House Democratic front-liners have a message for leadership as the party grapples with what went wrong in this year’s elections: Follow our example.
While Democrats were generally wiped out on Election Day — losing the White House and Senate, and failing to flip control of the House — vulnerable Democrats in the lower chamber were a rare bright spot for the party.
Those lawmakers proved highly successful in keeping their seats in tough battleground districts, even in some places where President-elect Trump won by comfortable margins.
As Democratic leaders conduct an election postmortem, the front-liners are urging colleagues to take a page from their playbook, which features a heavy focus on kitchen-table economics while largely avoiding the culture-war battles that were a drag on the party on Nov. 5.
“We’ve got a group of strong, battle-tested incumbents that have won in some really tough races and overperformed the top of the ticket,” said Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.), a perennial front-liner who won a fourth term this month by 8 points — well above the margin of victory for Vice President Harris. “The party would do well to look at how we’ve been able to win our races, and the type of messaging we’ve used that I think has connected with voters in our districts.”
For Pappas, that meant an outsized focus on two economic concerns facing working-class families: unaffordable housing and the high cost of child care. Both are pressing problems not only in his district, he said, but all across the country. If Democrats want to appeal to more voters, he argued, they have to focus on the pocket-book anxieties that keep them up at night.
“In my district, abortion rights is still a top-testing issue, and people are deeply concerned about the direction of that,” he said. “But I think overall the economic anxiety needs to be front and center in terms of our agenda.”
Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.), another battleground Democrat who vastly outperformed Harris, offered a similar assessment. Lawmakers need to earn the trust of voters of all stripes, he said, and that means burning plenty of shoe leather in the district — and “not getting caught in the bubble of all the institutions here” in Washington.
“I just think it’s back to basics: listening to constituents [and] showing up everywhere,” he said.
“We hammered affordability just over and over and over — obsessively talked about lowering costs — and I outperformed Harris by 11 points in one of the toughest districts in the country,” he continued. “So it’s all nothing new here.”
Democratic leaders say they’re open to the suggestions — and they’re ready to act on them to improve the party’s chances of flipping the House in 2026.
“Recalibrating and reenergizing our party in the coming weeks is the most important thing we can do as elected leaders, because that’s how we best serve the people that we fight for,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (Calif.), head of the House Democratic Caucus, said as Congress returned to Washington last week.
As part of their analysis, House Democratic leaders are hosting a series of formal “listening sessions.” They already held one closed-door meeting in the Capitol and will hold several more in the weeks to come.
Some lawmakers question the utility of those discussions, saying any strategic changes on messaging should be driven by hard data, not anecdotal narratives — especially so soon after Election Day.
“These listening sessions are a chance for us to vent and get things off our chests. But really: Let all the votes come in, let all the races get called. No one should really just subjectively do a deep dive in the House,” said Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), who led Democrats’ efforts to protect front-liners in the last Congress.
“I’m hearing a lot of my colleagues talk about why Kamala lost, but Trump won this election,” he continued. “And we ought to understand what his message was and why it resonated with so many people.”
Still, other Democrats have been eager to participate in the early talks. Some of them have used the forums to voice concerns about the party’s messaging on immigration, food costs and the Israel-Gaza conflict. Others expressed deep frustrations with the party’s focus on culture-war issues, like transgender rights, which Republican campaign operatives used to hammer vulnerable Democrats up and down the ballot.
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), who spoke up during the Democrats’ first caucus meeting last week, said the jubilant tone of the gathering belied the fact that they’d just lost control of the House for the second Congress in a row.
“It feels like a pep rally in there. Nobody’s holding anybody responsible,” he said afterwards. “I mean, I was one of the ones with a grievance, because I think we need to improve our messaging. I got clobbered on all the transgender messaging in my district, and it was very painful.”
Gonzalez’s advice for party leaders was simple: Don’t pressure vulnerable lawmakers to take tough votes that will hurt their chances of reelection.
“I got beat up on everything I pushed leadership against, everything I pushed the whip on on issues I knew were losers. You know what saved me? Oil and gas. My oil and gas votes,” said Gonzalez, who squeaked to victory by just more than 5,000 votes in a Texas border — and heavily Hispanic — district that also went for Trump.
“All I’m saying is: You’ve gotta respect me; respect my votes, and I kinda put everybody on notice,” he said. “Don’t ever try to whip me again, because it’s better to have me 97 percent of the time than my opponent 100 percent of the time.”
Another House Democrat, who spoke anonymously to discuss a sensitive topic, voiced similar gripes about the party’s messaging on several other topics. Those include “not pressing [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu enough to stop that bloodshed and the humanitarian disaster” amid the Israel-Hamas war, and not calling out food companies for their role in rising grocery costs.
“Grocery prices for a lot of people went up too high, too fast. And they were feeling it. And we didn’t point out that a lot of it was corporate profiteering,” the lawmaker said. “We basically let Trump blame Biden over and over and over, without pointing to the fact that, some of it at least was these companies that were taking advantage of the pandemic.”
Despite the bad cycle for Democrats broadly, those in the House had some reason to celebrate.
Of the 31 front-liners Democrats were defending, only three have lost reelection bids, while Democrats were able to pick off five GOP incumbents. Several more pickups are possible in California, where a handful of races have yet to be called. And Democratic front-liners fended off tough challenges in a number of states carried by Trump, including Nevada, Michigan and North Carolina.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said his party’s failure to seize the Speaker’s gavel was “bitterly disappointing.” But the silver lining was the vulnerable lawmakers who found ways to win in the face of tough headwinds.
“One thing I can tell you, all front-line incumbents did an extraordinary job,” he told reporters last week. “And that’s why 90 percent of them are coming back.”
