Liberal strategists and politicians are hosting a private event in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday aiming to urge Democrats to embrace more left-wing ideals in the aftermath of the party’s “catastrophic” losses in the 2024 election cycle, according to Politico.
The event, dubbed “Persuasion 2025,” will be hosted by liberal donor network Way To Win and ad-testing platform Swayable, Politico first reported. The Tuesday event will include discussions on topics such as how the Democratic Party can best move past its devastating 2024 election losses ahead of the looming 2026 midterms and 2028 White House race, according to Politico.
“[The 2024 election cycle] was such a catastrophic loss and a wake-up call that Democrats need new thinking,” Way to Win co-founder Jenifer Fernandez Ancona told the outlet. “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.”
Ancona also suggested to Politico that she does not believe in the “theory” that the Democratic Party lurching “too far left” was solely to blame for Democrats’ 2024 losses.
“I think there’s possibly other theories of the case,” she said.
Moreover, Ancona added that the Democratic Party has been “coming up short” when embracing more centrist strategies to solve its problems, saying “we’ve been trying a lot of those strategies for a while now, and coming up short.”
Some congressional Democrats set to participate in the event include Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Texas Rep. Greg Casar — who serves as the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — and California Rep. Lateefah Simon, according to Politico. Tuesday’s confab will also feature a panel titled “Grappling with Gaza, U.S. Politics and the Need for Moral Courage,” which will include Kat Abughazaleh, a Gen Z social media influencer running for Congress in Illinois’ 9th District, Politico reported.
Van Hollen notably made headlines in April after he flew to El Salvador in an unsuccessful bid to bring deported illegal migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a reputed MS-13 gangbanger and suspected human smuggler — back to the United States.
Additionally, a group of left-leaning influencers will be featured in a discussion called, “Culture to Political Content, Persuading Audiences Online,” Politico reported.
“We’re all searching for a way out of the wilderness, so all kinds of people are presenting alternative paths out,” Terrance Woodbury, a Democratic pollster who will discuss research on young men of color at the Tuesday event, told Politico. “But they’re not either or. We have to do all of these things.”
The report comes as some Democratic politicians have been attempting to diagnose the party’s shortcomings in the 2024 election cycle. Some prominent Democrats have also publicly criticized their own party as having a “weakness” problem and being too “woke.”
An analysis of voter registration data published by The New York Times (NYT) in August showed that the Democratic Party shed around 2.1 million registered voters between the 2020 and 2024 elections in the 30 states, along with Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, the Republican Party secured 2.4 million new registered voters in the same time period, the NYT reported.
Way to Win did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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