Self-styled moderate Democrats are pushing a future campaign message on the issue that defeated Kamala Harris: Don’t talk about migration.
Instead, Democrats should wrap themselves in the flag and patriotic imagery, says a five-page strategy memo drafted by Third Way, a pseudo-moderate Democrat group that held a post-election “Comeback Retreat” in February 2025:
Embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery (e.g., farms, main streets).
The memo mentions immigration once — but only to slam the GOP’s messaging on the issue: “Democrats often let Republicans set the terms of cultural debates (e.g., crime, immigration) instead of clearly defining their own positions in a way that resonates with voters.”
Politico published the memo, which says:
In early February 2025, Third Way gathered a group of highly experienced and passionate political professionals over 1.5 days to begin to chart the Democratic comeback. As part of this retreat, attendees participated in breakout sessions to deliberate on why Democrats are struggling with working-class voters around cultural issues, the nature of the economic trust gap with this critical group, and ideas for how to address both problems.
The Third Way group likely leaked the memo to Politico, which described it as “centrist” in exchange.
One of the Third Way founders is Jim Kessler. He worked for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who has twice lost control of the Senate due to his corporate-backed, pro-migration policies.
In 2013, for example, Kessler backed the Gang of Eight amnesty and cheap-labor bill that cost the Democrats five seats in 2014. “This memo outlines the best way to reach the conflicted middle — using the key words tough, fair, and practical,” Kessler wrote.
Those poll-tested terms were widely used by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, and by Kamala Harris’s pro-migration, investor-led 2024 campaign.
But the poll-tested terms did not prevent Mayorkas’s radical policies from pushing Donald Trump back into the White House and the Republicans back into the Senate’s majority.
Trump built his 2024 campaign on a popular pro-American migration policy. Once in office, he has quickly succeeded in almost entirely stopping the blue-collar southern portion of Mayorkas’s migrant flood. Those policies are also nudging up wages and are forcing more foreign investment in the blue-collar U.S. economy.
Trump’s migration messaging on crime, wages, and housing entirely trumped the Democrats’ effort to control voters with law-and-order evasions, moral blackmail, and language hijacked from the 1960s civil rights campaigns.
So far, Trump has not curbed the white-collar airport inflow that was supercharged by Mayorkas despite the huge damage to white-collar Americans.
But the Third Way memo simply ignores the economic damage caused to voters by migration.
Biden’s four years showed how migration causes Americans to lose earning power in the labor and housing markets, and lose the investment, productivity, and training once provided by employers.
They lose white-collar career opportunities to corporate outsourcing, civic stability amid government-imposed social diversity, and political power as expanding blocs of ethnic voters demand benefits for their communities, cultures, and home countries.
Americans also lose confidence as the government’s migration policy crudely works to extract human resources from poor countries for use in the U.S. economy.
But the Third Way’s approach to migration is shared by many other Democrats, partly because many Democratic donors profit heavily from migration.
Debu Gandi, the immigration policy chief at the establishment-funded Center for American Progress, recently admitted:
We [Democrats] have failed to respond adequately to a national and global political climate increasingly skeptical of immigration and unsympathetic to the reasons driving people to come to wealthier nations. We haven’t done enough to respond to upset Americans who believe there’s an extralegal backdoor into the United States and fear diminished opportunities in their own country.
Yet the fix pushed by Gandhi to the Democrats’ migration problem is More Cowbell.
He urges Congress to spend even more taxpayer money ushering more yet more migrants into jobs and housing needed by ordinary taxpaying Americans:
Federal immigration integration resources are modest and largely focused on permanent residents seeking to become U.S. citizens; they should be scaled up and made available to other immigrants as well.
One leader of Third Way seems to be Rachel Pritzker. She is a member of the billionaire Pritzker family whose real-estate wealth has spiked amid the massive inflow of President Joe Biden’s 9 million southern migrants.
The Third Way group itself already follows its don’t-mention-migration advice — and does not show any staff working on migration issues.
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