Democrats’ Recipe For Sun Belt Success: More Populism

Democratic candidates like Texas state Rep. James Talarico and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff have built surprising leads in their competitive races with a healthy dose of populist rhetoric linking government corruption to higher costs.

Now, a major Democratic group has advice for Talarico, Ossoff and other candidates running in the Sun Belt states about how to handle the final weeks of a midterm with the political winds at their back: double down.

A new memo from Way To Win, a group of progressive Democratic donors, argues the way to win in a sextet of racially diverse southern and western states with potentially competitive races – North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, Arizona and Nevada – is to take “up a populist mantle on affordability by promising to use the government as a tool of accountability for the ultra-rich.”

Celinda Lake, the Democratic pollster who the group’s advice was based on, said individual candidates are, by and large, already doing what Way to Win recommends: railing against political corruption and tying it to everyday affordability struggles. The broader party apparatus, however, has some catching up to do.

“I think we have a lot of individual candidates who are meeting the moment,” said Lake, who was one of the lead pollsters on former President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. “I think the party needs to make adjustments. The party is struggling with being as populist as it should be and struggling with anti-corporate framing because, frankly, the establishment in both parties is just too tied to corporate money.”

The group’s polling found Sun Belt voters were more likely to agree with a populist worldview blaming the nation’s problems on “an economic system where the richest 1% have taken $79 trillion in wealth from 90% of Americans over the past few decades” than with a GOP framing blaming “out of control government spending, too many immigrants coming here, going too far with wokeness, and DEI and rights for transgender people” by a 59% to 37% margin.

“We’re getting a lot of buy-in even from voters in more Republican-leaning districts, regions and states,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Way to Win’s chief strategy officer. “We’re overcoming a lot of indoctrination about how ‘big government is to blame.’”

Both Lake and Ancona said there was little difference between the messages that persuade Democratic-leaning voters who might otherwise stay home, and independent and swing voters who might otherwise vote for the GOP. However, Lake did note that not every candidate in these GOP-leaning areas would want to preemptively bring up the president.

“Sometimes adding Trump to the argument is just polarizing,” Lake said. “It’s not always as powerful as talking about corporate villains.”