7 Hard Lessons Democrats Must Learn in 2026
Democratic pollsters say economic populism is the party’s clearest path forward. What follows is their blunt, unfiltered thoughts on how to pull it off – and why Democrats keep sabotaging themselves.
In the closing weeks of 2025, Liberty and Power conducted in-depth interviews with a cross-section of leading Democratic pollsters and messaging experts on the party’s best path forward. The conversations included veterans and newcomers spanning the ideological spectrum —including Celinda Lake of Lake Research Partners, Anat Shenker-Osorio of ASO Communications, Evan Roth Smith of Slingshot Strategies, Adam Carlson of ZenithPolls, and Lakshya Jain of The Argument.
Despite some past differences, these analysts are now strikingly aligned on the economic messaging strategy required to defeat Trumpism. Their collective diagnosis is blunt: The Democratic Party has too often resisted the economic populism that—as its own data has shown for years—wins elections. Instead of heeding the large swathes of angry, idiosyncratic swing voters Democrats need to take and hold power, the party has repeatedly retreated into an outdated vision of centrism designed to win over traditional Republicans uneasy with Trump. The result—corporate-friendly policies and small-target politics packaged as smart moderation—has eroded the Party’s working-class brand and electoral prospects.
The experts we spoke to warn that Democrats risk repeating these errors again in 2026 and 2028. Bloodless language about “affordability” or “lowering costs” is not in itself sufficient. To win big, Democrats must be willing to embrace breakthrough economic policies, ignore the neoliberal policy wonks, and make actual enemies out of the billionaires, Big Tech leaders and other corporate oligarchs that too many politicians and operatives have deferred to for so long.
When an old-school party centrist like James Carville calls on Democrats to present a “sweeping, aggressive, unvarnished, unapologetic and altogether unmistakable platform of pure economic rage” the question for every party leader, candidate, and campaign operative should be “how?” What follows is the unfiltered answers of a few of the experts who have studied this question more closely than most.
1. Real Life Voters Don’t Want DC Centrism
The most dangerous misconception plaguing Democratic strategy is the belief that the swing-voters the party needs are moderate in any traditional sense. As Evan Roth Smith explains, “Independents can hold very, very radical views. And some of their most radical views are on the economy.”
Anat Shenker-Osorio recalls focus groups she conducted following the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thomson in late 2024. When asked how to get the country back on track, swing voters frequently volunteered that “Mangione was a good start.”
While not a literal endorsement of violence, the sentiment revealed a core understanding among voters: “that there are a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people and corporations that have basically vacuumed up all of the wealth that [other peoples’] work creates.”
In Washington, centrism typically implies a moderation of tone, a respect for institutional norms, a business-friendly economic posture, and quiet stability. But outside the Beltway, swing voters tend to view the status quo as rigged against them. Adam Carlson, for example, reports hearing countless eye-opening remarks from working-class Trump Republicans in focus groups who essentially believe that “we need a complete overhaul of the economy.”
The strategists paint a picture of a swing electorate that is deeply cynical, struggling to pay bills, reflexively anti-elite, angry at big business for gaming the system, and resentful toward establishment figures of both parties who they see as corrupt. Lakshya Jain notes that these voters "don't trust anyone on the political spectrum" and "don't really think anyone has their interests at heart."
When Democrats retreat to the comfortable, outdated DC conception of moderation—valorized as sensible by the both-sides DC pundits who dominate legacy media, and designed to appeal to wealthy, college-educated elites—they leave the potent lane of economic populism wide open for the right.
2. Pick Fights that Get People’s Attention
A critical failure of the Biden administration, and the 2024 Harris campaign, was failing to break through to voters. As Evan Roth Smith explains, “They did plenty of things that affected prices, like prescription drug negotiation.” But “people were totally unaware of it.” Because the policies were technocratic in design and the communications strategy around their passage was crafted to avoid loud confrontation, they failed to penetrate our fractured information environment.
The problem extends throughout the party. In recent decades, Democrats have gravitated toward “80-20” issues: policies that are broadly popular but often low-impact or invisible to the average voter. Roth Smith believes that a “60-40” issue—one that is opposed by more people but generates real controversy and dominates the news cycle—is often a far bigger political winner.
Donald Trump, by contrast, is a master at championing charged, symbolic policies that viscerally signal to voters whose side he is on. A prime example is the “Build the Wall” message from 2016. Polls showed only tepid support for the specific policy. But by making it the centerpiece of his campaign, Trump shifted the entire election onto his winning issue of immigration without spending a cent.
When Biden’s administration did pick big fights with elites—like when Lina Khan filed major cases against leading monopolists in tech, healthcare, and groceries—Biden and his communications team never spoke about it. Worse still, Harris actively distanced herself from those fights during her run.
For Democrats, the lesson is to stop trying to avoid being attacked and instead start choosing how to be attacked. As Shenker-Osorio advises, “Task number one of any campaign is to make the campaign about the thing that privileges you.” Given that every candidate will be attacked on some issue, choose a fight that advantages your campaign and clarifies your values. Backlash to bold economic policies from billionaires and their apologists is a feature, not a bug. It signals to voters that you are doing something significant enough to anger the powers that be.
3. Name Enemies—And Show How You’ll Beat Them
Voters do not believe that economic hardship is an inevitable fact of life; they believe it’s the result of big business and political elites rigging the system against them.
But Democrats too often rely on the passive voice in their messaging, describing the economy as if it operates based on natural forces, rather than human agency and political decisions. Wages ‘fall,’ as if they are autumn leaves. Jobs ‘drift’ overseas, as if they were clouds. Prices ‘rise’ like sourdough. Shenker-Osorio warns that, “when you don’t establish at the outset that a problem is person-made, it becomes implausible that it could be person-fixed.”
“We need to provide an explanation of why we got here,” as Celinda Lake puts it. “Republicans are quite good about providing an explanation. So if we leave a vacuum, they fill it with handouts and undocumented immigrants.”
To earn credibility, Democrats must name specific villains and commit to fighting them – the more specific and localized the better. Message testing reveals that voters see solutions as more credible when leaders identify exactly who is responsible for the problem. Overperforming swing seat Representative Pat Ryan, for example, pioneered the practice of making a foil out of local energy monopolies during his initial run for Congress. According to Roth Smith, whose firm advises Ryan, this signals to voters, “The names that you suspect are bad faith actors, I know those names, and I’m willing to say them out loud.”
This principle applies nationally as well. Carlson says voters already know who many of the bad guys are: dominant grocery chains, insurance companies, big pharma, and tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Bashing these figures polls “off the charts,” he says. “Even Republicans are on board with that in a lot of ways.”
But naming the enemy is only half the battle; the proposed solution must match the scale of the problem. This was a key missed opportunity for the Harris campaign. Early in the 2024 race, Roth Smith’s team tested bombastic, norm-breaking policies to see just how far voters were willing to go. The results were clear: “Trials for grocery store executives!” and “Universal price controls!” were top-testing policies. Voters wanted to see a fight.
While Lake says candidates must choose policies right for their district, those who play it safe and reject big ideas as "unrealistic" or “too expensive” sound foolish to voters who have watched Trump repeatedly do unimaginable things. Democrats, in short, must stop fearing accusations of class warfare and start proving they will actually protect America’s middle and working classes.
4. Defending Democracy Means Fixing the Economy
For years, Democrats have treated protecting democracy and fixing the economy as separate, competing lines of policy and messaging. One is high-minded and institutional; the other is kitchen-table practicality. But the pollsters we spoke to argue this distinction is false. Voters intuitively understand that concentration of economic power and massive hoards of wealth threaten our democracy and undermine our liberty.
“I’ve been surprised by the degree to which people understand that our political problem—the authoritarianism problem—is actually an economic problem,” says Shenker-Osorio. “Too much wealth is in far too few hands.”
“People pretty consistently say: ‘If you wanted to actually deal with this anti-democratic force that has overtaken us, you would have to deal with the consolidation of wealth.” And they see the Trump Administration as “the product of that.”
Lake put it in slightly different terms: “If this were truly a democracy, if people really had their say,” voters believe, “our prescriptions would not cost more than Canada. We would not have unregulated AI. We would not be relaxing the rules on corporate mergers of everything.”
The most effective way to campaign on democracy, Lake adds, is to tie it to the economic narrative and to campaign against the billionaire class who have hijacked our democracy. By framing economic populism as the mechanism for restoring democratic control, Democrats can unite their arguments into a single, coherent narrative that resonates with voters and breaks through their cynicism.
5. Don’t Take the Bait on Culture War Attacks
When leaders fail to provide a strong, confrontational economic message, opponents will inevitably try to make the race about culture war controversies.
This was the trap the Harris campaign fell into in 2024. Harris started strong, with an ad that said that “Big corporations are gouging families” but that “Kamala Harris is focused on you.”
But after the campaign abandoned the messaging it created an opening for the Trump campaign to fill the vacuum with culture war attacks, such as the infamous anti-trans and anti-immigrant ad that declared that “Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for You.”
Lake says the data consistently shows that strong economic messaging is the most effective shield against cultural attacks. Her research in factory towns, for example, found that while 61% of voters initially thought Democrats were “obsessed with transgender issues,” the party was able to neutralize these attacks on “wokeness” much more effectively with a bold economic message rather than cultural defenses.
“You have to actually have something you stand for, otherwise you’re going to get defined as something you’re not,” says Lakshya Jain. “If you’re always talking about fighting price gouging or a populist platform, you can weather a lot of hits.” When a candidate is unbothered and stays relentlessly on message—for example, pivoting from a culture war attack to a promise to deliver universal healthcare and crackdown on grocery monopolies—they project strength.
Roth Smith argues that the Democratic Party needs to center their core identity around “the economic wellbeing of the working and middle class and the defense of that wellbeing by standing up to concentrated money and power.” All other issues “must be allowed to float based on electoral necessity and political reality.”
6. Get Out Ahead of the AI Backlash
All the strategists agreed that voters today are increasingly fearful of Big Tech’s aggressive push on artificial intelligence and want political leaders to challenge both the power of the corporations and of the oligarchs who control them.
This means being willing to speak honestly about the dangers posed by AI, not merely the benefits. Liberals must be ready to address fears of AI destroying jobs and businesses, and of AI harming children. Concerningly, far right actors like Steve Bannon are rushing to take the lead on these and other issues, and Democrats have to be prepared to take the initiative, a point recently made in the opinion pages of the New York Times.
Democrats should “absolutely” be willing to go for it on AI regulation, Roth Smith says. “That is a fight worth picking, even if there’s a lot of money on the other side of it.”
Adam Carlson agrees. Democrats need to “get out ahead of this issue,” he says. “People are terrified” and “they realize data centers are only the beginning.”
Lakshya Jain is even more blunt: “AI is going to splinter a lot of our political coalitions as we know it.”
Data centers are already providing an excellent populist line of attack against some of the more overt harms of AI, both locally and nationally. The issue combines economic anxiety experienced everywhere with tangible local disruptions in the form of higher electricity prices and the construction of massive resource-intensive data centers.
“It’s much more of a political liability than when Big Tech just lived on your phone,” says Roth Smith. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh shit, they’re, like, building a new power plant down the block from me.’ You can build a political coalition around that.”
Jain agrees. “I think data centers are already causing a big spike in electricity. I think it’s a very convenient, very easy, and very obvious target for Democrats. And I think they’ve got to take advantage of it.”
Pieces of this winning strategy were present in Democrats’ impressive performances in the November 2025 elections. Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger made local utility monopolies who were raising rates to facilitate the AI buildout their number one enemies in their campaigns for the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia. In Georgia, Democrats won two seats on the state’s Public Services Commission for the first time in a generation running on similar themes.
Here again, as we noted in Hard Lesson 3, it’s vital to call out specific villains and to propose real, bold fixes. This means going against the biggest corporations driving both the AI and data center bubbles – especially Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google – and proposing fixes that would actually strike at their present concentrations of power and control.
7. “Welcome the Hatred” of Elites
In October 1936 at Madison Square Garden in New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt helped win reelection by declaring of the economic elites and monopolists who opposed his populist policies: “They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.”
For a brief moment in 2024, Kamala Harris seemed poised to adopt this mantle. Her early ads attacking price gouging and corporate speculators tested exceptionally well. The reaction from the right was immediate and furious, with cutting op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post screaming “Kamunism,” and corporate leaders condemning the policy.
Crucially, the strategists we spoke with all argued that this backlash was actually good. It was the exact response a party should desire to prove its bona fides to a skeptical electorate. Instead, many Democrats panicked, especially after big donors, neoliberal policy wonks, and established liberal pundits echoed the right’s criticisms. “Everyone in the Democratic Party knew it was a good idea and the data supported it,” Roth Smith laments. “Then as soon as they experienced contact, they shrank away.”
Jain agrees. Harris “was up three and a half points on Trump… when she was going hard,” he says. But after the campaign lost its nerve, “it all started going down.”
The retreat was fatal. Adam Carlson argues that by catering to “big donors” and “Never-Trump Republicans” who threatened to pull support if the party went “super lefty socialist,” Democrats protected their war chests but bled support in every demographic group aside from a narrow slice of upper-class, college educated voters.
The lesson is clear: Conflict with economic and media elites is not a side effect of a winning strategy; it’s a core part of the strategy itself. Essentially, as the old adage goes, “it’s not what you say about policy, it’s what your policy says about you.”
If Wall Street loves your economic plan, chances are the working class likely won’t trust it. Instead, Democrats should relish on-air meltdowns from figures like CNBC’s Jim Cramer and revel in angry tweet storms or indignant Substack posts from “very serious” commentators like Matthew Yglesias and Josh Barro. They must learn to welcome the ire of the few to win the votes of the many.
IN a nutshell, the Democrats should have listened to one of their leading men, Bernie Sanders, in 2015 and in 2020, Instead, they pushed Hillary and then Joe Biden (whose dementia must have been in full view to anyone who knew him up close). Two catastrophic errors that may prove fatal for the dems, not only in the coming election cycle, but more importantly, in the next.
A good read. I would only add that if the leaders of the Dem party once again ignore the facts highlighted, we should believe them once and for all that they place a higher value on protecting the interests of neoliberal elites and wealthy donors, than on winning elections. It’s a choice they keep making over and over again.