In the wake of last week’s Democrat victories in New Jersey and Virginia, which saw the two Democratic candidates for governor driving turnout to near presidential-election levels, it’s worth looking at the strategies prominent Democrats are cooking up to seize the House of Representatives in 2026.
Democrats are slowly beginning to realize their deeply corrosive cultural agenda combined with a flat-out refusal to address economic issues was a one-way ticket to obscurity. According to a new Democratic strategy document, the way the party plans to win next year is by calling on Congressional Democrats to “convince voters that we share their priorities” by shelving the party’s deeply unpopular cultural agenda.
An Oct. 27 strategy document, “Deciding to Win”, which has earned glowing praise from prominent Biden and Clinton strategists, calls on the Democrat Party to abandon its deeply unpopular left-wing cultural agenda and attempt a complete rebrand after polling showed 70 percent of voters say Democrats are out of touch with the people.
In an executive summary, the report notes that Deciding to Win surveyed more than 500,000 voters since the 2024 election, plus analyzed the results of hundreds of public polls and academic papers to deliver their prognosis that the Democratic Party needs a serious rebrand.
Among the strategists’ top recommendations to revive the Democratic Party, is a focus on convincing voters that Democrats “share their priorities”. In a rare glimpse of introspection, the authors write that in order to “give ourselves the best chance to win”, Democrats need to focus less on those fringe social issues that have waned in popularity over the past five years. Instead, Democrats need to pay more attention to issues Americans actually care about, like healthcare and the border. The document recommends that Democrats:
“Convince voters that we share their priorities by focusing more on issues voters do not think our party prioritizes highly enough (the economy, the cost of living, health care, border security, public safety), and focusing less on issues voters think we place too much emphasis on (climate change, democracy, abortion, identity and cultural issues).”
The document is eerily strategic, considering that for at least the past ten years, the Democratic Party has embraced a seemingly endless parade of pet social projects at the expense of everyone else and attempted to cancel anyone who hasn’t embraced their cultural agenda.
What this strategic shift indicates is that most Democrats never really cared about all of the pronoun language, adult content being marketed to minors, race wars and transgender Bud Light commercials, they just wanted to win. For a solid decade or more, catering to the cultural ideology of radical leftists was a winning strategy for them. Conservatives who objected to the left’s corrosive cultural agenda were dismissed as narrow-minded, and Hollywood, Big Tech, and academia all traipsed along promoting the same cultural agenda.
Something happened during the grueling years of the pandemic, in the aftermath of mass rioting and burning cities, after the country decided in a mass popular vote to elect President Donald Trump a second time. After the grueling series of violence from the political left including the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Something happened and it is no longer popular to be a radical leftist, so much so that now self-serving Democrats are abandoning ship and attempting to rebrand themselves as moderates.
It isn’t that the Democratic Party becoming more moderate is a bad thing, on the contrary it would be significantly better for the country if the party abandoned its attempt to undermine any sense of rationality. However, we should take a moment to pause and reflect on what the Democratic Party’s shapeshifting means. A party that for at least a decade has been focused on bullying the American people into surrender to their fringe cultural agenda is now suddenly wanting to listen to the people.
This change of heart may be less because Democrat leaders suddenly care about voters than they merely want to remain in power. Democrats are so fixated on blocking the populist movement within the Republican Party, that they are now considering shelving their pet liberal projects and abandoning the woke agenda just to cling to power. The left only cared about winning and now that the radical cultural agenda has begun to unravel — and now they could finally be looking to jump ship.
Manzanita Miller is senior political analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
