The Perfect Prego and the Myth of the Moderate Voter

Lessons in political strategy from the spaghetti sauce wars of the late 20th century.

In the 1980s, Prego was in trouble. They were falling further and further behind Ragu, their arch rival in the spaghetti sauce industry. Despite blind taste tests that often placed Prego above Ragu, customers remained loyal to an industry leader that was capturing about 60% of the sauce market at the time. Prego’s parent company, Campbell’s, knew they needed to take action. They needed a change. They needed to find the recipe for the perfect spaghetti sauce. They needed to find the perfect Prego.

Enter Howard Moskowitz. A trained psychophysicist and food optimization expert, Howard was enlisted by Campbell’s in 1986 to find the perfect Prego recipe that America would love. After the debacle that was New Coke, in the 80s, everyone knew the high stakes involved in rolling out a new recipe. A bona fide expert like Howard was needed to ensure that the new Prego was the perfect Prego. After extensive taste-testing and surveying, Howard Moscowitz would fail to find the one perfect Prego. Looking at the survey data from taste tests, Moscowitz saw that consumer opinions were not gravitating toward one optimal sauce recipe but instead were converging into three distinct clusters of preferences: plain, spicy, and extra chunky. Howard had discovered the principle of horizontal segmentation, the idea that markets for products are not just arranged vertically in a hierarchy of price and quality but also along a spectrum of diverse and distinct preferences. Prego would capitalize on Moscowitz’s discovery by rolling out an Extra Chunky line in 1989, which would rake in $600 million in sales. The spaghetti sauce market and the food industry in general would never be the same. When I was a kid in the 80s, there was one kind of Ragu and one kind of Prego - take your pick. Now there are 42 varieties of Prego for sale and 25 varieties of Ragu. Winning the spaghetti sauce wars was no longer a matter of creating one generic recipe that appealed to the most customers. It was about finding the flavor obsession of meaningfully-sized cohorts and ensuring that your line carried a sauce that most effectively appealed to the culinary hyperfixation of that market segment.

The Democratic Party in 2025 finds itself in a late 1980s Prego moment. Having lost the White House, Senate, and House (not to mention the Supreme Court), Democratic strategists are frantically looking for the perfect messaging recipe to win back the coveted “moderate voter” captured by the Republican Party in the 2024 elections. Centrists warn that the spicy mix of trans rights and pro-Palestinian activism inside the party turned off moderates with the overwhelming exotic flavor of far-left wokeism. Advocates of social democracy claim that the thin, watery sauce of the Democratic economic platform lacked the nourishing substance of policies like Medicare For All, which could entice moderates by giving them a meaningful material interest in voting Democratic. The Abundance faction wants to strain out all the chunks of regulation and judicial activism they believe prevent the Party from being known for “a liberalism that builds.” Young upstarts like DNC Vice Chair David Hogg are promising to use party funds to challenge ineffective incumbents in the primaries, creating fears within the old guard that such a revolutionary revision of the recipe for Democratic leadership will result in a disaster of New Coke proportions. Everyone is standing over the same pot, arguing over the perfect recipe for a Democratic Party message to win over the sought-after moderate swing voter. In other words, the Democrats are still searching for the political equivalent of the perfect Prego that simply does not exist.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the Republicans are not as vulnerable as Ragu was in the 80s. At least intuitively, Republicans internalized Howard Moscowitz’s principle of horizontal segmentation and used it to great success in the 2024 elections. While the Democrats searched for the perfect message to connect to moderate voters, Republicans understood that independents and undecideds weren’t moderates at all. They were extremists whose hyperfixations did not yet fit neatly into established partisan categorization. In winning over swing voters, Republicans looked for obsessives who were somehow embittered or aggrieved in some way by the Biden Administration. For those angered by Biden and SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s heavy-handed but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to regulate cryptocurrency, former BTC basher Donald Trump rolled out a Crypto Lovers MAGA message at the July 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville. Raw milk drinking, vaccine skeptic crunchy moms were lured to the Republicans with a Make America Healthy Again organic line of messaging hawked by RFK Jr. For white and Asian professional parents stressed that perfect standardized test scores and multiple extracurriculars would not be enough to get their daughters into a first choice college, Republicans served up messaging calling for an end to DEI and banning the participation of trans girls in school sports. A highly exclusive AI Accelerationist MAGA message convinced the former “Good Billionaires” of Silicon Valley to turn their back on the Democrats and bend the knee before Trump at his inauguration. There was even a Huevos Caros message transmitted to inflation-strained shoppers at Latino grocery stores via gift cards in the amount that groceries had increased during the Biden presidency.

Using one part Howard Moskowitz's theory of horizontal segmentation and one part Howard Phillips’ directive to “organize discontent,” the Republican messaging in 2024 was micro-targeted at peculiar frustrations toward the Biden Administration found in distinct and disparate clusters within the population. There were more varieties of MAGA messaging in 2024 than there are varieties of Prego currently on the shelves of your local grocery store. The 2024 Republican message was incoherent, disjoint, and at times borderline schizophrenic, but Trump won because of this diversity in messaging, not despite it.

If the Democrats are to succeed in 2026 and 2028, they need to stop deluding themselves that there are still moderate voters in this social media age of algorithmically amplified obsessions. They need to give up on trying to develop a recipe for one perfect message that appeals to everyone and no one all at once, e.g., weak sauce filled with flavorless banalities like “fighting for a future where every American can not only get by but get ahead.” Instead, Democrats need to be looking at the millions of Americans harmed by Trump’s policies in the coming years, and micro-target messaging focused on the one issue those voters can’t stop thinking about. For anxious parents living amidst measles outbreaks, offer a return to sound epidemiology that nearly eradicated the disease in the first place. For rural residents whose day-to-day lives are increasingly disrupted by extreme weather, offer increased funding for NOAA to ensure storm preparedness and solar-powered hubs to provide emergency electricity when the grid goes down. For Constitutional conservatives and legal professionals, offer the return to the rule of law and respect for the autonomy of law firms to operate without political coercion. For senior citizens who were dismissed as “fraudsters” by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for complaining about late Social Security checks, offer a more bureaucratically efficient, customer-friendly, and properly funded Social Security Administration. Most importantly, for all Americans who fear they are one trip to the ER away from bankruptcy, offer a single-payer healthcare system to replace the absurdly expensive and ineffective private model we have today. Offer real things to real people with real concerns rather than gimmicky centrist pandering like touring with Liz Cheney or promising to “fucking retake the flag,” empty messaging meant to appeal to moderate voters who exist only in the imagination of out-of-touch politicians like Chuck Schumer.

Of course, there are practical and ethical limits to how aggressively Democrats pursue the niche interests of uncommitted voters. We don’t need a White Supremacy Lovers brand of the Democratic Party any more than we need an Arsenic Lovers brand of Prego. Similarly, simultaneously marketing both a Maximal Zionist line of Democratic messaging and a From the River to the Sea line of Democratic messaging would taint the credibility of the entire brand. Outright contradictions aside, there are also undoubtedly risks involved in overpromising solutions to diverse clusters of disaffected voters. Trump has already disappointed millions of those duped by the newest lines of MAGA messaging. That said, it is not as though Democrats have ever had a problem in the past disappointing their voters once taking office, a complacency based on the cynical (if often correct) assumption that voting in an ineffective Democratic candidate will do more good for society than letting a Republican into office. As a party that has too often offered too little to too few voters, the danger of offering too much to too many is a risk worth taking, especially if it allows the Democrats to win back the White House in 2028.

While diverse Democratic messaging cannot be self-contradictory or contrary to core party principles, it need not be coherent or even palatable to a majority of the voting public. If there is a market for 42 flavors of Prego, there is a market for 42 flavors of Democratic Party messaging. Prego only turned the tide of the spaghetti sauce wars when they gave up on the hopeless pursuit of finding the one recipe that would appeal to the one idealized customer. Democrats will only turn the tide against the Republicans when they give up on the hopeless pursuit of finding the one general message that appeals to the idealized moderate voter who no longer exists in our age of extremism.