Sarah McCammon of Third Way moderated, joined by James Carville, Elaine Kamarck of Brookings, and Jackie Payne of Galvanize Action. They agreed on one key premise: Democrats keep relitigating questions the electorate has already answered about electability.

The myth hasn’t changed.

McCammon opened by asking Kamarck, co-author of the 1989 “Politics of Evasion,” which myths Democrats are believing now. The answer was the same one she diagnosed 37 years ago:

“There’s a belief out there, particularly in our brothers and sisters on the left wing of our party, that somehow if only we were more pure in our radicalism, more pure in our left wingism, that there would be millions of people who never voted for us who would suddenly come to the polls. That has never happened, and I can safely predict it’s not going to happen. This is a center-right country, and until the Democratic Party really internalizes that, we’re going to win sometimes when the other party screws up.”

Carville’s reaction was visible enough from the stage that McCammon called it out.

“I gag at the thought that there are untapped, unresolved people just waiting for the bugle of true progressivism. Every time they go find out who the 50 million are, more of them vote for Republicans than vote for us.”

Fifty million moderate white women, and they think both parties are corrupt.

Payne has spent nine years at Galvanize Action researching moderate women, with a specialty in moderate white women, who will be key to determining the outcome of the upcoming midterm election.

“There are almost 50 million moderate white women in this country right now. If you look at the toss-up races, they are 24% or more of the vote share in a large number of those toss-ups. So if you don’t understand what’s going on with moderate women, you’re not serious about winning.”

The numbers she brought are the affordability story, plus a corruption story that should worry Democrats.

“About 80% say they are worried about corruption right now. And the bad news for Democrats is it’s not just Republicans they think are corrupt. 66% of them disapprove of President Trump, but 76% of them disapprove of Congress, and 57% say they disapprove of both Democrats and Republicans. They do not feel like there is a party for them right now.”

She also reported that 73% plan to turn out in the midterms, and 22% of those don’t yet know who they’re voting for.

Harris didn’t lose because she was a woman.

Asked directly whether gender cost Democrats 2024, Payne said no, and pointed to the movement among the voters most often blamed.

“Sexism exists out in the world with voters and in this room. But Harris did not lose because she was a woman. If you look at white non-college women, they moved four points to the left. More of them voted for Harris than voted for Biden.”

The obstacle she identified is upstream of the electorate.

“The real problem with women getting elected is not the voters. It is the gatekeepers, the donors who don’t invest in women early because they’re asking this question: can a woman win?”

Check the strength box, then talk about affordability.

Payne’s framework was the most portable thing on the panel. Strength isn’t the message, but it’s something Democrats want to hear from Democrats before they listen to the rest of the message.

“What has been going on with Spanberger and Slotkin and Sherrill, they are using their military backgrounds to check the box. You can trust that I’m strong enough. And when that box is checked, voters turn to: now, are you going to focus on affordability? Do you care about me? And are you competent enough to get things done?”

Kamarck took the same logic to the presidency, which she argued is a different office than any other Democrats run for.

“The first female president of the United States will be a decorated combat veteran. Decorated combat veteran. Because nothing short of that gets you past the notion that women are not strong. The presidency is different because it’s not just strength in the American context, it’s strength in the entire world.”

One thing to get right.

McCammon closed by asking each panelist for the one thing a 2028 woman nominee has to get right.

Payne: “Focus on affordability and say you’re against corruption. That’s who’s going to win.”

Kamarck: “Be strong.”

Carville: “I’m not a criminal.”

At WelcomeFest, political scientist Ruy Teixeira opened up their panel by laying out the hole they were climbing out of, and neither of them argued with the premise. But they also presented a simple formula for winning: breaking from their party when the party broke from their voters.

The numbers behind the question.

“If you look back to the high point of 2012, the Democratic margin has literally been cut in half among non-white working class voters, from 64 to 32 points. That’s an extremely heavy decline.”

Add the Hispanic margin falling by half to two-thirds depending on the data source, a Black vote decline concentrated among men and voters under 45, and a youth vote that collapsed. Vasquez and Davis prevailed anyway.

“They just want to be heard.”

Vasquez started by refusing the national frame. His answer to why Democrats lost ground with Latino voters is that there is no such thing as the Latino voter, not even inside one district.

“The Latino vote is not uniform. Even in a district like mine, because it is so big and because the lifestyles and the economies and the issues are so vastly different, the Hispanic community thinks much differently about politics in the southeast than they do in the southwest, in Albuquerque than they do on the border.”

His district runs from Bracero-program families who came in the 1960s, to sixth and seventh generation families from Spanish land grants, to a majority-Hispanic oil and gas workforce. What connects them is not ideology.

“That’s why doing things like hosting carne asadas at the park, regardless of what area I’m talking about, people will show up for that, because it’s a non-threatening, non-political space that’s part of one of our cultural traditions, and it allows people to open up and listen.”

He ran Spanish-language radio, TV, and digital. He outperformed every statewide candidate in his district. And he was blunt about what the ticket-splitters were telling him.

“When you ask folks in the district why did you vote for Trump and why did you also vote for Vasquez, the unifying link there is the economy.”

“The party has left me.”

Davis hears one sentence more than any other in eastern North Carolina.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the party has left me. That’s what I hear.”

North Carolina Republicans have been touting the collapse in Democratic registration. Davis reads the same data differently, and his read is the more useful one.

“Perhaps there’s a turnoff on the Democratic brand. But at the same time, if the independent numbers are increasing, they’re not sold on the Republican brand either. So people are sitting here saying, I’m going to just look at the person, the candidate, and try to figure out the ballot.”

That is the whole Welcome thesis in a registration table. The voters splitting between Donald Trump and Donald Davis are not looking for a party. They are looking for a person.

Trump won the economic argument. Davis says so out loud.

He told the story of a young Black truck driver he met knocking doors, who was with him and not with the top of the ticket.

“I asked the question, why would you not be interested in supporting Harris? He said, I’m concerned about my pocket, my wallet.”

Then the part Democrats keep skipping.

“If you couple some social issues and sprinkle on top of perhaps not winning the economic argument, the affordability argument, at the same time we’re trying to convince everyone that it’s not really an issue, then people begin to question and have doubt.”

The problem was not only that Democrats lost the affordability argument. It was that they spent a year telling voters there wasn’t one.

Presence is a strategy, not a courtesy.

Davis’s second answer was simply showing up, in all 22 counties, on purpose, repeatedly.

“In eastern North Carolina, people feel left out and forgotten. They feel that if they get a chance to see an elected official, it’s only around election time, and after the election is over, they will likely never see this person again.”

And knowing the specifics. When Martin General Hospital closed, it wasn’t one community losing a building.

“You’re talking a $30 million economic impact in a small rural community, nearly 300 jobs on the line. People for years, their families may have worked at the hospital. And more important, if they get sick, it’s not just easy to go down the street.”

Four out of a hundred.

The most alarming number of the panel wasn’t electoral. North Carolina keeps getting ranked the best state in the country to do business. Davis pointed out that east of I-95, where most of his district sits, would rank worst if it were its own state. Two-thirds of the state’s growth is happening in two of its 100 counties.

So he asked a room of about 100 early-college students how many planned to come back home after school or the military.

“Four. Four. We have to truly help our young people in eastern North Carolina realize that they can live the American dream and stay home. It’s one thing to leave because you want to leave. It’s another thing to feel that you have no other choice but to leave.”

The grandmother test on immigration.

Asked whether talking economics was enough to clear the trust deficit, Vasquez went straight at the issue his colleagues avoid. His mother naturalized through an employer-sponsored visa. His grandmother waited 16 years for a family visa.

“She did it the right way. Now imagine a wave of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers at the border who are getting placed in places across the country, receiving work authorization and stipends, and how that makes somebody like my grandma feel.”

“That’s one of the things that many of my colleagues in D.C. don’t understand on immigration, when they assume that all Latinos have this very progressive view. In my district I talk to them about why the Mexican American population was pissed off at Biden’s policies, why they didn’t think it was fair. They felt cheated, and we had to address that.”

He was equally direct that the current enforcement regime is cruel and that voters reject it too. His point is that opposing ICE is not a position on immigration.

“The Democratic Caucus has to be more comfortable with acknowledging one, that we have borders, and two, that there are right ways to achieve a level of border security that Americans are comfortable with.”

For Vasquez that means technology at ports of entry, where the overwhelming share of drugs, human smuggling, and counterfeit goods actually move. He chairs the New Dems’ Border Security and Immigration Task Force, and he described building the plan as filling a void.

“Not only are we going to oppose ICE, not only are we going to oppose the draconian tactics of this administration, but we’re going to provide a sensible alternative, which the majority of Americans actually want to see. A legal, a fair, a just system that includes border security and that includes fairness to the American worker.”

The complacency problem.

Teixeira pressed the obvious 2026 question. Hispanic voters are snapping back, Black voters are snapping back, young voters are snapping back, and Democrats are poised to do well. Isn’t all of that thermostatic, and doesn’t it let the party skip the work?

Davis answered with the distinction he keeps returning to.

“If we totally lead to the fear and have no answer, what happens? You’ve relied on the fear. Everybody’s afraid of Trump and what’s going to happen, but then you go into the majority and you have no agenda, no clear purpose. Where is that taking you in the long term?”

Vasquez’s version was operational. He said the incoming majority needs bipartisan wins, not revenge, and that he’s already working with Greg Casar on a shared economic agenda rather than waiting to fight over pre-cooked bills.

“Rather than having pre-cooked proposals and then battling over them, and then going on TV and arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong.”

Then the line to end on.

“What voters are most frustrated with, and why we have such a low approval in Congress, is because the things that we need to get done never get done around here. That’s how we reach the median voter. They need to see that Democrats are going to be the party of action, not the party of talking heads.”

He currently frames his preferences around “civic abundance.” His definition: “abundance for normies, abundance for people who represent normal, middle-class, mostly suburban people in politically competitive places.”

His challenge to the panel was more blunt: democratic socialists are taking power inside the party, and the response should be to learn from them (see our Centrist School series). While it’s true that democratic socialists are taking power, it’s not clear that their pie-in-the-sky solutions are better than incremental bite-sized solutions. After all, a failed pie-in-the-sky attempt to pass single-payer in Vermont led to the state’s voters picking a Republican Governor.

Teles and Rep. George Whitesides (who flipped California’s 27th in 2024), Rep. Janelle Bynum (who flipped Oregon’s 5th the same year), and Brianna Johnson of Inclusive Abundance discussed the future of Abundance and the factional fight in the Democratic Party.

Teles on the scale problem:

Democratic socialists, whatever their flaws, and they’re many, are at least proposing solutions at the scale of the problems faced by the United States, while moderates seem attracted to incremental, bite-sized solutions that seem so much smaller than our problems. Faced with a 10-foot climb, we always seem to only propose a five-foot ladder.

Whitesides answered with a number: take the roughly $100 billion being spent on the Iran war and build houses with it instead:

Imagine if we could take $100 billion and split it into two pieces. $50 billion of which we do advance purchase commitments for factory-built modular housing. That would jumpstart that industry and would potentially be a pathway towards radically decreasing the cost of housing in America. The second thing would be to put $50 or $100 billion in a construction finance facility through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, at a low interest rate, which is a key part of the problem in building in America. Each of those things could catalyze, I estimate, half a million to a million units every two years. So over the course of the next decade, we could produce five or 10 million units, which is roughly the order of the problem that we have.

Johnson noted the socialists are already borrowing the playbook:

Even if democratic socialists and progressives are doing it under that banner, they are increasingly taking up Abundance proposals. Mayor Mamdani just released a housing plan, which was very Abundance-y. It was very supply oriented; it had permitting reform and zoning reform. I don’t think we should be so upset that we are losing power if the democratic socialists are increasingly taking our ideas.

Bynum answered the institutions question as a mom of four with a DSA daughter, a son with a MAGA hat under the bed, and a mother who calls every day:

I always ask every room: how many of you have kids who are still on the family plan? See, people are still on the family plan. The economics are still there. I still have that kid coming home every week. She was just home on Sunday with a whole shopping bag, going through my pantry, getting toilet paper, paper towels, crackers, lunch for the week. She’s in grad school. We call her Free 99 when she comes through the door. And then I’m seeing it on the other end, where my mother’s telling me our generation has too much real estate property, and that is one reason why young people can’t even pick off the market what they need. So the question about DSA, and any other philosophy around here, is a matter of: can you be practical, and can you understand what is actually happening in American homes?

Bynum on wins versus ideals:

We don’t defend the institution for the institution’s sake; we defend the institution because it provides some level of stability. And the people will defend the institution if it’s working for them. If it’s not, they’ll tell you. When I call Social Security and I have to wait 40, 50 minutes, or I never get an answer, they’re telling you it’s broken. I would argue this: 100% of nothing is nothing, and 50% of a million is half a million. So do you want the win, or do you want the ideal? I want to take the win, because I need the win to continue moving on.

Whitesides on mission versus process, from a former space industry executive:

We are not output focused in what we do in Congress. We do not say: right now we have to create 5 million homes in America in the next four years, or 100 gigawatts of power production. What we would do in the space industry is decompose that. In order to achieve that, we need this amount of housing produced per year, these are the ways we produce housing, and it has to cost this much less. That is a fundamental shift in how we would think about governance in this country.

What the American public is so hungry for is a collection of public servants who are going to be focused on getting something done rather than following process or rules. When they see the system start to effect change, it starts this dynamic positive cycle of greater engagement, because they see: my schools are getting a little bit better now, or there is housing being produced.

Bynum, asked why moderates won’t run as a pack, declined the premise:

Moderates are people who think of themselves as individuals. I have my own mind. I might be with you on one issue, I might not be with you on a different issue. I’ve never felt safe running with the pack. I don’t want somebody that’s shaped by their group and is afraid to step out of their group, because that group will eat its own.

Johnson’s counter: moderates don’t need a faction, they need cover:

Before this job I was communications director for Governor Laura Kelly of Kansas, and we had to break with the party all the time in order to win. What’s great about a place like Welcome, or Searchlight, or The Bench, or Third Way, is providing cover to Democrats who need to run with the party but take positions that are different from Democratic norms. Talarico just embraced oil and gas. That’s not a standard Democratic position, but very necessary to win in Texas. It would be helpful if more groups provided that cover, pushing against the interest groups that tend to push the party to the left in a way that is unhelpful for winning elections.

Whitesides closed with the frame he wants the next nominee to pick up:

We win the presidency with great ideas. Part of the purpose of this group is to develop the armory of great ideas that will be picked up by the next Democratic nominee. There’s this interesting idea of “strong floor, no ceiling.” We’re going to have a social safety net, but we’re going to encourage Americans to succeed beyond their wildest dreams. That is an idea that appeals to people in a way that is different than what the left side of our party is selling.

Now is one of those times. And people want to know what they can do right now.

The next major election is July 21 in Arizona. And the clearest investment for impact is Marlene Galán-Woods, who will give Democrats the best opportunity in a recently-opened district.

Support Marlene Galán-Woods

Arizona’s 1st congressional district is one of the best pick-up opportunities anywhere in the country this cycle. It’s an open seat and considered a toss-up by every ratings agency.

It also has an independent streak: in 2024, it voted for Trump by 3 points while Sen. Ruben Gallego won it by 5 points.

And Marlene matches that independent streak: the daughter of Cuban refugees who fled communism, Marlene spent decades as a broadcast journalist known for exposing corruption and holding leaders accountable. Her late husband, Grant Woods, served as Arizona's Attorney General — as a Republican. If elected, she'd be the first Latina to represent Arizona's 1st congressional district in Congress.

Marlene has what it takes to win this district. She recently signed the Promise to America, staking her campaign on a results-focused brand of politics that’s needed to win in a purple district like this one. That shows in her endorsements - the New Dems endorsed her last week:

"Marlene is battle-tested and laser-focused on lowering costs, the exact kind of person who flips and holds this tough seat," said Rep. Kim Schrier (WA-08). "House Republicans spent last year raising costs and gutting health care to hand tax breaks to the wealthy. Marlene is running to make them answer for it, and to deliver the majority in November."

Days ago, Senator Mark Kelly endorsed her as the strongest general election candidate in this field. She needs support now - give here.

Support Marlene Galán-Woods

The last line of her press releases notes Marlene is running for Congress to stand up to extremists. Let’s stand with her in doing that.

The Strategy

The strategy is simple: if you can pick your opponent, do it. Republicans identified Democratic primary candidates they viewed as weaker general election nominees (typically those who were too progressive for their district) and spent significant money to put them over the top. They did so because they were scared to face the Democrats who they viewed as harder to beat in November.

The record is mixed. Lead Left spent over $1 million trying to defeat Sheriff’s Deputy Johnny Garcia by boosting Maureen Galindo, a sex therapist who had made antisemitic comments online in Texas’ 35th District. Garcia ended up winning handily anyway.

Real Change burned through $650,000 trying to sink Rebecca Bennett in New Jersey’s 7th, and she advanced convincingly out of a crowded primary.

But in the two districts that matter most to the House majority math, Republicans picked the winners, making it harder for Democrats to win in November.

Maine 2

When Jared Golden announced his retirement, I was in the middle of drafting a piece titled: “A vote for Matt Dunlap is a vote for Paul LePage.” I shelved it, thinking it was no longer necessary and assuming the field would sort itself out. I was wrong.

Maine’s Second was going to be difficult for any Democrat not named Jared Golden. Golden is a former Marine who voted against Biden’s stimulus, built a decade-long brand as the most independent Democrat in the House, and still nearly lost in 2024 in a district Trump carried by 9 points. It takes a special Democrat to be able to compete and win in a district like Maine’s 2nd.

Dunlap is not that. He ran an unabashedly progressive campaign, including supporting Medicare for All, featuring Bernie Sanders in his ads, and rallying alongside embattled Senate nominee Graham Platner. NRCC polling from May showed LePage leading Dunlap by 10 points. Not the type of resume that can win a Trump +9 district. Republicans knew that as well.

Joe Baldacci was viewed as the strongest Democrat in the race and was added to the DCCC’s Red to Blue list. Baldacci is a state senator who served as mayor of Bangor twice. He is a self-described “independent-minded Democrat” who “worked with Republicans or independents to get legislation passed”. He’s the type of Democrat who could keep this tough seat on the board for Democrats. The Republicans sensed an opportunity to pick their candidate, and they pounced. Real Change PAC, another pop-up GOP-backed PAC, spent over $500,000 boosting Dunlap and attacking Baldacci. A senior House Democrat told Axios the seat is “probably lost.”

California 22

In one of the cycle’s most contentious primaries, Republicans were not even trying to hide their meddling. The Congressional Leadership Fund openly spent $250k to boost far-left progressive Randy Villegas over the more moderate candidate, Dr. Jasmeet Bains, in California 22.

Bains is a state assembly member in a district that is almost entirely within CA-22. In 2024, Bains outran Kamala Harris by 15 points, and was clearly the candidate that Republicans were the most scared of. Villegas had the backing of the Working Families Party, Bernie Sanders, David Hogg and CLF (the Super PAC aligned with GOP leadership), all of whom spent serious money to get Villegas over the finish line.

The incumbent Republican, David Valadao, is one of the most vulnerable incumbents this cycle, and Republicans pounced on the opportunity to pick their preferred candidate. They sent text messages to Democratic voters touting AOC’s endorsement of Villegas in an effort to improve his standing with Democrats in the district. Their reasoning makes sense: when given the choice to run against a double-digit overperformer with moderate views or a progressive with views that are out of touch with a purple district, you choose the far-left guy who doesn’t even live in the district 10 times out of 10.

Far Left Teams Up With Republicans

In May, Liam Kerr wrote about this dynamic, warning that “Speaker Mike Johnson can read the Villegas website just as easily as David Hogg can, and both are doing something eerily similar.”

Ironically, the story is unchanged from the original forms of scheming pioneered by Nixon’s aides in the run-up to the 1972 election. Their tactics, pioneered by Nixon aides like Donald Segretti, included stealing stationery from Democratic candidate Edmund Muskie's campaign and forging a letter accusing his opponent "Scoop" Jackson of fathering an illegitimate child with a teenager. All of the Nixon antics were focused on candidates like Muskie, Scoop Jackson and Hubert Humphrey. McGovern was the only Democratic candidate spared because Nixon’s team (correctly) believed his extremely liberal positions would alienate the electorate.

While the Republican Party’s tactics have changed, the goal is the same: nominate candidates too extreme to win a general election. Republicans have shown us who they are scared of. It’s up to Democrats to pick the candidates who can win.

This strategy was slightly different in these districts, but the outcome was the same. In Maine, the dark money did the work and stayed invisible until after the primary. In California, Republicans openly meddled. Either way, the far left and Republicans ended up supporting and electing the same Democratic nominees. In both cases, it was the nominee Republicans most wanted to face in November.

Dunlap and Villegas are not necessarily lost causes for 2026. However, both seats will be harder to win now, and the party and outside groups will need to spend more money than they likely would have had to. If ME-02 flips and CA-22 stays in Republican control, the overall House math becomes much tighter.

Republicans spent money to make this happen. The far left spent money to make this happen. And now Democrats are heading into November in both districts with the candidates their opponents picked for them.

That Democratic optimism is from Graham Platner withdrawing from the Senate race. Which he has to do by Monday at 5pm. But has not done yet. At 8pm Wednesday, Graham Platner released a fiery 11 minute video. He reportedly demanded to post the video in exchange for acquiescing to his advisors’ calls to drop out (the man has leverage on everyone!). He rejected their calls for him to be gracious in the video.

It may have been “tense” but it was not the “final hours.” Thursday afternoon, reported Platner had not filed his withdrawal with the Secretary of State yet.

He is in fact waiting until the last possible time: “Graham Platner privately told staff that he is planning to officially file paperwork to end his Senate campaign on Monday — the drop-dead deadline for him to exit the race.

Bellows was endorsed for governor by The Maine People’s Alliance, a state-based progressive umbrella group. It is structured like the the groups we covered in Centrist School on the entrepreneurial ecosystem pushing Democrats far to the left. Maine People’s Alliance is one such hub for “The Movement” that the Platner camp keeps talking about. The umbrella group raises and spends millions of dollars each year, with funding from Soros and others - including a recent $600,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and $500,000 from the federal government for “a community-led program to invest in the workforce development necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” This isn’t hidden stuff. You can find it in public databases on the Inflation Reduction Act or the Ford Foundation grantee database:

You can see a copy of their candidate questionnaire here, which includes decriminalizing drug possession.

Read more

1. Graham Platner’s mother told me two disturbing things the night of his campaign launch last August. The first was that she was part of an effort to “blank Jared Golden” in November 2024.

   By voting for Kamala Harris, but not for Jared Golden, a small group of leftwing activists in Maine’s 2nd congressional district were deploying a type of Factional Total Warfare, dubbed Murder-Suicide Politics by .

2. Jared Golden won more than 25,000 Trump voters en route to victory in a district Trump won by 10 points. makes the Golden for Senate case succinctly, saying Mainers should Replace Platner with a Man of Honor.

   “He is everything that Platner is not, starting with humble—which is why you may not know his name. He’s not a presence on cable news; he’s not at all flashy. I’ve not interviewed him, not even off the record, though I’ve tried …. But I’ve heard him speak, movingly, about his service and his fallen comrades. I’m also aware of his courage and moral rigor … He has been a splendid member of Congress. He would be a splendid Senator. His family runs a modest public golf course in Maine; he claims he is retiring to service the fairways and greens.

   I’ve got a better idea: Serve us.”

   Amen to that.

3. It has been 48 hours since the Politico story posted on Monday, causing all major Platner supporters to rescind their endorsement. But Platner has not dropped out, and the Maine Democratic Party has confirmed reporting that Platner is using his leverage to influence the selection of a nominee:

   

4. Platner’s leverage is real: according to Maine law, he cannot be forced out and must voluntarily withdraw by 5pm on Monday July 13.

5. The day after Maine’s June 9th primary, The Boston Globe published my op-ed making the case for Maine Democrats to prepare a write-in campaign in advance of the August 25 deadline.

   This is outside the bounds of what I’d normally do. But it was clear that this campaign was a ticking time bomb. It could have exploded after the July 13 deadline to be replaced, but before the August 25 deadline for a write-in to declare.

   Or it could have exploded after that deadline.

   But it was going to explode before the November election.

   

6. Many leading Democratic operatives and pundits are claiming that Platner has no leverage. That is a tragic misreading of the situation, of Platner, and of Total Factional Warfare Left.

   Not only does Platner have significant formal leverage - he’s literally the only person who can trigger the process to pick a nominee - he has significant informal leverage, and an army with a proven track record of prioritizing beating ‘the establishment’ over beating Republicans.

   And they are hard at work - just in the last few hours, it was reported that his campaign is polling replacements, and also that the campaign is doing a survey of their volunteers (would be a shame if you filled it out with a fun fake name).

7. Most Democrats and anti-MAGA Americans assume they share a ‘Big Tent’ with the left, where the main goal is beating Republicans. This is a mirage.

   It is difficult to comprehend that so many people who say they’re “fighting” Republicans are in fact helping Republicans. As notes:

   “Anti-MAGA Trump-focused resistance types keep getting played for suckers by hard-left factionalists who don’t actually care about beating Republicans” … “it’s the hard left that is taking advantage of the Democratic Party’s current weakened state to advance all-out factional warfare as their top priority, above fighting Trump.”

8. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and their affiliated organizations may have rescinded their endorsements of Platner, but they appear all-in on dragging out the factional war. said it well:

   

9. Platner also has a significant stake in the how this ends. According to Axios, “As of May 20, Platner's campaign had spent over $14 million. Much of it went to LLCs with little public information.”

   He is running a massive business, has an email list in the millions, and is positioned to flip the campaign assets into any number of businesses in new media or advocacy.

10. Back to the ‘blank Jared Golden’ thing … you think someone who would work to deliver a House seat to Republicans in 2024 wouldn’t use a Senate nomination as leverage?

    After leaving Ironbound, the Platner family restaurant, the night of his announcement, I sat in my car for a half-hour in the drive-thru lane of a closed Dunkin’ Donuts in Ellsworth to use the WiFi.

    It felt like I’d hallucinated. Or seen a ghost. Platner was incredibly charismatic, but also incredibly scary.

    After about 45 seconds of talking to Graham, it felt like a connecting moment with an old college friend. We were joking about the GAA All-Ireland football final - already had an inside joke! This guy is smart and fun and engaging!

    45 minutes later, I was sitting in my car staring into the clear, dark Maine sky struggling to adequately describe the encounter to colleagues.

    In the preceding years, I’d met more than 100 candidates. None made me so disturbed. He seemed like a narcissistic sociopath with enough talent - and enough talent around him - to pull the thing off.

    Yesterday, I half-jokingly asked AI about one of the many “Platner has no leverage” statements out there:

    

11. In recent hours, Platner’s key advisor flew up from New York to discuss his withdrawal. But, according to The Washington Post, Platner “has struggled with the decision … and has said he would like input on the replacement process, leaving the timing of any announcement unclear.” … “It is him who is wanting to hold on … He is having to come to terms that his dream is dead.”

12. People who previously defended Platner have sought to cast some of the blame on Schumer, or to simply claim that Platner “lied” to them. But as points out, it was OBVIOUS many weeks ago (and imo months ago) what you were signing up for.

    

13. They are right to blame us centrists, though. At 10:58pm that night, from the Dunkin’ drive-thru, I published this post on political parties becoming “unbundled.” Here’s the key quote, from :

    “So often people have blamed the most conservative Republicans and most progressive Democrats for creating the conditions where it is hard to govern. But in the logic of unbundled parties, it’s the moderates and the party establishments who haven’t figured out how to work in this new world. It could well be that the way to make political parties strong (again?) is through stronger factions and more politics.”

14. I feel awful. This is serious shit. This is not “I told you so” for fun, or even “we have to talk about it to learn from it.”

    This is “we knew and haven’t built enough to fix it”.

    There’s nothing worse than half-assing something important. Which I feel like we did. In the fall, I had a brief conversation with Janet Mills to encourage her to debate Platner early. In the spring, I briefly tried and failed to get a candidate to run as an Independent and caucus with Democrats (as Maine’s other Senator does). And readied that Boston Globe op-ed. Classic centrist stuff.

    Things are very different on the left, as wrote about the recruiter of Platner: “To use a term popular with the Silicon Valley types whom he doubtless hates, he is high agency. He saw a void and moved into it.”

    We have high agency … sometimes. In small batches. But nowhere near enough.

15. It really is delusional to think we can just try to beat Republicans and be effective simply coexisting in a “Big Tent” with these people, as they take potshots all day with little pushback.

    There’s nothing we can do to kick them out, even if we wanted to. So in a way, we must accept the Big Tent premise (despite its changing definition). But the course we’re on will lead to losing to the Total Factional Warfare Left AND increase our odds of losing to MAGA. We can’t give up the tent, or give in to its current dynamics.

16. Moderates are typically risk-averse. Slow to use leverage. And it is costing not only our faction but our party and our country.

    More than five years ago, in NBC News, I wrote that Democrats cannot afford to take the risks progressives can:

    

    Democratic primary voters nominated Joe Biden, whose moderate brand led them to see him as the most electable candidate — a view confirmed by general election voters, which allowed Democrats to reclaim the White House.

    Meanwhile, a small but vocal group on the far left has differentiated itself not only through electorally questionable dogmatism, but also through Silicon Valley-like disruption that embraces risk: “Move fast and break things.” Except it isn’t looking to disrupt business models and consumer goods, but the Democratic Party.

    In just a few short years, an interlocking group of political entrepreneurs has launched more than a half-dozen related nonprofits, PACs, LLCs, think tanks and polling outfits aimed at mounting primary challenges against mainstream House and Senate Democrats and influencing local races. As outlined in their “Future of the Party“ report, they believe the Democratic Party “simply cannot move to the center” on policies and must win without the “mushy middle.”

17. Five years later, the inverse is true. We need to take more risks to match the arsonists in the tent.

    As I was walking out of the Ironbound restaurant, his mom was standing at the door. She had one last comment: “You know, he’ll be president one day.”

    Graham Platner won’t be president. But another risk-taker will. And if we keep playing it safe, the whole party will blow up.

Successful Democrats have always been patriotic. While Democrats have never been shy about calling out the limitations of America, they always do so by pairing their love for the virtues of the nation with the duty that Americans have to improve it.

On July 4th, 1941, Fiorello LaGuardia organized President Franklin D. Roosevelt to give a patriotic address to the nation in which he shared “It is simple -- I could almost say simpleminded -- for us Americans to wave the flag, to reassert our belief in the cause of freedom, and let it go at that.” For Roosevelt, the formation of the nation on the four freedoms in 1776 was one of the most important events in human history, and one that was worth contemporary American sacrifice to preserve and advance.

At the 50th anniversary of the Selma march, President Obama said, “What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?” President Obama grounds his progressive values in a deep patriotism. President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural rang with a similar call, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

Even the modern progressive left has rooted its politics in American pride. On his fight oligarchy tour, Bernie Sanders specifically rooted his critique of Trump in the language of patriotism and Constitution, “Hey Mr. Trump, people fought and died to create a Democratic society. You’re not going to take it away from us. Hey Mr. President, turn off Fox TV and take a few minutes to read the Constitution of the United States.”

Democratic politicians have long understood that the story of America is not complete, and part of patriotism is building it.

But the new strain of the left is explicitly anti-America, calling America a colonialist, imperialist county. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who recently unseated Adriano Espaillat, tweeted, “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me :)”. Melat Kiros, the DSA candidate who defeated Diana Degette in Colorado suggested the that 9/11 was the “inevitable” response to U.S. foreign policy.

Sadly, they speak for a broader portion of the Democratic base, only 14% of whom are “extremely” proud to be an American. This stance puts Democrats at odds with the broader electorate:

When combining “extremely proud” and “very proud” responses, 93% of Republicans express high levels of pride, compared with 51% of independents and 27% of Democrats, both record lows for their respective groups.

As Congressman Tom Suozzi shared at WelcomeFest this year, “America is the greatest country in the world.”

Suozzi recently echoed these remarks in the Wall Street Journal, urging Democrats to show their love for America:

Patriotism doesn’t ask us to whitewash the country’s shortcomings. It requires us to confront them honestly while recognizing that our Constitution, our democratic institutions and generations of courageous citizens have given us the ability to correct our mistakes.

Democrats have long believed that America is great not because it is perfect, but because it has the capacity to become better. We must reclaim the language of patriotism, because our history teaches us the most American thing any of us can do is help our great nation live up to the ideals charted by our Founders 250 years ago: liberty, equality, democracy and the rule of law

A group of Democrats are making a specific effort to change the course and reaffirm their party’s love for their country. You have probably seen the news about the The Promise to America, which gathered millions of views in the last week in pieces like the Washington Post’s “After wins by democratic socialists, centrist Democrats unite to push back” and the New York Times’s “Centrist Democrats Rebuke Party’s Left Wing: ‘We Are Capitalist, Not Socialist’.” Fifteen federal candidates and members launched the Promise and hundreds so far have signed, you can sign here. The Promise to America put “confident patriotism and national renewal” at the heart of its agenda to declare what the party should stand for. The Promise is explicit in its disavowal of those on the left and the right that choose to turn their backs on the values that have driven American success when it states that signers “are proud, not ashamed of America.”

The Promise to America understands that most Americans have their own identity wrapped up in their nation’s identity and success. As Promise signer Bobby Pulido put it, “For too long, Democrats have lost entire communities and regions of this country by failing to speak their language. The Promise to America is a commitment to change that by showing up everywhere, speaking to everyone, and earning back the trust of voters who feel left behind.”

Importantly, the Promise does not whitewash and turn a blind eye to the shortcomings of our nation. It fully recognizes many of the nation’s shortcomings and at times ugly past -- it uses them as the basis for the work that Americans are called to do every day: “We believe America’s story is one of extraordinary achievement and unfinished work. We honor America’s strengths and exceptional character while striving to build a freer, stronger, more prosperous, and more perfect union.” A stronger America that lives up to its values is the North Star for the group. It’s the opposite of Chevalier’s position: the Promise to America revitalizes a love for America discarded as trash by the extremists.

Christina ran for Congress in 2022 in a previous iteration of the district
and went back for a rematch against Miller-Meeks in 2024. Christina lost that race by just 798 votes, the second-closest race in the country.

In her 2024 congressional campaign, Bohannan made a point to meet constituents in rural areas where voters had not seen or heard from Democrats in years. She was also able to differentiate herself by opposing Democratic policies that were not popular among voters like student loan debt cancellation and calling on President Biden to drop out of the race. This helped her achieve the strongest over-performance of any other Democratic challenger in the country, outperforming Harris by 8.2% and running 11.3 points ahead of a generic Democrat in her district.

All of this has put her in a great position to flip this crucial seat for her rematch against Miller-Meeks in 2026.

Iowa-1 has a Cook PVI of R+4, and Trump won the district by 8 points in 2024.
The district is on the DCCC's Red to Blue list.

You can watch the episode here.

Christina and I had a dynamic conversation where she shed light on the specific ways she differentiates from the traditional Democrat to earn trust in this conservative-leaning district. She emphasized the importance of independent-mindedness, bipartisanship, and diversity in thought as an elected leader:

We need to elect people who are independent-minded and in the middle — People who are trying to work with both parties to get things done and who are not constantly beholden to what their party leaders are telling them to do, or what the special interests or what the donors are telling them to do… The fact is that when you have representatives who are just taking tons of money from corporate PACs and special interests and from their very wealthy and influential donors, then that’s who they’re listening to. They’re not focused on the people right there in their district. And I think this is what has happened with Miller-Meeks… She’s become so entrenched in the Washington, D.C. bubble, listening to the people in her own party, and shutting out all other voices and her constituents. I don’t think she knows anymore what this district needs.

Christina also spoke about why supporting and listening to Democrats running in competitive and conservative districts is so important, particularly for the party overall, and how she feels privileged to be running in a swing district like hers.

I think it’s critical that we elect Democrats from very difficult districts for a number of reasons. What I would say to my friends in these safe Democratic districts who might want to take further left positions is if you want to win the majority and do anything for people, we’ve got to win my seat. So don’t tell me what we need to do here. You should be listening to what we’re hearing in these kinds of districts because these are the swing districts that are really going to make the difference.

I’m not running to make big statements and comment on the latest social media thing or make these far sweeping statements about different issues. I want to win this election so that I can actually do some real good for the people of Iowa. That’s why I’m in this. So we have to think about why the national Democratic brand has become so unpopular and so toxic. If we ever want to do anything for people again, that’s something that we really have to reckon with, and we have to have those tough conversations within our party…

And I will be honest and say I wouldn’t want my district to be a safe D district. I would not choose that. Because this is really more the heart of the country. This is the middle. It’s a little right-leaning right now, but it went for Obama twice. This is a classic swing district. This is where most Americans are. And I feel extremely privileged to be running in a district like that because I feel like we get more at the truth because we can see both sides of every argument. We can see how it’s affecting people, and we can see where most people really are.

I don’t want to be in a district that’s a bubble that doesn’t really reflect the entire country. I don’t want this to be a safe district or to be a super left-leaning district. I just want to meet you where you are and hear what’s happening in your daily life and see how I can help to make that better. And I think that that breaks down a lot of barriers. And I’ve heard from Marie [Gluesenkamp Perez]. She says something along the same lines that we don’t want to be judgmental and condescending, right? We need to start with respect. So I just feel a tremendous sense of honor and privilege that I have the opportunity to run in a district like this one. And I wouldn’t change it one bit.”

Finally, I asked Christina why so many Democrats who get elected to Congress fail to remain true to their values and their constituents when they’re elected, and how she plans to govern if elected:

I think a lot of people go to Congress with good intentions and then they get there and it’s just way harder in these interpersonal ways than they expect, even within their own caucuses…. When you’re talking with your caucus… that gives you strength as a member to go in and say, “No, let me tell you about my district. Let me tell you about what is happening there.” If you don’t have those stories, if you don’t have that knowledge about your own district, then you can’t fight for them… And, frankly, the other piece is just confidence. You’ve got to be confident in your beliefs and in your abilities. You can’t get bullied or intimidated by your party leaders or lobbyists or the corporate PACs or special interests. Sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, I need you to sign on to this thing.” And I’m like, “No, I’m not doing that.” We have some special interest groups who want you to sign on to all of these crazy positions and things and you just have to say no.

And sometimes that’s hard when it’s a big name national group that you were fully expecting to endorse you and then it turns out that they want you to say things that are just not consistent with the people of your district. You have to have the confidence and the courage to say “No, I’m not doing that,” and to stand up to the people…

We have to have confidence that what we’re doing is right and not allow ourselves to be intimidated or bullied or told that you’re a bad person because you’re not supporting this bill or that bill or whatever. We have to be willing to just stand up and say, “Look, I know my district, I know my people, and this is not the right thing for my district.”

Christina is part of Welcome’s Win the Middle slate for the 2026 election cycle. You can support her race here.

Alongside Felix Frisch and the Promise to America fellows, a team of seven college students frustrated with the state of the party, Gray and Suozzi became the first signatories of the “Promise to America,” a set of plainspoken principles built around economic security, a government that works, fiscal discipline, and patriotism.

Since WelcomeFest, eight additional Members of Congress and five candidates for Congress have signed the Promise to America. The team of fellows has tabled the Promise outside of a farmers market in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and met with countless state legislators from around the country. The Promise has been featured on Fox and Friends, The Washington Post, and a mix of local and state networks.

From The Washington Post:

The group says centrist Democrats need to assert their own vision for the party as forcefully and effectively as the left.

“We’re seeing a lot of results from the country from the far left and the far right, and they’re organized. I mean, you have to give them credit,” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) said. But “that kind of campaign and that type of ideology is not going to play with the people in our districts.”

As Yglesias put it, these are the people actually winning in the seats Democrats need: “If people in the world want takes on how Democrats can win, they should be listening to the people who are winning in these kinds of seats.” The Promise to America is a call for moderate over-performers to organize and articulate their vision for policy.

Tom Suozzi on why “capitalists, not socialists” shouldn’t be a controversial thing for a Democrat to say:

Capitalism is the most successful economic system in the history of the world. It’s lifted more people out of poverty, created more innovation, done more to make people’s lives better than any other economic system. Socialism has failed and has also resulted in a lot of authoritarianism throughout the world.

Zohran Mamdani and the MAGA movement, Donald Trump, they did a good job of feeding into people’s economic insecurity. They correctly diagnosed the problem, they just have bad solutions. Adam and I, who consider ourselves good Democrats, believe that economic insecurity and people’s concern about their financial health is very real. We’ve created an enormous amount of wealth in our country in the past 50 years. The problem is that wealth has not been shared with the people who go to work every day. We have to get back to a place, as Democrats, where if you’re willing to go to work every day and work hard, in return you make enough money to buy a house, educate your kids, pay for health insurance, and retire without being scared.

Adam Gray on the “inauthentic word salad” that holds Democrats back:

We’re capitalists. That shouldn’t be a bold statement. This is the greatest democracy on the planet, and we’ve had many great successes that have not only made our lives better, they’ve made lives around the world better. People shouldn’t be afraid to just say that.

Too often our Democratic colleagues, whether they’re in a rural part of California where I’m at, or in New York where Tom’s at, or anywhere in between, there’s just this kind of inauthentic word salad. I’m afraid to say this, I’m afraid to say that, I can’t use this word, I have to parse that word. One of the important parts of this promise is to say we’re just going to speak clearly and plainly.

Gray on why “a government that works” is the part populists miss:

People don’t experience politics through white papers or conventions. People experience politics when they’re on hold trying to get a health care procedure approved, when they’re in line trying to get a permit or a license or a service. Government exists to make us safe, but it also exists to make our lives better, to make things easier.

In the private sector, when things get more expensive, they oftentimes get better. You could stay at the Holiday Inn, or you could stay at the Ritz-Carlton. The Ritz-Carlton is more expensive, but the service is pretty good. The same thing is true in government, except things get more expensive and the service gets worse, and people say why?

Suozzi on talking about immigration and crime instead of avoiding them:

I had a special election in February of 2024 where I won a seat held by George Santos, and I was talking about the need to secure the border. A lot of Democratic consultants and senior people said, Tom, why are you talking about immigration, that’s a Republican issue. I said, no, it’s not. That’s what everybody’s talking about every single day.

We have to be, as Democrats, talking about what the people are talking about, and recognize that not everything’s perfect the way it is. They’re concerned about crime, they’re concerned about an open border, they’re concerned about what’s going on in the world, and we have to speak to them about those things.

Suozzi on fiscal discipline, in the terms a CPA would use:

I’m trained as a CPA and a lawyer. There’s only two things you can do with the deficit: you can either raise revenues or cut expenses. To actually make a deal in Washington, you’re probably going to have to do both. It’s not a bunch of jargon. You’ve got to raise revenues and cut expenses. That’s it. Those are your only choices.

Big deficits cause higher interest rates, and higher interest rates make it impossible for you to buy a home, or lease a car, or for a business to borrow money. Lower deficits are not some ephemeral thing. Big government deficits make your life more expensive by causing interest rates to go up.

Suozzi on his father’s immigrant story and Democratic patriotism:

My father was born in Italy. He came to the United States as a young boy, the first kid in the neighborhood to go to college. He fought in World War Two as a navigator on a B-24 and got the Distinguished Flying Cross. He came back as an Italian immigrant veteran and went to Harvard Law School on the GI Bill. He couldn’t get a job at a law firm because he was Italian. So he started a firm with another Italian guy, ran for city court judge, and at 28 became the youngest judge in the history of New York State.

America is the greatest country in the world, and there are so many stories like that with so many different families. We have a challenge constantly to make it a work in progress, to form a more perfect union. We have not done things perfectly from day one, but we’re still the best operating system in the world that combines free markets and democracy together. I’m proud of our country and our history, and we need to say that proudly as Democrats.

Suozzi on the long game, and the labor expression he keeps coming back to:

The left right now and the far right are very well organized, and they have a lot of energy. If we’re going to move forward as Democrats without playing into this extremism, we’ve got to have some principles, and we have to be organized. It’s not enough to do our one conference today. It’s to identify a dozen members of Congress that think this way, 20 candidates that think this way, 200 state and local officials, and thousands of people in the community throughout the country.

There’s an old labor expression: don’t mourn, organize. We need to organize the people that feel the same way we do about these general principles.

Gray on the three-part test for whether a policy actually works:

I used to work with a state legislator, an old guy from Southern California, who had a great three-part test every time he went to support a bill. One, is there a problem? Two, does your proposal solve that problem? Three, does your proposal not only not solve the problem, but make it worse?

Socialism is not building houses, it’s not solving anybody’s problem. It may make people feel better to rant and rave about it, but if we’re going to focus on results, people will know when the problem’s solved, when they have the house, when they can afford a better life.

Suozzi on the closing note: working with the left, and with the right:

Every problem we face in our country is complicated. You need really good people, smart people of good faith, who want to make things better, who may disagree with each other, to sit down and find compromise. There is none of that going on right now, because everybody’s just yelling and screaming at each other.

The Democrats that are on the left, we have to work with them as well. We may not agree with everything you say. We don’t want to get in a fight with you. We want to find common ground to solve the common problems we’ve identified. We’re proud to be Democrats, proud of the Democratic tradition, but we need to emphasize certain aspects of it that have been lost in this yelling and screaming.

Learn more about the Promise to America.

Mark Twain popularized the saying that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

As a lame centrist, I decided to actually look at the MU Law poll in the source note.

Here are the favorables for DSA:

For those who are more visually inclined, here is a chart showing it broken out by intensity: just 5% of Americans are “Very Favorable” towards DSA.

The image is from a crowd of honky yuppies at a DSA election night party chanting “You’re Next” at Hakeem Jeffries.

The economist Ronald Coase said “If you torture the data enough, it will confess to anything.” It is technically true that “among Democrats, the net favorability of DSA is higher than the net favorability of Democrats in Congress. But that torturous.

Socialism remains toxic to American voters. DSA remains toxic to the Democratic Party’s path to durable majorities. This is a worthy topic of attention.

’s recent Why I Write About the DSA Left So Much is that “I think they are wackos of import”:

I take the question of whether we need to change course as a given. I’m much more interested in how to change course, and to where. And that’s why I focus on the fight between normie Democrats and DSA Democrats: I think that’s currently the most relevant ideological rift in the country. If sane, solution-oriented Democrats win this factional fight, then I think we can turn the tide against MAGA and elect a competent government. But if we lose, then I think that will be good for MAGA and very bad for sanity, generally.

Last night was good for MAGA and the DSA. Expect to see that chart more from both, and be ready to fight back.

1. Party organs continue weakening as power shifts to outside entities like PACs & advocacy nonprofits. This shift heightens factional conflict.

2. Factional conflicts advantage high-agency actors with tolerance for risk. That disproportionately favors leftists today, not centrists.

3. Changes in technology, media, and campaign finance laws allow Republicans to aid leftists in amplifying intraparty tensions and hurting the most electable Democrats.

4. Racial dynamics of intra-Democratic Party factional conflict has flipped since the 1990s. Minority voters are disproportionately moderate and a bulwark keeping the party from following highly-educated white leftists “off the rails.”

1. Weak Parties & Strong Partisanship

Via CNN, here is How the 2026 primaries are reshaping the Democratic Party:

The struggle over control of the Democratic Party’s direction has roared to new heights this year, with New York’s primary on Tuesday looming as the next major battlefield between left and center.

From Maine to California, progressive and centrist forces have collided in an unusual, even unprecedented, number of primaries for local, state and congressional offices that have divided the party along ideological, and often generational, lines.

“The formal party structure is getting weaker and outside groups are getting stronger,” said Liam Kerr, co-founder of Welcome, a group working to support Democratic centrists, in a judgment echoed by many progressive activists. “We have not been in a place (before) where entire ecosystems of groups are effectively running parties within the parties in explicit, direct, factional warfare.”

We are in an era of “weak parties and strong partisanship”. The latter - the phenomenon by which the country, communities, and even families are torn apart by toxic polarization and deeply held partisan identities - is well-documented.

The former is both counterintuitive and rarely stated. The literal parties themselves - formal infrastructure like the DNC - are increasingly weakened relative to the interlocking nonprofits, PACs, firms, and influencers who profit off division to the tune of billions each cycle.

After the 2024 election, there was a widespread recognition that the party has moved too far left. But “The Democrats” are not a single empowered entity that can make such a change.

The incentives have not changed.

Read How the 2026 primaries are reshaping the Democratic Party here on CNN.

2. High Agency & Conflict

In The New York Times last week, wrote about the (suddenly) much-profiled recruiter of Maine senate candidate Graham Platner:

Mr. Moraff is not a Democratic insider or a strategist. To use a term popular with the Silicon Valley types whom he doubtless hates, he is high agency. He saw a void and moved into it. He doesn’t accept the view that good candidates need to have traditional résumés or that to be the guy behind the guy in a critical Senate race, you need to pay your dues by managing House campaigns or toiling for multiple cycles at the national party committees.

Yglesias highlights efforts to recruit nontraditional candidates from across the ideological spectrum, including by our friends at The Bench and several WelcomePAC-supported candidates. He notes that while it is possible to eschew ideological divisions - candidates are endorsed by both leftists and more pragmatic groups - factional conflict in modern politics is unavoidable and will likely increase:

For the most part, though, moving in the direction of fresher faces is going to necessarily mean more ideological conflict rather than less. The process will be contentious and will make existing party leaders uncomfortable.

In seeking out something better, Democrats will also run the risk of ending up with something worse. But they can no longer argue that their fundamental problem is Mr. Trump or the Republicans — at least not only them. It is the low regard in which they themselves are held by the American people. So even if it gets messy, the Democratic Party needs this process.

Read all of The Democrats Need a Candidate Shake-Up in The New York Times here, and a companion piece in The Wall Street Journal from , titled Meet the Political Bosses Who Brought You Graham Platner: The Democratic Party’s New Establishment is less interested in winning than in remaking the party.

3. Off The Rails

“The New Establishment” of upscale leftists face one clear obstacle in taking over the Democratic Party. As Tom Edsall writes in The New York Times on The Voters Who Can Keep Democrats From Going Off the Rails, the left vs. center factional battle has reversed since the rise of the DLC in the 1990s:

40 years later, the racial and ideological split in the Democratic Party has been flipped on its head.

White, well-educated liberals are the leading proponents of cultural and identity policies that often alienate swing middle-class voters. Black and other minority Democrats are a strong force for moderation.

Edsall quotes from Third Way:

Today’s white Democratic voters bear little resemblance to the white Democrats of Jesse Jackson’s era. They are wealthier, more highly educated and more socially liberal. Meanwhile, the Black voters who make up the consistent base of the party have held steady while the rest of the coalition has shifted around them.

Jackson used to say that parties need two wings to fly. He was right, but it turns out that voters of color are now leading the moderate wing of the modern Democratic Party.

And Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute:

the nonwhite working class has emerged as a force for moderation in U.S. politics. They are leery of the left’s cultural agenda — open borders, permissive prosecutors, the obsession with identity politics and “equity.” They express higher levels of national pride and patriotism. And they aren’t agitating for the replacement of a market economy with democratic socialism.

4. GOP Meddling Helps TNE

The New Establishment has risen with help from its symbiotic relationship with the GOP, who benefits from both internal division and the rise of a leftism that damages the Democratic Party brand. Such mutual assistance has broken new ground this election cycle, with Republican SuperPACs running campaigns amplifying candidates backed by Bernie Sanders, Justice Democrats, and the Working Families Party.

In CA-22, mailers sent by GOP groups were virtually indistinguishable from those sent by David Hogg’s PAC.

Many Ways To Lose

There are three levels of conflict in modern American politics:

• Can Democrats beat Republicans?

• Can factional leftists win enough primaries to take over the Democratic Party?

• Can factional leftists dominate the perception of the Democratic Party?

All three are intertwined, but distinct. Each has evolved over the past decade. In this cycle’s primaries and beyond, some trends benefitting The New Establishment are accelerating - weakening parties, stronger partisanship, more factional conflict, more opportunities for high-upside risk-taking from high-agency people, and more direct intervention from meddling Republicans.

Admitting this uneven terrain is the first step to changing it. Centrists can win the majority of primaries and flip nearly all the majority-making seats, but leftists - working with the GOP - will still claim momentum.

That is the lesson of the first half of primary season. Democrats cannot rely on “the party” to save itself, because the party does not have the capability. The choice is not between unity and conflict. The conflict is already here. The choice is whether the centrist side of the conflict has the agency and risk tolerance to empower voters who can keep this thing from going off the rails.

What To Watch For Tonight

The NYC-centric media will focus on candidates in districts where Harris got 65% (NY-14), 71% (NY-7), and 80% (NY-12) of the vote. While there will be some lessons in those, particularly regarding the strength of the Democratic Socialists of America, we suggest looking at two other races tonight:

NY-17: Cait Conley is running in a GOP-held seat, and has faced GOP meddling. This is the type of NewDem & Bench supported candidate who will determine if Democrats win durable majorities - and the GOP knows it.

UT-01: as this now-blue seat was being redistricted last year, we made a big push for former Rep. Ben McAdams, a top-1% overperformer in 2018 and 2020. He has been under relentless attack from a(nother) Bernie Sanders endorsed boarding school alum, but holds the potential to defend a tougher redraw when the GOP redistricts again.

Good luck to everyone participating in our democracy today, especially the centrist candidates getting whacked from both sides.

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.

Central Air

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2 months ago · 17 likes · 9 comments · Josh Barro, Ben Dreyfuss, and Megan McArdle

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.

Central Air

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2 months 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.