Will the Democratic Party Keep Learning the Wrong Lessons?

When Tester came up for reelection in 2012 and 2018, he returned to his successful 2006 story: Jon the regular Montanan, a third-generation Montana dirt farmer who was an outsider to the political system. In 2018, he ran ads thanking Donald Trump for “supporting Jon’s legislation to…get rid of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.” Meanwhile, he lampooned his Republican opponent, Representative Matt Rosendale, as an out-of-state carpetbagger who didn’t understand Montana. Those stories powered him to victory both cycles.

But even in the years where Tester kept winning, two problems emerged, and, in my view, ultimately doomed Tester and Democrats nationwide in 2024.

First, Democrats gave up the populist politics they had seized in the mid-2000s. Obama and the politicians elected alongside him may have run as populists, but they governed as technocrats. In-the-weeds economic policy defined Obama’s first term, and his ideas didn’t deliver the resurgent job growth his campaign suggested. Tester, meanwhile, lamented the millions of dollars pouring into politics, but then himself accepted more lobbyist cash than almost any other senator. Lackluster Democratic governance let Donald Trump create a “populist earthquake” in 2016.

The second problem was that Democrats forgot to keep thinking ahead. They found one strategy that worked and figured it would work forever. But those strategies weren’t a one-size-fits-all formulas. They were ideas tailored to the moment in 2006. After winning, Democrats failed to build a political base in states like Montana that would have put them in touch with what was happening on the ground. Instead, they ran ads created by DC consultants and staffed campaigns with people who knew almost nothing about Montana.

Our campaign presented a worn story without the right people or strategies to sell it because Democrats had spent the years since 2006 repeating, not building. As an intern, I was tasked with selling a story written when I was a toddler. It’s no surprise that most voters didn’t buy it.

Montana doesn’t have much Democratic infrastructure—the party has scuffled there in recent years, failing to make runs at the state’s other Senate seat or either of its two House districts. Without local organizers ready to hit the ground running, that left mass broadcast ads as one of the Tester campaign’s only real options.

Our advertisements told the basic tale of Jon Tester the Montana dirt farmer and Tim Sheehy the evil out-of-stater. Tester talked about voting to increase Border Patrol funding—as my dad put it, telling “Joe Biden to go fuck himself.” Sometimes it was hard to remember that he was the race’s Democrat.

Thirty seconds on television couldn’t erase the erosion of Democratic populism Montanans had felt since 2006, though. Maybe what could try to erase that would be actual conversations with people—a tactic more likely to change someone’s mind than an ad. With few native Montanans trained and ready to promote that story, our campaign’s cadre of out-of-state staffers went out most afternoons to knock on doors around our home base of Billings, Montana.

I delivered trained responses about how “the Senate’s only working dirt farmer” had bucked the president on his border policies and wasn’t a true politician because he had to cancel campaign events to harvest his peas. But I was just another advertisement. I couldn’t relate to people about rising home prices or the condition of the Treasure State economy because I hadn’t experienced those problems. Even selling the big-picture story—that Tester represented this more authentic populism—was a struggle because I could see all the contradictions in our message. If I didn’t believe what I was saying, why would any voter?

Well, the voters didn’t believe us. Tester lost reelection in November by seven points.

Since the election, political pundits have agreed that the odds were stacked against Tester and the dirt farmer from Big Sandy never could have won. But the campaign has more important lessons to offer the Democrats. Tester did what many pundits are now prescribing as the great new formula for Democratic success: He ran toward the middle, avoided hyper-partisanship, emphasized his rural manly down-home bona fides. And he lost, in part because his own voters no longer believed or trusted him. That’s a problem for Democrats nationwide, who are losing registered voters to the Republican Party almost everywhere.

Thankfully, in 2025, some Democratic candidates have broken out of those decades-old stories and strategies. Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York City has focused on authenticity that previous Democratic campaigns would find terrifying. Kat Abugazelah’s bid for a Chicagoland House of Representatives seat has been, in part, a campaign about campaigns (she refuses to run TV ads, for example). Even someone like Dan Osborn, the independent but Democratic-aligned Senate candidate in Nebraska, offers some hope: He’s a genuine outsider who can reclaim the populism that 18-year Senate veteran Tester lost.

Others, though, have proposed that the future for the Democratic Party is a “Joe Rogan of the left” to break through in our current media environment. Even Tester has made his own bid for the title. After losing reelection, he started a podcast called Grounded, taken from the title of his memoir. The podcast promises that listeners will leave “each episode with a roadmap forward” and can “stay grounded.”

But in 2024, Tester didn’t follow his own advice. He and the Democratic Party had been stuck in 2006, not thinking about how to build for the present and future. To win in 2026, Democrats need to stop making the same old mistakes.