Memo: Polling in Swing Congressional Districts and Progressive Policies Appeal

Introduction

While Joe Biden won the presidency, down-ballot Democrats in Senate, House, and state legislature races suffered significant setbacks. Despite the ambitious number of Congressional seats Democrats put into play, they ultimately failed to expand their House majority and lost many of the first-term Democrats ushered in by 2018’s “Blue Wave.” Democrats also lost races in an expanded Senate map that included Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Montana, North Carolina, and Texas. Control of the Senate -- and with it much of Biden’s legislative agenda -- will be determined by two runoff elections in Georgia. These defeats led to immediate questions of what had gone wrong. 

On a call with House Democrats, Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger made her diagnosis of these losses and ignited long-simmering tensions between centrist and progressive factions of the Democratic Party. Spanberger, a moderate who won her re-election by 8,270 votes, blamed the left flank of her party for their lackluster showing down-ballot, saying  “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. . . . We lost good members because of that.” 

Shortly after this exchange, Data for Progress launched a survey of 1,375 likely voters in 13 congressional districts that Democrats either lost or narrowly held in 2020: FL-27, SC-1, NM-2, IA - 1, OK-5, MN-7, FL-26, NY-11, IL-17, VA-7, CA-39, CA-21 and PA-17. These districts were selected because many of them, though not all, were won during the “Blue Wave” election in 2018 and then narrowly lost in 2020. Responses across all of these districts were then pooled and weighted to be reflective of the 2020 election outcome. The aim of this survey was to determine what may have gone wrong for down-ballot Democrats and to ascertain what progressive policies may be winning issues in these districts. 

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