Mythbusting Before the Midterms, Part I: Campaign Tactics

The first five in a series of traps every Democrat must avoid to win this November

It’s been a good few weeks for Democrats, politically speaking. (It’s all relative; overall, we have about the same approval rating as anchovies on pizza, but we can fix that, too).

The Party flipped the President’s own backyard, winning Mar-a-Lago’s state House district. A FOX News poll found Trump’s disapproval rating at its lowest level yet, through both terms, and a 20-point collapse in the President’s approval amongst Hispanic voters since December. Trump is 60 points underwater with independents on the cost of living, a 71-point swing since the 2024 election, prompting CNN’s Harry Enten to say “this [...] is just a political nightmare waiting to happen for the Republican Party come the midterm election.” And voters are feeling Republicans’ dysfunction firsthand–the shutdown of DHS caused hours-long backups at airports, while gas prices are a dollar per gallon higher than they were a month ago, when Trump launched his war of choice in Iran.

But Democratic candidates and campaigners shouldn’t take the wind at their backs for granted.

These are not normal times, and November 3, 2026, won’t bring normal elections. Yet in my travels across the country and conversations with countless Democrats, I far too often find candidates, organizers, and strategists playing by the old rules of electoral politics. Our party is too content running seemingly safe, conventional campaigns. And that’s what got us into this mess of Republican trifecta governance. As my friend Bradley Beychok says, we are Democrats, so if something works, we usually take a vow never to do it again, and instead revert to the usual losing play.

The map facing Democrats is still extremely tough, and Republicans are working hard to make it even more so, including through voter suppression. If Democrats are going to win in November–and lay the foundation for big wins in 2028 and beyond–we need to dispel once and for all with some of the pervasive, outdated, losing campaign mythologies that we’ve clung to for decades.

Over the next month, I’ll lay out the most dangerous myths I see reflected in our strategies, messaging, and coalition-building efforts–and the truth campaign stakeholders need to understand instead. I promise you will probably disagree on at least one or two of these. Please, don’t hate me–I can’t help it that I’m right.

Today, let’s talk about five such myths plaguing Democratic campaign tactics:

1. Myth: Swing Voters Aren’t A Thing Anymore; Turnout is All That Matters

A lot of Democratic campaigns assume that, ten years into the Trump era, voters know who Republicans are, and that there’s no sense in persuading them. Turnout alone determines who wins and who loses.

This is just plain wrong. Vice President Harris lost in 2024 because 6% of Biden voters in 2020 flipped to Trump or another candidate. Those swing voters were decisive in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where the VP lost by just 229,766 combined votes.

In tight 2026 elections, if we persuade these swing voters to flip back to Democrats, we win.

Swing voters are inexpedient for campaigns; persuasion is hard work. But earning their support is critical, because just getting voters to the polls isn’t enough to save us.

I constantly hear that “we lost to the couch” in 2024–that if everyone votes, Democrats win. But the data doesn’t support that theory. 2024 was a high-turnout election, at 64%–slightly down from 2020, but still one of the highest we’ve had in a century. Take a look at the 2020 voters and nonvoters and how they changed in 2024:

Source: NY Times & BlueRose

The chart on the left tells us that President Biden won in 2020 by about 4% of voters. Of the people who didn’t vote in 2020, he led by close to 8%. Flash forward four years: 2020 voters still supported the Democrat by 2%, but among those same non-voters from 2020, they supported Trump in 2024 by 14%. So the people on the couch actually leaned heavily Republican. Indeed, if all voters had turned out in 2024, Vice President Harris would have lost by even more.

Turnout matters, of course. I’m a big believer in robust field and get-out-the-vote organizing–the Obama campaigns helped invent modern turnout practices, after all. It was an essential part of how we won reelection in 2012. It’s just not the end-all, be-all that some organizers claim it to be.

2. Myth: Ads Don’t Make A Difference–You Just Need Field

Persuading these swing voters to turn out and vote for Democrats requires compelling, motivating messaging, and an increasingly pervasive school of thought holds that paid TV and digital advertisements are no longer effective (or cost-effective) ways of amplifying a campaign’s message. Better to spend that money on a strong field program, the thinking goes. But this is a false choice.

Blasting key messages out widely across platforms has a real, outsized impact on voter preferences and opinions. Look no further than the defining ad of the 2024 campaign: Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” ad. It was simple, direct, memorable, targeted, and devastatingly effective.

The Trump campaign ran the 'they/them' TV spot heavily during NFL and college football games and other high-viewership slots popular with men aged 18-44. From October 7-20, pro-Trump forces spent an estimated $95 million on ads, with more than 41% going to anti-trans messaging, making it their second–most prominent issue after taxes.

This blitz served to both succinctly share Trump’s stance on a wedge issue and define the Vice President on Trump’s terms, filling in the blanks for voters who didn’t know a lot about Harris in a way that benefited the Trump campaign. And it worked: men ages 18-44 shifted 16 points towards Trump compared to 2020, going from supporting President Biden by 8 points to supporting Trump by 8 points–a dramatic realignment of exactly the demographic this ad campaign targeted.

Democrats don’t have to wait until 2028 to learn our lesson; ads are, in fact, even more influential in down-ballot races, where voters have less information about candidates. Smart campaigns will use paid programming to amplify their key messages and shape voter preferences in the months ahead, while also deploying a robust field program to reinforce those messages and actually mobilize those voters. Ads and field shouldn’t be an either/or choice–it’s both/and.

3. Myth: We Only Need Digital Ads, Not TV Ads

Before I went to work on then-Senator Obama’s 2008 campaign, I sometimes found myself trying to convince candidates and strategists that they needed to invest in digital to reach voters, in addition to TV ads. Twenty years later, I often have to do the reverse. “Voters get all of their news, do all of their research, and form all of their opinions online and on social media,” I’m told these days. “And besides, TV ads are much more expensive to produce and place–only digital programming is a worthwhile expense, right?”

Wrong. Between the airwaves, cable, and streaming services, TV is still a critical tool for reaching voters where they are.

Source: Nielsen

More than 68 million Americans currently subscribe to a cable TV service, including nearly two-thirds of Americans over the age of 65. Meanwhile, 84% of all Americans–and critically, 90% of young people–watch a streaming platform every month. That includes 80% of independents. Even local TV remains a common way Americans get the news, with about 64% reporting they rely on their local stations.

Digital platforms are obviously critically important for connecting with, informing, and persuading voters (I’m personally absolutely addicted to TikTok). Democrats were early adopters of these mediums, to great success, and though we fell behind Republicans’ efforts in 2024, our campaigns are doing a lot of exciting, creative, and compelling work online this cycle. But the digital realm is not the only game in town to reach our voters–not by a long shot. Democrats can’t afford to cede TV to their Republican opponents and expect to win.

4. Myth: We Can Wait Until The Fall To Start Communicating With Voters

The type of ads we buy to persuade voters matters–so, too, does our timing. Many think the electorate makes up their minds about who to vote for in the weeks leading up to Election Day, so they keep their campaign’s powder dry until the fall. That’s a problem: only 37% of voters actually cast their ballot on “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November,” whereas three out of every five voters do so early. Democrats have to connect with voters early and often, so that they can clearly and memorably define themselves and their opponents before Republicans can.

A huge key to President Obama’s successful reelection campaign in 2012 was defining his opponent, Mitt Romney, before the Republican candidate got the chance to introduce himself to the wider electorate–hence the enduring caricature of the Governor as The Guy Who Fired Your Dad. Negative information is especially influential in candidate evaluation; early ads allow an opponent’s negative framing to dominate the narrative, creating an uphill battle to try to “reset” the race.

During the 2024 cycle, the well-funded Trump campaign took advantage of this dynamic better than our Party did. He went after President Biden early and hard: Trump’s Super PAC first started to run ads bashing Hunter Biden in 2023, and first began slamming the President over his age in March 2024. The narrative Trump created stuck, and it’s part of the reason why President Biden was unable to recover from his debate performance in June.

Even after President Biden dropped out of the race and Vice President Harris took over on July 21, Pew found that 81% of voters made up their mind on Harris vs. Trump before September 2024. That means the Vice President had just over a month to define herself and her candidacy before the vast majority of voters made their decision about whether or not to support her.

Election Day is just over 200 days away. The window of opportunity for Democratic candidates to define themselves is closing fast (and these campaigns will have way fewer resources than Presidential races, so get on ActBlue tonight and start giving).

5. Myth: “Cost Per Vote” Should Drive Tactical and Budget Decisions

I love data. I founded The Messina Group because I believe in the power of data-driven campaign strategies. In every campaign, we’ve grounded as much decision-making as possible in the data. Heck, that’s the crux of this whole post–using data to bust the vibes-driven myths of modern campaigning.

But I also know that data analytics can only take a campaign so far. Campaigning is both an art and a science.

Data can optimize cost per vote, short-term efficiency, and isolated tactics. What it can’t do is win a framing battle, shape the narrative environment, anticipate how an opponent responds, or account for the cumulative effects of months of campaigning. Those require judgment, instinct, and the kind of storytelling that no model can produce.

Throughout the last decade, poll after poll, focus group after focus group, and election after election have all made clear that what voters from both parties really want is elected officials who are authentic, normal, and relatable. As Democrats work through when, where, and how to best connect with their voters these next few months, that should remain their North Star.

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Getting the tactics right is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Even campaigns that spend smart, start early, and run great ads can still lose if their message is wrong.

This is the first in a series of myth-busting posts. Next up: the messaging traps that Democrats keep falling into – starting with the dangerous assumption that Trump’s chaos is all the economic argument we need to make. Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

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