Former Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz is being mercilessly mocked after he claimed he was chosen to join Kamala Harris on the losing ticket because he could “code talk to white guys.”

The Minnesota governor drew the derision of conservatives after he said on his national tour stop Monday that he was picked because of his ability to “code talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck” and “put them at ease.”

Walz added he was the “permission structure” to win over white men from rural America to vote for Democrats.

This is another chapter in a story we’ve written about: the Democratic White Guy Problem, epitomized by the Tim Walz tweet about knowing how to “run a pick six”.

Days after the Vice Presidential pick last summer, we wrote “what worries us” about Walz:

1. Data vs. Shapiro: Walz was picked for a vibe that can win swing voters … but the data says otherwise — Shapiro has actually been winning over swing voters in recent elections.

2. Vibes From Who? We have an uneasy feeling that Walz may be what very online, highly-educated liberals think that non-college white voters like. See point #1 on the data.

3. Pressure Groups: Walz was “the person with no organized group working against him.” The most cynical read is from Tim Miller: “might be a sign of left bullying Kamala.”

Uneasy Feeling

Why did we have that uneasy feeling in point #2?

Democrats moving towards the “power of social media” has been fun for the last two weeks (reminder: this was written last August). But it was disastrous four years ago. As Lauren wrote last year, Twitter Democrats vs. In Real Life Democrats is still a battle within the party. The hint of concern amidst this revelry about the VP pick is summed up by this Twitter user:

The “they” here is concerning - a caricature of swing voters. As one X user wrote:

And another:

Listen to the Winners

Back to 2025 … the most recent article on the Walz goof closes with a doozy:

Walz made the comments at a Harvard Kennedy School forum on Monday night on a stop of his national “listening tour.”

Democrats need to stop listening to the losers, and focus on the winners who overperform. Join us in DC at WelcomeFest on June 4 to keep the focus on the winners.

Rob Flaherty’s New York Times piece is one of the better-written entries, but still misses the real lessons. The former Harris deputy campaign manager and digital strategist in the Biden White House pins Democratic struggles on “opt-out voters,” social media drift, and infrastructure gaps. His argument is basically that Democrats need to build their own “Joe Rogan Cinematic Universe” to win.

The reality is simpler, and harsher: Democrats didn’t lose because voters opted out of politics, but because they opted out of the party.

The Biden Administration and Harris campaign weren’t undone by a new social media landscape, decentralized attention spans, or cultural drift. They were undone because they failed to meet voters where they actually are on their two biggest concerns: inflation and immigration.

The Biden-Harris campaigns bet the farm on democracy, Trump’s character, and abortion rights. These are important issues, yes. But mid-2024 polling already showed that the median voter was obsessed with the price of groceries and the chaos at the border — and skeptical that Biden and Harris even understood the scope of either.

You can build all the micro-targeted media strategies you want. If your candidate is out of touch on the cost of living and border security, you’re losing. This is Campaigns 101, not Advanced Cultural Sociology.

Let’s be clear: the medium didn’t kill the message. The message killed the message. And the messengers made it worse.

Instead of reckoning with this, some Democrats are reaching for an easier story: that “opt-out” voters — the ones who aren’t glued to MSNBC or Twitter — drifted away because they weren’t seeing enough Democratic content.

But that’s a cope, and a confusing one.

If these voters are so disengaged and lost in algorithmic fog, how did they manage to split their tickets in such disciplined fashion?

If the problem was mass disengagement, how do you explain Democrats who won over large blocks of Trump voters, like Ruben Gallego, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Adam Gray, and Jared Golden? Or Republicans like Brian Fitzpatrick and Don Bacon, who won enough Biden voters to hold blue districts.

These candidates ran well ahead of the national ticket by breaking with their national party. Democratic over-performers branded themselves as distinct, skeptical of progressive orthodoxy, and serious about the daily problems voters face.

Voters weren’t checked out. They were tuned in — just not in the way elite Democrats prefer. They were highly alert to which Democrats seemed willing to break with party orthodoxy on inflation, immigration, policing, and cultural elitism. And they rewarded them accordingly.

In other words, “opt-out” voters are real. They’re just not passive victims of social media drift. They’re active participants who smell phoniness from a mile away. They sized up Biden and Harris, found them wanting, and went shopping for Democrats who didn’t seem welded to national party talking points.

You can’t blame the voters for exercising discernment. You have to blame a campaign that made itself an easy “opt-out.”

Less than three months after the young political activist David Hogg was elected as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, he is undertaking a new project that is sure to rankle some fellow Democrats: spending millions of dollars to oust Democratic members of Congress in primary elections next year.

The plan is to “intervene in primaries in solidly Democratic districts as part of a $20 million effort to elect younger leaders and to encourage a more combative posture against President Trump.”

“This is going to anger a lot of people,” Mr. Hogg said of his efforts, which he began to brief allies, some lawmakers and party officials on in recent days. He predicted “a smear campaign against me” that would aim to “destroy my reputation and try to force me to stop doing this.”

Pragmatic Democrats should not try to destroy Hogg as an individual. They should simply beat him where he’s wrong.

Eleven Thoughts

1. Hogg embodies both the promise and peril of the activist response to Trump—talented, ambitious, relentless, and well-intentioned. But he also falls prey to the polarizing incentives of modern politics: amplifying ideological extremes and emphasizing conflict that pulls the Democratic ecosystem further left.

2. His very American saga captures the darkness of our current political era. A school shooting. An impassioned, hopeful movement for change that rose in the hearts of millions of Americans. And from the right-wing, a disturbing, trollish, conspiracy-minded campaign. He’s been subject to a lot of ugly stuff, and seems to have responded to it better than 99% of the general youth population would have.

3. We disagree with a lot of what Hogg has said (Defund the police, Abolish ICE, etc) and some tactics in prior endeavors (starting a liberal pillow company to mirror MAGA) and by his PAC for fundraising (mass list-buying for email fundraising that directs small-dollar donors to investments other than beating Republicans) and expenditures (mostly supporting safe-seat progressives; opposing the candidate best positioned to win in WI-03). However, we see nothing unethical in anything he has done in either fundraising or spending. Such fundraising and spending approaches are common. As we’ve previously noted, “Hogg is the symptom of what ails the Democratic Party, not the core problem.” After our prior writing on him was picked up widely, we were surprised by the false allegations against him that came in. Hogg is probably right to worry that he’ll be smeared.1

4. Is a $20 million fund to primary Democratic incumbents a good idea? There’s a thousand ways to say “it depends”.

5. We’d rather spend $20 million beating Republicans than beating Democrats.

6. But it’s a free country (for now) and if people want to spend $20 million beating Democrats, it is good to be very public about that goal so donors know what they’re funding. So kudos to them for being so transparent.

7. On February 9, we wrote “Most critiques of our Hogg opinion have been progressive doublespeak: now is not the time for infighting … when it comes from the center.” It took less than ten weeks for that double standard to become reality. When centrists create conflict, it is deemed bad for the party. When progressives create conflict, it is deemed healthy.

8. One interesting thing about the power of outside money is that the highest ROI is often on money that is *not* spent. Let’s say we started a PAC called Peanut Butter Jelly PAC, put $10 million into it, and declared that we would support candidates in safe Democratic seats who ate a PB&J live on Instagram. Both Nancy Pelosi and her primary challenger would be highly incentivized to go on Instagram and eat a PB&J. There’s little downside, other than their time, and if only the other candidate does it that could be a big problem. So now our Peanut Butter Jelly PAC got exactly what we wanted, and didn’t have to spend any money. The political science term is the “Iceberg Theory of Campaign Contributions” - most of the power is under the water. This has been proven out with primaries in particular, as bipartisan researchers from Brookings and R Street have demonstrated that “even the threat of a primary alters behavior in Congress.” Hogg is building power to make people eat PB & J live on instagram (or protest outside of USAID with Chuck Schumer, or go to El Salvador to “fight Trump”, etc).

9. Does Hogg have a point about age? Actuary tables show that the odds of a 75 year old American male dying in the next two years is 8.2%, or about 1 in 12. The odds of a 40 year old woman dying in the next two years is 0.23%, or 1 in 400. Last week in the House, Democratic vacancies due to death “proved decisive on a budget that unlocks the door for Republicans to make trillions in tax/spending changes.”

10. The most important near-term implication of the $20 million would be incentivizing Democratic incumbents to do dumb stuff to appease activists which could make Trump relatively more popular.

11. The most important long-term implication is trying to replicate the 2018-2020 mistake of focusing on what happens in Democratic primaries (exciting young people running on left-wing platforms) instead of general elections (pragmatic Democrats beating Republican). Because that could mess up the 2028 primary.

Beat the model, don’t destroy it

The warning sign in the article is the axis on which these primary challenges will be waged, which sounds like Combative Non-Centrism:

while Mr. Hogg said the 2026 efforts would not be based on ideology, he did say that some younger challengers were likely to run to “the right” of incumbent Democratic lawmakers — and that those challengers would not garner his group’s support. “That is not who we are looking to support,” he said.

The article includes two validators for Hogg’s $20 million fund to beat incumbent Democrats: teachers union president Randi Weingarten and College Democrats president Sunjay Muralitharan, who advanced activist views on student debt and Biden’s needed to be more pro-Palestinian to turn out young voters.

This is setting up a dynamic similar to the last Trump midterms, when progressive primary challengers built a narrative that Democrats should go hard left. This narrative won out over the (correct) view that it was centrist Democrats in swing seats that won back power from MAGA, and led the 2020 primary down a disastrous path that turned off independents before pragmatic Democratic primary voters chose the most moderate option.

Centrist Democrats should not destroy Hogg, or focus on beating back his tactical approach. Hogg’s PAC is not explicitly focused on moving the party to the left - and has at times supported moderates. But the impact will likely be moving the party away from the median voter. For those who think that’s bad, the focus must be on strengthening an alternative community focused on winning general elections.

The “Beat Democrats” approach won the narrative in 2018.

Our “Beat Republicans” team has to win in 2026.

New polls show voters continue to sour on Trump, which is expanding the map of competitive midterm districts - and building a safe harbor against the authoritarian threat he poses.

First, the new polling: “After last week’s tariff announcement, Trump’s economic approval has dropped precipitously, now tied for his worst ever in Navigator tracking since 2018.”

That’s a Democratic-aligned firm, but new polls from the bipartisan pollsters sponsored by Trump’s own pollster and the nonpartisan Morning Consult tell similar stories.

Nate Silver’s polling average now has Trump’s disapproval crossing 50%.

Economists - and their former students in the upscale Democratic and Never Trump chattering class - overwhelmingly oppose tariffs, as expected. But the good ol’ US of A hasn’t started a trade war since 1930, so we are watching an experiment unfold with the general electorate.

There are different views to be considered at different points as this unfolds, including:

1. Support or oppose tariffs conceptually

2. Highly partisan

3. Directly impacted by tariffs

4. Moved by general economic conditions like the stock market

5. Sensitive to high prices

Tariffs are typically thought to have visible supporters (benefits concentrated in business owners and workers in protected industries) and invisible opponents (costs are widely distributed). But the Trump tariffs are a whole different beast - this isn’t Senator Smoot and Rep. Hawley in a smoke-filled room in 1930.

It is unfolding live on social media, the nightly news and TikTok. The world is not just deeply interconnected, everyone can watch investments and prices moving in real time. It’s not just Dave Portnoy live-streaming, even kids YouTuber Mr. Beast is upset.

The stock market is currently the most prominent scoreboard. Many have noted that 61% of Americans own stock, but that number likely undercounts the share of stock-owning voters as it is driven down by groups less likely to vote like Hispanics (28%), young voters (41%), and households making less than $40,000 (29%). What is the share of midterm voters who own stock?

But stocks are mostly about the future. As notes, “The (high) level of political pain that's ongoing now is before people really even start feeling the real economy effects.”

What is that political pain? Early surveys look bad for Trump, with tariff favorability 28 points underwater. It is steeper among independents at 32 points, a 17 point jump from December.

Not surprisingly, independents show the biggest jump in awareness: 74% have heard about tariffs lately, up from 46% in December.

Vox’s Eric Levitz has a concise take on why:

Voters may have had a weakly held, ideological sympathy for protectionism at one point. But the largest tariff hike in modern history was liable to change that. And it has. In this survey, voters disapprove of tariffs by 28 points, while union households disapprove by *41* points.

It makes sense that voter views on tariffs are weakly-held. The subject matter is complex, not deeply tied to demographics, and voters have no memory of the impact (we haven’t started a trade war in 95 years). The more weakly held a view, the more prominent the topic, the faster opinions can change.

Trump’s tariff opponents have a clear base (conceptual opponents, hyper-partisans) that is now growing with the addition of those focused on economic forecasts, including their own investments. Support has grown among MAGA, but with just 8% of that group now opposed there’s not much room from growth from partisanship alone.

But the real economic effects are still to come. Political volatility is high.

Where Trump is Losing Support

Before the most recent movement, John Burn-Murdoch had a great chart showing where Trump was losing support:

Trump has gotten significantly less popular over the last eleven weeks, and it is clear who he is losing (non-MAGA 2024 Trump voters) and on what issues (economy and inflation).

The Midterms

The worse Trump does, the wider the midterm playing field can be. And House Democrats are responding.

Welcome has spent the past four years begging for a headline like this, from Axios yesterday:

It's essentially the codification of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries' (D-N.Y.) newfound bullishness that Trump-induced stock market turmoil is opening the door to a potential wave election next year.

• Democrats also view over-performances in special elections as a sign that their party is seeing the midterm enthusiasm typically enjoyed by the party out of power.

Driving the news: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's list of "districts in play" includes a whopping 35 Republican-held seats they believe "will determine the House Majority."

• That's more than the 29 districts listed as some degree of competitive by Cook Political Report.

• It's also more than the initial target list of House Majority PAC, House Democrats' primary super PAC, which has 29 seats.

• "Our Districts in Play map is more expansive than at the start of the 2024 cycle, reflecting a political environment of eroding public support for House Republicans," the DCCC said in a press release.

Details: More than a half dozen Republicans on the DCCC's list are considered to represent "safe Republican" seats by Cook.

The targeted “safe” Republicans include several highlighted by Welcome over the past four years, including Ann Wagner in Missouri and Cory Mills in Florida. We highlighted Andy Ogles as a potentially vulnerable incumbent and called for Democrats to make a play for Mike Turner’s Ohio district.

Economic uncertainty is leading to political uncertainty, creating a conditions to compete in a broad range of districts.

Watch What They Do, Not Say

Republicans have talked a big game about the upcoming midterms, but it’s worth focusing on deeds, not words. With Trump’s tariffs creating economic devastation and his immigration policy turning off even staunch allies, the midterms aren’t shaping up well.

There are signs Republicans recognize this.

Chris Sununu, the popular former Governor of New Hampshire, announced yesterday that he won’t run in the open Senate race in New Hampshire.

When top recruits turn down potentially winnable races, that is a sign of how they really view the political environment.

The Long Game

has a thoughtful piece on increasing risks from Trump. Here’s a bit from Competitive Authoritarianism Comes for Civil Society:

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

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

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

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

Bonus Concern

Sorry not to end on a high note, but Stid’s piece has one other vital warning:

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

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

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

It may be natural to experience self-satisfaction from witnessing the suffering or humiliation of another.

But it is shitty politics.

Blake Allen is asking “Democrats to do something that I know will be difficult: whenever you come across someone whether it be here or in real life for whom *this* was their breaking point with Trump, be welcoming and magnanimous to them. It’s hard to admit you’re wrong in politics.”

But there is a massive opportunity here. You know who has been turning against Trump? A bunch of famous dudes1

• CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who said in August to vote Trump “if you care about your paycheck” roasted him today (“knock down the stock market simply by opening his mouth … everything is good except one thing: we have a president angry at everyone except Putin”).

• Joe Rogan, who famously endorsed Trump to his massive audience, was shaken yesterday on the insane approach to deportations (“you got to get scared that people who are not criminals are lassoed up and sent to El Salvador prisons … it’s horrific”).

• Barstool’s Dave Portnoy, another Trump endorser, went viral last week demanding Trump start firing people from the leaky Houthi Signal chat. And then this morning he dubbed the stock market crash “Orange Monday”, mocking Trump.

John Burn-Murdoch has a great chart showing where Trump is losing support:

Trump has gotten significantly less popular over the last eleven weeks, and it is clear who he is losing (non-MAGA 2024 Trump voters) and on what issues (economy and inflation).

Is there an opportunity for some schadenfreude here? Some “I told-you-so”?

Sure, but do that in your group chat and not to the people in your life who could be persuaded to vote against chaos in 2026 and 2028.

Below are some charts that show Democratic presidents lead to more economic growth and lower unemployment. And a meme about how, for those of us under 50, life is just a cycle of GOP presidents crashing the economy between periods of Democratic growth (and deficit reduction!). And a chart of how the GOP Senate budget resolution adds $5.8 trillion to the deficit. And here’s a video cut of Kamala Harris predicting a recession by summer again and again and again.

Enjoy the charts, and prepare to share them effectively to make the case for Democrats. Invest the time in understanding how to effectively persuade your political opponents and welcome them to your side. This episode of The Depolarizers with Robb Willer of the Stanford Polarization and Social Change Lab is a good place to start.

More and more influential dudes with millions of followers are coming out against Trump every day. Even Bill Ackman, who is warning of a “nuclear winter”, is “turning on Trump … and he is not alone.”

We must continue building on-ramps for everyone in the party who can contribute to a majority that wins. Yes, even Bill Ackman.

You know nothing that transpired between Trump’s inauguration and today, although you had some coherent priors.

When you departed society on January 20th, Trump was more popular than ever.

Would Trump make America less prosperous and more cruel? Yes.

Would Trump follow through on his retribution tour? Probably.

Would Republicans lose power over it? Ehhh …

While Democrats were heavily favored to win back the House, the Senate looked impossible. Trump had a path to sustain his popularity. The most successful entrepreneur of the century, a former Democrat, had jumped aboard to identify swing voters’ favorite finding: waste, fraud, and abuse. Years of Democratic overreach and government inefficiencies provided plenty of low-hanging fruit.

The culture felt like it was shifting rightwards, maybe for a generation.

The economy was booming. Just weeks ago, Democrats were worried “Trump would win, inherit a growing economy with low unemployment and (relatively) low inflation, then cut taxes and declare victory again”

Plus, you could count on Democrats overreacting when Trump goaded them into playing on turf friendly to him: immigration, foreign aid, cultural liberalism, etc.

Well, here's what I’d tell you about the GOP trifecta after your eleven weeks of zen:

1. They’re worse than you thought

2. They’re more incompetent than you thought

3. We still have elections, and Dems really need to win them

Saving Disgrace

The “Trump 2.0 is worse than you thought” part is pretty far-reaching (PEPFAR, measles, mistaken deportations to foreign prisons, following the authoritarian playbook2, etc).

But since you just got out of a meditation retreat, let’s skip that part.

Incompetence will have longer-term implications. And it was not guaranteed. The scariest sentence muttered over the last eight years was “The next Trump-type figure will be far more capable.”

And all the talk of Project 2025 and Silicon Valley talent and billionaire capitulation indicated Trump 2.0 could launch with devastating effectiveness.

But, for now at least, the “Next Trump” figure is just Trump. And it turns out that having undisciplined leaders with fourth-rate middle managers3 leads to tremendous dysfunction.

As Jonathan Cohn noted, “Over and over again, we’re seeing basic, sloppy errors from this administration on everything from selecting people for layoffs to vetting immigrants for deportation. And these are just the visible ones. Makes me wonder what mistakes we aren’t seeing.”

On the one hand, it is shocking that these guys can’t text a group chat without mistakenly adding a reporter or create a sensible tariff chart after five months to prepare or keep 9/11 truthers from firing National Security Council staff or make sure that their nominee for a Pennsylvania state Senate special election can win an R+15 district.

But on the other hand, think about the middle management required to do these things.

The Department of Health and Human Services just clumsily fired 10,000 people before realizing that 2,000 of them were by mistake. Anyone who has worked at a big company knows layoffs require a lot of talented people to spend significant time on design and implementation.

Now imagine the resume pool available to RFK Jr.

Is it really a surprise the Administration is incompetent?

MAGA’s Razor

Hanlon’s Razor counsels us to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Achieving total malice takes a level of disciplined talent that MAGA appears unable to muster.

And that starts at the top. As Jonathan Chait put it, “the good news is that it's harder to build an authoritarian system when the authoritarian leader is totally bonkers.”

And MAGA incompetence does not just apply to governing. Having undisciplined leaders directing low-grade middle managers also matters for winning elections.

Which brings us to the biggest news:

We still have elections! And Republicans are faring very poorly in them.

Protect democracy by practicing it

Last August, I surprised myself in conversation with Vox reporter Zak Beauchamp for his article titled One way that Kamala Harris needs to be more like Joe Biden.

As noted in the article, Beauchamp had just released a book:

In my new book The Reactionary Spirit, I study how pro-democracy candidates — in the United States and around the world — beat authoritarian rivals in elections. One of the most consistent findings is that it’s possible, and quite effective, to campaign on democracy in conjunction with other issues: showing how anti-democratic politics affects voters’ lives in concrete ways.

I disagreed with him, in the way that happens when something comes out of your mouth confidently before you have internalized it:

“Our mantra has become ‘you defend democracy by practicing it.’ And you practice it by focusing on voters in the middle,” says Liam Kerr, co-founder of the Democratic WelcomePAC. “A lot of gettable voters — especially at this point, after eight years — don’t believe that stormtroopers are going to come into the streets the day after the election.”

But whatever message you think this group wants — be it tough-on-the-border centrism, a liberal focus on abortion bans, or middle-class economic populism — it’s not obvious that it trades off with pro-democracy messaging.

There are real tradeoffs between focusing on a democracy message and addressing the top concerns of voters - and even on taking the extra step to try connecting democracy with voter concerns.

This was a key finding of Ezra Klein and David Shor’s much-discussed podcast last month, as well as other postmortems.

Harris bet on democracy as a closing message, and trying to connect it to voter priorities didn’t save it.

Non-Strategic Safe Seat Dems

By talking about democracy instead of practicing it, Democrats lost it all.

But we still have elections, and Democrats are mostly acting responsibly by fighting where conflict is productive and restraining the worst impulses of progressives elsewhere.

This will be a constant battle. A few days ago, we covered the wrongheaded argument from a former Pod Save America honcho to arrest Elon Musk.

In a new post on Friday, doubled down:

Influential centrist commentators4 like Noah Smith and Liam Kerr all counseled their allies in Congress to strike a better balance between policy moderation and partisan confrontation: Bending to public opinion on issues like border security shouldn’t also entail allowing Republicans to shove you into lockers.

He criticizes Senator Ruben Gallego’s restraint on immigration issues as “a window into the minds of the Democratic strategic class and its front line members.”

This is an important phrase. Beutler and his fight-everything allies belong to the opposite group: the non-strategic class of safe seat members.

Listen to winners & betting markets

Beutler calls this approach “a stain on the party” without grappling with how Gallego ran 8 points ahead of Kamala to win a Trump state.

That is the non-strategic safe seat mindset. We’ve been writing for years about listening to the Democrats who are actually trying to win. As has written, too often Democratic political history is written by the losers.

Democrats have largely resisted the worst impulses of the resistance, keeping the government open and keeping the cuffs off Elon while fighting him & Trump on favorable issues that help win elections.

Can you imagine if Democrats had shut down the government, distracting voters from who is responsible for today’s worldwide chaos?

Everyone is focused on the stock market these days, but there’s another scoreboard: the betting markets.

Democratic odds of winning the Senate jumped from 17% to 24% when I drafted this on Friday ... and went past 28% this morning.

Odds of winning the House jumped from 67% to 80%.

The best place to fight is the ballot.

We still have elections. Democrats need to focus on winning them.

Those results hold larger lessons.

Political scientists have catalogued the thermostatic effect, where voters swing against the party in power like an air conditioner turning on to cool a house that is getting too hot.

That’s the research behind the controversial advice of James Carville, who wants Democrats to simply “play dead” and let voters sour on Trump. The idea being if you let Trump self-implode, Democrats will have a better chance to fight back:

With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us. Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat.

Ten weeks into Trump: The Sequel, voters are already souring on MAGA. Trump’s approval rating continues to fall, down 15 points (from +12 after inauguration to -3 today).

The same bellwether bros whose endorsements were hailed as moving persuadable low-information voters to Trump last year are now complaining about various insanities of the Administration:

• CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who said in August to vote Trump “if you care about your paycheck” roasted him today (“knock down the stock market simply by opening his mouth … everything is good except one thing: we have a president angry at everyone except Putin”)

• Joe Rogan, who famously endorsed Trump to his massive audience, was shaken yesterday on the insane approach to deportations (“you got to get scared that people who are not criminals are lassoed up and sent to El Salvador prisons … it’s horrific”)

• Barstool’s Dave Portnoy, another Trump endorser, went viral last week demanding Trump start firing people from the leaky Houthi Signal chat.

So, it playing dead working?

Well, “The Democratic Party” cannot totally play dead. The Resistance marketplace has been revved up so hot for so long that it’s impossible for everyone to stay calm for long. There are cable channels and consultants and activist organizations who need to feed the beast.

It is true Democrats need to fight, but the style of fight will determine whether it is helpful or counterproductive.

The divergent election results in Wisconsin and Florida hold some lessons for where fighting may backfire.

Reject The Impulse

The Democratic-aligned candidate in Wisconsin cut a low-key profile, prevailing despite Elon Musk’s legally questionable offer of $1 million for petition signers and massive investment in the race. Musk tweeted, then deleted, his sweepstakes offer to voters before his rally in Wisconsin on Sunday. On Saturday, a judge allowed the rally and promotion to go on.

It is also possible that the GOP lost so badly because Democrats played it cool while Elon Musk showed just how much of a dangerous weirdo he is. Recall from our post on Trump cancelling the NY-21 special election for Elise Stefanik’s seat: the lower turnout is, the better Democrats do.

But former New Republic and Pod Save writer Brian Beutler was upset that more centrist Democrats weren’t calling on Wisconsin authorities to arrest Musk. I got into a back-and-forth with Beutler, whose line of reasoning exemplifies the modern leftist activist impulse to ignore the asymmetry of American politics and disregard any downside risks. 

This impulse is not so much “fight or flight” as it is “wildly wave a knife at the first subway passenger you see because it worked for a mugger once.”

And it has to be resisted. The impulse manifests itself in a few ways:

1. Create a false choice with inflammatory language

2. Ignore how to operationalize your advice

3. Disregard downside risks

4. Crank up lawlessness that benefits authoritarians

5. Raise salience of elections when Dems do better with low turnout

Beutler first set up a false dichotomy, with some fancy words thrown in about how centrists are sellouts. For Beutler, there are two options: demand Elon be put in cuffs, or you are a coward sellout wanting to let any rich person get away with anything

He then completely ignores how implementing his recommendation would work. The hypothetical combative centrist congresswoman from another state is supposed to call on … someone in Wisconsin to defy a judge’s order and just handcuff Elon?

Most dangerously, it ignores the core asymmetry of leftists ratcheting up the heat. 40% of the country is conservative, 25% is liberal. And when lawlessness is met with lawlessness, somehow the gun-less pluralist liberals are going to end up winning? Yeah, don’t think so.

Clear in the short run, however, is what raising the salience of elections - and dangerous weirdness - does to election results. Republicans now do better with lower-propensity voters, and cross-pressured voters badly want Democrats not to do weird extreme stuff.

Here’s how Cook Political Report analyst Matthew Klein put it:

Democrats are performing so well in low-salience races that you almost wonder if they’d be better off not advertising in special elections at all. The Dem base is extremely attuned to off-cycle races, even when they get no coverage. As spending goes up, more Republicans tune in.

At 3:40pm on election day, the biggest story for the local Fox affiliate in Wisconsin was weather and a dog biting someone at a mall: 

Brian Beutler thinks Democrats would be better off if the lead story was about Elon Musk getting handcuffed for something a judge allowed to proceed.

He is wrong.

Florida Man Too Much In The News

Meanwhile, down in Florida, there were two special congressional elections in typically Safe Republican districts. Funny enough, the FL-1 race to replace Matt Gaetz was quiet. 

But the special election to replace Signal chat instigator Mike Waltz actually did make a lot of news. And that turned out to lead to some unintended consequences for Democrats. Turnout exploded in FL-6, as Decision Desk’s Michael Pruser noted before polls closed:

The surprise is just how heavy voting is in FL-06.  This district is one of the lowest election day voting districts in the state (4th lowest), and that it's crushing FL-01 (2nd highest rate of ED voting) suggests Republican attempts to juice turnout here proved effective. 

After polls closed and results started coming in, there was another surprise: despite raising more than $15,000,000 the Democratic nominee will likely do relatively worse in Fl-6 than the quieter FL-1 race.

Democrats are doing better in the quietest special elections, and Trump’s loud extremism is causing agita among both mainstream voters and the bros who boosted him to victory.

Democracy is so good it is worth protecting - and practicing. So keep the cuffs off Elon, and win at the ballot box.

lost control of the Senate and failed to recapture the House of Representatives. Of the 11 governor’s races held last year, Democrats won three. In state legislature races, they won fewer than 45 percent of the seats.

In the aftermath of this comprehensive defeat, many party leaders have decided that they do not need to make significant changes to their policies or their message. They have instead settled on a convenient explanation for their plight.

That plight is similar to one were Democrats experiencing in 1990.

Thirty-five years ago this week, a group of combative centrist Democrats launched a vision that would capture the White House for the rest of the decade.

Entering the 1990s, Democratic powerlessness was different than it is today. It was mainly a presidential problem.

Over three elections in the 1980s, Democrats won 173 electoral votes, nearly 100 short of winning the presidency.

Democrats did not average 173 electoral votes across three elections. That was the total. Republicans won the electoral college 1,440 to 173 across the Eighties, cruising to the White House in 1980 (49 electoral votes for Democrats), 1984 (13), and 1988 (111).

While the presidency was the main problem for Democrats entering the 1990s, today it is the Senate. Democrats are lucky to hold even 47 Senate seats and have no clear path to consistently winning a majority (Where’s the plan, Chuck?).

The New York Times is late to this realization.1 Two years ago, we outlined how troubled Democrats were. The early 2020s was not a time for “Hopium,” but for restructuring a party to win durable majorities:

Early 2020s trends show Democrats must now relearn the lessons they took out of the Eighties. Since 2016, the share of every demographic saying “Republicans care about people like me” has gone up. Black, Hispanic. Rich, poor. The share of every demographic saying “Democrats care about people like me” has declined – except among the highly educated.

But here we are — and we can only change moving forward.

Lessons from the 1990s turnaround are instructive on how to change.

New Orleans in 1990

Back to The New York Times from March 25, 1990. The article “Eyes to Left, Democrats Edge Toward the Center” describes the intra-party jockeying that resulted from those three blowout presidential losses of the 1980s:

Two very different political visions collided here today: A group of centrist Democrats asserted that the national party must change to reclaim the support of middle-class voters, while the Rev. Jesse Jackson asserted that the American mainstream was moving toward him.

The Democratic Leadership Council, a group of elected officials who are trying to nudge the party toward the center, spent two days arguing that the party must reject the orthodoxies of the past and move toward a philosophy that emphasizes economic growth, ''expanding opportunity, not government,'' getting tough on criminals, and helping America compete in the world marketplace.

...

The debate reflects a party groping toward the 1992 Presidential election, trying to rebuild a Presidential majority in the electoral college and a national image after losing five of the past six Presidential elections.

The council, founded in reaction to the party's landslide Presidential defeat in 1984, is pushing a party philosophy intended to recapture the middle-class voters who deserted the Democrats in droves in the past three Presidential elections.

Losing middle class voters, and losing lots of elections. Sound familiar?

Time to Party

A key takeaway here is the time between the organizational founding (1984) and this article on a major conference (1990).

Six years is a long time!

Like modern Democrats - including even Bernie Sanders, who pivoted hard on immigration earlier this week - the council knew that a break with the past was needed:

A ''New Orleans Declaration'' embraced here this weekend emphasizes civic obligation rather than entitlement, getting tough on criminals rather than ''explaining away their behavior,'' and implementing social welfare programs that ''bring the poor into the nation's economic mainstream, not maintain them in dependence.''

But over its six years, the council had already experienced a challenge in following through on such breaks - as Bernie himself found out in 2020, when he abandoned some of his popular 2016 stances in favor of more permissive policies in his second run for the presidency. Four years after the DLC was founded, the Democratic Party nominated Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis and Republicans gained a rare third consecutive term:

Still, despite the group's efforts to redefine and redirect the party, it faces a ''fourth-year problem,'' as Elaine Kamarck, one of its analysts, put it. ''We start out to rethink and then the fourth year comes along and what do we do? We nominate a New Deal liberal,'' she said.

It is hard to resist activist pressure, and it takes a strong community to do so. The DLC didn’t give up, and in 1992, Bill Clinton’s victory was the culmination of a half-decade of work shepherding an entrepreneurial ecosystem that could keep the focus on winning.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as Aesop noted. And Democrats had the necessary motivation to try new things heading into the 1990s.

And plenty of inventions followed.

The electoral wilderness of the 1980s produced organizations that would forge the way back to the White House. Led by the Democratic Leadership Council, affiliated groups socialized policy innovations and built a community of partisan centrists – “New Democrats.” They held luncheons, developed policies, hosted forums and created a social and political network of centrist politicians, culminating in the generation of leaders helmed by the young Arkansas governor.

Embracing the center, Clinton resuscitated the party. Democrats captured the White House in 1992 for the first time since 1976.

Unifying Fighters into the 2000s

During the George W. Bush years, liberal Democrats for the most part did not organize around pulling the party left ideologically. Instead, the Democrats popular among the “Netroots” activists and online bloggers were so-called “fighting Democrats” (as has recalled), using hardball to deny Bush wins. Youngsters coming of political age during the Trump resistance might be forgiven for their surprise upon learning that a hero of the Netroots was former Reagan Navy Secretary and moderate Democrat Jim Webb.

Like the pre-woke version of Bernie Sanders (pro-gun, anti-immigration), the early 2000s resistance was marked by heterodox views but a pugnacious spirit. While the Netroots were progressive, they were also pragmatic fighters, understanding the need to appeal to the median voter to win. They prized candidates like Webb who would make Republicans look hypocritical, rather than candidates designed to “mobilize” the base.

In 2008, Barack Obama leaned into this middle ground. He did not seek to be a “movement progressive.” He meticulously avoided stoking the nation’s ever-simmering racial passions, was slow to embrace gay rights, supported “clean coal,” quietly killed a Medicare public option, was known as the “deporter in chief” by the left, and rejected a command-and-control response to health care and the financial crisis, earning praise from the DLC. Nevertheless, Obama was a hero to progressives because of what he stood for: an opponent of the Iraq War (from the relative safety of the Illinois state Senate), and someone whose blitzkrieg U.S. Senate career suggested a liberal policymaking bent.

Obama managed a deeply moderate party with a large Senate majority created by DLC-style moderation and ideological diversity. These senators identified with a variety of positions that would have earned them the boot from late-2010s progressive partisans: the Democratic majority contained pro-life, pro-gun, pro-business, pro-military and pro-fiscal responsibility Senators.

It’s worth recalling how truly moderate-to-conservative the members of the Obama-era supermajority were: Pro-lifers like Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Fossil fuel enthusiasts like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. Fiscal hawks like Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

The 2010s and Today

Today’s intra-party Democratic debate is shaping up similarly to the debates of March 1990, which pitted Clinton’s network of an inclusive policy vision with the rallies of the left.

Bernie Sanders and AOC are on a sold-out national tour, while Ezra Klein is on an Abundance policy tour of his own and small collections of pragmatic Democrats do lunch & learns. Back to The New York Times from March 1990:

Governor Clinton told the group today that it should focus more on ideas than on the mechanics of winning the White House, asserting, ''Any political resurgence depends on the intellectual resurgence of our party.''

This sense, that the party needs that kind of debate, accounts, in part, for the group's preoccupation with Mr. Jackson, widely seen as the leader of the party's liberal wing. It invited him to speak at today's event.

This weekend’s NYT editorial offers a trio of actions for Democrats. First, “admit that their party mishandled Mr. Biden’s age.” Second, “recognize that the party moved too far left on social issues after Barack Obama left office in 2017.” And:

Third, the party has to offer new ideas. When Democrats emerged from the wilderness in the past, they often did so with fresh ideas. They updated the proud Democratic tradition of improving life for all Americans. Bill Clinton remade the party in the early 1990s and spoke of “putting people first.” In 2008, Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and John Edwards offered exciting plans to improve health care, reduce inequality and slow climate change. These candidates provided intellectual leadership.

Ideas are essential, and the DLC’s 1990 manifesto - the New Orleans Declaration - is worth reading today.

But the path back to power was not simply great ideas, it was built on deliberate organizing for a vision that could win a majority. The New Orleans Declaration rippled out into victories because of the lunches and local meetups and annual events and relationships built up over the six years before it.

Don’t be in denial. Join us at the second annual WelcomeFest on June 4 in DC - and check out the highlights of last year’s inaugural gathering. There are effective groups and leaders out there fighting denial, with lots of good ideas. Winning this fight requires doing it together.

Voters say they want change while their actions - re-electing incumbents and rejecting ballot initiatives - often display a sharp status quo bias. When push comes to shove, Americans are wary of big changes.

But political activists often have the opposite mentality: they say protecting the vulnerable is the focus, but much of modern advocacy is all about offense, not defense. It’s all about the upside. All about change. Never about protecting what we have now.

Years ago, I wrote an academic-ish paper for the Stanford Social Innovation Review on this problem which made the case that advocates too often think like investors in financial markets, where any specific investment has unlimited upside but limited downside. This “market approach” to advocacy takes the perspective that you can lose only what you put in.

But that is not what voters want, and opponents who take a “non-market approach” can seize on your mistakes to maximize their advantage on the risks that you took.

Progressive immigration advocates push for “abolishing ICE” and “decriminalizing the border”? Opponents can weaponize that, and now tattooed hairstylist residents are being deported to third world prisons.

But there is another way, where advocates can meet voters where they are to protect what they care most about - and then actually do so by winning elections.

Combative Centrism

Patrick Ruffini highlights some new data that might initially seem contradictory: Democratic voters want the party to move to the center, and be more combative.

The disconnect is recent - right now voters associate the progressive movement with a pugilistic anti-Trump attitude. But it’s not always been the case - in 2004, “fighting Democrats” like Jim Webb had appeal even among the blogosphere like Daily Kos despite not holding progressive views on many issues. Even the Netroots progressives were more obsessed with fighting Bush than getting deep into the weeds on left wing policies. Webb won over progressives with his anti-Iraq War views but he launched his campaign with an ad of Ronald Reagan praising his military service and was a staunch gun rights supporter. Webb’s appeal in 2005 was similar to Biden’s in 2019, he made the case to the Democratic base that he was the best candidate to win.

That’s what we need again. Moderates who are fighting to protect programs like Medicare and Social Security from Musk, not pitching voters on expensive policies like single-payer healthcare. It’s not Medicare for All that raises taxes and abolishes private health insurance.

It is “Medicare for People on Medicare” Democrats.

The last Resistance shows us one potential path.

Though the media focused on AOC and the left, the Democrats who actually won back that House in 2018 were Democrats like Abigail Spanberger, Conor Lamb and Elissa Slotkin, moderates who emphasized the threat of Trump to Affordable Care Act benefits.

“Medicare for People on Medicare” Democrats can focus on Elon Musk’s cuts to Social Security and Medicare, rather than being distracted by programs like USAID that don’t resonate with voters.

According to Blueprint polling, USAID was the second most popular agency to cut.

Messages that call Musk "dumb” and call him the “real President” didn’t work. Instead, the most popular messages are classic Democratic fare: Republicans want to cut your Medicare and Social Security to give a tax cut to the wealthy.

“Medicare for People on Medicare” Democrats

Compelling centrism wins elections.

Democratic voters want Democrats to fight and win.

So why is it that progressives are associated with fighting? It doesn’t have to be that way.

Moderate Democrats have the better message to beat Trump: protect the benefits you’ve earned.

The path to victory isn’t far-fetched promises that we can’t keep. It’s the real promises we can: we won’t randomly fire federal workers. We won’t strip away the protections of the Affordable Care Act. We won’t claim you’re dead and cut off your Social Security benefits. The other option is to move to the left, and make promises Democrats can’t keep.

Are you a Medicare for People on Medicare Democrat? Join us at WelcomeFest on June 4 in DC.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accidentally added a journalist from The Atlantic to the group text for American war plans.

It’s an incredible read. The TL;DR is that Defense Secretary Hegseth accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group chat with JD Vance and others in which the administration coordinated a military action. And then celebrated the bombings with emojis, making it look like the group chat for Maryland fans during the game last night.

It’s pretty insane:

We can’t help but wonder how Senator Tillis feels about his vote for Hegseth. One fact in the piece stood out:

A person identified in Signal as “Joe Kent” (Trump’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center is named Joe Kent) wrote at 8:22, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”

We previously described the elevation of Kent in the Trump White House as a “clown car to crazytown.”

Readers of this newsletter will know Kent well as the far-right election denier Joe Kent who has lost back-to-back elections to Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Her take on Kent’s nomination was concise: “Doesn’t seem wise.”

And she was proven very correct.

Kent’s Extreme Record

In 2022, Kent’s surprise upset in the preliminary election over moderate Jaime Herrera Beutler helped put WA-03 into contention and cost Republicans what should have been an easy pick-up. Kent claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and has ties to white nationalist Nick Fuentes, Proud Boy member Graham Jorgenson, and Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson.

Kent has a laundry list of conspiracy theories, including most recently his assertion that officers in the Secret Service may have been “in on” the July assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

Kent is known for his attacks on law enforcement and has threatened to defund the FBI, calling it, “a secret domestic intelligence agency” that will “continue to take us down this road towards total authoritarianism.” And now, he’s advising the administration on sensitive, high-stakes military decisions.

Jewish Insider has more on Kent’s worrying ties:

The former Army Special Forces officer, 44, also gave an interview to a Nazi sympathizer who has praised Hitler and appeared on a white nationalist YouTube channel — where he said that he did not “think there’s anything wrong with there being a white-people special interest group,” among other comments his critics interpreted as dog whistles to the racist far right.

Meanwhile, Kent has espoused conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and other topics, suggesting Secret Service agents were “in on” the assassination attempt against Trump last summer. Kent, who has called to defund the FBI, has also faced accusations of parroting pro-Kremlin talking points — as he has voiced skepticism of aiding Ukraine in its war with Russia.

When Kent was chosen, Republican Adam Kinzinger warned:

“This guy is, I’m not going to say neo-Nazi, but as close as you can get to that without being labeled that is about what he is,” Kinzinger said during a podcast interview with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller released on Wednesday. “Every conspiracy theory he buys into.”

And now, Joe Kent is getting national secrets texted directly to his Signal chat.

Think this is crazy? Want to figure out how Democrats can stop this?

Join us at WelcomeFest on June 4 in DC, because we need a vision for change, not more of the same.

Is a “Democratic Tea Party” on the horizon?

Do Dem voters desire “Combative Centrism”?

Meanwhile a third question dominates the strategic debate for Democrats. After a summer marked by an ideologically flexible insurgency against a septuagenarian party leader, there is a growing focus on translating that anger to ending the Senate Leader’s term. In July, a wide variety of Democrats agreed President Biden was too far past his prime. But the result of that insurgency was a loss.

So, what kind of conflict is coming for Chuck Schumer?

A combative centrist uprising focused on winning.

1. A Democratic Tea Party?

Politico Magazine has a big piece out on the intra-party antipathy that “ratchets up pressure in the 2026 primary election season”.

Written by Lakshya Jain, founder of the election analysis outfit Split-Ticket, the article’s accompanying charts are worth many words - and potentially some serious action:

Democratic voters are livid with their party, in a complete turnaround compared to the last Trump term. Today’s Democrats are the most upset voters have been at their own party since the GOP’s Tea Party.

Congressional Democrats have typically enjoyed higher popularity with their voting base than their Republican counterparts. But the trauma of the 2024 presidential election defeat appears to have ruptured that relationship. A review of Quinnipiac University’s annual first-quarter congressional polling reveals that, for the first time in the poll’s history, congressional Democrats are now underwater with their own voters in approval ratings.

Read the full piece in Politico here.

Not to do the progressive therapy-speak thing, but “rupture” and “trauma” seems like an accurate descriptor for the reaction of both Democratic activists and elected officials. The activists are exhibiting some symptoms (agitation, confusion, and a fight-or-flight mentality) while many leaders seem detached, numb or submissive.

So is a Democratic version of the Tea Party on the horizon?

2. Combative Centrism

One sharp difference with the Tea Party - and the 2018 progressive surge in urban Democratic primaries - is the lack of an ideological rift between Democratic voters and their leaders1. The dimension of conflict is attitude, not ideology.

Jain notes the ideologically temperate nature of the attitudinally intemperate Dem voters:

Despite the restive energy in the party’s progressive wing, the Democratic discontent does not seem to be centered around a desire to pull the party to the left or the right. Democrats cannot seem to agree on which direction the party should move in — recent Gallup polling found that 45 percent wanted the party to become more moderate, while 29 percent felt it should become more liberal, and 22 percent wanted it to stay the same.

Patrick Ruffini has coined the term “Combative Centrism” to describe this dynamic appearing in polling: Democratic voters want the party both to move to the center and to be more combative.

Noah Smith has a persuasive piece making the case for why - and how:

To many progressives, this must seem like a contradiction. To fight Trump harder, in their minds, means to stand up more strongly for progressive causes — trans rights, DEI, depolicing, and a more permissive attitude toward asylum-seekers. To compromise on those ideas, by definition, would be to accommodate or compromise with Trump…right?

The flaw in this thinking is that the issues most Americans care most about — the things they want Democrats to fight Trump hardest on — are not necessarily the same things progressive activists care about. The axes of “moderate vs. progressive” and “fight vs. compromise” simply don’t line up.

makes this point succinctly on The Rebuild: “Democrats don't face a choice between fighting harder or moderating—they need to do both simultaneously.”

There is one tiny little problem though: in the words of AOC, moderates are ‘meh’ about everything.

So where the hell are Democrats going to get a faction of centrist insurgents? And even if they did, what would they do?

3. What’s the Plan to Win, Chuck?

Back to Chuck Schumer in the political crosshairs. His decision not to shut down the government and “fight harder” has elevated questions about his ability to build and communicate a legislative strategy to counter Trump.

has boiled it all down in a Bloomberg column this morning:

What should Schumer critics do? Actually address voters’ biggest concern (Democrats losing) with the biggest problem facing Democrats in the Senate (they must moderate to build a caucus that consistently wins):

the first responsibility of anyone making an argument for new leadership: What is the new leader supposed to do? What is the plan to win a majority? Tellingly, the progressives calling for Schumer’s head have no strategy of their own to offer, because the only strategy that would work is one they don’t like. Schumer, meanwhile, seems paralyzed by fear of further angering the left and unwilling to articulate the plain truth.

This is how combative centrists build their muscles.

Organizing is a Muscle

The first rule for radicals, as we covered in Centrist School, is to approach organizing like a muscle:

“Getting into these fights is not like draining a battery. It’s like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets.” - Elizabeth Warren

Centrists typically look at conflict like something that is draining. But, structured effectively, conflict builds. And the “combative centrists” need to build.

Democratic centrists have done it before, despite the obstacles inherent in building a crew of antagonistic moderates. As we wrote in Rules for Engaging Radicals:

Political moderates tend to be more conflict-averse. But, as political scientists and political leaders demonstrated last time Democrats were in deep trouble (in the late 1980s), those who want to grow the party must structure productive conflict with the far-left.

This doesn’t mean fighting just for fun, it means drawing important distinctions to communicate more clearly to the rest of the country. Conflict has real costs and can distract — many on the far-left share motivations and goals with the center-left — so questions are warranted.

Is conflict necessary? Is it truthful? Is it helpful?

Define the Schumer Problem

Is attacking Schumer for not shutting down the government to “fight harder” necessary? Truthful? Helpful?

Maybe? But maybe not, as we covered last week.

If the problem centers around not shutting down the government, or around the intricacies of legislative strategy and vagaries of modern political communications, then the conflict will build power for the progressive left without getting Democrats closer to electoral victories.2

But there is another, much larger problem with Chuck Schumer. A problem for which the only proven answer comes from centrists.

Over his 8+ years as the party’s senate leader, Schumer has overseen a shocking decline in electoral competitiveness.

When Schumer took over in November 2016, Democrats had Senators representing Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, Missouri, Indiana, and Florida. The prior session, Democrats represented Iowa, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alaska, Louisiana, and South Dakota.

Those are 13 states Democrats no longer represent, most of which Democrats do not even seriously contest now.

That’s a lot of states!

Democrats currently hold both Senate seats from 22 states, plus Tammy Baldwin, Angus King, and John Fetterman.

This dismal situation has been widely known for more than half of Schumer’s tenure as leader. In a 2021 Ezra Klein column in The New York Times, David Shor described a total senate apocalypse that has only been avoided by a combination of luck (Democrats have won most of the close Senate races) and the insanity of their opponents (Republicans have nominated terrible candidates multiple times, including in Trump-won states last year).

Here’s Yglesias again:

It’s possible to argue that, considering these fundamentals, the party has actually done pretty well in winning elections. Schumer is a smart tactician who has recruited better candidates than Republicans, raised more money and ran better ads.

But tactics only get you so far. What Democrats need is a strategy for winning a Senate majority — a strategy that would put states like Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and Florida back on the map, while adding Texas. This is the only way to make Democrats systematically competitive in the Senate.

What the Democrats need, in other words, is not just more moderate candidates. They need a more moderate ideology.

Republicans have all 50 Senate seats representing the 25 states that Trump won thrice, and Chuck Schumer very clearly has no plan for changing that.

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Define the (Senate) Problem

The fight is coming to Chuck Schumer, necessary or not. The question now is if that conflict is truthful and productive.

And that requires defining the problem that Democrats have with him.

The current debate is conflated with broader dissatisfaction with party leadership. Arguments about the party brand - or even winning back the House in 2026 and the White House in 2028 - are endless, and often lead to debates over better TikToks and bro-friendly YouTubers and targeted voter turnout and “year-round organizing” or whatnot.

This general party debate is then applied to Chuck Schumer: is he the “best messenger”? Does he “have a strategy to fight Trump”?

This obscures the true problem for Democrats: the party can win the presidency and House in a good year. It’s a coin flip, with a coin that can be loaded by great candidates and smart investments.

But winning back the Senate with the current party is more like needing to roll snake eyes. With dice loaded in the wrong direction.

Combative centrists have an opportunity to create productive conflict that is truthful.

Where’s the plan to compete in 13 more states, Chuck?

Here’s CNN: AOC mobilizes Democrats against Schumer as colleagues privately urge her to consider primary challenge.

Mostly left unsaid: Schumer has 1,393 days left in his term.

How long is that in our current political environment?

1,393 days ago was May 23, 2021. These were the biggest stories:

• Supreme Court takes up case challenging Roe v. Wade

• White House releases Biden 2020 tax returns

• Coronavirus cases down in all 50 states

A lot can happen in 3+ years.

Here’s an example of another New York statewide elected official: in far fewer than 1,393 days, Andrew Cuomo has gone from Governor of New York, to a scandal that led nearly every elected Democrat in the state to call for his resignation, to resigning the office, and then coming all the way back to being frontrunner for Mayor of New York City (endorsed by some of those who called for him to resign).

Between now and mid-2028’s hypothetical AOC-Schumer primary, America will:

• Host the World Cup

• Hold Midterm elections

• Have a Democratic presidential primary

• Have a Republican presidential primary

• … and a zillion other things we cannot predict

Thirteen Democratic Senators hold seats up for election in 2026. The only one to vote for the controversial measure avoiding a government shutdown was Dick Durbin of Illinois, who turns 81 in November and is unlikely to run for re-election.

Five of the fifteen Democrats up in 2028 voted for it, including Schumer.

But 2028 is a long way away.

Miles from Median

So the Democratic Senators who “caved” to keep the government open will not face voters anytime soon. But they will face pressure from activists.

It is hard to overstate just how much the median Democratic elected official fears progressive activists more than they fear swing voters.

Democrats hold 47 seats in the Senate. The median Senator is from the 12th most-Democratic state - Illinois, which Kamala Harris won by 11 points.

This distance between medians is even more dramatic in the House, where Democrats hold 215 seats. The median Democrat is the 108th most-Democratic - by one measure, that is Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district, where Trump got 34% of the vote.

People joke that politicians play 5D chess, that Trump and Schumer are playing a game far more complex than our three-dimensional world.

But being a modern Democratic politician is more like playing regular chess in the park while surrounded by an angry mob of alleged supporters demanding that each individual move of a chess piece be an exciting offensive maneuver.

For 90% of Democratic elected officials, the primary election is a greater threat than a general election. Appeasing angry supporters with each individual move trumps winning the game.

Gone to battle with no ammo

It is not just progressive activists who are upset. There is tension between the chambers. And even within the Senate, even the most sober of leaders are showing frustration with Schumer.

Michael Bennet was pissed, saying Democratic leaders had "No strategy, no plan, and no message on this spending bill"

NBC reporter Sahil Kapur:

Democrats’ fatal flaw on govt funding: clinging to 30-day CR as their only counter-offer. Not viable when the speaker & president made clear they were done with FY25 approps. Whatever you think of Schumer’s move, his party had gone to battle with no ammo.

Who knew last week that there was no leverage?

The “Hollow Resistance”

Read more

Josh Marshall has a thorough breakdown of why Democrats should shut down the government, while has a convincing case for why Chuck Schumer was right not to.

It’s complicated. We’re in a historically unpredictable environment. Stakes are high, and possible impacts stretch from the Department of Justice to Kyiv.

Our team lives in purple districts1 far from DC. We’ve spent the last five years learning how to win swing voters, not things like how the parliamentarian will rule on the continuing resolution if the cloture vote yada yada. Gotta be honest there.

What we do know is that Democrats really, really needed to win another four seats in the House of Representatives.

And a major plot line of Resistance: The Sequel seems to be losing our shit at the very people who got Democrats close to a House majority.

Must try harder to win tough races

Last March, we wrote why Democrats Should Try Harder To Win Tough Races. It focused on what we can learn from political outliers and how their legislative actions contributed to their electoral success.

Democrats need to win more races to get the 218 members necessary to elect a Speaker.

About 200 districts are relatively easy for Democrats to win. Another two dozen have been coin flips - with good coins well-flipped - in the polarized environments of 2020, 2022, and 2024.

But a few outliers had proven an ability to win and hold seats that were much harder than a coin flip: districts where you needed to run 5, 10, or 15 points ahead of Democrats atop the ticket.

What could we learn from those outliers?

We have spent years - and more than $11,000,000 - trying to answer that question and put it into practice. And one big lesson we’ve learned is to trust voters more and pundits less.

Outliers

One of those outliers represents Maine’s 2nd congressional district, which voted for Trump by 9 points in 2016, 7 points in 2020, and 10 points in 2024.

How does a Democrat hold that seat?

It’s not just magic words and tattoos. A lot of it has to do with legislation.

Every time I think of Jared Golden winning Trump voters2, a 2021 column from The New York Times comes to mind. Jamelle Bouie wrote why Golden was “Making a Big Mistake” by voting with the views of his voters instead of the highly-engaged Democratic keyboard class:

We are well past the age of split-ticket voting. If and when voters turn against Biden, they’ll turn against congressional Democrats too. Try as they might, these Democratic skeptics will struggle to distance themselves from their party and its leadership. If past elections are any evidence, they’ll fail.

Well, Golden did not fail in the midterms - he won his Trump district in 2022 by even more than in 2020, which was by more than he won it in 2018. And he won again in 2024, despite Trump having his biggest win there yet.

Like other outliers, Golden votes differently. And that contributes to winning - not only his seat, but persistent majorities (see the full article for the charts & graphs).

The age of split-ticket voting is not over. If it was, Republicans wouldn’t represent districts Trump lost badly, like Nebraska’s 2nd or Pennsylvania’s 1st.

And it cannot be over if Democrats are ever to retake the Senate again, where states that Trump won thrice already account for 50% of seats.

The Counterfactual

Golden was ahead of the curve in forecasting what would happen on inflation, on Biden’s electoral prospects, and now it looks like his statement on the shutdown was Chuck Schumer’s first draft.

Is avoiding the shutdown right?

Shit, I don’t know - I lack access to the crystal ball into Elon’s Ketamine-fueled brain and Trump’s dark magic to forecast what would happen.

But it sure seems like a lot of Twitter and Bluesky - and leaders of organizations like Indivisible - know exactly what would happen. And at least they know what will happen in the short-term: more outrage, more clicks, more members.

That’s how the modern attention economy works. And political conflict is a big industry.

Raising Cane

Last week’s Get Big Mad controversy was less complicated. Ahead of Trump’s not-technically-a-State Of The Union address, Leader Hakeem Jeffries requested Democrats maintain decorum. Then 77 year old Rep. Al Green memorably gave a visual for the frustrations of millions of Americans.

Democrats on social media compared it to the image of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert screaming at Biden. That was the defense of Green.

I took to Bluesky to ask if the image of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert had made voters more or less likely to support Republicans. No one took the bait.

When it’s the other side, it’s easy to see: “expressive advocacy” feels good to the base but probably hurts the party’s ability to win over voters in the middle.

Ten Democrats voted to censure Green, and were met with the full fury of The Weak Tea Party.

Beware Certainty

Like The New York Times’ premature obituary for Jared Golden, Chris Hayes is 100% sure that 100% of voters will not remember a shutdown ever happened.

Hayes just released a new book on The War For Our Attention, and in that respect he’s right: the Outrage Of The Week will mostly be forgotten in, well, a few weeks.

But the certainty here is disturbing. Former US Representative Marie Newman wrote even more aggressively on the Al Green censure, claiming there are no Americans caught between the two parties:

· People either are antichoice or prochoice, not halfway

· People either believe in climate science or do not believe, not in the middle

· Folks either believe in equity and equality for all or do not, they do not assign belief at a 40-60% level

· Folks either believe in fair wages or do not

· People either believe billionaires are not paying their fair share or not

· People believe prices are high or not

· People believe government helps or not

The reason politicians came up with the idea of “centrist or moderate” voters and collectively placing them in the magical “Middle” is this allowed them to not address issues at all or just nibble at the edges. Their logic is: The “Middle” does not like it when all the sides fight, so I will just stay out and not address it.

If this is true, we are doomed.

But, while we don’t know what would happen if the government shut down, we do know this nuance-free worldview is wrong.

And for Democrats to regain power, we need more outliers who can prove it.

So says Jim Breuer’s character in the 1998 stoner film Half Baked while completely melting down after getting fired from his job at a record store.

Some Democrats are flipping out.

Will that bring more voters along?

Yesterday we passed 25,000 subscribers. Thanks to all who have shared our work! So appreciative to all of you who have contributed and shared, growing this community from a few dozen people focused on winning the middle to where we are today. Fittingly, our post today covers the GOATs: Golden, Yglesias, Manchin, and an opportunity for Democratic staffers. Thanks for continuing to read and share, excited to share in more overperformance - and wins - in the years ahead!

Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast

Congressman Jared Golden is not flipping out.

That’s the takeaway from his latest newsletter, entitled For Democracy, Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast:

President Trump’s administration is pushing big political and policy moves, and many of these actions already face legal challenges. Some have already been temporarily blocked, pending review and appeals.

This is a sign the system is working, with the judicial branch mediating legal disputes and making sure that the other branches stay within constitutional guardrails. This process is slow by design. But in response to passionate calls for immediate action from those who oppose President Trump, some Democrats have been tempted to ring the alarm of “constitutional crisis” loudly and frequently.

But in this fraught moment, leaders shouldn’t aim to match the rhetorical pitch of Americans’ worst fears. We should react with discipline to ensure the worst does not come to pass. That requires composure in the face of chaos. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

…

In the months and years ahead, we need to remain calm, roll up our sleeves, and take on the difficult task that begins with a look in the mirror and continues with the hard work necessary to win back the confidence of the voters. Otherwise, Democrats will continue down the same path that led us here.

Read the whole thing here. And ICYMI, check out the guest post from Rep. Golden and four of his congressional colleagues in the Blue Dog Caucus from last Friday’s WelcomeStack: 30 Years of Slipping the Leash.

What else is working? The normal rules of politics.

As points out, four new polls show Trump's approval rating sinking into the mid-40s. This quick dip is an accelerated version of what happens to most presidents as their honeymoon with the American people ends.

Don't need more “infrastructure"

wrote earlier this week that instead of more “infrastructure” - building or growing more progressive nonprofits - Democrats need more freedom and independent-mindedness. Because many of those institutions are actually hurting Democrats:

… there is a lot of enthusiasm for building new “infrastructure.”

And I get it. Many of us are incredibly alarmed by what Trump and Musk are doing, and people are eager to spend money fighting back. There are also a lot of people out there hustling to raise money for their own projects. Some of those projects are good, some are bad, and some are mid. But whatever your project, if you’re looking for funding, it’s almost always in your interest to argue that more infrastructure is needed. So I kind of feel like it falls to me to be the skunk at the party who calls this into question.

…

The keys to electoral politics — finding out what your voters think, and adopting some heterodox views that are popular with the electorate — are just not that complicated. Candidates don’t necessarily need a lot of infrastructure to execute on them. But what anyone working to elect Democrats does need is the freedom to do it without taking massive amounts of friendly fire.

A much harder question than “What will help candidates win in red-leaning districts?” is “Why has it come to be difficult to execute on this basic playbook?”

And the answer in many cases is not the absence of infrastructure but its excess.

Yglesias cites the critique of Indivisible that we wrote in Weak Tea Party. He notes that, eventually, Indivisible shifted to “explicitly organizing not against election denialists and people trying to cut Medicaid, but against the existence of the moderate Dem caucuses that serve as the bulwarks against MAGA trifectas forever.”

It’s fine for groups to explicitly work on moving the party left instead of winning, but people who want to focus on winning should be able to discern between those focused on ideological purity and those focused on winning.

The distinction that Yglesias draws is important, and something that shocked the Welcome team as we all stumbled into national politics: learning how to win red districts is knowable, but getting the Democratic “infrastructure” out of the way is complicated.

Figuring that out is key to building a sustainable majority.

As one Twitter user put it in a post retweeted by the Blue Dog:

make the TENT BIG

make it COOL and LOW PRESSURE to be a DEMOCRAT

welcome people from ALL BACKGROUNDS

EVERYONE has a place in the DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Join the WAR Room

While learning how to win tough districts is knowable, you still have to learn it. And while a lot of progressive infrastructure may be counterproductive, there is still too little investment in training for how to win over swing voters. So we encourage any mid-career campaign and political professionals interested in learning and discussing how to win close elections in difficult environments to check out the W.A.R. Room.

Short for Wins Above Replacement, the sports-derived shorthand for overperforming candidates, the W.A.R. Room is a virtual masterclass series. The 8-week, virtual night school will be followed by an in-person gathering in DC June 4-5.

Each week consists of one 75-minute Zoom seminar and a homework assignment. Approximately 20 students will be assigned to a single instructor for the entire course; each instructor will teach the core curriculum through the lens of their expertise.

The cost is just $75, and the deadline to apply is this coming Sunday. So go here now if you are a mid-career staffer in Democratic electoral politics.1

Thanks, Joe

Speaking of over-performance and the current importance of judges, a friendly reminder of how long judicial appointments can last: there are still 11 federal judges appointed by Ronald Reagan in active service.

Thanks to the electoral miracle that was Joe Manchin, a Democratic Senate approved more judges during the Biden era than during Trump’s first term.

Americans fired Democrats from the halls of power. There weren’t enough Manchins and Goldens to hold onto Congress.

Winning matters, and matters for a long time. It deserves our focus.

And that focus is incompatible with flipping out. Voters want a Low Pressure Resistance. Let’s not do what MAGA wants us to do. Who’s coming with us?

Don’t listen to them.

The phones are jammed in Congress.

But not red phones. Democrats are getting swamped by outraged constituents whipped up by progressive nonprofits like Indivisible and online personalities like Simon Rosenberg.

You’ve likely seen the many videos and tweets of Democratic elected officials doing performative nonsense that draws mockery from across the political spectrum.

Weeks into the second Trump Administration, why are Democrats doing performative nonsense?

The Indivisible Cycle:

In Step 1, nonprofit groups like Indivisible and online personalities like Simon Rosenberg grow their (profitable) social media followings and email lists by whipping up outrage.

But getting attention is only the top of an acquisition funnel - they then need people to take action. So you get emails like this, sent to hundreds of thousands of people:

Unfortunately, that causes Step 2: Democrats do performative nonsense to appease the activists whipped up to jam phone lines.

That’s how you get Chuck Schumer leading a chant ridiculed not only by MAGA, but by normies from all sides like former Democratic Representative and Senate candidate Tim Ryan:

Democratic leaders are, unsurprisingly, not too happy about being forced into performative nonsense that gets them ridiculed.

Here’s a story that broke last night from Axios:

A closed-door meeting for House Democrats this week included a gripe-fest directed at liberal grassroots organizations, sources tell Axios.

Why it matters: Members of the Steering and Policy Committee — with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) in the room — on Monday complained activist groups like MoveOn and Indivisible have facilitated thousands of phone calls to members' offices.

• "People are pissed," a senior House Democrat who was at the meeting said of lawmakers' reaction to the calls.

• The Democrat said Jeffries himself is "very frustrated" at the groups, who are trying to stir up a more confrontational opposition to Trump.

• Some Democrats see the callers as barking up the wrong tree given their limited power as the minority party in Congress: "It's been a constant theme of us saying, 'Please call the Republicans,'" said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.).

• The other side: "People are angry, scared, and they want to see more from their lawmakers right now than floor speeches about Elon Musk," Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg told Axios.

People are angry and scared? That’s good business for Indivisible.

Divisible & Risible

Anger and fear - along with millions of dollars from big-money donors - fuel the misnomered activist group Indivisible. Modeled after the Tea Party, the group has spent nearly a decade focused on division. Like the original revolutionaries in Boston, love throwing stuff overboard. They just never seem to have a workable plan for what to do next.

Indivisible’s failures partially stem from our common critique of the DC-centric corporatized progressive nonprofit groups: they focus on purity tests and intra-party clout over winning swing voters.

Their concentration of power among DC’s progressive elite was best articulated by scholar Theda Skocpol in the progressive outlet The American Prospect in 2021. In the aptly titled “Resistance Disconnect”, Skocpol argues:

More than any other part of the massive post-2016 resistance surge, the newly formed Indivisible network looked as if it might play a unique civic role, bridging long-standing divides between national and local levels and perhaps filling in the crucial middle tier of state-level and regional coordinating bodies. Building civic ties alongside the Democratic Party at all levels portended an enormously constructive achievement for the American center-left.

Unfortunately, Indivisible, so far, has not realized that potential. Since 2017, national Indivisible leaders have raised tens of millions of dollars from major donors, but have not devolved significant resources away from Washington, D.C., to empower democratically accountable state and local leaders. Instead, Indivisible directors have invested most of their resources into running a large, professionally staffed national advocacy organization, leaving local groups and networks largely on their own. This shift in priorities comes at a time when persistent organizing by locally rooted groups between as well as during elections remains more urgent than ever.

Indivisible stayed the course in the years after Skocpol’s critique. After Democrats lost the House in 2022,1 the co-founder said:

“The great thing about having your strategy being proven correct is that you don’t have to rethink your strategy…We would have, if the red wave materialized. But it didn’t…”

As we told the New York Times at the time “it kind of feels like Democrats are celebrating in the locker room because we lost by four.” Indivisible was popping champagne and doubling down on a failed strategy, even though the Democrats who won did so by creating distance between them and Biden’s toxic Democratic brand.

An Indivisible co-founder has touted experience working for Rep. Tom Perriello during the Tea Party wave as a template for Indivisible.2 A Time Magazine profile contains a fascinating line from Perriello:

“I make it a point not to think that far ahead. Planning ahead is an excuse not to do what you're called to do right now.”

MAGA is currently far stronger than the opposition party, in large part because the opposition’s leaders have intentionally not planned ahead. They have not course-corrected. They have interpreted losses merely as near-wins, with complete victory around the corner.

Maybe if they attack moderate Democrats more, maybe if Democrats just “fight harder.”

And Hakeem Jeffries isn’t happy about it. He’s got a House to win back, but the profitable progressive outrage industry wants to burn it down instead. Like David Hogg, the leaders of Indivisible are not the cause of all problems ailing Democrats. But they are clear examples of an outrage industry creating a doom loop.

And it is important for them to change their behavior! Millions of Americans want change, and they are following groups and online personalities that too often reinforce counterproductive actions.

We need to call out the Doom Loop, and reinforce a win loop. What Welcome and friends ask - persuade winnable voters in the middle and support candidates in tough districts - may be effective to beat MAGA, but it doesn’t hijack the part of our brains that outrage cash transfers to Indivisible and Simon Rosenberg.

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To help us build that Win Loop, join us as a paid subscriber to learn from & support winners - or donate to those Democratic winners here.

Democrats are getting a lot of hate calls right now, so show winners some love. We need more of them.

That quote, from a 2023 story in The New York Times on The Surprising Places Where Abortion Rights Are Winning, is about more than one issue. It’s about a choice facing practical leaders within the Democratic Party:

• Elevate messengers who resonate with the few million progressive activists? 

• Or build a platform for those who reject the litmus tests and condescension that drove voters to select a GOP trifecta?

We choose the latter, even when uncomfortable.

Fantasy Land

Like other pragmatic Democrats, we were dismayed by the leadership elections for the DNC last weekend. Here’s Lanae Erickson and Jon Cowan in MSNBC:

At the Democratic National Committee’s winter meetings this past weekend, there was almost no acknowledgement of the depth of the political hole the party finds itself occupying. Instead, attendees heard that a little tweak in messaging here and a new podcast or two there can fix the problem. That, to put it mildly, is a fantasy.

Many have pointed out that newly elected Chair Ken Martin's successful campaign was explicit in rejecting a need for change. But this is no surprise: as the Chair of the association representing his fellow state party chairs, the Minnesota Chair was the early frontrunner and had little to gain by rocking the boat.

It was the election of David Hogg as Vice Chair that caused us to ring the alarm. While primarily known for gun-related advocacy, Hogg expanded beyond his core issue to take maximalist positions on other issues like abolishing ICE and legalizing all drugs. And he built a PAC that hurt a dynamic centrist Democrat in a key primary race.

Politico captured several of our concerns in the story Why some centrist Dems fear David Hogg could ‘do more harm than good.’

That framing somewhat misses the point, though: Hogg is the symptom of what ails the Democratic Party, not the core problem.

Welcoming is Uncomfortable

Jason Paul, a candidate for Chair of the DNC,1 wrote a piece objecting to our critiques of Hogg’s elevation as a formal leader of the Democratic Party.

Titled Unwelcome PAC, Paul’s piece echoes critiques from others: we are being mean to 24 year old David Hogg, and any sort of fractious debates within the party are counterproductive to the goal of a lock-step mass protest of MAGA.

And, given our “Welcome” name, raising such tensions is counterproductive.

But that mistakes what the point of “Welcome” is about. Like abortion rights advocates in Kansas, we are not looking to give greater comfort to the people who are already dedicated Democratic activists. The entire point is to invite in others who currently feel unwelcome in the Democratic tent. There is little point in making progressive activists feel more welcome: they are not just welcome in the Democratic Party, they have become dominant - and themselves are hell-bent on making potential allies unwelcome.

There are full-time progressive activists, backed by millions in foundation spending and thousands of keyboard warriors, whose entire job appears to be making large swaths of the American electorate feel unwelcome in the party.

How do we know that? We ourselves have often felt unwelcome in the party. And not vaguely unwelcome: there are professional activists who see pushing people like us out of the party as part of their job. And they are succeeding: even sitting state legislators are leaving the Democratic Party at a rapid clip.

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Conflict Can’t Only Be For The Left

Most critiques of our Hogg opinion have been progressive doublespeak: now is not the time for infighting…. when it comes from the center. While also looking on as progressive activists whip up a frenzy, attack incumbents, attack moderate groups, and organize primary challenges to sitting Democrats.

Hogg himself had tweeted “I’m one of the most politically toxic people in the country and I’m too radical for American politics.”

So how did he end up running for DNC Vice Chair?

Melisa Byrne is who Hogg publicly credits as the person to recruit him to run for DNC Vice Chair. She typifies the progressive doublespeak on party unity: Byrne demanded that we stop criticizing Hogg - that we need to just “spend time fighting Musk”.

Meanwhile, in the same 24-hour period as she called for unity, she attacked Democrats on Israel (asked if Democratic Majority For Israel supports ethnic cleansing in Gaza, declared John Fetterman is “literally promoting ethnic cleansing”), attacked Never Trumpers (“Tell never trumpers to fuck off. We lose with them. We win without them.”, “trashy Never Trumpers had too much influence”), asked David Axelrod if he is okay with killing Africans with AIDS, said Politico likes dead children, claimed Chuck Schumer has failed comms folks promoting his dumb strategy, and that Tim Ryan is “doing nothing except making money for big oil.”

While these comments may sound like the pained blather of a random twitter account,2 Byrne is a leader of the modern progressive Shadow Party.

She led the student debt cancelation movement - the one that alienated non-college voters and harassed swing-district winners like Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, whose business was attacked in response to her opposition. She is regularly quoted in stories like The Washington Post’s “Biden has canceled $138 billion in student loans. Some say it’s not enough.” President Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain sought Byrne’s counsel and invited her to Zoom meetings with the transition team.

And she is who Hogg credits for initially calling on him to run for Vice Chair.

Her slash and burn approach is representative of the entire progressive Shadow Party. Just in the past few days:

• The ACLU’s Stefan Smith proposed putting a proverbial “sword of Damocles above the electoral heads” of Democrats in swing states by raising money to spend on primary challengers “depending on how elected officials act.”3

• Justice Democrats founder Saikat Chakrabarti launched a primary challenge to Nancy Pelosi.

• In The New Republic, there is a call to primary every Democrat.

• The president of Run For Something is saying “challenging Democratic incumbents is good & I expect we’ll see a fuckton more of it.”

Again, this is primary challenges of Democrats, not Republicans.

In the current Democratic Party ecosystem, this is what avoiding infighting means: progressives launch attacks on centrists, while centrists need to be quiet.

Attacking fellow Democrats with allegations of “ethnic cleansing” and the like is fine, but criticizing progressives is not.

David Hogg is not the problem - he’s just a clear manifestation of the problem.

Hogg should delete the worst of his tweets, where he said “Good Riddance” to Rep. Mary Peltola, and Democrats should continue pressuring him to do so. But we also need to counter the ACLUs and Melissa Byrnes and Justice Democrats who run the Shadow Party.

Progressive activists are looking for messengers who resonate with them, not the people we are trying to persuade. That means conflict is necessary.

Silence from centrist Democrats may make progressive activists more comfortable, but it makes the party less welcoming to the majority required to win.

The only catch? Donations do not go to the DNC. Or any formal Democratic entity.

Contributions go to Hogg’s own PAC.

The URL provided goes to Hogg’s Leaders We Deserve PAC:

Not surprising, as Hogg’s PAC spent more than $4.7 million last cycle on fundraising firms that buy emails and phone numbers to send spam emails and texts.

But disappointing nonetheless. Here’s a reminder why Hogg is such a problem:

After 10pm on Saturday night, the Democratic National Committee elected failed pillow pitch man David Hogg as Vice Chair.

Over the past year, Hogg has been known for two things: celebrating Democratic losses and spamming Democratic donors.

The Tweet

In the days following the 2024 election, Hogg tweeted - and has not deleted - a post saying “good riddance” to moderate Alaska Representative Mary Peltola, who performed more above partisan expectations1 than any other Democratic candidate in a competitive congressional election.

As you may have heard, control of the House of Representatives is incredibly narrow. Celebrating the loss of impure Democrats in red districts is exactly the type of litmus test extremism that failed the last Resistance, and the last thing we need at the top of the DNC.

The PAC

Like many high-profile progressive activists, David Hogg started his own PAC. Over the last two years, Hogg’s “Leaders We Deserve” PAC spent more than $4,771,884 on two progressive fundraising firms2 for the most annoying possible expenditures: list acquisition, digital ads, and texts.

Of nearly $12 million raised, none went to independent expenditures supporting federal Democrats in competitive races.3 His only spending was $194,000 for the primary challenger to Rebecca Cooke in WI-03 - like Peltola, a Blue Dog who won far more voters than analysts predicted.

But, again, Hogg celebrated the loss of Peltola:

Dems’ Other White Guy Problem

Read more

After 10pm on Saturday night, the Democratic National Committee elected failed pillow pitch man David Hogg as Vice Chair.

Over the past year, Hogg has been known for two things: celebrating Democratic losses and spamming Democratic donors.

The Tweet

In the days following the 2024 election, Hogg tweeted - and has not deleted - a post saying “good riddance” to moderate Alaska Representative Mary Peltola, who performed more above partisan expectations1 than any other Democratic candidate in a competitive congressional election.

As you may have heard, control of the House of Representatives is incredibly narrow. Celebrating the loss of impure Democrats in red districts is exactly the type of litmus test extremism that failed the last Resistance, and the last thing we need at the top of the DNC.

The PAC

Like many high-profile progressive activists, David Hogg started his own PAC. Over the last two years, Hogg’s “Leaders We Deserve” PAC spent more than $4,771,884 on two progressive fundraising firms2 for the most annoying possible expenditures: list acquisition, digital ads, and texts.

Of nearly $12 million raised, none went to independent expenditures supporting federal Democrats in competitive races.3 His only spending was $194,000 for the primary challenger to Rebecca Cooke in WI-03 - like Peltola, a Blue Dog who won far more voters than analysts predicted.

But, again, Hogg celebrated the loss of Peltola:

Dems’ Other White Guy Problem

Read more

At the DNC Chair forum on Thursday, every candidate raised their hand to affirm that racism and misogyny contributed to Kamala Harris’ loss.

As Josh Barro pointed out, this leads to Dumb DEI: if you believe that a black woman can’t win because of how sexist and racist the electorate is, you need to run a white guy. Now, there’s a ton of white guys out there so normally that wouldn’t prohibit a strong candidate. But there are two problems:

1. Selection - The Camo Hat Problem: the “shadow party” - the collection of nonprofits and interest groups chock full of over-educated, cosmopolitan elites who are disproportionately young and female - has a terrible Guydar. What will guys like? Ask anyone but The Groups!

There is no Zyn-filled room where savvy politicians can pick a white guy for electability. To the extent there are rooms, they’re just progressive Twitter come to life in an upscale urban apartment or NGO office tower.

Here’s a question: who were the straight white guy dads on the VP search committee?

Trick question: there were none.

2. Running - The Pandering Problem: most recently evidenced by Ben Wikler’s widely mocked identity-focused tweet, the type of white guy who rises to power in the late 2020s (we are now in the back half of the 2020s people) has performed so many ritualistic group signaling behaviors it’d make the head of the Freemasons blush. It’s impossible for them not to “center” an ever expanding set of capital letters.

Obama spent a good chunk of his 2008 win saying Stuff White Guys Can’t Say.

Faiz Shakir, the only non-white candidate to make a dent in the race, clearly saw the lane.

He said the Normal thing, which only in modern democratic politics is noteworthy. He said that we shouldn’t speak to people’s identities, we should speak to their needs. Black men, white men and Asian women all want a growing economy with low inflation.

Shakir knew what he was doing - he explicitly said he’d “use the party” and was clearly using the process to raise his own profile. But the role was useful, as a foil.

A former DNC spokesperson said “It’s clear no one understands what the DNC does, or what it’s supposed to do. Instead, we get roped into discussions that are detached from what it actually takes to win elections.” The race is more symbolic: and what it’s showing is Democrats haven’t moved past the politics of evasion.

The politics of evasion

Nearly all of the candidates agreed that the problem Democrats truly face is messaging - not substance. Per Weigel, O'Malley and Martin agree that they need a "misinformation, disinformation war room." Another said “We can overwhelm the algorithm." Another: “We've got the right message, what we need to do is connect it back with the voters." But Democrats spent more in 2024 than Republicans did, so it’s not merely the message that is the problem. This is classic “politics of evasion,” focused on “fundraising and technology, media and momentum, personality and tactics.”

None of the white guys on stage were willing to point to the party’s stances on crime, immigration or spending - in part because as white guys are conditioned to pass progressive litmus tests, they would be chastised for “speaking from a position of privilege” on these questions.

The white guy problem isn’t just a messaging problem. It’s a policy problem. Democrats need better ideas for governing, not just messaging, to win.

Don’t believe it? Within a year of the storming of the Capitol, at least 57 individuals who either attended the Save America rally that preceded the riots, gathered at the Capitol steps or breached the Capitol itself ran for elected office. The majority of them lost, but that was before the whitewashing of the violence began, before the GOP memory-holed the entire experience and before a sitting, popularly elected president described rioters as “J6 hostages” whose prosecution was “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people.”

In Republican primaries where the nomination will hinge on MAGA bona fides, these candidates may have an edge: Trump, the single most powerful force in the party, has portrayed them as martyrs for the cause. And to many in the reconfigured GOP, the J6ers will be running as heroes — a recent CBS poll found that 72 percent of Republicans supported pardoning those who forced their way into the Capitol. Some will view them as not entirely different from courageous prisoners of war from yesteryear like John McCain or Jeremiah Denton, both of whom returned home after harrowing imprisonment and soon thereafter won election to Congress.

One year and one day after the mob at the Capitol, we took to The Bulwark pages to call on “January 7th Democrats” to step up.

We asked What Didn’t Happen After January 6th? And why?

Three weeks after the January 6 insurrection, a high-profile faction on the left launched an aggressive recruitment campaign looking for candidates to primary a vulnerable incumbent.

The recruitment target? Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, fresh off casting his vote to impeach President Trump.

The recruiting entity? An offshoot of Justice Democrats, the progressive group aligned with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

That’s right: The founders of Justice Democrats went on the offensive against Manchin—immediately after the insurrection—in an attempt to find a more liberal West Virginia Democrat to primary him.

West Virginia is one of the reddest states in the country, making Manchin an electoral miracle; if the group were to be successful in its effort to oust him with a left-wing primary challenger, that challenger would lose to any GOP nominee in the general. Meaning that these progressives watched the January 6 attack on democracy and decided that what America needed was . . . one more Republican senator.

The net result being that this progressive group had effectively joined forces with the GOP to hobble what could have been a movement of empathetic big-tent Democrats incentivizing red-to-blue party switching.

It’s hard to overstate just how significant an opportunity January 6 initially represented for Democrats: Donald Trump’s anti-democratic movement had, in violent and grotesque fashion, paraded its true colors in front of the nation and the world. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Republican party shed 12 points in favorability among its own voters while Democrats made a 7-point gain with independents. A disgraced Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook, his loudest megaphones. Even some of Trump’s most ardent and vocal propagandists from Fox News acknowledged in private that the president had crossed a serious line. Democrats were handed a chance to win over the middle of the country.

Instead, the biggest recruitment story in the aftermath of the insurrection was the far-left trying to recruit candidates to knock off a fellow Democrat.

You can read the full piece here.

Three years later, core themes continue to be true:

1. Factions, not parties, are the level for change. “The Democrats” as a party were not structured to seize the January 7th opportunity. Only an organized faction can do that.

2. The Far-Left has peaked. Forget primaries from the left for sitting Democrats (even AOC is promising not to back such challenges anymore) - Squad membership itself is declining.

3. The most organized faction in early 2021 was the “harass Joe Manchin for clicks & cash” faction, not the “woo disaffected Republicans into a majority coalition” faction. The best bet for centrists and pragmatists of all kinds is still building partisan factions.

That’s why Organizing Beats Debating.

There’s no such thing as “The Democrats, Inc.”

The “Democratic Party” is little more than a loose-knit network of institutions (committees, think tanks, media outlets, organizing and advocacy groups, etc.) and individuals (politicians, activists, voters, etc.). There is no centralized decision-making apparatus to define priorities, make tradeoffs, and allocate resources. This means “The Democrats” are simply whoever within the coalition steps up and does the real work of organizing and investing.

One of the first questions this newsletter sought to answer was But don’t “The Democrats” do that?

The far-left has peaked.

Not only has the far-left never flipped a single seat, but the “Squad” has seen its growth (which unfolded only in some of the bluest districts in the country) slow dramatically since its inception in 2018. The slowdown in momentum has also unfolded in the entrepreneurial groups that powered the far-left’s rise, with flashy and disruptive upstarts like No Excuses PAC and New Consensus appearing to have fizzled out entirely with little to show.

Has the far-left peaked? Yes.

The most effective way for centrists to exert an influence on our politics is through moderate partisan factions, not third parties.

Vaguely defined anti-partisan centrist groups dilute moderates’ political power by diverting critical resources away from the center-left and center-right partisan factions where they could have a real impact and toward quixotic third-party efforts that are doomed to lose in our “first past the post” electoral system. Partisan factions are not only more effective now but also serve as the basis for the organized networks that could in a future where reforms like ranked choice voting and multi-member districts are more widespread.

We have Two Arguments to Win. Let’s go win them - and join the team as a paid subscriber to keep the momentum going.

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