Democrats are launching a new program Wednesday to try to reach voters in their corner who opted to stay home in 2024 instead of voting against then-candidate Donald Trump, as the party continues its search for its identity in the second Trump era.
The Democratic National Committee program — details of which were shared first with POLITICO — targets over a million voters they view as likely Democrats in battleground House districts who voted in 2020 but didn’t vote four years later.
The large-scale voter contact operation called “Local Listeners” is a tacit acknowledgement of one of the ways Democrats fell short in 2024, when then-Vice President Kamala Harris failed to engender enough enthusiasm from likely Democrats frustrated with the Biden administration’s economic agenda and its handling of the war between Israel and Hamas.
“We didn’t lose to Donald Trump. We lost to the couch,” DNC Deputy Executive Director Libby Schneider said in an interview. “We saw our voters, many of our important voters, stay home. Obviously, that is a trend that cannot continue.”
A key element of the strategy, according to the party, will be training volunteers to engage infrequent voters with a “listening first” approach that prioritizes “active listening” and “having difficult conversations about politics.”
Part of President Donald Trump’s winning strategy included engaging with unlikely voters his campaign identified as being potential Republicans. Trump aggressively courted people who had skipped previous elections, focusing predominantly on young men, and ultimately defeated Harris among voters who skipped the previous midterm and presidential elections.
“If we want to keep earning back the trust and support of voters, we have to listen to them,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. “The Democratic Party is done with waiting until the last minute to engage voters — these conversations need to happen early and often.”
Rima Mohammad, an executive board member of the Michigan Democratic Party and a former delegate who represented the “Uncommitted” movement at the Democratic convention in 2024, said she welcomed the attempts to engage voters who remain disenchanted by Democrats.
“I saw the level of disengagement, the frustration from people about the party, starting with Gaza and now with what’s happening now with ICE, what’s happening with all these corporate Dems,” Mohammad — who said she ultimately did support Harris — said in an interview.
“I’m glad that the DNC is doing this. I don’t know if it’s too late. I think that work should have happened right after Kamala lost,” she added.
Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, co-founder of liberal donor group Way To Win, said the DNC’s push to win back unreliable voters is supported by her group’s December analysis of the party’s shortcomings in 2024 and the lessons that can be learned ahead of the midterms.
“They weren’t uninformed, right?” Ancona said of potential Harris voters who stayed home. “They just didn’t like what they heard. So that’s why I feel like it’s so important for any engagement plan to recognize how kind of burned and cynical these voters are.”
The outreach to 2024 skippers marks one of the few public strategy shifts acknowledging the roots of Democrats’ electoral defeat to Trump, following a year of heated internal debate over the direction of the party. In December, the DNC announced it would not be publicly releasing an autopsy report diagnosing the causes of the party’s losses, in part to redirect focus to Democrats’ electoral victories in 2025.
Schneider said the outreach to voters who stayed home in 2024 is an extension of the introspection party organizers undertook following Trump’s victory.
“The work started immediately after we lost, and it was sort of a self-reflection of … what can we do differently and what is within our control?” she said. “This is one of those things that it’s a no-brainer that it should live with the DNC, and that we should have been doing it for a lot longer.”
Politics
