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When several dozen Democratic political operatives and elected officials gathered at a tony resort off the Potomac River last month, frustration boiled over at the left wing of their party.<\/p>\n

Democrats had become too obsessed with \u201cideological purity tests\u201d and should push back \u201cagainst far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging,\u201d according to a document of takeaways from the gathering produced by the center-left group Third Way and obtained by Blue Light News.<\/p>\n

The group of moderate Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials and party leaders who gathered in Loudoun County, Virginia<\/a> for a day-and-a-half retreat, where they plotted their party\u2019s comeback, searched for why the party lost in November \u2014 and what to do about it. Much of what they focused their ire on centered on the kind of identity politics that they believed lost them races up and down the ballot.<\/p>\n

One of the key ways to win back the trust of the working class, some gathered there argued, was to \u201creduce far-left influence and infrastructure\u201d on the party, according to the takeaways document. That included building a more moderate campaign infrastructure and talent pipeline, pushing \u201cback against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging,\u201d and refusing to participate in \u201cfar-left candidate questionnaires\u201d and \u201cforums that create ideological purity tests.\u201d<\/p>\n

The gathering resulted in five pages of takeaways<\/a>, a document Blue Light News obtained from one of the participants. (Not all attendees endorsed each point, and the document \u2014 and Third Way \u2014 kept the identities of participants private.)<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the wake of this election, where it became so evident that the things that the left was doing and saying deeply hurt [Kamala] Harris and down-ballot Democrats, a lot of people are looking to us, not just Third Way, but the moderates in the party, and saying, \u2018We got to do it your way, because the other way ain\u2019t working,\u2019\u201d said Third Way\u2019s Matt Bennett, who helped organize the February retreat.<\/p>\n

The document itself is perhaps one of the most comprehensive and sweeping of its kind following the election \u2014 both in its analysis of what went wrong and how to fix it.<\/p>\n

The retreat’s conversation centered on the party\u2019s disconnect with the working class. Among the causes of that detachment: weak messaging and communication, failure to prioritize economic concerns, overemphasis on identity politics, allowing the far left to define the party, and attachment to unpopular institutions such as academia, media and government bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

If Trump\u2019s first term energized the party\u2019s progressives, there are early signs his second term is doing the same for Democratic moderates.<\/p>\n

The party chose the battleground-state moderate Sen. Elissa Slotkin<\/a> of Michigan to deliver its response to Trump\u2019s address to Congress and the nation on Tuesday. Slotkin outperformed Harris by more than a full percentage point in all but 28 of the state\u2019s 83 counties, according to a Detroit News<\/a>analysis.<\/p>\n

Those gathered then laid out 20 solutions for how Democrats can regain working-class trust and reconnect with them culturally.<\/p>\n

Among their takeaways:<\/p>\n