The Harris-Future Forward food fight

Aggregated 2024 swings, rise of the Dallas suburbs, R+5 Texas redistricting, Dems funding non-competitive races, an MOE reminder, the anti-cancel culture & pro-Bernie voter

No. 367 | July 18th, 2025

🇺🇲 2024

I just recently picked up on some June reporting from Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker about the infighting between the Harris campaign and the main Democratic SuperPAC, Future Forward. Because Echelon does for the right what Future Forward on the left — randomized control testing of campaign ads — I read the piece with great interest.

Ultimately, the Harris campaign’s gripes against the PAC read like sour grapes from an old guard. Their basic case, along with Future Forward’s response, was as follows:

The Harris team liked Future Forward’s economic ads, but they believed that Trump’s approval ratings were dangerously high. There needed to be a sustained, direct attack on him. They also argued that the super PAC had delayed its advertising for too long, had not targeted those ads enough to different groups of voters, and had failed to properly distribute money for get-out-the-vote efforts. So Harris’s team shifted strategy to do some of that themselves. Harris told reporters that she saw Trump as a fascist, and recruited some of his former advisers as her spokespeople.

Future Forward’s team scoffed. “People might not mind ‘unhinged’ if their fingers are caught in the door,” one Future Forward strategist started telling colleagues inside the organization. They did not believe that there was evidence in the voter data to justify a switch back to the politics of protecting democratic norms.

The data was on Future Forward’s side — not the campaign’s — but it’s probably more accurate to say that neither was right: there probably wasn’t a message that could have beaten Trump in 2024.

Remember that the campaign’s ultimate strategy of running against Trump as fascist menace was the original brainchild of Mike Donilon of Joe Biden’s “Politburo,” who still thinks it was a mistake for Biden to have dropped out.

Economic messaging not only tested better, but when that was the main focus of the Harris campaign, Harris led Trump. It was around the time the campaign pivoted back to “democracy” that Harris began to lose ground. (Of course, this was also the time the campaign inexplicably pivoted to overexposing her in interviews, where she stumbled.) But independent polling was clear all throughout the election that a focus on democracy and Trump’s temperament was not going to outweigh the economy and “time for change” sentiment. The deck was stacked against them all along — and the Democrats were not going to fundamentally alter perceptions of Trump in the last 30 days.

Michael Baharaeen of The Liberal Patriot analyzes the three major election post-mortems – Pew, Catalist, and AP VoteCast – and, like others, concludes that Harris was defeated because she lost support among racial minorities, young voters, men, and low-income voters.

Zachary Donnini posted this graphic, highlighting that Trump’s greatest gains in 2024 were in the least-educated precincts.

👫 Demographics

The Wall Street Journal also had a data-driven look at the fast-paced expansion of Dallas’s northern suburbs, which may eventually reach the Oklahoma border.

Tons of mind-bending facts in this piece, including:

• Frisco, once the northern edge of the suburbs, has grown from 6,000 residents in 1990 to 240,000 — and planners are expecting 350,000 in the next five years.

• The school district built a $20 million indoor stadium where the Cowboys practice. And it was a lot cheaper than schools building their own stadiums: “When you look at high-school football stadiums in Texas, you’ve got to spend $60 million or you’re not trying.”

• Don’t hold your breath for California transplants turning Texas blue. One developer’s typical homebuyer: “A middle-class, conservative Christian family of four from California, who are searching for a good school district. They will likely end up trading a condominium for a four-bedroom house and feel like millionaires.”

• Diversity is also leading to some interesting political outcomes: Frisco’s schools are 44 percent Asian — especially South Asians. And the first South Asian member of the city council is a Republican.

🇺🇲 2026

Split Ticket explains how Republicans can pick up four to five seats in Texas through redistricting.

Liam Kerr uncovers a key difference in fundraising on the left compared to the right: most of Democrats’ money is going to non-competitive races.

CNN polling finds higher Democratic motivation heading into the midterms.

🗣️ Public Opinion

Jon McHenry of North Star Opinion Research reminds us that the margin of error in polling does not mean what you think it means. Only a lead double the margin of error is outside the margin.

The Young Men Research Initiative breaks down its recent YouGov poll, highlighting the nuances behind the politics of this key audience. While young men reject “cancel culture” and wokeness, they do not lean particularly right on many policy issues and they express support for Bernie Sanders.

Democrats continue to look more and more like the Republicans of the Tea Party era, this time in their drop in institutional trust. Since the election, their trust in institutions has plummeted while Republican trust is on the upswing.

Republicans under Trump are still not particularly dovish on foreign policy.

This data aligns with results from Echelon Insights’ July Verified Voter Omnibus, which found that many Democrats’ feelings of patriotism depend on who’s in office and their policies.