(WASHINGTON) — While the Democratic National Committee chose not to release its after-action report on the 2024 election, one prominent Democratic group is sharing feedback from a group of influential voters.
To some of them, Democrats can seem condescending, elitist and out-of-touch. And to win them over, candidates don’t need to take a specific policy position, but should communicate directly, authentically and with empathy.
Drawn from in-depth interviews and focus groups with more than 100 voters from battleground House districts and states, the “Baseline Report” released by MD PAC, a political action committee working to reshape Democratic Party, aims to help candidates and campaigns connect with voters who supported Joe Biden in 2020 and either voted for Donald Trump or stayed home four years later.
The organization is affiliated with Majority Democrats, one of several groups working with candidates to remake and redefine the party’s image ahead of the midterms.
“It’s not exactly a state secret that something went very wrong for Democrats in 2024,” Lis Smith, a senior adviser to Majority Democrats, told ABC News. “The responsible thing isn’t to bury our heads in the sand, it’s to figure out how to win their votes so we can move forward.”
Across the entire cohort, voters shared a sense of exhaustion and emotional burnout. They view both Democrats and Republicans skeptically, and they feel “unseen, unheard, and unrepresented by the federal government,” the group notes in its report.
According to the analysis and the group’s briefing on the findings, voters across the cohort felt a sense of economic strain, and a fear that the “floor could drop at any time,” as one of them told the group.
In 2024, Trump and Republicans won over a larger share of voters without college degrees, performing 4 points better than he did in 2020 among voters who are more economically vulnerable, according to ABC News exit polls.
Republicans also won more than half of voters whose total family income in 2023 was between $30,000 and $49,999, and $50,000 to $99,999, according to ABC News exit polls for the House of Representatives in 2024.
Smith recalled a conversation with a Democratic senator after the 2024 election that underscored how the party didn’t connect with voters’ concerns about the economy.
“They told me, ‘I would hear from voters about price of eggs and I thought it was a Fox News talking point,'” she said. “That suggested to me that a lot of members of Congress and their staffs are insulated from what voters are feeling. And this is a way to break through that.”
At a time when Democrats are grappling over the party’s positions on the U.S. relationship with Israel and whether to call for the abolishing or reform of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Majority Democrats’ report doesn’t recommend a specific set of positions for Democrats to adopt.
“Voters were not demanding ideological purity. They expected leaders to be
flawed, change their minds, or even contradict themselves. What mattered was why — and whether the shift seemed honest,” the report reads.
While the report doesn’t dig into what went wrong for the party in 2024 and how Biden’s unsuccessful run for a second term impacted the fall results, the voters who participated expressed a desire to see politicians focus on issues that matter to them and show a willingness to disagree with their party.
“When voters were overwhelmingly telling us Joe Biden was too old to run for reelection, the Democratic powers that be responded, ‘Don’t believe your lying eyes,'” Smith said.
She also pointed to Democrats’ defending the Biden administration’s economic record by saying inflation was lower in the U.S. than in other countries.
“Democrats came off too often as defenders of the status quo,” Smith said. “That missed the mark, and going forward what we recommend is that Democrats understand the real, deep frustrations with economic and political systems.”
Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.