Centrist Democrats have a plan for their party to win again: Talk more about the economy and less about democracy. Reject corporate interests and ideological purity tests. Keep the progressive policies that are popular — like expanding health care and raising the minimum wage — and moderate on issues like immigration and crime.
Those are among the takeaways laid out in an expansive report Monday from WelcomePAC, which supports center-left candidates, on how Democrats can rebound from last year’s electoral wipeout in 2026 and 2028.
The 58-page prescription comes as Democrats continue to war over the direction of their party nearly a year after their national shellacking. And it drops a week before a slate of gubernatorial and mayoral contests that will serve as the first major temperature check of the electorate since 2024 and President Donald Trump retaking the Oval Office.
It features input from a who’s who of top Democratic consultants — including David Axelrod; James Carville; David Plouffe, a top adviser to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign; Lis Smith; and former Biden White House spokesperson Andrew Bates — as well as analysts and strategists like Nate Silver, Sarah Longwell and former Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois.
The report is less an autopsy of the 2024 election — it spends a scant five pages on former President Joe Biden’s and Harris’ campaigns — and more so an indictment of the party’s leftward shift since the Obama administration and the donors, campaign operatives and progressive advocacy groups the authors blame for putting Democrats in an unwinnable position.
It largely echoes what moderate Democrats have been saying loudly for months — that the party should be running to the center and focusing on kitchen table issues.
It uses polling data to reinforce the message many centrist Democrats believe voters sent the party in 2024: that voters felt Democrats were prioritizing democracy, abortion and identity over top-of-mind issues like the economy, immigration and crime. It argues that moderate candidates tend to overperform progressive ones, citing centrist Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) as models for how the party should message on border security and the economy.
And Democrats “should distance ourselves from the Biden administration,” the authors write, “particularly by critiquing the Biden administration’s approach to border security and the cost of living.” Harris, they posit, lost in part because of her failure to do so — and because voters couldn’t let go of her past progressive policies even as she ran a more moderate campaign.
The report doesn’t call for a wholesale rejection of progressive stances. Expanding access to public health care, making the wealthy “pay their fair share” in taxes and raising the minimum wage are all popular with voters, and WelcomePAC believes the party should continue to focus on them. Democrats, the authors say, should emulate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Democratic nominee for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “relentless focus” on affordability.
But they also say Democrats should focus less on “lower-salience issues where our views are unpopular,” such as transgender athletes. They insist that running against the establishment — as is en vogue these days — doesn’t have to mean running toward the left. And they contend that simply running younger candidates “is not a panacea.”
WelcomePAC made no mention of next week’s gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia. But their strategy will undergo an early test in both states, where the party has put forward a pair of moderate lawmakers with military and national security backgrounds who are running campaigns centered on affordability. Democrats are favored to win both races, though Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s contest in New Jersey is expected to be far closer than former Rep. Abigail Spanberger’s in Virginia.
WelcomePAC warned against drawing conclusions from the elections heading into 2028 in its report, insisting that “doing well in midterms and special elections does not guarantee Democrats anywhere close to the same results in a presidential race” because less-engaged voters tend to skip those intermediate contests.
But Democrats across the ideological spectrum will undoubtedly be scanning the results of next week’s elections in two states that stayed blue in 2024 but shifted toward Trump for signs of what is — and isn’t — working for the party heading into a high-stakes midterm election and the critical presidential contest to follow.
