Third Way Writers Offer a Strategy for Democratic Party Resurgence

With a slim plurality of voters last November deciding to support a person that had been twice impeached in his first term, indicted for enabling an attempted coup to stay in power, found liable for sexual assault, convicted 34 times for business mismanagement, and driving the country into a ditch largely because of his mismanagement of the Coronavirus, it is easy to conclude that Democrats have a communications problem.

When your party’s record of delivering for the American People, especially the Working Class, in the areas of economic management, immigration, and crime prevention, is actually better than the other side but the people believe otherwise, Democrats have a communications problem. 

When large segments of the working class of the United States, despite the historical track record, think the Republican Party, with is track record of launching failed wars, fiscal incompetence by blowing up the national debt through tax cuts for the wealthy, not investing in social justice programs like raising the minimum wage or expanding health care, and launching a war on science and reality, is more in touch with them and on their side, Democrats have a communications problem.

How do Democrats solve it? 

In a February 2, 2025 position paper authored by Elaine C. Kamarck and William Galston for the Center-Left organization Third Way titled The Purpose of Party Renewal, the writers rightly offer a strategy for the Democratic Party to reconstitute itself through investing resources in purple and red states and reconnecting with working class voters that thinks, largely thanks to MAGA Republican misinformation delivered at non traditional social media outlets that the Democrats have abandoned them. 

The Paper Accurately Points Out Where Democrats lost Ground in 2024

In their paper, Kamarck and Galston ably goes over where the Democrats lost ground in the 2024 elections. 

The most pronounced areas that Democrats lost ground in the last election were among those who did not have a bachelor’s degree, working class voters who make less than $50,000, Moderates and Independents, Asians, and Latinos. 

Below are the charts that Kamarck and Galston used to base their data conclusions on.

Democrats also lost ground in turnout. 37 percent of Democrats turned out in 2020.  Just 31 percent in 2024. Democratic core groups among the Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Liberals, and Non-College voters also turned out less in 2024. 

The writers are right to assert that the Democrats need to repair and rebuild bridges with the working class and across the country. And not just in purple and red states. Trump, despite his first term track record of pandemic mismanagement, tax cuts for the rich, two impeachments, and enabling a coup, made inroads in Blue States because, unlike Harris, he actually campaigned, while waiting to appear in court, in Democratic strongholds like New York, New Jersey, and California.

To rebuild their coalition, the Democrats have to develop an outreach and communications  strategy targeted toward uninformed voters that boasts their messaging,  highlighting recent party supported achievements that have helped the people, counter Trump-MAGA misinformation and talking points on wedge issues like the LGBTQ community, assure voters that they are for law enforcement and border security, point out where the new Trump/Vance Administration is shortchanging Americans, and outline a forward vision that will move the nation forward and lift all people up.

Were Inflation and Illegal Immigration the Real Reasons Harris Lost?

According to Kamarck and Galston, the reason Democrats lost ground was the perception that the Biden/Harris Administration largely ignored, despite the real track record, the actual and imagined repercussions of inflation and rise in illegal immigration.

In responding to a request for comment to this article, Third Ways Senior Communication Director, Kate deGruyter cited two articles from reputable news sources, the Washington Post and CNBC, that showed the perception that the Biden/Harris Administration was slow to the concerns of rising prices after the highpoint of the Coronavirus. 

In politics, perception, especially when uninformed voters are fed volumes of lies and misinformation, becomes reality. 

Kamarck and Galston have a point in their arguments.

However, the writers also made several factual omissions in this part of their presentation. 

On inflation, they erred when writing “The administration was too slow to acknowledge the pain being felt by Americans beset by high grocery store and gasoline prices.”

This is falling for a MAGA talking point. Covering the Biden/Harris Administration, the President and Vice President routinely acknowledged the suffering of the American People in speeches and press releases. 

Furthermore, the writer’s contention that “In this context, the administration’s ill-conceived effort to sell “Bidenomics” was a fiasco that succeeded only in making the President and the party appear out of touch” is also incorrect. 

What part of reducing drug prices for seniors, passing the CHIPS and Science Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure, making it possible for States to invest in local apprenticeship programs, passing the American Rescue Plan that fully funded schools and law enforcement, is out of touch?

The writers also seemed to think that the goal of Bideonmics did not match working class wishes, stating: 

“Work conducted during the past two years by organizations such as the Progressive Policy Institute and Third Way offers a point of departure for developing a working-class policy agenda. A Third Way survey found that a set of policies that “grow the economy so that everyone has the opportunity to earn a good life where they live” beat the Bidenomics prescription of policies that “grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up” by a two-to-one margin and among every demographic group and ideology”

What part of “growing the economy from the middle out and bottom up” does not match up with “grow the economy so that everyone has the opportunity to earn a good life where they live?” 

Later in the article, the writers pointed out what working class voters want from Democrats.

Among the policy prescriptions were “easier to start small businesses; expanding alternatives to college for acquiring marketable job skills (including increased public investment in apprenticeships); reducing the budget deficit; tackling high medical costs; lowering taxes on working families; making additional investments in the U.S. military; building more housing, roads, and rail; and reinventing government.”

Did anyone pay attention to Biden/Harris policies over the last four years which, again, included record number of small business starts, funding apprenticeships, expansion of the private health care marketplaces, and the prescription drug benefit. 

Did anyone pay attention to the Harris/Walz Program which called for higher start up business tax credits, increasing the number of apprenticeships, putting Homecare into Medicare, expanding the Earned Income and Child Tax Credit, and a tax credit for first time homebuyers. 

These are all items the people polled by Third Way said they wanted. 

While the writers were right to conclude that Democrats need to communicate their achievements and goals better and in a way that does not sound snotty and condescending, ignoring actual achievements and proposals like they did not happen will not solve the issue.

On the border, while the writers correctly pointed out that border state Governors like Arizona’s  Katie Hobbs and Senators like Mark Kelly and then Representative Ruben Gallego called attention to the surge at the border, the paper while bashing the Biden/Harris Administration for being slow to resort to the Executive Action which did reduce the flow of illegal immigration traffic, nowhere in the paper is the critique of the lies and misinformation Trump and his MAGA allies spread about South American nations releasing prisoners and mental inmates into the United States.

Nowhere in the piece is a critique of Donald Trump singlehandedly torpedoing a bipartisan border security bill.

Nowhere in the article is mention of how Donald Trump, in his first term, did nothing to achieve bipartisan immigration reform or how Republicans, who use the issue as a wedge topic, have continually put a roadblock on immigration reform for the last 20 years. 

There seems to be a profound communications and messaging disconnect here.

The writers were right to point out that there was a perception problem with the Democrats and in a country where the Trump winning margins were propelled by how informed voters were. Other research has shown that the less informed voters were, the greater advantage for Donald Trump. No wonder he boasted that he loved the uneducated.

Democrats cannot allow perception to become uninformed reality again. 

The non reaction to Trump’s ad against the Transgender Community, as cited by Kamarck and Galston, is a case in point. The Harris/Walz team should have had a forceful response to it. 

To point out how the Democrats erred is valid and is necessary for putting a successful strategy, especially in outreach, communications and messaging forward. 

But to ignore where the Biden/Harris Administration succeeded and where the Harris/Walz Campaign wanted to take the country feeds the perception that the party is out of touch. 

Furthermore, to ignore how bad and incompetent Republicans have been on the policy front, over the last 40 years, is equally dangerous. 

Asked to comment on the article and how best to communicate with voters across the country, Third Way Senior Communications Director Kate deGruyter commented:

“This piece makes clear that Democrats have an urgent need for renewal and the party has some very hard questions to confront to build a durable majority to wrest back power from Donald Trump. Unfortunately, as we saw this weekend at the DNC, the pull of activist groups remains strong and the temptation to dismiss the results in November as a blip remains. We think that is a massive mistake.”

 “The report notes that the Electoral College path is shrinking for Democrats. Our ceiling has shrunk by 44 votes – the equivalent of the Blue Wall states. With population shifts in the upcoming census, Democrats need to expand the map into states that have been much redder.”

“Meanwhile, Democrats have a math problem if we do not reconnect with working-class voters of all races, who significantly outnumber their college-educated peers. Some are suggesting that Democrats answer Trump ‘s right-wing populism with a muscular populism of the far left. That overlooks one of the central challenges that the Harris campaign faced: the perception of being “dangerously liberal,” articulated by her own campaign chair in December. Our own battleground polling found that the top word voters associated with Harris was liberal. While most Democratic elected officials are mainstream and focused primarily on the economy and cutting costs, those are not the priorities most voters think dominate the Democratic Party.”

 “Voters want to know what we have done for them lately. And they saw an Administration that struggled to tame inflation, and that failed to act until the last few months to a border that was increasingly chaotic and out of control. Galston and Kamarck note, “While there is some uncertainty whether Biden could have done more on inflation once it emerged, there is none on the question of immigration.”

 “Throughout our history, presidents have effectively used the bully pulpit to show voters that they are focused on their priorities and fighting for progress, but that was not a tool that the Biden White House could use, as the painful debate last summer made clear. They had many noteworthy accomplishments for working Americans but did not have an ability to get into the spaces where those voters would hear about them.”

 “Democrats must recognize that their trust and credibility with voters is wiped out. It is not possible to run to the left in a primary and then pivot to the center in the final few months and hope voters won’t notice. They are smart and don’t want to be played for fools. It is true that Harris won a strong campaign and she embraced many mainstream positions as we hoped. But the toxic positions she was pressured to take by activist’s groups in years past were easily exploited by Republicans who successfully persuaded voters that Democrats were as extreme. To rebuild that trust, candidates for 2028 will need to be relentlessly focused on ideas that appeal to the reasonable center and actively distance themselves from the far left.”

Later, in response to the original draft of this piece, Ms. deGrutyer offered:

“There is an active debate underway about how damaging of a moment this is for the Democratic Party. The newly elected chair of the DNC stated just last weekend that “Anyone saying we need to start over with a new message is wrong,” he said. “We got the right message.” Third Way and the authors of this paper disagree. This is in fact a moment where the party has lost control of every level of government and lost ground with nearly every group of voters in blue states as well as in red ones and we need to undertake some serious reflection on the path forward and how we reconnect to the majority of Americans who do not hold degrees and who have been leaving the party over many cycles.”

Moving forward, the Democrats need a good and inclusive messaging-communications strategy that, as Ms. de Gruyter said in a follow up conversation for this piece is not “snobby” toward working and middle-class families who do not like to feel that they are being talked down to. 

Furthermore, she suggested that the party needs to both show the people how “Trump is not fighting for them” and how “We (Democrats) got to be the party that is building things and making government work, and the message Republicans are giving is flat out wrong.”

As mentioned earlier, the Democrats have to develop a reality based, respectful-inclusive, and positive communications and messaging strategy targeted toward uninformed voters that highlights recent party supported achievements that have helped the people, counter Trump-MAGA misinformation and talking points on wedge issues like the LGBTQ community (They are not them as Trump and his band of homophobic racists would say. They are innocent people, including many children,) persuade voters that they are for law enforcement and border security, point out where the new Trump/Vance Administration is shortchanging Americans in pursuing policies that show they are not for them, and outline a forward vision that will move the nation forward and lift all people up.

To accomplish this, the Democrats need to recognize that the reason that many people who are uninformed is not because they are stupid. 

It is because many of them are working many hours to make ends meet trying to support themselves and their families. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview with Joy Reid after the election, many times, “they do not have time to drink coffee and read the newspaper.”

Democrats need to do better with their communication strategies,  messaging and informing voters and they need to make the efforts to reach out to where they are both where they live and where they get their information. 

These outlets should not just be confined to Democratic and Progressive social media friendly sites. 

If there is an opportunity to appear on Fox, Democrats should be there. 

If there is an opportunity to appear on Newsmax, Democrats should be there. 

If there is an opportunity to appear on Howard Stern or Josh Rogan, Democrats should be there. 

If Terry Bradshaw offers Democrats a chance to explain their positions on the NFL Fox Halftime show, they should be there. 

There should not be the reality where Republicans, with their track record of supporting a 34 time criminally convicted and twice impeached leader who spearheaded an attempted coup should have an advantage over Democrats on patriotism. 

There should not be the reality where Republicans over the last 25 years allowed 9/11 to happen, passed three tax cut programs for the rich, grossly increased the nation’s debt, mismanaged a global pandemic, launched two unnecessary wars  to the tune of two trillion dollars on the nation’s credit card that did not result in the capture of Osama Bin Laden, obstructed immigration reform on at least three occasions, and presided over the start of two major recessions are perceived as being more competent and on my side than Democrats. 

Democrats need to do better with their outreach, communications and messaging.

The time to do it is now or the electoral math problem the writers and leaders at Third Way prophesies about will undoubtedly become a reality.