House Democratic front-liners have a message for leadership as the party grapples with what went wrong in this year’s elections: Follow our example.

While Democrats were generally wiped out on Election Day — losing the White House and Senate, and failing to flip control of the House — vulnerable Democrats in the lower chamber were a rare bright spot for the party.

Those lawmakers proved highly successful in keeping their seats in tough battleground districts, even in some places where President-elect Trump won by comfortable margins.

As Democratic leaders conduct an election postmortem, the front-liners are urging colleagues to take a page from their playbook, which features a heavy focus on kitchen-table economics while largely avoiding the culture-war battles that were a drag on the party on Nov. 5.

“We've got a group of strong, battle-tested incumbents that have won in some really tough races and overperformed the top of the ticket,” said Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.), a perennial front-liner who won a fourth term this month by 8 points — well above the margin of victory for Vice President Harris. “The party would do well to look at how we've been able to win our races, and the type of messaging we've used that I think has connected with voters in our districts.”

For Pappas, that meant an outsized focus on two economic concerns facing working-class families: unaffordable housing and the high cost of child care. Both are pressing problems not only in his district, he said, but all across the country. If Democrats want to appeal to more voters, he argued, they have to focus on the pocket-book anxieties that keep them up at night.

“In my district, abortion rights is still a top-testing issue, and people are deeply concerned about the direction of that,” he said. “But I think overall the........

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