The 2024 election was a triumph for President Donald Trump — but other swing state Republicans hoping to ride into office on his coattails were blocked by the success of moderate Democratic candidates.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) — who narrowly won her own Senate race in 2022 in a surprisingly good showing for Democrats — is hoping to harness that electoral energy. As Democrats take uneven steps toward rebuilding — with differing opinions across the party about how often to challenge Trump and some voters calling for candidates willing to fight — Cortez Masto wants moderate senators to lead the charge.

To do so, Cortez Masto announced Monday that she will be helming ModSquad, a political action committee (PAC) that has supported moderate Democrats in the Senate since 2007, as its honorary chair. Cortez Masto will sit atop a leadership pyramid that oversees ModSquad’s PAC, a new foundation and action fund to conduct public opinion research, coordinate messaging among moderates and amplify the group’s work. 

Currently, 10 senators — including both Nevadans — are members. While the group has had previous co-chairs, Cortez Masto is the first person to hold the consolidated role.

“We recognize that these are times that call for clear, informed leadership from moderate voices,” Cortez Masto said in an interview. “That's the conversation we’ve been having.”

Data seems to back up her case. An analysis from election data firm Split Ticket found that in the House of Representatives, centrist Blue Dog Democrats overperformed relative to the top of the ticket and national fundamentals, while more left-aligned candidates won by smaller margins than expected. And in the Senate, key moderate Democrats — such as Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) — held on to their seats in states Trump won, including in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada.

In the 2024 cycle, the Moderate Democrats PAC raised $1.2 million — and has posted nearly $350,000 in the first quarter of 2025, signaling greater momentum this cycle. Donors mostly include fellow PACs for trade groups and corporations. 

Cortez Masto said voters are looking for messaging on high costs, health care, housing affordability and calling out the Trump administration’s creation of economic uncertainty — and that moderate Democrats are delivering.

But it comes at a time when Democrats have faced historically low approval ratings from their own voters, as they analyze what went wrong in 2024 and what the right message is going forward. Members of both ideological wings of the party have argued that the dividing line among Democrats is not whether one is a moderate or a progressive, but about whether members are willing to stand up and fight the Trump administration.

Even though moderates may have the right electoral data to back up their claims, progressive leaders Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have loudly claimed the opposition mantle through their popular “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, drawing tens of thousands at events across the country from Las Vegas to ruby-red Utah and Idaho. 

At their Las Vegas tour stop, Ocasio-Cortez asked attendees to support “brawlers who fight — because those are the ones who can actually win against Republicans.” Without mentioning Cortez Masto by name, Ocasio-Cortez took an implicit shot at her by thanking other battleground Democrats in Nevada who voted against the Republican spending bill that Cortez Masto ultimately supported to avoid a shutdown. 

While 2024 trendlines favored moderates, they did not exclusively overperform Vice President Kamala Harris. A left-wing populist and the most famous member of the “Squad” of progressive women in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez also outperformed Harris by attracting Trump voters in 2024. A recent Siena College poll in New York showed her with a highly positive favorability rating while Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was underwater in his worst-ever showing in the survey. 

When asked about the popularity of the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Cortez Masto said Democrats need to offer an affirmative vision of how they will solve problems in addition to pushing back against the Trump administration. To that end, Cortez Masto has rallied around expanding eligibility for the earned income tax credit and expanding the child tax credit.

“This is about … having these conversations with individuals and showing them an alternative that’s going to make their lives better and show them that we are fighting for them,” Cortez Masto said.

While more centrist Democrats won Senate races in swing states, they were unable to retain seats in Montana and Ohio — red states that were never competitive in the presidential race but that had in the past elected Democrats to the Senate. To win those kinds of races in the future, Democrats will either need to reverse population decline in their strongholds or make inroads in the Republican-voting Sun Belt states that are growing in population and political influence. 

Cortez Masto said the party has to be more helpful to red and swing-state Democrats by leaving unpopular ideas behind. As an example, she said Democrats need to stop using phrases such as “Defund the police” — a popular activist slogan in the summer of 2020 that elected Democrats mostly abandoned years ago. 

Other Democrats — such as Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), fresh off of a tough victory in Michigan — want to expand Democrats’ base by leaving identity politics behind. In a series of speeches she plans to give, Slotkin will lay out a strategy that involves Democrats reclaiming patriotism and bringing “alpha energy” to disrupt the notion that Democrats are “weak and woke.”

With ModSquad, Cortez Masto said the goal is to harness moderate Democratic senators’ collective power to make their vision the one that the national party — and future leaders — adopt. 

“There's a conversation for us to have, and it starts with those commonsense moderate Democrats who understand that, because they always have to run in their states against the party brand,” Cortez Masto said. “The Democratic Party as a whole should really focus and [be] listening to the moderate Democrats and have [our] messaging if we're going to really show voters that they can trust us.”