Report: Democratic Campaign Rhetoric, 2020–2024
What issues have Democratic congressional candidates been running on, over the past three election cycles?
Key Takeaways
SUPPORT FOR PROGRESSIVE ECONOMIC POLICIES DECLINED
Support for Medicare for All fell from 29% to 15% of candidates. Support for student debt relief, free college, and Green New Deal messaging also declined.
ECONOMIC POPULISM PEAKED IN 2020 AND DECLINED THROUGH 2024
Pro-worker messaging reached 66% of candidates in 2024, but anti-elite rhetoric fell from 41% to 35%. Overall, the combination of these has fallen since 2020.
ABORTION MESSAGING MORE THAN DOUBLED POST-DOBBS
Despite surging from 24% to 53% of candidates, abortion messaging showed no significant association with vote share or win rate in competitive districts.
DEMOCRATS' FOCUS ON SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES FELL SUBSTANTIALLY
Racial justice messaging fell from 19% to 11% of candidates. Discussion of immigration declined from 18% to 13%. LGBTQ messaging held steady. Abortion appeared to crowd out the broader social justice agenda, with 82% mentioning abortion access.
COMPETITIVE DISTRICT CANDIDATES WERE MORE ECONOMICALLY POPULIST
Such candidates were 11 percentage points more likely to use economic populist messaging.
COMPETITIVE DISTRICT CANDIDATES WERE LESS SOCIALLY PROGRESSIVE
No competitive district Democrats mentioned abolishing ICE, trans bathrooms/sports, or reparations. 39% mentioned some form of border security, and 32% explicitly opposed defunding the police.
WORKING-CLASS CANDIDATES: DECLINING, AND LOWER THAN THE GOP
Working-class candidates made up just 6% of Democratic nominees in 2024, down from 8% in 2022 and 10% in 2020. Republicans actually led in this regard with 9%.
Executive Summary
In 2024, CWCP published its first report on Democratic congressional candidates. We examined candidate rhetoric, policy agendas, and electoral performance, with a particular focus on economic populism. We sought to understand whether candidates' messaging reflected a class-first approach. Did they prioritize bread-and-butter issues? Did they raise up workers, and go after elites? That report, which analyzed 2022 candidates, found that Democrats were not doing well by these standards. Precious few candidates combined pro-worker messaging with a willingness to name and challenge elite economic power. Further, few candidates came from working-class backgrounds themselves.
Unfortunately, our analysis of 2024 Democrats tells much the same story. This report examines campaign website rhetoric from 697 Democratic congressional candidates in 2024. Using various methods of text analysis, we document some key facts on candidate messaging across seven rhetorical categories. Leveraging our 2020 and 2022 datasets, we further document how messaging has changed over time. For 86 candidates in competitive districts in 2024, we also conduct keyword verification of 15 hot-button policy positions.
A few findings stand out.
Although the prevalence of hot-button cultural issues in Democratic candidates' messaging declined substantially between 2020 and 2024, so too did candidates' focus on anti-elite messaging and progressive economic policy.
Similarly, the supply of working-class candidates was lower in 2024 than in either 2020 or 2022, and for the first time in our data Republicans nominated a larger share of them than Democrats did.
In their place came a greater emphasis on abortion, and on Trump as a threat to democracy.
Despite these overall limitations, there is one encouraging sign: 2024 candidates in competitive districts spoke in an economic populist framework more consistently than the party as a whole. Competitive district Democrats were 11 percentage points more likely to deploy economic populist messaging than the average Democratic candidate.
This suggested that where elections were closely contested, and the electoral stakes were higher, candidates gravitated toward the bread and butter, class-first approach that CWCP has long advocated.
Methodology
DATA COLLECTION AND MEASUREMENT
Campaign website text was collected for Democratic congressional candidates in 2020 (N = 901), 2022 (N = 905), and 2024 (N = 697). Each candidate's full website content was scraped and processed through a keyword dictionary, which identifies and counts unique rhetorical terms across multiple messaging categories.
A candidate is coded as using a messaging category if they mention two or more unique terms from that category's dictionary. This threshold keeps passing references from counting while still capturing candidates who engage with a topic in a substantive way. For example, a candidate who mentions 'working families' once in passing would not be coded as using pro-worker messaging, but a candidate who mentions 'working families,' 'unions,' and 'fair wages' would be.
OCCUPATIONAL CLASS CODING
A candidate is coded working class if at least a quarter of their pre-political career occupations were in manual, service, or clerical jobs. We restrict our analysis to general election candidates.
RHETORICAL CATEGORIES
We tracked seven messaging categories: pro-worker rhetoric, anti-elite rhetoric, economic populist (pro-worker and anti-elite candidates), progressive economic policy, abortion, progressive social issues, threat to democracy, and inflation/affordability. Each category was defined by a curated dictionary of terms developed iteratively from campaign website text.
KEYWORD VERIFICATION
For the 86 competitive general election Democrats who competed in 2024 (Cook PVI within +/- 5), we conducted a deeper analysis using keyword-based verification of 15 hot-button policy positions. Unlike dictionary counting, this approach uses word boundary matching, 300-character context extraction, and endorsement filtering to distinguish candidates who genuinely support a position from those who merely mention it or oppose it. Each coding for the 86 candidates was manually checked by CWCP researchers.
How Messaging Changed, 2020–2024
The chart below tracks how each major messaging category shifted across three election cycles. By comparing the prevalence of each rhetorical category in 2020, 2022, and 2024, we can identify the direction and magnitude of change in Democratic campaign strategies.
AREAS WHERE MESSAGING INCREASED
Abortion messaging more than doubled, rising from 24% of candidates in 2020 to 53% in 2024, a 29 point increase driven entirely by the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. Pro-worker rhetoric continued its steady upward trajectory, gaining 10 points to reach an all-time high of 66% of candidates.
Two new categories appeared in the 2024 cycle. Democracy threat messaging, which captures explicit framing around threats to democratic institutions and norms (distinct from generic mentions of Trump), was used by approximately 29% of all candidates and 34% of competitive district candidates. Inflation and affordability messaging emerged as a response to the cost-of-living crisis.
AREAS WHERE MESSAGING DECREASED
Anti-elite rhetoric, the confrontational language targeting corporations, billionaires, and Wall Street that characterized the 2020 progressive wave, peaked at 41% in 2020 and fell back to 35%. Progressive social messaging excluding abortion also declined by 5 points. Economic populist messaging overall (which combines pro-worker and anti-elite messaging) dropped from 35% to 31%.
The Decline of Economic Populism
Economic populism, as we measure it, requires that candidates use both pro-worker rhetoric (references to working families, unions, fair wages, and labor rights) and anti-elite rhetoric (explicit criticism of corporations, billionaires, Wall Street, or the wealthy). A candidate must use both to qualify as an 'economic populist.'
The figure below shows these patterns from 2020 to 2024. Pro-worker messaging rose steadily across the period, reaching 66% of candidates in 2024. But anti-elite messaging peaked at 41% in 2020 and declined to 35%. The combined economic populist measure peaked at 35% in 2020 and stood at 31% in 2024.
The rise of pro-worker rhetoric to 66% was encouraging. It suggested that Democratic candidates had absorbed the lesson, long emphasized by CWCP, that working-class voters want to hear candidates speak directly to their economic concerns. But pro-worker language alone is insufficient. Without the anti-elite component, the naming of corporations, billionaires, and concentrated economic power as obstacles to working-class prosperity, pro-worker messaging risks becoming hollow reassurance rather than a credible signal of willingness to challenge entrenched interests on behalf of working people.
The net result is that Democratic candidates in 2024 talked about working families more than ever before, but, as we show below, were less willing to endorse the bold policy changes needed to improve the lives of working people.
We saw an even sharper retreat when we looked at specific progressive economic policy proposals. The figure below shows the trajectory of individual progressive economic terms. Medicare for All, the signature policy of the 2020 left, dropped from 29% to 15% of candidates. Student debt relief, free college, and Green New Deal messaging also declined substantially. Meanwhile, paid family leave and living wage language remained relatively stable, suggesting candidates were comfortable with incremental economic proposals, but shied away from larger structural reforms.
The Post-Dobbs Abortion Surge
The Supreme Court's Dobbs decision in June 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade after nearly 50 years, triggered the single largest shift in any messaging category in our dataset. In 2020, just 24% of Democratic candidates prominently featured abortion on their campaign websites. By 2024, that figure had surged to 53%, more than doubling in four years.
The figure below shows this change. The rapid rise of messaging around abortion coincided with declines in other progressive social messaging categories, such as racial justice, immigration reform, and LGBTQ rights (see detailed issue breakdown in next section). Where candidates once spread their messaging across a range of social causes, abortion had become the dominant frame.
The Decline of Social Justice Messaging
While abortion messaging surged after Dobbs, other progressive social issue messaging declined substantially between 2020 and 2024.
Racial justice language, including terms like 'Black Lives Matter,' 'systemic racism,' 'racial justice,' and 'civil rights,' appeared on 19% of candidate websites in 2020 but only 11% in 2024, an 8 percentage point drop. This likely reflected the fading of the George Floyd protests and the broader racial reckoning of 2020 from public discourse, combined with a strategic reassessment of the political risks associated with racial justice framing in competitive districts.
Pro-immigration messaging followed a similar trajectory. References to DREAMers, DACA, pathways to citizenship, and asylum seekers declined from 18% to 13% of candidates. In a political environment where immigration had become a top voter concern and a perceived vulnerability for Democrats, many candidates chose to de-emphasize or avoid the topic entirely.
The decline in messaging around progressive social issues was not uniform, however. Gun-reform language actually rose from 9% of candidates in 2020 to 12% in 2024, and climate and environment messaging ticked up from 8% to 10%. LGBTQ-related messaging held essentially steady (8% to 9%).
The figure below documents the specific declines in racial justice and pro-immigration messaging across the three election cycles.
Competitive District Democrats Lean Into Populism
We focused on competitive districts (Cook PVI within +/- 5) because these were the races where messaging choices were most likely to matter electorally. In safe seats, candidates could adopt any rhetorical strategy with little risk, whereas in competitive districts candidates had to worry about whether messaging choices would mean the difference between victory or loss. Comparing the 86 competitive 2024 Democrats to the full field of 426 2024 Democratic general-election candidates revealed stark differences in messaging emphasis.
Candidates in competitive districts were 11 percentage points more likely to deploy economic populist messaging than other 2024 Democrats. They also leaned harder into abortion messaging (+18 pp), inflation/affordability framing (+14 pp), and anti-elite rhetoric (+11 pp), while using progressive social messaging substantially less (-13 pp). Safe-seat candidates could afford a broader progressive identity, while competitive-seat candidates felt more pressure to align their messaging with the basic kitchen-table issues that most voters prioritize.
Competitive District Democrats Stayed Away from Hot-Button Cultural Issues
To understand not just how much candidates talked about social issues, but exactly which positions they took, we conducted keyword-based verification of 15 hot-button policy positions for the 86 competitive general election Democrats. Unlike simple dictionary counting, this method extracts surrounding context to verify whether a candidate genuinely endorses, opposes, or merely mentions each position. Each coding was manually verified by CWCP researchers.
The results revealed a remarkably disciplined messaging strategy:
Silence around Cultural Wedge Policies
Not a single competitive district Democrat mentioned abolishing ICE, trans women in sports or bathrooms, or reparations. Importantly, candidates did not just decline to embrace these positions; they also did not visibly distance themselves from them: we found no instances of competitive Democrats explicitly opposing these stances on their websites either. The result was total silence on the positions most strongly associated with the 'far left' in public perception.
A Narrow Set of Widely Embraced Cultural Policies
The only progressive social issue that competitive district Democrats focused on was abortion: 82% mentioned abortion access and 59% supported codifying Roe v. Wade. Beyond these, engagement dropped off quickly. Only sizable minorities endorsed LGBTQ non-discrimination protections (34%), an assault weapons ban (31%), universal background checks (27%), or support for DREAMers and DACA (22%).
Moderation on Border Security and Policing
39% of competitive Democrats explicitly supported increased border security, and 32% explicitly opposed defunding the police. Unlike the silence on ICE or trans athletes, these were active efforts to distance themselves from perceived left-wing vulnerabilities. Candidates proactively staked out moderate ground on the issues where Democrats were seen as most exposed, not just declining to fight on them.
The following chart shows the full breakdown.
Working-Class Candidates: A Widening Gap
The working-class share of Democratic congressional nominees fell in each of the last three cycles, from 10% in 2020 to 8% in 2022 and 6% in 2024.
This created something of a paradox: pro-worker rhetoric was at an all-time high, with 66% of candidates using two or more pro-worker terms, while actual working-class representation had fallen across three consecutive cycles. The party's messaging around standing up for working families was increasingly delivered by candidates who did not come from the working class, and the share who did was already very small, never reaching about 10 percent of all Democratic general election candidates.
The comparison with Republicans is instructive. In 2020 Democrats nominated working-class candidates at nearly twice the rate of Republicans, 10% compared to 6%. By 2024 that advantage had not merely narrowed but reversed: Republicans nominated working-class candidates at 9%, against 6% for Democrats. It was the first cycle in our data in which the GOP fielded a larger share of working-class candidates.
Among candidates who ran competitive primaries in 2024, Democrats still fielded marginally more working-class contenders than Republicans did, 11.3% against 11.1%.
Working-class Americans make up roughly half of the electorate. Research consistently shows that the class background of elected officials affects their policy priorities, legislative behavior, and responsiveness to working-class constituents. The growing gap between Democratic rhetoric and representation may contribute to the perception that the party is out of touch with ordinary Americans, even as Democrats adopt more pro-worker language.
