931: NFL vs. Succession
Meeting the marketplace
Last Tuesday, Adelita Grijalva won a primary that will send her to Congress. Despite it being a highly-publicized special election, Google Searches for her barely passed Zohran Mamdani for a few hours.
That captures one of the biggest challenges facing Democrats focused on a House majority: left-wing lightning rods getting more attention and raising more money than the rest of the party, especially centrist Democrats in swing districts.
And everyone is noticing the big gaps in attention and fundraising.
Here is Politico Playbook last week:
THE FUTURE STARTS NOW: The battle for the future of the Democratic Party is coming into sharper focus in Washington today on multiple fronts.
MAMDANI IN D.C.: Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, arrives in Washington this morning for a breakfast event hosted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). He will also meet with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). His long-awaited meeting with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is holding out on an endorsement, will come on Friday back in NYC.
Also coming soon: Mamdani “plans to clarify his stance on the use of the phrase ‘globalize the intifada,’ as soon as this week,” POLITICO’s Emily Ngo and Joe Anuta report.
The broader context: Mamdani’s D.C. pilgrimage comes as Democrats throughout the nation battle over whether a more progressive-populist approach or more moderate posture is better suited to compete, win and deliver in the Trump era.
One way to think of it: “Progressives are like ‘Succession,’ centrists are like the NFL,” Liam Kerr, co-founder of centrist Democratic outfit Welcome PAC, tells Playbook. “One gets high ratings across every demographic every single fall, while the other occasionally dominates elite conversation. Mamdani-mania is like the season finale.”
And yet: That wasn’t immediately clear in last night’s fundraising numbers.
MONEY TALKS: One takeaway from the latest FEC filings: Among Dems, the progressives — not the centrists — continue to be star fundraisers …
If Democrats want to win back the House and make a competitive Senate map, dollars and attention need to be on centrists in swing districts. But as Politico points out here (and our analysis showed last week), that is not happening.
And people are noticing. Here is
, who until recently the head of FiveThirtyEight at ABC News (and now writes Strength in Numbers).But centrist candidates can fundraise small-dollars when they invest in it. Last cycle, Welcome candidate (and now colleague) Adam Frisch raised nearly $10 million in small dollar contributions, roughly the same as AOC.
Political donors are stuck in a polarization doom loop, though: Conflict drives clicks and donations → centrists don’t compete for attention → donors drift to anti-partisan content → Republicans benefit.
To take one example …
launched The Free Press saying “There are tens of millions of Americans who aren’t on the hard left or the hard right who feel that the world has gone mad.” In 2023, The Free Press did $5m in revenue. In 2024, it did $10m in subscription revenue alone. It has continued to boom, and is reportedly under talks with Paramount.The Free Press now has more than 150,000 paid subscribers serving effectively as $1,000,000 per month small-dollar donors. In significant part because they serve content that relentlessly attacks the far left. That is millions of dollars every month to an audience that is at least nominally both anti-MAGA and anti-leftist.
With 931 days before the next presidential primary, how are those readers going to tune into the Democrats who can win?
We will lose if small-dollar donors keep rewarding progressive conflict over competitive campaigns, and centrists do not meet them in the marketplace for attention and small-dollar donations. We won’t just lose winnable seats. We’ll lose the ability to govern.
The House will stay red. The Senate map will remain out of reach. And Trump, with a compliant Congress, will face fewer checks in a second term than he did in the first.
That doesn’t mean every Democrat needs to pile on the left. But the vacuum needs to be filled with voices willing to make the case for electable, anti-MAGA candidates.
Elites will always want to talk about shows like Succession, even when most of the country reliably tunes into the NFL. Small-dollar donors will respond to those, like AOC, who spend millions to get onto their phones. The millions reading The Free Press want to defeat extremism, but don’t hear from candidates. The press will always focus on conflict.
We know where the attention is, and where it needs to be. Time to invest in closing that gap.
The Democratic Party has to return to the most important issues to every voter - the economy. Most Americans only care about how their lives are directly effected by Washington and decisions made in the state assemblies.
The actions of the President and the current Congress have already started to put pressure on everyone except their friends who are in the 1%. If Democrat candidates start designing and delivering messages focusing exclusively on the dramatic and damaging economic decisions made by GOP incumbents, those messages will have an impact.
This is not rocket science, but in the last decade, the Democratic Party has lost the thread. Winning isn’t about the progressive “base.” Winning is about getting voters who just want hope for a better life through good wages, lower food prices, and equitable health care. Focusing on the rest of the progressive agenda only hurts the Party’s chances of returning to some sort of political relevancy.
OK, I’m a geezer, a veteran, a retired member of “the Deep State,” and a guy who is absolutely a centrist. I have voted for common sense politicians regardless of the party affiliation.
In the last decade both parties have been captured by their fringes. The first party to come to its senses and move to the center will be the party that wins elections. I sincerely hope it is the Democratic Party.