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The Democratic National Committees Unity Tour, featuring the committee chairman, Thomas Perez, and Senator Bernie Sanders, included visits to overwhelmingly white states like Kentucky, Maine, Nebraska and Utah. Meanwhile, African-American women who voted at a rate of 94 percent for Mrs. Clinton last year, the partys most loyal voting bloc had to write a letter to Mr. Perez demanding time and attention.

In Georgias Sixth Congressional District special election last month, the Democratic nominee, Jon Ossoff, raised a record $23 million and spent dollar after dollar to cast himself as a moderate in a failed attempt to appeal to Republican voters.

The Democratic Partys fixation on pursuing those who voted for Mr. Trump is a fools errand because its trying to fix the wrong problem. Although some Democratic voters (in particular, white working-class voters in Rust Belt states) probably did swing to the Republicans, the bigger problem was the large number of what I call Obama-Johnstein voters people who supported Mr. Obama in 2012 but then voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, or Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, last year (according to the exit polls, 43 percent of them were nonwhite).

In Wisconsin, for example, the Democratic vote total dropped by nearly 235,000, while Mr. Trump got only about the same number of votes as Mr. Romney in 2012. The bigger surge in that state was for Mr. Johnson and Ms. Stein, who together won about 110,000 additional votes than the candidates of their respective parties had received in 2012. And in Michigan, which Mrs. Clinton lost by fewer than 11,000 votes, the Johnson-Stein parties total increased by about 202,000 votes over 2012.

The Democratic Party committees and its allies are likely to spend more than $750 million on the 2018 midterms. Will they spend it fruitlessly trying to lure Trump voters, or will they give uninspired black Democrats a reason to vote and offer disaffected Obama-Johnstein voters a reason to return to the fold?

Democrats have an opportunity in 2018 because of the significant enthusiasm gap between the parties. By concentrating their firepower on inspiring, organizing and mobilizing people who voted for Hillary Clinton to vote again in 2018, Democrats can take back the House and also win the governors office in six key states Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin for a fraction of their $750 million budget, less than $100 million.

In the congressional special elections and primaries for governor this year, just 39 percent of the Republicans who voted in the 2016 presidential election came back out to vote this year, while 57 percent of Democratic voters returned to the polls. Thats a normal pattern for midterm elections: The in-power party almost always sees a sizable drop-off in enthusiasm.

Too many Democrats sit out midterm elections (in 2014, drop-off was slightly over 40 percent). Those infrequent but Democratic voters hold the key to the balance of power in America. Democrats need to pick up 24 seats to take control of the House, and there are 28 Republican-held seats in districts Hillary Clinton won or nearly won. If Republican turnout drops by the 36 percent that it did the last time a Republican held the White House, Democrats need to get 951,000 drop-offs to vote again in those 28 districts. Civic engagement experts have found that an effective canvassing and mobilization program costs about $50 per infrequent voter who actually casts a ballot.

By that metric, it would cost $47.6 million to get enough infrequent voters to the polls in the 28 congressional districts that will determine which party holds the House. In the six battleground-state contests for governors, the cost to bring out the necessary number of infrequent voters is $42.1 million.

The country is under conservative assault because Democrats mistakenly sought support from conservative white working-class voters susceptible to racially charged appeals. Replicating that strategy would be another catastrophic blunder.

Steve Phillips, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the founder of Democracy in Color, is the author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 20, 2017, on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Democrats Billion-Dollar Mistake.

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The Democratic Party's Billion-Dollar Mistake - New York Times

UpdatedSince Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016the day after Donald Trump shockedthe world by winning the presidencyDemocrats have eyed 2018 as a year of redemption. The midterm elections would be the first real shot to make up for their stunning failure in 2016and to take advantage of a president who hasat least for nowproven to be historically unpopular.

And after careful consideration, likely countless hours of work-shopping and input from focus groups, the Democrats have reportedly settled on a new slogan and tagline for the '18 midterms. That's a big deal, since aslogan can prove massively importantremember that whole thing aboutMaking America Great Again?

"A member of Congress told me Democrats big 2018 slogan, which is set to be released Monday. It's: 'Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages'" tweeted Vox's Congressionalreporter Jeff Stein Thursday. He later deleted that tweet and corrected it by noting the full slogan was actually, "A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages."

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Stein saidthat a member of Congress "noted that this is the result of months of polling and internal deliberations among the House Democratic caucus."

If you're suddenly hankering for a slice of greasy, cheesy pizza with sauce thathot take alertis reminiscent of ketchup, it's hard toblame you. The Democrats tagline is eerily similar to that of Papa John's: "Better Ingredients.Better Pizza.Papa John's." The similarity is not one noticed solely by your intrepid Newsweekwriter. The internet was quick to point it out.

But the real inspiration for the slogan and tagline likely isn't late night pizza order. Ezra Levin, co-executive director of liberal grassroots organizationthe Indivisible Project, pointed out on Twitter the new slogan appeared to be co-opted from an op-ed written by Virginia SenatorTim Kaine, who was Clinton's running mate in 2016.

As it stands Thursday, the Democrats have yet to actually unveil the slogan and tagline, so it could perhaps change before 2018. But if "A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages"does stick around for '18, there's no word just yet ifthe Democrats plan to offer complimentary garlic sauce to every American.

This story was updated to reflect the change in Stein's report that the phrase "Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages" was a tagline under the over-arching "A Better Deal" slogan.

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The Democrats Are Stealing Papa John's Slogan for 2018 - Newsweek

The Democrats, Vice President Pence said recently, have already settled on their agenda, and it can be summed up in one word: resist.

He isnt the only one with that view of Democrats. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 37percent of Americans think the Democratic Party stands for something, while 52percent say it just stands against Trump.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House Democrats campaign arm, seemed to admit as much two weeks ago when it sent supporters an email with the proposed slogan: Democrats 2018: Have you seen the other guys?

Now Democrats are trying to fix that and not a moment too soon.

On Monday, I am told, congressional Democrats in the Senate and the House together will roll out a legislative policy agenda, their de facto 2018 campaign platform. The details, after months of haggling and cat-herding, could yet disappoint, but the broad outlines as described to me are exactly what the doctor ordered.

(Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

As important as whats in it is whats not. Democrats jettisoned social and foreign policy issues for this exercise, eschewing the identity politics and box-checking that has plagued Democratic campaigns in the past, most recently Hillary Clintons. This will be purely an economic message.

They also resisted invitations to steer the party toward the center (as pollster Mark Penn advised) or in a more progressive agenda. This is meant to be a populist manifesto that doesnt conform to the left/right debate but instead aims to align Democrats with ordinary, middle-class Americans fighting powerful special interests.

Titled A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages, it is expected to have many Democratic staples tax increases on the rich, affordable college, infrastructure spending, higher wages, job training, paid family leave and the like and a few new ones.

Hashed out over several months by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Lujn (N.M.), and Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), Cheri Bustos (Ill.) and David Cicilline (R.I.), it will be outlined Monday with a few sample proposals, to be followed in the coming weeks by more proposals, some to be introduced as legislation and some to be offered as Contract With America-style promises that a Democratic Congress would implement. Schumer told me in December that Democrats would have five, six sharp-edged [policies] that can be described in five words, although it sounds as if the plan hasnt come out quite so lean.

The goal is to avoid repeating Clintons problem in 2016. She had so many proposals, and she scratched the itches of so many Democratic constituencies, that she lacked a coherent economic message. The full-throated populist agenda should also make it harder for President Trump to claim that he is the one fighting special interests, which he did to great effect against Clinton.

Democrats have been little but the anti-Trump party lately, successfully fighting his legislative agenda, particularly health care, and raising a ruckus about the Russia scandal and Trumps other outrages. The danger is that an impression solidifies among voters that the party has nothing else to say.

As if to illustrate the point, 23 liberal House Democrats announced Wednesday morning that they were filing a resolution of no confidence in Trump. It contains no fewer than 88 whereas clauses (whereas the embassy of Kuwait held its national day celebration at Trump International, and whereas Trump referred to United States Senator Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas). The idea might work if Democrats had a majority and if the United States had a parliamentary system.

A reporter asked Rep. Steve Cohen (Tenn.), sponsor of the no-confidence resolution, if he was focusing too much on Trump over jobs. Bubble-gum chew and walk at the same time, he recommended.

Except Democrats havent been doing both. Some think they dont have to, because polls show that voters prefer a Democratic Congress. But as The Posts Mike DeBonis and Emily Guskin point out, more Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (65percent) say they will definitely vote next year than Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (57percent). To boost Democratic turnout, the party needs to be more than just anti-Trump.

Even if it doesnt help their electoral prospects, Democrats need a clear agenda so they can govern if they do win. If they win without a sharp agenda, they would end up where congressional Republicans are now: in power but without a popular mandate for their agenda.

On Wednesday, I asked Rep. Linda Snchez (Calif.), the No. 5 Democrat in the House, about the search for a unified agenda, and she bristled. Were not searching for an agenda, she replied. Democrats have always known what we stood for.

They just did a really good job of keeping it under wraps.

Twitter: @Milbank

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Democrats finally have an agenda. Here's what it looks like. - Washington Post

From left; by George Frey/Getty Images, by Win McNamee/Getty Images, by Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images.

So many times a day, my in-box and social-media feeds burble with outreach from the Democratic messaging machine: from democrats.org, say, or the D.N.C. War Room, the D.N.C. Rapid Response Team, the D.L.C.C. (Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee), or even from Organizing for Action, the Obama political-action committee that is a veritable subsidiary of the national party. Looking at them as a whole can be a mind-numbing task as they variously re-plow and re-litigate the same matters over and over. To be fair, occasionally a message will try to stake out new literary ground, as Senator Al Franken and his overworked thesaurus did in June when he referred to Trumpcare as not just bad, but also contemptible, despicable, execrable, heartless, and malevolent. Generally, though, the Democrats want something: often money, sometimes votes, other times participation in something called the Resistance Summer.

These messages provide a pretty clear picture of how the Democrats want to be perceived by the world and what they prefer to talk about with their voters, donors, and assorted camp followers. Not surprisingly, Obamacare repeal is the largest topic (especially on social media), followed not too far behind by a suite of issues that coalesce around the Trump folliesRussia, the firing of James Comey, the appointment of an independent counsel, and various other malfeasances too numerous to catalogue fully here. Then there is voting rights and gerrymandering; the Paris Climate Change Agreement; the many perceived shortcomings of Betsy DeVos, Wall Street reform, the federal budget, and protection of poverty programs, tax cuts for the wealthy, LGBTQ rights, Planned Parenthood and reproductive rights. I could go on for quite a bit. Even the prospect of a new conservative-inspired Constitutional Convention generates several alarmed e-mails and tweets.

All this is to be expected. What is most intriguing, however, is what the Democrats are not talking about: the economy. If jobs are mentioned at all in their manifold messaging operations, it is often generally as a derivative of a different topic, such as the charge that Trumpcare will lead to the loss of health-care-related occupations in rural hospitals. All in all, it is a stunning omission. Economic concerns almost always top the list of the most important issues facing voters; economic problems have, for instance, topped the monthly Gallup issues poll this entire year, with the exception of June when dissatisfaction with government and poor leadership briefly took the crown.

It is not that Democrats are unaware that the economy and jobs are a centerpiece issue for voters. This is, after all, still the party of its the economy, and since at least the days of F.D.R., the party that championed unions, social security, college-access programs, and other policies that helped create the American middle class. Two weeks after the 2016 election debacle, Chuck Schumer summed up the loss with a simple assertion: We did not have a strong, bold economic message. Joe Biden reiterated the point, characteristically in many more words: My party did not talk [about] what it always stood for, and that is how to maintain a burgeoning middle class. And the truth of the matter is, you didnt hear a single solitary sentence in the last campaign about that guy working on the assembly making $60,000 a year, and the wife making $32,000 as a hostess in a restaurant . . . and theyve got two kids, and they cant make it. . . Similar sentiments were echoed after Jon Ossoff went down in defeat in last months special election in Georgias 5th District. Josh Gottheimer, a freshman congressman who represents New Jerseys purple-ish 5th District, told me that when you peer inside the party caucuses, economic issues dominate the Democratic conversation. Its all job creation, reducing regulation on small businesses, and economic development. And thats what Gottheimer talks about with his constituents, too.

Yet none of that though comes through in Democratic messaging, at least on a national level. Some of this flows from our modern politics. One Democratic congressman suggested to me that this is all the result of our data-driven times. Responses to e-mails and tweets are tracked on a molecular level and what works is repeated; what doesnt, on the other hand, gets dropped. Stories of Trump misdeeds energize the Democratic base. Plans to expand economic growth from 1.9 percent to 2.5 percent, for instance, apparently dont. And the media operates on much the same basis, recruiting party officials eager to blab about the latest news-cycle talking points at the expense of covering larger economic trends and policies.

But there is more to it. Chris Murphy, the Senator from Connecticut whose name is now increasingly invoked in 2020 conversations, lamented to me that Democratic messaging has become mired in identify politics that we have made the mistake of thinking constituency groups care only about their issues. We talk to women about reproductive rights and African-Americans about police brutality. Those are important issues, but they all care about other things. The Democratic economic message has become soft, Murphy lamented, before noting that the party needs to aggressively promise more jobs, more growth, and more opportunity for the middle class. Tim Ryan, the outspoken representative from Ohio, frequently espouses this message as well. To be successful, Democrats need to return to core pocketbook issues: how to create middle class jobs, how to spur economic development, how to help the nations 2 million small businesses.

But Ryans outcry is otherwise in danger of being lost amid the daily, if not hourly, verbal warfare that dominates cable news and social media, and thus permeates national organizations calls to arms. Without a more specific, focused economic message, the Democratic Party will run the risk of becoming a blue-water party, confined to the coasts and largely irrelevant to broad swaths of the country.

Ryans concerns, as the 2016 general election map evidences, may already be coming true. It is not news that the Democratic Party is in bad shape, but it is still astonishing how beaten up it has become. Republicans occupy the White House, and both houses of Congress; they have made the majority of Supreme Court appointments, hold 33 governors seats, and have outright control of 32 state legislatures. If you judge a partys success by the number of people that they elect into officea pretty good measure, if you ask meDemocrats are in worse shape than any time since the Civil War.

The six months of Donald Trumps presidency may have been invigorating, what with all the marches and the resistance summer hashtags, but it has done little for the feckless reputation of the Democrats. A Washington Post-ABC poll earlier this month showed that only 37 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that the Democratic Party stands for something while 52 percent rallied to the belief that the Democratic Party just stands against Trump. Among Independent voters, it was even a bit worse, with only 32 percent agreeing that the party stood for something and 55 percent merely viewing it as the disloyal opposition.

It is a terrible long-term position for the party, to be defined by what you are against, not what you are for, and this reputation is clearly influenced by the failure to develop a coherent economic message. In the short-term, you can be sympathetic to Tom Perez, the chair of the D.N.C., and the party leadership for wanting to stand by while Trump immolates the Republican brand. Yet the Trump wildfire also has the potential of destroying not only his party and his presidency but public faith in both parties. And even if the pendulum swings and the Democrats claim power, it is difficult to govern when you have defined yourself entirely by opposing someone else, as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have recently found out to their chagrin. For the Democrats to both win and govern, they will need to convince the public and themselves that they have a vision to grow the economy for the benefit of all. Right now, they are a long way from achieving that goal.

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How the Democrats Fell for Trump's Trap - Vanity Fair

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Oh no.

In the midst of a reeling Republican presidential administration that may or may not be imploding in spectacular fashion even as you read this sentence, the Democrats have rolled out their slogan for the 2018 midterm congressional elections. My friends, the fight for the soul of this country is in the hands of people who came up with... this:

Congratulations to those of you who reflexively whispered "...Papa John's" before burying your head in your arms and sobbing quietly.

For God's sake, it's been only two weeks since the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee invited the Internet to vote on which inane resistance-themed Pinterest meme it should turn into a 2018 bumper sticker, and 13 days, 23 hours, and 59 minutes since the Internet responded by mercilessly roasting them for it. But instead of promptly firing every Don Draper knockoff involved in the creation of these abominations, the people charged with wresting control of the country from a senile bigot less than 18 months from today are indeed poised to roll out what sounds like a marketing tagline for Corinthian Colleges.

Given that "Make America Great Again" has become the preferred salutation at NRA events and has probably made the world's producers of generic red baseball caps into gazillionaires, I understand why Democrats feel the urge to craft some sort of hashtaggable one-liner to lead the charge. But obsessively tinkering with the slogan continues to ignore the problem, which is, as my colleague Drew Magary recently put it, that the Democrats still don't have a unified message other than some tepid variation of "Actually, we are the party of the white working class," "This is not normal," or "Hey, did we mention that we're not Donald Trump?" The Republican Party backs up its stupid slogans with substantive promises, and while I'll eat my shoe on Facebook Live if Mexico ever actually pays for the wall, simply taking a stand for something was enough to win control of the entire federal government. Meanwhile, the Democrats keep brainstorming vapid catchphrases and hoping that the next iteration will be more #viral than the last.

Voters want better skills, and better jobs, and better wages. (And better health care, and a stronger social safety net, and a fairer tax system, and so on and so forth.) But the party desperately needs to decide which policies it plans to support in order effectuate these outcomes, even if some of the more tantalizing possibilitiessingle-payer health care or a federal minimum wage hike or whateverare more aspirational at this particular moment in history than anything else. It's cool that the Democrats are not Donald Trump. Being something other than Donald Trump is great! Now, they need to figure out who they are instead.

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The Democrats Unveiled a New Slogan and It's Infuriatingly Stupid - GQ Magazine