Way to Win

Thank you Courtney!! 🫶🏽

YouTube video by Way to Win Action Fund 400K GEORGIA BLOWOUT!!! (feat. Melody Oliphant) - Charting the Way Forward Ep 48

FANTASTIC conversation with @melodyoliphant.bsky.social of the @georgiayouthco.bsky.social and how the wild election results two weeks ago looked from the ground. First state level win for Dems in GA since 2006!

🍎 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...
📺 www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vIN...

You should read this.

Democrats spent a year at rock bottom. Have they learned any lessons? It’s been a long year of arguments, wisdom-mongering and profanity for the professional left and its allies.

“We don’t need to all be rowing in the same boat, but at least rowing towards the same direction,” Tory Gavito, president of the donor network Way to Win, said of Democrats in late September.

www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/...

There's no problem Vance won't blame on immigrants, even if he has to invent the problem himself.

A few weeks ago he was insisting immigrants lived in cramped squalor and their (white) neighbors had a right to be upset about that.

Now they're so rich they're snatching up all the good houses? OK.

I'm not sure we have polling specifically answering that, it's a good question. But broadly, non-white and lower propensity voters very much wanted change. Trump's anti-system positioning was effective and the Harris pro-stability message and positioning wasn't.

Trump was a mess himself but his campaign message came through VERY clearly - it was that Dems are for everyone else, not for ordinary Americans. That's why the they/them ad hit. It wasn't transphobia, it was that it reinforced their overall message well. The 2024 pres level ads are all here:

I want to repost this in the sky, humongous.

YouTube video by The Hunger Games The First Death Recap Projected In the Sky #HungerGames

Ooo. Like in the Hunger Games dome. LFG.

They won't, and there's no question her identities played a real factor for a lot of voters. But every candidate has challenges they need to overcome, and we just found awfully strong patters of people telling us they heard what she was saying and just weren't persuaded by it.

Not only did key allies of the regime lose top races in New Jersey and Virginia, Americans rebuked his party in “local races – school board, city council, mayor, county – across the country,” as @simonwdc.bsky.social wrote. “Simply, Trump has been a terrible, terrible leader and people are pissed.”

If you read the piece it lays out the case for this quite clearly. She didn't run entirely right, but part of the issue was that all the performative right turns ended up turning her message into a bit of a muddled mess, like you hear in these clips from focus groups.

Thanks David! It's weird right?? We're pretty sure it's a coincidence. It's not like the corporate media has some kind of vested parochial interest in protecting the current hierarchies of how our system works or something.

By the way! The basic point I make here is made in much more depth, with more quantitative rigor, in this Way to Win post. (Way to Win quite obviously has the best of this argument & yet they have trouble getting any attention or traction among MSM outlets. Odd, that. Quite odd. The oddest. Hmmm.)

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*series of polite but increasingly awkward faux throat clearing coughs*

Trump built a surprising voter coalition. One key piece just cracked. Republicans could not recreate the president's coalition in last week's off-year elections.

Way To Win President Tory Gavito on the supposed Latino "realignment" of 2024: "...Trump is a unique beast who was able to persuade Latinos that he has their interests at heart. In the last 11 months, he’s done everything but think about Latinos’ interests.”
www.politico.com/news/2025/11...

YouTube video by Way to Win Action Fund All Trees, No Forest (Feat. Dan Pfeiffer) - Charting the Way Forward Ep 19

Lots more context on these and others in this episode of Charting the Way Forward.

More celebrity backfire and anger at the lack of a primary.

Celebrity backfire.

Didn't focus on homelessness, mental health, veterans, poverty. "As though she's been living under a rock all these years... if you are an awake citizen, you are aware of all these problems we have in this country."

Targeting a certain age group.

Sensationalism.

A few clips regarding the perfection of the Harris campaign. These are from focus groups of 2020 Biden voters that skipped 2024. April 2025 with Lake Research. The economic message-overwhelmingly focused on tax cuts ($289.7M in ads at the Pres level)-didn't land for this voter, even at a rally.

Everyone Is Wrong The Way To Win Is Strength, Not Moderation. The 2025 Winners Proved It.

❤️this:
“fight not fold, focus on affordability, make a populist argument that names the villains, and respond to cultural attacks”
open.substack.com/pub/charting...

@waytowinus.bsky.social thank you!

Just one example of the thinking we'd like to see change. These ads got around $4M each in AZ and OH. Party brands are open source. Everyone gets a say. But it's possible the image of the party might improve if we stop spending millions of dollars each cycle telling voters how wrong we are.

The path forward for Dems is less a question of moving either left or right, but a move towards strength. They can define the new center with a strong story that works for all kinds of voters, one built on the foundation of belief in the dignity of our neighbors and affordability for everyone.

Harris tacked right and lost. This strategy failed because persuadable and mobilizable groups of voters experience campaigns as stories much more than through ideological prisms. The 2025 candidates understand the assignment and their campaigns spent much less effort performatively moving right.

@davekarpf.bsky.social @brianbeutler.bsky.social @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social @gelliottmorris.com @gregsargent.bsky.social and @danpfeiffer.bsky.social.

And we're sure we're missed a few!

The good news is that while the big establishment substackers and PACs might be aligned, there’s a growing chorus for change. At the bottom of the post we included links to thoughtful critiques of the “move right to win” argument from @katelynburns.com @adambonica.bsky.social @pbump.com