Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
PPI report interviews 28 winning legislators in working-class battleground districts
Robin Johnson's ten-year project asked 28 Democrats who carried heavily working-class battleground districts how they did it. They agreed on the cultural obstacle and split on whether to run as populists or as business allies.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Robin Johnson, working with the Progressive Policy Institute and co-authors Stuart Malec and Jolie Libert, interviewed 28 Democratic state legislators who won heavily working-class districts in the seven main presidential battleground states.
- All of them concentrated on pocketbook issues, but by different routes: some embraced populist causes, while others positioned themselves as business-friendly.
- Asked what stood in the party's way with working-class voters, the legislators broadly agreed that cultural issues were the Democrats' biggest challenge.
- Johnson said none of the legislators raised their own identity in the interviews, in a round that included African American legislators in North Carolina and Georgia and Latinos in the West.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- contradiction Because the group splits between populist and business-friendly pitches while the authors distance it from left-wing populists, both wings of the party can cite the same 28 winners, and the report resolves the factional argument for neither.
- constraint Selecting on victory bounds what the study can do: a candidate deciding how to run in one of these districts gets a menu of what winners did, and the ranking of those choices is left to the candidate.
- decision If the binding obstacle is cultural, the decision that matters is recruitment: who gets asked to run, long before anyone drafts the economic platform.
- precedent Putting interview evidence into a fight that has run mostly on assertion sets the expectation that rival factions produce winners' interviews of their own.
A sample chosen for having won describes winners well and cannot say which of their choices produced the win. Johnson's 28 legislators are spread across seven states, an average of four per state [1]. His selection rule, as he described it to Vox, was districts that are really close and that have more working-class voters than the national average [12]. Vox's account of the method describes interviews with winners only [1]. So the report can establish what these officeholders have in common, but not weigh those commonalities against the record of a Democrat who lost the same kind of seat.
This round is also the smallest of the series. About 75 current and former legislators were interviewed for the first report, which then-Representative Cheri Bustos agreed to sponsor after Trump first won the presidency [10]; 28 is roughly a third of that [2]. The earlier rounds covered the Midwest, then Trump districts in 2021, then working-class heartland districts last year [11][14]. This one keeps every interview inside a battleground state [1].
The authors placed their subjects against a named rival. The lawmakers they focused on "could hardly be more different from the left-wing populists who've captivated the national media this summer," the authors wrote [6]. PPI is center-left, and the report arrives inside a party argument between left-wing and socialist candidates pressing for more far-reaching policy proposals and moderates pressing for concessions to working-class cultural sensibilities [7]. The series is older than that argument. It began in a diner in Maquoketa, Iowa, with former Iowa state senator Jeff Danielson, right after Trump won [9], and PPI joined only this year, after Bustos retired and Johnson attended a PPI conference in February [12].
The roster is where the biography case sits. Nevada Assemblymember Max Carter is a retired union electrician. Michigan Rep. Tullio Liberati owns a construction small business. Arizona Rep. Lorena Austin is a self-described "five-time college dropout" with sleeve tattoos, and Wisconsin Rep. Karen DeSanto is a nonprofit executive and former professional circus clown [13].
Johnson's own summary of the interviews is geographic. "It's really interesting how common the themes and the challenges are from rural Georgia, right down to the border of Arizona, to Las Vegas, northern North Carolina, and then up in the 'Blue Wall' states," Johnson told Vox [8].
What to watch
- Publication of the full PPI report, and whether it names specific tactics or compares its winners with Democrats who lost similar districts.
- Whether the party's left wing commissions a parallel set of interviews with its own winners in working-class seats.
- Whether state party committees cite these 28 profiles when they recruit 2026 legislative candidates in the seven battlegrounds.