Getting to No

Questionnaires and answers to growing the fight against The Groups

When will Democrats learn to say no to progressive advocacy groups?

That’s the title of The New York Times op-ed that drove the conversation this weekend.

Democrats are just starting to reckon with what the progressive nonprofit complex has wrought. On Wednesday, Ezra Klein proclaimed The End of the Obama Coalition, bemoaning “a culture in which nobody is saying no to the groups at any level of American Democratic politics.”

But it is Saturday’s op-ed from Adam Jentleson that has captured the zeitgeist against the progressive advocacy organizations known as “The Groups” that have pushed Democrats to the left in recent years. Key themes from the op-ed are familiar to our readers:

• Democrats will not get back to 2009 levels of influence “as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power.”

• The groups “have grown too big, adopted overly expansive mandates and become disastrously cavalier about the basic realities of American politics in ways that end up undermining their own goals.”

• We should be “declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win.” Candidates should “stop filling out interest group questionnaires and using their websites to placate them by listing positions on every issue under the sun.”

What is the path forward? Jentleson elevates both Abundance-style optimism and the issue differentiation of the Blue Dog co-chairs:

The emerging concept known as supply-side progressivism offers a good guide, embracing limited deregulation that advances liberal policy goals. Democratic candidates such as Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington opposed regulations that prevent day care workers from peeling fresh fruit for kids and a mandate for new safety features on table saws that would have made the saws so expensive that people would simply use circular saws, likely resulting in more severed fingers. For Jared Golden of Maine, it was opposing a Biden administration rule meant to protect whales that would have hurt his state’s lobster industry. Border security has clearly emerged as a threshold issue for working-class voters, including Latinos; by taking a hard line, Dan Osborn (an independent candidate) in Nebraska and Ruben Gallego in Arizona ran well ahead of Ms. Harris.

Jentleson’s piece has been persuasive to many in part because it is well-written, with spot-on eviscerations like “disastrously cavalier,” and you should read the whole thing here.

But it is also persuasive because it comes from a messenger with progressive credibility. And that will be necessary for making this necessary transition, because it turns out that saying no to The Groups results in a fairly intense variety of personal and professional hazards.

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What Happens After No

Golden and MGP gave a hard line no to The Groups on several of the most high-profile issues of the past two years, from immigration to energy to student loan debt cancellation.

While social media is now alight with glowing features on how Golden and MGP point the way forward for the party, we should not forget the blowback that happens when truly representing their constituents crosses The Groups:

They were the only two Democrats to vote against student debt cancellation, causing activists whipped up by millions of dollars in dark money to decimate the Yelp reviews of MGP’s family auto repair business.

Salacious headlines in outlets like Slate (“With Democrats like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who needs Republicans?”) and hit pieces, like The New Republic essay referenced in the above tweet, gave ample fodder to the professional left to make things difficult.

And what if Golden and MGP had run just slightly less ahead of Kamala and lost?

Look no further than Mary Peltola, who ran ten points ahead but fell just short. Here is what the most prominent gun control advocate shared last night with his 1.1 million followers after her loss was confirmed:

Many have pointed out the problem of Hogg wishing Peltola “good riddance” as Republicans hold the House by just a handful of seats (literally, flipping the fingers on just one hand).

If Hogg was seeking to maximize his single issue, that could be fine. A gun control advocate could rationally push for moderation on other issues to ensure that Democrats could win and prioritize gun control legislation. He could advocate for stronger borders and an all-of-the-above energy strategy.

But that’s not what is happening.

Here are the actions recommended by Jentleson:

One way to do this is for Democrats to stop filling out interest group questionnaires and using their websites to placate them by listing positions on every issue under the sun. This is where opponents go to mine for oppo, as they did for Ms. Harris.

Democrats should seek out issues that demonstrate their willingness to fight for their constituents and break with progressive orthodoxy.

There are no freebies to break with progressive orthodoxy. There are organizations with full-time staff ready to fight any break on any issue. Worse, all of The Groups have been ready to fight any break with any other group.

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Intersectional Maximalism

In early 2018, a candidate for state legislature in Massachusetts shared a threat that awakened me to the intersectional dystopia we now occupy.

The leader of a progressive nonprofit umbrella group, which organized unions and progressive nonprofits into a single issue questionnaire and endorsement process, told the state legislative campaign there would be significant blowback to being on the wrong side of a K-12 education issue.

It would not only cost the campaign an endorsement from the umbrella organization and the education groups within it, but from all member groups - including abortion rights groups like Planned Parenthood, environmental groups like Clean Water Action and the Sierra Club, several unions, and the LGBT rights group MassEquality.

They were enforcing solidarity. To say no to one of the groups was to say no to all of the groups, which were staffed by a dense network of progressive politicos.

Thanks to some personal relationships, the threat dissipated in that particular instance. But I’ve spent much of the last six years trying to understand what happens when political actors resist the maximalist intersectionality approach of progressive nonprofits.

What happens when Democrats say no? What can we do to make it easier?

We catalogued many of those lessons in Centrist School: what we can learn from the far-left, and how to activate a center-left community.

One path forward is more candidates like Golden and MGP. Leaders with such a deep sense of self and understanding of their constituents that they withstand the pressures of conforming to The Groups.

A complementary path is to strengthen a rival faction that breaks with The Groups. Earlier this year in the journal Democracy,

Lauren Harper Pope

and I asked “In a world of weak parties and strong partisanship driven by ideological—and unaccountable—groups, how do we empower a pragmatic faction to support the next generation of big-tent party-builders?”

We focused on how to build up support around elected officials with the courage to take tough stands. To do that takes a lot of talented, dedicated people. And a major lesson from 2018 onwards has been that The Groups sure have a lot of them.

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Zealous Converts

Why is Adam Jentleson such a persuasive messenger?

He has Beltway credibility, most recently as the prominent Chief of Staff to Senator Fetterman. But more importantly, Jentleson does not come from the anti-left camp. He has been an effective leader in mainstream Democratic politics who helped build the momentum among party elites for moving left. In the 2020 presidential primary, Jentleson was in the ascendent group of talented staffers advocating a quick nomination of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren to avoid a moderate. That gives his message unique credibility now, not only to other mainstream Democrats but to the talented operatives and activists who were fighting moderates a half-decade ago.

There is nothing like the zeal of the convert, and we need more zealous converts.

Earlier this year, we covered Matt Yglesias’ explanation of “How I went from left to center-left.”

His values had not changed, but he became skeptical of progressive institutions. He noticed that when confronted with unworkable activist demands “the impulse among so many sensible mainstream liberals was to lay low.”

Slow Boring

has helped many break out of that impulse. Yglesias is the most successful entrepreneur on the center-left. He has onboarded many into the practice of saying no, building a community around it that directly supported candidates like Golden and MGP.

Yglesias is strengthening a flywheel, and Jentleson is giving it another big push.

This works. Four years after we started working against the intersectional progressive candidate questionnaires in Massachusetts, leading gubernatorial candidate Maura Healey publicly refused to fill them out.

Moderating on salient issues will not be easy. At first, anyway. But the thing about a flywheel is that it moves faster and faster. Breaking can get easier and easier.

For years, we felt like we needed to make the prophets louder. Listen to the winners. Pass the microphone from politicians in deep blue districts like AOC to leaders like Golden and MGP.

We still need more people to hear from the prophets.

But now that the lights are on them, what we most need is more converts. As you can imagine, Jentleson is getting a ton of flak from The Groups. So follow him on Twitter, share his New York Times piece, and encourage other converts.