How Progressives Learned To Love Persuasion

WASHINGTON ― A gathering of top progressive political operatives, donors and elected officials on Tuesday, in many ways, could have come straight out of 2019. There was bemoaning of Democratic establishment timidity, promises to find “disability justice, racial justice, economic justice, water justice and air justice,” and spotlights placed on candidates running to the left in crucial primaries.

But the gathering’s name ― Persuasion 2025 ― contained a not-so-subtle shift in how the progressive movement is selling itself to the broader Democratic Party. For much of President Donald Trump’s first term, large portions of the left dismissed the idea the party should do much to try to win over his voters, and instead suggested they could win by motivating disaffected voters, many of them Black and Latino, to turn out by proposing sufficiently bold policies.

The movement is now changing its tune, placing a renewed focus on arguing progressives are better equipped to persuade swing voters who are distrustful of establishment politicians and skeptical of entrenched insiders, and speak to voter anger about rising prices.

“We want to push a shift,” acknowledged Tory Gavito, the president of Way To Win. “I was brought up in the Obama years to think about this as an either/or question, where you had to persuade some voters and you had to turn out others.”

While they are not wholly avoiding talking of turning out disaffected Democrats ― there was quite a bit of discussion about Democrats who voted in 2020 but stayed home in 2024 during Tuesday’s event ― it still amounts to a significant decision for a movement trying to one again find its footing after Trump won the popular vote and gained with Black and Latino voters in 2024.

“We have to be able to do both,” Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar, who spoke at the event, said when asked if the left was moving from a focus on motivation to persuasion. “For the longest time we have wrongly said be progressive to motivate, be moderate to persuade. And I think that is totally broken. I think we need a message for working class people that persuades those that we lost and motivates those that aren’t voting.”

The change has been building since even before Trump’s victory in 2024, but has gone into overdrive since. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.N.Y.), the highest-profile young progressive in Congress, is representative. In 2018, she told a progressive conference audience: “Our swing voter is not red to blue. It’s nonvoter to voter.” In the days following the 2024 election, she was quizzing her nine million Instagram followers about why they supported both her and Trump.

It’s also evident from odd-couple alliances developing between the traditionally moderate-to-conservative Blue Dog Coalition and leading progressives in Congress. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has endorsed Rebecca Cooke, a waitress running for a swing House seat in Wisconsin as a working-class moderate.

And on Tuesday, Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, shared the stage with Phil Gardner, the senior director of the Blue Dog Action Fund, where they favorably talked about Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez’s work on antitrust issues and Rep. Jared Golden’s support for unions, and emphasized both groups were focused on combatting corporate greed and ending political corruption. Shakir also pointedly noted 9% of the attendees of Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour were Republicans, according to voter data.

They spoke not long after Terrance Woodbury, the president of the Democratic polling firm HIT Strategies, delivered a presentation focused on how young Black and Latino men were “the new swing voters,” and not long before progressive Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner talked about how a relentless focus on affordability was winning over Trump supporters in the 1,000-person town he lives in.

“It’s not just working with Democrats, it’s not just working with progressives, it’s working with a ton of Trump voters,” Platner said. “They also think they are getting screwed by the system. They think that rich people are robbing them. They think the political class exists to serve elites.”

“They see the world as it is,” Platner continued. “At least (Trump) told them that that was true. They forgave a lot after that.”

Moderates, for what its worth, are likely to scoff at the the idea the left is better equipped to win over the center of the electorate, arguing progressives are most successful in bright blue districts and have a poor track record of successfully flipping GOP-held seats.

In an interview, Gavito said the hope was to convince party leaders to get more comfortable running progressives in key districts, citing the success left-wing candidates have had exciting voters. (Notably, neither House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has endorsed progressive Zohran Mamdani’s front-running bid for New York City mayor.)

“This is a conversation with party leaders, because it does feel like the Schumers and the Jeffreies are being confronted with these new rising stars like the Mamdanis and the AOCs, and that they have to decide what they’re bringing into this big tent,” she said.