A group of progressive politicians and strategists will call on Democrats to take a more leftward path out of the political wilderness at a private confab Tuesday — underscoring ongoing rifts within the party.
The event, Persuasion 2025, is hosted by liberal donor group Way To Win and ad-testing platform Swayable. They’re bringing together top progressive leaders to diagnose Democrats’ failings in 2024 and propose fixes ahead of the upcoming midterms and 2028 presidential election. The details of the event were described first to POLITICO.
“2024 was such a catastrophic loss and a wake-up call that Democrats need new thinking,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, co-founder of Way To Win. “We cannot continue to be the more palatable party or the lesser of two evils. We need to try to think bigger … and we don’t have to compromise our values in order to win.”
The event, scheduled for Tuesday afternoon at a Washington, D.C., hotel, is just the latest in a series of new groups, conferences, research and podcasts to lay bare the party’s ongoing disagreements over how to recover. In some ways, Tuesday’s event represents the progressive answer to WelcomeFest, a center-left meeting in June, when Democrats urged candidates to run toward the ideological center.
“There’s the theory that we’ve gone too far left … but I think there’s possibly other theories of the case,” said Ancona, who instead cited decades-long economic inequality as one of progressives’ other theories for Donald Trump’s success in winning over working-class voters with growing economic inequality. Of the more centrist solutions to Democrats’ challenges, Ancona added, “we’ve been trying a lot of those strategies for a while now, and coming up short.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Rep. Greg Casar — chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — and Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Calif.) are among those planning to participate. The conference will tackle U.S.-Israel politics, a particularly divisive topic for Democrats during the 2024 election, through a discussion entitled “Grappling with Gaza, U.S. Politics and the Need for Moral Courage,” that will feature Kat Abughazaleh, a Gen Z influencer running in an Illinois House primary.
Sarah Longwell, who led “Republican Voters Against Trump” in 2024, and researcher Anat Shenker-Osorio will lead a panel titled, “Persuasion Across the Anti-MAGA Coalition.” A group of left-leaning influencers will weigh in on a panel titled, “Culture to Political Content, Persuading Audiences Online.”
“We’re all searching for a way out of the wilderness, so all kinds of people are presenting alternative paths out,” said Terrance Woodbury, a Democratic pollster who will present research on young men of color at Tuesday’s event. “But they’re not either or. We have to do all of these things.”
Trump stunned Democrats in 2024 by improving his margins across demographics, cutting into traditionally left-leaning groups, including young and working-class voters and people of color. But even as Trump’s job approval numbers have dropped since he took office, Democrats haven’t seen their own brand’s popularity improve. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found voters more supportive of Republicans on crime, immigration and the economy.
Democrats nevertheless hope the looming shutdown, Trump-led tariffs and economic uncertainty will help catapult its candidates back to power in the House next year.
“Voters want leaders who are fighting for them and not folding,” Ancona said.
Ancona said the event aims to also bring in more moderate voices, like Phil Gardner, senior adviser at the Blue Dog Action Fund, who will speak alongside Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager Faiz Shakir, in a segment titled, “Economic Storytelling: Reaching the Working Class.”
But progressive stars are primarily headlining the event, including Morris Katz, one of the strategists behind Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign, and Graham Platner, running in the crowded Senate primary in Maine.
Several Persuasion 2025 participants name-checked Mamdani, along with Platner, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and state Rep. James Talarico, who is running in the Texas Senate primary, as examples of Democrats with divergent biographies, backgrounds and ideological leanings who nonetheless embody what they believe is successful messaging for the party — a “focus on the corporate corruption” and “willingness to call it out,” Ancona said.
“This is a style over substance debate that’s missed by center or left labels,” Woodbury said. “Washington doesn’t understand the Bernie-Trump voter. They don’t fall along ideological, or explicitly partisan lines because they often contradict themselves. … what’s missing on the left, that’s prevalent on the right, is the outrage — and it’s promise to tear down ineffective systems to build something new.”
But Qasim Rashid, a Democratic activist who will appear with other progressive influencers on Tuesday, argued Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ refusal to immediately endorse Mamdani as emblematic of Democrats’ larger problems.
“While the Democratic Party is 30 points underwater, [Mamdani] is 16 points above water, winning a majority of young white men,” Rashid said. “Despite all of [Mamdani’s] immense success, he’s being ignored, maligned by Democratic Party leadership. This is not a way to inspire young people.”
