They’re not going to fully absorb a positive Harris ad if one finds them. We’ve got to go to them.”

Were you surprised with the CD One and Six results as well as the LD results, especially the Schweibert, Marsh, Seaman, and Volk races?

“On CD-1, no I’m not surprised. We have lost voters in CD-1. The numbers fell between 2022 and 2024. We also continually run candidates that don’t live in the district and we lose. There was a reason I supported Conor O’Callaghan in the primary. We have to run somebody that’s in the district and messaging on the issues that are important to voters there. The Shah campaign did address immigration in their messaging, they did address aspects of the economy, and they did message on abortion, but I do think that the messaging interests shifted by the time we reached the very short general election. We needed to bash Schweikert on more than just abortion. He lied and said Shah was part of “The Squad” and blitzed with ads that drove that home for weeks. Not only is that attack absurd, but it’s also a lie! Talk about being defined by the furthest left elements! We should have been branding Shweikert as a Freedom Caucus fanatic, a January 6th supporting, election denying, extremist who voted against veterans benefits, supported defunding the FBI, and voted to keep inflation high — because it’s true and that shit freaks out swing voters! I think outside groups did Shah a disservice by pushing abortion rights messaging so hard in Latino communities across AZ-01 — that has not traditionally been a compelling issue in Latino and Hispanic culture — and when they received that message and tied the cause to Democratic candidates as our number 1 issue, that didn’t help us.”

“I was hopeful for CD-6. I think Ciscomani was getting more vulnerable with each passing day. She (Kirsten Engel) put up a hell of a fight. At the end of the day, It comes back to the voter registration issue and it gets to the same thing with some of the LD races you touched on. We don’t have enough Democrats to bolster our base which means we’re ever more reliant on appealing, to the middle. And in a year when the middle is turned off by our messaging because of wrong perceptions about our brand, it’s an uphill battle for Democrats across the board. In LDs where we have a better registration count, I think results likely came down to enthusiasm among Democrats, their turnout, and their perceptions of the Republican opposition. Were they defined as radical enough? And who was targeted with that messaging?”

“The way I recommend fixing our registration woes is this: we need to prioritize, as a party, going and getting our voters back into our ranks. Have a Voter Registration Director. Don’t rely on C4s and outside groups to do the work for us. Make this a priority from the PCs in the LDs up to the Executive Board and the State Party. Getting on par with Republican numbers is key so that we are not as reliant on appealing to swing voters and crossover Republicans. That’s still going to have to be an aspect, of course, but our real issue right now is the loss of party members.”

And the LD races and the question that if Kevin Volk won in LD 17, the other candidates should have won in their districts or did the Independents just not flock to them.

“Aside from voter registration, I think it goes back to the Independents just didn’t flock to Democrats this time (for all the above reasons). It also goes back to the who they’re (Democrats) are up against. For example, Gress, he’s not seen as a dangerous extremist by the middle. I know we’d like him to be, but he isn’t viewed that way. Finally, who are we talking to? How many Independents received information on our Democratic candidates? That’s not meant to be a sarcastic question. I’m genuinely interested. How many Independents were targeted? How many Moderate Republicans were targeted? What type of information did they have going into election day on their options? I know ADLCC had tons of ad buys. Who was seeing them and what was the message?”

“With an intense Presidential campaign, a historically long ballot, a million propositions — you’re competing for people’s attention down ballots and it’s hard. But I’m curious how many swing voters were targeted with Democratic messaging in these LDs.”

To what extent did misinformation play a major role in defeating Democrats up and down the ballot?

“To an enormous extent. I don’t know when people are going to wake up to the fact that Turning Point is an issue. it’s no longer just a fringe nuisance. Yeah, Kirk looks weird and sounds like a dork but he’s effective. The organization has a very disciplined, well organized, mobilized operation in Arizona and campuses across the United States. It’s appealing to younger voters. It’s making radical conservatism seem cool and logical. If you’re in the Democratic bubble, if you’re in big cities, on the coasts, if you’re watching John Oliver and reading the Atlantic, it seems nuts to you. It seems nuts to me. And that’s the problem.”

“We have to do battle with that group and fight to get these voters back.”

In an interview with New York Times. Senator-Elect Ruben Gallego said, some Democrats failed to connect to voters because they emphasized infrastructure too much. I think he said something to the effect of “nobody cares about that shit “and they should have focused more on kitchen table issues along with more direct contact with working in Middle Class groups. Do you agree with that assessment? 

“Yes, I do. Infrastructure is important but you have to message it in a good way. Our highways are better, right? Biden and Democrats could have put up Billboards that said ‘Do you like this newly repaved highway. Democrats delivered that for you.’ CHIPS brought a shit ton of jobs. They should have put up signs and banners next to the plants that say, ‘Democrats delivered this for You.’ ‘Jobs, Brought to you By Democrats’. Infrastructure means a stronger economy. it means better paying jobs. It means more people coming here. It means an easier way to live. Democrats are making it easier for you to thrive.”

“That’s how you message that kind of stuff, but just saying blankly like, oh well, we got an infrastructure package done. What does that mean? Nobody knows what that means. Nobody cares. It’s stale, it’s boring.”

“Meanwhile you’ve got a very straightforward message that resonates: Trump will fix it. And people are like, oh yeah, he’ll fix it. It’s vague and it doesn’t get into specifics and all that jargon. But it’s like, yeah, he acknowledges something’s not right. And so, I’m going to be drawn to that versus remember that time we did infrastructure’? I’m not saying that argument is correct. I’m just saying that our messaging missed that point.”

“So, I agree with Gallego’s assessment on that front.”

“I also think we have to recognize that people gave us everything in 2020. We had full control of government and a chance to deliver. We could have done so much for the country but instead you had characters like Sinema and Manchin who killed some of the biggest, sweeping things that would have shown how Democrats come through. So when people who voted in 2020 are asked to give us another term, at a 30,000 foot level isn’t it kind of understandable why they’d be jaded and not show up?”

In addition to registering more Democrats, what are at least two other items on the to-do list Democrats have to start doing in order to prepare for the 2026 and 28 election cycles?

“Candidate recruitment now. The more we can try to do to make sure that we don’t have ridiculously packed primaries like what we saw in CD One. I get everybody wants to have a process where they can choose the best candidate, and they can fall in love and all that stuff. But at some point, we got to get a little bit more serious about how we want to do combat in the general elections. We have a general election for three months, we have a primary season for nearly 20. That season should be spent arming our candidates with all the resources they need to win a general election, not being so worried about people’s feelings that we open the flood gates and have everyone under the sun jump in.”

“Importantly, once you’re a registered Democrat, how can we make voters feel like they’re part of an exclusive club? You know registering them is one thing. You got to turn them out too, right? Make them feel like a rewards member. Make them feel like they’re part of a cool exclusive thing and that’ll keep them in the party. We need to think about ways we can do that at our state party.”

Is there anything not covered in the previous questions you would like readers to know about Democratic prospects in the next election cycles? Please explain.

“Yeah, it’s easy to give these op-eds a glance and then decide TLDR and base your assessment on the headline or subline (something the papers generally pick, not the writer). In case anyone did that with this piece, I think it’s important to stress that it wasn’t just one thing that cost us this election ( as I said in my opening sentences) and I am not arguing that our messaging was universally or intentionally far left across the board, nor that messaging was the only reason we fell short. What I am saying is there is a giant portion of the population thinking that we’re out of touch or too far left regardless of our messaging attempts. That’s a problem. We have made some errors with how we talk about certain issues and how we talk to various populations, this makes our pitch to voters harder especially when the right can seize on those mistakes. That’s a problem. Too often, we have allowed our party to be defined by our most fringe elements. That’s a problem. We are in a situation where there are people in Arizona who have become so turned off by us that they literally left the party or won’t turn out. That’s a problem. Imagine throwing a party and people are storming out in droves! That sucks. So in terms of our prospects, if we don’t do some introspection and don’t prioritize voter registration in this next cycle we are in for a tough ride. I appreciate the positive responses to this piece and people’s overall reactions. I encourage people who haven’t already read it to do so and then register Democratic voters. We have a 300k-person gap. Let’s get to work.”