After the 2016 election, Democrats found themselves in the political wilderness. Donald Trump had won the presidency (if not the popular vote). Republicans had a four seat majority in the U.S. Senate and a 47 seat majority in the U.S. House. At the state level, Republicans controlled a majority of governorships and state legislative chambers.

Eight years later, on the day after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Democrats are in a remarkably similar – if perhaps worse – position. Donald Trump has returned to the White House, this time as the winner of the popular vote. And despite the millions invested in campaigns and aligned organizations over the past eight years, Republicans currently control the presidency, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House, and they still hold the majority of governorships and state legislative chambers. 

In the wake of Trump’s first election, “The Resistance” sprang into action. Eight years ago today the Women’s March organized one of the largest demonstrations in Washington, DC’s history. Organizations like Indivisible and Swing Left quickly amassed resources to resist the Trump legislative agenda and funnel resources into the 2018 election.

This time around, there seems little appetite for a “Resistance 2.0.” Instead, Democrats appear to be more introspective about what went wrong and what we might need to do to right the ship. 

Much ink has been spilled in the weeks since the election about where Democrats went wrong in 2024. It was inflation or Biden’s age or the power of right-wing media. Maybe it was some combination of all three.

We’re not going to offer a “hot take” on 2024. Instead, over the next several weeks, we’re going to dive deep into broader trends that have shaped elections over the past few cycles, and how campaign strategy and technology have failed to evolve alongside shifting electoral coalitions and a new media environment. Then, we’ll share our vision for how Democrats can embrace new strategies, and how Win Number is building political technology to implement those new strategies.

At this point you might be wondering- who are we to chart this new path forward? Before we founded a political technology company, Win Number’s founders were deeply enmeshed in the Resistance. We started a PAC, EveryDistrict, in early 2017 to fundraise for Democratic state legislative campaigns in competitive districts. We had prior experience working on campaigns at the state and local level, and seeing the lack of funding for down ballot campaigns, believed Democrats could overcome their deficit in state legislatures with better-funded campaigns.

This hypothesis proved partially true, as EveryDistrict (alongside a revitalized DLCC and a coalition of other Resistance organizations), invested money in strategic legislative campaigns and saw strong gains in battleground states in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

But, despite Joe Biden’s top of the ticket win in 2020, progress at the state legislative level stalled that year. 2020 saw unprecedented investment in Democratic legislative campaigns. The polling predicted Democrats would pick up four to eight legislative bodies (and perhaps even more on a really great Election Night).

And yet, on Election Night (and the days that followed), we learned that not only had Democrats failed to pick up a single legislative chamber, it was Republicans who had gained ground, wresting New Hampshire from Democratic to Republican control. EveryDistrict and Win Number co-founder Nicole Hobbs Morrison was quoted in The Nation calling the results “a blood bath.”

For the EveryDistrict team, these results were a wakeup call. If money was no longer what was holding Democrats back from winning competitive state legislative districts, we had to look more deeply at campaign strategy. In 2021, we partnered with legislative candidates who had run (unsuccessfully) in competitive districts in Pennsylvania to build a “listening tour” of voters they should have – but didn’t – connect with during their 2020 campaigns. Featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer, that work demonstrated how campaigns’ focus on quantity over quality was an insufficient strategy in competitive districts (more to come in a subsequent post on that strategy).

In 2022, EveryDistrict boldly declared on our website our revitalized mission to “throw out the old playbook” and invest in campaigns willing to embrace “new strategies.” But as we worked more closely with campaigns in 2022, we saw how pressure from traditional campaigns strategists and the limits of campaign technology made it difficult for candidates to break out of the mold.

In 2023, we closed EveryDistrict and pivoted to building Win Number, understanding that campaigns would continue to embrace failed strategies because the technology was built for those strategies. At Win Number, we set out to build a new technology future for Democratic campaigns, one that would leave behind the old playbook and enable campaigns to embrace innovative, data-driven strategies tailored to the unique political environment of their district.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll dive deeper into the themes we touched on above as to how campaign strategy and technology have failed campaigns in competitive districts in previous cycles and how new approaches can yield better outcomes. 

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