When we tested Facebook ads, the messages that got the strongest positive responses were ads attacking oil company price gouging, affirming the value of unions, and talking about the importance of helping small businesses. All are in the 60s in terms of overall support, and in the 40s in terms of strong support. Most of the Democratic policy agenda has fairly strong support, even items that do not top the list, including more financial aid for college, free community college, guaranteed paid family and medical leave, and making the Child Tax credit permanent. Raising the salary threshold on overtime has 81% overall and 61% strong support. Investing in home-based care options for the elderly and disabled has 88% overall support and 64% strong support. Investing in state and local infrastructure is also incredibly popular, with 92% overall support and 66% strong support. Investing in apprenticeships and job training was the second highest rated economic policy proposal, with 77% strong support and 92% support overall. Expanding those programs is also very popular, but less so than just protecting them. The number one economic policy proposal both in terms of overall support (93%) and strong support (81%) is protecting Social Security and Medicare. The fact that the Factory Towns region had four of them is a sign that we are making progress in these states. These were the Democrats’ only chamber flips in the country. We flipped the Minnesota Senate, both the House and Senate in Michigan, and the Pennsylvania House. The other loss in the region was Ron Kind’s open seat in Wisconsin.Īnother huge area where we had some exciting wins in this region were state legislative chambers. We won all three of the competitive Factory Town dominant races in Pennsylvania, three competitive seats in Ohio (two of which were pure Factory Town districts and one of which was a combination of Cincinnati and some Factory Town-style turf outside the city), three of four races in Michigan, and two Mississippi River districts in Illinois. His victory is another model for winning through targeting Factory Towns.īesides the aforementioned disappointments in Iowa, we did pretty well in the congressional races with a Factory Town demographic. His populist message, willingness to take on big corporate interests including Big Ag and Big Oil, and focus on voter registration and GOTV of immigrant communities not only in the Twin Cities, but in the Factory Towns paid off in a big way. Strong progressive AG Keith Ellison survived a weaker performance than in 2018 in the Twin Cities’ suburbs by paying a lot of attention to Factory Town counties in the Iron Range and in Southern Minnesota. Walz in his re-election campaign did pretty well in the Factory Town counties given where he is from and his positioning. The formula for victory has to be to do both. Ryan did relatively well in the Factory Town counties, holding his own or doing better compared to recent Democratic performances, but his margins in the big Democratic counties were far smaller than they needed to be. More importantly, if you look at 2022 turnout for Democrats in big cities and among young voters, big city voters, and people of color, it was pretty weak. For one thing, there are still quite a few base-vote Democrats who live in Factory Towns, and you can’t improve the margins there to the maximum extent without also engaging and turning out those voters. The Tim Ryan race in Ohio is a reminder that targeting only the swing, working-class voters in the Factory Towns is not a path to victory, unless it is combined with a strategy for energizing and turning out the Democratic base vote. The last four years have seen very little organizing work outside of the Des Moines metro area, and the results are no Democratic congressional seats, and even popular, longtime statewide officials who held their offices for four decades (Tom Miller and Mike Fitzgerald) lost. We won three of four congressional races, and almost won the most rural district in the state and the governor's race. Iowa has been generally moving away from us for a decade now, but even so, in 2018 there were solid candidates who targeted small and midsized counties. Iowa should be a warning sign for us all about the Factory Towns: if we don’t have a serious organizing strategy for these counties, they are going to keep getting worse and worse.
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