Win the Middle 2024

In the 2022 election cycle, Welcome identified the top Democratic overperformers when we supported Will Rollins and Adam Frisch. Since then, we’ve worked to perfect a formula for how Democrats can take on and beat MAGA incumbents in districts that the party’s formal machinery doesn’t deem competitive.

Welcome Track Record of Picking Overperformers And Our Process


Welcome has an excellent track record of finding the races that pundits and race-raters miss. In 2022, we targeted two races, Colorado’s 3rd and California’s 41st — districts that pundits and race-raters said were “safe” Republican seats. We recognized that the incumbents, Lauren Boebert and Ken Calvert, are embracing the politics of the extremist right, which don’t represent the interests or sentiments of their constituents. 

Adam Frisch and Will Rollins are two moderate, pragmatic Democrats committed to welcoming people into the Democratic coalition – not to turning voters away with purity-test politics. With strong candidates like them, these districts became tightly contested battlegrounds. Frisch’s strong performance led Boebert to seek employment elsewhere in a more reliably Republican district, while CA-41 has become one of the most closely contested races in the country.  

This year, we put together a group of advisers from the center-left and right. We solicited input from dozens of practitioners and analysts. We pored over national data and talked to on-the-ground experts to deepen our analysis of the races. We followed local media to determine which incumbents were getting out of touch with their districts. 

We look for those aforementioned criteria as we continue to build out our slate of endorsements for the 2024 cycle:

  • It’s a fact: politicos understate the variance in politics. This leaves them vulnerable to missing districts that are outside of the traditional bounds of party competition, races like Boebert’s and Calvert’s as well as races like Alaska’s At-Large seat that Mary Peltola won, Jared Golden’s Maine district and Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez’s Washington seat.

  • The theory that you can “mobilize” your way to victory has been a proven failure everywhere it has been tried. The path to victory is distinguishing yourself from the national brand of the Democratic Party and welcoming moderate Republicans and independents into the anti-authoritarian coalition.

  • To pull moderate voters into the Democratic Party, we need a push in the form of extremist Republicans. That’s why we look for Republicans who are out of touch with their voters, pushing voters to consider moderate options. Rendering themselves even more beatable, extremists like Lauren Boebert have made the districts they represent ripe for disruption with their antics.

Incumbents

Challengers

About WelcomePAC

In 2022, we believed Americans would overcome the “Red Wave” if given a choice. So we launched WelcomePAC to support Democrats who could reach disaffected Republicans in previously uncontested races, raising more than $2m in less than a year. The New York Times called us a “Centrist Insurgency”, and we are looking for more ways to leverage swing voters on behalf of democracy in the 2024 cycle.

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