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Democrats' Plan to Solve
Democrats’ Plan to Solve Their Biggest Long-Term Problem
Supporters cheer at the election night watch party for New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill at the Hilton East Brunswick Hotel on November 4, 2025, in East Brunswick, New Jersey. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)
For Democrats, few questions may be more consequential than whether they can regain ground among the Black and Hispanic voters who shifted sharply toward President Donald Trump in 2024.
Now, a new Democratic National Committee (DNC) analysis, shared exclusively with CNN, reveals that economic concerns overwhelmingly drove the party’s recovery among minority voters in last year’s New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections. However, many voters who turned to the party in 2025 might not do so again in 2026 and 2028 if they continue to feel financial strain.
“Democratic support is not automatic or locked in going forward for minority voters,” the study concludes. “Voters want concrete results they can see in their bank accounts and feel in their quality of life. If Democrats fail to act or cannot prove that the government can be used to improve people’s lives, there likely will be a backlash—erasing the gains earned in the 2025 campaigns.”
Trump’s historically strong 2024 performance with Black and Latino voters sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party. The new DNC analysis—based on pre- and post-election polling and focus groups among Black and Latino voters in New Jersey and Virginia—is clear: the party can only lastingly reverse that shift if it restores its credibility in delivering tangible economic improvements for average families.
“It’s not that economic concerns and affordability were the number one or most important issue; it was the only issue,” said veteran Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi, who helped lead the research project. “There was a palpable sense of financial dread, anxiety. People were literally telling us that they felt they were financially drowning… their lives were being totally upended by unaffordability.”
This new research will likely reinforce the growing belief among Democrats that persistent concerns about the cost of living are the greatest vulnerability for Trump and the GOP in 2026. Despite other ideological differences, all high-profile Democratic winners last year—including newly elected governors Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City—emphasized “affordability” and offered extensive plans to ease the financial squeeze on average families.
But Democratic pollster Anthony Williams, who also participated in the research, said the party should not interpret those victories as evidence it has settled voter doubts about its own economic record, which contributed significantly to Trump’s 2024 gains with minority voters.
“The party has an opportunity here, but just as we shouldn’t be overly pessimistic based on what happened in ‘24, we shouldn’t be overly optimistic about what happened in ‘25,” Williams said.
Affordability Explains Trump’s Advance—and Retreat
The substantial gains Trump made in 2024 in communities across the country with large minority populations—from rural South Texas to New York and Chicago—were the most notable part of his stunning electoral comeback.
According to exit polls conducted for a media consortium including CNN, Trump attracted more support among Latinos (46%) in 2024 than any GOP nominee in modern times. Trump performed especially well with Latino men, becoming the first GOP nominee ever to win a majority of them in exit polls; he also showed formidable strength among Latinos who were younger and/or lacked a four-year college degree. But he improved in virtually every segment of the Latino community.
And while the shift wasn’t as large, Trump in 2024 also performed better than in 2020 or 2016 with some segments of the Black community, particularly younger voters and men, the exit polls found.
After those dramatic losses, the 2025 results in New Jersey and Virginia allowed Democrats to breathe a sigh of relief. In both states, Sherrill and Spanberger performed much better than Kamala Harris did in 2024—and in most cases better than the Democratic gubernatorial nominees in 2021—in communities with large Black and/or Latino populations. This includes Newark, Camden, Passaic, and Paterson in New Jersey, and the cities of Richmond, Petersburg, and Portsmouth, and Prince William County in Virginia.
Exit polls conducted by SSRS for media organizations including CNN completed the picture: they showed both Sherrill and Spanberger winning about two-thirds of Latinos and over 90% of Black voters, much better than Harris’s national showing just a year earlier. Each nominee recorded very strong numbers even among the groups where Trump had made his greatest inroads in 2024: Spanberger, for instance, carried over 90% of Black voters younger than 30, while Sherrill won over three-fifths of Latino men.
Supporters celebrate at the election night watch party for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, as she is projected to win the race at the Greater Richmond Convention Center on November 4, 2025, in Richmond, Virginia. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The DNC research sought to identify the key factors in that recovery—and, just as importantly, whether other Democrats could replicate them in 2026 and 2028. The study closely examined both the messages the campaigns delivered to Black and Latino audiences and the mechanisms they used to communicate them.
The first broad conclusion from the research was that the campaign tactics and messages successfully expanded Democratic support in these communities. While many Black and Latino voters decided early, analysts concluded from pre- and post-election polling that Spanberger and Sherrill each won most of the voters who were initially undecided. They also concluded that direct contact from the campaigns had notably increased the number of Black and Latino voters in each state who showed up to vote. “Post-election polling showed the campaigns worked in terms of contacting these cohorts and gaining support, generating enthusiasm, and building confidence in their candidates,” the memo concludes.
The report identifies one factor above all in driving that outcome: the success of Sherrill and Spanberger in convincing minority voters that they understood, and were determined to address, the strains on their standard of living.
“Affordability was the dominant issue,” the study concludes. “The 2025 governor’s races in both states were shaped overwhelmingly by one defining reality: the increasingly higher cost of living has become THE lens through which voters judge politics, candidates, and their own futures.”
In all the polling and focus groups the party conducted, the memo continues, “pocketbook concerns, consistently and without prompting, rose to the top of what voters are concerned about and what drove their vote choice in 2025.”
Amandi said the level of financial distress expressed by minority voters in the study’s surveys and focus groups was the most intense he has heard in three decades of polling. “People said they were financially drowning; they were barely making ends meet,” he said. “They were redefining for us… the American dream. You and I growing up, we were taught the American dream was being able to own your own home, put your kids through college, maybe save a little money, go on vacation, retire at 65. For these people, the American dream and financial freedom was being able to pay all your bills that month and the next.”
Democrats Must Show They Can Do Better
The research made clear that while many minority voters were disappointed in Trump’s record on delivering a more affordable cost of living, they remained skeptical that Democrats could do better. “There’s an opportunity here, but there is still work to be done,” Williams said. “We need to prove to some of these voters that not only do we care, but we are going to proactively do something about these issues.”
The memo argues that Democrats need to take several steps to restore their credibility with financially squeezed voters. The indispensable first step, the report argues, is for candidates to signal to voters that they are more focused on their daily economic struggles than any other issue—advice the authors distill into: “Keep the main thing the main thing.”
Public concern about affordability was so great “that voters were really not interested in hearing about a laundry list of other important but not immediately resonant issues,” the memo declares. “The research clearly revealed that talking about anything other than the cost of living left the impression with voters that candidates ‘didn’t get it.'”
Customers shop at the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia on October 29, 2025. (Photo by Matt Rourke/AP)
The sole exception to that pattern was concern about Trump and his impact on American democracy, Amandi said. “That was certainly viewed differently,” he said. “There were a lot of voters in both (groups) in both states who cited their concerns about threats to democracy and/or their opposition to Trump as the main motivator for their vote.”
But even critiques of Trump, the memo concluded, landed most effectively when they could be connected “into the affordability frame by showing how his policies are directly contributing to the higher costs of living.”
The DNC’s conclusions largely paralleled the results of the SSRS exit polls, which found that voters across racial lines in both states identified economic issues as the most important to their vote. But in those exit surveys, a significant number of Latinos also identified other issues, including immigration, as their top concern.
Rafael Collazo, executive director of the UnidosUS Action Fund, which mobilized Latino voters for the Democratic candidates in both states, said the DNC’s conclusions mostly tracked his group’s own experience with voters. “These findings are consistent with what we found,” he said.
The exception, he said, is that, like the exit polls, his group’s outreach found concern about Trump’s deportation agenda to be more of a motivating factor for Latinos than the DNC research did. But even on immigration, Collazo agreed, Latinos tended to see Trump’s focus on deportation as another indication of him slighting their top priority. Latino voters, Collazo said, would often say “not only that we don’t agree with their enforcement policy, but it’s another thing that is taking away from what they should be focused on, which is affordability.”
Focusing on Concrete Examples
Beyond the advice to keep affordability at the center of their agenda, the DNC report also encouraged candidates to describe voters’ financial squeeze in terms that connect to daily life, using the most concrete language possible. When these voters talk about their economic challenges, “It’s not your mortgage, it’s your rent. It’s not groceries; it’s food. It’s not utilities; it’s heat. It’s not health care; it’s ‘I can’t pay for my pills,’” said Jill Alper, a Democratic media consultant who worked on the project.
These findings shaped the language of Democrats in both states. In New Jersey, they influenced how Democrats—from door-to-door canvassers to Sherrill herself—described the economy, said David Parano, the voter contact director for the party’s coordinated Get Out The Vote campaign. “Making sure we were able to communicate messages in terms that were appropriate… was the most invaluable thing,” he said.
Mikie Sherrill takes the stage at a Get Out the Vote Rally at Essex County College Gymnasium on November 1, 2025, in Newark, New Jersey. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Finally, the report said candidates must offer responses that are as concrete as the anxieties voters feel. The research, Amandi said, signals that laundry-list plans to address affordability are much less likely to resonate with voters than a small number of very tangible pledges—such as Sherrill’s highly visible promise to freeze utility rates if elected, or Spanberger’s pushback against energy-gobbling artificial intelligence facilities.
“What emerged from this (research) was a formula,” Amandi said. “It wasn’t just you can say: ‘Republicans bad (or) affordability.’ It had to also offer practical solutions to one or two things that people would understand and see how if they voted for this person, it could have an impact on their main concern, which was making life more affordable.”
No Clear Edge for 2026
The DNC plans to encourage candidates nationwide to employ these approaches in their campaigns this year. House Democrats are already moving in a similar direction and are likely to propose, before November, a short list of priorities they will pledge to pass if they regain the majority—much as Democrats did in 2006 (“Six for ’06”) and Republicans did in 1994 (the “Contract with America”).
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in a plan he’s tentatively titled the “You Deserve Better” agenda, has already previewed that the eventual party blueprint will center on affordability, health care, and corruption. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has signaled his intent to craft a similar pledge. “Democrats are going to make health care and other high costs—the high cost of living—the number one issue for all of 2026,” Schumer declared last week.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries talks to reporters during a news conference on September 2, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The challenge for Democrats is that the surge of inflation under former President Joe Biden severely damaged the public’s confidence in the party’s ability to manage the economy. Diminishing public confidence in Trump’s performance has allowed Democrats to erase the large advantage the GOP enjoyed on handling the economy when he regained office last January.
But even among the minority voters who have traditionally been a cornerstone of the party’s electoral base, the DNC’s new research indicates Democrats have only begun to restore their own economic credibility. Until more minority families feel greater economic security, neither party may feel very secure about their hold on these growing, and increasingly contested, voter groups.
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