Democrats push image over ideas. It's a losing strategy. | Opinion

In the midst of election primary season, Democrats are trying to engineer victory in the November midterms with the help of a new wave of progressive strategists.

Democrats are obsessed with candidate "type" – the résumé, the look – so much so that it's interfering with their judgment in selecting who actually runs. They chase an archetype hoping to build the perfect candidate, and when their candidates lose, they blame the profile instead of the person.

Progressive strategists are recruiting for a blue-collar look, but a look cannot make up for poor policy. Until they realize a candidate is more than the type they fit, they will continue to underperform.

Democrats prioritize candidate profiles over policy

"Every cycle, there is a different hot candidate profile that everybody's trying to be," Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha told The Washington Post in 2025. The piece, headlined "Meet the Rugged Guys of the 2026 midterms," detailed progressive strategists' effort to engineer wins in the coming November elections.

Modeling their approach on John Fetterman's Senate win in Pennsylvania, strategists at Fight Agency have tried to replicate that formula in other races. Their major win in 2025 was with Zohran Mamdani in New York – less "rugged" than the archetype, but still an "everyman" campaign.

Now, their two flagship candidates are Nebraska's Dan Osborn and Maine's Graham Platner.

Osborn ran for Nebraska Senate in 2024 and, though he lost to the Republican incumbent, overperformed expectations. Now, in a more favorable political environment, Democrats are hoping he can flip the seat. Osborn is running as an independent, but he's backed by Democratic money, and the party's own Senate nominee dropped out to clear his path.

Osborn is close to the exact archetype Fight Agency was looking for: a veteran, factory worker and union leader from Nebraska. But he didn't just look and sound the part – he brought policy to match.

Osborn has broken from the Democratic line on immigration and gun rights, and he calls himself pro-life, though his actual positions don't fully track with that label.

Osborn's campaign is going well by most accounts, with head-to-head polling showing him neck and neck with his Republican opponent.

Graham Platner shows why choosing candidates on image alone doesn't work

But recruiting for an image doesn't always work out this cleanly. Graham Platner, whose Maine Senate campaign has collapsed under a wave of scandal, is the clearest example of the strategy backfiring. The same operation behind Osborn recruited Platner to replicate that appeal in Maine.

"I think if what the voters wanted were people who were grown in vats and had never done or said anything that they might regret their entire lives, we'd have a very different country," Daniel Moraff, one of the strategists who recruited Platner, told The Wall Street Journal. "They want people who are real human beings."

Ironically, Moraff and Leanne Fan took a highly engineered approach to finding someone "authentic," handpicking Platner out of a pool of "thousands and thousands of prospects."

He was selected largely for his working-class appeal – the recruiters were "struck by his left-leaning ideology, his working-class affect and his gravelly voice," according to The New York Times.

If Platner is what these strategists picture when they think of the working class, that's a narrow and reductive view of American voters. His image blinded his recruiters to who he actually was. Moraff has said that their vetting process missed the Nazi tattoo, and that he knew about Platner's online activity but was interviewed before the sexual assault allegation surfaced.

Why Democrats are chasing this profile in the first place

Democrats are searching for blue-collar candidates because those are the voters they're losing. President Donald Trump won 60% of White men and roughly two-thirds of White voters without a college degree in 2024 – exactly the voters Democrats need to win back in 2026 and beyond.

But voters aren't easily fooled. They can tell the difference between someone who fits an archetype and someone who's performing it.

Platner looked and sounded the part, but he made no real policy concessions to the voters he was trying to win – he ran on a standard progressive platform instead.

Osborn is the opposite case. He's still running a left-leaning campaign overall, but his more moderate stances on guns, immigration and abortion give him a real shot with the audience Democrats are chasing.

Other candidates, such as Ohio congressional candidate Brian Poindexter, have made concessions on other issues, including immigration. Fetterman's own success – the model these strategists are trying to replicate – was built the same way: on real crossover appeal, not just a crossover look.

Democrats don't have a candidate problem. They have a substance problem – and no amount of casting will fix it.

Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Democrats push image over ideas. It's a losing strategy. | Opinion

Reporting by Dace Potas, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published July 14, 2026 at 5:07 AM.