Tangle - Will Kaback interviews lead author Simon Bazelon about his Deciding to Win report and where politics are headed.

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

Senior Editor Will Kaback interviews Simon Bazelon about the state of our current politics and where it is headed, the kinds of issues that will resonate most with voters, and the kind of policy platforms that are going to be winning for political candidates moving forward. For more information on the Deciding to Win report that Simon Bazelon was the lead author on go to https://decidingtowin.org/Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was hosted by: Will Kaback and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take. I am senior editor Will Quebec. Today we're going to be diving into a report that has proved quite divisive on both the right and the left. You may have heard about it. It's called the Deciding to Win Report, published a little over a month ago, and it was produced by this group called Welcome, which is a centrist political advocacy group. They mainly work with left-of-centered candidates, but they call themselves a place that's trying to build a home for people

on the center left and the center right. And what this report was was a diagnosis of why Democrats lost in 2024 and what they need to do in order to get back on track for future elections. So I know that this is a topic that we've written a lot about Entangle. You've probably read a lot about it in other outlets. And as we move into 26, there may be a question in your which is totally understandable. Why are we still looking back at the 2024 election? Well, the thing about this report is it's not really about 2024. It's really a diagnosis of in the author's minds where Democrats have gone wrong over the past decade plus the way that they have highlighted certain issues over others, the way that they've transitioned their policy

priorities, the kinds of candidates that they've elevated, et cetera. So it is an analysis with quite a lot of relevance for the future of the party. going forward and how they're going to make decisions about the 2026 midterms and the 28 presidential election. Now also, if you are a listener who doesn't really care about the future of the Democratic Party perhaps or where they may or may not have gone wrong, also totally understandable. But again, this conversation is broadly about the state of our politics in this moment and where it's headed. The kinds of issues that are going to resonate with voters be popular with the most voters and the kinds of policy platforms that the authors think are going to be

winning for political candidates going forward. And it really isn't specific to Democrats. It's a kind of prescription for any political candidate or any political party. Of course, this report was very controversial. It's taken a lot of flack from progressive Democrats. A lot of Republicans have dismissed it. But I do think it is a really interesting report because it does speak to some of these themes that we've talked a lot about in Tangle. Political polarization, evolving partisanship, what kinds of platforms are resonating with voters? And the lead author behind the report,

a guy named Simon Bazelon, who I spoke with, is a really interesting figure, too. He's a fairly precocious political figure. He's in his early 20s, but he, as you will hear, has some very, very strong opinions about the state of the country and the direction that our political parties are headed.

So it felt like a great opportunity, to talk to the author of this report that's generated a ton of controversy and debate in the political sphere and speaks to a lot of the themes that we ourselves get to entangle. So without further ado, I want to jump into my interview with Simon Bazelon and would love to hear what you guys think about this. All right, let's get into it. All right, Simon, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. So I'd love to start just with your background and hear a little bit about how you got into the work that you're doing today.

So could you just share a little bit about your backstory, how you got into politics, and then what you're doing right now? Yeah, so my background is in public opinion and research. I started my career at Data for Progress, which is a progressive polling firm. After that, I worked for three years at Blue Rose Research, which is one of the premier data vendors within the Democratic Party. They do a lot of polling work and other kinds of work with a wide range of folks within the party, including PACs, committees, advocacy organizations, candidates, et cetera, et cetera. And then following that, I worked in the 2024 election cycle. I worked for Future Forward, which was, you know, the primary super PAC on the Democratic side, supporting President Biden and then Vice President Harris during their presidential election bids. After the 2024 election, I left Future Forward and have been working with Welcome, which is a center-left organization that helps.

candidates flip house districts that Donald Trump won. And as part of that, I did this really long research project called Deciding to Win, which we released in October at the end of October. That's what I'm here to talk to you about today. So I want to talk a little bit about the work that you're doing at Welcome as well. As an organization, can you walk us through the mission and then some of the inputs that went into the Deciding to Win report that you mentioned before? Yeah.

So Welcome's mission is to. help Democrats build a majority in the House. So welcome to that end, focuses on how can we support Democrats who have really strong chances at flipping Republican seats in their primary elections, and then how can we make sure that they win in the general election as well. And so that process involves interviewing candidates, talking to lots of people, finding candidates who have, you know, compelling backgrounds and, you know, a clear reason for running, who also, you know, match the kind of politics of the districts that they're in to help Democrats flip the House and retake control.

In terms of deciding to win, this was a research project that we embarked on. I spent a huge amount of time digging through historic election results, academic literature, other people's survey data. We also surveyed more than 500,000 people in the aftermath of the 2024 election. And that all gave us a really rich data set to kind of draw upon to learn from and develop the conclusion of the report. Awesome. So you did some of your own survey work. I know there's been a lot of discussion.

I was actually just at a conference with the Pew Research Center a few weeks ago where they were talking about some of the polling and survey challenges that are unique to the moment we're in right now. Did you have a specific way that you accounted for or approached those surveys to make sure that you were getting the kind of representative sample that you were looking for? Yeah. So, you know, with a huge amount of data, that allows you to sort of get more granular and sort of overcome some of the problems that polling has had in the last couple years,

particularly on the methodological side. There's some technical things that we did that I think help. You know, we also, I also think it's important that, like, the problems with polling are a really good reason to look at all sorts of inputs, including but not limited to polling.

And that's why, you know, my first view is always to look to the actual candidates who are winning difficult races. So, you know, you can throw out all the data. You know, the data is cool. I love looking at it and whatever. But ultimately, at the end of the day, a really high level,

what the Democratic Party needs to be doing is being more like the candidates who actually win difficult races, the people like Jared Golden or Marie Gliss and Camp Perez, or Ruben Gallego, or Lizzie Slokkin, people are actually flipping seats that Donald Trump won. Those are the candidates that I think we need to be looking to as guides for how we're going to get out of the mess that we're in. So I know that the report made quite a bit of a wave,

both on the left and the right. I mean, I remember shortly after a published, just on my feed on X, there was, I was seeing criticism coming from people on the left. I had seen criticism coming from people on the right. I was seeing a lot of people saying this is the kind of strategy document that the Democratic Party has been missing. So obviously there's been a lot of debate about it. I know I've watched some of your interviews where you've talked about some of that response.

But I want to dive into some of the specific findings, some of the things that jumped out to me as I was going through it. So one of the things early on is you have a section about the evolution of the Democratic Party since about 2012 to the present day. And then there's this one visual that I found very striking that shows the prevalence of specific. words in the Democratic Party platform and how those words have become more or less prevalent over that time span. So there's words like black, white, Latino, Latina, climate, guns, LGBTQ, and those have appeared much more frequently or they're much more prevalent from 13 years ago or so. And then words like economy, middle class, jobs are appearing a lot less frequently. And then at the same time, you kind of pair that with this other graphic that shows that voters are saying they want the party

to focus more on the economic issues. They don't see Democrats prioritizing them, and that's something that's turning them off about the party. So my question to you is, I mean, it's been 13 years. This seems like it's been a pretty deliberate shift. But why do you think the party is moving in this direction? What are the forces that are pushing in in that direction? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know,

it's always complicated to figure out why things are happening in the world. But I think at the high level, a lot of this has been driven by party elites. It's been driven by donors. It's been driven by staffers and advocacy organizations. elections, elected officials themselves to some extent. And a lot of this is reflective of, you know, a Democratic Party that is an increasingly professional class party. It's an increasingly a coalition of highly educated people whose priorities and preferences are pretty different

from the electorate as a whole. So, you know, later in the report, we have a graph that looks at, you know, differences in issue prioritization between people who voted for Kamala Harris to have either a four-year college degree or an advanced degree and comparing those people to people who, you know, were swing voters or just the general electorate or, you know, non-college voters. What we see is these really big gaps where non-college educated voters and swing voters, they care dramatically more than highly educated Democrats about issues like crime and border security and the budget deficit and gas prices. And they care much, much less about issues like the environment or climate change or guns or race relations or things like that. And so I think as

this class of, you know, highly educated professional Democrats who are giving funding, you know, both small dollar and big dollar contributions, who are, you know, putting out the kind of press releases that advocacy groups put out all the time, internal in campaigns, the staffers making decisions, as these people have gained increasing power and themselves become increasingly liberal and less focused on economic issues, I think that's flowed through to the party's broader prioritization messaging. Yeah. If I could posit my own idea here to this question, I think there's an authenticity issue as well of people just feeling like the messages that are coming to them from the Democratic Party are focus groups.

and they're not being delivered in a genuine authentic way that they might get from somebody like President Trump. So I wonder how much of this is like an oil and water issue. Like, do you need to get these increasing professional class people out of positions of power? Or can they coexist with the future that you're kind of laying out in this report? I think it's an interesting question. I mean, look, I think the authenticity point is something that people bring up to me all the time.

And what I like to say to the authenticity thing is, absolutely we need Democrats who are authentic. Absolutely, we need Democrats for compelling speakers. charismatic and whatnot. The question is, you know, what are they authentically supporting, right? And there's a difference between, you know, somebody who is authentic in their support for very unpopular left-wing ideas, whether it's, you know, cutting police budgets or decriminalizing border crossings or whatnot. There's a difference between how that reads to voters and somebody who is authentically in favor of very popular policies, whether it's something like voter ID

or stricter border security, right? And my view is we need authentic Democrats. We need Democrats who authentically hold views that most Americans hold on public policy issues that they care about. And I think that's kind of, you know, the way to thread the needle here. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right. So moving on to another part of the report, there was a section that was titled the myth of mobilization, which I thought was really interesting too

because I hear a lot and I've been involved in campaigns myself and you hear this idea of mobilization that you speak to which is this idea that Democrats can get more progressive maybe they should get more progressive move further to the left and that will activate parts of the base

that aren't turning out right now so it's just a question of motivating your vote is not necessarily changing the message you say this theory falls flat and I'm wondering if you could speak to the data and your findings that back that up. Yeah, so there's a whole range of reasons why mobilization, you know, doesn't really make sense. So the first reason that we know that it doesn't make sense is that it doesn't line up with actual election results.

So if the mobilization theory was true and that the way Democrats could better win elections was by moving further to the left and that this would excite some pool of non-voters, then we would expect to see progressive Democrats doing really, really well electorally and moderate Democrats doing worse electorally. But in fact, we see the opposite. when we compare how moderate Democrats do relative to the top of the ticket, like Connell Harris in 2024. We see moderate Democrats like the Blue Dogs or Jared Golden and folks like that running significantly ahead of Kamal Harris in their seats. And by contrast, we see members of the squad, people like Elon Omar or Summer Lee or whatnot,

running significantly behind the top of the ticket. And so just run off the bat, that's something that doesn't make any sense under a kind of mobilization view of the world. I think more broadly than that, though, there's a bigger problem, which is that there's been a misconception in democratic politics about what the kind of disaffected pool of non-voters actually looks like. So for example, in 2024, basically every reputable analysis has found that if every American had voted in 2024, Donald Trump would have won the election by

more votes, not fewer votes, right? So we're seeing Democrats overperform in special elections and, you know, do worse in higher turnout races. And I think that's reflective of the fact that this pool of less engaged voters, they're now more conservative than the general electorate is. And I think a lot of that is because the characteristics that make somebody not want to vote are actually quite similar to the characteristics that make somebody, you know, be open to switching their vote between the various different parties. And so the kinds of swing voters that the mobilization theory basically positing, there's kind of centrist swing voters and then there are leftist non-voters. And actually, that's totally off base. What we have are, you know, centrist swing voters and then centrist non-voters. And that doesn't mean they're centrist in the sense that they have centrist views on every issue.

It just means that they're a lot less ideological and more open to right-wing and left-wing ideas than hardcore partisans are. And so the problem here is, you know, people who work this professional class of the Democratic Party, they are constantly being exposed to people who don't vote because they don't think that Democrats are pure enough or ideologically, you know, left-wing enough. But that turns out to be just a really, really tiny share of the electorate. And, you know, they're not that meaningful from an electoral perspective. Yeah, I think another aspect of the theory of mobilization that we're talking about is that people like need to be fired up and excited about candidates in order to show up to vote for them, especially outside of like a presidential year or a midterm year. Do you think that the ideas that you're sharing in the report, which are more middle of the road, they are more moderate, they are catering more towards that center left, center right?

Do you think that, you know, there are messengers or there are ways to craft those policy platforms that could be as animating as they might be to the farther left, and further write ideas that speak more to like an emotional resonance. So let me just say one other thing before I answer that question. It's absolutely true, you know, firing up your base, you know, it can be good sometimes. But I think what people forget is that if you're firing up your own base, you're probably firing up your opponent's base to oppose you. So one thing we saw, for example, if you look at the election of Zaraamamani in New York City, you see really, really high turnout for a mayor election, but you also see very high turnout in Republican parts of the city. So people turn out to vote for Zoran Mamdani, but they also turn out to vote against Zoran Mandani.

And so this sort of issue of turnout, what you really care about is differential turnout. How do you get the difference between the number of Democrats, not just more Democrats turning out, but a differential between the number of Democrats and Republicans turning out, right? If you turn out lots of Democrats, but that extremism motivates even more Republicans to vote,

that's actually net negative for you. And what we actually see is when we're talking about differential turnout, it's usually more moderate candidates who do a better job of getting that sort of differential turnout because they're not motivating people to vote against them as much. Yeah, I'm curious, just quickly to get your take on the result that we just saw in the Tennessee 7th special election, Afton Ben, the Democrat. There's a lot of questions, I think, about whether a more centrist Democrat could have won

in the national climate right now. And I'm curious, like, as we talk about these ideas, whether you think that that's true. Well, you know, here's what I would say about the Tennessee 7th race. That district is very conservative. You know, Trump won it by upwards of 20%. That's a lot. Afton Bain ended up losing the election by nine percentage points. You know, that's a pretty significant deviation from Kamal Harris's performance,

which suggests a very favorable national climate. Now, I think obviously she was pretty clearly not an ideal candidate for the seat. For folks who don't know, you know, she had previously endorsed defunding the police. And in fact, had refused to say she didn't want to defund the police even a couple weeks ago and had a variety of other, you know, very extreme statements in her record. So I think she pretty clearly wasn't an ideal candidate. You know, would a more moderate candidate have been able to do nine percentage points better? You know, probably not.

That's kind of the upper, upper limit of the difference differences we see in different candidates ideologically. But I think certainly it would have been a closer race. But I think, you know, Afton Bain is also a good example, right? One thing that I heard a lot of people say is, look how impressive this race was given how high the turnout is. But again, you know, turnout isn't totally divorced from the candidate's position, right? I think one reason the race was high turnout was that Bain motivated a lot of Republicans to vote because they wanted to come out and vote against, you know, a former, you know, a DSAR who had, you know, previously said that she, you know, thought it was good to fire,

you know, burned down police stations and whatnot. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I know just a little aside, but we've had, we've had a few elections now, I think, where we can test this theory post-2020. And that one jumped out to me. That's one that we talked about in Tangle. And I think we came to a similar conclusion. So another section of the report, one of the last ones that that I want to talk about immediately is it jumped out to me because it's kind of responding or anticipating this critique probably from the progressive left

that essentially the platform or the report is advocating for defending the establishment and that it's not actually doing anything more than that. So could you say a little bit more about your response to that critique? And then specifically what you're referring to as the establishment in this context.

Yeah. So, you know, we it's always, we try to be really, really clear about what we're saying and what we're not saying in this document. So, you know, obviously a lot of critiques. You know, most people who criticize anything, any given thing on the piece of content on the internet probably haven't read it. So, you know, I don't, I don't take that too personally. But yeah, I think being, being moderate and being part of the establishment are pretty different, right? Being a moderate is about holding views that are in line with the views of the average voter, right? Defending the establishment is about being, you know,

a protector of the status quo of these institutions that in a lot. lot of cases voters think aren't working for them. So what we see in, you know, survey data is really clearly voters are frustrated with the way things are going in the country. They're frustrated with political elites on both sides. They think that special interests have too much control over the political agendas of both parties. So I don't think that Democrats want to be positioning ourselves as kind of defending that kind of broken status quo. With that said, I think there's a lot of disagreement and a bit of confusion about what not being part of the establishment means. And the way I like to talk about this is to say that there are, you know, politics really

operates on two separate axes. So one axis is this kind of insurgent versus establishment access, right? So you can be an outsider or you can be, you know, kind of an insider. So like Kamala Harris in 2024, she was an insider, she was vice president, somebody like Zoran Mamdani, he's an outsider, he's not part of the political establishment. And then separately, on a separate axis, you can either be a liberal or you can be a moderate, right? So Zora and Mamdani is very liberal, whereas Jared Golden is very moderate. But you can have people who are moderates and also outsiders.

For example, Jared Golden is a great example of somebody who is not part of the Democratic establishment. He doesn't fit in with Democratic elites, but he is also much more conservative than Zoranam Dani is on these issues of public policy. And my view for Democrats is the place we want to be in is this kind of moderate public policy positioning plus outsider positioning as well. So we want to be in the Dan Osborne. mode, the Jared Golden mode, the Marie Gliss in Camp Perez mode, these are candidates who are not

part of the D.C. class. They don't, you know, they haven't been in office for decades. They're not cozy with special interests. They're, you know, authentic to their communities, but also they're not endorsing very, very left-wing ideas. And I think that's, that's kind of the perfect match. Yeah, and I think I know this is a good time for us to talk because I just saw earlier this week, you released a slate of endorsements for the coming cycles and six candidates. I'm not personally familiar with those candidates or their intricate positions, but I'm curious just from like a strategy conceptual standpoint, could you walk us through, you know,

how you identify those people who you want to throw your support behind with that framework in mind that you just described? Yeah, well, let me give you a perfect example. So one of my favorite candidates running for Congress this cycle is Bobby Polito. So Bobby Polito is running in the Texas 15th District. That's a district that Donald Trump won by about 15% in 2024. So, you know, it's almost entirely a Latino district in South Texas. And look, he's going to have an uphill climb to win that district.

But Bobby Bluto is not a traditional politician. He is a music star. He has been a Tihano musician for upwards of two decades. You know, he won a Latin Grammy. And he has a whole following. He's not a traditional politician. But he's also not super progressive. He's a moderate.

He understands the importance of, you know, an industry like oil and gas to the economy of his district. He understands the importance of a secure border to his district. And I think that kind of match is going to make him, you know, quite successful in his district. Like I said, it's quite conservative. So, you know, he may not win the election. But I do expect him to do dramatically better than Kamala Harris did in that district in 2026. We'll be right back after this quick break.

Okay, well, a little bit of a little bit of a question. So something that jumped out to me when I was looking at Welcome's homepage is that you call yourself, you're trying to offer a political home to the center left and the center right. But obviously, you're just working with Democrats and you're working to boost Democrats. So is the idea there that you think that, you know, the Democratic Party can become a place where reliably people who have center right views can find candidates they support? Or what are you working towards with that idea? I mean, I think that's a real hope, right? Like, I think there are a lot of folks on the center right who are frustrated with the current state of the Republican Party who feel like, you know, Donald Trump, he came into office. His mandate was to secure the border to lower prices.

And instead, what he did was raise prices via tariffs and cut health care. And he, you know, embarked on all these, you know, radical culture war attacks, all this stuff that Americans didn't really want or support. And so there are a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump who we think are going to be alienated from the Republican Party. in the coming years. And the question is whether or not Democrats are going to be able to offer a vision to those people that's palatable to them. You know, if Democrats continue to sort of run

on the like 2020 era version of the Democratic Party, those people are, a lot of them are going to continue to think, hey, you know, I'm frustrated with Trump, but the Democratic Party is still too far away from my views for me to want to cast a vote for them.

And so I think our hope is that if we can get Democrats to, you know, shift more in the direction of the center of public opinion, a lot of those people will find that Democrats are the better choice for them, and Democrats will be able to build, real, durable, lasting large majorities in Congress to get some stuff down. That segues nicely into kind of the back half of what I wanted to talk about in the interview,

which I alluded to a little bit earlier, but that's some of the criticism that the report has received, both from the left and the right. So I read a few pieces responding to the report from progressive writers, or I'll just call them writers on the left. One of the themes that I saw emerge in those criticisms was that the report doesn't really reckon with how somebody to like Trump could be elected and especially reelected as decisively as he was in 24 and that that is a really strong signal that that people are looking for a tear down of the

system in a way that goes beyond what a moderate platform can offer. Did you think about that when you're crafting a reporter? How do you factor Trump into these calculations when you're thinking about how to craft a political strategy? Listen, I guess what I would say is I think Trump has been immensely misunderstood, right? I think the story of Trump, in the Trump era, can be summed up very simply. Between, over the last 15 years, Donald Trump got the Republican Party to drop its most unpopular commitments on economic policy, at the same time as the Democratic Party adopted much more left-wing and quite unpopular views on immigration, crime, energy production, and a number of cultural issues. And if you just summarized in those two sentences, all of the changes we've

seen the realignments we've seen of working class, moderate and Hispanic voters, you know, working class, black voters, working class, white voters, et cetera, those all kind of make sense. And so I think when we're thinking about Donald Trump, what we see is, you know, Trump is a story of how an extremist can take control of a party. And that is often by being quite extreme and by playing to, you know, the fires of the base. But with that said, the way that Trump was able to defeat Democrats in presidential elections was by being, in voters' minds, the more moderate candidate.

So in both 2016 and 2024, a greater share of voters said that Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton were too liberal than said that Donald Trump was too conservative. And I think a lot of that has to do with, you know, him promising to veto a federal abortion ban, him, you know, dropping a ban on same-sex marriage from the Republican platform. Mitt Romney ran on raising the retirement age.

Donald Trump promised not to touch Social Security and Medicare. And so those are big policy distinctions that I think a lot of progressives have kind of lost sight of the fact, the ways in which Donald Trump has moderated the Republican Party. Now that Trump is president, he has embarked on a really radical agenda of policy change. And we're seeing in the data really clear backlash to that policy change. But we also see that even with that backlash, you know, voters continue to think that Democrats are more ideologically out of step than Republicans are.

So, for example, in the most recent survey data on this question, 55% of voters said they thought the Democratic Party was too liberal, only 51% said they thought the Republican Party was too conservative. Yeah. And using that, the axes you described earlier, I think, you know, at least let's say prior to coming back into office and Trump would probably be accurately described as being more on the moderate and that outsider. Exactly, right.

He was in the moderate and outsider lane. Now he's in the extreme and outsider lane based on how he's governed, right? So he did, one minute to think about this. He did a lot of lying about what he was going to do if he took office. or a lot of people didn't necessarily believe what he was going to do. And now he's actually putting that into practice. So in voters' minds, he's gone from, you know, the moderate side of that spectrum to the extreme side of that spectrum, but he's always been an outsider. And so the question is, you know, what do you want to attribute his general election success to?

Do you want to say it's because he was an outsider or because of these moderate policy issues? I think it's kind of both. I think voters did want an outsider. But also, I think if he had campaigns in 2016, like Romney did on privatizing Social Security and Medicare, then I think he probably would have lost to Hillary Clinton, right? I think if that election had been fought on whether or not Republicans wanted to raise the retirement age, instead of on, you know, border security and illegal immigration, I think Trump wins that, Trump loses that election to Clinton. And so it's important not to lose sight of the ways in which Trump has dropped Republicans' most unpopular

commitments on these issues that a lot of Americans care a lot about. At the same time, and you just described it, like there still does seem to be this perception, at least, that the Democrats, liberals are more radical or they're more radical of the two. Which to me, like the question raises for me is, is that something that can be solved in a cycle? You know, or Democrats, is this something where, like, even if all the recommendations that you're putting forward in this paper

are adopted writ large by 2028, is that perception going to shift meaningfully enough to... I think it can shift meaningfully. I think it can shift meaningfully. I think we see meaningful shifts and things like that all the time. I think it'll depend on having a nominee. who's willing to articulate, you know, in clear ways where they break from, you know, previous progressive orthodoxy and what issues they think, you know, Democrats have gotten

wrong. But I absolutely don't think that any of those things are set in stone, you know, voters, you know, are willing to take in new information about where the political party stand. I mean, just this year, right, we saw a huge shift in the share of voters who thought the Republican party was too extreme. And that was motivated by actual governance actions, almost certainly. And so I think, you know, if Democrats really commit to, you know, advocating for secure border, advocating for, you know, increased law enforcement to make sure that, you know, we have good public safety. I think that will help Democrats a lot in regaining that middle ground. So on the right, some of the responses that I read to the report, one of them that

jumped out to me was the idea that you're signaling openness. You just talked about immigration and the importance of supporting secure borders. You signal more of an openness on an issue like abortion. But the question is, how far are you willing to go on something like that? Would you endorse or support a Democratic candidate who was pro-life? Or is there a line that you're drawing there and how open you think Democrats should and can be? So on the pro-life point, you know, I think abortion isn't an issue where, you know, Democrats, where it's imperative for Democrats to moderate in particular. I do think that, you know, the Democratic line is a bit, you know, further to the left of public opinion, particularly on something like public funding for abortion, right?

I think voters generally the Hyde Amendment prohibits public funding of abortion. Democrats have called to repeal that in our recent presidential platforms. I think that was kind of a mistake. But I don't think that, you know, being pro-life is the most important issue. I do think it's mostly about immigration and public safety to a lesser extent energy production. I don't think that we should really have, you know, litmus tests for Democrats beyond, you know, core commitments to the economic policy that have traditionally been the centerpiece

of the Democratic Party, as well as, you know, a core commitment to upholding our constitutional republic and, you know, our democracy. Yeah. Do you see any Democrats on the national level? I know we talked about some people in the House like Jared Golden, but let's say people who may be angling for the nomination in 2028. Do you see any of them as particularly effective messengers on these points right now, especially like on economic messages?

Yeah, I mean, look, the field for 2028 is super crowded. I think everybody's going to run. I think Democrats have a real problem right now. you know, one part of our analysis that we looked at was looking at it for each of the 2028 candidates, their track record, you know, previously had brought up how a candidate does relative to the top of the ticket as kind of a relevant way to evaluate their performance. And the reason we think this is, look, it's always better to be getting more votes than fewer votes. And so if you're in a state where Kamala Harris got 60% of the vote and you got 75% of the vote, that means that there are a bunch of

people who voted for Trump who voted for you. And that suggests that you'd be a pretty strong candidate. But if you're in a state that Kamala Harris got 60% of the vote and you got 51% of the vote, even though you won, that doesn't suggest that you'd be a particularly strong candidate because that means that even lots of Democrats, you know, are voting for your Republican opponent over you. And the problem here is that when we look at the current Democratic field, the people who are leading the path in the polls for the primary are some of the people with the worst track records of winning over swing voters and of actually doing well electorally. And just to put a point on that, you know, the single, you know, the person who's currently the front runner in the field, Gavin Newsom is currently, you know, in my data, has the worst electoral track record of any of the candidates in the field in terms of his ability to win over those crossover voters that Democrats need. And so I do think that there's a lot of reasons for Democrats to be concerned about the state of the field and about who's going to win the nomination.

If I can put you on the spot, I mean, no need to answer, but, you know, who do you think the data shows or your personal view shows would be a stronger nominee than I think Newsom's at the top of the pack. Kamala's near the top of the pack. AOC is near the top of the pack. I'm guessing all three of those probably would not rank towards the top of your own list. But are there any names that you would throw out there

that you think are more effective? I think that there are a bunch of potential very strong candidates for Democrats. So I don't want to pick a single person because we're a couple of years out, but I'll give you like five or six names of people who I think would be really strong candidates. Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear,

you know, Ruben Gallagher, Amy Klobuchar, John Ossoff, Mark Kelly, all of those people, I think, are people who have shown a proven ability to win over voters who Democrats don't traditionally win. And I think all of them would be good nominees for the party. You know, even an more outsider person, somebody like Mark Cuban could be great. That's somebody I think about sometimes. But on the flip side, I think, yeah, somebody like AOC or Kamala or, you know, J.B. Pritzker

or Tim Walls or Gavin Newsom, those are all people more on the left-wing side of the spectrum. And I think those would be, you know, have a war show. chance of beating J.D. Vance in 2028. So one of my last questions here is just looking forward and what you're going to be watching for as you continue to assess the field and kind of the state of our politics in the lead up to 2028. I know right now, Jasmine Crockett getting in the Texas Senate race is a big story this week. I think that underscores maybe some of this intra-party struggle that we're seeing and, you know, what kinds of candidates, what kinds of ideas are going to rise to the top.

So in a race like that, are you going to be looking to the Texas Senate Democratic primary as a litmus test for where the party's headed going forward? Or what kinds of things are you paying attention to? Yeah, I mean, I think those Senate primaries in a bunch of different states, whether it's Iowa or whether it's Maine or Michigan or Texas, I think a lot of those are going to be informative about where the Democratic Party is. You know, we saw in 2010, Republicans have a huge advantage in the national environment, but also nominate a number of candidates in winnable races who, were pretty unfit for their districts and didn't really make sense, whether it was Sharon Engel or Christine O'Donnell, Todd Aiken in 2012, even more recently, people like Blake Masters and Dr. Oz. So it's definitely possible for parties to have a wave environment and yet cap their own ability to gain seats by nominating candidates who don't quite, you know,

match up with what voters in those states are looking for. And so I do think there's a real concern that Democrats are going to nominate some of these weaker candidates in some of these must win races. Simon, really appreciate the time. For our listeners who want to follow along with the work that you're doing, as we continue to navigate this very interesting political moment, where's the best place for them to follow? Yeah, so you can follow me at Simon underscore Basel on Twitter.

That's where I do most of my talking these days. And you can also read the full report at deciding to win.org, nice and simple, deciding to win.org. And thanks so much for having me on the show. Yeah, awesome. It's a great conversation. Thank you. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Woll.

Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saw, Lindsay Canuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at reetangle.com. You know,