Democrats Forgot How to Win
Why Democrats traded strategy for moral theater — and the only guy left who gets it wears gym shorts to work.
Silence.
The last campaign ad fades to black. My six-year-old son, Connor, and I are sitting on the couch, the room still echoing with the over-modulated voice of Winsome Earle-Sears declaring, “I am speaking.”
It’s from Abigail Spanberger’s most prolific spot — her campaign slicing Sears into the villain of a dystopian horror flick, complete with dramatic music and an urgent voiceover about “extreme MAGA positions.”
I look over at Connor and say “I am speaking” in that same ridiculous tone. He laughs and fires it back: “I am speaking.”
My wife shakes her head. “It’s not nice to mock someone like that.”
Connor, without missing a beat: “Then why is your candidate for governor doing it to her opponent?”
We laughed. And then I realized the kid was right.
What’s playing on that television isn’t politics anymore — it’s performance art for the algorithmic age.
And Spanberger, for all her competence, is doing what every Democrat seems trapped into doing: defining herself entirely by what she’s not.
She’s the anti-candidate. Anti-Sears. Anti-MAGA. Anti-anything risky enough to stand for. Which is fine when you’re facing the worst Republican ever nominated for statewide office. But it’s suicide when your opponent’s doing the same thing back.
Voters aren’t dumb. They’re exhausted. They’re wondering which of these two people to believe and who actually gives a damn that they’re working themselves to death to keep the lights on.
Attack ads are fine — they’re foreplay. But at some point you have to fuck your opponent’s narrative. That’s Politics 101. You can’t just hate the villain; you’ve got to convince people you’re the hero. And that means positive branding and giving people a reason to believe in you.
From the Trenches
I can’t even judge the people making those ads. I used to be one of them.
My wife once told me she wasn’t sure she could marry me because some of the ads I’d worked on were so vicious — and because of the pure joy I took in watching them test well.
From grad school until marriage, I lived in the trenches: studying opposition research, dissecting polling crosstabs, sitting in focus groups where half the room was eating pizza and the other half was plotting the apocalypse.
I’ve written the lines I now mock. I once green-lit an ad that said “No quiero illegal immigrants.” Our target? A Republican who owned Taco Bell franchises. Yeah. That was a career low point — but the damn thing worked.
Because back then, we were trying to win. The moral calculus wasn’t complicated: beat the other guy or go home unemployed.
That’s not what drives Democrats anymore. Somewhere between the Clinton triangulation era and the Instagram-influencer era, the left stopped optimizing for victory and started optimizing for virtue.
The consultants didn’t get dumber — they got scared. Scared of Twitter. Scared of the Squad. Scared of being called “moderate” like it’s a slur. Better to lose and keep your speaking slot at Netroots Nation than risk offending anyone.
The Two Faces of the Modern Left
And so you get today’s Democratic split screen.
On one side: Zohran Mamdani, the self-styled socialist from Queens. A Bowdoin grad — a liberal-arts college for people who think the Ivies aren’t quite pretentious enough — with a spotless résumé, a deep belief in 1917-style economics, and the kind of DEI-approved aesthetic that makes white progressives feel spiritually hydrated.
To his credit, he’s not stupid. He understands both strategy and governance — he just wants to govern like it’s the USSR. The Soviets called it communism. Venezuela called it Bolivarian socialism. Mamdani calls it “social justice.” It always starts the same: tax the rich to fund utopia. It always ends with empty shelves and new uniforms for the secret police.
But in branding terms? He’s brilliant.
He knows how to weaponize envy. He tells the “oppressed vs. oppressor” story like it’s a Marvel movie — and he’s mastered the art of mobilizing the young, angry, well-moisturized. The kind who live in $3,000 studio apartments and think struggling to pay for Equinox and their Soho Club membership makes them “working class.”
That’s not policy. That’s performance. But it works.
Then there’s Abigail Spanberger — the Virginia moderate who, on paper, is exactly what the party needs. Former CIA operative. Never voted for Pelosi. Pro-family, pro-capitalism, socially liberal.
She should be the blueprint for post-Trump sanity. Instead, her brand feels like it was built by a committee that starts every meeting with “Let’s not offend anyone left of Marx.”
She’s running from her own shadow — apologizing for being normal.
That’s the fatal flaw: she’s trying to be liked by everyone instead of trusted by anyone.
A Hollow Party
The Democratic Party isn’t a coalition anymore. It’s a therapy group that occasionally holds elections.
The strategists are gone. The street-level tacticians — the ones who knew “messaging” meant persuasion, not pronouns — have been purged. What’s left are moralists, bureaucrats, and vibe managers.
The new left doesn’t recruit talent. It recruits purity. You don’t get hired for instincts; you get hired for hashtags. And if you say the wrong thing, the mob you were feeding yesterday eats you for breakfast tomorrow.
I used to sit in war rooms arguing whether “kitchen-table issues” or “middle-class families” tested better. Now those same arguments happen online — except the battlefield is BlueSky, the prize is retweets, and “middle-class” is oppressive because it implies someone’s lower.
By the time you’ve purified your language, you’ve offended everyone you needed to persuade. Ask the “Latinx” community how that branding exercise went.
That’s how a party dies — not with corruption or scandal, but with self-censorship. You can’t win a knife fight with a poetry slam.
The MAGA Mirror
Meanwhile, MAGA knows exactly what it’s doing.
They’ve turned politics into professional wrestling, and Democrats keep showing up expecting a policy debate.
The right understands archetype and story. They cast their opponents before the Democrats even announce. Every rally needs two villains: the “establishment elitist” and the “woke radical.”
Spanberger? They paint her as the first — cold, calculating, a deep-state automaton who hates America.
Mamdani? The second — chaotic, dangerous, hates cops, hates capitalism, wants to take your paycheck. Which, frankly, isn’t inaccurate.
See the trick? Both serve the same plot. MAGA isn’t just winning elections; they’re writing the screenplay and selling the popcorn while Democrats argue over lighting cues.
Trumpism is pro wrestling with better merch. Democrats keep submitting policy briefs to a cage match.
And the right gets the human operating system: people don’t think their way into politics — they feel their way in.
The right manipulates emotion. The left lectures reason. One side runs on adrenaline; the other runs on spreadsheets. Guess who wins?
The Fetterman Exception
Then there’s John Fetterman — the last Democrat who remembers what authenticity feels like.
He’s the only guy in the party who can wear gym shorts, drop an f-bomb, and somehow come off more authentic than the rest in tailored suits. He calls out his own side when they lose the plot — and gains credibility for it.
He’s the working-class progressive who doesn’t sneer at the working class. The guy who says “I support unions” without turning it into a spoken-word piece about intersectionality.
He’s what Democrats used to be before they started speaking in hashtags.
It’s no wonder his own party’s trying to cancel him. He’s proof they could still win — if they weren’t so addicted to losing the right way.
A Nation of Spectators
So where does that leave the rest of us? Somewhere between resignation and rebellion.
Most Americans aren’t ideologues. We’re just tired. We want a functioning government, not a TikTok debate club.
But the system rewards outrage. It rewards purity. It rewards whoever can stay mad the longest.
Republicans have turned rage into religion. Democrats have turned guilt into gospel.
And the rest of us are just looking for someone who can talk like a human being and not a hostage reading a statement written by a DEI intern.
How They Could Win (But Won’t)
Could Democrats win again? Sure.
All it would take is three things they currently consider heresy:
Tell the truth — even when it hurts.
Call out your own crazies. You can’t out-woke the woke or out-moralize the moralists. Have a “Sister Souljah” moment every cycle. Make it tradition.
Talk to people, not demographics.
Stop slicing voters into micro-segments like lab samples. Say something human. You don’t need a DEI consultant to tell you “parents” beats “birthing people.”
Run campaigns to win, not to cleanse.
Politics isn’t church. You don’t need to confess your sins before voting. You just need to convince the guy changing your oil that you’re not insane.
But they won’t. Because somewhere along the way, the left decided purity feels better than power. And losing with pride pays better than governing with grit.
The Silence Before the Next Storm
Back in my living room, the television is still black. The ads are over — for now.
Election Day is the only peace we get — that rare moment when democracy stops screaming at you to pick a side.
But I know what’s coming. The midterms. The next wave of ads. Same fonts. New villains. Zero lessons learned.
They’ll say democracy’s on the ballot. They’ll warn of extremists. They’ll cue the piano music and soft-focus families on porches.
And they’ll forget, once again, that politics isn’t a morality play. It’s a contact sport.
Part of the game isn’t just destroying your opponent. It’s defining who you are. And, most importantly, being someone voters actually want — not the weird freak lecturing them about plastic straws.
Maybe someday one of them will remember what this is supposed to be about.
Not about being right.
About winning — so you can finally make things right.
—David