Contrary to what Democratic elites think is conventional wisdom, Representative Jasmine Crockett is not just a viable candidate for the Texas US Senate race next year—she’s the strongest one. Pundits and Democratic politicians haved failed to appreciate her potential, clinging instead to outdated theories about “moderate candidates” and mythical Republican “crossover voters.”

But the path to flipping Texas has already been illuminated: most notably by Beto O’Rourke’s near-miss in 2018 and, more recently, by Zohran Mamdani’s stunning ascent to victory in New York City.

The closest any Democrat has come to winning statewide in Texas over the past three decades was O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign, when he lost by just 2.6 points, falling just 215,000 votes short. O’Rourke’s unapologetic progressivism—his courage to staunchly defend NFL players protesting police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem—separated him from the pack and attracted support from across the country.

His campaign demonstrated that inspiring, galvanizing leadership resonates in diverse states with large populations of voters of color. This same dynamic propelled Stacey Abrams within a hair’s breadth of the Georgia governorship and Andrew Gillum to a near-win in Florida in 2018. The pattern is clear: bold, progressive candidates who refuse to run from their values come closest to victory in these former slave-holding states.

What too many political strategists fail to understand is that Texas is a majority-minority state. People of color are 61 percent of the population and 51 percent of eligible voters. The challenge in Texas is not changing the minds of conservative voters but tackling the low levels of voter participation among communities of color. While not all people of color in Texas are Democrats, the upside is considerable in those communities in light of Republican hostility to racial justice and inequality. Most applicable to Crockett’s candidacy is the fact that O’Rourke won the support of 89 percent of Black Americans and 64 percent of Latinos, according to exit polling data. In that 2018 contest between O’Rourke and Ted Cruz, 5 million eligible people of color did not cast ballots.

The pattern has persisted in the intervening years. While more than two-thirds of eligible white voters participated in 2024, only 44 percent of eligible Latino voters turned out, while 1.5 million Black Texas residents did not cast ballots.

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The formula for a Crockett victory lies in following the path blazed by O’Rourke, while increasing the intensive GOTV work necessary to close that gap with voters of color. Texas is not exactly a conservative state; it’s a nonvoting state. Case in point: If every eligible Texan had voted in 2020, Joe Biden would have defeated Trump, based on exit poll data showing how each racial group voted.

A logical and promising starting point for closing Beto’s 215,000 vote gap lies in massive mobilization of Black Texas residents, who, clear-eyed about the Republican Party’s hostility to racial justice and its reliance on stoking white racial resentment, historically vote more than 90 percent for Democratic nominees. As Stacey Abrams showed in 2018 and Barack Obama 10 years before that, when you have a candidate who comes from and speaks authentically to the Black community, you can efficiently and effectively attract hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls.

Unfortunately, many in the Democratic establishment are drawing precisely the wrong lessons from recent elections. They point to moderate candidates like Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger as proof that centrist politics are the path to power, while dismissing Mamdani’s New York victory as irrelevant to other contests.

This analysis ignores crucial context. Virginia’s Democratic success over the past decade stems from the voter registration and mobilization work of organizations like New Virginia Majority, which dramatically changed the composition of the electorate. Democrats have won 10 of the last 12 statewide elections there because they built a multiracial progressive majority, not because they ran away from progressive values. And, notably, while Virginia did elect the relatively moderate Spanberger as governor, they also elevated the very progressive Ghazala Hashmi as lieutenant governor, making her the first Muslim elected to statewide office anywhere in the nation.

In terms of which 2025 template is most applicable to Texas in 2026, Texas demographically resembles New York City far more than it does Virginia. People of color are 69 percent of New York City’s population and 61 percent in Texas, while whites are still the majority in Virginia, 58 percent of the residents. Mamdani’s victory—surging from single digits in May—demonstrates what happens when a young, progressive candidate of color articulates an entirely different vision of what society could be. He captured imaginations, fueled spirits, and inspired young people to turn out in large numbers.

While the inspiration and mobilization formula is Democrats’ best bet in Texas, many Democratic strategists remain enamored by the fantasy of significant Republican crossover votes. Looking at the Texas Senate contest next year, many in the media and the Beltway harbor a strong and completely unfounded belief that Republican voters will cross the aisle and support a moderate Democratic nominee if right-wing Attorney General Ken Paxton is the GOP standard-bearer. This fanciful framework somehow ignores the reality that Paxton has won three successive statewide elections over the past decade. Texas “moderates” have certainly not abandoned him yet.

Recent polling by Data for Social Good confirms what the demographics suggest: Among potential candidates including Colin Allred, James Talarico, Beto O’Rourke, and Crockett, she polls strongest among Democratic voters and, critically, shows the highest upside in communities of color. Crucially, Crockett has the most support among Latino voters of any announced candidate, according to the DSG poll.

The enthusiasm in Washington for State Representative James Talarico—with one New York Times column dubbing him the Democrats’ “savior”—reflects the party elite’s misguided nostalgia for a candidate who might win back conservative voters. While he is a decent man and a fine state legislator, Talarico simply has no electoral track record demonstrating an ability to inspire the kind of increased turnout required to flip Texas. The Beltway’s excitement about him stems from hope that he can attract the mythical crossover voters who have failed to materialize in race after race.

Crockett represents the future of American politics: authentic, unapologetic leadership that speaks to the diverse majority this country is becoming. Her candidacy will not only be exciting and inspiring; it also represents Democrats’ best chance to flip the Lone Star state and shift the political balance of power in this country for decades to come.

Three recent events have converged to illuminate the road map for Democrats, progressives, and anyone committed to building a multiracial democracy: the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, the hospitalization of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the release of journalist Abby Phillip’s book on Jackson’s transformative political journey.

Most significantly, Mamdani’s election represents a profound and seismic development in the country’s political landscape. The coalition he assembled, the campaign he ran, who he is, and the vision he offers provide critical and urgent lessons about stopping the rise of authoritarianism and fascism and resuming the struggle to build the kind of country we want—one rooted in justice, equality, and inclusion.

The first core lesson from Mamdani’s win is simple but often ignored: The way to win is to inspire, organize, assemble, and unleash the multiracial majority that wants justice, equality, and inclusion. Too much of the dominant conventional wisdom on the progressive and Democratic side holds that championing justice and equality is a losing electoral proposition. This view stems from a deep-seated, unfounded fear of alienating conservative white voters who are seen, with little empirical evidence of success, as cornerstones of any winning coalition. But Mamdani’s victory—along with other recent election results across the country, including Virginia electing a Muslim woman of color as lieutenant governor and Mississippi picking up seats in the state legislature—proves there is a New American Majority. This is the same majority that elected and reelected Barack Obama and ousted Donald Trump in 2020. And it continues to grow every single day.

The demographic reality is stark and undeniable. Every day, 7,000 people of color are added to the population while 1,264 white people are subtracted (when you look at the numbers of births, deaths, and legal immigrants). The majority of people under 18 are people of color. Four million young people turn 18 every year. The margin of difference in the 2024 election was just 2 million people. The country is inexorably becoming increasingly diverse (which explains the ferocity and intensity of the immigration crackdown and voter suppression efforts). But the math shows it’s too late to turn back the clock.

Obama would not have beaten Ronald Reagan in 1984 with the coalition he assembled in 2008, because the country was insufficiently diverse. Eighty percent support from voters of color and 43 percent of whites was not enough to win in 1984. But by 2008, the demographic revolution had made it possible. And that revolution continues apace.

What Mamdani did was tune into this reality. He spoke to justice, equality, and affordability. He energized young people, people of color, and Muslims. He ran a campaign full of joy and celebration that permeated the streets of New York for six months.

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A key lesson for Mamdani and for America comes from the Chicago of the 1980s—and two historic figures, Jackson and Harold Washington, in particular. In 1983, Washington ran for mayor of Chicago. Like Mamdani, Washington went up against the establishment figure of his day—Jane Byrne, a moderate who distanced herself from people of color, failed to root herself in the movement for justice and equality, and disrespected communities. She was the Andrew Cuomo of her time.

Harold Washington was encouraged to run by Jackson and others. He put together the kind of coalition that Mamdani assembled—and had to have that kind of coalition in order to win.

Chicago is a city with very few Republicans. No Republican had been elected mayor in decades. But when a Black man won the Democratic nomination, many white political leaders lost their minds. They did nothing to douse the flames of racial fear and resentment. The intensity of the white backlash led Leanita McClain, the first Black editorial writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, to write a searing column explaining, “Whites were out of their wits with plain wet-your-pants fear. Happy black people can only mean unhappy white people in this town.”

The white flight was overwhelming. And this is probably the unspoken but widely shared fear among many Democratic consultants and political leaders today—not just white ones. The reluctance people had to embrace Mamdani, the actual Democratic nominee, flowed from a similar mistaken assessment of the electorate and a similar absence of political courage.

But—and this is the crucial thing—Harold Washington won. He won through massive mobilization of the New American Majority, including the many progressive whites in Chicago.

He refused to get into the race until 100,000 new Black voters had been added to the voter rolls by community organizations and civil rights groups in an effort that was termed Operation Big Vote. Then those people turned out in droves. Eighty-two percent of Black people turned out to vote—a historic and unheard-of level of voter turnout. And it was absolutely necessary to enable Washington to prevail in the overwhelmingly Democratic city. He prevailed by just a small amount. But prevail he did.

Washington’s campaign gave rise to Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. As Abby Phillip captures so compellingly and accurately in her book, Jackson learned in 1983 that the Black community and its allies could no longer solely depend on white allies. Jackson then expanded the Washington and Chicago model nationally.

He ran with an unapologetic, strong, progressive public policy agenda, calling for far-reaching change around justice and equality. He made a massive commitment to and investment in voter registration and participation. Jackson would end all of his rallies with a church-like summons for people to come down front and register to vote.

In the process, he brought new people into the electoral process and changed the composition of the electorate, making it dramatically more diverse.

Jackson also committed to democratizing the electoral process itself—reforming the Democratic Party rules for delegate selection, moving away from backroom deals and winner-take-all mechanisms. Although Jackson actually led the nomination contest after winning the Michigan primary in 1988, he ultimately fell short—the country still needed to change more—but, 20 years later, the combination of those reforms, changes, and advancements in political development paved the path that made it possible for Barack Obama to win.

The democratization of the nomination process enabled Obama to accumulate delegates all over the country in a fashion that was different than had been done before. That surprised Hillary Clinton, who had been relying only on the big states and thinking that the prior winner-take-all mechanisms would propel her to victory.

The expansion of the electorate, the diversification of the electorate, and the making younger of the electorate is what enabled Obama to win the Iowa caucuses and, ultimately, the White House.

What Phillip captures, what Jackson helped lead, is what the country and progressives should heed at this moment in history.

Mamdani’s example should be embraced and disseminated across the entire country and enthusiastically followed. In so doing, we will lay the foundation for empowering the New American Majority to both take back the country and then rebuild and remake the country.

That is what these past few weeks have offered us—if we are willing to see and follow what is being shown.

The future of the party—and the country—hangs in the balance.

As Democrats sift through the wreckage of 2024, they’re starting to conduct a familiar procedure: the post-election autopsy. Armed with exit polls, turnout data, and demographic breakdowns, analysts are dissecting Kamala Harris’s defeat with surgical precision. But like many autopsies, this one risks missing the cause of death by focusing too narrowly on symptoms. All of these postelection reports are missing the forest of the tribal reality of American politics for the trees of disconnected data points.

The latest analysis from Democratic data firm Catalist offers valuable insights about voter dropoff and demographic shifts. Yet it also perpetuates some of the most problematic tendencies in Democratic political analysis—tendencies that helped create the conditions for defeat in the first place.

The greatest weakness in the Catalist report—and in much other analysis from media and commentators and political operatives—is the reluctance to grapple seriously with the centrality of racial and gender animus and resentment as central organizing forces in American politics. On the one hand, the Catalist report does say that “men moved towards Trump in 2024…. These changes were seen across racial and other demographic groups,” helping to explain his modest improvements among Latinos and African Americans. On the other hand, however, that finding is listed seventh in their 11 “key findings,” making it just one tree in a forest of misogyny.

Similarly with race. In their sixth finding they mention almost in passing that “Harris also saw support drops among white men with a college degree.” In an election where the conventional wisdom is that inflation and the price of eggs defeated the Democrats, what’s the explanation for college-educated white men moving to Trump? 

The 14th-century philosopher William Ockham popularized a framework now known as Occam’s Razor that holds that the simplest explanation is usually the best. In a country that has never elected a woman president and engaged in a violent and bloody Civil War explicitly animated by racial politics, the explanation of race and gender having swung the 2024 election is the simplest. Another way Catalist could have framed their findings would have been to say that Kamala Harris won among every single racial group—except white people.

The reality is that Harris lost not because she was too progressive on cultural issues but because Democrats continue to shy away from the battle over the existential questions of whether America should be a white nation or a multiracial democracy and of whether a woman could or should be president. Trump’s appeal has always been explicitly racial—from “Mexicans are rapists” to “they’re eating the dogs”—yet Democrats remain terrified of calling this what it is and mounting a forceful counternarrative. And they remain perplexed about how to run against a man who has been caught on tape proudly bragging about sexually assaulting women.

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While it’s true that turnout declined among key Democratic constituencies, the story is more nuanced than a simple narrative of across-the-board Democratic failure. Harris actually increased Democratic vote totals over 2020 in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. In California, Democratic turnout dropped nearly 20 percent, but this likely reflected the reality that the state wasn’t competitive, so campaigns overlooked it and spent their voter mobilization funds elsewhere. The drop-off wasn’t some fundamental rejection of the Democratic message.

More importantly, Trump’s success came largely from his ability to turn out previously nonvoting conservative supporters—a phenomenon that has been building for years but gets insufficient attention. As I wrote in November, the main thrust of the story behind the many counties that ostensibly “flipped” from blue to red is that the Democratic vote dropped dramatically. And that followed the prior pattern of Trump’s previously nonvoting MAGA voters. In 2020, for example, Trump galvanized 75,000 previously nonvoting Republicans in Hidalgo County, Texas, while Biden attracted 22,000 more Democratic voters than Obama had. The story wasn’t Latino voters abandoning Democrats; it was Republicans finally mobilizing their dormant supporters.

Perhaps the most under-analyzed aspect of 2024 is the role of sexism and misogyny. The United States has never elected a female president. Ever. This isn’t an accident or a statistical quirk—it reflects deep-seated attitudes about leadership and power that don’t disappear just because we’re uncomfortable discussing them.

The emergence of the “manosphere” and its influence on young men across racial lines is real, but it’s building on centuries-old foundations. In a country where women couldn’t vote until the 1920s and couldn’t open bank accounts on their own until the 1970s, the idea that gender played no role in Harris’s defeat is naïve at best.

What’s the difference between Stacey Abrams’s and Raphael Warnock’s performance in Georgia in 2022 and Harris’s and Ruben Gallego’s in 2024? Gender. The Catalist report is on point in its conclusion that “support drops [for Harris] were concentrated among the younger cohorts of voters, particularly young men.” Does this discrepancy reflect a failure of Democratic Party messaging, or is it an unsurprising outcome in a country where women are the majority of people and yet make up just 8.2 percent of the CEOs of S&P 500 companies? To many people, the cultural conception of the picture of leadership does not look like a woman of color, and failure to confront that reality is naïve and foolhardy.

The Democratic Party faces real challenges, but they’re not the ones most analysts are identifying. The party doesn’t need to moderate its positions or chase after Trump voters. It needs to build the infrastructure and craft the message to mobilize its natural coalition—the multiracial new American majority that elected Obama and Biden, and that then stayed home in 2024.

To win going forward will require massive investments in voter registration and turnout operations in communities of color. It will require bold messaging that doesn’t apologize for standing against racism and for equality. And it will need to understand that in a rapidly diversifying country, the path to victory runs through empowering and inspiring the coalition of transformation, not chasing the coalition of restoration, as Ron Brownstein dubbed the Obama and then Trump coalitions.

Democrats didn’t lose the 2024 election because they were too progressive. They lost because they weren’t progressive enough—at least not in ways that inspired their base to turn out in overwhelming numbers. Until we’re willing to face that reality, we’ll keep conducting autopsies on preventable deaths.

I recently saw a meme on social media with a picture of Trump that said: “President of the white people of the red states of America.” The meme not only perfectly captures the current situation in this country but also illuminates the power and potential of those who are not represented by the latest occupant of the oval office.

Historically, revolutions take place city by city, county by county, state by state. As the progressive forces liberate a region, they deepen the support and enthusiasm among the residents of that region by manifesting a clear alternative in terms of priorities, policies, vision and quality of life (the slaves are freed, the billionaire’s land is redistributed, etc). In such a fashion, the reach of the revolutionary forces steadily grows until they are in a position to take power nationally and seize the seat of government. That framework is especially relevant to this moment. A deep dive into the geography, economics, and population of the nation focused on justice and equality reveals that we are bigger and more powerful than we may feel.

Looking just at states can blur the picture of what our nation actually looks like. It’s not primarily land mass that defines a nation but shared worldview, values, and vision. Champions of multiracial democracy don’t just live in the 19 states won by Kamala Harris.

In order to get a clearer picture of our nation, it helps to look through a county-focused lens. There are more than 3,000 counties in the country, and more than half of the votes cast nationwide came from the 150 largest counties. In those places, Harris won, cumulatively, by 17 points. Most important, in most of the battleground states, the greatest areas of opportunity lie in the counties. People of color tend to be concentrated in a relatively small number of counties within states that are frequently thought of as more conservative. Arizona, for example, has 15 counties, but 82 percent of all the people of color in the state live in just three counties (Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima). Similar situations exist across the country, even in the states that lost to Trump in the latest election.

North Carolina presents one of the best opportunities for Democrats to flip a US Senate seat in 2026, so it is a timely and useful case study. There are 100 counties in the state, and the majority of people of color live in just nine of the counties. Harris lost North Carolina by 183,408 votes, and in those nine diverse counties, 760,283 people did not vote.

An accurate understanding of the geography of our nation, then, will look at both the states where Democrats won as well as the counties where people of color and their white allies live. Viewed in that fashion, the reach and power of our nation is more promising than we may feel at the moment.

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The sprawl of the progressive nation is not just more geographically far-reaching than it may appear at first blush. It is also much more fundamental to the operation of the entire country than we may realize. Looking just at the economic data in the states where there are Democratic governors (and that leaves out states such as Virginia and New Hampshire that were won by Harris but have Republican governors) reveals that it is actually our nation that powers the progress in this country. According to the latest statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Gross Domestic Product in the states with Democratic governors is $17 trillion as compared to just $12 trillion in the red states.

As an extension of that economic power, the Democratic states shoulder a larger share of the tax responsibility for the operation of the federal government. States with Democratic governors provide 60 percent of the country’s entire tax revenue.

Maximizing our power over the next four years will require steadily and methodically proceeding on two parallel and synergistic paths in the various cities, counties, and states in our nation: (1) Developing and championing a clear, unapologetic progressive public policy agenda that defines the differences between the respective nations; and (2) embracing a “1 million precinct captains” strategy of ensuring that every potential progressive voter is identified, informed, and encouraged to vote in each upcoming election. While we need to raise the flag and throw sand in the gears of the oppressive plans of those in Washington, the greatest opportunities exist in the states, counties, and cities where most of our people live.

In many ways, our states and counties can provide a more powerful and meaningful counterweight to the administration than our minority in Congress. The executive order attacking the 14th Amendment, for example, was swiftly opposed in the courts by a coalition of 22 states—led in part by Arizona’s Democratic attorney general—and that coalition received an immediate injunction blocking something akin to “Make America White Again.” The task over the next two years is to make elections in 2025 and ’26 a referendum on what kind of society we want to live in and what kind of people we are. That entails unapologetically pursuing an alternative public policy agenda and loudly articulating how our agenda is the opposite of and based on opposite values and vision than that being advanced by the president of the white people in the red states of America.

I saw this approach play out firsthand 21 years ago in San Francisco with marriage equality. At a time when the leaders in Washington—Republican and Democrat alike—were championing bigotry, homophobia and hate, local leaders in San Francisco, led by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom and then–District Attorney Kamala Harris, defied that direction and started handing out marriage licenses. And they did so with a visible and forceful defense of the values underpinning their actions, with Newsom defiantly declaring that the United States Constitution “leaves no room for any form of discrimination.… Today a barrier to justice has been removed.”

Two years later, in the face of rabid resistance in Washington to extending health care coverage to people without a lot of money, San Francisco again modeled what is possible at the local level. In 2006, city leaders developed and implemented their own health insurance program, Healthy San Francisco, to provide access to health care for the city’s lower-income residents. Funded with a 25 percent surcharge on restaurant tabs, the program generated the resources to provide health insurance for 90 percent of the city’s uninsured residents.

This course of action can provide a road map to state and local leaders today. As Trump tries to whitewash the curriculum, for example, local school boards, mayors and state legislatures and governors should forcefully say“Hell No” and offer a clear alternative—a different direction and course of action. As reactionary red-state governors and leaders follow in the footsteps of the heirs of the Confederacy who worked relentlessly to ban books and suppress any accurate depictions of the violent, white-supremacist, mass-murdering regime that was the Confederacy, progressives should go the opposite direction, challenge those actions, and hand out the books being banned in other parts of the country.

Likewise with the bogeyman of DEI. Local and state leaders should announce initiatives that turn the argument on its head. They should embrace the objective of avoiding racial preferences and announce detailed studies and vigilant oversight of why white people get so many of the jobs and contracts and preferential positions in our society. And high-profile conferences should be convened and extensive hearings conducted to explore just how it is that the positions of wealth, privilege and power in every section of our society are overwhelmingly allocated to whites. The key is to let the people see the dividing line, challenge people to choose, and begin the buildup now to make 2026 an opportunity to create the kind of society we want to have.

While standing up and fighting back, we have to simultaneously lean into the unsexy yet essential work of voter registration and mobilization. Ultimately, voting is the key to peacefully retaking power. When facing an earlier but similar level of naked aggression, racism and unleashed white racial resentment, Malcolm X warned of the choice between The Ballot or the Bullet. When he uttered those words, the country’s population was 88 percent white. Today, after removal of the whites-only immigration laws and practices that had kept the country unnaturally white for centuries, the US is a truly multiracial country, with people of color accounting for 41 percent of all residents, and they are not alone. A meaningful minority of whites have always supported and fought to make this a multiracial country. And despite the darkness of this hour, the electoral trend remains encouraging as the majority of young people rejected Trump, and every year nearly 4 million 17-year-olds turn 18 and become eligible to vote (Trump won the popular vote by 2.2 million votes).

We have the votes to take back power, but we have to register, inform, inspire, organize and galvanize our supporters. The way to do that is by going extraordinarily deep: There should be 1 million precinct captains in the country (there are roughly 200,000 total precincts), with every precinct, especially the ones in our counties, having a designated person making sure that every progressive-minded person is registered to vote and actually casts a ballot. In Texas, for example, the 2020 election was decided by 600,000 votes, and 4 million people of color did not vote. In Georgia, decided by 11,000 votes in 2020, 1.2 million people of color didn’t vote. The seeds of our resurgence are right there in the counties we won in the states we lost.

The ultimate objective of social change is to improve the lives of the people. The people of this country live in the cities and counties across the country. The majority of those places are areas of hope and opportunity, and that is where we need to focus our time and attention over the next four years.

As we brace for a potentially brutal four years, it is essential that we have a clear understanding of the actual fight that we are engaged in. The fact is that there have always been two different, hostile, and usually combative nations within this one country; the current real and existential threat to our democracy is an outgrowth of a centuries-long struggle over who belongs in America and who doesn’t. By coming to terms with this reality and redirecting our energy, efforts, and resources accordingly, we can better withstand Trump’s assaults, make meaningful progress towards fostering greater justice and equality in many parts of the country, and lay the foundation for retaking power at the federal level in 2026 and 2028.

What, Exactly, Is a “Nation”

It can be confusing to understand what constitutes an actual nation, since we live in a world where the planet’s population has regularly been organized and reorganized, often violently, to fit within shifting borders. The complexity is accentuated by the fact that there are also 574 Native American “nations” within the current borders of the United States.

Notably, the definition of a nation is not simply, or even primarily, a question of borders. The United States’ borders have shifted multiple times, including in the 1840s when the country went to war with Mexico in support of the white colonizers in the region who wanted to continue to enslave Black people. After that bloody war, the United States annexed 55 percent of Mexico’s land mass and created the current Southwest of this country (giving rise to the defiant phrase favored by many Mexican Americans—“we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”).

Alaska is perhaps the clearest illustration that geographic proximity is not the defining characteristic of a nation. The state is located 500 miles from the northern border of the continental United States. And although the only country geographically contiguous to Alaska is Canada, the region still sends two senators and one representative to Washington, DC, to serve in the United States Congress. Furthermore, Donald Trump’s latest nonsense about annexing Greenland further affirms the reality that borders don’t define a nation.

So what exactly is a nation? First, while often used interchangeably, it is not necessarily the same thing as a country.

Voice of America describes a “country” as an organized political unit, with territory, sovereignty, and a governing body. For its part, a “nation,” as defined by scholars and described by the think tank Global Policy Forum is “a large group of people with strong bonds of identity.” That common identity “is typically based on shared culture, religion, history, language or ethnicity.” You sometimes see disparate people bound by a common identity organically using the phrase in contexts such as popular culture (Cornell University professor Riche Richardson, for example, teaches a class called, “Beyoncé Nation: The Remix Course”).

Common identity based on shared culture, religion, and ethnicity has been an ever-present reality in a country whose first naturalization law, passed in 1790, restricted citizenship to “free white person[s].”

The Civil War

The clearest manifestation of the cleavage of one country into two nations occurred in 1861 when the leaders of the slaveholding states refused to accept the results of the presidential election in which the candidate backed by Black people—Abraham Lincoln—won. The legislatures in 11 states formally voted in rapid succession to leave the United States of America and create their own nation, the Confederate States of America. Each nation elected leaders, convened governing bodies, collected taxes, and drafted young men to serve in their respective militaries.

The Civil War also provided the clearest articulation of the values, visions, and priorities that distinguished the respective nations. Lincoln eloquently described the United States in his famous Gettysburg Address. The opening lines of that 272 word speech remain relevant and instructive to this day:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

For their part, the Confederates did not dispute what was at stake. In its Declaration of Secession, South Carolina—the first state to secede—clearly and unmistakably stated that the cause of the conflict was the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.” Three months later, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens drove the point home in his famous Cornerstone Speech, plainly stating that the Confederate government’s “foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

Today, 38 percent of the country’s entire population lives in states that went to war in the 1860s and killed people by the tens of thousands in defense of the belief that “the negro is not equal to the white man.” So while the most common—and comfortable—response to the racism and atrocities of the Civil War is “that was a long time ago,” the essential inconvenient truth is that the underlying struggle that caused the conflict 163 years ago has persisted to the present day.

The Civil War Never Ended

The determination to carry on the Confederate cause stretched from the 1865 assassination of Lincoln by a white supremacist just five days after the Confederates ostensibly surrendered at Appomattox, all the way up through Trump’s pardon of the January 6, 2021, insurrectionists—people who, carrying the Confederate flag, stormed the United States Capitol wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with the words “MAGA Civil War.”

In Trump’s lifetime, the political and financial power of the Confederate-adjacent portion of the population has steadily grown. In 1948, two years after Trump was born, a coalition of white Southerners proudly declared, “We stand for the segregation of the races,” formed the Dixiecrat Party and mounted a third-party presidential bid that succeeded in winning the most votes in four states. Twenty years later, in 1968, Alabama’s segregationist Governor George Wallace took the white supremacist baton and launched his own presidential bid, quintupling the Dixiecrat popular vote and winning five states outright. Alabama writer John Anderson highlighted the reality that Wallace’s “startling appeal to millions of alienated white voters was not lost on Richard Nixon and other Republican strategists.”

For all the energy expended seeking nonracial explanations of American voting behavior, it remains the fact that in every single election since Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the majority of white voters have sided with the Republicans. Every. Single. Election. For 60 years. That’s how residents of a nation—a grouping of people who share a common identity—behave.

The fundamental failure of Democrats and progressives over the past four years was the inability to understand the essential distinction of what’s happening in this country. We remain “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” but too many on the Democratic and progressive side are afraid to truly engage that battle. Rather than confront and denounce Trump’s racism by staunchly standing for the kinds of calls for justice and equality that were widespread in the weeks after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, too much of Democratic messaging downplays the fight for equality in the hope of wooing people drawn to the nativist and divisive leadership of Trump.

Surviving this period and pursuing the path back to power requires tailoring strategies, plans, and actions that will strengthen and maximize the full power and potential of our nation. Looking through that lens, we will see that we are more powerful than we feel at the moment. To take just one example, in Houston, Texas, and its surrounding county Harris, the majority of voters (52 percent) sided with the Democrats in 2024. Harris County’s population is larger than that of 15 states. And when you take into account the fact that nearly 90 million people did not vote, the power-building potential is considerable.

Doubling down on strengthening the people and places in our nation—the one dedicated to the proposition of equality—is the best way to navigate the uncertainty and chaos that Trump’s administration is causing while continuing the journey toward justice. Better understanding the exact composition of our nation and the opportunities that still exist for building power and making progress will be the subject of part two of this two-part series.

The road to recovery and healing must begin with a proper diagnosis. Just as a good doctor conducts tests and rigorously reviews the results before prescribing a course of treatment, those seeking to revive the Democratic Party need an accurate assessment of what actually happened in the 2024 election. Unfortunately, recent weeks have seen an avalanche of dubious interpretations of the election results.

As bruised and battered party leaders search for solutions and explanations, they have had to contend with politically shallow, culturally ignorant, and mathematically incorrect interpretations of electoral data. These bad takes have come from myriad sources, most recently and alarmingly from The New York Times and its chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, who occupies one of the most prestigious and prominent spots in the political media universe because of his paper’s outsize influence on public opinion.

In his December 3 newsletter, Cohn argued that it would be a mistake “to conclude…that Harris might have won if [Democrats] had voted in the numbers they did four years ago.” Cohn based his contention on the belief that “millions of Democrats soured on their party and stayed home, reluctantly backed Harris or even made the leap to Trump.” Then he sought to buttress that position by pointing to the election results in Clark County, Nevada, where the Democratic margin shrank from 9.3 percent in 2020 to 2.6 percent this year. Citing statistics that Democratic voter turnout fell, Cohn posited that “two-thirds of the shift toward Trump was because voters flipped his way.”

Cohn’s conclusions are not only mathematically incorrect; they are, in fact, absurd. For some inexplicable reason, far too few people in politics pay attention to the single most important data set there is: actual votes cast. Looking, as Cohn does, at shifting statistical margins and percentage turnout rates by party misses the more obvious point of who actually voted. Cohn completely misses the fact that Kamala Harris got almost the exact same number of votes in Clarke County as Joe Biden did in 2020.

If the Democrats lost a lot of voters to Donald Trump in Clarke County, then how did Harris get nearly the exact same number of votes there as Biden did four years earlier? (Vote tallies are not yet final, but Harris is just 1,665 votes shy of the 2020 number, in a county with more than 1 million voters.) At a minimum, she would have had to backfill those allegedly lost voters with new Democratic voters, but this inconvenient fact is completely overlooked.

The underlying reality that many in the media and politics are missing is that in four of the battleground states—Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Wisconsin—Harris exceeded Joe Biden’s performance four years earlier. The biggest story of the election is not that Trump succeeded in flipping the allegiances of previously Democratic voters; it is that Republicans did a better job of mobilizing their previously infrequent voters, while Democrats squandered far too much money on television and digital ads trying to appeal to Republicans.

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To properly understand why Republican turnout expanded while Democratic turnout ultimately contracted, it helps to look at the now centuries-long role that white racial resentment and fear have played in US politics. New York Times reporter Astead Herndon’s podcast The RunUp touched on this reality when he conducted a focus group after the election. One of the participants broke it down clearly when she said, “People just came out of the rural areas and came out of everywhere to make sure that that Black woman would not win.”

A similar wave of racial resentment surfaced in Georgia in 2018 when Stacey Abrams came within 55,000 votes of winning the gubernatorial election. Abrams boosted Democratic turnout by 68 percent over the 2014 numbers, but fell just short because of a combination of massive voter suppression (e.g., purging hundreds of thousands of people from the voter rolls) and a historic increase in white voter turnout that occurred at the same time that Georgia was as close as it had ever been to having a Black female governor.

One of the reasons that it is essential that those attempting to analyze election results have deep cultural competence is that the electoral power of white racial grievance has long been a staple of American politics. In 1948, Southerner leaders outraged by President Harry Truman’s support for civil rights banded together to form the Dixiecrat Party whose platform unapologetically stated, “We stand for the segregation of the races.” Twenty years later, staunch segregationist George Wallace, governor of Alabama, used his defiant call for “segregation now…segregation forever” as a springboard to his 1968 presidential campaign. In 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign by traveling to the county in Mississippi that was nationally famous as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. The same Southern states that anchored the Confederacy made up the cornerstone of Wallace’s, Reagan’s, and now Trump’s electoral support.

Understanding this historical context—the kind of “family history” that a doctor takes—illuminates the proper path forward. Given the abundant evidence of the electoral power and endurance of white racial fear, Democrats must do even more to maximize voter turnout of their supporters than they have in the past. Nearly half of Democratic voters are people of color, and the country’s profound racial wealth gap means it takes even more resources to help those families surmount the myriad financial and logistical hurdles that make it harder to vote. And Democrats must aggressively pursue a policy agenda that will galvanize the proponents of equality in commensurate numbers as the enemies of racial and gender justice.

If this election proved anything, it is that no amount of money or television ads are going to change the minds of voters susceptible to the fear-based and divisive politics of the Republicans. The good news is that there are still tens of millions of supporters of justice and equality among the ranks of those who did not vote this year. And despite what you may have read in The New York Times, prioritizing policies and politics that engage, inspire, and mobilize those potential voters is the correct course of treatment and path back to power for the Democratic Party.

With fewer than 50 days left until the presidential election, two key states are now in play: Florida and North Carolina. In fact, Kamala Harris’s historic candidacy has galvanized voters across the political spectrum to such an extent that nearly every state Barack Obama won in 2012 is within reach and winnable by Harris. But, surprisingly, you won’t see much mention of this critical development on the electoral landscape.

Most of those in the media don’t properly appreciate the underlying trends and dynamics of this election because of their stubborn insistence on ignoring what is the most determinative set of relevant data that exists—the differences in political preferences of our country’s respective racial groups. Since the advent of modern-day exit polling in 1976, the starkest difference among subsets of the nation’s population can be seen in the voting choices of Black and white voters. Over the past 44 years, no Democratic nominee for president has ever received less than 83 percent of the Black vote, according to exit polls, and the majority of white voters have always sided with the Republican nominee (Jimmy Carter is the Democrat who has come the closest to winning the white vote, securing 48 percent of it in 1976).

To address this gap in the political analytical landscape, I worked with data scientist Dr. Julie Martinez Ortega two years ago to develop the New Majority Index (NMI), the only election resource that incorporates historical election data, polling results, and racial demographic data from the US Census. When elections are viewed through this lens, a clearer picture emerges of what’s happening, and what’s possible. For example, I wrote in 2022 how the NMI indicated that there were far more competitive House seats in play than most pundits believed in a year when nearly everyone was prognosticating a “red wave” of Republican House pickups. As the NMI suggested, that red wave never materialized, resulting in a mere pink puddle of just a handful of seats changing parties instead of the dozens that most were forecasting.

I’ve updated and expanded the NMI model this election cycle to incorporate electoral and demographic data from presidential elections, in addition to congressional contests. In particular, I have added pertinent data points from the 2012 election—the last time there was a Black presidential nominee. Viewed through this prism, the 2024 map of competitive states is far larger than most in the media realize.

As was the case with Obama’s candidacy, Harris has electrified the electorate, causing a surge of enthusiasm and excitement across the country, especially galvanizing people of color, and women of color in particular, who have demonstrated their excitement about the prospect of sending someone of their background and life experience to the White House.

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The tidal wave of support began the very day Joe Biden withdrew from the race. On Sunday, July 21, more than 44,000 Black women joined a Zoom call to strategize and coordinate their efforts, raising $1.6 million in a matter of hours. That combination of technological and demographic revolutions was repeated throughout the week as hundreds of thousands people joined similar Zoom calls organized by and for Black men, Latinos, Asian Americans, white women, and even “White Dudes for Harris.” By the end of the week, the entire electoral landscape had been transformed, and Harris’s position at the top of the ticket was secured.

The enthusiasm continued to manifest as Harris shattered fundraising records, bringing in $200 million in the first week of her campaign, a fundraising haul unmatched in the history of US politics. Almost immediately, the polls began to tighten, as previously divided Democrats (those who wanted Biden to stay in, those who wanted Harris instead, and those who wanted someone else entirely) consolidated their support behind the Harris-Walz ticket. Notably, that excitement promptly brought back into play relatively more recent “purple” battleground states such as Georgia and Arizona. In the first week of her candidacy, Harris traveled to Georgia, attracting the largest crowd of the campaign cycle in the Peach State as more than 10,000 people packed the arena.

While much of the mainstream media has recognized that the full 2020 set of states are currently competitive, what most still don’t see is that Harris’s candidacy has brought back into play not just the 2020 states but also the 2012 states. The levels of excitement and energy among voters of color now make nearly all of the states won by Obama newly winnable by Democrats.

This rapidly emerging reality is affirmed by the New Majority Index and the latest polling data. The “Obama coalition”—what I call in my books “the New American Majority”—consists of the overwhelming majority of people of color aligning with a meaningful minority of white voters. The Democrats’ “formula” for victory involves combining the necessary proportions of support from the country’s respective racial groups.

Two dominant realities combine to illuminate the potential of Florida and North Carolina—Harris’s current polling numbers among white voters and the lag in support from Black voters showing up in the polling data (that is, most polls are failing to capture the depth and breadth of Black voters’ support for Harris).

In Florida in 2012, Obama won the state with the support of just 37 percent of the state’s white voters. In North Carolina in 2008 (the year Obama won the state, before narrowly losing it in 2012), his white support was only 35 percent, according to the exit polls. The most recent polling data show Harris doing better among white voters than Obama did in Florida and North Carolina (39 percent in Florida and 37 percent in North Carolina, according to the latest polls).

In both states, despite increasing demographic diversity, white voters remain the largest sector of the electorate (59 percent of the eligible voters in Florida and 65 percent in North Carolina), so Harris’s surpassing Obama’s levels is extremely significant.

What makes the electoral map look particularly promising for Harris is the reality that polls are undercounting Harris’s Black support. That is, there is a lag between what they currently show in terms of Black voter preferences and what her support is most likely to be.

This lag is most pronounced in the latest New York Times/Siena College poll which shows Harris’s support among Black voters at just 75 percent. No Democratic nominee has ever received less than 83 percent of the Black vote, so it’s nonsensical to accept a number like 75 percent as accurate of what Harris’s ultimate 2024 numbers will be. The qualitative and quantitative tea leaves all suggest that Harris will win more than 90 percent of the Black vote. According to Pew Research’s rigorous statistical analysis, the Biden/Harris 2020 ticket received 92 percent percent of the Black vote. In the prior historical analog, Obama received 93 percent of the Black vote nationally, winning 95 percent of Black voters’ support in Florida and North Carolina.

If Harris’s support among Black voters continues to consolidate as it has over the past two months, then she stands a very strong chance of winning both states. In Florida, the critical constituency will be Latinos, and she needs to secure 60 percent of that community’s votes to prevail. The latest polls show just 50 percent of Latinos backing Harris, but that number is likely low and lagging, as the September Pew survey shows that, nationally, 57 percent of Latinos back Harris.

In North Carolina, YouGov’s August poll shows Harris meeting the Obama threshold of white support, but the number for Black voters is clearly incorrect at 75 percent. If the 37 percent of white voters’ support holds, and the percentage of Black voters moves to the Obama level of 95 percent, then she will win that state. To be sure, in those states—and, indeed all states with large numbers of people of color—a major challenge will be overcoming the widespread voter-suppression measures that have proliferated in recent years.

Something profound, historic, and transformative is sweeping the nation. You see it in the faces of the people attending Harris rallies, the astounding number of dollars pouring into her campaign coffers, and the surge in voter registration and volunteers since she took control of the ticket. A race-conscious approach to analyzing the underlying data both affirms the significance of what is bubbling up across the country and points to the very real possibility that the electoral map is much larger than people realize. The entire set of Obama-won states is in play, and Kamala Harris could win even more states than many realize, including North Carolina and Florida.

Democrats need to realize that if Donald Trump’s felony conviction won’t weaken his support among most white voters, then nothing will.

In the days after Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsification of business records, white leaders from coast to coast rushed to microphones and social media to pledge their allegiance. Polls show no meaningful erosion of backing for Trump among voters (a New York Times/Siena survey found just 3 percent of his supporters saying they plan to switch their vote after the conviction).

None of this should be surprising. In a country that is growing increasingly racially diverse, the Republican Party remains disproportionately white (83 percent of GOP voters are white, according to Pew Research analysis of exit polls). White rage has always been the rocket fuel powering Trump’s ascendance and continued political relevance. Most have forgotten that when he entered the 2016 presidential contest in the spring of 2015, he languished in the polls with the support of just 5 percent of Republican voters. Then, in his presidential announcement in June of 2015, he demonized Mexicans as rapists and murderers and clearly sent a signal that he would be the defender of white people and the culture he claimed immigrants of color threatened to destroy.

The political fruits of the speech were instantaneous. Trump rocketed to the top of the pack in a matter of weeks and has never looked back. He infamously marveled at the fervor of his (overwhelmingly white) supporters when he commented in January 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

Now, Trump stands alone as the first former president impeached twice by Congress and criminally convicted of a felony (well, 34 felonies to be exact, but who’s counting?). One would think that if anything would dampen the enthusiasm among members of a political party that once embraced law and order and the criminal justice system as core to its identity, it would be that criminal justice system rendering 34 guilty verdicts. But that has not been the case.

Even former Trump critics and ostensibly moderate voices such as former Maine senator Susan Collins have quickly come to Trump’s defense, saying, “The district attorney, who campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump, brought these charges precisely because of who the defendant was rather than because of any specified criminal conduct.”

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Why are Collins and other Republicans being so craven? Simple: The evidence has been clear for decades for anyone who cared to look. From a quantitative standpoint, championing white nationalism in this country has always been good politics.

In 1968, unapologetic white segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama ran for president and won five states. Twenty years prior, South Carolina leader Strom Thurmond—who infamously conducted the longest filibuster in US history when he tried to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957—ran for president on the overtly segregationist platform of the Dixiecrats, and won four states. And 88 years before that, the entire presidential contest turned on the question of whether white people could legally buy, sell, and own Black people—48 percent of the voters backed pro-slavery candidates (the slave states couldn’t agree on a single candidate and divided their votes, making it possible for Abraham Lincoln to prevail with just 39 percent of the vote).

The implications of this history for Democrats are profound. The dominant strategic focus of the Democratic Party has been and remains to woo white voters, but in my 30 years in national politics, I have seen precious few examples of empirical data and research guiding this quest to win white support.

To address this gap, I have spent the past year working with the groups Showing Up for Racial Justice and the Working Families Party to conduct a study on what the data really shows about white voter behavior over the years. We just released the resulting report titled “Expanding the White Stripe of Our Multiracial Coalition” this week (“white stripe” as in how to broaden the white stripe of the multiracial rainbow that is the Democratic electorate). In conducting the report, we analyzed decades of electoral data, Census reports, and field experiments by a wide range of social change and political organizations.

With the clarity that Trump’s conviction won’t dislodge his white supporters, the findings in the White Stripe Report are more timely and urgent than ever. The report offers three top-line calls to action. They are:

• Target the right white people

Much of the media and too much of the Democratic focus has primarily centered on trying to change the minds of voters inclined towards Trump. But there are millions of progressive-leaning whites who are infrequent voters but would likely support Democrats if they did come out and vote. This pool of people is a far more promising demographic to target. Political strategist and former political director of the AFL-CIO Mike Podhorzer has described the necessary shift in approach as pulling back the lens to look at the working-class female food servers pouring the coffee for the white guys in those stereotypical Midwestern diners that so many reporters flocked to in the wake of Trump’s win in 2016. That woman is far more likely to vote Democratic, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s all-out assault on reproductive rights over the past year.

Our analysis of the nonvoting population among registered voters in 2020 identifies 26.9 million whites who didn’t cast votes but would probably have backed Biden. A far better use of funds this year will be making sure that those white people vote, instead of spending millions of dollars on endless television ads trying to get Trump supporters to switch allegiances.

• Spend proportionately

There comes a point where Democratic spending on white people results in diminishing margins of returns. The results of every presidential election over the past 32 years show that white support for Democrats remains in a narrow band from 39 percent to 44 percent.

Having a realistic expectation of what percentage of white voter support the party is actually seeking will be key heading into November, as will be setting a limit on the amount of money, time, and effort that will be spent trying to exceed that limit. Saving money in this fashion will free up funds to invest in mobilizing voters of color who support Democrats at much higher rates.

• Run toward—not away—from racial issues.

Though this may seem counterintuitive, it turns out that being explicit about race doesn’t diminish support among white voters. In fact, it could increase support by activating those millions of progressive nonvoting whites.

The default impulse of most white people when it comes to issues of diversity, racial justice, and equality is to change the topic. In the research we examined, the data shows that pushing back on these attacks and summoning people to be their highest and best selves actually works. Democrats received their highest share of the white vote in the past 24 years when they challenged America to elect a Black man as president, and Obama secured 43 percent of the white vote in 2008.

In the Kentucky gubernatorial election last year, the Republicans backed Daniel Cameron, an African American Trump follower who had defended the notorious police killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020. In his 2023 campaign, Cameron deployed the divisive tool du jour of attacking transgender youth, but the incumbent governor Democrat Andy Beshear, a white man, fought back, vetoing a bill targeting transgender children, saying, “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God.” Beshear handily won.

What this moment is showing all of us is that there is virtually nothing that will change the minds of the tens of millions of whites who support Trump. If Democrats want to win, they need to embrace this reality and turn their attention and resources to doing what works to get the maximum number of realistically attainable white votes possible.

Yes!

This November, for the second time in three election cycles, the US voting public will probably be forced to choose between two of the country’s least-liked, most-distrusted politicians. It was this same dynamic that led to the narrow defeat of Hillary Clinton at the hands of Donald Trump in 2016, and all signs indicate that if the election were held tomorrow, it would end the same way: with Trump in the White House.

Don’t let the spurt of pro-Biden hype after the State of the Union address fool you. Trump is currently in the strongest position of his political career. Biden, long broadly unpopular, has recently sunk to all-time approval lows, and it has allowed his opponent to break through the public’s distaste for him. At the time of this writing, Trump hasn’t trailed in national polling since September. He also has an advantage—a commanding advantage, in some cases—in every swing state that Biden won in 2020. There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Biden isn’t just on track to lose. He’s on track to lose badly, and nothing that he or his campaign has done over the past six months has improved the situation.

It’s a harrowing set of circumstances. Fortunately, the culprit behind it is obvious: Joe Biden himself. Some may dispute this, because they either don’t want to believe it is the case or don’t want to reckon with the implications of the liberal establishment presenting us with a defective nominee. We have a lot of information on public opinion regarding this election, and it overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that Biden is a uniquely poor candidate.

Democratic Senate candidates, both incumbent and non-incumbent, are outpolling the president across the country. Compared to his party’s showing in generic congressional ballot polls, he also tends to underperform, which wasn’t the case in 2020. While some may point to national polls showing that younger, mainstream liberal alternatives—say, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan—fare poorly in matchups with Trump, this is clearly a result of their lack of name recognition. In polls that test an alternative Democrat against Trump in states where said alternative Democrat is known—say, Whitmer in Michigan—the candidate substantially outpolls the current president, leading Trump in the same surveys that show Biden behind.

Simply put, most Americans, after four years of Trump and nearly two years after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, want to vote for Democrats. They just don’t want to vote for one particular 81-year-old Democrat whom they largely regard as too old to serve effectively. It’s hard not to think that any alternative would be better.

Even Vice President Kamala Harris.

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While some of Biden’s staunchest defenders may admit that the president is not the optimal candidate this year, they justify his nomination by arguing that Harris, his most likely successor, would be even worse. For a long time, I agreed with this, and I still might agree with it if I thought that Biden’s poor polling numbers were the only thing holding him back. But a series of recent stories indicate an even more worrying possibility: Biden’s problems might not just be limited to voter perceptions of him; he could very well be too stubborn to lead the kind of campaign that could assuage such concerns.

Just look at the December New York magazine article on Biden’s campaign, which presented the picture of an operation that’s less concerned about losing the election than it is about the media reporting on its poor polling numbers. Read the New Yorker article from March in which his chief of staff tried to argue that Biden wasn’t in a bubble because he speaks with people like the disgraced economist Larry Summers, the billionaire-by-marriage New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, and the GOP Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Consider that even a favorable biographer like Franklin Foer wrote that Biden regards his own presidency as the realization of a decades-old “revenge fantasy” that he has harbored against “Washington’s liberal elite.” Despite everything that’s on the line, Biden and his team seem happier to lose if it means they get to do things “their way” than to win by adjusting what they do in a way that would vindicate their imagined haters.

It’s for this reason that Harris looks appealing. While her polling numbers may be worse than Biden’s right now, she’s gone out of her way to let people know she rejects the siege mentality of the rest of the administration. It’s not for nothing that her allies have made it clear to the media that she desires a shift in messaging on everything from abortion to Gaza. Harris may not be a popular politician, but she appears to have a basic understanding of the moment that her boss and his team lack. Unless and until Biden decides to stop letting his own arrogance drive him off a cliff, his vice president is and will continue to be the better option to keep Trump out of the White House.

Joshua A. Cohen

No!

Hell no, Joe Biden should not drop out of the presidential race. The fears about the president’s reelection prospects—only somewhat alleviated by his excellent State of the Union address—are unsupported by the evidence. The most important electoral indicators show that Biden is actually the front-runner in 2024.

Three fundamental factors tilt the electoral battlefield in Biden’s favor. Let’s take each in turn.

§ The Vitality of the Economy: Almost everyone agrees that the state of the economy can be decisive in an election year. Confounding earlier expectations of an impending recession, the economy is remarkably strong, and the financial situation of most Americans has improved over the past couple of years. More than 14 million jobs have been created or restored since 2021, and unemployment is at a near 50-year low of 3.9 percent. The inflation rate has been cut in half, and economic growth is robust. The economist Paul Krugman wrote recently that “the economic news in 2023 was almost miraculously good,” adding in another article that “inflation has plunged…even as the economy has boomed, with real G.D.P. rising 3.1 percent and employment rising by 2.9 million.” These underlying factors have helped propel the stock market to record highs, swelling the retirement accounts of workers across the country by an average of $10,000, according to an analysis by Fidelity Investments.

§ The Changing Composition of the Electorate: One of the main reasons many analysts and journalists fail to accurately assess elections today is that they have an antiquated understanding of the modern-day electorate. The composition of the population has changed over the past 50 years, producing a new electoral formula for victory.

People of color have grown from 12 percent of the population in the 1960s to 41 percent today, according to the latest US Census data. The majority of children under 18—and hence the majority of those who will become eligible to vote every year—are people of color.

Given that fomenting white racial resentment is the leading Republican strategy, it should come as no surprise that people of color overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. According to the exit polls, two-thirds of voters of color backed Democrats in both the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms.

In a country undergoing a demographic revolution, no candidate steps into the same electoral river twice, and this augurs well for the president’s prospects. There are 16 million new eligible voters since Biden’s last election, and about half of them are people of color.

Much of the prevalent pessimism stems from the outsize attention given to polls by white pollsters showing a perceived slippage of support for Democrats among voters of color. All recent election results, however, affirm continued solid support from these same voters.

In the 2022 elections, Democrats received the support of 86 percent of Black voters and 60 percent of Latino voters. Just five months ago, Ohio’s vote on a Democratic-sponsored pro-choice ballot measure garnered the support of 83 percent of Black voters and 74 percent of Latinos.

§ The Shrinking Significance of Swing Voters: A critical third reality benefiting Biden is the shrinking number of people who are swing voters. Many analysts maintain that a large number of voters may swing their allegiance to the Republicans. Such an assumption is contradicted by both ample empirical data and common sense.

The gold-standard measure of voter behavior is the American National Election Studies, a collaboration between the University of Michigan and Stanford University that uses data collected over several decades. The ANES has found a clear trend that swing voters are virtually disappearing from the populace.

When Patrick Murray, the director of Monmouth University’s polling institute, was asked who the swing voters are in 2024, he amusingly and accurately responded, “You want me to name them individually? Because I probably could at this point.”

In terms of Biden’s admittedly low approval ratings, it is important to understand two facts: First, a large percentage of the country is implacably opposed to anything he does. Second, a percentage of those who disapprove of Biden’s performance are people of color and progressives who feel that the White House is too timid. The idea that people who want Biden to fight harder for racial justice would express their displeasure by voting for Donald Trump is nonsensical.

Biden said in 2020 that he was a generational bridge for the country. We’re far from settled on what’s next and who’s next. The movement could use four years to sort—and fight—that out.

For 2024, my three-word mantra is: “Run, Joe, run.”

Steve Phillips

Enough with the pessimism. Progressives, Democrats, and many in the media are both plagued by and perpetuating a pervasive sense of doom and gloom about the 2024 election and President Joe Biden’s chances to win it. This wave of worry is unfounded, as most of the pertinent and predictive data shows that Biden is absolutely the front-runner, poised to win reelection in November.

As the general election campaign begins to heat up, Biden enjoys several structural advantages that significantly tilt the electoral battlefield in his favor.

The Economy

The overarching factor that almost all agree is important in an election year is the state of the economy. Confounding earlier expectations of an impending recession, the economy is remarkably strong.

More than 14 million jobs have been created since 2021, and unemployment is at a near-50-year low of 3.7 percent. The inflation rate has been cut in half, and economic growth is robust. The economist Paul Krugman has written, “The economic news in 2023 was almost miraculously good,” adding “inflation has plunged…even as the economy has boomed, with real G.D.P. rising 3.1% and employment rising by 2.9 million.” These underlying factors have helped propel the stock market to record highs, swelling the 401(k) retirement accounts of workers across the country by an average of $10,000 according to an analysis by Fidelity Investments.

Although inexplicably overlooked and underappreciated, these indicators are excellent news for any incumbent president seeking reelection. The fundamentals of the economy are sound, and the objective reality is that the financial situation of most Americans has improved over the past couple of years.

The Changing Composition of the Electorate

One of the main reasons many analysts and journalists fail to accurately assess contemporary elections is that they have an antiquated understanding of the modern-day electorate. For most of this country’s history, elections were competitions among white people, but the composition of the population has changed, producing a new electoral formula for victory. Most analysts and political consultants, however, fail to appreciate the electoral implications of the demographic revolution.

Ever since the end of legalized white supremacy in immigration and voting laws in the 1960s, the US population has inexorably become increasingly racially diverse. People of color have grown from 12 percent of the population in the 1960s to 41 percent today, and the nation is on course to “majority minority” status by 2045, according to the latest census data. The majority of children under 18—and, hence, the majority of those becoming eligible to vote every year—are people of color.

Given that tapping into white racial resentment and demonizing of people of color are bedrock practices of the modern Republican Party, it should come as no surprise that people of color overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates and causes. According to the exit polls, two-thirds of voters of color backed Democrats in both the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms.

The practical electoral impact of this demographic revolution is that elections need no longer focus solely on white people, and a coalition of progressive whites and people of color can win elections. This multiracial new American majority is what propelled a Black man into the White House in 2008 and ousted a white nationalist from that same building in 2020. In fact, with the sole exception of the 2004 presidential race, the Democratic nominee has won the popular vote in every single presidential election since 1992.

In a country undergoing a demographic revolution, no candidate steps into the same electoral rivers twice, and this also augurs well for the president’s prospects. Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by 7 million votes, and since that time, the pool of eligible voters has grown by more than 9 million people, according to the latest US Census data (applying the latest data on rates of population growth to the 2020 Census numbers). Nearly 90 percent of those new potential voters are people of color (a fact attributable to differing birth and immigration rates, as well as the obvious but uncomfortable reality that the majority of older Americans—and those who die every year—are white).

Much of the prevalent pessimism stems from the outsize attention given to polls suggesting slippage of support for Democrats from voters of color. In November, The New York Times released a poll showing Trump leading in five of six battleground states, with support from voters of color cratering. That same week, however, Democrats swept to victory in several contests across the country, enjoying strong support from voters of color, most notably in Ohio and Kentucky.

Ohio’s November 2023 vote on the Democratic-sponsored pro-choice ballot measure garnered the support of 81 percent of Ohio voters of color, including 74 percent of Latinos. On that same day, Kentuckians went to the polls to choose between a white Democrat, Andy Beshear, and his African American opponent, Trump acolyte David Cameron. If there were ever a test case for the proposition that African Americans were defecting to the Republican Party, Kentucky offered it, but that is not what happened. Not even close. The white Democrat handily defeated the Black Republican, with his widest margins of victory coming in the counties with the most Black voters, such as Jefferson, home to Louisville, where Beshear increased his vote share from 2019’s.

The Shrinking Significance of Swing Voters

A critical third factor benefiting Biden is the steadily shrinking number of people who are swing voters. Much of the national avalanche of anxiety stems from the fear that large numbers of voters will latch onto a concern such as Biden’s age and then swing their allegiance to the Republicans. Such an assumption is contradicted by both ample empirical data as well as common sense.

The gold standard measure of voter behavior is the American National Election Studies (ANES), “a joint collaboration between the University of Michigan and Stanford University” that analyzes voter behavior over several decades. ANES has found a clear and undeniable trend of swing voters virtually disappearing from the populace.

When Patrick Murray, the director of Monmouth University’s polling institute, was asked who the swing voters are in 2024, he amusingly and accurately responded, “You want me to name them individually? Because I probably could at this point.”

To the extent that voters are swinging from one party to the other, Democrats have been the beneficiaries in recent elections. Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, giving a green light to attacks on reproductive freedom, white women—a constituency that backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016—have turned out in force for Democratic-sponsored pro-choice ballot measures, even in previously Republican-leaning states such as Kansas and Ohio. In his analysis of the 2022 Kansas election, market research firm TargetSmart president Tom Bonior concluded, “Voters turned out in record numbers to deliver a resounding victory for pro-choice advocates in a red state where Trump bested Biden 56.2 percent to 41.6 percent in 2020 and Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost 400,000 registered voters.”

Why the Pessimism?

If all of these macro factors bode well for Democrats, why does the pessimism persist? One big reason is a grave misunderstanding of presidential approval ratings. Biden’s approval ratings are admittedly low, hovering around 38 percent as of February 20, 2024. Unfortunately, even intelligent journalists who should know better nonetheless consistently equate current approval ratings with future voting choices, and that is just not how voter behavior works.

To properly interpret why the president’s numbers are low and what implications, if any, they hold for his reelection, it’s important to understand a couple fundamentals. First, as the declining number of swing voters illustrates, a large percentage of the country is implacably opposed to anything Biden does. Between 43 and 47 percent of the country disapprove of this president on the general principle that he is a Democrat. He could cure cancer and make everyone a millionaire, and close to half of the country would still manage to find fault (even Obama, at the zenith of his 2008 “hope and change” campaign, was still opposed by 46 percent of the voters).

Second, a meaningful percentage of those who disapprove of Biden’s performance are people of color and progressives who feel that the White House is too moderate and timid. In fact, perhaps the greatest electoral danger facing the president is the real anger and disillusionment among progressives, especially young people and people of color, stemming from the White House’s refusal to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. But even in the face of widespread and passionate disagreement, progressives remain practical, as evidenced by this week’s Michigan primary, where more than 100,000 people cast a protest vote for “Uncommitted,” instead of backing Biden. Democrats’ sending a message of disapproval to the White House is very different from Democrats’ flipping to back Donald Trump, and the election is still many months away, affording ample time to course correct, use the bully pulpit to promote peace, and solidify the Democratic coalition.

Pessimism as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Given the significant structural advantages Biden enjoys, the greatest electoral danger he faces is low voter turnout (a fact affirmed by the right-wing obsession with making it harder to vote). Worry and anxiety is fine, but worry should lead to constructive action, not negative thoughts. Every time your blood pressure rises and anxiety spikes, go online and make a contribution to a voter-mobilization group in a swing state such as Living United for Change in Arizona or America Votes Georgia.

Perpetuating pessimism is almost like doing the Republicans’ job for them, by spreading doom and gloom and diminishing the motivation to turn out and vote. If progressives do our work right, Biden will win. So let’s do our work right.

We need to talk about white people. Heading into the very high-stakes 2024 election cycle, progressives and Democrats need to engage in a sober, empirically grounded analysis of what we really know—and don’t know—about how best to expand support among white voters.

For the past 10 years, I’ve been banging the drum about how the Democratic Party overprioritizes wooing white swing voters (a shrinking population) and does not spend nearly enough on investing in, inspiring, and mobilizing voters of color—who, after all, make up nearly half of the party’s voters. But I’ve always also said that Dems need at least a certain percentage of white voters to win.

With Democrats and their allies preparing to spend more than $1 billion next year in the 2024 presidential election cycle, it’s critical for us all to pause and make sure that the planning, spending, and strategy heading into next year’s Election Day is informed by the latest and best data, including data on the most effective ways to attract more white voters. It’s also imperative to assess the limits of that support, that is, to get crystal clear on which—and how many—white voters are actually woo-able.

Much of the conventional wisdom about voting patterns along racial lines in this country is faulty. Many people are surprised to learn that Lyndon Johnson was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win the white vote (in 1964). After he signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, no Democratic nominee has won the majority-white vote again. Ever. (Jimmy Carter came the closest, winning 48 percent in 1976.)

Many misremember Bill Clinton’s 1992 election as a high-water mark of white support for Democrats, but Barack Obama actually eclipsed Clinton’s numbers in 2008 when he secured 43 percent of white votes compared to Clinton’s 39 percent. In Clinton’s 1996 reelection bid against a weak Bob Dole, he did manage to get the backing of 44 percent of whites.

That was the high point of white support for Democrats since the advent of modern-day exit polling in 1976; the nadir was Walter Mondale’s 34 percent in 1984, and the average has been 40.3 percent. Forty-one percent of whites supported Joe Biden in 2020.

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These figures should prompt Democrats to ask themselves two fundamental questions. First, how do we move the needle closer to the 43-44 percent that Clinton and Obama enjoyed? Second, when does political spending that targets whites reach the point of diminishing returns—that is, at what point do we reach the ceiling on how many white votes we can win?

This inquiry needs to go beyond the usual handwringing about Democrats’ problems with white working-class voters. Trump bested Hillary Clinton among white non-working-class voters as well. How should we understand this, especially in light of the ongoing outsized attention showered on white working-class voters in Midwestern diners by candidates and the media? Maybe we should be paying more attention to trying to boost the turnout of college-educated white voters instead of continuing to chase those least likely to support us.

I’ve spent the better part of the past decade trying to sound the alarm about the need for Democrats to have a data-driven conversation about how to maximize the turnout of voters of color in a nation that is increasingly diverse and increasingly racially polarized. In a 2016 analysis, I showed that nearly 80 percent of Democratic dollars in that election cycle were spent on targeting white voters. In my 2016 book, Brown Is the New White, I broke down the math of the Obama coalition, which I dubbed the “New American Majority.” This coalition comprises of progressive people of color (23 percent of all eligible voters) and progressive whites (28 percent of all eligible voters). These two groups make up 51 percent of all eligible voters. My book offered lessons on how Dems could maximize support from each racial group, including whites, in such a way that the elements commingle and create a winning formula. And yet that year the Democratic Party’s white support dropped to a 34-year low as Trump turned white racial resentment and rage into a powerful political force.

While wooing white voters has always been top of mind for Democratic strategists, operatives, and leaders, there has been shockingly little transparent and constructive conversation about the evidence underlying the party’s strategies and spending tactics. For example, Democratic operative David Shor has become infamous over the past couple of years for his advocacy of “popularism” as a way to boost white support. In The New York Times, Ezra Klein distilled the essence of popularism down to: “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” (Spoiler alert: Much of that “unpopular stuff” includes talking about the problem of racism in this country.)

Shor’s views have reverberated throughout the Democratic ecosystem. His tweets and views have been retweeted by Obama. Klein’s 6,000-word piece in the Times was a paean to Shor’s way of thinking. And yet, despite the reverence for his ideas and his lofty status as a “data scientist,” Shor has never published anything clearly articulating his views, let alone outlining the evidence supporting it. (One thing is clear, though: as Elie Mystal has pointed out, Shor is “convinced and vocal that Democrats should dump their racial justice message if they want to maintain power.”)

Over the past 20 years, I have been in multiple meetings with top Democratic Party leaders and operatives who were making million-dollar asks of major donors. Rarely in those meetings did I witness insiders share any meaningful data to justify these asks. Shockingly, too many billionaire donors simply fork over large political contributions without asking tough questions or demanding to see hard evidence or plans. These are the same donors who conduct extensive due diligence before making private-sector investments.

Small-dollar donors also fall prey to impulse buying. Time and again, we have seen tens of millions of dollars flow to Democratic candidates running against prominent and destructive Republican leaders such as Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Lindsey Graham. These candidates’ respective opponents—Amy McGrath, Sara Gideon, and Jamie Harrison—received a combined $300 million in 2020, but all three Democrats lost badly because the races were never really that winnable in the first place based on historical voting patterns. This would have been obvious based on a clear-eyed assessment of the data.

The stakes next year are too high for our standards to be so low. That’s why I have joined with the Working Families Party and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) to start a candid conversation among progressives about what the data really shows about how best to attract and retain the maximum amount of white support possible. We are calling this effort the White Stripe Project (broadening our nation’s multiracial rainbow). We will be inviting all sectors of the progressive movement—including Democratic Party and super PAC leaders—to share the data they rely on and encourage a transparent and constructive conversation about 2024 strategy and spending.

This conversation is long overdue and vital as we gear up for an election taking place at a time when the country is more racially polarized than at any point since Martin Luther King’s assassination and the subsequent urban rebellions in 1968. Notably, Richard Nixon won the ’68 election by less than 1 percent of the vote. The margin of difference in 2024 also stands to be razor-thin (even if one of the candidates is in jail). This means that those spending the most money need to engage in the important work of explaining, sharing, and defending their plans and the evidence underlying them.

Increasingly, Republicans are going after Black candidates for higher office. The GOP has fielded multiple Black nominees for statewide office and encouraged South Carolina Senator Tim Scott to run for president. Although these are mainly cynical attempts to peel away some Black support from Democrats, these developments do pose a threat to the party—but not for the reason many pundits think.

For a party whose political power is based on stoking white fear and resentment, the trend is certainly notable at first blush. In just the past three years, Republicans have nominated Black candidates for vitally important contests: US Senate in Michigan (John James in 2020) and Georgia (Herschel Walker in 2022), and the party’s standard-bearer in this year’s Kentucky gubernatorial contest (Daniel Cameron). In 2021, Winsome Sears won her race for Virginia lieutenant governor. And now, on top of all that, Tim Scott has thrown his hat into the ring for the 2024 presidential race.

Scott’s candidacy has captured the attention of many reporters in the mainstream media. For example, The New York Times recently published a roundtable on the implications of his bid. But most of these analyses incorrectly diagnose what is happening, why it’s happening, and what the true threat is to Democrats. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg is a good example of this misunderstanding, writing in an op-ed last month that “at a time when the Democratic Party is losing Black men, a Tim Scott nomination would be a nightmare for Joe Biden.”

It is important to set the record straight that Democrats are not, in fact, losing support from Black men even when the GOP is running Black candidates. A cursory glance at the results from their recent races affirms this fact: In both the Georgia and Michigan Senate races, the Democratic nominee secured 90 percent of the vote, even when, in Michigan, the Republican opponent was a Black man.

All available electoral data continues to affirm that Black men are the second-most-Democratic demographic group in the country, second only to Black women.

The confusion over the Black vote seems to be coming from the fact that the margin by which Democrats have won Black men shrank in the Trump era. While Trump lost by 69 percent among Black males in 2016, that margin fell to 60 percent in 2020. That shift, however, does not mean what reporters like Goldberg think it means.

Black voters are not switching to the Republican Party. Republicans are just doing a better job of increasing voter turnout among infrequent voters. Reporters often apply this same faulty reasoning to Latino voters, which I wrote about last year. As I pointed out there, Trump’s “gains happened among voters usually on the sidelines of politics.”

And therein lies the real challenge and difficulty for Democrats. The greatest threat to Biden’s reelection is not that Black voters will throng the polling places to embrace Scott; It’s that those infrequent voters will not vote at all.

or decades, Democrats have failed to resolve a fundamental dilemma: Black people are their most reliable and strongest supporters, but fear of alienating white voters mutes their full-throated support for Black equality. This ambivalence is most profound when it comes to addressing one of the most important issues of all—the racial wealth gap.

The average white family in America has six times more wealth than the average Black family. This is, of course, the result of centuries of government-sanctioned and -enforced public policies, from slavery to sharecropping to redlining to racial restrictions in the GI Bill and New Deal. Despite this reality—even after the murder of George Floyd and many other innocent Black people—Democrats, who controlled both houses of Congress at the time, could not summon the courage or resolve to pass a bill that would simply study the issue of reparations. Biden doesn’t need any congressional support to establish a Presidential Commission to examine reparations, but he has failed to take this basic step.

With a new race looming, the challenge for Democrats will be inspiring and mobilizing Black voters. The default posture of the party will be to tiptoe through the policy landscape and unleash a fire hose of spending targeting white people to try to convince them that Democrats still care about them. From 2016 to 2020, Democrats have devoted the lion’s share of their election spending on communicating with white voters, at the expense of working to inspire Black ones.

The GOP’s flirtation with Black candidates is something that Democrats should absolutely take seriously, and they should be alert that Republicans, while cynical and shameless, are nonetheless tinkering with their electoral formula. The most effective response would be to intensify the fight for true racial equality and signal unequivocal support for the Black struggle for justice. In doing so, Democrats would reinforce the cornerstone of their winning coalition, at which time Republicans would return to their regularly scheduled programming of running white candidates who come from the tradition of voicing white resentment.

t’s hard to tell time by revolutionary clocks.” That observation by historian Lerone Bennett Jr. in an essay about the turbulent times of the late 1960s is equally apt today when trying to properly understand the dynamics of important political contests such as the 2024 race to replace California’s senior US senator, Dianne Feinstein.

Feinstein will either retire at the end of next year or, given her recent health issues, even earlier than that. One way or another, though, her time in office is coming to an end, and a high-profile contest is already underway to succeed her. Despite the considerable national attention being paid to the race, most pundits, reporters, and donors are missing the mark in assessing the viability of the candidates and how the campaign will likely play out. In particular, one of the candidates—Barbara Lee, the progressive hero who represents Oakland in the House of Representatives—is being written off much, much too early.

(It’s important to note that the electoral calculus for this race could quickly become entirely scrambled if Feinstein’s health forces her to step down and Governor Gavin Newsom follows through on his 2021 promise to appoint a Black woman to her seat. Should Lee be appointed, she would then be running as an incumbent, with all the advantages that flow from that. But since we simply don’t know whether that is going to happen, this piece will examine the situation as it currently stands with Feinstein still in office.)

Lee was the last of the three major candidates to throw her hat into the ring. The first two were Southern California Representatives Katie Porter and Adam Schiff. Both Porter and Schiff are fundraising powerhouses who trail only Nancy Pelosi among Democratic members of the House in dollars raised in 2022. Porter’s aggressive and provocative questioning during congressional hearings has made her a viral favorite of progressive small-dollar donors across the country who helped her amass $26 million for her reelection bid last year.

Schiff, for his part, has assiduously cultivated major donors over the years with his calm, erudite, methodical manner that resonates deeply with major donors who hope for a return to an “Age of Enlightenment” where political discourse is civil and fact-based ideas dominate. Schiff brought in $25 million in the 2022 cycle.

Conventional wisdom has quickly congealed into the belief that Schiff and Porter are the front-runners in what will be an extremely expensive contest.

Should the race proceed as currently configured, it is certainly true that this election will break the bank, possibly in record-setting ways. But it is by no means a given that Lee will lag behind, and that is because of two dominant realities that most analysts are missing: California’s demographic revolution and the obliteration of campaign finance rules and laws that formerly shaped electoral contests. (For the record, although I live in California, I have not endorsed or contributed to any of the candidates.)

The first and most important electoral reality in the Golden State is that the composition of the population has changed dramatically in the three decades since Feinstein went to Washington. In 1990, nearly 60 percent of the state’s residents were white. Today, that number has been cut nearly in half, with whites making up just 35 percent of California’s population.

And while the country’s hypocritical immigration laws bar some residents from becoming full-fledged citizens with the attendant right to vote, people of color still account for 55 percent of all eligible voters in the state. According to the exit polls in 2020, the majority of Californians casting ballots were people of color.

These racial realities matter because, in a country with centuries of racial oppression and a continuing gargantuan racial wealth gap, people of color, as a group, have more progressive politics than whites. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden barely beat Trump among California’s white voters (51 percent to 47 percent), but fully 73 percent of voters of color voted Democratic. Myriad public polls show that on issues such as economic justice, people of color prefer far-reaching public policy change. A 2021 Pew Research poll found, for example, that support for student loan debt relief had a net approval rating of more than 80 percent among African Americans and Latinos, as compared to 53 percent among whites (Asians support relief by a margin of 69 percent).

Among the three candidates, Lee’s public service track record most closely aligns with the values and priorities of the majority of California’s voters. Coming of political age in Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and serving as chief of staff to Oakland’s champion of peace Ron Dellums, Lee has made her mark and her name fighting for peace, justice, and equality with an unapologetic racial lens. Most notably, her courage in being the lone vote in Congress against the Afghanistan War inspired millions of people of all races to proudly proclaim, “Barbara Lee speaks for me!”

Schiff, in a sign that he now understands his electoral vulnerability, recently sought to join the Congressional Progressive Caucus to beef up his progressive bona fides (he eventually dropped his bid after media criticism). Porter, for her part, has made her name taking on Wall Street and corporate greed, while being less vocal about criminal justice reform, immigration, and systemic racism.

While the majority of Californians are likely more politically aligned with Lee, it does in fact take a lot of money to communicate with 26 million potential voters scattered across several of the most expensive media markets in the country and let them know that you are on their side. Porter’s and Schiff’s fundraising prowess will definitely help them, but the campaign finance landscape has changed in two profound ways that could accrue to Lee’s benefit.

Over the past 20 years, the campaign finance system that previously shaped federal elections has withered and is on the verge of dying. These changes have occurred in two stages over the two decades. The first stage was the democratization of campaign finance flowing from the power of the Internet to connect and coordinate small-dollar contributions across the country into a firehose of campaign cash. In Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign, he raised $119 million, and he received widespread media criticism for his courting of donors. By 2008, Barack Obama opted out of the federal campaign finance matching funds system because he knew he could raise astounding sums on his own, and he was right, bringing in $750 million (more than $287 million of that in the primary).

As record-breaking as Obama’s performance was, Bernie Sanders nearly matched his haul, bringing in $237 million in his 2016 campaign. Notably, just last week Representative Ro Khanna, who served as cochair of the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, endorsed Lee and agreed to serve as her cochair as well. If the Sanders donor army gravitates to Lee, they could quickly level the fundraising playing field.

The other development in campaign finance is the rise and normalization of super PACs and independent expenditure campaigns. I helped create the country’s first super PAC in 2007, and newspapers ran front-page articles attacking Obama for not more forcefully denouncing our political action committee, which had received contributions of $90,000. Last year, right-wing billionaires such as Peter Thiel spent more money backing J.D. Vance’s Ohio bid for the US Senate than Vance himself spent ($19 million to $15 million). Nary a peep of protest was uttered (Vance was actually outspent three to one by his opponent Tim Ryan, but Thiel and company more than made up the difference).

The floodgates have now opened in terms of major donors’ participating as major players in elections, and in Lee’s case, a constellation of major donors is making plans to back her bid. If that is the case, then the millions of voters who would gravitate to Lee’s record and leadership will in fact learn about her candidacy in far greater numbers than they would if she were left to her own fundraising devices.

The demographic and campaign finance revolutions have changed the calculus and formulas for how elections unfold. While it is hard to tell time by revolutionary clocks, those who appreciate the profound changes taking place in politics will see that Barbara Lee’s bid to become senator may in fact be right on time.

For an entity that spends nearly half a billion dollars every election cycle, surprisingly little is known about the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). As the political arm of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, the DCCC (or “d-trip” in Beltway lingo) is responsible for raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help Democrats win congressional elections. The committee spent $354,623,642 on the 2022 midterms, according to its filings with the Federal Elections Commission.

House Democrats need to flip just five seats in 2024 to recapture control of the chamber. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the new House minority leader, has tapped Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) to serve as chair of the DCCC this cycle, and DelBene has named Julie Merz as executive director to drive the committee’s day-to-day operations.

With Democrats so close to recapturing control at a time when white nationalist fascism is still very much in the air, there is little margin for error, and it is imperative that the party make smart, strategic decisions about how to deploy its massive war chest. In that spirit, here are five fundamental questions that all interested parties should ask DelBene and Merz.

Will you base your spending decisions on rigorous data about what works in winning elections?

As basic as this sounds, it’s sadly not common practice. Cook Political Report prognosticator Dave Wasserman expressed bewilderment in November at DCCC spending decisions, tweeting in November, “It was always strange to me that Jevin Hodge (D) wasn’t taken more seriously by DC strategists/spenders/modelers considering…redistricting moving #AZ01 from Trump +4 to Biden +1.” What Wasserman flagged is that, though the data would seem to have made Hodge’s bid to flip Arizona’s First Congressional District an obvious priority, the DCCC spent none of its $96 million in independent expenditures (a subset of its $354 million total spending) on that contest, according to the FEC reports. Left to fend for himself, Hodge lost by less than 1 percent of the vote.

It’s a sadly elemental, yet key, starting point in engaging with the new DCCC leadership. Will they commit to making data-driven spending decisions based on rigorous analysis of the numbers?

Will you be transparent in explaining the rationale for the spending decisions?

The lack of communication, transparency, and accountability in Democratic politics is breathtaking. In Hodge’s Arizona race, for example, the DCCC leadership never had to account for its decision to forgo investing in a winnable race. If you invest $10 in buying stock in a publicly traded company, then you get regular reports and updates on the company’s future plans and past performance, with financial results that are verified by auditors. As someone who has advised many progressive donors, I’ve been shocked to learn that if you give $1 million to Democratic Party committees, you’re lucky if you ever get a single piece of paper explaining what happened and why.

There is absolutely no rational justification for an organization that aspires to high performance to have such low standards.

Every stakeholder—and that includes small-dollar donors, billionaires, and every member of the Progressive Caucus—should request a simple explanation for how and where the DCCC plans to allocate the hundreds of millions of dollars it will spend over the next 21 months.

How much will you spend on voter turnout in 2024?

The untold story of the midterms is that Democratic voters stayed home in just enough congressional districts to allow Republicans to steal control of the chamber. As this table shows, below-average Democratic voter turnout contributed to Republicans’ flipping control of nine seats.

Exacerbating the problem is that seven of the low-turnout districts were substantially more racially diverse than the average district. In a country where 72 percent of people of color vote Democratic, the failure to invest in turnout out those communities is political malpractice.

Increasing voter turnout is not a mysterious or exceptionally risky proposition, but it does require a real commitment of assets. Sadly, most of the strategists and money-spenders in the Democratic ecosystem undervalue, overlook, and underinvest in voter turnout, opting instead for wave after wave of television and digital ads designed to persuade the ever-shrinking pool of swing voters. All of this despite the paucity of evidence about the efficacy of such spending strategies.

All those who want Democrats to win in 2024 should ask DelBene and Merz just what they are going to do to boost Democratic turnout, and how much of their hundreds of millions of dollars in spending will go towards that objective. Although turnout will increase naturally in a presidential year, that high-profile contest will also boost Republican turnout, so the DCCC’s leaders need to be asked about their plans for targeted investments to swell the ranks of Democratic voters in key districts. And they should ask as soon as possible, not when the election is almost here.

Will you hire staffers with the cultural competence to communicate with a racially diverse electorate?

Typically, Democratic operatives see people of color and their demands for justice and equality as nuisances to be neutralized while the party zeroes in on white voters. That’s the subtext of the conventional wisdom calling for talking more about “the economy” while downplaying “social issues” (the racial wealth gap is not merely a “social issue,” but that’s a topic for another column). Even setting aside the morality of the matter, the math is such that Democrats can’t win without a large and enthusiastic turnout of people of color.

Appealing to and inspiring a racially diverse voting population requires significant cultural competence in the leadership and staffing of the party committees. It helps if the people commissioning ads and hiring staff have stepped foot in a Black barbershop or beauty salon, been to a quinceañera, or attended a Lunar New Year celebration. Notably, cultural competence also means having insight into how to communicate with white people about racial issues in ways that summon them to rise to their highest and best selves.

Historically, the DCCC has not distinguished itself in this area. In 2020, the lack of diversity within the committee, and the attendant outcry from Congress members of color, led to emergency staff meetings, copious crying, and the resignation of the executive director. Hopefully, such drama can be avoided this year, but it will require Merz and DelBene to commit to real diversity at every level of the organization—and to follow through on their promises.

A culturally competent staff, backed by a massive war chest, could do extensive research, analysis, focus groups, and polling to probe attitudes towards racial justice and test language and messages that neutralize racial resentment and maximize enthusiasm for building a better world.

Will you encourage the Democratic SuperPAC—House Majority PAC—to answer the previous four questions?

Democrats’ political arsenal also includes the activities of a super PAC, House Majority PAC (HMP), that runs a legally distinct but mission-aligned set of activities to boost Democratic prospects in House races. HMP spent nearly $200 million in 2022, bringing the total allocation from the Democratic ecosystem to more than half a billion dollars.

All of the previous concerns and questions about the DCCC apply to HMP, and while the entities cannot legally coordinate, the DCCC can encourage HMP to up its game in terms of adopting best practices and conducting its operations with transparency, accountability, and a commitment to data analysis and results. The current HMP executive director is Mike Smith, and DelBene and Merz should urge him to provide answers to the above four questions as well.

he conventional wisdom is that Democrats defied expectations of a “red wave” in the midterm elections, but a smart, data-driven analysis of the playing field would have revealed that Joe Biden won the majority of votes in 225 of the redrawn districts, seven more than required to hold their majority. But because the committee failed to embrace best operational and political practices, they allowed the Republican barbarians to storm the gates (the previous DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney even lost his own seat).

The most extreme elements of the Republican Party now dominate the House of Representatives. They are threatening to throw the economy into chaos and doing everything in their power to roll back the tide of change on all matters of social justice and economic equality. The good news is that the House is there for the taking in 2024 if Democrats are smart, strategic, and accountable. All those with a stake in the future of the country should ask the DCCC leaders these basic questions, so that the process of fundamental change can begin.

Arizona has officially become America’s newest battleground state. With Democrats winning the statewide contests for governor, senator, and secretary of state this year, a state that was once solidly red is now decidedly purple, if not trending blue. How did it happen? What lessons can we learn, and how do we hasten the journey toward the promised land of progressive politics?

This moment has been over a decade in the making. In 2012, The New York Times chronicled the efforts of the Obama campaign to put Arizona—which it termed an “unlikely state”—into play. Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, correctly assessed the situation: “It is going to be a swing state. The question is whether we can get enough people registered to put it in play this year.” Obama fell short in 2012 by seven percentage points, with Mitt Romney prevailing by just over 200,000 votes.

In 2016, I was at a fundraising dinner with Hillary Clinton, and I asked her if she planned to contest Arizona. After a long and thoughtful pause, she said that it was under consideration (I also asked about Georgia and got the same answer). Her campaign made a late push with $2 million in television ads and a visit from Clinton days before the election, and, despite the lateness of that effort, she cut Obama’s margin of defeat in half, coming within three and a half percentage points of winning (a deficit of just 91,000 votes).

And, then over the past four years, the tide shifted fundamentally. In 2018, Democrats Katie Hobbs and Kyrsten Sinema won election as, respectively, secretary of state and senator, both of them narrowly attaining 50 percent of the vote to secure their seats. In 2020, Joe Biden bested and shocked Donald Trump, and Mark Kelly won a special election for a US Senate seat, helping to flip control of that chamber.

This month, the exclamation point was put on the sentence of political change, with Hobbs winning the governor’s office and Kelly beating back the billionaire-funded challenge to his Senate seat.

These results in Arizona are not outliers—they represent a trend, and progressives need to analyze its origins, learn its lessons, and make smart and strategic decisions going forward in order to solidify the state’s place as a cornerstone of a new national progressive political order.

So, how did it happen? There have been three major developments over the past few decades, and they need to be understood in their proper order and sequence.

The first reality is that the demographic revolution is transforming the racial composition of the electorate. The land that we now call Arizona was part of Mexico prior to the bloody 1848 Annexation of the Southwest, and the current border abuts Mexico, so it should be no surprise that lots of Mexican Americans have settled in Arizona. Since 1990, the Latino population in Arizona has steadily increased, growing nearly threefold from 688,338 people in 1990 to 1.3 million in 2000 and 1.9 million in 2010, at which point Latinos comprised fully 30 percent of the entire state population. The 2020 Census counted nearly 2.4 million Latinos in Arizona, 32 percent of the total population. The proportion of people of color (encompassing Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans) has risen from 28 percent of the state in 1990 to fully 47 percent today. As the non-white numbers were zooming up, the white numbers were tumbling down—from 78 percent of all Arizonans in 1990 to just 53 percent today.

The population revolution has begun to spill over into the composition of the electorate. In 2008, Latinos accounted for 12 percent of the people who cast ballots. By 2020, that vote share had nearly doubled, to 22 percent. Despite widespread and inaccurate claims that Latino voters are trending toward Republicans, the majority of Latinos have backed Democrats in nearly every exit poll taken since exit polls started tracking Latino preferences (earlier this year, I wrote about the inaccuracy of the interpretations of the Latino voting trend). The Democratic tilt of voters of color and young people has similarly been affirmed in election after election. Republicans see the writing on the metaphorical wall, and that is why they continue to clamor for a brick-and-mortar wall to try to hold back the tide of demographic change.

But demographics alone do not a political movement make. The second reality propelling change in Arizona is the creation and persistence of a cohesive core of leaders and organizations steadily working together to transform population shifts into political power. I devote an entire chapter of my book How We Win the Civil War to the Arizona story, and I describe how the 2010 anti-immigrant, right-wing “Show Me Your Papers” bill (SB 1070) “catalyzed an entire generation of organizers, leaders and public servants.” The activists who came of age as high school and college students protesting that policy created an array of civic engagement organizations that work together in the coalitions One Arizona and Arizona Wins. “One Arizona began as an alliance of four organizations who came together in 2010 and set a goal of trying to register 12,000 people to vote,” I wrote. “By 2018, the coalition had grown to two dozen groups who registered nearly 200,000 people to vote.” In 2022, the Arizona Wins coalition knocked on 2.5 million doors and talked to 1.1 million voters. Hobbs won her race by 17,428 votes.

The third reality is that a meaningful number of white voters apparently did indeed recoil from the extremism of Trump and his political progeny running as the Republican senate and gubernatorial nominees. According to the 2022 exit polls, both Kelly and Hobbs attracted 49 percent of the white vote, significantly higher than the 40 percent share that backed Hillary Clinton and Obama before her. It is possible that this relatively high share of the white vote is attributable to home-state fondness for John McCain that resulted in a backlash against those who attacked the late senator, as Trump and Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake did, but it’s equally plausible that a relevant chunk of Arizona Republicans were, as a matter of principle, turned off by the rhetoric and election-denying antics of the party’s standard-bearers.

While the bump in white support is a welcome development in the short term, it is not a solid or dependable foundation on which to build lasting progressive power. If and when a more palatable and less offensive right-wing leader emerges, the support of moderate Republicans can quickly dissolve like quicksand. Chasing these voters with moderate candidates and policies is not likely to build durable political success. We know from almost all available data that Arizona’s future is both racially diverse and progressive. Sixty-two percent of Arizonans under the age of 18 are people of color. Kelly and Hobbs both dominated among younger voters, winning respectively 76 percent and 71 percent of their votes. These are the voters whose support Democrats need to consolidate. It would actually be counterproductive to bend over too far backward to appease moderate Republicans, since failure to develop and deepen enthusiasm among younger voters of color could lead to the bottom falling out of the coalition that is steadily transforming the balance of power in the state..

Arizona is in the midst of a political realignment that has revolutionary implications for the national political balance of power. If progressives are smart, recognize the factors fueling this transformation, and strategically invest in the leaders and groups driving social and political change, Arizona can become a solid pillar of national progressive politics for years to come.

There is a growing fear in the mainstream media that the United States could be on the path to civil war. But the hard truth is that a civil war is not on the horizon—it’s already here. In fact, the original Civil War never ended, and its ideological—and in many cases, genealogical—heirs continue to wage that war to this day.

Earlier this month, The New York Times ran an article noting that “more than a century and a half after the actual Civil War, the deadliest war in U.S. history, ‘civil war’ references have become increasingly commonplace on the right.” In the arena of popular culture, the final episodes of the Paramount+ legal drama The Good Fight are about to air. In the words of the show’s cocreator Michelle King, “we’re dealing with an upcoming civil war in Season 6, and it’s more than just a metaphor.”

Those sounding the alarm about civil unrest are right to be worried, but popular explorations of the term “civil war” don’t go far enough. A civil war is far more than groups of men wearing 19th-century uniforms and standing opposite one another in a field with rifles raised, shooting at each other on dusty battlefields. And in the modern era, it’s not just a question of the potential for the use of violence—that is only one part of the picture. The predicate to war is the rejection of the legitimacy of government and authority of society. Through that lens, civil war is all around us.

The original Civil War didn’t start out as a civil war at all. Rather, it began when the party that lost a presidential election to the candidate backed by Black people refused to accept the results of that election—sound familiar? After Lincoln was elected in 1860, the slaveholding, “keep America white” states didn’t vote to go to war; they voted to secede from the country to which they’d belonged for 73 years. The shooting and killing came later, after the states that had seceded from the union sought to seize federal property in those states, and then defend that seizure by firing cannons at US troops.

In order to properly appreciate the moment that we’re in, we need to understand that, while the leader of the Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee, technically surrendered on April 9, 1865, the Confederates never stopped fighting. Just two days after the supposed surrender at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth listened to Abraham Lincoln give a speech in support of limited suffrage for former slaves, and promptly told a friend, “That’s the last speech he’ll ever give.” True to his word, Booth then slipped into Ford’s Theater and shot Lincoln in the back of the head. Lee’s “surrender” was not even a week old. Over the course of the next 157 years, the Confederates and their descendants have regularly and repeatedly resisted and rejected the legitimacy of governmental attempts to establish multiracial democracy in America.

Although he did not live to see it, Booth’s murder of Lincoln did a spectacular job at codifying America as a white nation. Andrew Johnson, the man who replaced Lincoln as president, quickly sided with the defeated Confederates in resisting civil rights laws; opposing passage of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed African American men the right to vote; and paving the path for the abandonment of Reconstruction, which handed the control of slave states back to slave owners.

For nearly 100 years after the official end of the Civil War, tenacious defenders of the Confederacy and its goals fostered white supremacy throughout American politics, culture, and life. The ongoing war was—and is being—waged on multiple fronts. One is via voter suppression, in the form of new, discriminatory laws. Another is white domestic terrorism, with the creation of the Ku Klux Klan by ex-Confederate soldiers. And a third is the fight over the minds of the country’s children. Long before the recent right-wing feast on book banning and so-called critical race theory, the genealogical descendants of the Confederates formed large, influential, and unapologetic organizations such as United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). As explained in The Tennessean, UDC led the effort to whitewash the curriculum in the early 20th century, spending “decades shaping and reshaping textbooks to put a strong emphasis on Lost Cause views of the Civil War and Reconstruction, glorifying the white supremacist foundations of the Confederacy and providing justification for racial segregation and Jim Crow.” SCV carries on the cause by selling Robert E. Lee bobblehead dolls and other white nationalist memorabilia.

Over the past century and a half, Hollywood has pitched in and piled on to the narrative by lavishing millions of dollars on essentially Confederate propaganda. Margaret Mitchell, author of the popular 1936 paean to the Confederacy, Gone with the Wind, drew her inspiration from Thomas Dixon’s play The Clansman—the book that was also the inspiration for the 1915 film Birth of a Nation. Both Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind were immensely successful in recasting white nationalist slaveholders as sympathetic heroes and heroines. Gone With the Wind has continued to capture the popular imagination, and was in the “Top 10 of Americans’ favorite novels” as of a 2018 USA Today survey.

In the 1950s, when the iron grip of white nationalism was finally loosened by the force of the civil rights movement, modern Confederates forcefully rejected the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education order to desegregate public schools, and launched a coordinated counter campaign dubbed “Massive Resistance,” as outlined in the “Southern Manifesto,” a document signed by 90 percent of Southern congresspeople in 1956, and described by historian Dan Carter as calling “upon whites to unite in an unbroken phalanx of opposition to any changes in the South’s racial system.” In Prince Edward County, Va., white leaders shut down the entire school district in response to Brown, and kept the public schools closed for five full years—longer than the duration of the Civil War itself.

With the election of Trump, modern-day Confederates found a champion unlike any they had had in many years. His celebrity and wealth offered a semblance of legitimacy for white nationalists across the country, and the message was not lost on them. As former FBI member and counterterrorism expert Frank Figliuzzi has pointed out, “never has our nation had a president who served as a kind of radicalizer-in-chief…. he has given license to those who feel compelled to eradicate what Mr. Trump himself has called an infestation.”

That some people refuse to accept a government that doesn’t uniformly champion whiteness is nothing new for our country. It was not just Trump who attempted to defy the will of the American people. On January 6, 2021, as we have been reminded by recent congressional hearings, the majority of the Republican members of Congress voted to side with the insurrectionists and throw out the results of an election that had been certified by all 50 governors, across party lines.

We are right to be worried about civil war in America, but the concern should not be forestalling another conflict: The imperative of this hour is to finally end the original Civil War.

don’t see race,” Stephen Colbert used to say. Since the phrase was clearly a satirical device, he would regularly add punch lines such as, “People tell me I’m white, and I believe them because I just devoted six minutes to explaining that I’m not a racist.” When it comes to politics, however, many in the media and political establishment also don’t see race, and the results are not so funny. In fact, they’re deadly serious, in terms of their impact on who controls this country and what direction it heads.

Racial identity is one of the most salient and predictive data points that exist. Exit polling in presidential elections began in 1976, and over the subsequent 44 years, voter behavior has diverged sharply along racial lines, with 88 percent of African Americans backing the Democratic presidential nominee and just 40 percent of whites siding with the Democrats.

Yet, despite this mountain of evidence affirming the centrality of race in US politics, it is essentially ignored in almost all electoral analysis, projections, strategy, and planning. Perhaps most notable is the invisibility of race at Nate Silver’s website, FiveThirtyEight, which has established a reputation as a go-to resource for data-driven forecasts about electoral outcomes. It describes its mission as using “data and evidence to advance public knowledge.”

In Silver’s 4,749-word description of his methodology of modeling and forecasting, there is just one passing reference to racial demographics. FiveThirtyEight makes available on Github nearly 200 underlying data sets that inform its work. The array of data is vast and sprawling, spanning pollster ratings, congressional election forecasts over the past several years, and, among other things, a statistical analysis of 381 paintings featured in the Bob Ross show, The Joy of Painting (56 percent of the paintings contained a “deciduous tree”). But nothing on racial demographics and how they affect election outcomes

The Cook Political Report, to its credit, does make available to its subscribers race-specific data on individual congressional districts, and Dave Wasserman often expresses awareness of racial dynamics in his commentary about various races, but Cook’s benchmark Partisan Voting Index (PVI) is decidedly race-neutral.

It’s not just journalists and pundits who ignore racial data. Many top Democratic strategists and leaders also fail, to their own detriment, to look at the electorate in living color. In the first half of 2020, the Democratic group Senate Majority PAC spent nearly $8 million in Iowa, a state where just 8 percent of the voters are people of color. It allocated nothing to Georgia, where whites are just 51 percent of the population, and where Democrat Stacey Abrams had come much closer to winning in 2018 than the Iowa gubernatorial candidate did in the same year. Similarly, the Biden presidential campaign made minimal investment in Georgia, leading Biden to marvel on election night, “We’re still in the game in Georgia, although that’s not one we expected.”

In an electorate with a cavernous racial vote gap, failing to account for that gap leads to distorted and inaccurate analyses. Specifically, it often paints a picture of a voting population that is whiter—and more conservative—than what it really is. For example, The Cook Political Report rated now–US Senator Raphael Warnock’s contest as “Lean Republican” less than a month before the November election. What happened in Georgia is that the analysts and strategists overlooked and underestimated the electoral significance of the voter turnout operation that Abrams had been building for a decade as a way to reduce and ultimately eliminate the racial vote gap in a state undergoing a demographic revolution. Since African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, applying a race-conscious lens to the Peach State’s electoral battles would have revealed that the contests were much more competitive than most analysts believed.

Given the enormous stakes of the midterm elections, there is little margin for error in assessing the competitiveness of congressional races and making smart decisions about strategy and spending over the next 12 weeks. That’s why I have spent the past several months working with a team of talented data scientists to develop the New Majority Index—the first election rating system to specifically incorporate racial demographic data in assessing and rating how competitive a given district is. In addition to the data points that PVI uses—past election results compared to the national average—the NMI goes further and deeper by analyzing a district’s racial diversity and the racial gap in voter turnout among its respective demographic groups (the full methodology of the NMI is described here).

When the additional racial data points are factored in, the picture that emerges is more complete and less dire in terms of Democrats’ prospects for retaining their majority in the House. The Cook Political Report identifies 26 Democratic-held seats as vulnerable, versus just seven Republican-held seats. The NMI, by contrast, shows 11 Democratic seats are most in peril, and 22 Republican seats that could be flipped by addressing the racial voter turnout gap.

Conventional wisdom about the midterm elections misses the mark because it is based on the entirely incorrect premise that the electorate consists of one undifferentiated mass of people—“the voters”—whose political allegiances are buffeted back and forth between the political parties by macro-environmental factors such as inflation and gas prices. Voter behavior differs dramatically by racial group, however, and omitting the data on the racial composition of the electorate leads to incomplete and often inaccurate electoral predictions. The data is there for the analyzing. It’s high time that we retire the notion that there is virtue in “not seeing race.” If we want to understand and have an impact on elections, we need to open our eyes to the racial realities of American politics.

Conventional wisdom holds that Democrats are doomed to defeat in this year’s midterm elections. It is an article of faith that the party that controls the White House automatically loses seats in the next election, so much so that members of the Biden administration are already hiring lawyers in anticipation of needing to fend off investigations by a Republican-led Congress. But such an outcome is not a foreordained law of nature, and Democrats have previously defied the odds—most notably in 1998. The lessons from that contest offer valuable insight about how to maintain Democratic control of the House of Representatives this year.

During Bill Clinton’s second term as president, Democrats shocked the pundits (and, quite possibly, themselves) by increasing their numbers in Congress instead of losing seats. That outcome rocked the Republican Party, with The New York Times writing that the GOP was “stunned by the Democratic resurgence in the midterm elections,” adding, “The Democratic victories were even more remarkable in a year marked by the monthslong scandal over President Clinton’s affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.”

What 1998 proved—and what has been regularly re-affirmed over the past two decades—is that midterms are decided by which party does a better job of getting its supporters to the polls. This data-driven truth runs counter to the popular narrative that fickle swing voters tend to turn their wrath on the incumbent party as a way of showing dissatisfaction with the economy and unpopular public policy choices.

The incorrect understanding of voter behavior was distilled in a FiveThirtyEight article earlier this year titled, “Why The President’s Party Almost Always Has A Bad Midterm.” That piece posited that “the most compelling explanation for the midterm curse is the ‘presidential penalty,’ whereby some voters change their minds and vote against the president’s party.” Barack Obama and his top advisors subscribed to this flawed understanding of voter behavior in the 2010 midterms, with Obama describing his party’s catastrophic losses as “a shellacking.” One of his top strategists, David Axelrod, wrote in his book Believer that Obama’s advocacy for the Affordable Care Act “had ignited a blazing grassroots opposition that would cost him his House majority.”

All of that makes for a nice narrative—which is why the media so hungrily embraces the provocative storyline—but it is absolutely not what happened. Democrats did not lose the House in 2010 because the voters recoiled against Obamacare and punished the president’s party—while plenty of people did hate the idea of people of color being able to afford health care, those haters did not constitute a majority of Americans. What happened in 2010 is that after turning out in record numbers to elect the country’s first Black president, Democratic voters thought their job was done and stayed home in record numbers, leaving the polling places to the rabid Republicans. This chart shows just how dramatically Democratic voter turnout plummeted in 2010.

The importance of voter turnout is also the primary takeaway from the 1998 election. That year, the Democratic Party increased its ranks by four seats, ousting four Republicans. (Technically, they flipped five seats, but the fifth was in a Democratic district that was temporarily held by the Republicans as a result of a fluke in a special election.) The most notable data point from the 1998 contest is that in the seats that changed parties, a higher percentage of Democrats came back out to vote than did members of the Republican Party. The chart below shows the same pattern and tells the same story as the 2010 election—voter turnout determines electoral outcomes.

It is possible that the Republican witch-hunt that resulted in Clinton’s impeachment over lying about a sexual encounter played a role in the political environment, but not in the way many thought. Then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich suspected that Republicans had underestimated “the degree to which this whole scandal became just sort of disgusting by sheer repetition.”

But as the data shows, there is little evidence of people switching their support to back Democrats. What is far more likely is that the ferocity of the Congressional Republican attacks sated the bloodlust of their voters, resulting in the kind of complacency that would plague Democrats in 2010. Satisfied that they didn’t need to send a message, they stayed home. In turn, the attacks on Clinton may well have motivated Democrats to turn out in larger numbers to defend the man they had just re-elected two years earlier. The degree of Democratic motivation and mobilization in response to the impeachment attacks was reflected in the grassroots surge that resulted in the founding of the online activist organization MoveOn. (The very name of the organization comes from their petition, signed by hundreds of thousands of people in 1998, urging Congress to “Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation.”)

Therein lies the most important lesson for Democrats. In order to win in the midterms, they must sound the call to arms and summon their supporters to join the fight. The Republicans are waging all-out political war at the state level against pretty much anybody who isn’t a cis straight white Christian male, and Democrats respond by essentially ignoring the attacks or issuing meek and mild expressions of disapproval. What they should be doing is responding in kind, issuing full-throated defenses of the policies flowing from the conviction that this is a multiracial democracy and not a white nation.

If they do so, they will win and hold their majority in the House of Representatives, where they need 218 votes to maintain control. Biden won the most votes in 227 of those districts, nine more than a majority. But Democrats must inspire those voters to come back and vote in the midterms, and they must invest massive amounts of money in the civic engagement organizations with the best track records of mobilizing voters to the polls. The default position of spending hundreds of millions of dollars running defensive television ads trying to reassure swing voters is a losing strategy rooted in an incorrect understanding of voter behavior. What the 1998 midterms showed is that maximizing turnout is the path to winning in the midterms, and it is not too late to learn that lesson and course correct.

emocrats worried about President Biden’s plummeting polling numbers and the party’s prospects in the midterm elections have stumbled on the solution to their problems: nominating and defending Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. By unapologetically championing racial equality in the form of finally putting an African American woman on the Supreme Court, they have both energized their base and garnered the support of a meaningful majority of the American people.

Over the past year, Democrats have battled waves of bad news in the form of plummeting presidential polling numbers, a stinging electoral defeat in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, and historical headwinds that typically favor the party out of power in midterm elections. Focusing on so-called “kitchen table” issues of Covid relief checks, extended unemployment benefits, eviction moratorium legislation, and a massive, somewhat bipartisan infrastructure bill has failed to move the needle of presidential approval.

The response to the Jackson nomination, however, shows that there is ample reason for hope if the right lessons are learned and followed. The absence of a Black woman on the Supreme Court is not the only modern-day manifestation of centuries of racism and sexism in America. Issues such as voting rights expansion, immigration reform and canceling student debt are all important to and supported by the same constituencies who have rallied to support Judge Jackson.

Over the past year, Republicans have moved with extraordinary velocity to ruthlessly rewrite as many laws at the state level as possible in a desperate and determined effort to restrict democracy and attack anything that does not conform to their notion that America is primarily a straight, white male Christian society. Buoyed by the large numbers of people who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 compared to 2016, they no longer fear electoral repercussions from passing policies that suppress votes, restrict reproductive freedom, target transgender people, and whitewash what children are taught in schools about a country founded by white men who bought and sold Black human beings.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s decision to step down at the end of the current term forced a political confrontation in this country. Democrats are poised to prevail if they continue to embrace this “KBJ strategy,” with its long-term implications for altering the trajectory of electoral politics in a multiracial nation heading towards the midterm elections. The strategy’s success stems from two essential elements—first, unapologetically taking action to redress America’s racial inequality, and then mounting a forceful defense of those steps by drawing connections to African American history and culture.

To his credit, Biden did not back away from his 2020 campaign pledge to nominate an African American woman to the Supreme Court. Despite the usual conservative criticism about any race-conscious approach to addressing the consequences of racism, the president was resolute about the importance of having such a voice on the court, saying, “It’s long overdue.”

During the confirmation hearings, Republican senators unleashed the full fusillade of racially charged attacks that they regularly use to appeal to their base. Senator Ted Cruz took the lead, chastising Jackson—a person who would have likely been held in slavery at the time of the country’s founding—for speaking favorably about the 1619 Project in a speech where she said, “The America that was born in 1776 was not the perfect union that it purported to be.” Cruz followed up that broadside on by raising the current racial bogeyman—so-called “critical race theory”—including showing off poster-sized images from bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi’s book, Antiracist Baby, in an effort to distort Kendi’s message and achieve maximum alarm and concern among white people.

The second part of Democrats’ KBJ strategy came in the form of Senator Cory Booker’s passionate defense of Jackson. Booker squarely placed Jackson’s nomination in the context of the centuries-long struggle for racial justice in America, saying that when he looked at Jackson, “I see my ancestors and yours.” He went on to note “the challenges and indignities” that people of color still face. And he surrounded his argument with specific reference to African American historical icons—Harriet Tubman and Constance Baker Motley. Booker tied up his remarks with an artistic bow by quoting African American poet Langston Hughes’s poem, “Let America Be America Again,” reciting the line that, “the land that never has been yet, but yet must be.”

Biden’s race-specific nomination and Booker’s racially-proud defense has worked spectacularly. In the most recent poll on the nomination, conducted by Marquette University, two-thirds of Americans think the Senate should confirm Judge Jackson. Notably, the support was even higher— 72 percent—among those polled after the hearings began, showing the impact of making a case and resolutely standing by that decision.

Notably the Economist/YouGov poll found strong majority support for the specific action of choosing a Black woman to become our next SCOTUS justice, with 61 percent approving such a step. Even 52 percent of white working-class men—the demographic least supportive of the Democratic Party—backed the appointment of an African American woman to the bench.

The broad backing for the nomination shows that this is among the most popular moves Biden has made as president since he took office two years ago. The breadth of support is amplified by the depth and intensity of enthusiasm among African Americans. From anecdotal evidence of social media posts bursting with pride in witnessing Jackson’s professionalism, poise, and grace to the millions of views of Booker’s defense of her to polling cross-tabs showing that 86 percent of African Americans want to see Jackson on the court, the move has been a home run on all accounts.

The implications of how well the Jackson nomination has unfolded should be both encouraging and instructive. Naming racial inequality as a current and ongoing pressing problem and then offering a specific solution to redress a prominent manifestation of that inequality has the politically powerful result of infusing enthusiasm among Democrats’ most reliable voters—people of color —while not alienating or driving away white voters.

It is easy to lose sight of the fact that a majority of Americans support steps toward racial justice, but an electoral coalition comprising 71 percent people of color and 40 percent whites elected and re-elected an African American as president and then deposed a white nationalist occupier of the Oval Office. With the way the Jackson nomination is unfolding, Democrats now know that leading on and leaning into the fight for racial equality is not only popular, it may be their best hope in holding onto power in the midterm elections.

After Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives in the 2020 elections, many were quick to conclude that the party had moved too far to the left, driving away Latino voters in the process. Exhibit A: Trump’s stronger than expected showing in heavily Latino parts of Texas, which quickly became an article of faith among journalists and operatives alike. Last week’s results in the Texas primary elections, however, shattered that conventional wisdom, as Latino voters flocked to unapologetically progressive candidates. It turns out that Latinos aren’t turned off by progressive politics after all.

In July, data analyst David Shor, one of the most prominent proponents of the idea that left politics repelled Latinos in 2020, spoke to NPR in an interview titled, “Latino Voters Are Leaving The Democratic Party.” Others piled on, with Eric Levitz writing in New York magazine, “No political development worries blue America’s operatives more than Hispanic voters’ rightward drift.” A central data point they cite is the declining Democratic margin in places like Hidalgo County, on the Mexican border, where Barack Obama won by 42 percent in 2012, but Biden bested Trump by only 1.9 percent. The shrinking margins, they say, reflect an exodus of Latinos out of the Democratic Party and over to the Republican ranks, spelling potential doom for the party’s prospects. Shor assigns blame for the smaller margin to “the increased salience of socialism in 2020—with the rise of AOC and the prominence of anti-socialist messaging from the GOP.”

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the a for progressive Latino politics. In last week’s Texas primary elections, unapologetically progressive Latino candidates performed exceedingly well across the state. The population of the state’s 35th Congressional District, which stretches from Austin to San Antonio, is 60 percent Latino. Voters there delivered an overwhelming victory to democratic socialist Greg Casar, an Austin city councilor backed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and running against a much more moderate opponent, Eddie Rodriquez. In the statewide primary for attorney general, progressive former ACLU attorney Rochelle Garza bested both of her opponents by a more than 2 to 1 margin. And in the congressional race on the border—the region Shor and others point to as most indicative of the Latino shift to the right—progressive Jessica Cisneros battled one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, long-time incumbent Henry Cuellar, to a near-tie, sending the race to a runoff in May.

So what gives? How are Latinos both fleeing the perceived left politics of the Democratic Party and also electing candidates from the party’s left wing?

The first answer is that the pundits are misreading the data. Democratic margins have in fact shrunk in South Texas—but not because Latino Democrats are switching their allegiances to the Republicans. In Hidalgo County, for example, Biden got 22,000 more votes than Obama did. Vote totals doesn’t go up if voters are defecting. What requires careful inspection is that Republicans, and Trump in particular, have been doing a better job of mobilizing conservative infrequent voters, while Democrats have neglected the importance of boosting voter turnout. Though Democrats did see an increase in Hidalgo County in 2020, the Republican increase was much larger, with Trump getting 75,000 more votes than Romney received against Obama. That’s what explains the shrinking margin. As Equis Labs outlined in its report on the 2020 election, Trump’s “gains happened among voters usually on the sidelines of politics.”

Therein lies the challenge for Democrats—how to generate greater enthusiasm among Latino infrequent voters. The answer is the opposite of current conventional wisdom: The Democrats’ enthusiasm gap stems from being too timid and moderate, not from being too left and radical.

Two overarching realities predispose people of color, including Latinos, to progressive politics—that is, far-reaching political and economic change. The first reality is economics, in general, and the racial wealth gap, in particular. The average Latino family in America has just $36,000 in assets, while the average white family’s net worth is $188,000. The Latino poverty rate of 15.7 percent is twice as high as that of whites (7.3 percent). It only makes logical sense that prioritizing economic equality would be well-received in a community wrestling with major economic challenges.

The second reality is the unrelenting and escalating promotion of white supremacy. The most extreme and tragic expression of the hostility toward Latinos came in 2019, when a young white man drove 10 hours to El Paso, Tex., headed to a Wal-Mart whose customers were mainly Latino, and proceeded to murder 22 people with an assault weapon. A manifesto that police linked to the killer states that he acted out of fear that “the United States will soon become a one-party state run by Democrats because of the growing Hispanic population.” While that was the most extreme recent example, it is not the only one. Hate crimes against Latinos reached an 11-year high in 2019, according to a 2020 FBI report.

In Texas, anti-Latino hostility gets expressed in myriad ways, from defending monuments, to white supremacist Confederates, to the anti-“critical race theory” bill that stripped out the words “Chicano movement,” “Cesar Chavez,” and “Dolores Huerta” from the education code’s directives about what should be taught in Texas schools. The everyday reality of relentless racism creates the conditions for those most affected by racism to be more receptive to anti-racist politics.

Greg Casar comes from, understands, and speaks to those underlying realities of the Latino lived experience. The second sentence of his website says, “The proud son of Mexican immigrants, Greg has passed policies to protect families from being separated, raised wages for thousands of workers, and has successfully fought to expand civil rights protections.” Proud Mexican-American. Economic equality and civil rights. Followed by a dominating victory. It’s really not that complicated.

The reason Democrats don’t inspire the level of excitement that they could among Latinos is that the first principle of party politics is to not do anything that insecure and anxious white voters might disapprove of. As a result, Democrats keep their distance, muting their support for justice and equality for people of color. Insufficient policy commitments and invisible cultural and symbolic cultural connections to the community make for lukewarm enthusiasm.

If Democrats really want to increase support among Latinos, they should deploy the full arsenal of tools at their disposal. The prominence and prestige of the Bully Pulpit should be used to elevate the prominence and profile of Latino leaders. Biden should invite Harris County’s top executive, Lina Hidalgo, to the White House for a high-profile conversation about innovative public policy solutions to intractable problems. The Democratic National Committee, which has raised $161 million in this cycle, should direct its biggest donors to invest tens of millions of dollars in Latino-led civic engagement organizations such as the Texas Organizing Project. And the White House should use its executive authority to cancel student debt, a move that is supported by 72 percent of Latinos. (A step that makes even more sense given that Latinos have the youngest median age, 30, of all racial groups.)

None of this is rocket science. Stacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo wrote a 4,101 word essay for The New York Times titled, “How to Turn Your Red State Blue.” The secret? “Organizing was and is the soul of how we operate every day. Our organizing centers, always, on everyday people dealing with deep wealth and income inequality and structural racism, with xenophobia and bigotry.”

Last week’s results show that Latinos are ready for leadership that promises change. And when your day-to-day life is defined by economic challenges and racist obstacles, progressive change is the order of the day.

Just as Stacey Abrams’s 2018 Georgia gubernatorial campaign laid the foundation for the transformation of US politics in 2020 and 201, Beto O’Rourke’s 2022 Texas gubernatorial candidacy has the potential to bring about similar long-term revolutionary changes in American politics and public policy priorities for decades to come.

When I first started raising money for Stacey 10 years ago, we had no way of knowing that her work would result in cutting US child poverty in half, removing every single dangerous lead pipe that poisons our nation’s drinking water, and ousting a white nationalist fascist from the White House who tried to destroy democracy itself. But all of those things happened this year. None of them would have been possible without the creation of a civic engagement and voter mobilization machine in Georgia capable of mobilizing millions of voters of color, flipping the two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the Senate 11 months ago. The fight in Georgia is not finished, and Stacey’s announcement last week that  she is running for governor again is one of the most hopeful developments in US politics heading into 2022.

With Beto also mounting a gubernatorial bid next year, the potential for permanently reshaping the national political landscape is enormous. By replicating the Georgia model of organizing everywhere and making massive investments in boosting Democratic voter turnout, Beto can not only win the office in 2022—he can accelerate the transformation of Texas, and by extension American politics, for decades to come.

The Strategic Significance of the South and Southwest

The states in the South and Southwest are the linchpins of the progressive political revolution in America. This is the land where enslaved Black people picked the white cotton that made white people rich. It’s the territory that once belonged to Mexico until it was taken in a violent and bloody war. And it’s true: Both have some of the most conservative politics and politicians in the country. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Texas Governor Greg Abbot are ideological descendants of those who defended slavery and segregation. The ugly truth is that millions of people enthusiastically embrace those politics of white nationalist fear and resentment.

Much less appreciated is the fact that those states are also chock-full of people of color (as well as a meaningful minority of progressive whites). Georgia is teetering on the edge of becoming a “majority minority” state, as the proportion of white people has shrunk to just 50.06 percent of its population. In Texas, people of color are 61 percent of the population; there are as many Latinos, 39 percent, as whites in the state.

Stacey Abrams understood that building a statewide voter turnout operation could transform Georgia politics—and thereby upend the national political balance of power. In so doing, Georgia showed the way, opening the door to a new and better political era. Texas can now blow the door off its hinges, bury the right-wing movement seeking to make America white again, and usher in an era of greater justice and equality for the entire country. As Texas trends blue in coming years, it can flip its Senate seats and create a Texas-sized hole in the electoral college math necessary for any Republican seeking the White House.

Beto Can Win

Let’s be clear. This is not just about laying the foundation for long-term gains over the next several years by giving it the old college try. Beto can absolutely win, and he is uniquely positioned to do so by virtue of the assets built during his 2018 Senate campaign.

The notion that Texas is a “red state” is incorrect. While it is true that the people who cast ballots in recent elections largely supported Republicans, albeit by decreasing margins, the composition of the population of the state as a whole is trending Democratic. (I wrote about this January when I said that Texas is the next Georgia.) Latinos and African Americans are now the majority of the state’s population, and the popular perception of Texas as a place filled primarily with Stetson-wearing white men is fundamentally anachronistic. When you think Texas, you should now think of Selena, Beyoncé, and Megan Thee Stallion. Those Texas-born and raised cultural icons came from the communities that increasingly define the state.

The electorate in 2022 will be even more favorable than it was four years ago when Beto first ran statewide and came within 214,921 votes of winning. Nearly 300,000 people of color in Texas turn 18 every year, with 33 new eligible voters of color every single hour. By the time ballots are cast in November 2022, 1.2 million more young Texans of color will be eligible to vote than was the case four years ago.

In addition to all the new voters of color, there are literally millions of previously ignored and disengaged people of color who have sat out past elections. In 2018, 5.4 million people of color didn’t vote. What we learned in Georgia is that victory depends on massive turnout, and massive turnout requires strong organizational infrastructure working to find and mobilize every possible supporter.

That is the second advantage contributing to Beto’s improved prospects.

One of the hallmarks of Beto’s 2018 candidacy was the heavy emphasis on grassroots, hyper-local voter contact and mobilization. As a result, he has both a valuable network of preexisting relationships and also a literal road map to victory: He drove to all 254 counties in the state in 2017 and ’18, and was probably the only candidate to do so. In the intervening years, taking another page from the Abrams playbook of supporting ongoing civic engagement work, Beto has partnered with voter turnout powerhouses such as the Texas Organization Project. He has also kept his own network alive through the organization Powered By People, which has helped to register 200,000 people since late 2019.

Beto kicked off the gubernatorial campaign in November by focusing on the largely Latino and highly neglected Rio Grande Valley (where Abbott has been cultivating voters and buttressing his image for years), signaling that showing up everywhere will again form the basis of his campaign strategy,

The third pillar of power Beto has going for him is money. Texas is a huge state and, consequently, it is expensive to mount a campaign there. Abbott spent $85 million in 2018. He has already amassed a war chest of $55 million more than one year out from the election.

Beto is quite literally one of the only people in the country with a proven fundraising network capable of going toe-to-toe with the Republican financial juggernaut. In his 2018 campaign, he raised $80 million, and he still has those relationships, connections, and contact info. The continued passion of Beto’s backers shone through in the form of an impressive first day of fundraising in November, where he brought in more than $2 million. In contrast to what typically happens in Texas, the Republican standard-bearer will not be able to massively outspend the Democrats with Beto atop the ticket.

Texas is winnable. Turning it blue will quickly improve the lives of the 29 million people who live there—and the millions more, like me, who have family in the state. The implications for such a victory are even greater. If 2021 has proved anything, it’s that mobilizing voters of color in the South and Southwest is the progressive revolution we need.

Terry McAuliffe’s defeat in Virginia shows what happens when you are in a war, and only one side fights. The raging battle over whether America is primarily a white nation or whether it is a multiracial democracy continues to define US politics, and we now have painful proof that Democrats’ approach of ignoring the attacks and trying to change the subject to non-racial topics is woefully inadequate.

Republican Glenn Youngkin’s campaign caught fire when he ratcheted up his attacks on so-called critical race theory (CRT), code for criticisms of any educational curriculum that addresses the country’s long history of racism and oppression of people of color. In complaining that CRT—a law school construct and not actually taught in pre-college courses in Virginia or anywhere else—teaches children to see everything through a lens of race,” Youngkin made the issue into the 2021 equivalent of Trump’s 2016 proposed wall along the Mexican border—a symbolic rallying cry for whites worried about the country’s rapid racial diversification. McAuliffe responded by trying to tie Youngkin to the unpopular Donald Trump, using race-neutral language, without realizing or mentioning that racism and white nationalism both predate and will outlast Trump.

The combination of Youngkin declaring war and McAuliffe pretending there was no war had two fatal electoral effects. First, Youngkin successfully lit the same fuse that ignited such fervent support for Trump across the country, resulting in the highest Republican vote total for any Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate ever. On the other hand, Democratic voters, especially people of color, were neither informed of the existence of a battle, nor encouraged to engage in it. McAuliffe ran a typical moderate campaign, and people of color voted in typical numbers, with slight increases over their numbers from the last gubernatorial election in 2017. This chart compiled from the exit poll data shows the mathematical difference between summoning your side to the battlefront and pretending there is no battle taking place:

It is not surprising that Youngkin’s racial call to arms resonated so strongly in Virginia, the state where racism and white nationalism began after white settlers began buying Black people in 1619 to do the lucrative but backbreaking work of picking tobacco on land previously occupied by Native Americans. Richmond, Va., was the capitol of the Confederacy, and an earlier generation of whites angry about the 1860 election of a president who didn’t think Black people should be bought and sold turned to violence, murdering thousands of fellow Virginians, starting with the Battle of Bull Run in Virginia’s Prince William County. Virginia is the state with the most monuments to the white nationalist leaders of the Confederacy, and the place where, during a 2017 rally to defend those monuments, James Alex Fields gunned his car into the crowd of anti-racist counterprotesters, tossing 32 year-old Heather Heyer onto his hood and flinging her body several feet away, killing her. After which Donald Trump said there were “very fine people” on both sides of the protest about removing white supremacist statues.

For more than 400 years, many white Virginians have shown that they are willing to fight, so the notion that Democrats could succeed by ignoring the battle was always fanciful and a reflection of the lack of cultural competence that continues to plague Democratic leaders and strategists. It turns out that ignoring the racism of your opponent is actually the worst possible strategy. In her 2001 book The Race Card, Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg revealed how Republicans’ use of coded racial messages were less effective in swaying voters when the implicit was made explicit, finding that “when campaign discourse is clearly about race—when it is explicitly racial—it has the fewest racial consequences for white opinion.”

The problem is obviously not limited to Virginia. The people who believe that this is and should remain primarily a white nation never stopped fighting after the Civil War and have continued to fiercely resist any tentative steps toward making this nation a multiracial democracy, up to and including attacking the United States Capitol (while carrying Confederate flags) and seeking to overthrow the democratic process itself earlier this year. Since January, the white right wing has engaged in a paroxysm of democracy-destruction in states across the country, passing draconian voter suppression legislation, seeking to undermine any accountability for the January 6 insurrection, and, of course, passing laws banning the modern-day bogeyman of CRT.

For the most part, Democrats have done what McAuliffe did—ignore the attacks and hope to change the subject. Little effort and no political capital has been expended on the critical challenges of immigration reform, protecting democratic participation, and police reform. Prominent progressive strategists and writers such as David Schor and Ezra Klein have devoted copious amounts of attention to advocating for what has come to be called “popularism.” As Klein wrote in a 6000 word New York Times manifesto last month,“Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.”

The Virginia results show the folly of that approach. CRT doesn’t even exist, and McAuliffe sure didn’t campaign on it. But it did the trick of alarming white people about the state’s changing racial composition, and McAuliffe’s silence did nothing to rally progressives to turn out in commensurate fashion.

The Republicans are just getting started, and their continued racial call to arms to fearful white voters will now only escalate after Youngkin’s success. But the good news is that when progressives fight, they win. Barack Obama challenged a nation founded in slavery to put a Black man in the White House, and a multiracial majority responded in record numbers. Donald Trump rooted his presidency in white supremacy and racial resentment. With the stakes clearly defined, again, a multiracial majority turned out in historic numbers to wrest back control of the federal government.

In 2022, the conditions are actually very favorable for Democrats to expand their margins in Congress, especially in the Senate where strong candidates of color are running to oust Republicans in Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. There are more than enough people to win those battles, but first we have to recognize that we are in a fight and then summon people to join the battle.

In light of Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s actions repeatedly obstructing progress on policies that would foster greater economic, and racial justice, momentum is gathering for an effort to back a Democratic challenge to her in the 2024 primary when she comes up for reelection. Key state leaders and groups including Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) have launched PrimarySinema, an effort to lay the foundation now for defeating her in 2024. Such an effort makes eminent sense for several political, policy, and moral reasons.

The first reason to primary Sinema is that she’s bad at math. As Willie Brown, former San Francisco mayor and the longest-serving speaker of the California Assembly in history, said after defeating a plot by renegade Democrats to try to topple him from the speakership in 1988, “the first law of politics is you have to learn to count.” Kyrsten Sinema can’t count.

Deepak Bhargava, former president of the Center for Community Change and a leading immigration reform leader in the country, shared his experience with her in a recent edition of his newsletter The Platypus. Bhargava and Sinema had bonded in the early 2000s when she was “a strong ally to immigrants under siege from a crazy state legislature and armed militias who roamed around (and crashed our meetings) with impunity.… she was sometimes the only white person to be seen at them.” Bhargava enthusiastically supported her first congressional run in 2012, but then expressed dismay at her anti-immigrant votes during her first term. When he challenged her on it, she explained, “I gotta do what I gotta do.”

What Sinema thought she “gotta do” was appeal to white moderates in order to win elections, and, in a manifestation of how she is as bad at math as she is at loyalty, she mistakenly thinks that that is how she won her 2018 Senate race. But she is mistaken.

Sinema in 2018 and Joe Biden and Senator Mark Kelly in 2020 all won their elections because of a massive increase in voter participation in Arizona over the past decade. Notably, much of that increase consisted of hundreds of thousands of new voters of color brought into the electorate through the meticulous organizing work of organizations and activists of color such as LUCHA, founded by Alex Gomez and Tomás Robles Jr, and One Arizona, a coalition of two dozen organizations coordinated by Montse Arredondo.

From 2014 to 2018, when Sinema was elected to the Senate, the growing constellation of civic engagement groups registered nearly half a million people to vote, most of them Latino. When Sinema won her Senate seat in 2018, she did so on the strength of a vastly expanded electorate in which 800,000 more people voted than in the previous midterm election in 2014. The One Arizona coalition registered nearly 200,000 people to vote in 2018, and 55,000 newly registered Arizona Democrats cast ballots for the first time that year. Sinema won her seat race by just 56,000 votes.

The one existing data point that superficially supports Sinema’s apparent belief that she possesses a unique and powerful appeal to moderate white voters is the 2018 exit poll finding that she received 45 percent of the white vote. At first glance, that level of white support is notably higher than the 40 percent Hillary Clinton received in the state in her 2016 presidential campaign and comparable to the 46 percent share of the Caucasian constellation that supported Biden last year. But when you dig a little deeper, that 45 percent number is dangerously deceptive and subject to wild misinterpretations (such as believing one has unique and powerful appeal to moderate white voters).

Across the country, 2018 saw a massive mobilization of Democratic voters determined to repudiate everything Trump, resulting in the highest voter turnout rates in 104 years. Democratic candidates across the country, including in Arizona, rode that wave. In Arizona in particular, almost all of the whites who came out in 2016 to vote for Clinton came back out in 2018 to vote for Sinema. Meanwhile, white Republican voters, content that they had installed their white man in the White House, stayed home (or went to the golf course). White Republican turnout plummeted, while white Democratic turnout stayed constant.

The outcome of this enthusiasm gap is that there were fewer white Republicans in the pool of actual voters, resulting in the white Democrats’ having a bigger percentage of those left in the pool, thus the 45 percent showing. Again, this is not evidence of Sinema’s brand having greater appeal with moderate white Arizona voters.

The second reason to primary Sinema is that she’s not an effective politician for Arizona, even on issues where there is demonstrable bipartisan support. She has publicly justified her conservative positions, saying in a 2018 interview with The New York Times, “What I’ve learned to do is use the tools and skills that I’ve learned to be productive and get stuff done…. Getting stuff done is amazing. It’s amazing when you can say, ‘I’ve delivered real results.’” When it came to raising the minimum wage, however, she delivered a death blow to the popular and progressive policy rather than delivering results.

If there’s one issue where there is clear and incontrovertible evidence of widespread public support in Arizona, it’s raising the minimum wage. In 2016, LUCHA and other progressive groups put an initiative on the ballot to raise the state’s minimum wage. In the same year that Trump won the state with 48 percent of the vote, the minimum wage measure passed with 58 percent of the vote. In nearly every single county, including all those won by Trump, the minimum wage measure passed handily, improving the quality of life for more than 1 million Arizonans and their families.

And yet, this past March, when the Senate was on the precipice of passing an increase in the minimum wage, Sinema memorably and cavalierly sauntered down the aisle in the Senate to vote no, dooming the measure. Bringing no results to the many Arizonans who would have benefited significantly from the policy—a policy whose fate she held in her hands.

The third reason to primary Sinema is that she is torpedoing the prospects for Democrats’ holding on to the seat in the 2024 election and thereby jeopardizing the party’s prospects for controlling Congress. The statewide success in recent years of Democrats Sinema, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, Senator Mark Kelly, and Joe Biden has illuminated the elements of a winning coalition in Arizona. None of those candidates won the white vote, meaning that their success depended on large turnout and strong support from voters of color.

Smart campaigns look to maximize the number of their strongest supporters, and they carefully track demographic trends. People of color are the most reliable and dependable Democratic voters, with 70 percent of Latinos supporting Sinema in 2018. The upside for Democrats among the Latino population is enormous. Two-thirds of that community tends to vote Democratic, and there are still half a million Latinos who did not vote in 2020. The pool of eligible Latino voters will only grow in coming years, as revealed in the recently released Census data showing that people of color now make up 47 percent of the total population and 57 percent of people under 18. More than 100,000 Arizona young people turn 18 every year.

Not only is Sinema failing to make the most of this structural systemic opportunity, but she’s actively alienating the very population that constitute the core of a winning coalition. Despite the central role played by the civic engagement coalition in delivering hundreds of thousands additional votes in an election that she won by just 56,000 votes, The New York Times reported, “She has not once met with his group or its partners since taking office in 2019.” Refused to even talk to them. That is not how smart politicians solidify and expand their support.

While 2024 may seem a long way away, the damage Sinema is doing is happening right now, and she’s acting this way because she thinks she won’t face political consequences. In fact, she thinks these actions will add up to electoral success. But her math is wrong, as is her moral compass.

And that leads to the fourth and final reason to primary her—her betrayal of her own principles and what that says about her character and place in the political firmament.

In a book chapter titled “The Moral Compass of Ambition,” biographer Dan Carter tells a powerful story about former Alabama governor and staunch segregationist George Wallace. In reflecting on his life, Wallace told an interviewer, “I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes—and I couldn’t make them listen.… Then I began talking about niggers—and they stomped the floor.” While Sinema has not, that we know of, taken to talking about niggers, her ambition has broken her moral compass, leading her to pander to the same white racial fears and resentments that motivated whites in Alabama to elect Wallace as their leader.

For that reason alone, she should face a primary challenge, but, as outlined above, there are multiple more pragmatic and realpolitik reasons to begin the process now of fielding a strong challenge in 2024. Backing the Primary Sinema effort is an excellent place to start.

Nina Turner has been criticized for a lot of things in the wake of her loss in the Cleveland, Ohio, special election last week. The conventional wisdom is that her politics were too leftist, and that she was too confrontational, to win in a time when Biden-like moderate politics are the order of the day. Those takes are nonsense; the race was eminently winnable. If there is a single critical mistake Turner made, it was placing her campaign in the hands of strategists who squandered her financial firepower on ineffective and ill-conceived expenditures.

I grew up in Cleveland; former Representative Marcia Fudge attended my grandfather’s church; and I’ve known and supported Turner since her 2014 run for Ohio secretary of state. (She was a guest on my podcast two weeks ago.)

Last week, a friend who lives in the district took her mother, an older woman of color, to the polls to cast her ballot. My friend’s mom asked her, “Which candidate will fight more for poor people?” When my friend answered that Turner was unquestionably the stronger champion of the poor, her mom said, “Well, then, I’m voting for Nina.” In that district, there are a lot of poor people. The median income is just $37,000, far below the national average of $60,000.

The implications of Turner’s loss for the future of the Bernie Sanders movement are profound. The defeat should be a wake-up call about the challenges inherent in translating the power of a movement built by the presidential candidacies of an older white man into a lasting political force that can elect progressive people of color and advance social justice public policy agenda in the 2020s. That is the untold story of the OH-11 race. From the perspective of accruing the power to make possible the changes that poor people across America need, I see three big takeaways from Turner’s defeat.

Being Attacked Shouldn’t Have Been Surprising

It should have come as no surprise that many establishment figures in the Democratic Party opposed Turner’s candidacy. As Frederick Douglass so eloquently articulated in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Those who want the outcome of justice and equality without the struggle to get there are people who “want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

Although it is indeed unusual for members of the Congressional Black Caucus to weigh in on a primary election between two Black candidates, it should have been expected that congressional leaders such as James Clyburn might swoop in at the last minute to oppose Turner. That is what happens in an arena where the loyalty of its members is the cornerstone of power in the Democratic caucus.

Nor should the high-dollar opposition of outside groups such as Third Way have been surprising: The organization spent a quarter of a million dollars to defeat Turner. For many years,  Third Way has been far more focused on the perceived electoral risks of advocating for justice and equality than on actually achieving justice and equality. Not only should such opposition have been expected; it should have alerted Turner and her campaign’s officials to prepare for a ferocious fight, to get ready for the awful roar of the ocean’s many waters in the form of attack ads and other onslaughts.

The Bernie Money Machine is Powerful

My second takeaway is that Sanders’s money machine is still a very powerful force in American politics. In both 2016 and 2020, Sanders raised more than $200 million, an extraordinary sum of money that is on par with what Barack Obama raised in his 2008 primary campaign. Such a financial engine can be a potent political force, and its continued relevance was on full display in helping Turner raise $4.5 million, an astounding sum for a small, off-year election in northeast Ohio—more than twice the $2.1 million haul of her opponent Shontel Brown. That is the kind of money that can propel people to positions of power and influence. And that’s part of what makes Turner’s loss particularly painful.

The Tough Path to Victory

Looking through Turner’s spending reports, it’s clear that the people who ran her campaign defaulted to the typical playbook of putting far more money into television and digital ads than into the nitty-gritty work of getting people to cast ballots.

This strategic blunder is especially egregious because the formula for winning special elections, which are typically low-turnout affairs, is to focus on that humble work. That’s how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez prevailed in her 2018 upset win. Her communications coordinator, Corbin Trent,  explained that their campaign strategy identified a universe of 75,000 potential supporters, and “then we knocked on their doors, we sent them mail, we knocked on their doors again, we called them.”

That is the path to victory—knocking on doors, calling people, identifying supporters, and then getting those supporters to the polls. It is simple in concept, yet challenging in execution. And it is made more challenging to pull off in the realm of professional politics, because it is meticulous, nonglamorous, and not profitable for consultants. Developing and running television and digital ads is far easier than hiring, training, and tracking dozens of volunteers going door to door. A get-out-the-vote operation isn’t cheap, either. But when you have more than $4 million, it is eminently achievable.

But Turner’s team squandered the bulk of her money, spending nearly $2 million of the $3.7 million expenditures on television and digital ads, according to the mid-July filing with the Federal Election Commission. (Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 campaign, by contrast, spent no money at all on television ads, according to their FEC report.) There is scant evidence in the FEC filings of any meaningful Turner campaign resources going to canvassing and voter turnout: The category for GOTV lists just $5,000 in expenditures.

Had Turner’s team focused on funding teams of canvassers and phone bankers to identify supporters and then encourage those supporters to cast their ballots, she would almost certainly have secured the 38,000 votes necessary to win. In their benchmark study on get-out-the-vote efforts, Yale professors Donald Green and Alan Gerber quantified the costs, and The New York Times summarized their findings, writing, “Door-to-door canvassing, though expensive, yields the most votes. As a rule of thumb, one additional vote is cast from each 14 people contacted. That works out to somewhere between $7 and $19 a vote, depending on the pay of canvassers…. Canvassers who matched the ethnic profile of their assigned neighborhoods were more successful.” Green and Gerber updated their findings in the 2019 edition of their book, reaffirming the efficacy of canvassing, while upping the cost per vote to roughly $33 per vote secured. By those metrics, Turner’s $4 million could have yielded something like 121,000 votes in a race where she needed 38,000 to win.

I devoted an entire chapter of my 2016 book Brown is the New White to the need for better, smarter, more culturally competent campaign consultants—titled, “Fewer Smart-Ass White Boys” (borrowing from the phrase popularized by Andrew Young, former mayor of Atlanta and lieutenant to Martin Luther King). I warned about operatives who display “a persistent disregard for the country’s communities of color as a political force and an inability to do the basic math necessary to appreciate the size and power of the electorate of color.”

The people who were responsible for spending the biggest chunks of the Turner campaign were consultants from the white-run firms Canal Partners Media, Aisle 518 Strategies, and Devine, Mulvey, Longabaugh. The political director was Trevor Elkins, a white man from small, largely white Cleveland suburb. Who among these folks had the relationships, experience, or network to hire dozens of local residents and run a full-fledged canvassing operation in the Black neighborhoods of that district where nearly 300,000 African American voters live?

A similar situation happened in 2016 with Lucy Flores’s congressional run in Nevada. Already familiar to voters from a statewide 2014 run for lieutenant governor, Flores ran for Congress in an election where 13,000 votes would have been enough to win. As a Bernie supporter, she received $1 million in funding from his national network of supporters, more than enough to do the nitty-gritty voter identification and mobilization necessary to capture the seat. But the white consultants who ran her campaign overemphasized television ads, and she lost.

This is the most urgent lesson from Turner’s defeat. The United States is in the middle of a modern-day Civil War, with the neo-Confederate forces having taken over the Republican Party and unleashed an aggressive assault on democracy and the very notion that America is anything but a white nation. Too many in the Democratic Party hierarchy fail to appreciate the nature of this battle and accordingly underinvest in leaders of color who will be fierce fighters for justice. The Sanders movement has the potential to embrace and elevate the kinds of leaders who will take the fight to the right, but opportunities will be lost if campaigns are run by consultants who lack the cultural competency and commitment required to win elections in communities of color.

Alarm bells are ringing about the dangerous implications of the behavior of the Republican Party. By doubling down on defense of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, punishing any members who reject that lie, refusing to support an investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and unleashing a fusillade of voter suppression legislation across the country, many see these actions as an ominous new trend in American politics that threatens the foundations of our democracy itself.

Viewed through the lens of history, however, none of this is new. The hard truth is that whichever United States political party has been most rooted in the fears, anxieties, and resentments of white people has never cared much about democracy or the Constitution designed to preserve it. Those who do want to make America a multi-racial democracy must face this fact with clear eyes and stiff spines to repel the ever-escalating threats to the nation’s most cherished institutions and values.

Contemporary analysis of domestic politics is obscured by the historical fact that white Americans fearful of the ramifications of equality for people of color have moved their political home from the Democratic Party, which was their preferred vehicle at the time of the Civil War, to the Republican Party, where they reside today. In the 19th century, Democrats dominated the South, led 11 states to secede from the Union, and waged a murderous multiyear war against their fellow Americans. Today, it is the Republicans who are the standard-bearers of the modern-day Confederate cause.

Whatever the label, the party that prioritized protecting white rights has always been more willing to destroy the country than accept a situation where people of color are equal and can participate in the democratic process.

Donald Trump was not the first politician to refuse to accept the results of a presidential contest. After Abraham Lincoln and the anti-slavery Republican Party won the election of 1860, the Confederates did not waste time filing lawsuits and trying to bully state election officials into overturning their state’s election results. They simply severed their ties with the United States of America, seceded from the union with the defiant 1861 Cornerstone Speech by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declaring that “the negro is not equal to the white man,” and quickly organized an army that killed hundreds of thousands of their formerly fellow countrymen.

The violence, bloodshed, and contempt for America’s democratic institutions did not end with the conclusion of the Civil War. Just five days after the Confederates formally conceded defeat and surrendered on April 9, 1865, Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot the president of the United States in the back of the head, having told colleagues that Lincoln’s speech in support of allowing Black people to vote “means nigger citizenship,” with Booth vowing, “That is the last speech he will ever make.”

Even passage of constitutional amendments ending slavery, securing equal protection of the laws to people of all races, and guaranteeing the right to vote (the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments) meant little to the political leaders committed to the concept that America is, first and foremost, a white nation. Much as Southern leaders in the past few months have passed a blizzard of voter suppression legislation in states across the former Confederacy, so too did their predecessors furiously draft laws designed to accomplish with pens and ink what they could not achieve with guns and bullets.

In her book One Person, No Vote, Carol Anderson outlines the “dizzying array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled voter registration rules” adopted in 1890, all designed to evade and undermine the 15th Amendment’s provision prohibiting laws restricting voting “on account of race.” The antidemocratic motivation behind these new laws was cheerily articulated at the time by Virginia State Representative Carter Glass, who explained in 1890 that that era’s election law reform was designed to ““eliminate the darkey as a political factor.”

A hundred years after the end of the Civil War, the Confederates continued the crusade of doing everything in their power to stop America from becoming a multiracial democracy. As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, public officials and party leaders across the old Confederacy openly defied and actively undermined the pillars of American democracy.

In response to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools, public officials in Virginia’s Prince Edward County shut down the entire school district for five years. After civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964 for helping register Black people to vote, the state’s leaders essentially sided with the white nationalist domestic terrorists responsible for the killings by refusing to investigate or prosecute the murderers (some of whom were public officials themselves).

The partisan political migration of the defenders of the Confederacy began as the Black demands for the constitutionally-mandated rights of equality and democracy began to reach a crescendo in the South in the 1960s. After Democrat Lyndon Johnson unequivocally embraced the cause of multiracial democracy declaring in a 1965 nationally television address that “their cause is our cause…and we shall overcome,” fearful whites felt betrayed and abandoned, and Republicans swooped in to offer their party as the home for white racial resentment.

What has been dubbed the Southern strategy began in the 1960s with South Carolina segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond striking a deal with Richard Nixon to rally white support for Nixon against Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace’s more naked appeals to aggrieved whites. It worked like a charm, building to the point where Ronald Reagan sealed the deal by offering the unmistakable symbolic solidarity of beginning his 1980 presidential candidacy with a pro “states’ rights” speech to a massive crowd “almost entirely made up of whites” in the very county where Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner were murdered.

More recently, the reaction to the election and governance of a Black president mirrored prior periods of contempt for the Constitution and resistance to public policies designed to benefit a multiracial electorate. Echoing the actions of those who shut down school districts rather than provide public education to students of all colors, contemporary Confederates shut down the entire federal government in 2013 in attempt to stop the government from providing health care through the Affordable Care Act to Americans. It is no accident that the 11 states of the Confederacy were the leaders in rejecting funding for Medicaid.

Today, 82 percent of Republican voters are white, and the party has comfortably won the white vote in every single presidential election since Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The political home of the defenders of the Confederacy and white power has shifted, but the strategies and tactics of that constituency and its leaders has not.

While none of this is new, fortunately the efforts to defend and expand democracy also extend back over a century, offering important lessons about how to repel efforts to destroy our democratic institutions.

The primary strategy that has worked—and we now have 160 years of empirical evidence to back this up—has been putting the full force of the federal government on the side of equality, justice, and democracy for people of all racial backgrounds, not just white people.

What hasn’t worked is seeking compromise with those contemptuous of democracy, the Constitution, and the social contract underlaying it. Compromise only works when all parties are operating in good faith and subscribing to the same set of core values. How do you compromise with people who identify more with lynchers than with those being lynched?

The most dramatic example of deploying federal power, of course, is the Civil War itself. Also instructive is that after the military conflict, clear-eyed congressional leaders recognized the fragility of the victory and the ferocity of the vanquished and made sure to pass constitutional amendments to entrench equality in the country’s governing document in the form of the 13, 14th, and 15th amendments (and even those were fiercely resisted, barely mustering enough votes in Congress).

In the aftermath of the violent and bloody attacks on peaceful protesters in the 1960s, who thought that the 15th Amendment did in fact apply to them, Lyndon Johnson and Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to, as Johnson said, “establish a simple, uniform standard which cannot be used, however ingenious the effort, to flout our Constitution.”

In 2021, the imperative of the hour is to pass similar legislation as was advanced in prior periods of intense conflict with the enemies of equality. Specifically, HR 1, the For the People Act, and HR 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, will both protect the democratic process and advance the cause of expanding democracy that the Republicans are working so feverishly to obstruct.

In addition to the voting rights legislation, President Biden can use the full force of the bully pulpit of the presidency. More than 100 corporate executives have expressed concern about the viral spread of voter suppression litigation, and he should rally all of them behind a national crusade for democracy where every corporate, entertainment, and sports leader uses their platform to aggressively promote and support voting. Every Amazon package, for example, could come with an 800 number on it on how to vote. Google could provide easy searching for how to vote just as it’s doing for vaccines. iPhones could facilitate voter registration.

Failure to meet this moment would be catastrophic. From the January 1861 start of Confederate secession from the Union to the January 6, 2021, attempted insurrection and failed coup supported by 147 Republican members of Congress, the political party fueled by white fear has scoffed at the Constitution and mocked the notion of fidelity to country over Caucasians. The result after the Civil War was nearly 100 years of Jim Crow voter suppression, widespread domestic racial terrorism, and raging inequality and injustice. None of this is new. The question is, do the current political leaders recognize what is happening, and, if so, do they have the courage to do something about it?

If Democrats want to hold onto control of the House and Senate in 2022, they should talk more about defunding the police, not less.

The video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killing an unarmed George Floyd last May unleashed an international outcry against police brutality, a national racial reckoning about long-standing systemic racism in America, and a demand from the Black Lives Matter movement to “defund the police.” Coincidentally contemporaneous with Chauvin’s murder trial and the latest Minnesota shooting of an unarmed Black man, Daunte Wright, a growing chorus of voices is now saying that Democrats paid a political price for their proximity to that controversial slogan and should do everything they can to distance themselves from the demand if they want to prevail in future elections.

A deeper dive into the 2020 electoral data, however, shows that the greatest upside for Democrats in working to maintain their congressional majorities is to solidify their strength with the young people transforming the composition of the electorate and to do so by embracing progressive policy positions such as reforming the police.

The origin of the debate stems from the fact that Democrats lost several congressional races that they had hoped to win in 2020, reducing their majority in the House of Representatives by 12 seats and falling short in several US Senate contests. Assigning blame to the “defund” slogan began immediately after the November election when Democratic House members who’d only narrowly won reelection vented their anger about attack ads suggesting they were soft on crime. This point of view gained traction in December when former president Barack Obama criticized the phrase as a “snappy slogan,” adding, “You lost a big audience the minute you say it.”

And last month, multiple articles with wide reach have amplified the argument that the slogan proved to be political poison in the 2020 elections. Analyzing Trump’s surprising strength in some Latino areas, former Obama staffer David Shor stated in an interview with New York magazine, “We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on.” As a result, Shor asserted, “conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.” Shor’s individual interview was then elevated and amplified when Obama retweeted the article to his 130 million Twitter followers.

In a similar vein, a recent New York Times column quoted several pollsters and strategists who maintained that there was a significant “defection of Hispanic voters” which can be attributed to a “cultural agenda” that “is driving a number of minority voters into the opposition party.”

These analyses misinterpret the big picture of what really happened in last year’s elections. To the extent that there was any erosion of support for Democrats among voters who had previously backed Clinton, those numbers represent a mere mathematical molehill compared to the mountain of conservative infrequent voters who turned out in extraordinary numbers to try to keep Trump in office.

While it is true that Trump did perform significantly better in some heavily Latino areas than he did in 2016, Democrats did not do worse. Biden received more votes than Hillary Clinton did in every single racial group. If Democrats were shedding large numbers of voters in key constituencies, how did Biden’s number go up, resulting in his receiving 3.6 million more Latino votes than Clinton?

Consider Hidalgo County, a 91 percent Latino county on the border of Texas and Mexico where Trump increased his share of the vote from 29 percent in 2016 to 41 percent in 2020. Despite the Democratic margin’s shrinking significantly, Biden nonetheless got 9,390 more votes than Clinton received four years earlier. An underappreciated story of the election was the surge of Trump voters, an increase of 41,885 in Hidalgo. Crystal Zermeno, data strategist for the Texas Organizing Project, recognized during the early voting period last October and warned at the time that Trump was turning out more of his infrequent voters than Biden was.

While deconstructing data from places where Democrats fell short can sometimes be helpful, the best way to understand how to win is to learn the lessons from the places where Democrats did, in fact, win. The shining example of Democratic success this past election occurred in Georgia where the party defeated the incumbent president, ousted two Republican senators, and scored its only pickup of a House seat formerly held by a Republican. Stacey Abrams and her campaign manager Lauren Groh-Wargo have written eloquently and at length about the ingredients of their success, but one piece of the picture that has not received nearly enough attention is the role of young people in the political transformation of Georgia and, by extension, America.

In the runoff elections that decided control of the Senate, Georgia’s 18-to-29-year-olds provided the margin of victory in those closely fought contests by giving Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff 67 percent of their votes, according to the exit polls. Biden’s defeat of Trump was similarly attributable to young people, 56 percent of whom backed him while Trump carried voters over the age of 44. The rising tide of increased youth turnout also lifted Carolyn Bourdeaux into the House of Representatives. Despite being attacked as wanting to defund the police, Bourdeaux nonetheless attracted 50,000 more votes than she did in her narrow 2018 loss, giving House Democrats their sole pickup of a Republican-held seat.

The strategic significance of this population is not just how progressive but how underutilized they are. Of all age groups, the lowest percentage of eligible voters who actually cast ballots is among 18–29-year-olds. Just 44 percent of all potential young people voted in Georgia last year, as compared to the 80 percent of the eligible voters over 45 who cast ballots.

Furthermore, the pool of young voters is growing each year as teenagers turn 18. By the time of the 2022 midterm elections, 8 million young people across the country, nearly half of them people of color, will become eligible to vote.

If the strategic electoral focus is on solidifying the support of that progressive and rapidly growing sector of the population, then the approach to issues of racial justice, in general, and Black Lives Matter and its demand to defund the police, in particular, should be the opposite of what is currently being counseled. While older Americans express greater ambivalence and anxiety about the concept of Black lives mattering, the under-30 crowd is far more enthusiastic and supportive. A Gallup poll last summer found that 70 percent of 18–34-year-olds supported “reducing the budgets of police departments and shifting the money to social programs,” more than twice the 32 percent level of support of those over 50.

The data shows that Democrats need not succumb to the Faustian bargain of distancing themselves from the movement for racial justice in order to achieve electoral success. They don’t have to rest their political prospects on the hope that police officers will kill unarmed Black people only in non-election years. They can in fact retain both their values and enough votes to win. If Democrats double down on their advantage among young voters, they can have both justice for Floyd and a lasting majority in Congress.

The 2020 election showed that there is a right way and a wrong way for Democrats to try to win in states where they have historically lost. The extent to which they have learned those lessons will be revealed by the ways in which they pursue the winnable open Senate seats in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina next year.

The right way to enhance the prospects of victory is to work to recreate the multiracial Obama coalition that twice powered the first Black president to victory. The wrong way is to try to convince Trump voters to see the error of their ways and hope they will shift their allegiance to the Democrats.

I fear that too much attention is already being paid to the wrong way—particularly in my home state of Ohio, where Rob Portman’s retirement has created an opening and lots of opinions about how Democrats can win in the Midwest.

The Right Way

For too long, Democrats haven’t even tried to repeat Obama-era turnout, believing that the 44th president was a once-in-a-lifetime talent, never to be seen again. But smarter analysts who saw the movement that propelled the man understood that those voters would come out again and again if properly invested in and inspired.

That is exactly what happened in Georgia and Arizona over the past decade, and last November those states demonstrated that building on and expanding the Obama coalition of people of color and progressive whites can actually flip a formerly red state.

Achieving that kind of success doesn’t happen by accident. It takes sustained investment, at scale, over many years. You have to try, and you have to keep at it.

Take Georgia. Obama did relatively well there in 2008, without even trying, winning 47 percent of the vote despite spending no money to contest the state. Stacey Abrams did try, and her historic 2018 gubernatorial bid secured more votes in the state than Obama won, something unheard of for a midterm election. After that election, the Abrams coalition kept trying, dramatically expanded the number of voters of color, and won the state for Biden (who also didn’t try, but nonetheless benefited from the Georgia activists and organizers). And then that same coalition tried some more, won both Senate runoff elections in January, and flipped control of the entire US Senate from red to blue. As Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo recently explained in an article detailing their work in Georgia, “Years of planning, testing, innovating, sustained investment and organizing yielded the record-breaking results we knew they could and should.”

Out West, Arizona followed a similar path as Georgia and arrived at the same destination of Democratic success. Years of methodically registering, organizing, and mobilizing voters of color resulted in 253,000 more Latinos voting in 2020 in a state that Joe Biden won by 10,457 votes. No Democratic presidential candidate had won either Georgia or Arizona in over 25 years.

The Wrong Way

Then there’s the wrong way. Over the course of the past several years, Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan has been a leading proponent of the wrong way. Ryan, who is likely to throw his hat in the ring for the Ohio Senate seat, made clear that his focus is on trying, as he put it in a recent MSNBC interview, to “capture those working-class people who may have voted for Donald Trump.” He recently diagnosed the dire situation of Buckeye State Democrats by saying that “80 to 90 percent of the problem is and has been the national brand, the perception of what Democrats believe and stand for nationally on the coasts, versus what we stand for as Democrats in Ohio.”

As someone who grew up in Ohio and now lives on “the coast” in the lefty San Francisco Bay Area, I’m curious about exactly what parts of the “national brand” Ryan bemoans. Were Black Lives Matter protests, for example, about coastal hot-button issues, or were they relevant to Ohioans worried about the well-being of young Black boys like 12-year-old Cleveland resident Tamir Rice, who was killed by the police?

Let’s call a spade a spade. Ryan is talking about white people. He certainly wasn’t referring to Ohioans of color—84 percent of whom regularly voted Democratic last year. The actual—typically unstated—critique is that Ohio Democrats can’t win because white Ohioans think the party is too closely aligned with people of color. Or, in Ryan’s formulation, candidates must show the Trump voters that the election “is about them” (emphasis in the original, at the 3:14 mark of the interview linked to above). About them. As opposed to caring about someone else, who is not like them and does not look like them.

Myriad case studies have now shown that white Trump voters are largely driven by racial resentment and anxiety about the country’s demographic changes, a phenomenon Joy Reid calls “demographic panic.”

Panic can drive voter turnout, and that is the under-appreciated story of 2020. While Trump lost support among some white women and suburban Republicans, he still increased his vote total by 11 million people. These were people panicked by the prospect of losing the leadership of the man working to make America white again. But, as the Georgia runoff election showed, without Trump on the ticket, Republican turnout dropped back toward typical levels, and the multiracial Obama coalition prevailed.

The problem Democrats face in seeking to secure the support of more white voters is not insufficient attention to economic anxieties. After all, if Democrats were so obviously not the party of working people, then why do so many people of color—who, given this country’s “staggering racial disparities,” have far more reason to be economically anxious than even working-class whites—consistently vote Democratic? The real problem facing Democrats in Ohio and other swing states is an unwillingness and inability to speak to the racial realities and demographic changes that animate white political behavior.

The way to win over white voters is not to downplay racial inequality and systemic racism but to confront it head-on and then highlight the common ground between people of color and their Caucasian countrymen. That’s what Obama did in his famous “race speech” in 2008 when incendiary clips of sermons from his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, inflamed the fears of white voters across the country. Obama—against the advice of his white consultants—grappled directly with the issue, telling white people that “your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.”

And then Obama won. In Ohio. Twice.

To be clear, challenging white voters to rise to their highest and best selves will not result in securing the support of the majority of white people. No Democratic presidential candidate has won the majority of whitessince Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, telling a joint session of Congress and a national television audience, “We shall overcome.” Even Senator Sherrod Brown, the unicorn success story of Ohio Democrats, peaked at 47 percent support from whites in his 2018 relection campaign (against an unknown and underfunded candidate).

While following the high road won’t win the majority of whites, it can win enough of them to win. There is a meaningful minority of whites who always vote Democratic, embrace rather than fear cultural change, and support the idea of living in a multiracial democracy. Even while losing badly in Ohio in 2016, Hillary Clinton still secured 33 percent of the white vote. But that meaningful minority only gets to become part of the majority when paired with large and enthusiastic support of voters of color. Or, as Jesse Jackson said in his 1984 convention speech, “when Blacks vote in great numbers, progressive whites win. It’s the only way progressive whites win.”

Biden rebuilt one part of the Obama coalition in Ohio, increasing his share of the white vote to 39 percent, close to Obama’s 41 percent in 2012. Where he fell short was with voters of color, who made up just 16 percent of the electorate, down sharply from the 21 percent share they comprised in 2012.

And therein lies the answer. The right way to win is to massively invest in increasing turnout of voters of color. Obama’s campaign deployed 800 staff people to knock on doors, identify voters, and get them to the polls. Georgia has nurtured a network of community-based organizations with a presence in every county in the state. Arizona has created a coalition of dozens of organizations spanning the entire progressive spectrum from labor unions to organizations working in the Latino, African American, and Native American communities.

Democrats can absolutely hold, and even expand, their majority in the Senate, but it will require learning the right lessons and following the right path. That is how the left can beat the right in 2022.

When I first met Stacey Abrams 10 years ago, I knew right away that the work she was doing in Georgia had great potential. While Stacey has graciously credited my wife and me as being among her first national supporters—even joking that we supported her before it was logical—the ingredients for success in Georgia were there all along, if you knew what to look for. Now that the world has come to marvel at the Georgia miracle, we should be thinking about what states are next and what lessons from the Georgia journey can be applied to the political transformation of other states.

The next state that is most clearly poised for a Georgia-like trajectory is Texas.

I’m working on a book for the New Press analyzing the success stories in states that are upending the national political balance of power, and I’ve identified four factors that are critical to winning. All of these elements were present in Georgia, and Texas has a similar constellation of ingredients for success (it is important to note that while Georgia now commands the national spotlight, Virginia and Arizona have also blazed similar paths, with Virginia actually being somewhat farther along on the journey than most other states).

Favorable Terrain

The threshold factor for determining how likely a state is to flip from red to blue is the composition of the population and the demographic trends of that population. Largely overlooked in the celebration of Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory was the fact that he got 47 percent of the vote in Georgia although he had removed staff from the state and stopped advertising there. Obama lost the Peach State by 205,000 votes, and there were nearly 1 million people of color who were eligible to vote but didn’t cast ballots. You didn’t have to be great at math to see that increasing the number of voters of color was the path to making major change in Georgia.

Texas at the start of this decade is actually even more promising than Georgia was at the start of the last decade. The Lone Star State has the second-largest pool of nonvoting people of color of any state in the country (second only to already-blue California), and the number of potential voters of color far exceeds the margin of difference in statewide elections. Joe Biden lost Texas by 631,221 votes, and despite the record turnout on both sides, 4.5 million eligible people of color still did not vote, according to exit polls and Census data. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke lost his Senate bid by 215,000 votes in an election in which 5.4 million people of color didn’t cast ballots. The still-untapped potential in Texas is enormous, which is exactly why the conservatives work so hard to suppress the vote there.

Level 5 Leaders

A key cornerstone of success is leadership—in general and, in particular, the presence of what the author Jim Collins calls a Level 5 Leader. Collins, who in his book Good to Great analyzed 1,435 corporations to distill the essential elements that distinguished the most successful organizations, described Level 5 leaders as follows:

Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious—but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves…. [They] are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce results.

Stacey Abrams is such a leader. Although she is super-famous now, what’s most remarkable is how her ambition has not been for herself but for the cause. When he was still Senate minority leader—dreaming of becoming majority leader—Chuck Schumer begged Abrams to run for the US Senate in 2019, but she turned down the entreaties and instead encouraged the Rev. Raphael Warnock to enter the race. While at the beginning of the 2020 presidential race, it seemed like every white Democratic politician who had ever run for office decided that they could and should be president, Stacey passed on the race to, as she is fond of saying, “do the work.” And the work that she did laid the foundation for ousting a white nationalist from the White House and flipping control of the United States Senate.

Texas is blessed to have Level 5 Leaders as well. Two of the key ones are Michelle Tremillo and Brianna Brown, the executive director and deputy director of the Texas Organizing Project. The fact that you probably haven’t heard of them is actually a testament to their Level 5 humility. Like Stacey, they are maniacally focused on “doing the work,” and have built TOP into a relentless and effective civic engagement machine that has helped tip electoral outcomes in cities and counties across the state. As graduates of elite universities, they each could have had far more lucrative and prestigious professional careers, but they have made meaningful life decisions to focus their energies and talents on the cause of transforming Texas.

Texas has so many Mexican Americans and African Americans (a combined 53 percent of the state’s population) for a reason—the land there used to belong to Mexico and was annexed into the United States through war and bloodshed in the 1840s so that the residents of the state could continue to hold Black people in chattel slavery. Just as Abrams’s success is rooted in Georgia’s civil rights history, it is not inconsequential that Mexican-American and African-American daughters of Texas are leading an organization that is entrenched in and driving change.

Strong Civic Engagement Organizations

A large pool of potential voters of color in a state undergoing demographic transformation is an essential component of success, but translating that population potential into political power requires well-run, community-based, disciplined organizations. The presence of a strong civic engagement infrastructure is the third pillar of transforming a state.

Virginia’s political metamorphosis over the past decade would not have been possible without the steady and savvy work of New Virginia Majority and other key groups that registered 300,000 voters and knocked on 2.5 million doors to pave the path for Democrats to take control of all branches of government in 2019. The work that resulted in Arizona electing two Democratic senators and defeating Trump started 10 years ago when a constellation of community-based organizations came together to form the One Arizona coalition, which has steadily organized in communities of color across the state, significantly boosting the number of Latino voters over the past several years. And in Georgia, Stacey saw the need for a key vehicle in 2014 when she created the New Georgia Project and recruited Nse Ufot, another Level 5 leader, to run it, growing it to an operation that has hired and trained 3,000 organizers in all 159 counties of the state and registered half a million voters.

The Texas Organizing Project is playing a similar linchpin role in Texas. TOP has a membership of 285,000 people, and in 2020 reported that it directly turned out 310,000 infrequent voters of color who did not vote in 2016. TOP’s voter registration and mobilization work has tipped the balance in close mayoral elections in Houston and San Antonio, and it has helped elect progressive district attorneys in five counties. The fact that Trump won Texas obscures the progress that has been made. Trump squeezed every last vote out of a constituency going through what Joy Reid calls “demographic panic,” and, as the Georgia runoff elections showed, without Trump and the fanatical allegiance to him that leads people to storm the Capitol and murder police officers, Republican turnout is less visceral and large, making winning the Texas gubernatorial election and capturing the state House in 2022 a real possibility.

Add a Zero

I used to try to illustrate the chronic underfunding of the most effective and promising leaders and groups by saying that donors should add a zero to their contributions to those organizations. Stacey’s PAC Georgia Next, Inc. raised just $53,000 in 2012 (and still accomplished its goal of blocking a Republican supermajority that year). In 2020, her organization Fair Fight raised $90 million, and, properly funded, she was able to help save the entire democracy by withstanding and fending off the full force of the president of the United States, the Republican Party, all the statewide elected officials in Georgia, and untold millions of dollars from Republican dark-money operations.

Texas is bigger than Georgia, and the long-term potential is even greater than what we are witnessing in Georgia, but the organizations and leaders there are woefully underfunded for the work they are doing. TOP’s budget is about $5 million. It should be $50 million. The Democratic ecosystem of party committees, super PACs, and progressive groups spends close to $1 billion every cycle; $200 million of that should be flowing into Texas.

Georgia has shown the world that it’s possible. Texas is poised to build on that model and continue the revolutionary work of transforming America into the multiracial democracy that it aspires to be.

Too many congressional Democrats are making a potentially fatal political miscalculation about the reason the party lost several seats in this year’s elections. And those incorrect interpretations of why Democrats lost at least 12 seats could lead to grievous missteps that will imperil their majority in 2022.

Representative Sean Maloney, incoming chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has pledged to be data-driven in his quest to improve Democratic prospects in 2022, saying, “If you’re not God, bring data.” Taking him at his word, then, here are the data that have been largely overlooked in the post-election analyses.

Completely contrary to much current conventional wisdom, House Democrats actually outperformed their prior electoral showings by significant margins—24 percent greater, on average, for the nine incumbents who had lost their seats as of November (the outcomes in several races are still too close to call). The problem was that Republicans outperformed their earlier showings by an even greater margin, boosting their vote totals by 46 percent over 2018.

Several of the Democrats who lost or came close to losing their seats strongly believe that affiliation with progressive calls for social change damaged their contests this year. On a post-election call with party leaders, Representative Abigail Spanberger articulated this point of view when she reportedly blamed the Black Lives Matter demand to “defund the police” and the specter of “socialism” for many of her and her colleagues’ electoral woes.

The truth behind the unexpected losses, however, is exactly the opposite of what those members believe. It wasn’t their proximity to the words that some movement activists use to promote solutions to economic and racial inequality that made their races competitive. It was their failure to inspire progressive and Democratic voters to the same extent that Donald Trump galvanized his supporters to turn out in extraordinarily large numbers to defend him and his race-baiting presidency.

None of the Democratic incumbents who lost their seats lost many, if any, votes from the 2018 totals that put them in office in the first place. On average, the number of votes for Democrats in those districts increased by 33,000. The number of Republican votes, however, increased by an average of 55,000.

In a voter-turnout battle, which is what American politics is now, there are definitely some congressional districts that just don’t have enough Democratic voters to hold those seats in contests where high percentages of the electorate participate. The Republican pickups occurred in districts that are relatively conservative to start with, historically voting four points more Republican than the country as a whole, according to the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index.

The good news for Democrats is that the pool of potential voters who could be brought into the active electorate has more than enough progressives for them to prevail in most cases, certainly in enough cases to hold majority control of the House of Representatives. This is especially the case in the South and Southwest, which are going through rapid racial demographic changes.

Rep. Donna Shalala’s South Florida district, for example, is two-thirds Latino, and while she prevailed in 2018 by 15,000 votes, 200,000 people in that district didn’t cast a ballot at all. When she stood for reelection this year, an additional 91,000 people voted, but it was failure to match the Republican increase that doomed Shalala, as her 36,000-vote increase was eclipsed by a Trump surge that saw 60,000 more Republican voters cast ballots. It is also notable that in a district with large numbers of non-voting Latinos, Republicans fielded a woman of color, Maria Elvira Salazar, to challenge a white Democrat.

A similar situation unfolded in New Mexico’s Second Congressional District, where Xochitl Torres Small won a close contest two years ago by 4,000 votes. In that race, where the district is nearly half Latino, more than 300,000 people did not vote. This year, Torres boosted her numbers by 21,000 votes, but her Republican opponent, Yvette Herrell, picked up an additional 44,000. There are still nearly a quarter-million eligible people in that New Mexico district who didn’t vote at all. That is the sector of the population that holds the key to Democrats’ future prospects.

For all the attention paid to the Democrats who lost or almost lost, the greatest insights and lessons come from those who won, most importantly in Georgia. In 2018, Carolyn Bourdeaux lost her bid for a greater Atlanta congressional seat by just 417 votes. This year, riding the wave of expanded Democratic and African American turnout propelled by the formidable grassroots progressive electoral operation in that state, Bourdeaux improved on her 2018 showing with an additional 51,000 votes, enabling her to oust incumbent Rob Woodall, despite a Republican gain of 40,000 votes.

Ironically, the numbers in Spanberger’s own race tell the same story of increased Democratic turnout being the key to electoral victory. Spanberger won this year by an even larger number of votes than she did in 2018, despite a massive increase of 53,000 votes by her Republican challenger. Benefiting from the groundwork laid by civic engagement groups such as New Virginia Majority, Spanberger prevailed because 54,000 more people voted for her than in 2018.

If the lesson, then, is that Democratic shortcomings stem more from failing to turn out more of their core supporters than from turning off voters who dislike progressive politics, then they will need to reconfigure their strategic targeting and spending priorities in the coming years. Between them, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the political arm of the House Democrats, and House Majority PAC, the super PAC focused on boosting Democratic congressional candidates, spent nearly $400 million. Far too much of that money, however, went to television ads trying to persuade a smaller universe of likely voters to vote blue rather than to civic engagement activities and grassroots organizations focused on expanding the overall universe of voters.

The nine Democratic incumbents who lost their seats fell short by an average of 16,000 votes. In those same districts, despite record high turnout, an average of 154,000 eligible voters still didn’t cast ballots. The nonvoting numbers are even higher in Texas, where Republicans held on to eight seats that they were at risk of losing.

Those nonvoters didn’t stay home because Republicans shouted “socialism.” They failed to see the relevance of what Democrats were doing to improve their lives, and they likely didn’t hear from many local Democratic organizers about the importance of casting a ballot.

The electorate of the 2020s will be increasingly racially diverse and young. Studies show they’re not cowed by the word “socialism,” believe that systemic racism is a profound problem, and are eager to tackle the dominant structural challenges of the day. If Democrats run away from those realities for fear of name-calling by the right, they will fail to generate the necessary levels of support required to defeat opponents whose voters are participating in ever larger numbers.

Who is in charge of the Democratic Party? In particular, who is in charge of its strategy and spending? That’s actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer—and it shouldn’t be, at a time when the party and the country face critical challenges that will affect millions of lives for years to come. The next six weeks will see significant turnover in the staffing and leadership of the biggest organizations in the Democratic ecosystem, but many of those decisions will be made in metaphorical smoke-filled rooms, shielded from the kinds of transparency and accountability that are hallmarks of effective and successful organizations.

What is commonly called “the Democratic Party” is actually a constellation of six entities that, collectively, spent more than $1.3 billion in the 2020 election cycle.

Even in the most public process—as with the Democratic National Committee, where bylaws clearly explain the process for electing a chair—it remains unclear how to even put one’s name in the hat to be considered for the top job. Despite raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars from Democratic donors, the super PACs—House Majority PAC, Senate Majority PAC, and Priorities USA—operate with the least level of accountability, frequently making leadership changes without posting positions, searching for talent, articulating the key responsibilities of the position, or even revealing who is in fact doing the hiring.

With respect to the campaign arms of the Senate and House Democrats, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), there is some measure of clarity regarding who becomes the chair of each entity. The Democratic senators select their leader, currently Chuck Schumer, and that leader typically picks the chair of the DSCC. On the House side, the members directly vote for the chair of the DCCC (before 2018, the leader of the House Dems choose the committee chair).

While those lines of authority are clear, what happens next is not. The incoming chairs choose an executive director, who then hires the rest of the staff, who in turn run the day-to-day operations.

Over the past decade, dating back to my work in 2008 helping to create a Diversity Talent Bank of 5,000 diverse candidates interested in working in the Obama-Biden administration, I have rarely, if ever, seen a job description circulated for the top staff position of these entities. At best, these poor practices undermine their ability to function at optimal levels. At worst, they result in the kind of diversity debacle that occurred last year, when Congressional Black Caucus and Hispanic Caucus members loudly complained about the overwhelmingly monochromatic composition of the DCCC staff assembled by then–executive director Allison Jaslow.

Absent clear criteria for what the job entails and with no process in place for a healthy range of promising contenders to offer their expertise, the pool of potential people to fill those positions is, almost by definition, limited to the friends and family of a small circle of insiders.

The window for fixing these processes and pulling in the talent regularly walled off from participating in the biggest and richest organizations in the ecosystem is closing fast. Many of the key positions will be filled between now and mid-December, while attention is focused elsewhere.

Now more than ever, Democrats need all hands on deck to analyze what happened in 2020 and chart a course forward. There are no more compelling examples than the results in Arizona and Georgia. The Biden campaign invested little in Georgia, and Arizona did not receive the same level of attention as the Midwestern triumvirate of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Yet, winning those Southwestern and Southern states was essential to securing a victory large enough to block Trump’s plans to steal the election through cries of fraud and appeals to the GOP-packed courts (with Trump revealing the game plan on election night, when he said he was going to take his allegations to the Supreme Court). Going forward, given the continuing demographic transformation of the country, smart Democratic leaders will build on those successes in the South and Southwest to solidify and expand progressive power.

Victory in those states was not charted by the handful of consultants who dominate Democratic politics (in fact, in the Report Cards we did in August, we found that Senate Majority PAC had invested $0 of its first $80 million of expenditures in the Georgia Senate races, on which control of the Senate now turns). If the party wants to win, it should learn from those who actually won in what was formerly hostile territory, and bring their insights and understanding into the rooms where it happens. But quick, quiet, closed-door hiring practices inevitably lock out much of the available talent and knowledge.

Although Trump has been defeated, the battle is far from finished, and the stakes going forward are enormous. Despite losing support from some college-educated white voters, Trump brought millions more people to the polls, causing Democrats to lose several House and Senate races they thought they would win. In light of this reality, the next Democratic leadership team must confront several critical questions:

• Why did Democratic candidates fall short of expectations in congressional races?
• What explains the party’s weakness with Latino voters, especially in Florida and Texas?
• What went right in Georgia and Arizona that didn’t translate to Florida and North Carolina?
• What is the right balance—and allocation of resources—between solidifying support in communities of color and trying to hold or increase support among white voters?
• What is the right balance between spending on television ads (still the preferred investment of choice by many consultants) and grassroots mobilization of the kind done in Georgia and Arizona to help turn those states blue?

If the Democrats are going to get it right, they need to pull back the curtain on who is making the decisions, open up the process to the full diversity of the party’s talent, and clearly explain what qualities they are looking for in the leadership of the future. Specifically, they should take four immediate steps:

• Provide transparency in hiring: Job descriptions should be written and widely circulated for all top positions, including executive directors. What are the qualifications? Who exactly makes the hiring decisions? How do you apply—and to whom?
• Insist on cultural competence. Notice I didn’t say “hire people of color” (although, let me say it now, hire people of color!). Too often, consultants think that racial issues are something that only relate to people of color. Cultural competence, however, refers to the ability to also communicate with white people about racial issues. Racial identity is one of most clear-cut determinants of political behavior, and the political environment today is highly racially charged. Trump understands this, and that’s why he was able to garner such enthusiastic support. As a rule, people of color are more culturally competent than white people, because they’ve had to navigate the realities of race and racism their entire lives. Some whites have, in fact, developed cultural competence, but it’s a skill set and talent that’s largely missing from much of the Democratic ecosystem. The incoming staff and leadership will determine how much of the party’s hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on research seeking to understand why voters of color sit out elections—and how much will be spent on anxious whites fearful about losing their way of life? Culturally competent leadership is critical if we want to productively explore and answer those questions.
• Conduct data-driven post-mortems on the 2020 results: We are seeing lots of recriminations about Democrats’ losing seats in the House, but most of that commentary is driven by fact-free, preexisting biases that are not supported by empirical evidence. The conventional wisdom that the Black Lives Matter demand to defund the police weakened Democratic performance is contradicted by data showing that Democratic candidates actually significantly improved their performance over 2018 (the incumbents who lost fell short despite garnering an average 25 percent increase in votes). The problem was that the Republican increase was even greater. Whatever remedies are pursued in 2021 must be tied to an accurate diagnosis of what happened in 2020.

Calamity has been averted with the defeat of Trump, but entrenched and ferocious opposition to progressive values in a rapidly diversifying nation is only going to increase. If the Democratic Party is going to win the battles to come, it needs to change its hiring practices so that it can find, elevate, and empower people who know how to win the kinds of fights that are on the horizon.

In the final few weeks of the election, with Joe Biden looking strong (fingers crossed!), winning the Senate is a critical imperative in terms of rebuilding this country and reversing the damage caused by Trump. For the average activist, the best way to help in these final few weeks is to focus on Georgia and Texas, in particular the voter mobilization work happening in those states, as they are among the winnable races that could use the most help.

From both a qualitative and quantitative standpoint, the conditions are favorable for Democrats to win back control of the Senate.

Qualitatively, all indications are that 2020 is shaping up to be a negative referendum on Trump’s presidency, with a gathering wave of resistance and revulsion that looks like it is poised to sweep him out of office. In such an environment, which can render harsh judgment, Trump’s enablers and apologists in the Senate run the real risk of being tossed out along with him.

Quantitatively, Democrats need a net gain of three seats (plus winning the White House, since the vice president is the tie-breaking vote in the Senate if that body is split evenly between parties) to take control of the chamber. With Alabama incumbent Democrat Doug Jones facing long odds to hold on to his seat in that heavily Republican state, that means at least four of the 23 Republican incumbents up for reelection must go down to defeat. Fortunately, 11 of those 23 races are highly competitive, and analysts such as Nate Silver and his team at 538.com give Democrats a 69 percent chance of taking control.

In January, I worked with the data scientist Dr. Julie Martínez Ortega to create an index to rate the winnability of each competitive Senate race. This index incorporated multiple predictive data points, including several typically ignored by many political analysts. The folks at FiveThirtyEight, for example, do an excellent job of aggregating polling and other data to generate a probabilistic model of an election outcome. Others, such as The Cook Political Report, use the Partisan Voter Index to compare a state or district with national election outcomes.

While all of the main analysts help fill in the picture of what is happening electorally, I have yet to see much reliance on Democratic vote potential, as measured by the relative size of the infrequent voting population, and analysis of demographic and election trends in terms of how a diversifying population steadily erodes Republican margins. The analysis Martínez Ortega and I conducted incorporates those additional factors, and we also look to see if there is an effective in-state voter mobilization infrastructure that can manifest the Democratic vote potential. These additional factors were critical components in the political transformation of Virginia from a red state to its current situation, in which Democrats hold all of the statewide offices and a majority of the legislature; and they helped forecast the competitiveness of the statewide races in Georgia, Florida, and Texas in 2018.

In terms of specific states this fall, Arizona and Colorado are the most likely Senate seats to flip, and the Democratic nominees in those states—former astronaut Mark Kelly and former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper—hold sizable leads in all of the polling averages. Picking up the next two seats is where the challenge lies for Democrats. Nine additional seats are in play, and all of them are worthy of support and attention. For particular focus in the final weeks, investments in Georgia and Texas make the most sense at this point in the race.

There are two paths to electoral victory in any race: persuasion and mobilization. Persuasion involves wooing a sufficient number of swing voters to your side, usually through television and digital ads making the case for your candidate and against the opponent. Mobilization consists of get-out-the-vote efforts to turn out more of your supporters than your opponent does of hers.

The lion’s share of political spending is focused on just one of these paths to victory—persuasion, i.e., targeting and trying to influence swing voters. Such an approach makes the most sense in the handful of states that have a sizable population of people who do in fact transfer their political allegiances back and forth. Iowa, for example, is perhaps the swingiest of swing states, having voted for Obama twice but then electing Trump by nearly 10 points.

Other states, particularly in the South and Southwest, offer two roads to victory because, in addition to swing voters, they also have large numbers of infrequent, usually uninspired, voters who are heavily inclined toward backing Democrats. Texas is the starkest example, as was illustrated in Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate race, when he came within 215,000 votes of defeating Republican Ted Cruz. In that same closely contested O’Rourke-Cruz contest, more than 5 million people of color did not vote. That pool of infrequent voters is a huge hidden advantage for Democrats, and groups such as the Texas Organizing Project are working to turn that potential into power.

Of the states that have Senate seats in play, those that are similar to Texas in having sizable populations of infrequent and Democrat-friendly voters are Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina. Georgia rises to the top as a promising place to focus because it has two Republican-held seats that are being contested this year, and there is a formidable preexisting statewide electoral infrastructure, including groups such as the New Georgia Project Action Fund, from Stacey Abrams’s historic 2018 gubernatorial bid.

Polling data suggest that nine states beyond Arizona and Colorado are winnable, and a case can be made that some of them are somewhat more winnable than the Georgia and Texas races. That’s why it’s important to also analyze which contests need the most help.

In South Carolina, for example, no Democrat has won a US Senate seat in decades, but Democrat Jaime Harrison is waging a surprisingly competitive fight against Republican incumbent Lindsey Graham, and The Cook Political Report has moved that race to “Toss Up.” In terms of need, however, Harrison is now fortunately awash in cash, with $90 million raised, including a historic $57 million coming in just in the last quarter. In Maine, Republican pseudo-moderate Susan Collins is in the fight of her political life against Sara Gideon, who actually leads Collins in the RealClearPolitics polling average by more than four points. Gideon, like Harrison, has benefited enormously by battling a high-profile target of the progressive movement, and she’s received close to $30 million in a state with just 1 million voters.

The candidates in Georgia and Texas, on the other hand, have far fewer resources to work with as they seek to communicate with much larger voter universes. In Georgia, Jon Ossoff has raised $28 million, and Raphael Warnock received less than Ossoff in the first half of the year. And as M.J. Hegar seeks to unseat GOP Senator John Cornyn in Texas, the third-largest state in the country, she has raised $20 million.

In addition to the financial disparity, Texas and Georgia offer more promising targets because they have both paths to victory—persuasion of swing voters, and mobilization of large numbers of infrequently voting but progressive-leaning, people of color. In a state such as Iowa, which also has a competitive Senate race, the only real path lies in persuasion, since the state is 90 percent white and its voters have demonstrated a history of swinging back and forth from supporting Obama twice and then backing Trump by a nearly 10-point margin.

The contest in North Carolina offers another promising pickup opportunity for Democrats, with Republican incumbent Thom Tillis trailing by 4 points in the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. And North Carolina is similar to Texas and Georgia in that it has a large pool of 700,000 people of color who didn’t cast ballots in 2016. The need in North Carolina is not as great, however, as Cal Cunningham, the Democratic nominee, has raised $41 million, and the Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC, has moved more than $15 million into that contest.

In these final frantic days of the election, the highest leverage and most strategic allocation of money at this point is to the Senate races in Georgia and Texas, with a special emphasis on backing the voter mobilization groups there, such as the New Georgia Project and the Texas Organizing Project. Direct contributions to candidates are also beneficial, as the official campaigns can purchase television time at a reduced rate. Backing the candidates and the groups in those states maximizes the potential for victory. All indications are that Democrats are poised to take control of the legislative body that will be critical to reversing the damage of the past four years. One last push in the right places can get them over the finish line.

Why do we settle for mediocrity when we should be insisting on excellence? Having spent the past few weeks working on a report card grading the Democratic super PACs and the more than $600 million they’re planning to spend on the fall elections, my main takeaway is that we tolerate far too much mediocrity in progressive politics.

The grades given in the report cards span the spectrum from D+ and C- (American Bridge 21st Century and Senate Majority PAC) to A and A- (Fair Fight, Next Gen Climate Action, and the Progressive Turnout Project), and the underlying analysis clearly shows that tens of millions of dollars are being wasted on spending strategies that are unsupported by—if not directly contradictory to—what the empirical evidence says we should be doing. A summary chart is below, and you can read the full report here.

Beyond the specific grades of the particular groups is the much larger issue of how low the standards of excellence are in political investing. From minimal transparency and accountability about strategy and spending to the incorrect and inadequate use of data to elevating leaders with little insight into the communities they are targeting, progressives fall far short of proven best practices. This reality is problematic enough when super PACs are being entrusted with the smart spending of hundreds of millions of dollars, but the situation is especially dire when those dollars needed influence an election where millions of lives are in peril depending on who wins in November.

Transparency and Accountability

Transparency and accountability are cornerstones of any high-functioning organization. By clearly and forthrightly articulating a plan of action, the underlying rationale for that plan, and the expected outcomes, an organization and its leaders can avail themselves of the best thinking, insight, and feedback from their critical stakeholders.

As Starbucks expanded globally, for example, the company realized that its success was predicated on being open to and receiving feedback from a broad cross section of interested parties. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz explained, “We’re…trusting that the people in the marketplace know better than the people in [the headquarters in] Seattle.”

If you invest $100 in Coca-Cola company, you will get two shares of stock and then you will receive quarterly reports about the company’s revenue and expenses, plans and strategy for the next year, and an extensive narrative report from the management discussing and analyzing how things have been going. If you invest $1 million in a Democratic super PAC, on the other hand, you generally get no further updates, plans, explanations, or written analyses (I happen to know people who have, in fact, made million-dollar contributions to the party and its super PACs).

Those wanting to know how their money is being spent are forced to scour Federal Election Commission filings, read between the lines of vague e-mails and press releases, and piece together whatever information they can find from friends or on the Internet. If they’re lucky—and rich enough—they might get a call from a super PAC’s principal offering a general oral explanation, but rarely are written plans or election debriefs offered.

Notably, Barack Obama’s 2008 candidacy was quite transparent, as campaign manager David Plouffe gave regular updates on strategy and plans via YouTube. Perplexingly, no one has carried on this tradition in the progressive ecosystem. As a result, the decisions about how to spend hundreds of millions of dollars are made by a tiny handful of people who are insulated from the kinds of meaningful feedback and accountability that sharpen, refine, and improve an organization’s plans and operations.

This is no way to run a railroad, let alone a political party. One would think that progressive millionaires would insist on the same kinds of transparency and accountability that they receive for their investments in the private sector, but they don’t. And it’s not just millionaires. Much of the money that flows to progressive organizations comes through small-dollar donations from ordinary people. These folks are investors too, and they deserve better. The whole movement deserves better.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

When big decisions are made by a small group of people who are shielded from scrutiny, it can result in the kinds of methodological sloppiness, intellectual laziness, and political plans that are based on feelings and not facts. Effective organizations root their decision-making in rigorous data analysis about what works and what doesn’t, which markets to target and which ones to avoid. If you’re selling Black hair-care products, for example, it doesn’t make sense to blanket white neighborhoods with advertising for Afro Sheen.

Democrats need to flip four Republican-held seats in order to gain control of the US Senate. A data-driven approach to determining where to concentrate resources to achieve that goal should analyze and incorporate multiple, state-based data points, including the closeness of the 2016 election, competitiveness of the 2018 mid-terms, recent changes in the composition of the eligible electorate, and current polling data. Such an analysis would logically lead to placing Georgia in the top tier of target states, especially since the Peach State has two Republican-held Senate seats on the ballot this year, effectively creating a “two for one” opportunity in terms of dollars invested in boosting Democratic voter turnout.

Despite this clear road map revealed by the underlying data, the largest Democratic super PAC, Senate Majority PAC, had invested $0 in winning Georgia as of August 1, while plowing $8 million into the contest in Iowa (in September, Senate Majority PAC did begin making some investments in one of the Georgia races). The following table comparing the respective states shows how the Iowa investment—and the Georgia omission—are completely unsupported by the underlying data.

Reflect and Know Your Target Market

In successful organizations, the leadership and management have real and deep insight into the minds of the people who comprise their core market. Those managers draw on their lived experience and accumulated knowledge to develop carefully targeted strategies and plans. Apple, for example, sells more iPhones in China—the largest market in the world—than it does in the United States. It’s no accident that the head of its China operation, Isabel Ge Mahe, comes from China, knows the people, and speaks the language. Cultural competence and experiential insight are critical components of success.

In the Democratic ecosystem, nearly half of all Democratic voters are people of color; logic would therefore dictate that a commensurate percentage of the people in leadership come from those cultural communities. Unfortunately, the near-apartheid state of the top of the Democratic ecosystem sadly persists. Of the 10 largest Democratic super PACs, nine are run by Caucasians, little improved over the state of affairs I flagged in the wake of the 2016 election debacle. And this despite the widespread protestations of fealty to diversity and people of color that freely flowed a few months ago in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

As a general principle, words are nice, but actions are better. In terms of smart spending in order to win critical elections that depend on large and enthusiastic support from people of color, giving check-writing authority to people who come from the communities being targeted is the best course of action.

The world is falling apart around us, and people are counting on progressives to win this election and pave the path for the kinds of large-scale changes this country’s multiple crises demand. The forces arrayed against us are enormous and ferocious, so we must be at the top of our game in order to prevail. That means embracing and adopting best practices in how we spend the hundreds of millions of dollars that people are entrusting to the leaders of the Democratic Party and its allied super PACs. The times demand excellence. Mediocrity is unacceptable.

What are we waiting for? If this is not the moment to finally come to terms with the United States’ 401-year legacy of government-sanctioned, anti-Black oppression, then, pray tell, when will that moment be?

Nearly every year since 1989, Congress has ignored a bill that would create a commission to study the effects of slavery on African Americans and explore possible remedies—including reparations. The current iteration of that bill, HR 40, was introduced by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee last year and languished in the House Judiciary Committee ever since, awaiting action in a chamber controlled by Democrats. What are they waiting for?

There has never been a more promising period for action on this legislation than the one we are in now. Even before the recent wave of protests for Black lives swept the nation, the bill already had unprecedented support. As of today, 135 members of Congress have added their names as cosponsors—compared to the two cosponsors that the previous iteration of the bill had in 2014. Largely in response to the tenacity of African American New York Times reporter Astead Herndon, many Democratic presidential candidates explicitly expressed support for reparations when interviewed last year; The Washington Post reported that 15 of the candidates said the issue should be “studied.”

The current uprisings have made the imperative for this conversation even more compelling. The United States is in the midst of a racial justice reckoning unlike anything it has seen since John Lewis, Amelia Boynton, and other activists tried to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in March 1965. Those peaceful protesters encountered police mounted on horseback, who swung billy clubs into the skulls of marchers and shot tear gas at the assembled men, women, and children. The nationally televised broadcast of that attack—on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday—shocked the conscience of the country, and created the political will for the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year.

Fifty-five years later, we are seeing marches, protests, and rallies in more than 2,000 cities and towns in every state in the country (and on six of seven continents), demanding justice for Black lives. The shift in public opinion has been dizzying: As recently as 2017, polls found that only 28 percent of white Americans supported the Black Lives Matter movement, while 51 percent opposed it. Today, 42 percent of whites say they support the movement.

Institutions as mainstream as Target, Amazon, the National Football League, Lululemon, and many others have also expressed their support, and these aren’t your typical vague, feel-good statements about “diversity.” Even Walmart issued a statement saying it was working “to help replace the structures of systemic racism, and build in their place frameworks of equity and justice that solidify our commitment to the belief that, without question, Black Lives Matter.”

And yet, in response to this seismic shift, Congress has only moved incrementally on legislation that would finally address the centuries-long legacy of Black oppression. Much of the legislative energy to date has been channeled toward police reform, an area that desperately needs to see radical change. However, our political leaders should not be limited in their imagination or courage when it comes to pursuing even more far-reaching measures to remedy systemic racism. As Nikole Hannah-Jones writes in her June essay for the New York Times, “What Is Owed”: “If we are truly at the precipice of a transformative moment, the most tragic of outcomes would be that the demand be too timid and the resolution too small.”

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson did not stop at signing the Voting Rights Act. As Taylor Branch detailed in his 2006 book At Canaan’s Edge, Johnson quickly followed that step by bringing forward historic and transformative legislation to change the country’s immigration, health care, and education systems. That included the creation of Medicare, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and Title I federal funding for schools with a high percentage of low-income students, shifting the priorities of the nation and improving the lives of millions of people. The INA, in particular, finally ended America’s racist immigration quotas—and with them the legacy of restricting US citizenship to “free white persons.” The results reshaped the very composition of the country. Trump and his white nationalist puppet master, Stephen Miller, are still working overtime trying to reverse its effects.

Just as voting rights were only part of the picture in 1965, police reform is similarly only one aspect of a much larger and deeper problem. Policing in the United States has always been a form of social control of Black people, with roots tracing back to the slave patrols created in the early 1700s. The intersection of policing and the enslavement of African Americans is so embedded in American culture that it is still codified in the United States Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause, which compels the return of an runaway enslaved person to their “owner.”

Policing as social control of a racial group is not the only—or, frankly, the worst—legacy of slavery. Most of the structural problems in this country are caused by the gargantuan racial wealth gap that resulted from the expropriation of free labor from African Americans. That labor generated enormous economic profits for white people, who then continued to restrict Black access to wealth through decades of (explicit, then implicit) discrimination. As Harvard professor Sven Beckert wrote in his exhaustive 2014 book Empire of Cotton, “It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the US economy ascended in the world.”

The consequence of this course of action has been to limit wealth and perpetuate high levels of poverty in the African American community. People living in poverty may not have money, but they still have needs. It is even possible that they could take extralegal actions to satisfy those needs, perhaps even going so far as to utilize a counterfeit $20 bill in a Minneapolis convenience store. That is what George Floyd was alleged—but not proven—to have done when those four police officers arrived on the scene, one of whom proceeded to kneel on his neck and kill him.

To limit the focus of the current moment to outlawing choke holds and passing police reform would be the equivalent of seeking to change the conduct of security guards at the bank—while ignoring the fact that the bank itself is filled with ill-gotten plunder.

The cause is just, and the country is clamoring for change. So what is Congress waiting for? There are 233 Democrats in the House of Representatives; right now, 98 of them have yet to cosponsor HR 40. In the Senate, Cory Booker has introduced a companion bill, but just 18 of the 47 Democrats and independents have signed on as cosponsors. What are they waiting for?

Not only that: What are we waiting for? People of conscience across this nation are looking for ways to act on their values and manifest their desire to rectify this country’s tortured racial history. One thing we can do is to lend our voices to HR 40: We can each pick an undecided member of Congress and call and e-mail them daily, until they either sign on as a cosponsor, or give an official statement explaining why they won’t. You can also urge Congress to act by adding your name to the petition that my organization, Democracy in Color, and many allies are circulating.

Many of us in the United States never thought we’d see a reckoning like the one happening now. When South Africa emerged from the shadow of apartheid, it modeled what a path forward could look like by establishing its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That commission spearheaded a national dialogue that confronted the truth of South Africa’s history, as a first step toward healing and justice.

In this country, HR 40 could be a vehicle to do the same. This is the moment for action.

ernie and I just talk about what’s next.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent statement on the New York Times’ podcast The Daily reflected what’s on the minds of many who poured their time, energy, and resources into the progressive candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Both presidential bids were as much cause as campaign. Now that the campaigns have ended, what happens to the cause?

Those of us who received our political baptism during the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s progressive, movement-based, presidential campaigns in 1984 and ’88 faced a similar question at the conclusion of his second run. Like Sanders, Jackson offered America a vision of a far more just and equal society; his Rainbow Coalition rocked the political establishment in 1988 when he won the Michigan primary, temporarily taking the lead for the Democratic nomination.

As an idealistic California college student, I gravitated toward Jackson’s campaigns. I ended up running his student operation in the state and became a delegate at the 1988 convention. When it became clear that his opponent, Michael Dukakis, would become the Democratic nominee, it felt like we had failed. But an electoral campaign can make lasting social change that extends far beyond the temporal limits of that specific election. With the clarity of hindsight, I now see what Jackson meant when he said throughout the campaign, “We’re winning every day.”

The legacy of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition reveals three important lessons for those who came of age in the Sanders and Warren campaigns, as they now seek to make their mark in the coming months and years.

Put People in Positions of Power

Perhaps the most lasting impact of the Jackson campaigns is the empowerment and elevation of the people who were part of that effort. “The most positive thing that came out of the campaign was how it inspired his supporters to run for local office,” Eddie Wong, Jackson’s 1988 national field director, told me recently. “The momentum from the campaign and the infrastructure and alliances that were created laid the basis for several successful efforts.”

I can personally attest to this. The electoral experience I gained during those campaigns—doing media appearances, raising money, and identifying, contacting, and mobilizing voters receptive to the coalition—inspired me to run for office, and educated me about how to win.

In 1990, Mabel Teng, the California state cochair of Jackson’s 1988 campaign, became one of the first Chinese American women to be elected to citywide office in San Francisco when she won a seat on the city’s Community College Board. When I congratulated her at her victory party, she pointed at me and said, “You’re next.” She was right: Two years later, I was elected to the San Francisco Board of Education.

That kind of encouragement and solidarity propelled people across the country to jump into electoral politics—and in the two years after Jackson’s candidacy ended, multiple progressive champions began their political ascent. Barbara Lee entered elected office as a state legislator, Maxine Waters secured a US congressional seat, and Paul Wellstone, who cochaired Jackson’s Minnesota campaign, won election to the United States Senate.

Over the next two decades, Rainbow veterans continued to secure positions of power beyond elected office. Activists inspired by Jackson’s 1984 campaign went on to become labor leaders in places such as Watsonville, California, where Gloria Betancourt and other Mexican American cannery workers led a historic, 18-month strike starting in 1985 that improved conditions for workers throughout the industry. Leaders from that movement later helped transform the formerly all-white Watsonville city council into a body that is now majority Latinx.

In the nonprofit sector, Ben Jealous—who cut his teeth as a teenage field organizer in Jackson’s 1988 campaign—became the youngest-ever president of the NAACP in 2008. He connected its considerable clout to successful efforts to end the death penalty in New Mexico and other states, pass the Dream Act in Maryland, and champion marriage equality across the country.

The Sanders and Warren campaigns could have a similar legacy. Ocasio-Cortez has already emerged as a national leader of the Sanders movement, and African American operative Jessica Byrd, who backed Warren, is becoming one of the country’s preeminent political strategists and experts. Who else will run for office next, and who will manage those campaigns? Who will take the reins of Democratic committees, Super PACs, and key nonprofit organizations? Who will shape and implement pivotal public policies that advance the goals of the movement?

Pass Progressive Policies

The ultimate point of a populist revolution is to transform priorities and public policies. It is particularly important to choose strategic policy battles that can build on the strengths of the movement.

One such frontier is the expansion of democracy, and the elimination of rules that dilute the power of people of color. Prior to 1984, the Democratic primaries followed a winner-take-all format in which the winning candidate in any given congressional district received all of its allocated delegates. (Republican primaries are still decided this way in some states.) Jackson fought those rules for years, ultimately winning significant changes that lowered the threshold for accumulating delegates. Now, any candidate who secures at least 15 percent of the vote in any state receives a proportional number of that district’s state-level delegates.

That change paved the way for Barack Obama to win the Democratic nomination in 2007. The proportional allocation rules meant that Obama could amass delegates in states with large black populations—even those where Hillary Clinton won overall—and establish a lead that his rival could not overcome.

Other movements for change start at the local level, then gather momentum as they spread across the country. Progressive policy agendas are not limited to what can get through Congress.

Cities in California have already demonstrated this. While extraordinary amounts of time, energy, and resources were poured into national battles over expanding health care coverage, San Francisco showed in 2007 that you could pass a comprehensive health care plan at the municipal level first.

Likewise, Sanders’s campaigns have galvanized a generation with the call to make college free. Michael Tubbs of Stockton, California—then a city council member—welcomed Sanders to his city during the senator’s 2016 presidential campaign. After becoming mayor, Tubbs implemented the Stockton Scholars program in 2018, which guarantees that every high school graduate in the city can get funding to continue their education.

Sanders and Warren supporters live all over the country, and they now have an opportunity to explore and advance their causes at the state and local levels.

Bond with the Black Freedom Struggle

The primary reason that Jackson’s candidacies have reverberated for decades is that his movement came out of—and remained connected to—the African American freedom struggle. Jackson’s involvement extended all the way back to his days as a key lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr., and continued through his leadership in the civil rights movement in the 1970s and ’80s.

During his speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Jackson situated the moment in its historical context: “We sit here together, a rainbow coalition, the sons and daughters of slave masters and the sons and daughters of slaves, sitting together around a common table to decide the direction of our party and our country.”

His fidelity to the cause inspired historic African American voter turnout that year, propelling his candidacy close to the pinnacle of American politics.

The harsh truth is that Sanders and Warren were unable to convince and inspire many black voters during their campaigns. That failure is particularly cruel because the African American experience lies at the heart of the inequalities and contradictions that they both sought to highlight.

Sanders, in particular, fell short because his language always seemed to reduce the struggle for racial justice to a subset of the larger fight against economic inequality. As Jessica Byrd explained on the podcast Deep Democracy in October: “So much of the nucleus of systemic oppression and injustice [in America] is around black identity in this country, and by centering black people, what we actually do is address the root of the problem…. We can recreate and reimagine a world in which everyone is free, because we have gotten to the root.”

The people who will carry on the legacy of Sanders’s movement must not replicate his error. They will be unable to elevate the leaders and pass the policies that this country needs most without making close connections to the African American struggle for justice and equality. If they can prioritize these relationships in their own communities, it will pay dividends in political and social change.

After the 1988 campaign, I moved to San Francisco, got involved in local politics, and joined a community-based organization called Black Men in Action that was founded by the late Rotea Gilford, who had been a deputy mayor to Dianne Feinstein.

Gilford took me under his wing. I’ll never forget him telling me, “All these years white politicians been leaning on us for support. Well, now I’m going to lean back on them for you.”

When I went to Nancy Pelosi to seek her backing for my nascent school board campaign, one of first questions she asked me was about my ties to the black community. Gilford was true to his word: The Black Men in Action seal of approval helped secure her support, and proved pivotal to my becoming the youngest person ever elected to citywide office in San Francisco at the time.

As Sanders and Warren supporters chart their next steps, they should ask themselves what their connections are to black communities in their area. What black-led groups are they working with, and how are they harnessing the assets of the campaign—the voter ID lists, the donor networks, the volunteer-organizing technology—to strengthen the work of those organizations? Can they recruit people from those communities to run for local office, and promise to put the knowledge and might of their movement behind them?

I left the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in 1988 disappointed that Jackson didn’t win. I was nonetheless full of hope and optimism about the future of the Rainbow Coalition, and the years that followed his runs showed that the power and energy unleashed by a progressive campaign could still help to move us forward.

Today, the hundreds of thousands of people who participated in or contributed to the Sanders and Warren campaigns face a similar situation. I am a witness to the possibility that just because your candidate does not become the nominee, it doesn’t mean that your cause can’t continue to change the country for the better.

After months of dancing around the issue of diversifying the Democratic ticket, the remaining viable candidates finally got more specific on Sunday, with Joe Biden firmly pledging to choose a woman as his running mate, and Bernie Sanders saying that “in all likelihood” he would follow suit.

What neither of these septuagenarian white men could bring themselves to do, however, was to say that that woman would be a person of color.

Their ongoing silence on that front speaks volumes about how much the fear of alienating white men continues to rule Democratic decision-making. It reveals how public opinion has been influenced by decades of attacks on affirmative action. And it shows how little some white liberals understand about why it’s insulting to people of color to hear them pledge fealty to “merit” and wanting to hire the “best person for the job.”

Biden has been saying he would nominate an African American woman to the Supreme Court since the end of last month. But even that ostensibly progressive pledge highlights how his apprehension of alienating whites is more important to him than inspiring the constituencies that propelled the Obama-Biden ticket to victory. Talking about a Supreme Court nomination is speculative; committing to a woman of color as running mate is something he can do now.

The hunger for a diversified ticket is deep. With Elizabeth Warren’s withdrawal from the race, her supporters across the country are both grieving the departure of the last viable female candidate and demanding that the nominee choose a female running mate. Columns with titles such as “I Am Burning With Fury and Grief Over Elizabeth Warren. And I Am Not Alone” capture the sentiment among many—especially women—who supported the senator.

People of color are also eager to see a Democratic ticket that reflects electoral reality. As my research has found, nearly half of Democratic voters are people of color; it is certainly relevant that the last time the Democrats won the White House was when an African American topped the ticket. Groups such as She the People, a national network of women of color in politics, have crystallized the demands for gender and racial diversity into a call for a woman of color as the vice presidential nominee.

The math of the moment lends empirical support to choosing a woman of color. The 2008 exit polls showed that it was women who made Barack Obama president, with 56 percent voting for him. My research has found that 46 percent of his coalition consisted of people of color; just 23 percent of Obama voters that year were white men. Clinton was defeated in 2016 in part because of two key shortcomings: a dramatic drop-off in black voter turnout (the first decline in 20 years) and the fact that a meaningful number of white women decided to give Trump a chance. As the Democrats seek to unseat Trump, a running mate who appeals to women and inspires voters of color seems like the obvious electoral strategy to pursue.

The list of women of color who could strengthen a Biden or Sanders ticket is long and impressive. Stacey Abrams received more votes statewide than any Democrat had before during her gubernatorial run in Georgia, and was popular with young voters. As a 40-something leader tapped into popular culture, she could help Biden with the youth vote that he has failed to excite. Kamala Harris, Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley, Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, and New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham are some of the other talented women of color who could significantly enhance the Democratic ticket this year.

The Sanders and Biden camps’ fear of commitment is a capitulation to decades of attacks on programs designed to address inequality in America. The anti–affirmative action backlash of the past 30 years has been so ferocious, unrelenting, and sustained that it has taken root in the public consciousness and much of the mainstream media. Many white liberals now live in fear of being seen as offering “unfair” advantages to nonwhite job candidates; they have become more anxious about being criticized for the remedies they choose to redress inequality than they are about the inequality itself.

This mindset persists without any actual evidence to support it. The notion that women and people of color enjoy unfair advantages in America is laughable. More than 90 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are men, 98 percent of venture capital funding goes to men, and nearly 90 percent of all elected officials in this country are white. Primary evidence of bias in this country shows that whites are the ones who continue to benefit disproportionately from hiring decisions.

If there is a grand plot to elevate women and people of color through identity-based practices, it is failing spectacularly.

Candidates’ caution shows which constituencies they think are most important. Who are Biden and Sanders afraid of offending? It can’t be women; the pain that was expressed in the wake of Warren’s departure stems from lifelong experiences of seeing more-qualified women being passed over in favor of mediocre men. And they can’t be trying to placate people of color. Nonwhite voters are unlikely to be worried about the politicians who won’t get a chance to become the 49th white male vice president.

It really comes down to the Democratic Party’s fear of alienating white men. The party assumes that those men must feel as if the country they once controlled is slipping away from them. But not all white men feel that way, and almost all of those who do are supporting Trump anyway. Do the candidates really think that the white men who voted for Clinton would abandon their ticket if they took a stand for desegregation?

What the candidates also fail to appreciate is that their reluctance to commit to a woman of color running mate is actually offensive to women and people of color. The unintended (but unmistakable) message is that they believe there is only a very small pool of qualified people in the country who aren’t white men. People of color and women know all too well that that is far from the truth.

If they say they don’t want considerations about race to get in the way of choosing “the best person” for the job, that could be easily interpreted to mean that the vice presidential pick will be white, as they have been in every single election since the founding of the republic. If you believe that qualified women and people of color are legion, it should be simple to clearly state: “I’ll choose from that pool, which is overflowing with abundant and under-appreciated talent.” Offending and insulting the voters you need in order to win is not a prescription for victory.

We are faced with the task of defeating an unrepentant misogynist and racist, who clings to power by stoking the flames of white racial resentment and the power of patriarchy. This is not the time for cowardice. This is a moment that calls for courage, and both Sanders and Biden should declare, unequivocally, that they would each choose a woman of color to join them on the journey to the White House.

The Democratic nomination contest is at a pivotal point, especially for the left. Progressive issues are ascendant, moderate candidates are vote-splitting, Bernie Sanders tops the polls, and Elizabeth Warren just had a very strong debate performance in Nevada. And yet despite the tantalizing proximity of progressive victory, there remains a glaring hole at the heart of the left’s strategy: the failure to prioritize the fight against white nationalism and racial resentment—the sources of this president’s power, and the cornerstones of capitalism’s structural inequality.

If the structural change that Warren espouses and the political revolution that Sanders champions don’t explicitly address the racial realities that lie at the heart of this country, then their movements could fail to inspire the kind of transformation the candidates say they want. My research has found that nearly half of Democratic voters are people of color, and a dramatic drop-off in African American turnout in 2016 was a principal factor in Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Conveying the urgency of the fight against white supremacy could be critical to propelling the kind of turnout that will help Democrats win in November.

Donald Trump is obviously unlike any president we have seen in a long time. Trump, who famously said he could “shoot somebody” on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, seems to defy the laws of political gravity. But many fail to appreciate what has kept him afloat.

White identity politics are at the foundation of the United States—enshrined in slavery starting in 1619 and codified at the nation’s conception, with the passage of the 1790 Naturalization Act restricting citizenship to “free white persons.” Typically, political appeals to white racial resentment have come in more implicit and coded “dog whistles,” such as Ronald Reagan’s demonization of black “welfare queens.” It has been a long time since someone with Trump’s stature openly and unapologetically embraced the racist right wing; many might have assumed it would be political suicide to brand Mexican immigrants “rapists,” enact bans on Muslim immigration, or whip up a xenophobic mob chanting, “Build the wall!” Trump’s speech and policies have unleashed deep wells of racial resentment, and myriad academic studies—most of them ignored by Democratic consultants and leaders—have shown that this is a motivating factor for many of his supporters. (I have started a list of these studies here.) The engine driving the Trump machine is white supremacy.

Despite this, the most progressive candidates in this race have spent far more time critiquing other, more moderate candidates and supposedly race-neutral aspects of Trump’s time in office, such as his tax cuts for the rich, than they have fighting white nationalism. (Ironically, moderate Joe Biden may be the only one who has directly refuted Trump on this point: One of his early campaign ads challenged the president’s 2017 defense of the white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.) Warren and Sanders are correct to decry the rise of corporate interests within the Democratic Party. It’s admirable to fight for a higher minimum wage, universal health care, and aggressive action to save the planet from climate catastrophe. But in doing so, both progressive voting groups and candidates like Warren and Sanders are missing the strategic and moral imperative of reframing this election.

With upcoming primaries in the more diverse states of the South and Southwest, candidates are starting to bump up issues pertaining to voters of color. Yet none of the remaining candidates have made Trump’s drive to make America white again a centerpiece of their campaign. This would go beyond talking about issues that resonate with communities of color. It would require ably and enthusiastically countering Trump’s vision of a white America with what it really is: a proudly multiracial country. When progressive candidates fail to call out Trump’s appeals to white racial resentment—or to match the force with which he makes them—they’re allowing him to reap the benefits, without paying the price.

The default playbook for too many Democrats is to talk around white supremacy, usually for fear of turning off white voters. But there is compelling evidence that the best way to blunt racist dog-whistling is to call it out. In her 2001 book The Race Card, Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg revealed how Republicans’ use of coded racial messages, and their impact on voters, lost power when the implicit was made explicit. In studying voluminous survey data on the 1988 presidential elections when George H. W. Bush used ads about Willie Horton—an African American who committed a crime after being released from prison—Mendelberg noted that Democrats feared that “if they [spoke] explicitly about race they [would] lose crucial white votes.” But her research found the opposite to be true: “when campaign discourse is clearly about race—when it is explicitly racial—it has the fewest racial consequences for white opinion.” Even Trump usually prefers to talk about a border wall than about the pro-white immigration agenda advanced by Stephen Miller, one the White House’s most enthusiastic white supremacists.

The through line between this November’s election and the long-term goal of transforming this unequal nation should be an agenda that speaks to the pain so many Americans feel: the pain rooted in the racial wealth gap. The average white family now has more than 10 times the wealth of the average black family, and 7.5 times that of the average Latino family. That is a direct consequence of centuries of public policies that have sanctioned white wealth creation by seizing land from indigenous people, importing Africans to do backbreaking unpaid labor, and exploiting Mexican and Central American farm workers—topped off by government-sanctioned racial discrimination in housing and hiring.

Although it’s not widely discussed, Republicans are, in fact, experiencing some blowback from Trump’s actions—especially from white-collar suburban voters who gave Trump a chance in 2016 but defected to the Democrats in 2018, contributing to the Democratic takeover of the House and seven previously Republican-held governors’ offices. Groups and leaders on the left have an opportunity, and an obligation, to push their preferred candidates to lead on the fight over America’s racial identity. Warren’s and Sanders’s speeches are replete with references to Wall Street, big corporations, and corruption in Washington, DC. Although both have been critical of Trump’s deportation policies and ICE, they have not distinguished themselves in a field of candidates who tiptoe around the issue of immigration—even though children are still in cages at our nation’s border—and dance away from reparations, ignoring the gargantuan racial wealth gap that cleaves the fabric of our society. None of the candidates onstage in Las Vegas on Wednesday even mentioned immigration until late in the evening. It was clearly not top of mind, even in a state as Latino as Nevada.

It is still not too late for these candidates to course-correct. There are at least three concrete steps that progressives could take to make a meaningful difference:

Forge a united front to demand that the Democratic nominee choose a person of color as their vice presidential pick. For all the appeal of hoping Sanders and Warren would team up, an all-white ticket is not what will inspire and mobilize the most racially diverse electorate in the history of this country. None of the current candidates have been willing to make this commitment, and a chorus of voices from the left on this issue could push them do so.

Create a common war room to drive the narrative about this administration and its enablers’ white-supremacist priorities. Progressive and left groups could each dedicate staffers to this joint effort, which could provide tools, information, and coordination for activists. This could lead to creative, attention-getting actions in cities across the country, exposing both the presidential reelection campaign and key Senate elections as the referendums on whiteness that they are.

Launch a joint petition to demand a Democratic campaign budget and plan that reflect the actual demographics of the voters they need to reach. The default focus of much Democratic spending remains on running television or digital ads targeting white swing voters. The organizations and committees in the Democratic ecosystem typically spend significantly more than $1 billion in a presidential election year; a coalition of progressive groups could demand that half of those funds go toward organizing and turning out the vote in communities of color.

The black Marxist author Manning Marable wrote in 1985 that at the heart of the American experience is “a series of crimes”: the violent theft of the land itself, the violent theft of millions of people from Africa and their subsequent bondage as chattel, the bloody conquest of the Southwest from Mexico, and the government-sponsored war on Native Americans. That series of crimes has created the conditions which the left is now working to transform. But during this campaign, they have done it wearing racial blinders. That could lead them to failure. The resurgent progressive movement could both win this election—and lay the foundations for a better society—by tackling the existential threat that white supremacy poses to this country’s social contract and democratic institutions. It is not too late, but the clock is ticking.

The impeachment trial in the US Senate is clearly a constitutional and moral moment of truth. It is also an excellent opportunity to advance the nitty-gritty work that will defeat vulnerable incumbent Republican senators and allow Democrats to recapture control of that critical chamber when voters head to the polls this November. It is easy for progressives to get excited about compelling candidates—people with impressive life stories and hard-hitting ads—and then shower resources on those candidates. And, yes, charisma and well-crafted ads are nice. But as Virginia Democrats’ success last fall demonstrates, robust, statewide voter mobilization operations are better.

Republicans currently hold 53 of the Senate’s 100 seats; Democrats will need a minimum net gain of three seats and a new, Democratic vice president to flip partisan control of the body.  Of the 23 Republican-controlled Senate seats up for election this year, there are currently 13 seats in 12 states that offer plausible prospects for Democrats to defeat their Republican opponent.

Factoring in four key criteria—past electoral results, demographic developments, existing civic engagement infrastructure, and incumbent favorability ratings—I have given all 12 states with a Republican incumbent (and one state, Alabama, with a vulnerable Democrat) a score that illustrates their respective winnability.

(Read a complete description of the methodology and underlying data incorporated in the ratings here.)

Most Promising: Arizona, Colorado, and Georgia

The states where Democrats are most likely to flip a Senate seat are those where they’ve fared well in recent statewide elections, and where there is a large pool of potential Democratic voters who could be brought into the electorate to improve the overall odds of victory. 

Kyrsten Sinema won the Arizona US Senate race in 2018—the first Democrat to win an open seat in that state since 1976. Conventional wisdom attributes Sinema’s success to popularity with “moderate” voters, generally code for white swing voters; but she actually lost the white vote to her opponent. While her white vote share was admittedly higher than many Democrats receive, it was her 70 percent of the Latino vote that propelled her to victory, by just 56,000 votes. And there could be a whole lot more where that came from: More than 600,000 eligible Latinos did not vote in 2018.

Burgeoning Latino civic engagement infrastructure is the progressive secret weapon in Arizona. Ever since the state’s government passed the 2010 anti-immigrant legislation often referred to as the “show me your papers” law, a strong, sustained and effective cohort of organizations and leaders have worked together to build political power and darken the complexion of the Arizona electorate. Republican Martha McSally is the incumbent up for reelection this fall; progressive solidarity, combined with the strong fundraising of likely Democratic nominee Mark Kelly—former astronaut, current gun control activist, and husband of former representative Gabby Giffords—makes this one of the most winnable Senate seats in the country.

After two decades of sustained investment in a strong progressive infrastructure of organizations and leaders in Colorado—a period during which the state’s population has also become increasingly diverse—Democrats have won all four statewide elections since 2016. Cory Gardner, the current incumbent Republican senator, won this seat in 2014 by the narrow margin of 40,000 votes. (He was helped along by the fact that 300,000 fewer Democratic voters turned out than had voted in 2008’s presidential election.) Two Democrats, former governor John Hickenlooper and former speaker of the state House Andrew Romanoff, will face off in Colorado’s June primary; whoever prevails should be the favorite to win the seat in a high-turnout presidential election year.

The silver lining of Georgia’s bitterly disappointing gubernatorial election in 2018? Stacey Abrams’s historic bid helped to build an electoral infrastructure that resulted in record Democratic voter turnout. That operation gives a massive head start to Democrats looking to win the state in 2020, at both the Senate and presidential levels. (A few months ago, Abrams even created a document in which she shares her prescription for victory.) Georgia has two Senate seats on the ballot in November. The field of potential Senate candidates is still unsettled: It includes Jon Ossoff, who previously ran for US Congress; Sarah Riggs Amico, a former candidate for Georgia lieutenant governor; and Teresa Tomlinson, who was the first female mayor of Columbus, Georgia. All are competing for the seat currently held by David Perdue. (There’s a special election planned for the second seat as well, but there’s been little clarity yet about that race.) Regardless of who the ultimate candidates are, Georgia should be all-hands-on-deck for progressives nationally—especially because the state is also within reach of any Democratic presidential nominee, even more so if Abrams were on the ticket to be vice president. If the Democrats can mobilize the Abrams coalition, it will lift all boats.

Texas: The Great Non-White Whale

Texas, once seen as a solidly red state, now has the greatest progressive electoral potential of any state in the country. Its enormous number of eligible, non-voting people of color absolutely dwarfs the shrinking margin of difference in statewide elections. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke lost his US Senate bid by just 215,000 votes, despite the fact that 5.5 million people of color didn’t cast ballots.

Similar to what we’ve seen in Virginia, groups such as the Texas Organizing Project have helped make the difference in mayoral elections in Houston and San Antonio in recent years, with a steady course of methodical civic engagement work. Texas’s very competitive Democratic primary is fast approaching, on March 3, or Super Tuesday; that contest is among the first of the battleground Senate races. While the Democratic senatorial Campaign Committee has sought to tip the scales in favor of M.J. Hegar—whose military background, it’s assumed, will help attract white voters—there are multiple candidates of color in the race. The person with the clearest and most logical path to defeating Republican John Cornyn is Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez. She comes from an organizing background, has deep ties to Latino communities across the state, and is the kind of inspiring and progressive candidate who can capture the imagination of the large—and still essentially untapped—electorate that holds the key to flipping Texas. (Full disclosure: I have contributed to Tzintzún Ramirez’s campaign, and she is a guest on the latest episode of my podcast, Democracy in Color.)

The Swing States: North Carolina, Maine, Iowa

There are actually just a handful of states where large numbers of voters regularly switch their partisan preferences. Such states are harder and more expensive to win; at worst, they can be bottomless money pits, where political ads may or may not be wasted. (Bringing to mind the old adage: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”) But with a president as divisive, unqualified, and destructive as the one we have now, the prospect of Democrats’ prevailing in swing states could be higher than usual.

Many people forget that Barack Obama managed to win North Carolina in 2008, if only by a tiny margin. And although Trump won the state in 2016, Democrat Roy Cooper prevailed in the gubernatorial contest that year. In a state with a meaningful number of college-educated whites, particularly around the so-called Research Triangle of Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, likely Democratic nominee Cal Cunningham may have appeal, but he’ll need to work hard to inspire the African Americans who make up 22 percent of the state’s population. Much of the burden of increasing African American voter turnout—a group that overwhelmingly votes Democratic—will fall to progressive groups and the Democratic presidential ticket (further accentuating the importance of a ticket that can inspire voters of color).

Maine Republican Susan Collins and her pseudo-moderate rhetoric have enraged progressives for years—most notably during the fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, where she provided critical cover for the Republicans’ patriarchal power play. She could be vulnerable this year. Maine is more Democratic than many people realize; the state voted Democratic in the last seven presidential elections. Collins now faces a formidable Democratic opponent in Sara Gideon, the well-funded speaker of the Maine House of Representatives and daughter of an Indian immigrant. Furthermore, Collins’s favorability numbers are underwater, as 10 percent more Maine residents view her unfavorably than favorably.

Iowa, of course, is among the swingiest swing states in the country, having flipped from backing Obama by substantial margins in 2008 to a Trump blowout in 2016. (Pat Rynard, who runs the political news site Iowa Starting Line discussed this phenomenon on my podcast in October, observing that “candidates who have run on a change-type message have done well” in the state.) In that light—and taking note of incumbent Republican Joni Ernst’s unfavorable polling numbers—it is realistic to try to flip this seat. A three-way Democratic primary in June will determine the party’s nominee. Many party leaders have high hopes for Theresa Greenfield, who is backed by Emily’s List and other progressive groups.

The Keep-Hope-Alive States: Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Kentucky

There is another cohort of states where seats are up for election this year—ones that would normally be out of reach, just by virtue of their paucity of Democratic voters. But in a high-turnout year when many white voters are alarmed by the Republican standard-bearer, things could conceivably break just right for Democrats. Think of the perfect storm that swept through Alabama in 2017, when Republicans nominated accused child-molester Roy Moore for the Senate, and Democrat Doug Jones rode a robust black voter turnout operation to victory.

Jones is up for reelection this year, and he faces daunting odds in a state that Trump won by nearly 28 points. (Jones’s own 2017 win came in a contest with much lower voter turnout.) But in addition to the possibility of Jones’s being reelected, the other states where an “Alabama Miracle” could conceivably occur are Mississippi, South Carolina, and Kentucky. Mississippi and South Carolina are similar to Alabama, in that they have large African American populations; Kentucky is worth considering, too, since Democrat Andy Beshear squeaked to victory in the governor race last year, and incumbent Mitch McConnell’s steadfast support for Trump’s divisive agenda has made him one of the least popular senators in the country.

The Wild Card: Montana

Montana is a true iconoclast, where there is frequent ticket splitting of perplexing proportions.  In 2016, Trump won Montana by 20 points, even while Democrat Steve Bullock prevailed in the gubernatorial contest. The popular Bullock—who briefly entered the Democratic presidential primary last year, before pulling out in December—has thus far resisted entreaties to run for Senate. But should he do so, he would be a strong favorite to flip that seat.

The Clarifying Potential of the Impeachment Trial

The Senate impeachment trial will force all incumbent senators to openly condemn or condone Trump’s behavior. This could draw a clear connection between the actions of this president and the responsibility of his congressional enablers. If Democrats can make sure that voters in the most winnable states understand the role that their incumbent GOP senators have played in this havoc, it could accelerate their efforts to take back control of the Senate and this country.

Taking control of the Senate will require success on two fronts: increasing turnout of voters of color, and cementing support among those suburban white voters who gave Trump a chance in 2016, but shifted their support to Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Most people of color understand clearly the danger and destruction presented by this administration, but the Senate trial offers an excellent opportunity to affirm the increasing alarm felt by those suburban white voters too. Once the evidence is presented, every senator will have to go on the record about whether they support Trump’s unconstitutional corruption. Come November, there are at least 12 incumbent Republicans who can, and should, pay the political price for their complicity in endangering and undermining our democracy.

ife under this presidential administration has brought many dark days of despair. Looking ahead to the 2020 elections, many members of the media see doom and defeat. Away from the White House, however, this year also offered up ample reasons to hope as we head into the next. Here, then, is the evidence of things not seen: 10 stories from 2019 that should renew your faith in politics.

10. Legal Victories for the Activists Fighting for Families on the Border

After a brief period of national concern about the lives of migrant adults and children being held in cages at the border, the plight of these people has faded from the spotlight. But courageous activists and organizers have continued to fight the good fight, and they are still winning meaningful victories. Most recently, the Southern Border Communities Coalition—a network of groups spanning Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—partnered with the ACLU and the Sierra Club to win a lawsuit in federal court that blocked the use of $3.6 billion of federal funds to build Trump’s border wall. This victory is important: It fuels the fight of those in the trenches, and forestalls even worse human rights abuses. Every day that the construction of the wall is delayed is one day less of destruction that will need to be reversed after this awful administration.

9. Continued Progressive Investment in the Work of Stacey Abrams

The rise of Georgia’s Stacey Abrams as a political leader was one of the most inspiring developments in 2018—and her loss in the subsequent stolen gubernatorial election was one of the most depressing. The national progressive movement needs authentic and visionary leaders who come from the communities most under attack in this country, and Georgia sits at the pivot point of power. Abrams got more votes in Georgia than Bill Clinton did when he won the state during the 1992 presidential election; in 2020, the Peach State could be a battleground, as well as a key state for recapturing control of the US Senate, with two Republican-held Senate seats on the ballot.

For progressives to realize Georgia’s full potential, the infrastructure built by Abrams and her team must be maintained, invested in, and expanded. Fortunately, in 2019, leaders, organizations, and institutions have contributed their resources and platforms to the cause. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer chose Abrams to deliver the Democratic response to the State of the Union address in February; more recently, the team behind the progressive podcast Pod Save America helped raise more than $2 million for Fair Fight, the voter protection organization Abrams created. This month, Michael Bloomberg committed $5 million to Fair Fight. This collective embrace of Abrams’s movement will give progressives a fighting chance to turn Georgia blue in 2020.

8. The Supreme Court Saves the Census

With its mission to Make America White Again, this administration worked hard to turn the national Census into a weapon for intimidating immigrants of color from letting themselvesvliterally be counted. As files from a GOP strategist revealed, the attempt to add a question to the Census about individuals’ citizenship status may have been an effort to aid Republican gerrymandering. But the progressive legal advocacy community swung into action and fought the administration all the way to the Supreme Court, where they won a 5 to 4 decision in June—frustrating yet another of Trump’s attempts to circumvent the demographic revolution.

7. Louisiana Reelects a Democratic Governor

In 1991, avowed white supremacist and former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke lost the race to become governor of Louisiana—but he won a majority of the white vote. While Barack Obama was sweeping to victory in 2008, just 14 percent of white voters in the state backed the black man seeking the White House. (It was the second-lowest level of white support for Obama in that election, behind only Mississippi.) It’s no wonder, then, that Trump prevailed in Louisiana in 2016, winning by 20 points.

This year, Trump tried to leverage his platform and overwhelming white support to oust the state’s Democratic incumbent Governor John Bel Edwards. Despite the full force of Trump’s engagement—including multiple trips to the state, where he begged the voters to “give me a big win, please”—Edwards beat back, and prevailed. The Louisiana success affirmed that the formula for Democratic victory starts with, as one political analyst put it, “increased African American turnout.”

6. Democrats Take Control in Virginia

In Virginia, a decade of old-fashioned and methodical community organizing by groups such as New Virginia Majority paid off: Democrats flipped enough seats to take control of the state legislature. Combined with their victories in the 2017 elections for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, Democrats now control all branches of government for the first time in more than two decades. That means they can begin to advance progressive legislation that will improve the lives of millions of people, by expanding voting access, advancing gun control, and protecting LGBTQ rights. Virginia is a sterling example of how electoral effectiveness can lead to inspiring and relevant public policy.

5. We Finally Get Closer to Passing the Equal Rights Amendment

Nearly a century after it was first introduced, and nearly 50 years since it was passed by Congress, the Equal Rights Amendment—which would ban discrimination on the basis of sex under the Constitution—needed ratification by just one more state to reach the threshold for adoption. Virginia’s new establishment means that state will now become the 38th to ratify the ERA. There had been a time limit imposed on the legislation’s ratification to keep it from being passed, but there’s no such thing in the Constitution; the House of Representatives has already introduced a bill to remove the time limit. Although conservatives are mobilizing to argue that the time limit has expired, the stage is, nonetheless, finally set—both for a legal battle about the process used to pass the amendment, and for a long-overdue, election-year debate about whether this nation is going to outlaw discrimination based on gender.

4. The 1619 Project

This year marked the 400th anniversary of the arrival of ships bearing the first African slaves to be brought to America’s shores. In a remarkable feat, Nikole Hannah-Jones, an African American writer for The New York Times, persuaded the paper to put its resources, prestige, and platform behind the audacious endeavor of redefining “the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” The 1619 Project is a wide-ranging editorial package including essays, images, and reported stories, and a radical challenge to the idea that “slavery was a long time ago”; it firmly roots the United States’ societal problems and inequalities in its treatment of black people. The persistence of profound racial and economic inequality, as well as the White House’s aggressive championing of white supremacy, provide stark contrast to this new understanding of American democracy’s relationship to African Americans. This breathtaking project will have long-lasting ramifications.

3. The Continuation of the Demographic Revolution

For all the endless polls and articles published about the importance of conservative, white, working-class voters, the fact is that this country’s demographic revolution has continued apace: The United States is getting browner by the hour. The 2020 electorate will be the most diverse in history. One-third of eligible voters will be people of color, up from about a quarter just 20 years ago. Since Trump was elected, 14 million young Americans have turned 18 and become eligible to vote, nearly half of whom are people of color. A detailed data dive by the Center for American Progress found that if voter turnout and voter preferences exactly mirror those of 2016, the Democratic candidate will take back Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, carrying the electoral college by 279 votes to 259—simply because of the growth of the population of people of color.

2. Pelosi Retakes the Speaker’s Gavel

If ever there were a political leader made for this moment in history, it is Nancy Pelosi. Trump is a misogynistic bully of a president, contemptuous and dismissive of the institutions, laws, and standards that govern our society—and he has more than met his match in Speaker Pelosi. From calling Trump’s bluff on the government shutdown, to delaying his prized, primetime perch for the State of the Union, to blocking congressional funding for his border wall, Pelosi has run circles around this White House. People often underestimate how progressive she is, but we would not have passed the Affordable Care Act had she not held the line when many Democrats wanted to capitulate. Her leadership and coalition-building skills have united an ideologically broad (and often courage-challenged) caucus. She waited for the moment when she could get all of the Democrats to act in concert on impeachment, then moved with lightning speed—bewildering Trump, who, complacent after the conclusion of the Mueller report, whined, “I thought we had won.” For all of these reasons, Pelosi has been indispensable to the most important story of the year.

1. Trump Is Impeached

When Trump was elected, the Democrats didn’t have the power to stop his deliberate, inexorable march toward fascism, and Republicans didn’t have the will. As a result, he has become increasingly bold, dangerous, and destructive. With each passing day, he has undermined and attacked the vulnerable—especially people of color and immigrants—as well as societal institutions, journalism, and democracy itself.

Now the House of Representatives (one full of timid, conflict-avoidant Democrats, at that) has made Trump just the third president in history to be impeached. It has held Trump accountable for his conduct—a completely new experience for him. This also educates the country about how dangerous the president’s behavior is. Impeachment answers the doubts of those who might drift toward him with the full authority and solemnity of the United States government.

It also suggests that maybe, just maybe, our democracy can withstand Trump’s kind of assault. A lone whistle-blower acted on his conscience about Trump and Rudy Giuliani’s calls with Ukraine; now, despite the GOP’s best efforts to undermine the process, the president is being punished. Even if he’s not removed in the Senate, Trump has been weakened and condemned. The next phase, of course, is to defeat him in 2020. The combination of impeachment and electoral defeat would affirm the power of our democratic institutions, and the nature of the society that we thought we lived in. And that is reason enough to keep hope alive as we head into the new year.

It is clear that Democrats’ success in Virginia’s state elections earlier this month offers significant lessons for the national Democratic Party. By winning seven seats in the state legislature, Virginia Democrats flipped party control of both houses; with their Democratic governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, they now have control of every statewide office for the first time in more than two decades. Journalists have mined the backstory to try to understand how a formerly red (or, at best, purple) state is now completely controlled by Democrats; The New York Times attributed the outcomes to 30 years of demographic shifts, including a major increase in South Asian residents. It’s a significant change: People of color went from making up 24 percent of the state’s population in 1990 to close to 40 percent today.

Tram Nguyen, the co-executive director of the voter-mobilization and power-building organization New Virginia Majority, is one of the key architects of the change in the state over the past decade. In a recent op-ed, she identified three factors that were essential to their success: sustained, multiyear, paid political organizing; staff who can talk to and organize their neighbors year-round; and the concentration of resources in communities of color, in order to turn population shifts into political power. The article was headlined, “Democrats Could Learn a Lot From What Happened In Virginia”—which raises the question: Which Democrats are responsible for learning those lessons?

Too often the amorphous moniker “Democratic Party” obscures the specific roles of the particular people responsible for creating the kinds of changes we saw in Virginia. At the national level, what we know as the Democratic Party is essentially run by four main entities: the Democratic National Committee, focused specifically on presidential elections; the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which helps win elections for the US Senate; the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is similar to the DSCC, but for the House of Representatives; and the Democratic Governors Association, which supports gubernatorial candidates. Collectively, these groups controlled and spent about $1 billion during the 2015–16 election cycle and are on track to spend even more money for 2020. If progressives want to win, they must insist on a greater level of specificity, transparency, and accountability from these entities.

Nguyen points out in her article that one secret of their success in Virginia was early and sustained investment in voter registration in communities of color—the populations responsible for the transformation of the state’s electorate and political leadership. At the national level, Democratic groups have made these populations a low priority. Common sense would suggest that you would try to maximize the participation of your strongest supporters. According to presidential exit polling data, 90 percent of African Americans, and 75 percent of people of color overall, consistently vote Democratic—but in 2016, Democratic super PACs allocated $0 of their first $200 million in spending to African American voter mobilization. (By my calculation, they did finally spend close to $30 million—less than 10 percent of their total spending—targeting black voters, but not until six weeks before the election.)

Key decisions need to be made soon about how Democrats and their progressive allies should invest their massive amounts of money in 2020. Between 2016 and next November, 14 million young people will have turned 18, half of whom are people of color. How much money is going to make sure they are registered to vote and will turn out at the polls? Black voter turnout fell off a cliff in 2016, resulting in the slim defeats in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. How much money is going to encouraging massive African American voter-turnout effort?

The silence is deafening. Civic engagement organizations with deep roots and solid track records, such as Nguyen’s New Virginia Majority, played a critical role in that state, but they still had to scrimp and scrounge to put their budget together. Comparable groups and leaders exist in Arizona, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, and Colorado. When will the people who run and fund Democratic campaigns move money to these groups?

The reason that many millions of dollars are spent in this unaligned, unintelligent, and unaccountable fashion is because party committees, and especially the large super PACs, don’t have to answer to a board or the public. (I know, because I’ve created and run super PACs myself.) In 2016, virtually all of the Democratic Party’s money was controlled by whites in a party that exit polls show is widely supported by people of color. The demographic complexion of the party apparatus is significantly better now, with people of color serving on the leadership teams for the DNC, DCCC, and DSCC, but the necessary changes must be more than skin-deep. The party must do more than diversify the melanin of its individual leaders, and move on to transforming their organizational cultural competence. What are the backgrounds and expertise of the people making funding decisions? What is their understanding of the psychology and motivations of all stripes of the rainbow? Is the leadership applying the proven best practices from other fields and disciplines?

Medical breakthroughs aren’t tried out on real patients until theories have been subjected to rigorous peer review. That kind of salutary public testing and confirmation and engagement is largely missing from Democratic politics. The leaders of the party need to communicate with their stakeholders in a clear and concise fashion that explains how their spending and strategies are data-driven, empirically sound, and likely to succeed.

The DNC alone, led by Tom Perez, spent $350 million during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Last year, in 2018, it spent $151 million. Meanwhile, the DCCC, under Cheri Bustos, spends close to $300 million (its 2018 expenditures came in at $296 million); the budget for DSCC, led by Catherine Cortez Masto, approaches $150 million ($145 million for 2018). The DGA, whose chair is Gina Raimondo, raised more than $103 million in 2018. (The DGA self-reported only money raised, not spent.) And then there are the super PACs: Senate Majority PAC, which focuses on Senate races and whose president is JB Poersch, spent $164 million last year, while the House Majority PAC, now run by Robby Mook, spent nearly $96 million last year.

Turning around the Democratic ship won’t be easy. Implicit bias runs deep, and old habits die hard. On the night of the Virginia victories, Guy Cecil of Priorities USA—the country’s largest super PAC, which spent nearly $200 million in 2016—used his prominence and platform to shine a spotlight on two white-run groups in Virginia, completely overlooking New Virginia Majority and other organizations that have been in the trenches with communities of color for a decade. Priorities USA has pledged to spend $100 million on the 2020 primaries; it should be working in battleground states across the country to fully fund the kinds of voter-turnout organizations that made the difference in Virginia.

Virginia has shown the Democrats a path forward, but the stakes are high. In January, the party entities will report on their 2019 spending and their 2020 cash on hand, shedding light on their priorities and plans. We will soon see if the right people are paying attention—adjusting their behavior, and their budgets, accordingly.

The shift in public opinion regarding the impeachment of Donald Trump reveals that Democrats are frequently worried about the wrong white people. In the last two months, the mainstream media has trumpeted polling showing that the majority of Americans now support impeachment, and a deeper dive into the data shows that it’s white people in particular who have shifted their views—coming around to a position people of color have had for a long time. Looking at which white people have changed their minds offers insights and a cautionary tale to Democratic leaders seeking to make inroads with those who previously supported this president.

The polling data couldn’t make it more clear that the white people who are finally moving away from supporting Trump are college-educated—not the working-class whites that many Democrats and reporters obsess over. (Pollsters and journalists often use “working-class” and “non–college educated” interchangeably.) In August, support among all whites for impeachment and removal of the president stood at 27 percent in a Monmouth University poll. After the first whistle-blower filed a complaint in August about Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, the impeachment inquiry was launched in late September, and the White House released the partial transcript of the Zelensky call, public opinion turned.

By the end of September, overall white support for impeachment had risen to 34 percent in that month’s Monmouth poll. Nearly all of that change, however, came from college-educated whites whose enthusiasm for ending the Trump presidency rose by 70 percent—jumping from 26 percent supporting it to 44 percent. For whites with no college degree, however, allegiance to Trump stayed strong, and support for impeachment barely budged, with a small uptick of 2 percent.

This steadfast loyalty to Trump has significant strategic implications. First, since non-college-educated white Americans will be the last to leave the Trump ship of state, it is foolhardy to spend significant time, money, and attention trying to change their minds. Ever since Trump’s election, many in the progressive movement have obsessed over finding ways to “win back” the white working class. The magazine The American Prospect devoted an entire issue to chasing this great white whale (pun intended). Illinois Representative Cheri Bustos rode to leadership of the campaign arm of the House Democrats on the promise of focusing attention and resources on white voters in the “heartland.” Democrat-aligned super PACs such as Priorities USA are spending hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of dollars running ads targeting the voters least likely to be receptive. If conservative, white, working-class voters are sticking with Trump even after his corruption has been laid bare by this impeachment process, they’re not going to be swayed by slick ads attacking the administration’s pro-billionaire tax policies.

Given the pearl-clutching that comes when people point out the intractable nature of these views, it bears repeating that progressives should nonetheless champion a public policy agenda that benefits all members of the working class, including those who hated President Obama and love Trump, as well as his policies that cage children, deport innocent people, and aim to make America whiter. That’s the lesson of Obamacare: Despite the widespread fears and right-wing distortions to the contrary, Obama didn’t propose health insurance just to benefit people of color. His public policies sought to improve the lives of working-class whites as well, whether they wanted it or not.

If we want to expand a political coalition, we don’t start with those least likely to join the cause. What the impeachment polls show is that the most potential for expanding white support lies with those college-educated whites who, to this point, have found ways to rationalize, minimize, and excuse Trump’s conduct and destructive policies. Some sector of this demographic does still believe in this country’s democratic institutions and the principles of patriotism that they grew up embracing. What the developments of the past couple months show is that emphasizing the core concept of “country over party” does have some persuasive value—there is, in fact, some behavior by this president that is just a bridge too far.

There is deep irony, if not poetic justice, in the fact that it is patriotism that is now uniting the country across partisan and racial divisions. For decades, if not centuries, the popular perception has been that people of color, in their quest for justice and equality, were only concerned about their own “special interests” and not the broader good of the country as a whole. But as Nikole Hannah-Jones highlighted in her seminal work on The New York Times’ 1619 Project, people of color are actually the most patriotic people of all. Speaking of African Americans, Hannah-Jones wrote, “More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.”

It is no accident that this reclamation of American values called impeachment has been led by the nation’s elected leaders of color—people such as Texas Representative Al Green of Houston, who introduced articles of impeachment in 2017; California Representative Maxine Waters, who publicly proclaimed two years ago that this president should be impeached; and Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib, who famously declared back in January, “We’re going to impeach the MF-er.” The late Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, was literally signing impeachment-related subpoenas on his deathbed.

The majority of people of color have long supported impeaching this president because they have been clear-eyed from the beginning about the threat that he represents to the best of what America aspires to and should be. Now that the curtain has been pulled back by the most diverse Congress in history, many more college-educated whites have come to see the appalling corruption and contempt for the American ideal unfolding in the Oval Office. Maybe their relative economic security makes them less susceptible to race-baiting and fear-mongering, but whatever the reason for their change of heart, understanding and building on common values is the most promising path for progressives to expand their support among white voters.

how me the money.” That famous phrase from the movie Jerry Maguire succinctly summarizes what the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee must do to show that its leaders are serious about addressing the controversy that recently exploded in light of criticisms raised by African American and Latino members of Congress regarding the committee’s hiring practices.

While it is encouraging that DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos (D-IL) announced last week that she has chosen a Latina, Lucinda Guinn, to be the new executive director, it is still not evident that Bustos properly appreciates the depths of the problems that exploded in July, causing chaos and widespread staff resignations and recriminations. The uproar about the overwhelmingly white composition of the DCCC senior staff highlights the latest in a string of missteps that included blacklisting consultants who work for candidates challenging an incumbent.

What the hiring debacle laid bare was a much more profound problem: deeply embedded implicit racial bias that illogically directs Democratic spending toward the pursuit of white Trump supporters—the sector of the electorate least likely to vote Democratic—above all other electoral priorities.

To recap, in July, Politico reported that several African American and Latino members of Congress were alarmed that the DCCC, under newly elected Bustos, was assembling a nearly-all-white leadership team, marginalizing consultants of color, and failing to invest in engaging the country’s rapidly growing Latino population. This led to tense, dramatic staff meetings and ultimately the mass resignation of almost the entire leadership team. In response, Bustos admitted some mistakes were made and created a diverse advisory team that oversaw the hiring of the new executive director.

Bustos’s proposed improvements, many of which are reinstatements of procedures that her team abandoned after taking over from her predecessor, Ben Ray Lujan, are necessary but woefully insufficient. Solely focusing on HR processes fails to address the likelihood that hundreds of millions of dollars will be wasted this election cycle pursing an ineffective political strategy that is rooted in racial bias rather than empirical data.

Bustos’s belief that white voters—and white Trump supporters at that—are the most important political priority for Democrats is long-standing. After the 2016 election, she commissioned a report, “Hope From the Heartland,” that reprimanded the Democratic Party for failing to perform better among rural, Midwestern white voters. Notably, few, if any, people of color were among the 72 Democratic officials interviewed for the report, and a central conclusion of those dozens of white politicians was that rural white Trump supporters voted Republican because of their perception that Democrats were “fixated” on “specific groups that didn’t include them.” In order to improve the party’s prospects, according to Bustos’s prescription, Democrats needed to stop being “too focused on controversial social issues to the exclusion of economic concerns.”

The inherent contradiction and underlying racism of this prescription, and the worldview that undergirds it, were laid bare in a January 2018 article by Politico reporter Michael Kruse. In Indiana, Kruse met with state Representative Terry Goodin, who in the “Heartland” report  is lifted up as an example of how Democrats can connect with rural Trump supporters. According to Kruse, as Goodin chatted amiably with a MAGA-hat wearing constituent who had nonetheless voted for her, the constituent, a truck driver, unapologetically stated that he refuses to train new drivers who are Muslim because “they’re taught to be nice to you, and then they blow you up.” After an awkward pause, the conversation turned jovial again, ending with Goodin asking about the man’s “grandbabies.”

Bustos clearly believes that when confronted with such racist views, the preferred approach is to change the topic rather than try to change minds. When faced with sensitive civil rights topics, such as Black Lives Matter and transgender bathroom laws, Bustos says: “I don’t dwell on them” when talking to voters.

From a strictly mathematical standpoint, the preponderance of empirical electoral data proves that the majority of voters do not share the anti-Muslim views of Goodin’s Indiana constituent, but Bustos’s strategy prioritizes attention, energy, and resources on connecting with the minority of voters who do. And, without any real evidence, Bustos posits that Democrats can successfully attract and win significant support from those who are resistant to and fearful of the country’s demographic changes.

It is no wonder, then, that the leadership team selected by Bustos set about prioritizing the pursuit of white Trump supporters. And if the mandate of the leadership is to focus resources on white Trump voters, the importance of attracting and elevating staff of color naturally got put on the back burner, resulting in the meltdown we saw in July.

Properly staffing the DCCC is just one part of the picture. The bigger challenge for the committee is to intelligently spend the nearly $300 million that DCCC is projected to expend this cycle. The DCCC, like many organizations in the progressive ecosystem, is notably undemocratic and opaque in how it decides to spend its resources, and as Guinn assumes the role of executive director, she will have significant say in how to spend the committee’s hundreds of millions of dollars in the racially polarized environment of a country whose demographic composition continues to rapidly change, creating both opportunities and challenges.

Since political spending is publicly disclosed and subject to scrutiny and accountability, this is where the public can see if DCCC leadership has truly learned the deeper lessons about how to win in modern, multiracial America. The most meaningful measures of the committee’s clarity and commitment will be found on the expenditure side of the campaign disclosure reports. Those documents will answer the following questions:

• Which voters does the DCCC prioritize? Will the lion’s share of the spending go to television ads designed to persuade Trump supporters that Democrats are really on their side, or will data-driven decisions prevail? If it chooses the latter, the DCCC could invest tens of millions of dollars in strategic partnerships with local leaders and groups who can help boost turnout in heavily Latino and black districts—particularly in Texas, Georgia, and Southern California—where Democrats can expand their majority.
• Which candidates are being recruited and groomed? How much time, attention, and priority will go toward finding and funding candidates for Congress who reflect the growing racial diversity in highly competitive districts? It is no accident that candidates like African American Lucy McBath in Georgia nd Latinos Xochitl Torres Small in New Mexico and Gil Herrera in California had cultural connections with the voters who helped them prevail in their rapidly diversifying but previously Republican-held districts.
• What is the plan for white voters? How much will the committee pander to the worst instincts of anxious white voters by trying to distance the party from “divisive” issues such as immigration and Trump’s racism? If the committee moves away from this approach, it could devote its considerable research budget to polling, focus groups, and studies by behavioral scientists and psychologists to determine how to best tap the anti-racist sentiments held by most white voters.
• Who’s “in the room where it happens”? While the advisory council Bustos has assembled to assist in hiring the next executive director is laudable, it isn’t enough. Who will oversee and guide the committee’s spending to ensure decisions are determined by math and not the wishful myth of widespread white support for Democrats that the party enjoyed before the reforms of the 1960s?

To prove that she has learned the right lessons, Bustos doesn’t have to mimic the scene from Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise shouts into the phone, “I love black people!” But she does need to show her colleagues and stakeholders the money and a budget that proves she’s learned the deeper lessons from the summer debacle.

Should five people stand in the way of Congress’s performing its constitutional, historical, and moral duty? Despite widespread agreement among Democrats that the president has committed multiple impeachable offenses, fear of the political consequences of proceeding with impeachment continues to dominate the behavior of House Democrats. They need not be so worried.

The political calculations and hesitation about proceeding with articles of impeachment are rooted in an incorrect understanding of what happened in the 2018 midterm elections and a vastly overstated estimate of the number of congressional districts where moderate voters made the difference. House Democrats won 235 districts in 2018, giving them a 17-seat majority. Contrary to the widespread political conventional wisdom, the defection of Trump voters to the Democratic side determined the outcome of contests in only five of those districts.

Democratic Georgia Representative Hank Johnson, a member of the Judiciary Committee, articulated the concerns of his fellow Democrats when he said, “I think we have to pay close attention to what’s going on in the 30 or so swing districts, what are those people thinking.” But the idea that there are 30 Democratic-held districts where Trump supporters are the dominant force is empirically unsound and mathematically unsupported. First of all, only 21 of the seats won by Democrats in 2018 were in districts won by Trump in 2016—fewer than half the seats that Democrats flipped. Second, 16 of those 21 districts are less moderate than most analysts think they are.

“Districts Won by Trump” Does Not Mean What You Think It Does

A frequent media and strategist talking point is that many new members of Congress come from districts that Trump won in 2016. That assertion implies that in those districts, many Trump voters switched allegiances in 2018 and backed the Democratic congressional candidate. Those new members of Congress, the thinking goes, are vulnerable to a backlash from moderate and conservative voters who could see impeachment as Democrats overreaching.

While on first impression it’s not illogical to draw such a conclusion about the implications of a Trump-won district, a closer read of the numbers and data reveals a very different picture. In fact, it reveals the opposite.

Quite simply, of those who voted in 2018, more people who voted against Trump in 2016 came back out to vote in the midterms than did those who voted for him in the last presidential election. In the decisive midterm races that flipped the House to the Democrats, significantly more Hillary Clinton voters returned to the polls than did Trump voters.

The current enthusiasm gap between the parties, fueled by the passion of the resistance, compelled Democratic voters to turn out in historic numbers for midterm elections. In 2018 in most of those flipped districts, Trump’s supporters, more satisfied with the political status quo now that they had their preferred person in the White House, did not cast ballots in equally large numbers as Democratic voters did.

In the pivotal congressional races that changed hands, the total number of Democratic votes was fully 99 percent of what the Democratic turnout was in the 2016 presidential election—an astounding level of participation in a midterm contest. The Republican vote, by contrast, dropped to 88 percent of 2016’s. And even with such an impressive level of Democratic turnout, the number of votes for Democrats in these districts still did not exceed those they cast for Clinton in 2016, further suggesting that it was the original anti-Trump voters who made the difference. Logically, if large numbers of Republicans were defecting to the Democratic ranks, the total number of Democratic votes would increase. But it didn’t. The following diagram illustrates what happened:

Looking more closely at the individual districts that changed hands in the midterms, the same basic pattern holds, for the most part. In 81 percent of the Democratic pickups, voters who opposed Trump in 2016 were largely responsible for flipping the seats in 2018.

This pattern can be seen by comparing the raw vote totals from 2016 with those from 2018. In the 21 now-Democratic districts won by Trump, seven races saw a decrease compared with Clinton’s 2016 numbers (the original anti-Trump voters). In six other seats, the Democratic candidates saw bumps in their vote totals over Clinton’s, suggesting there may have been some Republican voters drifting to the Democratic camp. But in those six races, the number of Trump voters who didn’t vote for their Republican congressional candidate was so large that the defections were not needed for the Democrat to prevail.

That leaves eight districts where voters who previously supported Trump may have been decisive in flipping seats. In three of those, other factors were likely more decisive than the vote switching of disaffected Republicans. In Georgia, for example, Stacey Abrams’s campaign brought waves of new voters to the polls, boosting Lucy McBath to her narrow win in the state’s sixth district.

The implications of this reality are enormous. The voters who flipped control of the House opposed Trump from the start and came back out in historic numbers in 2018 to rein him in. (According to exit polls, a plurality of midterm voters said their motivation was to oppose Trump.) Far from being alienated by impeachment proceedings, they want Congress to hold this man accountable.

Even in those seats where Republican defections did make a difference, impeachment would just as likely solidify the Democratic advantage as erode it. Something caused those Republicans who defected to abandon Trump, and it stands to reason that meticulously documenting and explaining to the American people exactly how he obstructed justice, destroyed societal norms, and undermined our democracy could reinforce and validate the doubts that caused them to abandon him in 2018.

It is not always the case that doing the right thing is supported by the electoral calculus. But when it comes to impeachment of the current occupant of the White House, that is certainly the case. The political imperative of this moment is actually the opposite of what many are concluding. Energized anti-Trump voters delivered the speaker’s gavel to Nancy Pelosi. Those voters now expect Congress to do what they were elected to do: impose consequences for the destruction of our democracy and the flouting of our constitutional norms. That requires courage, not caution.

he next president of the United States will likely be Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, or Joe Biden. Looking at the nomination contest through the lens of the fundamental factors that have historically determined who wins the Democratic nomination—namely, the results in Iowa and then the subsequent much more diverse states—the current state of the race is that these candidates stand the best chances of prevailing as the nominee (and as I’ve previously written, the Democratic standard-bearer in 2020 is more likely than not to win the general election).

This analysis is not based on who I want to be president (full disclosure: I’m supporting Booker), but rather what my read of the current data and dynamics suggest will most likely happen. Although it’s still early in the process, we are nearly halfway through the 13-month pre-Iowa-caucus period, and we can glean a lot from what has transpired these past six months.

The Twin Pillars of The Democratic Nomination Process: Iowa and Voters of Color

There are two dominant fundamental factors that will shape the 2020 contest, and both of them are being under-appreciated in most political analyses.

First is the enormous influence of the Iowa Caucus results on the rest of the contests that follow. Both in terms of propelling a candidate to front-runner status and simultaneously winnowing the field, Iowa has historically been critical, especially in multicandidate contests. In 2004, after dominating the primary race in terms of attention and fundraising for months, Howard Dean faltered at the end. John Kerry then surged from 4 percent in the polls to win the contest just one month later, effectively dealing a death blow to Dean and the other candidates. In 2008, Obama was trailing Hillary Clinton nationally, even among black voters, until he overtook her and John Edwards in the closing weeks of Iowa, catapulting him to a front-runner’s status he never relinquished. In 2016, Bernie Sanders came from nearly 30 points behind in Iowa to almost snatch the state from Clinton, but her formidable in-state organization enabled her to withstand Bernie (although barely). That victory, however narrow, allowed Hillary to blunt Bernie’s momentum and hold him off until she could get to the Southern states where she solidified an insurmountable lead.

Which brings us to the second fundamental factor—the centrality of voters of color in Democratic politics, African Americans in particular. Nearly half of all Democratic votes come from people of color (48 percent in the 2016 general election), and their role is accentuated in the Democratic primaries by the electoral calendar. After the overwhelmingly white states of Iowa and New Hampshire have their say, the race largely turns to states where voters of color are the majority or near-majority of primary voters. This year, that role is further entrenched by the fact that California and Texas vote in early March, and the majority of Democratic voters in each of those states are people of color (actually the majority of people in each of those state are of color). Most significantly, there is a late-February to mid-March gauntlet of Democratic primaries in states such as South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi—states where the African American vote is a sizable, if not dominant, percentage of the Democratic base. It was in those states that Obama expanded his delegate lead over Clinton by 500 percent in 2008 and built a lead that was impossible to overcome. In 2016, a similar situation unfolded as Clinton ran the table in the largely black states and built an insurmountable delegate lead over Sanders.

Joe Biden

At the moment, Biden is in fact the front-runner. He starts with the considerable strengths that one would expect of a former vice president of a popular presidency—near universal name-recognition, favorable feelings about the Obama era, an extensive fundraising network (he’s suggested he has raised over $19 million already), and a national political team. Plus, he is the primary beneficiary of an intractable, but inaccurate, belief that a white male candidate would be the strongest nominee against Donald Trump.

That array of assets could well be enough to help him withstand the crucible that is coming as the race heats up and approaches Iowa. Like Hillary Clinton in 2008, Biden is viewed favorably by African Americans, and that strength could make him formidable in a place like South Carolina where he could conceivably run well among white and black voters alike.

However, Biden faces two significant hurdles that could derail his efforts. First, he is late to the game and under-organized in Iowa. The best organizers have largely already signed up with other campaigns, leaving him to build an operation from a pool of people with shorter résumés and smaller track records (and while he enjoys warm feelings among voters generally, it’s worth noting that the last time Biden ran without Obama, in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, he got less than 1 percent of the vote). I recently spoke with a veteran of Iowa politics who referred to Biden’s campaign in Iowa as a soufflé that may well collapse.

The other challenge facing Biden’s campaign is how out of touch he is with today’s politics and social norms. His tone-deafness in grasping the seriousness of the #MeToo allegations against him and how until recently he clung to his support for the Hyde Amendment betray rusty political skills at best and a combination of atrocious instincts and arrogance at worst. These poor instincts were on display again just last week when Biden extolled his close partnership with white supremacist senators as an example of his ability to get things done. His candidacy very much has the feel of Clinton in 2008, when significant advantages were eclipsed by superior organizing and a candidate more aligned with the moment.

Elizabeth Warren

At this point in the race, Elizabeth Warren stands the best chance of being the next president. She has three significant quantifiable strengths, and one enormous qualitative advantage. Warren’s first advantage is her strength among progressive whites. Many people forget that before Bernie Sanders ran in 2016, Warren was the person that progressives pined for. Only after she deferred to Clinton did Bernie emerge as the progressive alternative. Most analysts acknowledge that her recent surge in the polls has come at the expense of Sanders, whose poll numbers have declined. In the latest Monmouth University poll, Warren leads Sanders among self-identified liberal voters by 8 points.

Warren’s second advantage is her strength among voters of color. Polls show her consistently in the top tier, and those numbers were made manifest by the popular reception she received among audiences of color at the She the People Forum and Black Economic Alliance gathering this year. She has led the conversation on reparations and the racial wealth gap, and her rhetoric is reinforced by her actions. Five years ago, for example, Warren sought out a meeting with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates to learn about reparations, showing not only principle, but prescience, in light of Coates’s recent congressional testimony on a proposed commission to consider reparations.

Equally important as her macro strengths among progressive whites and people of color is her third strength: a micro focus on the nitty-gritty of organizing in Iowa, where the contest may be decided by a few thousand votes. Warren reportedly has the largest paid staff on the ground in Iowa, with respected talent running the operation.

Lastly, the least quantitative measure is that Warren has harnessed her personal strengths into a campaign brand that is extremely authentic and, hence, powerful. Her identity as a wonkish professor and her campaign’s theme, “She Has a Plan For That,” resonate as real rather than gimmicky.

Kamala Harris

When the president of the United States is unapologetically misogynistic, racist, and xenophobic, in many ways the boldest and clearest repudiation of all he represents would be to elect a woman of color who is the child of immigrants. In the same way that Obama personified many of the hopes and dreams of Americans across the racial spectrum in 2008, Harris similarly represents the hopes of those across the racial, gender, and immigration spectrum of this moment. The power of that potential was proven by her highly successful campaign launch, pushing her up the polling ladder and attracting a broad fundraising base of tens of thousands of supporters.

Further cementing her strength, Harris has assembled a top-flight team of women of color to help guide her campaign, including her sister and campaign chair Maya Harris. One particular secret weapon in Harris’s arsenal: preeminent organizer Emmy Ruiz, architect of Clinton’s and Obama’s successes in Nevada. Ruiz’s talent and knowledge can help Harris in the Nevada caucus, which is historically underappreciated in the nomination contest, but which comes at the critical moment of just two weeks after the New Hampshire primary. Strength in Nevada could generate momentum for South Carolina, the state that kicks off the “black phase” of the primary process.

Harris’s fundraising prowess will place her in good standing in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, although there are conflicting reports about the size and strength of her operation in that state. If she is able to emerge from Iowa with meaningful momentum, her early organizing groundwork in Nevada, South Carolina, Georgia, and other states will serve her well, and she could also run the table in the heavily black states and emerge with the lead (truth be told, competing with Booker, as reporters Nick Corasaniti and Astead Herndon of The New York Times examined).

Cory Booker

For reasons that conflate misogyny, patriarchy and 400 years of racism and white supremacy in this country, the deep and palpable Democratic desire for someone who is “electable” has led many people to conclude that a white male nominee offers the best chances for victory in 2020. But what the actual historical data shows is that in the past 20 years, Democrats have only won the White House when the nominee was an inspirational Black man who’d served in the US Senate. Of all the candidates running, Booker is closest to the Obama mold. Despite his current low polling numbers and apparent fundraising challenges (factors that may pose his largest obstacles), Booker has three core strengths that give him a realistic shot to break out of the pack and capture the nomination.

Obama’s message of racial healing and unity (characterized by his refutation of the red state-blue state divide) resonated deeply among Iowans, and helped him perform remarkably well in that 90 percent white state. Booker’s message of love, unity, and inspiration in the continuation of the Civil Rights movement is very aligned with an electorate where 91 percent of voters named a priority to have “someone who can heal the racial, ethnic, and partisan divide in our country.” The power of that message in Iowa was on full display at his speech in October when he brought the crowd of 1,100 to its feet by connecting the post-Kavanaugh moment to Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and the Civil Rights struggle of 1965, even invoking and adapting King’s cry of “How long? Not long!”

Booker’s second significant strength: his campaign is matching his soaring rhetoric with a heavy investment in boots on the ground in Iowa where organizing is critical. Media reports indicate that he has the second-largest number of staffers in the caucus state, with key respected leaders in charge of his effort.

Also like Obama, Booker could ride success in Iowa throughout the heavily Black states that follow on the calendar. His comfort, history, communication gifts, and roots in the Black community (he lived in public housing for seven years while serving on Newark’s city council and is the only candidate to still live in a largely Black neighborhood) enable him to inspire and galvanize African American voters. With these skills, he can capture the lion’s share of those delegates, just as Obama did in 2008 and Clinton did in 2016.

The Wild Cards: Beto and Stacey

The dictionary defines a wildcard as “a person or thing whose influence is unpredictable,” and that definition perfectly fits two people on the national political landscape: Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams.

Beto O’Rourke. In his 2018 Senate campaign, O’Rourke captured the imagination of progressives across the country and became a fundraising juggernaut, bringing in more money than any Senate candidate in US history. His team also displayed an impressive and cutting edge organizational operation that could be critical to winning in a state such as Iowa. Furthermore, he came of political age in El Paso, an 80 percent Latino city, and his knowledge, comfort and ease with Latinos comes through. Plus, his forceful defense of pro football players protesting racism went viral and displayed a level of unapologetic courage in the face of white racial anxieties that is unusual among white politicians and did not go unnoticed by Black America. In the first half of this year, however, Beto’s magic has dissipated, and it is very hard to regain momentum once lost, especially in such a crowded and credentialed field. Running against multiple talented Democrats is a much different proposition than being the sole opponent to Ted Cruz, and that reality will make it hard for him to recapture his mojo.

Stacey Abrams is a rare political talent whose combination of brains, strategic savvy, and inspiration set her apart on the political landscape. In many ways, substantively and symbolically she is the diametric opposite of Trump and the America Trump is trying to build. Her authenticity deeply resonates with this political moment, and there is a scenario where a late entry by Abrams (don’t forget that Bill Clinton didn’t launch his first presidential campaign until October of 1991) captures the imagination of an electorate hungry for a fresh face and voice, and she swoops in and sweeps to victory.

About the B’s: Bernie and Buttigieg

Bernie Sanders. This will probably be the most controversial part of this piece, but, again, I’m not advocating here, just trying to call it like I see it, based on data and history. Given that Sanders is so well-known, it is hard to draw any other conclusion from the 2019 polling data than that he has a fairly low ceiling of potential support. Granted, he also has a fairly high floor of support (his national polling numbers have never dropped below 14 percent). Iowa is a perfect example. In that state where he secured 50 percent of the vote in the 2016 caucuses, Sanders is currently polling between 16 percent and 25 percent. That reduction in support is certainly not the result of unfamiliarity with the candidate; it’s a function of more options to choose from. While it’s theoretically possible that after Iowans survey the field, they’ll return to Sanders, given the size and quality of the field, that scenario is very unlikely.

It is not out of the question that Sanders’s high floor could be enough for him to prevail in a crowded caucus field in Iowa, but even if he does so, he will again run into the challenges he faced with voters of color in 2016, especially African America voters. Clinton’s strength in the South blocked Sanders’ ascent in 2016, and in 2020, he’s unlikely to do better among black people than the black candidates once the race narrows to a few choices.

Pete Buttigieg’s rise has definitely been impressive, with attention-getting fundraising numbers, multiple favorable media profiles, and measurable momentum among many Democratic donors. In some ways, his ascent is reminiscent of previous white reform candidates such as Gary Hart in 1984, Bill Bradley in 2000, and Howard Dean in 2004. None of those candidates ultimately prevailed, however, and Buttigieg will likely ultimately face a similar fate. The primary impediment for Buttigieg is his near-nonexistent support among people of color. In California, the state with the largest Latino population in the country, Buttigieg has so far secured just 2 percent support among Latinos. In South Carolina, a poll released last month showed him netting 0 percent support among African Americans. Buttigieg’s challenges with African Americans were on vivid display in recent days as he struggled to deal with community outrage in the wake of the police killing of Eric Logan, a South Bend, Indiana, African American man. It’s virtually unfathomable to see how someone unknown to black voters will, in a matter of months, significantly rise in that community when running against two African Americans and the vice president to the first black president. Theoretically, in a different field, Buttigieg could be the consensus choice of white Democrats and gain the lead as multiple candidates splinter the votes of people of color, but he has serious competition for white votes from Sanders, Warren, Biden, and O’Rourke. Absent all the other white candidates dropping out after Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s nearly impossible to identify Buttigieg’s path to the nomination.

The good news is that Democrats have an extraordinarily talented field. The candidate with the superior Iowa organization, resonant message to Iowa voters, and strong appeal to voters of color will most likely be the Democratic nominee and the next president.

Most people in this country do not support Donald Trump and never have. As The New York Times recently reported, he “is the only president in the history of Gallup polling never to earn the support of a majority of Americans even for a single day of his term.” This simple fact should be the starting point for all analysis of the 2020 presidential election, but rather than stating it at the outset, most pundits and columnists ignore a crucial reality. In doing so, they distort their coverage and default to Trump.

I almost hesitate to point this fact out because we need to sustain a strong sense of urgency in order to win back the White House, but it is important to allocate time, energy, and resources in the most informed and effective fashion. What we think has to happen in order to win in 2020 will drive our efforts in 2019, so we need to have this discussion now. Mathematically and empirically, as we enter this election cycle, Donald Trump is not favored to win reelection. The president is not the front-runner.

In normal election cycles, incumbent presidents are seen as likely to win reelection by virtue of their name recognition and media attention. Trump has both in droves, but this is no normal election cycle. The country is currently engaged in a titanic struggle that is evocative of the 1860s Civil War era and 1960s civil-rights movement. CNN political analyst Ron Brownstein describes it as a battle between the “coalition of restoration” and the “coalition of transformation.” The essence of the struggle, as Brownstein explains, is whether one embraces or opposes the “relentless economic, demographic and cultural changes reshaping American life.”

Brownstein’s framework is more on point than the pervasive view that the 2020 contest is a boxing match in which victory will belong to the party that selects the most effective pugilist. What will decide the 2020 election is not how many blows one can land on Trump, but how many bodies one can get to the polls to vote him out.

If we fail to learn the right lessons from 2016 (and 2018), we will waste many millions of dollars, squander precious time, and fail to properly reassemble the coalition that twice voted to put a Black man in the White House. An essential fact to keep in mind is that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. But her opponent won more electoral votes, so he must be in the stronger position today, right? Wrong.

Three things conspired to make the 2016 election a perfect and catastrophic storm, whereby the election was determined by a mere 78,000 votes in three states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (none of which, notably, gave Trump 50 percent of the popular vote). First, African-American turnout plummeted to its lowest level in nearly 20 years. Second, many Obama voters defected to the third- and fourth-party candidacies of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. (The vote increase for Stein in Michigan from 2012 to 2016 was greater than the margin of difference between Clinton and Trump). Third, some Obama voters likely did vote for Trump, but not nearly as many as people think. More Obama voters switched to Johnson and Stein than to Trump, and Trump received fewer votes in Wisconsin than Romney did in 2012, troubling the popular perception that a wave of voters switched sides to swell the Republican ranks. Had any one of those three developments gone differently, Clinton would likely be president.

Obviously, since Trump is in the Oval Office, it is possible for him to win again. But is he favored to do so? No. Just as three key factors handed the election to Trump, three significant changes to the country and the electorate since 2016 now give the electoral advantage to the Democrats. First, the country continues to get browner by the hour (hence this administration’s maniacal focus on restricting and reversing immigration trends). Based on the analysis I did of census and government data for my book Brown Is the New White, there are 7,000 more people of color added to the US population every single day—as compared to just 1,000 whites—through a combination of births, deaths, and legal immigration. The Center for American Progress and other think tanks released a report last year showing that, if we had a do-over of the 2016 election, with every demographic group voting in 2020 exactly as they did in 2016, including third-party votes, Trump would lose, simply because there will be that many more people of color in the electorate in 2020. Roughly one-third of all eligible voters will be people of color next year, in what will be the “least white and most diverse electorate ever.”

The second changed reality on the electoral landscape is the tangible effect of the 2018 elections, which brought a new slate of Democratic leaders and a push to expand the electorate. Whereas the previous Republican governors of Wisconsin and Michigan worked overtime to restrict the franchise and aid and abet voter suppression, those states now have Democrats in their governor’s mansions (and African Americans in the lieutenant governors’ offices). The governmental apparatus can now be brought to bear to remove obstacles to voting instead of erecting them. In states that were decided by 11,000 (Michigan) and 22,000 (Wisconsin) votes, that’s a major development.

The work done to expand the electorate for the 2018 elections also created new battleground states out of formerly comfortable Republican territory. Democrats fielded historically strong gubernatorial candidates in Georgia, Florida, and Arizona last year, with the nominees all winning more votes than any prior Democratic gubernatorial nominee in their state. Although their candidacies fell agonizingly short of prevailing, the states saw major infrastructural changes: Florida restored the right to vote to people with felony records; Georgia was forced to overturn a harsh automated voter-purge system; and Arizona elected a secretary of state who supports automatic voter registration and has pledged to keep a close eye on the rolls. These changes will give Democrats a competitive edge in the three states, all of which are on the front lines of the demographic revolution. Moreover, the gubernatorial candidate standard-bearers in Florida and Georgia (Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams, respectively), among the party’s top rising stars, are focused on turning their 2018 supporters into permanent political forces.

The third development is that, finally, some whites who supported Trump have had enough. The 2018 election saw Republican support among white college-educated women drop from a 10-point GOP advantage to a statistical tie between the parties. That shift helped the Democrats take back control of the House. In determining political priorities and investment strategy, it is critical to realize that the data shows that the most movable white Republicans are white college-educated women, who many Democrats seem to have forgotten in their obsession over white working-class male Trump supporters.

To be sure, Democrats and progressives could still mess this up (I’m looking at you, Jill Stein and Howard Schultz). But the mathematical foundation is plain and simple: Trump starts out behind. The coalition of transformation is bigger than the coalition of restoration. The majority of people don’t support this president, and never have. If we can keep them from splintering or becoming dispirited, the Democratic nominee will become the 46th president in January of 2021.

Nearly two years after the #MeToo movement burst the dam of centuries of silence about inappropriate male behavior, some Democrats still don’t know how to properly respond to allegations of male misconduct. Or, worse, some have learned the wrong lessons from the worst perpetrators such as Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh.

The responses to the essay by Lucy Flores about Joe Biden’s unwelcome massaging and kissing have put this problem in stark relief. (In full disclosure, I consider Lucy a friend, and I supported her runs for lieutenant governor in 2014 and Congress in 2016. I also have established Dream United, a Super PAC to support Senator Cory Booker’s bid for president.)

The conservative playbook for responding to women who stand up and speak out about inappropriate male behavior is clear: Attack the accuser, and never apologize. Trump used such an approach to get past the Access Hollywood tape, where he was caught bragging about committing sexual assault. Kavanaugh deployed the same approach in fighting for his seat on the Supreme Court.

In responding to Flores, Biden’s allies have deployed a kinder, gentler form of attack. Call it Kavanaugh-lite. They haven’t aggressively tried to destroy her reputation, but they have tried to indirectly and implicitly cast doubt on the allegations.

Kavanaugh’s team secured letters of testimonial from women who said they knew the judge and attested that he was a great guy who had never acted inappropriately around them. Similarly, in recent days, numerous prominent women such as former UN Ambassador Susan Rice, actress Alyssa Milano, South Carolina political strategist Amanda Loveday, and others have vouched for Biden’s bona fides.

All of those testimonials are besides the point. Neither Flores nor Amy Lappos, who came forward on Monday to say she too had had an inappropriate physical interaction with Biden, have ever said Biden is a bad human being. They said they had specific interactions where his behavior made them feel uncomfortable and, in Flores’s words, “gross.” The flurry of testimonials are actually attacks on the accusers—there is no reason to say “he didn’t do that to me,” other than to cast doubt on those who say he did it to them.

Other attacks have been more direct. Henry Muñoz, finance chair of the Democratic National Committee, issued a statement saying he’d been unable to find any corroborating photographs, leading him to conclude, “I, and the organization I cofounded and those in attendance, do not believe that circumstances support allegations that such an event took place.”

Cristobal Alex, former head of Latino Victory Project and current Biden staffer, went full-on Kavanaugh, in that he appeared more outraged by how Biden was being treated than by the underlying treatment of the woman. Alex indignantly said he “felt sucker-punched” by Flores, whom he accused of misrepresenting his statements to her.

At its most extreme, former DNC Chairman Ed Rendell sounded positively Trumpian in declaring (on Fox News, of course) that, “We have to draw a line on this #MeToo.… The vast majority of the American people are sick of this stuff. They know what’s real and what isn’t real. This isn’t real.” Further adding fuel to the fire, published reports cite anonymous Biden allies as dismissing the allegations as simply “all coming out of Bernie world.”

While his aides and surrogates do the dirty work, Biden released a gentle video on Wednesday expressing his intention to be “more mindful” of personal space in the future and offering several excuses for his handsy nature—because he doesn’t believe politics are “sterile,” and he likes to comfort people. Notably, what Biden’s video did not include was an apology to any of the women who found his conduct problematic.

Progressives are supposed to be better than this. They are supposed to embody and model the values of empowerment and equality and justice. The starting point for a progressive response is to trust the women speaking up about their experiences. In a country where an estimated 64 percent of sexual assaults are never reported, and only 5 percent of claims are found to be false, believing those who come forward should be the default position. The whole point of women baring their souls about their own experiences was to educate the society in general, and men in particular, about the pervasiveness of the problem. “Trust Survivors” and “I believe” are not just slogans; they’re markers laid down to differentiate progressives in a country where the default posture of most institutions is to not believe the women who speak up.

A progressive response to allegations of misconduct should also include accepting responsibility and atoning for one’s actions. Biden’s non-apology did not achieve that. Emphasizing one’s intent over one’s impact, intended or not, is by definition self-centered. As Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday, “What’s important is how they receive it, not necessarily how you intended it.”

This controversy could have quickly been put to rest had Biden been less defensive and more empathetic. An apology would have shown that he sees and respects those who were made uncomfortable by his conduct. Unfortunately, properly apologizing is difficult for Biden, as he still hasn’t apologized to Anita Hill and could only muster an anemic statement of ‘I wish I could’ve done something” to protect Hill during the 1991 hearings that he controlled as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The lack of learning is troubling enough in and of itself, but it is particularly dangerous heading into a titanic battle to oust the misogynist in the White House. It’s not about whether Biden runs or doesn’t. It’s about how the movement and party manifest an understanding of how to build a better society than the one championed by the sexual assaulter in chief. So far, the results and actions are less than impressive. We can and must do better.

Is the president of the United States a racist? The short answer is yes, but the question itself actually misses the mark and is dangerously misdirected for those who want to redress the ongoing consequences of racism in America.

Since January, a number of national leaders have asserted that Trump is a racist. First, when asked on CBS’s 60 Minutes whether she believes President Trump is a racist, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded, “Yeah, no question.” More recently, Senator Sherrod Brown followed suit, telling Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that “We have a president who is racist.” Bernie Sanders has also forcefully said, “We now have a President of the United States who is a racist.”

These statements were met with surprise by white male reporters. During the 60 Minutes interview, Anderson Cooper immediately challenged Ocasio-Cortez by asking, “How can you say that?” Chuck Todd, host of one of the most important television political platforms in the country, quickly cut off Brown with the rejoinder, “Let me pause you there. You believe in his heart, he’s a racist?”

Since that specific question is in the national conversation, we should give it a clear answer: Yes, Donald Trump is racist. My colleagues at Democracy in Color have catalogued 242 separate actions, statements, or policies from the first 18 months of the administration. Both Vox and The New York Times recently provided historical summaries of Trump’s racism going back decades.

While it’s important and a good sign that some of our nation’s leaders, and media, are coming forward to call out Trump as a racist, focusing on that narrow question is problematic and could be counterproductive in many ways to the larger goals of ending inequality and injustice in America.

First, it diverts attention from the manifestations of racism that are most destructive. The emphasis on one individual’s personal views, actions, or statements misses the point, if the goal is to dismantle racism. Martin Luther King clarified the distinction in 1963 when he challenged the idea that legislation “has no great role to play in this period of social change because you’ve got to change the heart and you can’t change the heart through legislation. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me.”

The problem in this country isn’t the backward views of individuals, even if one of those individuals occupies the Oval Office. What plagues this nation is a vast array of public policies and practices that perpetuate a status quo that is grossly unequal and unjust after centuries of explicit racialized economic exploitation that is maintained by widespread, contemporary implicit bias. It is those public policies and practices that are the problem and that need to be addressed.

Far more dangerous than Trump’s personal beliefs are his public actions to make America white again—his political efforts to consolidate the support of millions of individuals who fervently believe that white Americans are under siege from people of color, especially Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Muslims. At a recent Trump rally in El Paso, Texas, a Trump supporter articulated the public-policy priorities of far too many Americans when he said, “Build the wall, deport them all.”

Which leads to the second shortcoming of focusing on what’s in Trump’s heart—a diversion of energy and efforts from the immediate and most important challenges before us. The solution to a racist individual in the White House is to remove that individual (which absolutely has to happen). But our country’s problem is bigger than that. Much bigger. In order to transform this status quo, we need sophisticated electoral and social change strategies that are executed with a narrow focus and pinpoint precision.

In light of the significant opposition to increasing racial diversity and enthusiasm for returning to the days when white was legally and unapologetically right, the moral and political imperative of this moment is to build a larger, more powerful, and more effective movement than the one that propelled Trump to power and continues to cower most of the Republican Party. Journalist Ron Brownstein, one of the clearest analysts of this situation, describes what is happening right now as a struggle between the Coalition of of Restoration versus the Coalition of Transformation. Fortunately, there are more people in the Coalition of Transformation, what I call the New American Majority—people of color and progressive whites. The challenge is ensuring that those in the transformation coalition turn out to vote so that there are more voters in each upcoming election. Naming racism—especially systemic and structural racism—can in fact be an important and motivating signal to the multiracial base of the Democratic Party.

To maximize our prospects for victory, we should also work to attract moderate whites who are repulsed by Trump’s behavior but have managed to excuse and overlook what he is doing to the country. In order to attract those voters, a singular focus on what goes on in Trump’s heart rather than what comes out of his mouth and how those words represent the sentiments of a hateful and hostile movement of people would be a serious electoral mistake.

Democrats and progressives made a fatal miscalculation in 2016 when they emphasized Trump’s personality over his policies. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent by the Clinton campaign and progressive allies highlighting the shortcomings of Trump’s temperament, sending the message that something was wrong with him. Had they highlighted his racially hateful and harmful agenda, then voters, especially moderate white voters, would have had to wonder if something was wrong with them if they chose to side with his candidacy. With the 2020 presidential campaign now underway, it would be electorally disastrous for progressives to replicate that strategic emphasis.

The better answer to the question, “Is Trump a racist?” is that it’s not about who he is, it’s about who we are as a country. Whatever is in his heart, his actions plainly show that he’s trying to return this country to a time when racism and white supremacy was the law of the land. But we are a better people than that, and if we make the right strategic decisions today, we can reclaim the political power necessary to build a country that reflects our highest and best values and ideals.

Truly transforming this country requires more than winning the White House. While Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams would all be amazing presidential candidates—and probably excellent presidents—they are each uniquely suited to advance the larger cause of political transformation by running again for the offices they just recently sought and fell short of attaining.

With the 2020 presidential race heating up, potential candidates staffing up, and political anticipation amping up, there is an unprecedented breadth of potential candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. More than 40 people have been mentioned or are mentioning themselves as potential candidates to date. Much of the most breathless recent speculation has centered on the possibility of El Paso, Texas’s (soon to be former) US Representative Beto O’Rourke throwing his hat in the ring, with articles describing him as the political heir to Barack Obama. Beto himself has opened the door and fueled such speculation, after previously ruling out that route during his bid for the US Senate. Two of the other rising stars from 2018 who captured the popular imagination—Georgia’s Stacey Abrams and Florida’s Andrew Gillum—have also been floated as possible contenders, albeit in less fawning fashion than with Beto.

In order for the progressive movement to avoid perpetuating the same kinds of implicit racial bias that it seeks to eradicate in society at large, the question must be asked, “Why is Beto getting so much more adulation than Gillum and Abrams?” All three ran inspiring grassroots campaigns, performed exceedingly well in states Democrats have recently or regularly lost, and all, in different ways, have the “It” factor that captures imaginations and inspires enthusiasm. And in terms of who is the next Obama, it is actually Abrams and Gillum who can more accurately lay claim to that mantle, since they, like Obama, captured their nominations with overwhelming support from African Americans. In terms of winning back the White House, high levels of enthusiasm among African Americans are absolutely essential (had Clinton received the same level of support as Obama, she would now be president). Noted Brookings Institution demographer William Frey noted in his book Diversity Explosion that voters of color “were largely responsible for [Obama’s] wins.”

But as we ponder the psychological and sociological dimensions of why Beto’s smile makes Democratic hearts swoon, while the natural twists in Abrams’s hair do not, the bigger question is “How do we turn around and transform the entire country?” That work happens state by state, and that is why all three should run again in their respective states.

It is exceedingly difficult to attain progressive power at the state level, especially in the former slaveholding states. Political analyst Ron Brownstein describes the political battle in America as a struggle between the Coalition of Restoration, comprised of those who are fearful of and resistant to the country’s demographic transformation, and the Coalition of Transformation, which is largely what I call the New American Majority of people of color allied with progressive whites. The fundamental racial divide that has defined our nation’s politics for the past 400 years—and resulted in a bloody Civil War in the 1860s—is still playing out in our politics today. It is no accident that Trump followed the first black president, and the racial backlash to the browning of America is the engine that drives the current president’s political power. And race-conscious obstacles to democracy and political power were on full display in the 2018 midterm elections. From the outright voter suppression employed by the then-sitting secretary of state in Georgia, to racist appeals and mobilization in Florida, enormous barriers stood—and will continue to stand—in the way of winning elections in those states.

To win any statewide election requires widespread name recognition among the voters, a dedicated and geographically dispersed network of volunteers and organizers, and the ability to raise money, which is necessary to communicate with and mobilize voters. It usually takes many years to assemble such an operation, but now all of these elements are in place in Florida, Georgia, and Texas (as well as other red or purple states such as Arizona). For the long-term prospects of building progressive power, it is imperative to maintain, nurture, develop, and deploy those resources, first in the 2020 presidential election, followed quickly by 2022 rematches. In Texas, Beto doesn’t even have to wait until 2022, as Republican Texas Senator John Cornyn’s seat is up in 2020.

One painful lesson from the Obama era—one for which we are still paying the price—is that it’s not enough to just win the White House. You have to also build power at the state and local level. That’s how irreversible revolutions unfold. Democrats lost 968 state legislative seats and 13 governorships during the Obama era because there was no investment in the progressive electoral apparatus and many left-leaning voters were not inspired to participate when Obama wasn’t on the ballot.

Some believe that Democrats need a singular figure in order to defeat Trump. Mathematically, that actually isn’t true. Democrats have a significant structural Electoral College advantage, and the Coalition of Transformation is bigger than the Coalition of Restoration. That was even the case in 2016: Too often ignored is the fact that Clinton beat Trump by nearly 3 million votes, and Trump did not even attain a majority of the vote in the states that tipped the Electoral College—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The increase in the vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in Michigan was larger than Trump’s margin of victory in that state (Stein’s total jumped by nearly 30,000 votes over her 2012 showing, and Trump won the state by just 11,000 votes). What happened in 2016 was that the Coalition of Transformation fractured, splitting between Clinton, Stein, and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. Also, black voter participation plummeted, dropping below the levels of even John Kerry’s bid in 2004. But in 2020, that New American Majority coalition will be even bigger, as nearly 16 million young people will have turned 18 in the time since Trump took office, and so will be eligible to vote; close to half of them are people of color. And as we saw in the midterm elections, this baseline mathematical advantage can get even larger if suburban women, repulsed by the current president, side with Democrats.

With the legal walls closing in around him just as Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, it should not be taken as a given that Trump will even be the Republican nominee. Solely seeing the 2020 contest as a personality battle with Trump would be a profound miscalculation.

Taking back this country is a team effort that will involve winning back the White House and also winning state power in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and other states. There is no shortage of credible and strong contenders for the presidency. What Democrats don’t have are candidates who are perfectly positioned to be the next senator from Texas, governor of Georgia, and governor of Florida. Attaining progressive power and leadership in those and other states—and then working hand in hand with a Democratic 46th president—is the best way to achieve the kinds of deep-rooted and long-lasting structural changes that this country desperately desires and deeply needs.

Coming out of the midterm elections and looking ahead to the 2020 presidential race, many pundits and strategists are once again urging Democrats to devote more time, energy, and resources to talking to white, working-class, and rural voters. Professor Joan Williams, a leading advocate for wooing white people, distilled this point of view in a recent piece in The Atlantic when she wrote, “If Democrats were to focus more attention on economic issues, they just might be able to win back the non-elite white voters they’ve been bleeding for half a century.”

Talking to those voters is a logical thing to do, especially since there are a lot of white people in America, and the majority of them almost always vote against Democrats. The question is not whether to talk to them, but what to say to them at a time when the president of the United States is quite effectively preying upon the fears and anxieties that fuel racism and sexism in America.

A threshold question is whether one accepts the premise that racism and sexism are fundamental to modern American life, and not just peripheral issues perpetuated by a few bad actors. The president and his political party accept that premise, and actively work to fan the flames of racial division by attacking immigrants, Muslims, and African-American football players protesting police brutality. Many Democrats, on the other hand, hope and believe that you can gain greater white support simply by changing the subject to “pocket book” issues such as economics, taxes, and trade.

Speaking as somebody whose family was initially blocked from buying a house in a white neighborhood because we were black, I’m not so sure you can overcome white racial fears about the consequences of an influx of brown-skinned people by simply talking up the advantages of lower mortgage rates. That doesn’t exactly address concerns about who’s going to date your daughter or take your job.

If we do accept the reality of the racially polarized times we live in, then there is an effective approach we can take toward a solution… and there is an ineffective one. You can summon white people to their highest and best selves, or you can pander to their lowest and basest instincts. You can defend Colin Kaepernick, or you can bear-hug Brett Kavanaugh.

The recent election was instructive on this front.

In the Texas Senate race, Beto O’Rourke had to confront the highly charged issue of football players protesting police killings of unarmed African Americans. When, during a town-hall meeting, a white, male voter decried players’ kneeling during the national anthem, not only did Beto confront it head-on, he went on to educate and illuminate by explaining the history of racial discrimination and oppression in the country. The candidate defended a tradition of “peaceful, nonviolent protests, including taking a knee at a football game to point out that black men, unarmed, black teenagers, unarmed, and black children, unarmed, are being killed at a frightening level right now, including by members of law enforcement, without accountability, and without justice.”

Not every Democratic candidate followed Beto’s lead.

In Tennessee, the state’s former governor Phil Bredesen, the Democratic nominee for US Senate, displayed the opposite approach to a flashpoint of discrimination and oppression that cried out for courageous leadership. During the searing national debate about whether a man credibly accused of sexual assault should be placed on the United States Supreme Court, Bredesen—in the face of a year’s worth of #MeToo revelations roiling the electorate—sought to pander to the worst instincts of voters, saying that, if he were in the Senate, he would vote to confirm Kavanaugh.

The subsequent electoral trajectories of O’Rourke and Bredesen are instructive. Beto’s candor and courage rocketed him into contention in a once-solid-red state, and captured the imagination of activists across the country. His campaign was showered with small-dollar donations, helping him raise more money than any congressional candidate has ever raised in US history. And Beto received more votes than any Democrat who’d ever run for office in Texas, coming within three points of winning—the strongest showing by a Texas Democrat in decades (previous candidates routinely lost by 800,000 votes; O’Rourke cut that gap to 219,000).

By contrast, Bredesen—who had statewide name recognition and was considered popular—went the opposite direction, plummeting in the polls, languishing in fundraising, and losing by double digits on Election Day.

Their respective performances among white voters is also telling. In the 2016 presidential contest, just 26 percent of white voters in Texas supported Hillary Clinton, but O’Rourke increased that level of support by nearly a third, garnering 34 percent of the white vote. In Tennessee, however, Bredesen’s capitulation did little to move the needle among the white voters he coveted, with white support among Democrats moving just a blip, from 34 percent in 2008, to 36 percent this year.

What Beto proved is that you have to first acknowledge the realities of racism before pivoting to the economic issues that the vast majority of people of all races have in common. Ten years earlier, Barack Obama modeled the effectiveness of this approach when addressing the controversy stemming from the racially provocative rhetoric of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. In his now-famous 2008 “race speech,” Obama spoke at length about the underlying validity of the concerns of those speaking out against racial inequality. “Many of the disparities that exist between the African-American community and the larger American community today can be traced directly to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow,” the then–presidential candidate said. He next explicitly acknowledged the concerns of whites living through profound demographic changes. “Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race,” said Obama. “They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away.”

After facing head-on the fact that people of color have legitimate grievances about widespread inequality, and acknowledging whites’ understandable trepidation about the implications of far-reaching social change, Obama then challenged Americans of all races to find common ground by emphasizing the unifying core economic concerns: “We can come together and say, ‘Not this time.’ This time, we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children.” That speech turned the tide of the contest, and helped propel a black man into the White House for the first time in US history.

What Obama and Beto did not do was ignore the issue, hoping it would go away. And they certainly didn’t pander to the sentiments of those more concerned about the consequences of fostering equality than about the underlying and persistent inequality itself.

Yes, Democrats should talk to white people. If they have the courage to face the facts of the persistence of racism in America, then they will also know what to say.

ld wineskins must make room for new wine.” During the Rainbow Coalition days of the 1980s, Jesse Jackson used that biblical reference to press the Democratic Party to make structural and strategic changes in order to seize the opportunities presented by the country’s demographic revolution.

Today, this change is more imperative than ever, with an unprecedented number of Democratic gubernatorial nominees of color in the 2018 election cycle. These new candidates, propelled by large numbers of new and potential voters, create new opportunities for Democratic gains across the country. But to take advantage of these opportunities, Democrats will have to discard their old approaches.

Just two African Americans in US history have been elected governor: Doug Wilder in Virginia in 1989 and Deval Patrick in Massachusetts in 2006. This year alone, there are three black gubernatorial nominees: Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Ben Jealous in Maryland, and Andrew Gillum in Florida. In addition to the black candidates, there are three Latino gubernatorial nominees—David Garcia in Arizona, Michelle Lujan Grisham in New Mexico, and Lupe Valdez in Texas. And if that weren’t enough, the Democratic nominee in Idaho, Paulette Jordan, is bidding to become the first Native American governor in the country.

The very fact that these leaders are the nominees shows that they have already proven their popularity. What they need—and indeed, what most candidates of color need in a country where the average black or Latino family has just 10 percent of the net worth of the average white family—is money. That’s why this is a moment of truth for the donors and institutions who comprise the core of Democratic spending on gubernatorial races.

In each of the last two election cycles, the Democratic Governors Association, which is “dedicated to electing Democratic governors across the country,” has spent nearly $90 million on gubernatorial races. A data-driven analysis of the underlying composition of the electorates in all 50 states and the closeness of the last gubernatorial election shows that five of the top 12 battleground races have nominees of color.

Logic would dictate that Democratic investors should try to turn out as many Democratic voters as possible, especially in those races that are and have been the most winnable. People of color are consistently the most Democratic voters of all, giving nearly three-quarters of their votes to Democrats (in the case of Obama, the number was four-fifths).

Furthermore, academic research by Yale University professor Ebonya Washington and others has affirmed that candidates of color at the top of the ticket increase voter turnout among Americans of color.

Fortunately, some major players on the more progressive side of the party are taking note. Tom Steyer’s organization, NextGen, for example, stepped up in Florida, spent over $1 million in the primary backing Gillum, and turned Steyer’s organization’s infrastructure—with its 120-person staff and 1,000 volunteers on 45 college campuses—into an electoral army supporting Gillum. NextGen is quintupling down and investing an additional $5 million into the Florida election, recognizing that a rising tide of voters coming out for Gillum will lift all Democratic boats, including that of endangered incumbent US Senator Bill Nelson.

Alarmingly, other major players like the DGA do not appear to have adapted to the new environment, and are instead clinging to outdated approaches that have overlooked and under-invested in the candidates of color who have represented some of the best opportunities for Democratic gains such as Jealous in Maryland, Garcia in Arizona, and Abrams in Georgia.

The dozen blue or purple states with Republican governors offer the greatest potential for Democratic gains this year, and simple arithmetic suggests that a $90 million spending plan would allocate roughly $7.5 million to each of those top 12 most competitive states. That $7.5 million figure should obviously be adjusted for various factors such as size of a state’s population, but it is a useful baseline to assess the efficacy and intelligence of the political investments. But the DGA is falling far short of that benchmark.

Even where DGA is spending the most to support the nominees of color, it has still only allocated less than $4 million in each state (reports are that it has spent roughly $3 million in Florida and $1.3 million in Georgia). Campaign filings as of September 30 show just $765,000 from DGA going to support Abrams in Georgia. In Maryland, one of the most Democratic states in the country, DGA has invested nothing.

The old approach to making political-investment decisions relies primarily on polls, but polls are, by definition, rooted in the past, because the universe of those polled is determined by looking at who voted in 2014, not who is likely to vote this time around. That’s why pollsters missed the Gillum surge in Florida and the size of the Abrams margin in Georgia. And it’s why they’re underestimating the strength and potential of Ben Jealous’s running in Maryland, a state with twice as many Democrats as Republicans.

Compounding the problem is that, unlike NextGen, which is so transparent that it publicly posts the progress of its organizing efforts, the DGA operates in a shroud of secrecy that shields it from the best practices of transparency and accountability to stakeholders. As a result, there is little public rationale or explanation for why it is failing to properly invest in the states with the most promise for Democratic pickups. What we do know is that it has started advertising in Oklahoma and Kansas, states that are significantly whiter and less Democratic than the states with nominees of color.

The unprecedented diversity of this slate of candidates is not simply a statistical quirk. It is a natural response to the resurgent racism of this president and this moment. It should be no surprise, then, that leaders from the communities bearing the brunt of the attacks are standing up and fighting back. Most promising is that voters are responding in large numbers to these calls to take our country back.

The electoral math shows that these candidates can win, with proper investment. It is those who control the purse strings who must change how they do business.

This November, Democrats have an excellent chance to pick up 23 Republican-held seats and take back control of the House of Representatives, but where should the left focus their time, energy, and resources over the next two months in order to do so?1

Statistician and writer Nate Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight developed probability models for every congressional district in the country, and concluded that Democrats have a better than 70-percent probability of winning back the House in this year’s midterm elections. Dave Wasserman of The Cook Political Report puts Democratic odds at 60 to 70 percent. But within those macro projections, which races, exactly, most deserve the attention of progressives?2

Steve’s Top Ten

So that I don’t bury the lede or drag this out like a bad reality show, here is a list of places where my calculations and analysis show that the national progressive movement can have the biggest positive impact on the overall odds of taking back the House.3

(This table with links to more information about the candidates and the groups working in those districts can be found on my website.)5

These are the contests where investment from progressives can help change the electorate’s composition and create a voting universe more favorable to Democrats. These are also places where there is a local progressive organization with a track record of effectively mobilizing Democratic voters.6

Why These Ten?

Compiling this list required a significant amount of analytical firepower (from much greater minds than mine) and months of review of multiple data sets and sources. The foundation of this analysis is an extraordinary statistical calculation compiled by the “PhDs of the People”—Dr. Julie Martinez Ortega (the principal researcher for my book Brown Is the New White) and Dr. Tom K. Wong, Political Science professor at the University of California, San Diego. Using a proprietary algorithm that incorporates 22 different statistical variables, they developed projections for Democratic and Republican turnout this fall in 65 competitive districts across the country. While others (such as The Cook Political Report) have analyzed previous totals of votes cast in a district, no one to my knowledge has looked at every individual voter in the competitive districts, reviewed their voting history, and then modeled district-by-district turnout rates to assess each district’s winnability. On top of that, Martinez Ortega and Wong then added a data overlay incorporating the size of the pool of potential Democratic voters, with a particular focus on voters of color (nearly 80 percent of whom historically vote Democratic).7

Standing on that data-rich foundation, I then looked district by district at past election performance, watched videos of the current candidates, and considered the dynamics of the races at this particular moment in history (e.g. the potential resonance of a female candidate running to hold accountable a sitting President of the United States who has bragged about grabbing female private parts, or a candidate of color offering her or his leadership at this moment of resurgent racism across the country).8

Likely Wins vs. Toss-Ups

Based on a synthesis of the above quantitative and qualitative calculations—along with a pinch of gut instinct from my 34 years in politics thrown in—I’ve rated 57 competitive congressional districts by the likelihood that the Democratic candidate will win. My assessment is that Democrats are likely to win 15 districts, and another 17 are toss-ups. For comparison purposes, here is how my rankings compare to those of Nate Silver and The Cook Political Report:9

In arriving at my Top 10, I excluded all of the “Likely Win” districts, where Democrats are in reasonably good shape. The party needs at least an additional eight seats to take the majority (preferably more, as there are seats currently held by Democrats that are in jeopardy).11

In the toss-up category (where I focus my recommendations), there are two basic types of districts. Some districts have a meaningful number of swing voters—especially suburban women who (according to Wasserman and others) voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump, yet supported the Republican candidate for Congress in 2016. The challenge in those races is to convince those ticket splitters to support the Democratic congressional candidate this time. It is harder for the national progressive movement to have an effect on those races beyond moving money to the candidate to help get her or his message out. That’s important work, but not where I think the biggest value-add is in terms of increasing Democratic odds of controlling the House. (Plus, those races are where the Democrats’ House Majority PAC will be spending tens of millions of dollars.)12

But in other toss-up districts, there are significant numbers of people of color, who historically vote in smaller numbers in midterm elections. If Democratic challengers are able to increase turnout in those communities, that will make many of these districts much more competitive. This is where I think the national progressive movement can make the biggest marginal impact.13

All Hands on Deck

By the way, if you’re part of a progressive organization that is already working in a district not on this list, you should keep doing what you’re doing. All of the volunteering, making calls, sending postcards, knocking on doors, and giving money that has already been done is likely what’s making a district you’re working in so strong that it is not on this list. Those efforts must continue through Election Day to get close to the number of pick-ups needed. But to surpass the magic number of 23 flipped seats, everyone needs to amplify their efforts and giving. What I’m recommending is a set of key races on which to focus that additional energy and money.14

Now Is the Time

The national conditions are favorable, and the trends are in Democrats’ favor. But if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that even the most promising political prospects can change quickly. The political battlefield is broad and varied, but by picking the right battles in the most strategic places, and by redoubling expenditures of time and money, we can collectively increase Democrats’ chances of retaking control of the House of Representatives, and our chances of bringing this national political nightmare to an end.15

Correction: An earlier version of this article inaccurately identified Dr. Tom K. Wong. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, not the University of San Diego. The text has been corrected.

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