The Democratic Party is now the true “freedom faction”

“Thinking about building a brand strategy is two-fold,” Jeremy Tucker, a brand consultant who has worked with Future Majority, told me. “What does the market want? And what does the organization — in this case, the party — want it to stand for?” The Future Majority team met with more than 300 Democratic officials, activists and campaigners in 2017 and 2018. The first question they asked, Tucker recalled, was, “Who owns the Democratic Party brand?” The Democratic National Committee “said very explicitly and verbatim, 'We don't own the brand. We don't want it. We're running for president.'” The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee also disagreed. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, then chaired by Ben Ray LujAn (who would win a Senate seat in 2020) was “the first to say, 'What do you mean by owning the brand? Is that possible?'” Tucker told me. Future Majority began working with the DCCC on its message in the run-up to the 2018 election, when Democrats retook the House. “They were incredibly helpful and influential in 2018,” Dan Sena, the executive director of the House Campaign Committee, told Politico in 2019.

The group used polls and focus groups, particularly in the most competitive districts and swing states, and asked “a lot of open-ended questions, which is rarely done in political polling, but that's how you get to the underlying consumer psychology of what buyers – or in this case voters – actually want in commercial branding strategy,” Tucker said. In total, Future Majority spent $100 million and surveyed over 215,000 voters and analyzed over 30 million data points, according to Riddle.

(Some of the questions were so abstract they sounded silly: A May 2021 study included a question about which party voters would prefer to see in power during a zombie apocalypse. Sixty percent of independents and even 40 percent of Democrats chose the GOP. “Republicans are perceived as providing strength and security through aggression,” the analysis concluded, adding: “Black voters unilaterally voted Democrat because they believed Republicans might shoot at them.”)