When Democrats last had a competitive presidential primary, the unwieldy field of candidates was often bogged down in picayune arguments about the details of one liberal policy or another. That eventually repelled key voters in battleground states when President Trump won the 2024 election.
A new Democratic effort called Project 270 is aimed at appealing to general election voters while candidates speak to early-state primary voters.
Its leaders say they plan to make public monthly polling of Democratic candidates in battleground-state matchups with Vice President JD Vance and other Republican candidates, and test how issues are playing with voters.
“This research and data, we believe, will be helpful to every Democratic presidential primary candidate,” said Rahna Epting, a former executive director of the liberal advocacy organization MoveOn who is leading the project with Xochitl Hinojosa, once a senior aide at the Democratic National Committee. “And it will be helpful to the field as a whole to make it more likely that we emerge with the strongest candidate to head into the general.”
The group has enlisted a handful of Democratic pollsters, including Molly Murphy, who worked on Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, to conduct research and focus groups in seven presidential battleground states and eight other states expected to be competitive in 2028.
In 2020, Ms. Hinojosa got an up-close view of how presidential campaigns directed attention at primary states over general election battlegrounds.
“There really isn’t anyone in the ecosystem that is focused on what needs to happen in order for Democrats to win in November of 2028,” Ms. Hinojosa said. “No one is pulling together that research so that the D.N.C. and the Democratic Party apparatus, donors, other people and the candidates themselves understand what general election voters care about.”
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