Democrats have a credibility problem. To re-build, they must first re-commit.

Operating from a place of fear has broken trust with voters who smell the bullshit

Many have spent the last few months drawing a faulty conclusion from the 2024 election: Democrats might have won if they had only committed to more moderate messaging in order to appeal to “conservative-leaning swing voters.” In my experience, this conclusion has been drawn by the old boy’s club within the Democratic party every time we have lost an election in the last two decades, usually as a result of conspicuous data and one-dimensional thinking.

My years working in Democratic politics and public opinion research have shown me that this kind of thinking is both overly simplistic and outdated. Voters are humans, and humans contain multitudes. While political ideology is certainly one of the most predictive variables driving voters’ decision making, reducing analysis to ideology demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding regarding two things: 1) elections are ultimately battles for trust, not agreement; and 2) voters’ mental models are informed by aggregated impressions made via a candidate campaign’s presence in the community (or lack thereof), their message, their voice, and perhaps most importantly, their vision, demeanor, and values.

The question we should be asking is not “Could Harris and Democrats have won if they had tacked more to the center?” but rather, “What is it about how Democrats campaigned that made voters feel they couldn’t rely on them to bring about change they could feel the impact of in their everyday lives?” Anti-incumbency bias and a desire for something-fundamentally-different-than-the-reality we-live-in-now clearly played a huge role in the outcome of the American election and elections the world over. One signal has been crystal clear in the data over the last four years: in the wake of a global pandemic and rising costs of living, voters are sick of merely surviving. They want to thrive.

Swing voters and sporadic voters decide elections, and they are less concerned with whether the solution being presented to them is “progressive” or “conservative” than they are concerned with belief that the solution will be big/different enough to bring real change and affect their lived experience. Two of the most common refrains we heard in qualitative research (e.g. focus groups) during the 2024 election were: “Nothing feels like it’s changed in the last four years” and “It just feels like it shouldn’t be so hard to just get by — just look at the cost of groceries.” That sentiment was pervasive and much more powerful than statistics about GDP. The most important two words in both of those sentences: “feels like…”

Democrats didn’t successfully make people feel like their future would truly be different and better if they voted for them. The fact that our nominee was a part of the incumbent administration made this a difficult task from the beginning (and the Right did a great job of making sure voters didn’t forget it). Out of fear of looking weak, Democrats took the bait over and over. They too often focused on the issues the Right wanted them to focus on (crime, immigration, Gaza), accepted their frame, and took a “we’re tough too” approach to these issues. In doing so, they reduced the contrast (making the choice “tough (D) or tougher (R)”), and repeated an old playbook that voters recognized as the status quo. Moreover, they did the opposite of what they intended: they made themselves look weak, like leaders who did not hold the courage of their convictions if there was a chance swing voters would disagree with them. On these issues, Democrats departed from both their tone and their espoused values: compassion, justice, humanity. In doing so, they made it even more difficult for voters to believe that this time, things would be different.

It takes a lot to convince people that politicians will truly make things better, and it takes very little to convince them that they won’t. Voters see these departures as a tell: same old shit.

It’s like going on a date and finally thinking you’ve met a nice guy, only for him to be rude to the server in some kind of weird, misguided effort to impress you. These guys, they’re all the same.

In short, Democrats did what Democrats have done for years. They got scared. They stopped trying to set the terms of the conversation, they stopped trying to win the debate, and they muddied the waters. And in the final weeks of the election cycle, we saw the effect of this among sporadic voters in the qualitative data: “All these politicians are the same. Democrats are no different.”

As we look down the barrel of the next election cycle, I hope that Democratic strategists and pundits will stop drawing the same faulty conclusions and repeating the same mistakes. Democrats need to focus on earning trust and credibility, something that is earned only when we display consistency, authenticity, and vigor. Democrats need to get in the fight, and stand by their values instead or retreating from them. You don’t fight a bully by trying to out-bully them. You fight a bully by standing up for what you believe is right, consequences be damned. We don’t need swing voters to agree with us on every issue. We need them to trust that we will fight for their best interest, and that we will keep fighting until we get the job done. That is how we show voters that all politicians are not the same; that there is a real difference between these two parties.

If we are ever to regain the trust and confidence of voters, the party (and the larger movement that powers it) will have to remake itself. That starts with presenting a clear vision for a future in which we make peoples’ lives meaningfully better (think cost of housing, groceries, childcare), consistently demonstrating our values across issues, and reflecting an understanding of how hard life feels right now and the bigness of the solutions required to change that.

To be clear: stronger vision and better communications can’t solve it all. There is no silver bullet. There never is. Like I said, electoral outcomes are driven by the aggregated impressions campaigns make on voters. We need a new generation of leaders who are motivated by service instead of ego, who are unafraid to be authentic and human, and who are unafraid to fight. We need campaign leadership who have the training and support to make and execute effective strategy, using the best tools, technology, and data. We need organizers and movement leadership with the resources to build deep relationships and durable political power in communities. We need better communications infrastructure, alignment, and distribution. And we need campaigns to engage a much broader swath of voting-eligible Americans.

But before we can do any of that, we have to widen the aperture of our analysis and grapple with the hard truth that Democrats have a credibility problem that will not be solved if we keep asking the same questions and coming up with the same answers. Democrats have failed to earn the trust because we have shown ourselves to be fearful and inconsistent. Voters have called our bluff. We have made the choice one of strong versus weak; change versus the status quo; a new politics versus the same old shit. We have been scared, and operating from a place of fear.

We need a party that fights for people, one that stops cowering to conservatives, and one that expands and reinvigorates its base, as the Right has successfully done. We need a party that’s brave.

Long before I worked in politics, I grew up in the theater. One note you hear directors give to actors time and time again: stop being afraid of being too big; you can’t be timid, you need to commit. That’s what it takes to be believed.