Searchlight Institute

THE CASE FOR FREE PRIMARY CARE David Bowen helped write the Affordable Care Act. Now he's a senior fellow at Searchlight, focused on the future of American health care. That future: Free primary care for all — no copays, deductibles, or paying out of your pocket. A new public option for health insurance that strongly competes with private plans to lower costs and improve care. And more to come. David sat down with @treeaston to discuss the plan and Searchlight's efforts to move beyond some 16 years of frozen health care debates and inaction. 0:00 - Why pair free primary care with a public option? 3:33 - Concerns with health care tied to employment 5:49 - Lessons from the ACA 7:18 - Working with the Medicare for All coalition 11:31 - Changes for those on Medicare 12:34 - Adding more loved ones to your family plan 16:36 - Time with Sen. Ted Kennedy during the ACA fight 20:49 - Building upon the ACA as a 'starter home'

Mikey Dickerson, the first administrator of the U.S. Digital Service and a senior advisor for Searchlight's Tech Viaduct, congratulates Mayor Mamdani and @NYCOfficeofTech for the launch of the city's PIT crews. 🏎️ "Mayor Mamdani's PIT crews represent what government efficiency should be: civil servants coming together to improve government and its capacity to deliver for all. "At the city, state, and national level, leaders should embrace a vision of efficiency that fortifies government services and makes them stronger. That's why our team at Tech Viaduct has been working to draft the plans and people to reverse the harms of DOGE within our federal government. "Together, we believe in reclaiming government efficiency by investing in civil servants and delivering on the promise of better, faster, and more reliable services."

Trans activist Mara Keisling sat down with Kamala Harris for an interview in 2019. Years later, Donald Trump's campaign found the interview and used it as source material to run anti-trans ads in every single swing state. Here's what Mara learned. wordsinsearchlight.org/p/i-was-in-tru…

Mara Keisling: I don’t have a single answer for candidates, but I do want to share one more finding that provides an important general framework when dealing with sensitive issues around trans minors. Ninety-two percent of Americans believe it is important to ensure that parents are involved and have the most important say in decisions about their children. wordsinsearchlight.org/p/i-was-in-tru…

Today, we've got a piece from Mara Keisling, the trans-rights activist who was used in Trump's infamous They/them ad. Mara doesn't want trans issues to be weaponized Democrats. She wants the party to advance a more pragmatic politics: "The candidate’s answers should also adapt to the district they’re running in. Transgender activists need to understand that too. The stakes are just too high to impose litmus tests. We lose the support of the public, and we empower the exact politicians that hate us." wordsinsearchlight.org/p/i-was-in-tru…

“We are still in a much better place with this work than when I started. Which is why we need to be pragmatic in advancing a politics that protects trans people while not empowering the sort of hateful politicians that run those ads.” wordsinsearchlight.org/p/i-was-in-tru…

"I am not one to believe that the anti-trans ads were the deciding factor in the presidential race, but of the swing voters who broke for Trump during the final stretch of the campaign, 67% thought Democrats were 'too focused on identity politics.'" wordsinsearchlight.org/p/i-was-in-tru…

Mara Keisling is a leader who has been fighting for trans rights for decades, back to when trans activists struggled to get a seat at the table. She was in Trump’s infamous “Harris is for They/Them” ad, and to say she is a voice worth listening to is an understatement. We are so proud to work with her at @SearchlightInst.

We are so fortunate to have Mara in our ranks @SearchlightInst. Her voice, perspective, and wisdom are invaluable for those of us interested in building a better world for trans people.

In a March memo to elected leaders, Keisling said there needed to be a 'reset' for trans advocacy — but that substantive polling found voters did indeed support equal rights and treatment for trans Americans. puck.news/texas-senate-r…

Trans activist Mara Keisling on her interview with Kamala Harris becoming the source of Trump's infamous 'Harris is for they/them' ads — and what Democrats can learn from it.

Searchlight's @charlotteeffect spoke with the New York Times for a definitive look at the midterms. Who will win — and by how much? Here's what she and five other leading pollsters had to say. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

.@charlotteeffect: The Kansas primaries for governor feature a pile of candidates on both sides, in an under-covered race. Unlike Maine, where Democratic candidates flocked to the gubernatorial primary to avoid the tricky Senate race, Kansas Democrats seem more excited about the long-shot Senate election than the (somewhat less long-shot) one for governor. The Democratic side features three candidates, all from the same county, and an endorsement by Gov. Laura Kelly that doesn’t seem to have moved the needle for her preferred candidate, Ethan Corson. The Republican side has six candidates, with the Trump endorsee and State Senate president Ty Masterson still feeling enough pressure to spend big on ads. It’s a microcosm of the dynamics of both parties: Republicans are grappling with the extent of Trump’s control over the party, and Democrats are watching the sway held by incumbents and party leadership degrade in real time. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

THE PATH FORWARD FOR TRANS RIGHTS Trans activist Mara Keisling's 2019 interview with Kamala Harris was taken by Donald Trump's campaign and turned into the infamous 'Kamala is for they/them' ads. Those ads became a fixture of the 2024 campaign — they aired more than 30,000 times in all seven swing states by October. Across the country, Republicans spent $65 million on anti-trans ads in the final three months of the election. Mara, now a senior fellow at Searchlight, sat down with @charlotteeffect to discuss the path forward — starting with our team's year-long project polling trans rights and acceptance among voters. 0:00 - Takeaways from our polling 7:45 - 'Kamala is for they/them' 13:45 - Meeting voters where they are 19:34 - Parents and their kids 23:21 - The public isn't 'anti-trans' 30:50 - Trump, Elon Musk, and anti-trans attacks

.@charlotteeffect: Midterms are a reaction to what the president is doing, and right now the president is doing poorly: Trump’s approval rating is below 40 percent. But we don’t have strong historical evidence on what happens with an approval rating like this. Pure correlation would suggest a big Democratic wave, but the Republican wave in 2022 was smaller than expected, on the back of a similarly low approval rating for Joe Biden. My guess is the relationship between approval ratings and midterm results isn’t linear, making 2026 a strong Democratic year but not a re-enactment of 2018. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

I'm in the NYT today writing about the midterms and how I think Democrats are very definitely going to win the House, but the Senate is trickier

.@charlotteeffect: Democrats are very, very likely to win a House majority. They’re only a few seats shy, and midterm elections are highly thermostatic, with the president’s party losing seats in every midterm since 2002. The real question is if they can get a Senate majority to match it. I think not quite — the overall Democratic shift seems likely to sweep North Carolina, but past that you run into a wall of states with either unusually strong Republican candidates (Maine) or solid Trump margins (Ohio, Alaska, Texas, Iowa). The polling is so patchy that it’s hard to know which of those seats might flip. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

ICYMI: Our first-of-its-kind poll with @zeteo_news finds that voters are least likely to support a government-run health plan when it’s described as a replacement to all private insurance — including employer-sponsored plans. zeteo.com/p/medicare-for…

@charlotteeffect @zeteo_news @andrewperezdc A note on how this came together: The folks at @zeteo_news had some good-faith criticisms of a previous health care poll we did, so we invited them to collaborate with us on a new one and we wrote the survey together. Via @andrewperezdc:

We @SearchlightInst enjoyed collaborating with @zeteo_news on this M4A polling. It gets at the question of why M4A starts off reasonably popular but gets less popular as people learn specifics. (Tl;dr: it’s because people don’t want to be forced off their private insurance.) 1/x