You can find one of the best recent articles about Democratic strategy, Andrew Levison’s strategy paper, “Anti-Trump Political Strategy in Red States Must Include Many Independent Candidates” with excellent sidebars, right here at TDS. As Levision writes, “As the initial shock of Trump’s victory has passed Democrats are now responding to his aggressive extremist agenda by recognizing that active resistance is necessary and that Democrats must try to regain support in working class and rural districts that shifted even further toward Trump in2024 than in 2020.1…Within this growing consensus, however, a profoundly important argument is emerging: itholds that in a significant number of cases anti-MAGA candidates in red state districts should run as independents rather than as Democrats…The recent spark behind this view was the candidacy of Dan Osborn in Nebraska. Osborn, a trade union leader who led a major strike before entering politics ran as an independent rather than as a Democrat and combined a solidly class conscious economic populism with culturally traditional positions on a number of social issues such as immigration, guns and crime. Although he fell short of winning a majority, Osborn did dramatically better than most Democratic candidates in deep red areas…His example is now cited as a model by a growing group of progressive activists that includes Bernie Sanders, Washington Post commentator E.J. Dionne and top Democratic data guru, David Shor…In one of his dramatic “Fight Oligarchy” mass meetings that have drawn over 100,000 people in recent weeks, for example, Sanders said the following:“One of the aspects of this tour is to try to rally people to get engaged in the political process and run as independents outside of the democratic party…”Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne echoed the view: A heretical thought is that as they rebuild Democrats should acknowledge that in places where their brand is badly broken independent candidates, particularly for Senate, might have a better chance of building an alternative coalition to Trumpism than running as Democrats. Senate candidate Dan Osborne lost in Nebraska running as a pro-worker independent but his nearly 47% of the vote should be seen as a prologue not a failure.”

Levison adds, “And leading Democratic data analyst David Shor also agreed: If you look at Nebraska the biggest single over performance that we had was Dan Osborne running as an independent. He outperformed the top of the ticket by 7.1%…we’ve only ever tried this strategy of running candidates who are not formally tied to the Democratic Party in extremely red states but I think it’s something we have to seriously consider more broadly…Many Democrats will immediately and passionately reject this idea. Their argument, in essence, will be that the problem is not actually the Democratic Party “brand” in the abstract but rather specific policies, messages and candidates. If these specific areas of weakness are corrected it should make it possible for Democratic candidates to win even in strongly red state districts and areas…This view actually a combination of two distinct arguments: First, it is widely felt among Democrats that the broad Democratic “brand” has deep historical and emotional roots that extend from the New Deal era of Franklin Roosevelt and the successful passage Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Medicare in the 1960s to Barack Obama’s campaigns that championed the “Rising American Electorate” of women, People of Color, environmental advocates and GLBTQ Americans. This enduring progressive tradition is embodied in the deeply held vision of the Democratic Party as a “Big Tent Coalition.” For many Democrats this basic progressive vision of the Democratic Party as a Big Tent Coalition is the essence of the basic Democratic “Brand.” In their view this vision is profoundly valuable and must not be abandoned. Second, whatever the current level of popularity of the party, by correctly fine tuning the Democratic platform, message and selection of candidates, it is held that Democrats should be able to successfully appeal to working class voters. There should be no need for candidates to run as independents.”

Further, Levison writes, “The extensive ethnographic field research conducted by the new generation of sociologists found, however, that this was simply not how workers actually made political choices. In the 1950s and 1960s many working class voters were blue collar workers deeply embedded in a social world and community life that was shaped by tight-knit working class neighborhoods, trade union halls, Democratic precinct captains and liberal Catholic churches all of which reinforced the view that the Democratic Party was “the party of the working man.” It was this social and community reinforcement and not any armchair contemplation of TV ads and newspaper reports that had made workers loyal to the Democratic Party.3… By the 1990s and 2000s, on the other hand, this tightly knitted social world had largely disappeared and sociological research dramatically revealed that the younger generations of workers—the children and grandchildren of the “working class Democrats” of the 1950s and 60s—no longer had any memory of or loyalty to the vision of the Democratic Party as a “Big Tent Coalition.” On the contrary, they felt profoundly isolated, abandoned and ignored by both political parties and wanted, above all else, candidates who they felt they could trust because they were passionately committed to representing these workers’ very distinct political perspective. Trump clearly understood this and cynically filled the vacuum…The alternative is a more sociological approach that begins by asking a basic question: Are there basic sociological differences between the attitudes of MAGA voters and non-MAGA voters who nonetheless support the GOP? The first group is beyond persuasion, the second is not.”

In the concluding section of Levison’s analysis, he notes that “in deep red states the problem is not simply that voters in these areas overwhelmingly vote for Republicans. It is that major elements of GOP and specifically MAGA ideology have become so pervasive and familiar in everyday life that many voters—even if they disagree with certain particular ideas—simply cannot imagine that there is any sensible political alternative to voting for candidates who espouse the GOP and MAGA perspective. For many Republican voters this view has become synonymous with what they feel all “normal” or “sensible” people should view as acceptable. Many people in red state areas genuinely feel that “no sensible person could really support all that crazy stuff that Democrats believe”…Moreover, in the past even deeply conservative people in small towns and rural areas who firmly rejected Democratic candidates nonetheless still considered local Democrats to be “normal” – their neighbors and co-workers, their children’s schoolteachers and little league coaches, shopkeepers on main street and so on. This is increasingly no longer the case. The pervasive current view of Democrats as completely “alien” or “crazy” in many red state districts now stands as a profound roadblock to even the most preliminary attempts to develop a Democratic presence in these areas. It empowers a political “race to the bottom” as GOP candidates, freed from the need to debate with moderates compete instead to “out-extreme” each other…In fact, there is now a boringly standardized Republican playbook for attacking any Democratic candidate. Republican TV ads simply show lurid scenes of crime, riots and waves of immigrants followed by images of the Democratic candidate standing side by side with Nancy Pelosi,Barack Obama or some other well-known Democrats during the Democratic convention or other events. The commercial then ends with bucolic images of the Republican candidate with his family posed in front of a pickup truck, ranch, farm or small town city street. Narration is basically unnecessary. Regardless of how much a Democratic candidate proclaims his or her independence from the overall stances of the party, they cannot escape the identification with the national brand…Independent candidates like Osborn confound this Republican strategy. They can be attacked as “false flag” secret Democrats but, when they emphatically assert their independence and uphold positions clearly at variance with the national Democratic agenda, the garish smear ads simply don’t work as well…As a result, independent candidates like Osborn have a profoundly important role to play in the coming period and must be encouraged. The anti-Trump coalition must be as broad as possible and Democrats simply do not have the luxury of demanding political purism.”Read Levison’s entire article right here.