Welcome back to be on the polls. This week, I'm joined by Simon Bazelon, principal author of the provocative news study, deciding to win. Let's dive him.

Well, Democrats are a happy bunch, not about the shutdown. Obviously, many Democrats in the field dislike the decision of the gang of eight to vote with Republicans

to reopen the government. But after the Tuesday November election landslides, no other way to put it,

many Democrats are looking eagerly to 2026 and perhaps a little more eagerly to 2028.

But what path do they choose? And that is the

ongoing discussion in the Democratic Party. And here to talk about that with us is the author of a

really important paper on that, deciding to win. The author is Simon Bazelon. Simon, welcome to be on the

poll. Thank you for having me.

Well, we could ask everyone to read the 70-page report before they listen to this and just go

into the weeds.

Let's not.

Let's ask you to summarize what does your report's primary findings show and what is your

primary takeaway?

I think deciding to win centers around two ideas.

So the first is what I like to call prioritization, and the second is what I like to call

positioning.

And so we track how the Democratic Party has changed over the last 12 or 15 years.

So starting in 2012, we start to see really big shifts. So the first shift is that

the Democratic Party focuses a lot less on economic issues than it used to. And the way we looked

at this was to look at the Democratic Party platform and the frequency with which various terms

appeared in the party platform. What we saw is that in comparison to 2012, the 2024 Democratic platform focused dramatically

less on words like the economy or economic or middle class, work, crime, responsibility.

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