The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

If the secret to winning elections is to believe in nothing at all except what focus groups approve of, then Future Forward should have been the most successful campaign operation in American history.

The biggest outside spending arm in the 2024 election cycle, Future Forward raised across its super PAC and nonprofits a staggering $950 million, easily the most of any outside political organization in the last election, and almost certainly the most ever. The group appeared completely out of nowhere in 2020; Biden political maven Anita Dunn initially worried they were a new pro-Trump super PAC. But its funding base of Silicon Valley donors like Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman supported Democrats. And four years later, it was established enough to be the primary outside advertising force for Kamala Harris.

Future Forward was “probably the most analytics- and evidence-driven PAC I’ve ever seen,” a veteran of Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign told The New York Times. It promised “a ‘Moneyball’ method to political advertising,” in which thousands of messages would be tested in over ten million voter surveys and dozens of rounds of successive focus groups, to find exactly what combination of words, sounds, colors, and shapes elicited precisely the emotional response desired of the widest possible quantum of potential voters, cross-referenced by every demographic category, to once and for all solve politics.

In 2024, Future Forward solicited hundreds of ads for Harris from dozens of Democratic ad makers, then whittled them down to produce those it found the most effective. In charge of the whittling process—and thus, the methodology for whether an ad was “effective” or not—was consulting firm Blue Rose Research, run by David Shor, the ever-ascendant pollster with Sam Bankman-Fried ties. Shor is the key theorist behind “popularism,” the idea that Democrats should exclusively talk about the parts of their agenda that poll well.

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Shor’s theory of politics, then, had at its disposal the largest pool of funds in the history of elections, raised to win the most consequential race in the history of elections. Controversially, the group plunged almost all of its record-breaking budget into ads and analytics, and almost nothing into door-to-door field campaigning. It produced message-testing surveys, conducted deep analytics, cross-referenced the trusted data, then backwards-engineered what it determined to be “popular,” in order to make its candidate appear supportive of whatever it was currently optimal to appear supportive of. The result was that the Democrats, and Harris in particular, displayed their best selves, with scientifically engineered precision, in the messages with the greatest financial backing in 2024.

We already know what happened. Harris lost, Trump won, and American fascism dawned in earnest. Polling this year has found that 69 percent of voters say the Democratic Party is out of touch, and just 27 percent say Democrats are focused on helping people like them. A 56 percent majority say the party is not looking out for working people. Just 16 percent say Democrats are the party with stronger leaders—indeed, just 39 percent of Democrats say their party has stronger leaders—and only 25 percent view Democrats as the party of change. In short, people today don’t seem to trust the Democratic Party.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the 2024 election results. Stanley Greenberg laid out the intra-Harris campaign chaos in detail for the Prospect, and we have also stated our own gripes with Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients and communications czar Anita Dunn. But clearly, if contemporary polls show that the public distrusts Democrats, then Shor, its messaging guru in control of the very core of Democratic strategy circa 2024, has not succeeded in optimizing the Democratic brand, even after being given virtually limitless resources to do so.

The question, then, is whether this is because everyone else in Democratic politics has failed to believe in popularism hard enough, or because Shor’s technique just isn’t very good. Perhaps, Shor is overlooking an essential fact: Politicians are supposed to believe in things.

LAST WEEK, D.C. HOSTED WELCOMEFEST, billed as the nation’s largest gathering of centrist Democrats; Shor was a prominent speaker. All day long, attendees were not told about the major problem in Democratic politics, that nobody knows what the party stands for.

Instead, the problem is the vile “groups,” the informal network of issue-focused nonprofits that advocate for Democratic politicians to support their particular causes. Crucially, “the groups” also criticize Democrats who turn away from their causes. So the problem, according to the WelcomeFest sponsors, is that some Democratic-aligned people still believe in things.

Let me be extremely clear that, in the broad sense of the health of our democracy, it is quite problematic that “the groups” exist. But the problem is not, as WelcomeFest insists, that they have particular policies they advocate for. It is that one must make a lifelong career out of asking our national legislature to do good things for there to be even a remote chance that it ever will. It does not speak highly to the state of our nation that calling upon the democratic process is professionalized labor, funded primarily by wealthy foundations. (Yes, I’m aware of the ironies in writing this as a trained lawyer turned career political advocate.) Most people I know within “the groups” wish they were instead working for a revitalized labor movement, or for a mass-membership organizing campaign, as this country used to have.

But for better or for worse, within the panoply of D.C. institutions that make up the broad Democratic tent, “the groups” at least try to be something like that tent’s conscience. They are the ones here because they actually want to do something. And that dynamic actually benefits those working inside the system. For example, in the 1930s, the relatively establishment-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions were helped by the more socialist- and communist-influenced unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

A politics dominated by focus group–tested positioning makes it impossible to tell a coherent story.

To WelcomeFest, that’s the problem. “Places like City Hall and Albany and even Washington, DC, are more responsive to the groups than to the people on the ground,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) claimed. Shor’s fellow popularist Matt Yglesias delivered a keynote on how “groups-think generates bad substantive policy,” including examples like “Didn’t really do anything on inflation,” “Higher cost of living in blue states,” and “Behind the curve on phonics” (um, what?).

WelcomeFest’s featured speakers clearly identified what they were against: the groups. Yet they were determinedly tight-lipped about what exactly they were for.

When asked point-blank what story centrist Democrats are trying to tell America, Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) replied, “I don’t know the answer to that question.” Separately, think-tanker Andrew Rotherham chided Florida Democrats for opposing that state’s “don’t say gay” bill, and Shor applauded Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) for opposing a so-called “electric vehicle mandate.” Neither Rotherham nor Shor had any opinion about the merits of these issues, but warned that the polls showed being on the wrong side of them could cost substantial vote share.

A politics dominated by focus group–tested positioning makes it impossible to tell a coherent story. My colleagues and I have argued extensively that Democrats need good conflicts that drive public interest, precisely what a populist economic message delivers. Popularism would seem to argue that this kind of messaging is a dead end today; it’s much more efficient to blast ads across the internet, radio, and television. That eliminates the campaign risk of having a reporter ask the candidate a tough question. Aside from its cynicism about the value of a free press, this idea runs headfirst into the evidence: If voters didn’t care about stress-testing their candidate in an off-script environment, Joe Biden’s debate performance would not have single-handedly doomed his re-election campaign.

Popularism also means that electoral strategy can become one big math equation. As data engineer Lakshya Jain explained at WelcomeFest, a “good candidate” is one whose vote share exceeds statistical expectations for a Democrat in their district—a definition that evinces no interest whatsoever in what the candidate actually supports. Forgive me for being a bit crude in how I put this, but by Jain’s definition, a Klan Grand Wizard who registered as a Democrat and ran on restoring Jim Crow laws in the Deep South could be welcomed into the Democratic Party wholeheartedly, so long as he could win his district. I am certain Jain does not actually want to restore the Dixiecrats, which leads me to assume that there are unstated assumptions in his definition of a “good candidate.” (Also, why exactly is it the goal of blue state/district candidates to flatter the wealthy to run up the score against often uncompetitive opposition, rather than get enough votes to win without compromising the purpose of politics, to improve people’s lives?)

As Hamilton Nolan put it, WelcomeFest seemed to have two contradictory messages: (1) just listen to normal people, and (2) do so by listening to our extremely abnormal, Ivy League–educated, hyper-credentialed data scientists. There are no principles here, and no mass politics. There is only polling.

THERE WAS ONE TOPIC WHERE WelcomeFest attendees did not adhere to a popularist vision. At one point, an audience member asked Auchincloss about polling indicating that the “abundance agenda,” the policy vision in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s utopian airport book Abundance, polls far worse than economic-populist messaging. Auchincloss laughed it off. “It’s what happens when you test an economic textbook for the Democratic Party against a romance novel,” he said.

Why does the abundance agenda deserve special immunity from message-testing, the single most vital part of the political process, as the popularists would have us believe? It arises from a belief that some things—dense housing, or railroads, or innovative science—are just intrinsically better uses of relevant resources. Some stakeholders might have a different perspective: Perhaps that railroad would cut through their family farm, or eradicate an endangered species. But that’s not a sign to Klein and Thompson that they ought to persuade those people on the merits, or find a compromise. They see it as evidence that these capital-intensive projects suffer from an excess of public input. This particular framing is the thesis of neoliberalism, that certain capital investments must be kept safe from democracy.

Shor’s particular idea of how to find and emphasize what is “popular” does important, if counterintuitive, mental work for the project of keeping some things outside of democratic deliberation. If some policy is too important to allow the public a role in the process, then elections become purely aesthetic competitions, beauty pageants for nerds with advanced degrees. All that matters is saying the right words and pandering to the right demographics; not telling a story, as Auchincloss’s questioner asked, but jangling ever prettier keys in the faces of the voting public.

Moreover, abundance is an expressly cross-partisan project. Klein and Thompson say that their book is primarily addressed to broadly liberal readers because “we don’t see ourselves as effective messengers to the right. There are people seeking complementary reforms in that coalition … We wish them well.” Yet one might find it bizarre to call an expressly cross-partisan vision a “textbook for the Democratic Party.” Indeed, the WelcomeFest crew says it wants above all to win elections, thus necessarily defeating their would-be Republican coalition partners in the abundance agenda. Again, though, this is not new: The original neoliberals recognized that their beliefs were unpopular, hence the need to insulate laissez-faire capitalism from the public will in the first place. There’s a desire for this agenda to be Democratic (that is, of the Democratic Party), but not democratic (that is, legitimate due to conscious public support).

We can therefore finally see just what WelcomeFest offers: a mass politics that screams “nothing is wrong, everything is fine, and you’re the real problem for talking about it!” It is only angry because it has analyzed public sentiment to find that the public is angry, so performative anger is currently optimal. Fundamentally, Shor’s ideal candidate believes in nothing besides what Shor has prevented it from reconsidering. (It is little surprise that Shor parties with tech people; he treats candidate selection like a coding experiment.) We have seen the results of that experiment: a mass politics of everything people hated about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, from insecurity to glibness to a lack of articulating what one stands for. It has led Democrats to a point of crisis.