Part of Welcome’s Win the Middle slate, Ager and Pulido represent the type of centrist Democrat needed to win in conservative districts. Ager is a fourth-generation farmer running for the western North Carolina seat his grandfather held in the 1980s in a district no Democrat has won since Heath Shuler. Pulido is a Tejano music artist challenging for a Rio Grande Valley seat at the center of the South Texas realignment, where Trump's support among Texas Latinos has slipped back to 30%. Neither is running away from a tough map. Instead, they spoke with Egan about how they're running toward it.

Jamie Ager discusses how moderate candidates can navigate Democratic primaries:

I didn’t get strategic about it much. I was mostly just: I am who I am. A lot of people in this community know who I am, and if there’s still a spot in this party for me, let’s go learn and see. In some ways I leaned into that. Y’all know me. I’ve been around this community for 48 years. I went to high school here. I built our business here.

If people are always trying to litmus-test me, I tell them that’s actually really unhelpful in all scenarios, because we’re here to be leaders and to learn and to become familiar with this community. Nationalizing all these questions and making them the core differentiating point where people make their decisions: you can choose to make that choice, but that’s not the kind of campaign I’m going to run, and you probably shouldn’t vote for me.

Being really clear with people, being upfront, being friendly, being generous with ideas, and being nice. Mostly that worked. You’re going to get some criticism, no question. But hey, welcome to politics.

Bobby Pulido on why the Rio Grande Valley won’t elect just another Democrat:

The people down in the Rio Grande Valley, in South Texas, on the border, their politics is between the 40-yard lines. It’s always been very Blue Dog-ish, and probably more culturally conservative than the average area. Religion is big. You walk into a house and you’ll probably see a cross in every house.

My district is one of the poorest in the nation. If we’re talking about issues helping people, they’re really gettable. But if you start getting into stuff that’s more social justice, that they perceive as going against their religion, then we start having a problem.

Guns are a big thing down there. It’s South Texas. My oldest son’s name is Remington, not a joke. I’m a competitive long-range shooter. Guns are part of our lives. When you talk about gun control down there, people say: keep guns out of the hands of the people who shouldn’t have them. That’s where the focus should be. But don’t say you’re going to ban them. Full disclosure, I have eleven AR-15s, and I actually shoot them and use them.

But I’m also a father. I know what it’s like to get a phone call when there’s a false alarm about a school shooting at your son’s school. We have to bridge that gap. When they talk about banning fracking, that’s a problem, because for a lot of people in my district, those are the jobs they feed their families with. You say you’re going to ban that, like you’re going to ban AR-15s, and they look at it as extreme.

To win in November, both will need to win over Trump voters. Bobby shared how he approaches earning trust among Trump voters:

I never mention Trump very much in my campaign speeches. And I actually say, and I believe this: if you voted for Trump, I don’t hate you. I don’t even blame you. And they’re like, really? You’re a Democrat. Why are you saying that? Because we’re literally all in informational bubbles right now. You’re not seeing the things I’m seeing, and I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. That’s why grassroots campaigning and getting out on the ground is so important. It’s the only way to break that algorithm.

I never had a fight with somebody who voted for Donald Trump. I always say I never voted for the guy. But it was a binary choice. Your candidate resonated more than our candidate. That’s the past, and I’m looking for the future. Do you care about the future? I do. Well, then vote for me. I don’t have any problem flipping them. They understand, because they don’t feel disrespected.

And Jamie discussed how he’s earning trust among rural voters:

Let me tell you something about rural people. Us rural people have learned to live with less. Money is not our chief motivation. Do you know what our chief motivation is? It's respect. If you respect me and don't try to change me and just try to make my life a little better, they will vote for you, they will trust you. But if you come at them with "How's that economy going now? Having trouble paying gas prices?", they will dig in, I promise you. They will say I don't care, because if they feel like you disrespect them, they will never vote for you.

For more on these two, check out Welcome’s documentary on Jamie Ager and his NC race; both candidates’ episodes of Welcome’s Winner, Winner podcast (Jamie Ager here, Bobby Pulido here); Bobby Pulido on Central Air, our coverage of how Democrats can break the Texas gerrymander; and lessons from the Welcome Democracy Institute’s survey of South Texas.

, , and interviewed San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and Tejano music superstar-turned-congressional candidate Bobby Pulido to discuss winning back the middle for Democrats.

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Jenkins — a crowd favorite at this year’s WelcomeFest — explains how she brought crime down in San Francisco, pushing back on the idea that the city’s improvement was merely part of a broader national crime decline1:

That’s actually one of the criticisms that I get from both the far left and the far right: “Oh, this is happening nationally anyway.” But the truth is our trend started sooner than the national trend did. And we’ve been ahead of the curve as far as what the percentage rate of reductions has been in reported crime.

We are actually leading the nation in what those reductions look like. Yes, there’s probably something just going on in our country that has improved things, but we have made a concerted effort that has now helped us to be a leader in showing how low you can get it.

When Barro asked what Jenkins was doing different, her answer was simple:

Prosecute crime. Sounds really wild, doesn’t it?

My predecessor was a career-long public defender. He didn’t believe in prosecution. He literally didn’t believe it should happen at all. Not only did he carve out a number of low-level crimes that he simply refused to prosecute outright, but he also dealt very leniently even with felony crime. In 2021, only three people charged with drug dealing that entire year received a felony conviction. Everyone else who was convicted got a misdemeanor, for selling fentanyl. So you’ve essentially decriminalized it, even if you’re still technically prosecuting.

I’d like to say that I came in and said, “No, no, no. I’m going to do the job of a real prosecutor.” There will be accountability. There will be appropriate consequences depending on what you did. And it goes a long way when somebody realizes, “Oh, wait. They’re not going to just let me run wild.”

So that’s been the biggest thing. But also a partnership with the police department, which was nonexistent when I took over, and which you have to have when you’re on a joint mission together.

The Central Air crew also talked to Bobby Pulido, the Welcome-endorsed congressional challenger in South Texas. Bobby explains the brilliant campaign strategy behind his appearances at quinceañeras, and how it hacks the attention economy:

Let me tell you why it’s great. Because it works on so many levels.

First of all, we ask them for permission to sign up their people. So when they get there and sign in, we collect data, and they tell us, “Yeah, of course.” As a result, we reach a lot of people who are registered to vote but really have nobody to vote for and don’t normally turn out. That’s number one.

Number two, we’re driving the algorithm nuts, because almost everyone in there is streaming while I’m singing. So we’re literally everywhere on social media because we’re actually reaching all of their friends and everyone they know.

And more importantly, what we’ve learned from running and campaigning is that cash-on-hand really matters. This is incredibly budget-friendly. We don’t have to pay for the venue, feed anyone, or provide liquor. We just show up, sing to them, make them happy, and say, “I’m Bobby Pulido and I’m running for Congress, and I appreciate your support.”

Be sure to check out the full podcast below.

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10 days ago · 17 likes · 9 comments · Josh Barro, Ben Dreyfuss, and Megan McArdle

Two of those Trump-district winners shared exciting news in The Washington Post this morning:

Two Democrats in Congress who flipped Republican-held seats in 2024 plan to debut a pledge for their party’s candidates that acts as a rallying cry for centrists, calling for a “politics of persuasion over purity” and declaring that “we are capitalist, not socialist.”

The pledge is a direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt as democratic socialists such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) capture the party’s energy and activism.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Adam Gray (D-California) said they will announce the pledge Wednesday afternoon at the center-left conference WelcomeFest, and hope to get candidates up and down the ballot to join them in signing it. As Democrats wrestle with their identity heading into the midterms and 2028 presidential race, the effort marks moderates’ latest bid to assert themselves.

…

The pledge originated with a newly formed centrist group called Promise to America. Felix Frisch, the 20-year-old director, worked on the campaigns of his father, Adam Frisch, a Democrat who came close to unseating Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) in a red-leaning district in 2022.

“I was shocked at the gap between the lessons that I learned … and the unwillingness to listen to leaders like Rep. Gray and Rep. Suozzi who actually win,” Felix Frisch said.

Frisch said he began working on the pledge with several other young people “frustrated with the Democratic Party and where it was going” and then approached Suozzi and Gray about it.

You may remember Felix from last year’s WelcomeFest, which he managed to tremendous growth from the inaugural gathering in 2024.

Learn more at ThePromiseToAmerica.com and tune in to WelcomeFest from 10:15am-5:00pm EST today!

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PS more on the theme, Building To Win, here

But in the Axios summary back on July 21, 2025, the final word did not get to a GOP redraw or a Dem redraw. It went to a Dog:

The bottom line: Even Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), an arch-centrist who represents the reddest district of any House Democrat, declined to condemn potential redistricting in California — but he did warn Republicans against what is known as a dummymander. “I won in a seat that the president has won by 7-10 points. ... You want to draw some of your incumbents out of R+12, R+15 seats into R+6? We’ll find some good candidates who can win there.”

Today we finally have nominees in Texas. The Blue Dogs have a quartet of candidates in the southernmost Trump districts, two incumbents who won red districts in 2024 and two candidates - one of whom just beat an antisemitic sex therapist propped up by $1m in GOP dark money.

And we also have new research: Welcome Democracy Institute released a deep dive into the four South Texas congressional districts that produced some of the largest rightward swings in the country between 2016 and 2024. The findings should reshape how Democrats think about Hispanic voters, the persuadable middle, and what it takes to compete in territory where losses have been growing for a decade.

The big takeaway: South Texas has not permanently realigned. But Democrats need to change course to win it back. Last night’s primary results offer hope: Democrats have officially locked in strong candidates in four South Texas districts, including two incumbents with a history of over-performance and two challengers who are well positioned to do the same.

Last Night’s Results

Despite the GOP’s best efforts to get a weak Democratic nominee in TX-35 by spending $1m boosting an antisemitic fringe candidate, the compelling Sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia won with nearly 64% of the vote. Republicans were the only group spending in support of Maureen Galindo, who raised less than $11,000 and whose vile anti-Semitic comments have been condemned across the Democratic party spectrum. Leftists like AOC and Greg Casar should get credit - they saw through the Republican canard and backed Garcia.

But how did we get here? Why is an overwhelmingly Hispanic district rated Likely Republican?

The Scale of the Swing

The numbers are stark. WDI looked at four districts in South Texas: TX-15, TX-28, TX-34, and TX-35. In these districts, the aggregate presidential margin moved from a 27-point Democratic advantage in 2016 to an 8-point Republican advantage in 2024. A net swing of roughly 35 points in eight years.

TX-28, Henry Cuellar’s district, swung 46 points, from Clinton +36 to Trump +10. TX-15 swung 32 points. TX-34 swung 23 points. These movements represent a wholesale collapse of what was once a reliably Democratic region. The RGV hadn’t gone GOP on the presidential level since 1972.

The losses were most pronounced among specific groups that tell a larger picture of Democratic challenges nationally by ethnicity, educational attainment, and ideology: minority voters, non-college voters, moderate and conservative voters. Hispanic conservatives moved 14 points away from Democrats between 2012 and 2024. Hispanic moderates moved 12 points. Non-college-educated white moderates moved 16 points.

The Blue Dog Exception

Two incumbents bucked the trend. Henry Cuellar (TX-28) ran 12.7 points ahead of the presidential ticket. Vicente Gonzalez (TX-34) ran 6.7 points ahead. Both are Blue Dog Democrats. Both have emphasized cultural moderation, local identity, and visible distance from the national party.

This is not a new pattern. We have tracked the over-performance of differentiated candidates for years. But the South Texas data adds new texture. After winning a Trump district in November 2024, Gonzalez declared “someone needs to get fired” for DC-based groups running ads in his district on cultural issues that overshadowed the economic concerns of working-class Hispanic voters in his district.

The survey data backs him up. Voters in the open-ended responses didn’t just say they wanted moderation in the abstract. They described the Gonzalez profile almost verbatim: culturally moderate, locally rooted, independent from the national party, focused on affordability and border security rather than culture-war positioning.

Why They Left, and What Would Bring Them Back

Why did these voters leave the Democratic Party? WDI asked former Democrats why they left. Voters who moved toward Republicans most often cited ideological drift in the close-ended version of the question: “the party I used to support moved away from my values” (28-38% across districts), followed by immigration (18-26%). Voters who moved toward Democrats overwhelmingly cited the economy and cost of living (29-42%).

Democrats are losing voters on culture, values, and immigration. Republicans are losing voters on cost of living. The strategic implication is clear: a Democrat who leads on affordability while moderating on culture and immigration is playing to this dynamic.

The open-ended responses made the moderation demands specific. Thirty-six respondents used the literal language of “move to the center” or “be more moderate” unprompted. Six issues came up repeatedly: guns, gender policy, spending, immigration, the Biden record, and abortion. On each, the critique came from Republicans, independents, former Democrats, and current Democrats alike.

Taken together, the six moderation openings describe a coherent candidate profile: pro-Second-Amendment with sensible background checks, opposed to gender transition for minors, fiscally disciplined, tough on the border with legal pathways, willing to criticize Biden-era mistakes, and pro-choice without absolutism.

Immigration: The Both-And Position

Immigration is the second most-cited reason voters left Democrats (18-26% across districts), and the quantitative data explains why. All voters across the four districts prefer Trump’s approach to immigration over Biden’s by 18 to 24 points. On border security specifically, the margin runs +26 to +28 in Trump’s favor.

The focus groups in Pharr, TX added critical texture. Voters blamed the Biden Administration for an “open border” and simultaneously recoiled at Trump’s targeting of longtime residents and family separation. The winning position was not one side or the other.

The open-ended responses reinforced the pattern. Voters consistently described a preference for border security, orderly processing, legal pathways, and prioritization of violent offenders over mass enforcement against established families. They also said Democrats “failed the Dreamers” and “had many opportunities to do something,” a credibility problem that a campaign can address by being specific about enforcement as well as legalization.

The strategic read here is that Democrats do not need to match Trump’s position on immigration. They need to stop being perceived as having no position at all, or worse, the wrong one. The both-and framing that Cuellar, Gonzalez, and Pulido have all adopted, secure the border and protect legal pathways, is the only positioning in the data that holds across moderates and independents simultaneously.

Republicans Are Reading This Data Too

The South Texas research lands in a cycle where Republicans are actively working to ensure Democrats nominate the weakest possible candidates in swing districts. The Left-Right Pincer described last week is directly relevant here.

This is not an isolated case. A new SuperPAC called Lead Left, which turned out to have Republican fundraising infrastructure embedded in its metadata, has been spending millions to shape Democratic primaries in competitive districts. The pattern is consistent: back the more progressive, less electable Democrat. Thus far, Democratic primary voters have seen through the ruse, and Lead Left is 1 for 3.

The South Texas data shows exactly why this strategy works. Voters in these districts are not looking for a national progressive. They are looking for someone fiscally disciplined, culturally moderate, locally rooted, and independent from the national party. Every time Democrats nominate a candidate who doesn’t fit that profile, Republicans gain. And now Republicans are spending money to make sure it happens.

The Bottom Line

The South Texas swing was not a permanent realignment. The voters who produced 32-46 point rightward swings between 2016 and 2024 describe a region that is volatile, frustrated with both parties, and responsive to candidate quality and issue positioning.

Both parties face headwinds. Democrats run -6 to -19 net favorable across the four districts. Republicans run +3 to -12. Trump is underwater everywhere. Abbott is underwater in three of four districts. The loudest version of each party has worn out its welcome.

The path back for Democrats runs through exactly the kind of candidates the research describes: Blue Dog-style moderates who lead on affordability, take clear, credible positions on immigration and border security, and maintain visible distance from national party orthodoxy.

The question is whether Democrats will nominate candidates who fit that profile, or whether the Left-Right Pincer will produce nominees who confirm everything these voters already believe about the party.

We will explore at WelcomeFest, now less than two weeks away!

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These are hazy days for Democrats. Prediction markets show an 80% chance to win the House and 50% to win the Senate.

Those who remember 2018 shudder at what came next: a fleeting congratulations to pragmatic candidates who flipped seats, followed by two years chasing the mirage of a national left-wing ascendancy.

Republicans remember, too. And they are doing far more now than the last Trump midterm to press every possible advantage. Total Gerrymandering - every two years, without Supreme Court restraint. And Total Primary Meddling - whenever Democrats have a choice in a swing district primary between an electable moderate and left-wing candidate, they’ll back the left-wing candidate.

Because Republicans can read polls - and the “Red Boxes” candidates put up to signal where SuperPACs should invest - too.

The House will be Another Senate

Democrats are headed into a new reality: the Senate favors Republicans, with just a handful of swing states that require competing in truly red territory to win consistent majorities.

Total Gerrymandering, combined with reapportionment after the 2030 Census, will soon make the House look more like the Senate.

That means the ‘stretch’ candidates that WelcomePAC has backed in supposedly “Safe Republican” seats will have to become the new normal for a party seeking majorities. Trump won Jared Golden’s district by 10, and districts featuring current challengers Bobby Pulido and Jamie Ager have a similar margin to stretch Senate seats like Alaska, Ohio, and Iowa.

What Came First, the Candidates or the Brand?

The chicken or egg problem facing Democrats comes up in most thoughtful conversations we have. Should moderates focus on “the Democratic brand” or on supporting candidates who are differentiated from that brand?

At a strategy retreat after our first cycle, a participant laid it out clearly: the only way to change the brand is by supporting candidates different from the brand.

The way for Democrats to have a better brand is to engage in the natural feedback loop of democracy: if you support House candidates competing in seats that Trump won by 10 points, you can probably compete in Senate seats Trump won by 10 points (eg: Mary Peltola).

Building a better brand, like organizing, is a muscle. Not a battery, or a pitch deck, or an op-ed. It is dozens of candidates, hundreds of staffers, thousands of volunteers, tens of thousands of financial supporters, and hundreds of thousands of voters all practicing democracy by being responsive to what voters want.

And then eventually, the presidential primary can look very different than in 2020.

Turns out, Democratic voters get it.

The Strategic Left

As we broke down in The Four Types of Democratic Primary Voters, the majority of Democrats are now liberal - for the first time ever. This is a major shift. But that doesn’t mean they want a liberal nominee. Because a significant quadrant, which we call the Strategic Left, prioritizes electability over issue purity.

Back to The New York Times poll, where the Strategic Left flexed:

While a majority of Democratic supporters said that they were generally happy with the party’s ideological positioning, 52 percent said the next Democratic presidential candidate should move the party to the center in order to win. Only a quarter said the next candidate should move the party to the left.

Earlier this week, Tom Edsall wrote in the Times summarizing two recent political science findings on what moves voters. One we covered here in New Research on How Moderation Works, but in different ways both demonstrate that voters actually vote on … wait for it … issues!

Voters actually care about issues! Not just how many tattoos you have or how good your vertical video operation is or if you are the first person of Maltese descent to be elected to the Springfield City Council, but whether or not you will effectively represent their views in our federal government. The Founders would be proud!

The Strategic Right

It isn’t just the left who knows that Democrats need to move to the center. Republicans can read polls, too - and read the “Red Boxes” that candidates use to instruct SuperPACs on how & where to spend money.

Late last month, a new SuperPAC called Lead Left started spending in a handful of Democratic primaries across the country. But there were clues that this was not just a progressive PAC. It filed its incorporation papers on April 24, registered out of a Staples in Tallahassee. On paper it seemed progressive enough: a left-coded name with anti-Trump framing, but it disclosed none of its donors. Within days it was spending millions to shape who Democrats would nominate in three of the most competitive districts on the 2026 map, while spending nothing on progressives in tough primaries in safe blue districts.

Shortly after the first round of spending, Punchbowl News reported WinRed, the Republican version of ActBlue, was embedded in the site’s metadata. In other words, the supposedly “progressive” group appeared to be wired directly into Republican fundraising infrastructure.

This group wasn’t about helping Democrats. It was about helping Republicans pick the Democrats they’d rather run against in swing seats this November. And those are the same candidates that legitimate progressive groups are backing.

In TX-35, Republicans are the only group that has been spending in support of Maureen Galindo, a fringe candidate who has raised less than $11,000 and whose vile anti-Semitic comments have been condemned across the Democratic party spectrum.

The Left-Right Pincer

It is not just shady PACs though. Republican leadership is doing this out in the open through its main PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund.

Take CA-22, where a slew of progressive outfits - the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Working Families Party, and David Hogg’s PAC - are backing Randy Villegas, a young PhD who lives outside the district boundaries. The Villegas campaign website has a “Red Box” instructing those SuperPACs on where they want money spent. But GOP Speaker Mike Johnson can read the Villegas website just as easily as David Hogg can, and both are doing something eerily similar: sending mail to Democratic primary voters touting how progressive Randy Villegas is.

This means the more electable candidate, state legislator Jasmeet Bains - whose legislative district overlaps with most of the House district, and who ran 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris last cycle - is getting hit from both Republicans and progressives.

Such is life in the center. Defending against a Left-Right Pincer Movement is a notoriously difficult battlefield situation, and I won’t bore you today with how the Union army formed a fishhook defensive maneuver at the Battle of Gettysburg. But in this situation you should donate directly to Dr. Jasmeet Bains and also come to WelcomeFest on June 3 in DC (and check out her conversation with Lauren).

Support Jasmeet Bains in CA-22

DC is Always the Last to Know

Because this news has not broken through in the Democratic establishment.

We frequently reference HouseQuake, the documentary on Rahm Emanuel’s merry band of moderate-to-conservative candidates who powered the 2006 Democratic House wave. At the victory party, Rahm says, “It’s been said that Washington often is the last place in America to get the news. Well let me tell you tonight, the news has arrived from every corner of the country.”

Many pundits and operatives want you to believe that Democrats need a fancy new formula, that the lessons of the 1990s and 2000s don’t apply. But does any of this from 2006 sound outdated to you?

Analyst in 2006:

The Democrats decided they had to be more flexible on social issues. People in the party care a lot ... But it just wasn’t winning them elections. So the choice was: you could continue to care about those things, and lose. Or you could show some moderation and some flexibility and have room for candidates who are speaking to a different part of the culture, and maybe win some of those.

News Reporter in 2006:

… tired of relentlessly being branded liberal, many Democrats running around the country are actually quite conservative. Shuler, the former Tennessee and Redskins QB has put incumbent Charles Taylor on the defensive, Taylor could lose to a Democrat … who sounds downright Republican on gun control and talks openly about his faith.

Candidate & Campaign Manager in 2006:

Know what Rahm says? Stay on message, stay on message stay on message … they are hammering us, trying to portray us as soft on immigration and tying you with the Democrat platform …

Anyone who was at last year’s WelcomeFest can tell you that applying these lessons in modern day politics ain’t boring.

And defending against the Left-Right Pincer is not about just hitting the left - it is about an offensive charge through the center to where the American people are. It’s democracy, and it’s fun as hell. Join us.

Register for WelcomeFest - June 3 in DC

Many of the findings validate our Deciding to Win report, the defining autopsy of 2024.

Reid Epstein reported:

The first potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate to weigh in on the D.N.C. draft report is Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and ambassador to Japan.

“It’s not worth the paper it’s written on,” Emanuel said in a brief interview. “The New York Times poll on Democratic primary voters showed that two to one believe the party should move center and avoid the culture wars and embrace policies that move families forward on firmer footing.”

Interestingly, the autopsy actually says a lot of that! Maybe too much for the DNC to handle!

Here are three:

1. Explicitly invokes the 1989 course correction led by moderate and conservative Democrats to “reclaim the vital center” and be “less about race” and less about “pie-in-the-sky narratives.”1

2. Called for more separation from Biden on immigration. Page 72

The report elevates pollster concerns that Kamala Harris needed “breaks” with the Biden Administration to win, and that “attempted differentiation on immigration” was “too little, too late.

3. Cited a rejection of “identity politics” as key factor for successful candidates in case studies on North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada. Page 22; Page 38

The DNC report, titled Build to Win, echoes many of the themes of Welcome’s Deciding To Win postmortem and upcoming WelcomeFest, the largest annual gathering of centrists themed Building to Win. The echoes may have been too loud.

Most Democrats now admit voters distrust the party on both cultural issues and the basics of government, like immigration and public safety. But most won’t admit that voters have good reason not to trust the party: Democrats ran to the left on every measure since 2012, from bill sponsorship to the party platform. Voters noticed, and didn’t like it. That’s the key takeaway from Deciding to Win, and possibly a reason the DNC’s own autopsy was not released.

Then Punchbowl News reported that WinRed, the Republican version of ActBlue, was embedded in the site's metadata. The "progressive" group was wired into GOP fundraising infrastructure, it is a Republican operation to pick the Democrats they'd rather run against in November. In California's 22nd, Republicans aren't even bothering to hide it: the Congressional Leadership Fund has spent nearly $60,000 on mailers branding primary challenger Randy Villegas as a "lifelong Democrat" who "opposes President Trump's policies," a transparent attempt to boost him with Democratic voters.

The message is unmistakable. Republicans see Dr. Jasmeet Bains as the candidate they don't want to face. But several leftwing groups—including David Hogg's SuperPAC, Leaders We Deserve, along with the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Working Families Party—are also dumping resources into the race using nearly identical messaging to boost her far-left primary opponent, Randy Villegas. This is the Left-Right Pincer in action. Dynamic leaders like Bains get whacked from both the purity-test left and a Republican Party that can't beat a pragmatic candidate in the general election.

In today’s episode of the Winner, Winner podcast, I’m in conversation with Dr. Jasmeet Bains, who’s running for Congress in California’s 22nd congressional district against Republican David Valadeo.

Dr. Bains is a frontline physician and California State Assembly member. The first South Asian woman elected to the Assembly, Dr. Bains has been a fearless, independent voice and vote, bucking special interests to protect the Central Valley’s economy and healthcare access.

California’s 22nd congressional district sits in the Central Valley, anchored in Bakersfield and stretching north toward the Fresno suburbs. It is a heavily working-class district shaped by agriculture, energy, and logistics, where voters are primarily driven by the cost of living, water access, fuel prices, and job stability.

Following new maps adopted after Proposition 50 in 2025, CA-22 has been significantly reshaped, altering its political landscape ahead of the 2026 cycle. CA-22 now has a PVI of D+1, and Trump won the district by 1.8 points in 2024. The district is on the DCCC’s Red to Blue list for the 2026 cycle.

Here on the Winner, Winner podcast by Welcome, we speak with the Democratic Party candidates who prove they can win the middle, beat Republicans on Trump turf, and recalibrate the party to the median voter. Here at Welcome we work to strengthen a centrist faction that wins and governs responsibly. We support centrist Democrats running in Trump districts through WelcomePAC.

In this episode, Dr. Bains highlights the relationship between her public health and public service careers. Being a member of the California Assembly and congressional candidate hasn’t stopped Dr. Bains from seeing patients; she still does hours in the clinic most weekends!

Dr. Bains also emphasized her commitment to serving her constituents over party interests:

I grew up in an area where politics is very divisive, and people don’t even want to hear about politics.

My parents immigrated here. We are happy and proud Democrats. It’s the party of immigrants. It’s the party that really worked toward protecting immigrants, and that was important to my mother and father and my grandparents.

I’ve been a Democrat my entire life, and I’m proud of it. But at the same time, when you were elected to represent an area, I think a lot of politicians quickly forget that it’s the voters you are representing; it’s that area, that district, and the constituents. You’re not representing the Democratic Party, you’re not representing the Republican Party — you’re representing those people who voted for you.

When I got up to Sacramento, the very first vote I took was not to destroy oil and gas, which my community relies on for jobs and for health care. I had first-hand knowledge of that when I was out in Taft providing care. As the only doctor out there, I saw the demonization of the oil industries. What I saw as a doctor was people losing access to healthcare insurance and people who died because they could not get access to life-saving medications.

In a lot of ways, the Central Valley was left behind in a pursuit of a transition. And then people get very divisive, “Oh, you’re against transition.” No. This is about listening to the other side, not getting so into the, “I’m right, everybody else is wrong.” Please take a second. Listen to the stories of why people do certain things.

Why was Dr. Bains the only Democrat in the entire legislature who voted against decimating oil and gas? Dr. Bains represents a community that relies on that for jobs, and that’s access to healthcare. You cannot fight corporations and also fight for access for healthcare at the same time because the reality is those corporations are providing access to healthcare insurance in those areas.

Because of the policies, because of the decimation of industries in the Central Valley, now we have the most amount of patients in the state and country that rely on Medicaid because those private insurances were being provided by the industry.

Sacramento shut down our industries, which is access to private insurance. Any physician can tell you we want our patients to have good private healthcare insurance. Medicaid is a band-aid; it doesn’t cover anything, and there’s always changes and cuts to it. And then you have D.C. that cut it by a trillion dollars and added work requirements in an area that has inadequate access to jobs.

You literally took away everything from this community overnight.

My constituents are people who don’t care about Democrat or Republican because they’ve been screwed by both. My independent streak happens because I’m a doctor…This is an area that’s very unique, and there is not a cookie-cutter solution for this community, and that’s why you cannot have extremists who represent this community.

My [primary] opponent likes to say he is fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party. I’m fighting for the soul of the valley. I’m fighting for my community, not fighting for a party, not fighting to represent this or that. The only thing that Dr. Bains is fighting for is for the Valley… because it’s my constituents, my voters who I will always listen to over any political idea or anything political party because this is a very unique area.

The things I saw and my experiences in rural California are what shape me and what I bring to the floor of the Assembly. And it’s my experiences in the clinic because I get to see in real time the impacts of legislation as I go back to provide healthcare on the weekends.

This is an area that needs a person who’s not going to adhere to fighting for the soul of a party but are going to be strong and say, “I’m fighting for the soul of the Valley. I am here to represent the Valley,” and has really done the work, been out to those areas, provided services, and listened not to a party but listened to the people and what their needs are.

You can support Dr. Jasmeet Bains in CA-22 via the Win the Middle slate here.

They aren’t… yet.

Through Q1 2026, Democrats have made 27 of those 47 Republican-held seats fully competitive based on fundraising. Republicans have made 13 of 66 Democratic-held seats fully competitive.

Conceding Winnable Seats

Start with the seats being left on the table.

In North Carolina’s 3rd District, Republicans redrew the map in October 2025 and pulled the Cook PVI to R+6. Democrats finally have a credible candidate in Raymond Smith Jr., an Army veteran and former state representative who won a competitive primary. He has $41,091 cash on hand. The Republican incumbent has $2.65 million.

In Ohio’s 7th, Max Miller won reelection in 2024 with just 51 percent of the vote in an R+5 district. An unusually weak showing, partly explained by a third-party spoiler taking 13 percent. Miller is a former Trump White House aide and 2020 election denier sitting on $1.19 million. When CCI was published, Democrats had eight candidates splitting a primary field with no obvious frontrunner. But then Democrats got their act together and nominated Brian Pointdexter, an ironworker and city councilman. Pointdexter could bring the district to full competition.

These are the kinds of seats that flip in wave years, and every indicator suggests 2026 could be one. Gas prices are reaching four year highs, while Trump’s approval hovers near the lows. If these trends continue, Democrats could flip a lot of seats pundits are ruling out.

The Infrastructure Gap

At the candidate level, the money is roughly even. Democratic candidates in competitive seats raised an average of $1.4 million in Q1. Republicans raised $1.5 million. Cash on hand is similarly close.

The real imbalance is at the party and outside group level. Republicans and aligned organizations hold approximately $807.8 million cash on hand while Democrats hold $259.1 million.

That gap is fueled by MAGA Inc ($312 million), Senate Leadership Fund ($166.4 million), the RNC ($116.8 million), Congressional Leadership Fund ($91.4 million), and the NRCC ($78.2 million). On the Democratic side, the top accounts are Senate Majority PAC ($74.8 million), the DCCC ($70 million), House Majority PAC ($63.9 million), and a DNC carrying $18.4 million in debt against $13.9 million cash.

Candidates’ money is more valuable than outside spending. But the spending that decides close races, TV reservations, field programs, digital persuasion, late ad money, will be supplemented by national allies. Outside spending is also more flexible, so it can target the races that are most competitive in the final weeks. If this gap persists into the fall, it could be determinative in close races.

Where the Money Actually Goes

Part of the problem that the CCI report discusses is how political money gets spent. Their analysis of Q1 filings identified six House incumbents, three from each party, who together spent $17 million this cycle while routing roughly $10.3 million of it to a small set of digital fundraising vendors. None faces a competitive general election or a serious primary challenger.

Eli Crane, a second-term Republican from Arizona in a Likely R district, spent $1.96 million in Q1, more than he raised, and sent 84 percent of his cycle spending to a single firm. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat in a D+21 district whose only primary challenger is the mayor of Inkster, burned through $614,000 against $379,000 raised, a 162 percent burn rate, while sitting on a $4.67 million war chest.

This is money that could be funding credible challengers in NC-03 or OH-07. Instead it cycles through campaign committees that function as small-dollar acquisition machines, where each quarter’s haul flows back out to the vendors who raised it. We covered this in depth recently.

Signs of a Bigger Map

The other side of the data is more encouraging. Several Democratic challengers in heavily Republican districts are posting numbers that suggest the map could expand beyond the conventional battlefield.

In Florida’s 7th, Cory Mills was outraised in Q1 by Democrat Bale Dalton roughly $350,000 to $74,000. Dalton has about $460,000 cash on hand. Mills has $115,000 and $2 million in debt. Mills is the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation covering campaign finance violations, misuse of congressional resources, and sexual misconduct. A Washington Post investigation based on body-camera footage showed D.C. police were preparing to arrest him for domestic assault before a lieutenant intervened and downgraded the incident. Five veterans who served alongside him have disputed the Bronze Star actions in his official biography. Three separate censure resolutions in 2025, including one from fellow Republican Nancy Mace. This is a Trump+11 district where the incumbent is being outraised four-to-one by a first-time challenger.

Florida’s 7th isn’t a likely pickup opportunity today. But 2018 offers a precedent. Democrats flipped seats in Utah (R+13), South Carolina (R+10), and Oklahoma (R+10) that cycle. Baggage-heavy incumbents in an unfavorable national environment is exactly how “safe” seats become competitive ones. If national conditions continue to deteriorate for Republicans, some of today’s longshots become tomorrow’s battlegrounds.

The Choice

The first quarter provides a clear baseline. There are more potential opportunities on the board than are currently being treated that way.

Another 17 Republican-held seats are on pace to become competitive if Democratic challengers sustain their current fundraising pace. Republicans, meanwhile, have 27 Democratic-held seats approaching that threshold. The map is fluid, and court rulings in Virginia and Florida could still change the number of competitive seats before November.

Democrats have the larger offensive map because Republicans hold more vulnerable seats. But they have not built it out fully yet.

In 2022, had Democrats fielded credible challenges in a dozen additional winnable seats, the House majority could have been different. The same math applies in 2026. The question is whether either party is willing to compete on the full map, or whether they’ll settle for the narrow battlefield that gerrymandering and institutional inertia have drawn for them.

Read the full CCI here.

Shannon Bird doesn’t approach politics like a typical candidate. She’s running in Colorado’s 8th congressional district, one of the most closely-divided districts in the country. CO-08 has flipped parties in back-to-back cycles, and both times the winner received less than 50% of the vote.

Bird was raised by a single mom and her grandmother, and for a time they lived in a trailer. She talks openly about it on the campaign trail as a way of grounding how she approaches both governing and campaigning.

Her background isn’t in politics, but in finance and budgets. She carried that with her into the state legislature, where her focus remained on the basics like improving schools, reducing crime, protecting jobs, creating housing, and making life more affordable for Coloradans.

Some of that work is easy to miss at a distance. They’re the kinds of policy and legislative fixes that don’t always break through immediately but show up as real results over time.

In a district like this, that’s the job.

Watch our conversation with Shannon Bird below, and support her campaign here.

That is the top-line problem. It gets worse when you look at what the money does once it arrives.

The Split

Democrats with serious Q1 hauls in non-competitive districts posted a median burn rate of 64%, meaning roughly two-thirds of every dollar raised went out the door in the same three months. In competitive districts, the median burn rate was 34%, about half that. The money raised for seats that matter is being saved for the general election. The money raised for seats that don’t matter is being spent on the next fundraising email.

Roughly $60 million walked out the door from Democratic campaigns in safe or hopeless districts in Q1. In competitive districts, that figure was under $24 million. Not all of that spending is digital fundraising overhead, but as Colorado Pols observed in February about CO-04’s candidates, there is little reason for a congressional campaign to be spending 70-80% of its revenue on anything else before the calendar even turns to an election year.

What the Pattern Looks Like

Four candidates illustrate different versions of the same dynamic.

• Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN-5, Solid D). Omar is a safe incumbent in a D+30 seat with no serious opposition. Omar raised $1.97 million in Q1 and spent $1.51 million of it in the same quarter. Her total-cycle burn rate is 77%. The money is not going to helping Democrats win the House, it’s going to the operation that produced the receipts.

• Eileen Laubacher (CO-4, Solid R). Laubacher retired Rear Admiral challenging Lauren Boebert in a district Trump carried by 18 points. Raised $2.13 million in Q1 with a 74% burn. Her total-cycle burn is the lowest of this group at 64%, because she has had enough time and volume to carve out a $3.1 million war chest. She has raised $8.58 million so far in a district no Democrat has won since 2008. We know Lauren Boebert well: we almost beat her. But setting small donor money on fire isn’t the way.

• Shawn Harris (GA-14, Solid R). Harris is a retired Army brigadier general who lost to Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2024 and lost the April 7 special election runoff to Clay Fuller by 14 points in a district Trump carried by 37. He raised $2.87 million in Q1 and spent $2.91 million, a 102% burn rate. Across his entire campaign history he has raised $7.16 million and spent $6.92 million, leaving just $243,000 on hand heading into the May 19 primary for the full two-year term. That’s a lifetime burn rate of 97% on a race he has now lost twice.

• Saikat Chakrabarti (CA-11, Solid D). Chakrabarti is a former AOC chief of staff and Stripe engineer running for the open seat vacated by Nancy Pelosi. He reported $3.41 million in Q1 receipts, of which $3.35 million is a loan from himself. Spent $3.32 million in Q1, a 97% burn and closed with $209,000 on hand. The “average donation of $27” figure his campaign emphasizes is real. It is also less than 1% of what he has spent.

What It Looks Like When It Works

The contrast to Democratic candidates who are winning the middle in tough races is instructive. Five candidates Welcome has backed in actually competitive districts are preserving money for their tough election:

• Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-3, Toss Up): $1.31M raised, 21% burn, $3.46M on hand

• Rebecca Cooke (WI-3, Toss Up): $2.43M raised, 23% burn, $4.42M on hand

• Janelle Stelson (PA-10, Toss Up): $2.17M raised, 24% burn, $3.17M on hand

• Christina Bohannan (IA-1, Toss Up): $2.09M raised, 19% burn, $4.01M on hand

• Sarah Trone Garriott (IA-3, Toss Up): $1.69M raised, 21% burn, $2.19M on hand

Support The Win The Middle Slate!

These are the campaigns that will determine whether the House flips. They are banking 75 to 80 cents of every donor dollar for the general election. Their burn rates are running at roughly one-third of what Omar or Laubacher are posting, with war chests ten to twenty times larger than what Harris or Chakrabarti have left.

The Takeaway

We wrote in December that the first priority for Democratic donors in 2026 should be beating Meta before beating MAGA. The Q1 numbers suggest most donors have not gotten the memo. The small-dollar digital fundraising infrastructure is now efficient enough that a candidate can raise seven figures a quarter on a seat she cannot win, spend most of it on the firms that raised it, and report the gross number as proof of “grassroots momentum.”

The Congressional Competition Index tracks 113 seats that will decide control of the House. Most of them are not the ones producing the viral fundraising totals. A donor giving $25 to Shawn Harris after his Q1 report is funding the email that asked for the $25, nothing more. A donor giving $25 to Welcome’s Win The Middle slate is funding a Toss Up race where the money will actually be spent beating Republicans.

Check Out Invest To Win

Florida’s 7th and Tennessee’s 5th are not supposed to be competitive. They voted for Trump by double digits, they were uncompetitive in 2024, and they started the 2026 cycle rated Solid Republican by the ratings agencies. But the incumbents in both districts, Cory Mills in FL-07 and Andy Ogles in TN-05, are exactly the type of candidates who put these districts on the map. Mills and Ogles are polarizing, baggage-heavy, and far from the low-drama incumbents (how many of these guys have you heard of seriously?) that keep these seats “safe.”

Now the fundraising reports are starting to reflect that and people are paying attention.

We’ve been hammering these districts for literally years (literally!) and this week we were excited to see The New York Times feature the races, particularly Tennessee’s 5th:

That Mr. Ogles’s seat is even in the conversation is an indication of the political shape Republicans find themselves in as they approach the midterm elections. Anger over President Trump’s war in Iran, spiking gas prices and persistent affordability concerns have led to shifts of up to 20 percentage points in recent elections compared with the 2024 election that returned Mr. Trump to the White House.

Tennessee Republicans thought they drew a safe seat during the last redistricting cycle, slicing a Democratic district in Nashville into three districts stretching into rural areas. The Fifth Congressional District now reaches south of even Columbia, a town of nearly 50,000 about 50 miles south of the state capital. Mr. Ogles won it for the first time in 2022, by nearly 14 percentage points. The question is whether Mr. Trump’s 18-point advantage in the district in 2024 is enough to guarantee a win this fall.

What’s raising interest? Fundraising.

In Florida’s 7th, Mills was outraised in Q1 by his top Democratic challenger, Bale Dalton, by a wide margin, roughly $350,000 to just $74,000. Dalton’s continued advantage shows up even more clearly in cash-on-hand. Dalton is sitting on about $460,000, giving him a commanding financial edge over the Mills campaign, which has just $115,000 in the bank and is carrying $2 million in debt.

Mills had flown a bit under the radar, but the recent resignations of Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales may force his misconduct to center stage. Mills is the subject of a wide-ranging House Ethics Committee investigation covering campaign finance violations, misuse of congressional resources, and sexual misconduct. In February 2025, D.C. police responded to a domestic assault report at his residence after a woman showed officers fresh bruises and let them listen to a call where Mills instructed her to lie about the origin. A new Washington Post investigation this week based on body-camera footage and police documents obtained by the paper goes further: officers were preparing to take Mills into custody and had summoned a transport vehicle before a lieutenant intervened and downgraded the incident to a “family disturbance” after the woman appeared to speak with Mills by phone and recant. The responding officer, Richard Mazloom, can be heard on his own body camera telling the alleged victim that his supervisors were “making this into a family disturbance instead of an actual domestic assault.” The next day, police reversed course and sent an arrest warrant to the interim U.S. Attorney, who refused to sign it. A Florida judge then issued a protective order against him last October after a different ex-girlfriend, a sitting Republican state committee member, accused him of threatening to release explicit videos and to harm future boyfriends.

It gets worse. Five veterans who served alongside him, including two of the men he claims to have saved, have disputed the Bronze Star actions in his official biography. Before Congress, he built his fortune selling arms to undisclosed foreign governments and crowd-control munitions used against civilians in Egypt, then moved from a $4.2 million house in Virginia into the 7th district to run for the seat. An Office of Congressional Ethics inquiry found his companies had secured close to $1 million in federal contracts for munitions distributed to prisons since he took office, none of which he properly disclosed on his House financial forms. He was the subject of three separate censure resolutions in 2025, including one filed by fellow Republican Nancy Mace. Welcome has tracked Mills across our Dark MAGA Police Reporting series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).

Tennessee’s 5th is even harder to ignore. Andy Ogles has spent much of his time in office dealing with questions about his background and ethics filings, including scrutiny over discrepancies in his resume and campaign finance reporting. Trump’s DOJ dropped the charges. Like Mills, he’s built a brand that generates attention, but not the kind that typically helps shore up a general election.

And the numbers are worse. Ogles was outraised in Q1 by Democrat Chaz Molder by a wide margin, and the gap shows up clearly in the bank. Molder enters Q2 with more than $1.2 million cash-on-hand. Ogles has about $85,000. That’s a million-dollar advantage in a district that isn’t even supposed to be competitive.

Ogles has built his own opposition research file. Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 has spent the past three years documenting his fabricated resume, including claims to be a trained economist, a law enforcement officer, and an expert in international sex crimes, none of which held up on review. The FBI executed a search warrant on his personal cell phone in August 2024 as part of an ongoing investigation into a $320,000 personal loan he reported making to his 2022 campaign, a figure he later amended down to $20,000 after records indicated he did not have the money to begin with. The House Ethics Committee voted 6-0 in January 2025 to extend its review. His policy record is similarly off the mainstream. He has introduced a resolution to let Trump run for a third term, still denies the 2020 election result, supports overturning the Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage, and recently called for a congressional inquiry into Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. Welcome has had Ogles on the competitive radar for some time, and the financial picture is now catching up to the political one.

Of course, finances are only part of the equation, and these gaps do not guarantee success in November. However, both Dalton and Molder are running locally-focused campaigns that can appeal to a large portion of the electorate. This is exactly the kind of setup that turns “safe” races into real ones: incumbents with baggage, challengers who can raise money and appeal to their voters, and early financial gaps that force national groups to at least take a look.

If those conditions hold through the next quarter, these districts won’t stay under the radar for long.

Shannon is part of Welcome’s Win the Middle slate for the 2026 cycle, and we wrote about her in our endorsement of her campaign last year:

Shannon is the only candidate in the [CO-08] primary who’s won contested campaigns, and she’s working to build the broadest coalition possible. With her bio, record, and commitment to service, Shannon is uniquely positioned to not only flip this must-win district “blue” in 2026, but to remain in elected office for cycles to come.

Shannon served in the Colorado State House for seven years and has been a pragmatic voice and leader for Democrats in the state. As a results-oriented legislator with an independent streak, Shannon has built a record of challenging the status quo to deliver tangible outcomes for her constituents.

In the state legislature, Shannon focused on issues that resonate across party lines: protecting Colorado jobs, improving public safety, and expanding economic opportunity. She has consistently shown a willingness to take politically difficult votes when they align with the needs of her district, reinforcing her credibility with moderate and unaffiliated voters.

Colorado’s 8th congressional district is the near definition of a swing seat and is likely to play a decisive role in determining the control of the U.S. House in 2026.

Located just north of Denver, the district includes many of the region’s northern suburbs. CO-08 has a Cook PVI of even and is currently rated as a toss-up, and Trump won the district by 2 points in 2024.

The district is on the DCCC’s Districts in Play list, a possible precursor to being added to its prized Red to Blue list.

In our conversation, Shannon shares remarkably thoughtful takes on governance and effective leadership.

When we’re elected into office, we are vested with a vote, and that’s a vote on behalf of the people who sent us there.

It’s not my vote — my own personal capacity, my own wishes, how I’d cast maybe even my own ballot… Your voters vest you with agency and with power to weigh in and to either advance an idea forward if it’s going to be good on their behalf, and to stop it if it’s going to be bad for them. And that is something that I take personally… Our votes mean something, and that’s something I wish people understood is not theory. Those votes we take on the floor, on the dais, they mean something to people’s lives… The votes are not without consequence.

I recognize the vote is the power comes from the people. And I just couldn’t live with myself to give that power away to someone else trying to achieve their own objective if it wasn’t in the best interest of the people who trusted me to go and represent them and fight for them.

I couldn’t live with myself.

I often think to myself, what if I had my representative come and say to me, “you know, Shannon, I know you really cared about such-and-such thing, but this person in House District X over here really wanted this and wanted me to show up for them, and I didn’t want to make them mad, so I’m sorry that now your costs have gone up exponentially, but I didn’t want to make them mad over in this other district.”

They would have my head on a platter! And rightfully so.

So every time I put it to myself like that, it’s like, no, I’m not going to do that.

So I vote my district.

Shannon is part of our Win the Middle slate of endorsed candidates for the 2026 cycle. You can support Shannon in her race in CO-08 here.

SUPPORT SHANNON BIRD

Let’s bump a few dynamics of the Hungarian election, given their implications for American politics.

First, authoritarians lose when they become unpopular AND the opposition is more popular (as we wrote in Relative Popularity). That means neutralizing attacks, not mobilizing the base. The leader of the opposition, Péter Magyar, vowed to take a hard line on immigration and did not adopt progressive positions on culture issues. You won’t be shocked to learn that “some liberal voters remain wary of his … conservative views.”

Second, it seems like Orbán may have done what we warned MAGA about: changing the rules for short-term gain that backfired into a Dummymander. Here’s Yascha Mounk:

There is a delicious irony to how lop-sided Magyar’s victory is. During his 16 years in power, Orbán repeatedly changed the electoral system to tip the balance in his party’s favor. Because the opposition was divided and he counted on always retaining the most votes of any single party, he adopted an electoral system which strongly boosts parliamentary representation for the numerical victor. Now that Hungarian voters have finally turned on Orbán, he is a victim of his own machinations. Despite winning about 40 percent of the vote, his party will hold less than a third of seats in parliament.

Third, how’s this for a medium-term take on populism? Via CNN:

One reason that Orbán’s campaign focused so heavily on foreign policy is that his domestic record was so poor. This is another lesson of his defeat: Populism is about winning the day, the week, the news cycle. To function, this one-battle-after-another mode of governance needs a steady stream of enemies. Orbán found plenty: NGOs, liberal universities, George Soros, the LGBTQ movement, the European Union.

But eventually you run out of dragons to slay. Much of Orbán’s campaign vilified neighboring Ukraine. Budapest is plastered with posters of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Some read: “Danger!” Others read: “Don’t let him have the last laugh.”

Without a thriving economy, or a well-run healthcare system, or other policy achievements to point to, Orbán’s campaign instead aimed to scare Hungarians into voting for Fidesz by posing as the “safe choice” to protect Hungary from threats allegedly posed by Ukraine. “He is always talking about sovereignty, but to believe that the major threat to Hungarian sovereignty in Ukraine (became) comical,” said Krastev.

To counter Orbán’s vague warnings of danger from abroad, Magyar simply had to point to his record at home – with which Hungarians were less than impressed.

Fourth, opposition leaders have varied backgrounds:

the sharpest message from Budapest should be for the Democrats, strange as that may sound.

That is because Orbán’s ouster represents a new triumph for a particular brand of disruptive politics: one defined by reformist candidates who launch new parties and blow up old ones, winning elections by rendering traditional political structures obsolete. Hungary’s Peter Magyar, the leader of the anti-Orbán Tisza party, is the latest victor in this mold. There is no equivalent figure among Trump’s American opponents …

What these politicians have in common is a path to power. And it is one that Democrats have resisted for a decade since Trump became the dominant figure in American politics, killing off the traditional Republican Party along the way.

The American party system is heavily armored against disruption. It would be all but impossible to replicate here what Magyar has done in Hungary — or what France’s Emmanuel Macron and Argentina’s Javier Milei did before him — and turn a fledgling political organization into a personal vehicle and bring it to national power in a flash. We do not have secondary political parties that can surge to prominence in a single campaign, like Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia or Rob Jetten’s D66 in the Netherlands.

Yet as Trump himself has shown, it is possible to devour a major party from the inside — commandeering an old institution with grassroots support, casting aside its entrenched leaders, remaking it in a new image and earning a fresh look from voters who didn’t like the old version. Mark Carney has done something similar in Canada, with a very different political agenda. So has Lee Jae Myung in South Korea.

It takes a special kind of candidate to carry a political project like this, and probably not one likely to win popularity contests with members of a conventional party committee or legislative caucus. Magyar… is viewed by his peers as stubborn, imperious and self-absorbed, and also manifestly the most lethal rival Orbán ever faced. I remember hearing from a senior Canadian lawmaker that Carney was an academic stiff sure to flop in electoral politics, only a few months before he freed the Liberal Party from Justin Trudeau’s shadow and led it to an astonishing upset.

If Democrats want to take the hint, they’ll give a closer look to the leaders frustrating their peers in Washington and defying their home-state political bosses, and less time measuring the applause meter at various special-interest conventions and donor retreats.

Like the Democrats frustrating their peers in DC? Check out the Win The Middle slate of reformist disruptors.

I wrote, then deleted, two thousand words on the topic. Instead, I want to share this:

There is a debate on what messages can best repair a Democratic brand that’s gone toxic with too many swing voters: communicate popular mainstream messages to voters, especially swing voters (“popularism”) or go to ideological extremes to fire up the base.

But this argument, unfolding in upscale media outlets and online, is relatively low stakes because Democratic message discipline is not available at the party level.

If message discipline were possible at the party level — if there were a Board Chair for The Democrats, Inc. who could approve a multi-year strategic plan enforceable for a range of party actors (from candidates to advocacy groups to media outlets) — then this debate might be worthwhile. But no such structure exists.

…

While enforcing message discipline on high-profile far-left leaders is impossible, the good news is that pragmatic Democrats focused on winning swing districts can achieve message discipline (focused on popular issues) at the faction level.

The “popularism debate” is a waste of time. Even if it is possible to win, there is no payoff — the benefits accrue to those who organize.

We don’t need better facts, we just need to organize.

We wrote this exactly four years ago, in our April 10, 2022 newsletter.

318 people got it by email. It gained 52 more subscribers, a record at the time (thanks to a laudatory tweet from ).

Two years later, more than 318 people were gathered *together in person* for the first WelcomeFest. And then it doubled in year two.

My natural instinct is to write 2,000 words about Hasan Piker. To argue on the internet.

There is some value there. We can’t have zero people explaining how “going on a show” is different than “campaigning with” someone. It would be bad if no one pointed out that hyping the nasty in your own base is different than bridge-building into the opposite tent.

But as an individual1, and as a faction, every 1 unit of energy spent arguing should be paired with 10 units of organizing. Party-level message discipline is not available - there is no “Democrats should do X” button to push.

But faction-level community building is available, and it can get things moving. But only when you get involved!

Here are a few things you can do:

• Join us on June 3 for WelcomeFest III: Building to Win - registration now open for our readers

• We have more fellowship-type opportunities than ever before, so drop a line with interest or recommendations

• Spread the word on Investing to Win to make sure dollars go where they’re needed most

• For anyone who needs the 101 on how Democrats can win again, it’s always a good time to share Deciding to Win

• And please, share this newsletter to get likeminded people in the game

Share

It is so tempting to debate for the sake of it.

We are four years into preaching organizing. And we still have to repeat it to ourselves because, like most worthwhile things, it takes more effort to build community than to get sucked into a screen (there is someone in your pocket right now saying something outrageous on the internet, and you could be arguing with them!).

But if you must debate, then debate as a tactic for organizing. And do 10 things to build community.

Full piece below for a refresher.

Hope to see you soon.

Register for WelcomeFest - June 3 in DC

A week after the 2022 election, there were about 80 of us. We asked a red-district candidate to share what we could do to help him next time:

“Outgrow this room.”

That’s how 300 of us ended up together - still in a basement, although a much bigger one in a hotel - for the first WelcomeFest in 2024 under the theme For The People in the Middle. Jared Golden presented how he’d win again that cycle (he did, in a district Trump won by 10 points). Milan Singh, during Peak Brat Summer, explained why Democrats would actually lose ground with young and non-white voters in 2024 (they did, for the reasons he said). Matt Yglesias held a prescient discussion on the pitfalls of immigration, energy, and education with Senators Chris Murphy & Michael Bennet. Sarah Longwell and WelcomePAC-endorsed Janelle Stelson discussed how PA-10 would be in play from the art of persuasion (it was nearly the median district nationally, after being uncontested in 2022).

We were building. Not we, Welcome. Something bigger. And it was fun!

Then 600 of us gathered last year, with the theme Responsibility to Win. More than two dozen candidates were in the room, including the majority of Trump-district over-performers. All of a sudden, everyone noticed. With nicknames to boot:

“The Totally Normal Party” - Slate

“Who’s-who of center-left Democratic politics” - Politico

“CPAC for the Center” - The New York Times

“Centrist Coachella” - MSNBC

And, best for last, “Boring Man” (New York magazine). And the haters, of course (“The Centrist WelcomeFest was everything that’s wrong with the Democratic Party” read a wordy headline from Rolling Stone).

But one day making headlines isn’t the point. The point is the building.

WelcomeFest 2026 Theme: Building to Win

We spent years studying the far left entrepreneurial ecosystem. And as much as we thought intersectional maximalism and tent-shrinking dickery was terrible for both America and the Democratic Party, we admired how effectively they built organizations. As we learned in Centrist School, they had the hallmarks of a dynamic ecosystem that builds: the easy flow of ideas, talent, and resources.

WelcomeFest is designed to make that flow even easier. And after five years of basement gatherings, this community is building. Not just growing, but really building programs that can depolarize our politics and empower the center of the country to win sustainable majorities.

We need that impact - the electric collision of ideas, talent, and resources - to match the scale of the problems we face within this party, society, and country.

And the problems are massive! We fell short in the 2024 election. Then we didn’t affect the trajectory of the party enough in the months following, allowing the current state of Trump-induced disaster to allow more Resistance energy to ride the Blue Wave toward a potential repeat.

Three Tracks

In those early Basement gatherings, we would focus on three major challenges or opportunities. Each would have a pre-reading, and partners would lead conversations on the dynamics. Here are three for this year’s WelcomeFest this community must address to continue Building to Win:

I. Telling Our Story

There were two clear critiques of WelcomeFest last year: it focused too much on hitting the left, and it lacked a larger ‘story.’

These critiques aren’t just about WelcomeFest, though. These are larger community and faction-wide problems.

On hitting the left, some of it is the nature of the media. Even if just 10% of programming critiques the left, that is the juiciest material for reporters on the hunt for conflict. And there’s no way to study over-performers, ask them what they need help with, seek to amplify those lessons & actions … and not have the organized left come out looking badly. It would be disingenuous to try teaching the lessons of the Democratic Party’s most over-performing candidates while obscuring the challenges presented by the left. And, obviously, if climate protestors rush the stage harassing speakers, the left is going to look bad.

But we can be more explicit in framing leftist activists as what they are: an obstacle on the path to building a community that wins majorities and governs well. Hitting leftist activists is not the goal. Overcoming them is just a necessary part of getting to the goal.

That is part of the overall storytelling problem. Marshall Kosloff goes deeply into it in this piece, our first recommended reading before WelcomeFest.

II. Getting Uncomfortably Specific

“Specificity is a character issue this year,” proclaimed George Stephanopoulos during the 1992 presidential primary. It is safe to say that specificity has not been the central theme of 2026. After years of lurching leftward with great specificity, we’ve entered a period of vague moderation interspersed with radical phrasing.

We may not have the intersectional maximalism of the left, but we’re also not defined solely by opposition to the extremes on left and right. We can engage in disagreement and debate, and come out stronger for it.

Our first recommended read in this category is Jared Golden’s keynote on The Rise of Progressive Conservatives from the first WelcomeFest, in which he articulates a specific vision (that many centrists would disagree with!)

Second picks up on a theme from the second WelcomeFest: Varieties of Abundance from Steve Teles of the Niskanen Center, a typology of seven groups, including the lamely-named Moderate-Abundance Synthesis (in keeping with the above storytelling theme, all the other groups have cool names like the DSA’s Red Plenty and MAGA’s Dark Abundance).

Third is the 1990 DLC manifesto The New Orleans Declaration, which is shockingly difficult to find on the internet - the past link we’ve used can now only be found on the Wayback Machine (in an instance of symbolism that hits a little too close to home).

III. Investing to Win

Philanthropy and fundraising have always been major topics in the basement. Since we just launched Investing to Win last week, we’ll keep the pre-reading light here. But the ecosystem doesn’t spin into a major flywheel with just ideas and talent - it takes resources, too.

See you on June 3 in D.C.

Register Here for WelcomeFest 2026

In most elections, the votes “roll-off” as you move down the ballot. Marquee races that appear at the top of the ballot ticket, like President, Senate and Governor, typically get the most votes while “Down-ballot races,” like county and local offices, typically get much fewer votes.

But in South Texas this year, something unusual happened: there was a reverse roll-off on the ballot.

In both Texas’s 15th congressional district and Texas’s 28th congressional district, more votes were cast in the U.S. House race than in the U.S. Senate race, by thousands of ballots.

At the topline, both districts show the same dynamic:

• TX-15: 50,935 House votes vs. 48,557 Senate votes (+2,378)

• TX-28: 58,058 House votes vs. 55,646 Senate votes (+2,412)

Specifically in Texas’s 28th congressional district:

• Starr County (98% Hispanic): +11% more votes in House

• Zapata County (94% Hispanic): +13%

• Webb County (95% Hispanic): +3%

The relationship is pretty clear: the more Hispanic the county, the more likely voters were to participate in the House race relative to the Senate race. Why?

High Turnout, Low Enthusiasm

Turnout numbers also tell an enthusiasm story. Nate Cohn noted:

Take Starr County, a heavily Hispanic county along the Rio Grande. It was ground zero for the Trump surge among Hispanic voters: He won the county by 16 points in 2024; Hillary Clinton won it, 79 to 19, just eight years earlier. The turnout was enormous, leading some to highlight the surge as a sign of a Democratic rebound. Well, about half of Democratic primary voters left their ballots blank in the Senate race and left their ballots blank for most races, other than the county judge election. And among those who did vote in the Senate race, 8 percent voted for Mr. Hassan.

So yes, turnout was high. But participation in the Senate race wasn’t as high. Nearly half of the people who turned out to vote only voted for one race: the primary for county judge.

That distinction matters because it helps explain what we’re seeing in the congressional and Senate data.

If this were a simple turnout and enthusiasm story, more Hispanic voters showing up, more engagement, a rebound for Democrats, you would expect that to show up consistently across the ballot. You’d expect Senate participation to rise alongside House participation. You’d expect Democratic candidates to benefit in the most heavily Hispanic areas.

That’s not what happened.

Instead, voters showed up and then made decisions about where to engage. They’re voting in the House race, but not the Senate race. They’re participating in local contests, but not completing the ballot. And when they do vote, their choices don’t line up cleanly with ideology or party expectations.

What does this mean?

The simplest way to understand what’s happening in South Texas is that voters are becoming more selective.

They’re showing up to vote, but they’re not treating the ballot as a single, partisan decision. They’re deciding which races and candidates matter to them, which races they feel informed enough to vote in, and which ones to skip entirely. And those choices don’t neatly track with party, ideology, or traditional measures of engagement.

That’s what “reverse roll-off” is capturing.

It’s evidence that a meaningful share of the electorate is no longer participating uniformly across the ballot. Because if voters are opting out of certain races altogether, then turnout and vote share alone aren’t enough to explain what’s happening.

Don’t Call It An Autopsy

Democrats have finally released their autopsy - er - “Playbook.” While the party isn’t focusing on what went wrong, there are some nuggets in the report, for instance:

“Over the past decade, the Democratic campaign industry and its funders have become obsessed with massive, shiny output numbers from traditional tactics: Millions of calls made and hundreds of thousands of doors knocked,” the playbook writes. “Despite making 300+ million phone calls in 2024—more than any campaign in history—only 3% of the calls the Harris campaign made actually resulted in a contact with a voter.”

Only 3%!

It’s worth a read, but it’s important to remember that every position is a communication with a voter. Organizing can’t make up for ignoring the positions of the median voter.

Fundraising Eve

Your phone probably exploded last week, the end Q1.

“FINAL NOTICE.” “Account status: LAPSED.” “We’re BEGGING.” Language designed to mimic debt collectors, targeted disproportionately at seniors. Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica found that 95% of the money raised through these churn-and-burn operations comes from donors 65 and older, with a significant share from people over 80. This is elder fraud dressed up as democracy.

Before you tap that button, here’s where the money actually goes.

Ninety-one percent of top Democratic House fundraising went to races decided by 18 points or more. Safe seats. Our own Lauren Harper Pope documented this in The Bulwark: Democratic donors are getting bamboozled by fantasy campaigns. Marcus Flowers raised $10.8 million to unseat Marjorie Taylor Greene in a district Trump won by 48 points. He lost in a landslide. Meanwhile, 16 of 21 actually winnable districts had Democratic challengers who started the year with less than $100,000.

As Lauren told CNN: “We get so caught up on the super villains that we don’t focus on the villains.”

Our “Conceding Democracy” analysis (now Congressional Competition Index) has tracked this for years. In 2022, Democratic nominees had raised less than $100,000 across the entire cycle in 8 of 29 GOP-held districts where Trump received 50-54% of the vote. No Democratic candidate even filed in 19 of 45 competitive districts by mid-2023. Winnable races go uncontested or barely contested with candidates raising paltry sums. The party concedes before a single vote is cast.

Tomorrow, when the texts hit, remember: the machine doesn’t need your money. The candidates in winnable districts do.

Our 2024 slate over-performed Kamala Harris in Trump-won districts by an average of nearly six points. Independent analysis confirmed the highest “Wins Above Replacement” among Democratic groups that cycle. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Vicente Gonzalez, Jamie Ager. These are the candidates who win by differentiating, who compete in districts the national party has written off.

So while you spend your day unsubscribing from the emails and replying Stop2End the texts consider giving through our Investing to Win project to support differentiated Democrats running in districts Trump won.

Support Investing To Win

While we often ask you to contribute to the highest-ROI House candidates flipping Trump districts, today we are asking you to educate some of the 10 million donors who contribute to Democrats online every cycle. Read the brief on InvestingToWin.org and watch this video overview:

Then share! This is a community problem and a market problem. There are billions of dollars trading hands, and the incentives are wrong every step of the way. So money gets siphoned away from candidates by big tech companies and niche consultancies, and away from beating swing district Republicans towards padding the coffers of safe-seat Democrats.

Those are two of the Seven Deadly Sins of Democratic Fundraising detailed on InvestingToWin.org.

Money doesn’t go to beating GOP

When money does reach actual candidates, it flows disproportionately to the wrong ones. The top 8 fundraising House Democrats outside of leadership raised more than $18 million in 2024, compared to $11 million for their Republican counterparts. Sounds like an advantage, but it isn’t. Ninety-one percent of that Democratic money went to races where the presidential result was decided by 18 points or more. Meanwhile, Republicans raised money for competitive races.

The Middlemen Problem

The biggest lesson we’ve learned since we started studying swing-district Democratic overperformers: the market isn’t built for them.

Digital fundraising is controlled by the middlemen - like data brokers, who sell your email address and cell phone number, and giant companies like Meta who rake in the advertising fees. That works fine if you are in a seat that Kamala Harris won by 40 points and just take the Acela down to DC when Congress is in session. It does not work when you are a Win The Middle candidate trying to flip a rural district won by Trump.

WelcomePAC candidates can’t just pad their coffers and build up lists over time, working all those middlemen to get the best rates. They need the money now to beat MAGA.

Here’s an example of how the math works for a candidate who has $100,000 to invest in digital fundraising:

• $30,000 on a consulting firm ($5,000 a month for six months)

• $40,000 buying 400,000 phone numbers at ten cents per record.

• $30,000 sending texts at a cent and a half per send, blasting those numbers five times each.

On a good day, the first-time candidate will eventually get back $120,000 in donations. So the consulting firm made $30,000 and the data vendor made $40,000 and the texting platform made $30,000.

And the candidate has $20,000 in net profit, which they’ll be told to put back into buying more emails.

Let’s Invest to Win

We have a solution. Our due diligence process has the best record in politics: we identify the overperformers. But we needed to educate the millions of Democratic donors who want to beat MAGA, but mostly get nonsense emails from Scam PACs and safe seat progressives.

So WelcomePAC spent the last year building a database of Democratic donors, starting with someone who knows the problem. was the first candidate we ever endorsed, and became a case study of both how the market is broken and how it can be fixed. In 2022, our own was in The Bulwark and CNN and The Washington Post arguing that Adam needed just a few more bucks to beat Lauren Boebert - but the middlemen were directing more than $10 million to the challenger against the unbeatable Marjorie Taylor Greene in a deep red seat.

After losing by just a few hundred votes, Adam built one of the best digital fundraising operations with more than 300,000 donors in the 2024 cycle. And then he brought that base & expertise to WelcomePAC, giving this Investing To Win program a head start that we’ve built on over the last year.

We are building a machine that gets your money where it is needed most AND where 100% of the money goes to candidates. No middlemen allowed.

We want you to Give Smart. But today, we most want you to get smart and build this community by sharing.

Share

Responsibility to Win was the theme of WelcomeFest last June, gathering the community of leaders who deliver majorities. Digital fundraising is one area where Democrats have been flat-out irresponsible.

Deciding to Win came out in October with the most comprehensive breakdown of how Democrats alienated the majority of Americans from 2012-2024. Many of the lessons there are seen in the disastrous fundraising ecosystem.

You are responsible, and you have decided to win. Now let’s grow our community so we can Invest to Win at the level needed for this November and beyond.

Check out InvestingToWin.org

Bobby is a native South Texan and a Grammy award-winning Tejano music artist. His hits and star status have helped define modern Tejano music and solidified his reputation as a cultural ambassador for the region.

TX-15 is one of the newly-drawn congressional districts that the Texas GOP is betting will result in a Republican hold. It has a PVI of R+7, and Trump won the district in 2024 by 18 points. But Hispanic voters in South Texas have shown significant volatility in recent cycles, and recent polling has shown meaningful movement away from Donald Trump among Hispanic voters, creating a real opening in this district that may not be as red as recent results suggest.

The district was also recently added to DCCC’s Districts in Play list, a possible precursor to being included in the Red to Blue program, an indication they view the district as a key battleground.

On the Winner, Winner podcast, we speak with the Democratic Party candidates who prove they can win the middle, beat Republicans on Trump turf, and recalibrate the party to the median voter. Here at Welcome, we work to strengthen the centrist faction that wins and governs responsibly. We support centrist Democrats running in Trump districts through WelcomePAC.

We wrote about Bobby when we endorsed him late last year:

Bobby Pulido is a legendary Tejano musician (check him out!) and small business owner, making him the ultimate political outsider. He represents a new-generation challenger whose appeal aligns with Welcome’s belief that Democrats can regain ground in South Texas by focusing on costs, community safety, and resisting the status quo that has frustrated voters. In a district Republicans redrew to be safe (+18 Trump), Pulido’s deep cultural ties and name ID offer a unique opportunity to reclaim the working-class vote.

Pulido has criticized Biden’s open borders policies, called out the use of the term “Latinx,” and highlighted his faith and support for American energy, calling himself a “Tejano Democrat.”

Bobby will be speaking at this year’s WelcomeFest, so be sure to mark your calendar for June 3 so you can join us in D.C. in person.

Be sure to listen to the whole Winner, Winner episode on YouTube, but check out this quote from my conversation with Bobby when I asked about his response to people who ask him why he’s not just running as a Republican, since he’s someone who identifies as a conservative Democrat.

I am a Democrat, but I am conservative. I want to make sure I can conserve the traditions my dad passed on to me and raise my sons the way my dad raised me, because I happen to like it. So I want to conserve that. Is that such a bad thing for me? I don’t think so. The problem with that was saying, well, I’m a conservative Democrat. People look at that and go like, “oh, no, no, then you’re just a MAGA guy.”

No, I’m not.

I’m absolutely not.

A lot of the things about our way of life that we have in South Texas people do not want them to change… And I’m here to tell you that rural America is probably polar opposite [from urban areas] when it comes to change.

They say, “I just want you to make my life better —Don’t change it.”

So we have that divide where as a Democrat, I feel like we have to understand rural America a little bit better.

Bobby is part of our Win the Middle slate of endorsed candidates for the 2026 cycle. You can support Bobby in his race against Monica de la Cruz here.

Give to Bobby

The word parents used for baseball was boring. Slow. Expensive.

Baseball was mostly dead.

But, as a former Yankee said, mostly dead is slightly alive.

I’m in The Boston Globe this morning with an essay on the lessons from our pastime’s recent comeback:

This spring, the resurgence of a storied American institution just might offer an antidote to tech doomerism. Baseball is back.

The pitch clock, instituted in 2023, shortened game lengths without cutting any of the excitement. And this season’s introduction of the robo-umpire, which is not really a robot but a system of specialized cameras set up to review challenges to umpire calls, made it the first sport to make instant replay a thrill rather than a commercial-inducing slog.

The modern renaissance of the nation’s pastime is clear in the data: The average duration of baseball’s notoriously long games has dropped by more than 30 minutes. Attendance is up three years in a row. And the last World Series game drew the largest audience in three decades.

But it was even more obvious in the stands at Worcester’s Polar Park on Opening Day of the Triple-A season, when a Red Sox minor leaguer tapped his helmet to instigate a challenge to the called strike. The crowd rose to its feet in anticipation. In 15 seconds, we got a clear call from the robo-umpire and the chance to exult in the correction of the human umpire’s mistake. It was downright exhilarating.

Read the full thing in The Boston Globe here, with the case for how lessons from baseball’s resurgence can be applied to other parts of American life.

Many American institutions are in crisis. But they have irreplaceable assets: multigenerational history and inimitable nostalgia create the opportunity for network effects that ground you.

Baseball is back.

My younger son/editor was displeased that I used that phrase in the Globe. After all, baseball never went anywhere. But it has changed - largely thanks to the rules changes shepherded through baseball’s Competition Committee by our own Theo Epstein, whose curse-breaking leadership of the Red Sox (ok, and the Cubs) was a prelude to staving off baseball’s decline.

The significant uptick in popularity and cultural cache matters!

Talking to my boys about the Sox outfield logjam is a joy. But overhearing them in February arguing with friends about whether the Sox should release Masataka Yoshida?

That is transcendent. It makes me think I’ll be talking about it with their kids one day.

Missing that was the big fear. An uncertain future, without baseball.

Bart Giamatti has one of the most well-known quotes about baseball that pops up each spring. So popular it shows up on those quote cards when you google it:

But it is actually the line following this oft-cited quote that captures what was so hard about baseball’s cultural irrelevance:

You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

We were counting on baseball. Just like we were counting on going into the office each day after grabbing the newspaper, and the kids going off to college after years of schooling and churching, and America leading the world.

Baseball’s 21st century decline was leaving us to face a larger fall alone.

Giamatti was a Renaissance scholar before becoming president of Yale and then Commissioner of Major League Baseball. The Green Fields of the Mind closes with a pitch for a deliberate immaturity:

It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.

In the climactic scene of Field of Dreams, the oracular James Earl Jones pronounces “they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as if they’d dipped themselves in magic waters.” Fewer people are getting literally baptized anymore, but walking up the Fenway ramp feels like walking into an old church where you feel preternaturally at home. It “reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

America may fall from world supremacy.

The Catholic Church may never revive.

Newspapers may stop being delivered.

Schools may just be screens.

AI may destroy humanity.

But baseball is constant.

First pitch on Saturday is 4:10pm. I’ll be at Fenway with my family and an old friend and, while the sun may hide, the green grass doesn’t know anything is different than in 1912 or 1989. For a few hours, I won’t either.

Thanks again, Theo.

Net Intensity

The intensity of these ratings is most interesting. And a good reminder of how different things were after Trump’s second inauguration.

Look at the movement between the “Strong disapprove” and “Strong approve” lines:

It may be hard for those of us who read politics newsletters to believe, but just 30% of Americans strongly disapproved of Trump two years ago. That is now up to 47%. More than the MAGA base “Strongly approved” of Trump shortly after inauguration, with 36%. It is now 23%.

Pollsters often report “Net Approval” for the difference between approve and disapprove. Let’s refer to the difference between “Strong approve” and “Strong disapprove” as Net Intensity.

Following inauguration, Trump’s Net Intensity was +2. It is now -24. And cracking 50% Strong disapprove looks possible.

Relative Popularity

Nearly half the country really dislikes Trump. And less than a quarter really likes him. This dynamic is essential to preventing what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.”

Daniel Stid had a thoughtful piece this time last year on the increasing risks from Trump. Here’s a bit from Competitive Authoritarianism Comes for Civil Society:

Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way first developed the concept of competitive authoritarianism in the early 2000s. Their goal was to describe and classify a growing number of hybrid regimes in which elements of ongoing democratic competition coincided with undeniable patterns of autocratic rule. Today, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Narendra Modi’s India, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey stand as classic examples of this type of regime.

Trump has long made no secret of his admiration for these strongman rulers. In his second term, the U.S. will come to operate more like their countries.

One optimistic take is that these leaders have been far more popular than Trump. Pew Research shows majorities of Turkish adults held favorable views of Erdogan for most of the last thirteen years, with a peak of 75%. Pew has had Orban at 56% among Hungarian adults, a majority he has sustained for a decade. Modi has been even more popular in Pew polling, reaching 88%.

MAGA’s unpopularity is key, not only for the midterms but for the long game.

Warning!

Stid’s piece has one other vital warning. Let’s not get high off the fumes from Trump’s slide into unpopularity:

It will once again be tempting for progressive philanthropists, advocates, and activists to intermingle their pre-existing policy preferences with their efforts to defend democracy. This helps them maintain their intersectional commitments and alliances on immigration, climate, DEI, trans rights, political economy, etc. But it makes it much harder to build the cross-partisan coalition of supporters that liberal democracy requires.

Civil society actors who are serious about stopping and reversing authoritarian drift should ask themselves a clarifying question: “Do the policy positions we hold currently appeal to a broad majority of Americans, including the median voter?” If the answer is “no” or “not really,” then they should either modulate the intensity with which they insist coalition partners and leaders share their policy preferences, or candidly acknowledge that they are prioritizing those preferences over the recovery of liberal democracy.

This is key. It is the dear leader’s relative popularity, not just the raw numbers, that determine who wins a competition in a two-party democracy.

Even in polls that show Trump deeply unpopular and Democrats dominating the midterms, like this one from NBC News, the opposition is still not trusted on many priority issues.

Keeping Trump unpopular - and Democrats relatively more popular - will require a lot of restraint, and not just from politicians.

Give to Candidates Most in Need

The first quarter of the year ends at midnight, which means you’ll have a tremendous amount of “urgent” emails and texts headed your way. Get ahead of that anxiety and head on over to the Welcome Win The Middle slate of candidates. 100% of your contribution goes directly to candidate campaigns who need it most, will win back Congress, and will improve the relative popularity of Democrats!

Donate to Win The Middle slate