A Party Without a Plan
What Democrats are (not) saying about growth, innovation, and the future
The question that launched this campaign was: What have Democrats learned?
The platform we've been running on for the last decade or more isn’t working. How are we going to bring new people into the party? We got beat in 2024. How are we making sure it doesn't happen again?
My campaign is answering with a vision for a New American Century. A critical part of that vision is bringing innovation and economic growth back into focus for Democrats, both because they are indispensable to achieving our progressive goals and because they can inspire more people to join us.
We wanted to get a sense of whether the Democratic Party is putting any attention or energy toward innovation and growth—not just in the statements of a few leaders or commentators, but in the actual campaigns we’re running. We did that by looking at the websites of Democrats running for Congress around the country. We looked at 91 Democratic candidates in 41 districts, focusing on those where Democrats are trying to take a seat from Republicans, along with a couple of competitive races here in Illinois.
A few disclaimers. First: this is obviously not scientific. We focused on a subset of campaigns, and deciding whether a website talks about an issue is a judgment call. Second, our goal is not to call out individual Democrats, but to see how we're doing as a party. I won’t drill into any individual candidate’s site, but just look at a few high-level observations. Finally, we started with a quick glance at innovation and growth here, but there is a lot more to learn from seeing how our candidates present themselves, and we will come back to that. I recommend taking a look at the candidates in your area to see how they do.
Let’s get into it.
41% of Democrats don't talk about their ideas for the future at all.
This one is the most shocking to me. We tried to be inclusive—we counted anything from a comprehensive issues page down to a few bullets on priorities anywhere on the site. But of the 91 candidates we looked at, 37 didn’t have a single clear, substantial statement about what they’d do in office. They might have plenty of photos of the candidate shaking hands and maybe even merch, and they’ll almost certainly say they’re going to fight, but they don’t say what they want to get done or how it’s going to help us get out of the MAGA era.
I got advice like this early on. Experienced candidates and campaign professionals told me that nobody reads websites, that voters only care about personal stories, and that ideas don’t really matter because Democrats all have the same ideas. Putting a vision out there, they said, just creates a target for people to attack.
This drives me crazy. Why are these candidates running? For some people it's just the next job, and for others it's a way to get in the spotlight. That might have been good enough in the past—a Democratic vote is a Democratic vote—but not anymore. We need to convince people to choose us to lead, people who don’t already agree with us, and personal stories aren't enough. This is not the time to show up without ideas.
If you’re running in this era, you should have beliefs that you care about so deeply that you can't help expressing them, and that no campaign advisor can convince you to keep to yourself. 41% of the Democrats we looked at didn't clear that bar.
38% of Democrats don't mention the economy.
We know that the economy is consistently the most important issue to voters, and certainly was in 2024. To our credit, nearly every Democrat talks about affordability, which is absolutely critical. But when it comes to the broader economy, 35 of the Democrats we looked at made no mention of it.
The economy is not just another issue—it’s the one that underlies better jobs, better education, more affordable housing, and everything else we care about. You can talk about bringing costs down, but if you’re not thinking about the health of the overall economy, you’re talking about symptoms, not causes.
81% of Democrats have no plan for economic growth.
It gets worse if you look at growth. Of the 91 candidates, only 17 had anything to say about how to drive economic growth.
In this campaign, we’ve been making the case that growth is essential. If we want to realize a bold, progressive vision, we’ve got to be able to pay for it, and we need growth to do that. Moreover, it’s an issue we can use to expand the appeal of the party and build a winning majority, particularly when this administration is so determinedly anti-growth. Unfortunately, it’s plainly not where our attention is. That’s a mistake, practically and politically.
What’s more, 89% of Democrats had nothing to say about innovation, which goes hand-in-hand with growth. Innovation will help us make progress on an energy transition, on healthcare, on education, and more, and it will drive growth. There is so much we can do to promote innovation, starting with reversing attacks on research, immigration, and trade. If we’re not planning to accelerate research and invention, we’re not serious about progress.
The Democratic Party is my party, and has been since before I could vote. Looking across all of those websites, I was reminded why. We’re the ones standing up for civil rights, for healthcare and Social Security, for education and opportunity, and for democracy and the rule of law. The country needs us more than ever, and I want us to win, and win big - in 2026, in 2028, and beyond.
But we are not rising to the moment. Even in a primary, we can’t only speak to the issues we know other Democrats want to hear about. Unless we find new ways to bring more people in, we are in for more disappointing election nights.
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