Recent polls show a surprising combination of results: Democrats appear to be leading even as president in six tough Senate races Joe Biden follows former President Donald Trump in the same states.
What are these Democratic Senate candidates doing right? To answer that question, I studied their campaigns, looking at ads, social media posts, and local reporting.
It’s clearly still early in the campaign, and some of the candidates now in the lead could lose in November. Yet most Democrats in these races are not only ahead in the polls; they also have a track record of winning tough races by appealing to voters skeptical of the Democratic Party.
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Here are six themes that emerge from the six campaigns:
Populism
Successful campaigns, such as films and novels, often have both heroes and villains. Republicans are comfortable with this idea. Their villains in recent years have included criminals, immigrants into the country without legal permission, and cultural elites. Democrats are sometimes squeamish about naming antagonists (unlike Republicans) and prefer a higher-minded version of politics.
This year’s swing-state Democrats are no prudes. All six Senate candidates – in Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – are basing their campaigns on a populism that sharply criticizes both big business and China.
The criticism of business focuses on the parts of corporate America that the candidates say have made life difficult for working families.
“I will never stop fighting to tackle corporate greed,” Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown said in an ad. Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania talks about ‘greed inflation’ and ‘shrinkflation’ in corporations. Set to “Pink Panther”-style music, a Casey ad shows fictional CEOs sneaking around a supermarket at night to reduce product sizes.
In an ad for Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, workers talk about how “Wall Street greed” has cut their pensions and say Baldwin has “fought like hell” to restore them. One Brown ad features a truck driver saying Wall Street was trying to “screw Ohio workers.”
An advertisement for Sen. Jackie Rosen of Nevada claims she “took on the big pharmaceutical companies – and won.” In an advertisement introducing Ruben Gallego, an Arizona congressman running for Senate, says, “The rich and the powerful – they don’t need more advocates.” Gallego adds, “It’s the people who are still trying to choose between groceries and utilities that need a warrior for them.”
The other villain is China, which the candidates say uses unfair trade tactics to undermine American jobs.
The first television ad from Montana Sen. Jon Tester’s campaign described China as “the greatest threat facing our nation.” Baldwin says in one of her ads, “We can’t let China steal jobs in Wisconsin.” In one of Brown’s ads, workers at a washing machine manufacturer joke about his reputation for looking disheveled, sloppy and wrinkled — and say they don’t care because he’s fighting to protect their jobs.
Brown’s blue-collar reputation is central to his unusual electoral success in Ohio. He is the only Democrat to win a Senate, gubernatorial or presidential race in the state in the past decade. He, Tester and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia (who is retiring) are the only Democratic senators representing states Trump won in 2020.
This kind of populism, in which politicians promise to fight for ordinary people against the powerful, was once the core of the Democratic Party. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman were more populist than many people now remember. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign was also strikingly populist, as was Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
It is true that almost all elected Democrats today favor populist policies such as raising taxes on the wealthy. But now that the party is dominated by college graduates, it has tended to emphasize issues that don’t resonate with working-class Americans. Remember, most Americans do not have a bachelor’s degree.
Not Campus Links
Climate change. Student debt. Diversity, equality and inclusivity. The war in the Gaza Strip.
These topics are central to progressive politics today. They are the subject of campus protests and online debates. They are also almost entirely absent from these six Democratic campaigns.
Why? The campaigns avoid issues that are important to educated progressives but matter little to most voters, especially working-class voters.
Student debt and housing costs provide a useful comparison. Student debt, an issue the Biden administration has emphasized, may seem like the ultimate wallet problem. In reality, it’s more of a niche market: Only 18% of American adults have federal student debt.
That helps explain why, in a recent Harvard University survey of U.S. residents between 18 and 29 years old, student debt ranked last when pollsters asked respondents which of 16 issues mattered to them. Israel and Palestine rank 15th out of 16. Climate change ranks 12th – and again, this was a poll of Americans under 30. The three main problems were inflation, health care and housing.
No wonder student debt is largely missing from these Democratic campaigns, while housing – a cost that affects almost every family – is a focal point. Rosen has an entire ad dedicated to housing costs in Nevada. Tester’s campaign cites the “housing crisis” as one of Montana’s biggest problems.
An illuminating point about American politics is that people who follow them closely are very different from swing voters.
Bipartisanship
As polarized as the country is, many voters still hunger for bipartisanship. In their ads, the six Democrats generally treat Republicans with respect and celebrate cooperation.
Brown brags about working with Republicans to pass a semiconductor bill. Baldwin shows videos of Trump and Biden in one ad, and a narrator explains that she has worked with both to crack down on Chinese imports. Rosen boasts that he has been “named one of the most bipartisan senators.”
The issue on which Democrats are most trying to distance themselves from their own party is immigration, which polls show is a major weakness for Biden. Rosen tells voters she “stood up against my own party to support police officers and get more money for border security.” An ad from Tester says he “fought to stop President Biden from allowing migrants to stay in America instead of Mexico.”
Abortion
This is the issue where the Republican Party is out of step with public opinion, and Democrats are going on the attack.
Rosen describes her likely opponent from Nevada, Sam Brown, as “another MAGA extremist trying to take away abortion rights.” Tester, in listing the ways he’s fighting for Montanans, says, “We have people who want to take away women’s right to choose.”
That said, abortion remains a secondary issue in most of these campaigns.
Patriotism
“Growing up poor, the only thing I really had was the American dream,” Gallego says in the opening line of an ad. “It’s the one thing we give to every American, no matter where he or she was born.”
That sentiment is typical of the unapologetic patriotism of the six campaigns. Gallego highlights his naval service in Iraq. Healthcare for veterans is a theme of some campaigns. An ad for Casey targeting Pennsylvania steel includes the line “Take that, China.”
Diversity, but subtle
The candidates’ ads portray a diverse America. When Rosen talks about housing, she shows a racially mixed group of young couples. A Brown campaign ad about Ohio’s steel industry features both black and white workers. In a Baldwin ad, a Wisconsin businessman with a European accent praises the senator for fighting federal rules on cheesemaking. Gallego talks about his mother’s struggle as an immigrant.
But the campaigns treat diversity as a natural part of American life, not a political project. They emphasize the similarities between Americans from different backgrounds. It is a different approach than race-centered identity politics.
Gallego has even gained some notoriety for mocking the term Latinx. It disrespects the Spanish language, he has said, and is “largely used to appease white liberals.” He banned his congressional office from using the term.
It reminds me of a point that Steve Bannon, the far-right political strategist, made: when American politics focuses on race, Republicans — like Mr. Bannon and Trump — tend to benefit.
The downside is that when campaigns target the economic class, Democrats have an opportunity to benefit. You can see that lesson in these six populist campaigns.
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