The think tank Third Way will launch a campaign to help Democrats reconnect with the voters who have abandoned the party. Democratic Party rethink gets $20 million injection Centrist think tank Third Way is launching a campaign to help Democrats reconnect with voters who abandoned them.

Hoping to help Democrats recover from what it has dubbed the party’s “worst electoral position since the Civil War,” a centrist think tank is launching a $20 million campaign to study how the party lost its way and offer a new economic agenda for moving forward.

The think tank, Third Way, on Tuesday is set to launch “New Blue,” a campaign to help Democrats reconnect with the voters who have abandoned the party. The money will be spent to conduct extensive research, reporting and polling in Rust Belt states that once formed a Blue Wall, but which voted for president-elect Donald Trump last November.


The goal is to help start a top-to-bottom rethink for the Democratic Party -- tossing out the old model that assumed Democrats from state legislatures on up to the Oval Office could count on winning majorities, simply because of the country’s changing demographics. The think tank plans to launch a deep dive study of blue-to-red districts like Macomb County, Michigan, where voters flipped from supporting President Barack Obama four years ago to voting for Trump.

It will also conduct in-depth research and public polling on what it calls “the Trump 12,” the 12 Democrats who won races in districts where Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. “We want to study how did they win, and how can you scale it up,” said Third Way president Jonathan Cowan, a former White House aide under Bill Clinton.

Third Way is joining a crowded field of Democratic organizations which are redefining themselves in reaction to the upending results of the November election and trying to map out a path forward. Many outside groups that backed Hillary Clinton during the campaign are now vying to become the nerve center of the anti-Trump opposition in Washington, D.C., ready to fight him on everything from Cabinet nominations to key legislative battles like the upcoming showdown over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.

The liberal, non-profit Center for American Progress, led by Clinton loyalist Neera Tanden, has reorganized itself with the mission of resisting Trump’s legislative efforts. Clinton defender David Brock is also relaunching his super PAC, American Bridge, to act as a watchdog group monitoring Trump. And the super PAC that spent close to $200 million to support Clinton’s presidential bid, Priorities USA, is also rebranding itself as an opposition group to the president-elect, with the longer term goal of bringing voters back to the party.

Third Way, however, sees its $20 million initiative as a complement to those efforts, rather than a competitor in the same space -- its stated goal is a longer-term effort to conduct research and analysis that will help the party dig itself out of a hole at every level of government, with a greater focus on statehouses than on daily skirmishes with Trump.

“The task is now how do you restore Democrats as a national party that can win everywhere,” said Cowan.

Indeed, since January of 2009, Democrats have lost 20 percent of their Senate seats, 25 percent of their House seats, almost 50 percent of the statehouses they control across the country, and more than half of the state legislatures they controlled that year. Today, there are just six states where Democrats control the governorship and both legislative chambers, compared to 25 for Republicans, Cowan said. “The Heritage Foundation did a whole bunch of work long before Ronald Reagan was the nominee. The next three years are about shaping that conversation and context and narrative for whoever are going to be the people who can test the presidency.”

Part of the economic message the group is driving -- which is in line with its centrist ideology -- is to steer the Democratic Party away from being led into a populist lurch to the left by leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

“Populism is inherently anti-government,” Cowan said. “That works if you’re a right-wing conservative, like Donald Trump. That doesn’t work if you’re the party of government." He added: "You can’t meet right-wing populism effectively as a matter of politics or governing with big government liberal populism, or 1990s centrism. You have to do something entirely new for a new era.”

Democratic lawmakers on the Hill said they were supportive of the campaign because they are desperate for answers on how to rebuild the party, not just how to fight the rare phenomenon that is Trump.

“We took it all for granted,” California Rep. Scott Peters said in an interview. “People assumed we had this rising majority that would never let us down. Clearly we’re losing people who are voting for Republicans, or we’re not offering something to get our voters out. This will be an honest assessment of what we’re getting wrong.”

Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes said he is aware of the pitfalls of simply relying on the party’s stars on the left to dig Democrats out of their hole. “I can't make a hall rock more loudly than if I talk about gun safety issues,” said Himes. “But it kills [Oregon Rep. Kurt] Schrader. we need to be attuned to those differences. Bernie Sanders mobilized and excited a whole lot of young people. But that doesn’t mean that the Bernie Sanders message is going to win a district on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.”

Third Way is in conversations with the polling firm Global Strategy Group to conduct its first round of research, which will focus on the troubled state of the Democratic brand in large parts of the country.

"When we look back on how parties recover," said Cowan, "there is an entire network of people who shape the debate long before you end up with whoever the presidential nominee will be four years from now."