Rep. Ritchie Torres and Matt Yglesias at WelcomeFest 2025
Join us June 4 at WelcomeFest for expert discussions on polarization, abundance, and popularism with Rep. Ritchie Torres and Matt Yglesias.
The largest public gathering of centrist Democrats, WelcomeFest showcases the array of ideas, policy, and leadership hailing from the centrist faction of the Democratic Party. It’s also our way of bringing to life the posts on this Substack. Along with our partners, we’re creating an in-person space for all of us that features many of the elected leaders and centrist ecosystem influencers we write about on WelcomeStack and feature on The Depolarizers podcast.
In today’s post, we’re excited to share Rep. Ritchie Torres and Slow Boring’s Matt Yglesias are speaking at WelcomeFest 2025 on June 4 in Washington, DC. RSVP to join us, and invite a friend!
Matt Yglesias
The Spanish author Corín Tellado famously wrote 4,000 novellas, but even she would struggle to match the output of Matthew Yglesias, who at his blogging peak at Slate filed 5 to 8 times a day.
Today, Yglesias is co-host of a popular podcast and writer of the wildly successful
newsletter. We were grateful to feature him as a guest on our first episode of The Depolarizers.Yglesias has noted that certain skills are best suited to specific moments and contexts. His ability to churn out provocative, engaging perspectives on policy and politics has gained a special ubiquity in our current media environment, influencing a wide range of audiences including federal staffers, elected officials, political practitioners, and pundits.
Yglesiasisms have found purchase in the discourse of not only Center Left politics, but those — to their annoyance — of the Far Left as well. And they’ve gained a significant following: Slow Boring has more than 200,000 subscribers.
Yglesias leverages this influence for good, often directing Slow Boring readers’ small dollar donations to pivotal races like Rebecca Cooke and Janelle Bynum this past election cycle, and, more recently, the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.
On a personal note, I’ve appreciated both reading Matt’s writing over the years and time we’ve spent together IRL at conferences. He is equally interesting and enjoyable to be around.
Matt Yglesias is at the top of the list of the most effective political entrepreneurs in the country.
Some of the biggest lessons we’ve learned from him over the years include:
1. Polarization is a Choice
One of the defining features of Yglesias’ work is the view that polarization is a choice that elites in both parties have made, not a true reflection of voter sentiment.
Yglesias has amassed a trove of evidence for this claim - the success of Republican Governors in blue states, the victories of Democrats like Joe Manchin and Jared Golden who buck their parties, and the fact that according to surveys, voters actually viewed Trump as more moderate than the average Republican.
Yglesias has pointed out that underneath the big ideological fights, Congress passes a number of big pieces of legislation that rarely get discussed through the “Secret Congress,” the bipartisan appropriations process, and National Defense Authorization Acts each year.
He notes that polarization is not an inevitable force — it’s a choice elites have made to prioritize ideological purity over broad coalitions.
The good news is that if polarization is an elite phenomenon, elites can change the incentives: donors could prioritize candidates who win rather than those who incite fury, politicians could appeal to the median voter instead of obsessing over a primary challenge, and the media can focus on policy issues that matter to voters instead of those prioritized by activists.
Background Reading from Slow Boring:
The rise and importance of Secret Congress (Shh, don't talk about it)
Polarization is a choice Political elites justify polarizing decisions with self-fulfilling prophecies
Some thoughts on “faculty lounge politics” The problem of the BA bubble
2. Popularism
Yglesias is known as a leading proponent of “popularism,” the concept that politicians should prioritize policies and rhetoric that resonate with the majority of voters (another proponent of this ideal, David Shor, will also be at WelcomeFest).
Competing theories focus on “mobilizing” a core base of supporters with ideas that target them, and still others propagate the idea that expensive social programs will “deliver” benefits that lead to electoral success.
Popularism simply meets voters where they are.
The opposite of popularism is the politics of evasion, which imagines a non-existent electorate that mirrors the views of progressive activists to avoid making tough decisions. But while the practitioners of the politics of evasion are wrong, they are organized – and that means realists must be organized as well.
WelcomeStack has been featured with links in outlets such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe. But our biggest traffic day, by far, was when Yglesias tweeted our post on the need for popularists to do more organizing:
And it wasn’t just traffic: Fellow travelers signed up to get these weekly posts, sent us direct messages on social media, and set up calls. It instigated community. Our post that day called for more focus on organizing pragmatic Democrats, and thanks to Yglesias, more than on any other single day, we felt the impact of our work.
Background Reading from Slow Boring:
Democrats Have Changed a Lot Since 2012 Moving left on economics — but also on climate, race, and a bunch of other things
Joe Manchin to the rescue The Inflation Reduction Act and how we got here
Should Democrats talk more about their values? It depends on the values...
Most Americans are moderates In order to win, Democrats need to meet voters where they are
The two types of progressives Moralists vs. pragmatists
3. Yglesias, the ultimate centrist entrepreneur
Our “Centrist School” series (check it out if you haven’t!) covered how partisan centrists lack the natural organizing structures of the progressive left’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Welcome has been a benefactor of Slow Boring’s impact on the partisan centrist political ecosystem, and Yglesias’ writing has been foundational to our work. But, perhaps more importantly, Yglesias’ transition from Vox co-founder and Twitter personality to Substack pioneer has elevated him to another level: he is a centrist entrepreneur driving the strongest online community in the Center Left.
Rep. Ritchie Torres
Yglesias and others will be joined by Rep. Ritchie Torres, a depolarizing Democrat who embodies the values of combative centrism.
Rep. Torres, representing the Bronx in New York’s 15th congressional district, is one of Welcome’s oldest friends – he spoke at our Clyburn Day event back in 2021.
A member of the progressive caucus, Rep. Torres brings a refreshing dose of centrist common sense to his messaging.
Torres isn’t afraid to be vocal about some of the flaws and failures of blue city/state governance. That perspective has also made him one of the most prominent elected officials to support the idea of an “Abundance” agenda. Torres was quoted by Ezra Klein on X saying:
"I feel like the abundance agenda is the best framework that I've heard for reimagining Democratic governance. And New York should be a laboratory for the implementation of a 21st century abundance agenda."
Torres also posted on X:
The State of New York is the antithesis of abundance. New York is one of the hardest places to build anything—from affordable housing to clean energy infrastructure. It has an inefficient government that prioritizes scarcity over abundance and bureaucracy over building.
Torres’ approach to governance is truly results-oriented. He told a Times reporter back in 2021:
“I don’t hire ideologues or zealots,” he tells me on a walk through his district. “Most of the people in the South Bronx are practical rather than ideological. Their concerns are bread and butter, health and housing, schools and jobs.”
Even before Abundance was coined, Torres expressed in that same 2021 interview a very proto-Abundance approach to housing policy:
His answer is a classic triangulation between big-government interventionism and small-government common sense. He wants to greatly increase the Section 8 federal voucher program, turning it into a new federal entitlement — “housing vouchers for all,” he calls it — that would ensure that no American family would need to pay more than 30 percent of its income in rent. Doing so “would instantaneously make millions of units affordable for the lowest-income households.”
But he also understands the need to streamline the public-review process to increase the supply of housing stock. “One of the great ironies of our time is that some of the most progressive cities are among the most systemically racist in their housing policies,” he says, mentioning San Francisco’s policies of single-family zoning and other land-use practices that are the way in which liberals discriminate today.
Torres’ governing style is inspiring. And the most surprising thing about Torres’ glowing Times profile? It was written by the paper’s resident conservative columnist, Bret Stephens. In the piece, Stephens remarked about Torres:
In other words, Torres is everything a modern-day progressive is supposed to look and be like, except in one respect: Unlike so much of the modern left (including A.O.C., who grew up as an architect’s daughter in the middle-class Westchester town of Yorktown Heights), he really is a child of the working class. He understands what working-class people want, as opposed to what so many of its self-appointed champions claim they want.
It’s the perfect encapsulation of the “welcome” ethos he brings to governing, and you’ll be able to see it firsthand on June 4 at WelcomeFest.
As a bonus, Rep. Torres and Yglesias recorded a podcast together in January. In it, Yglesias noted about Torres:
Torres is young, he’s dynamic, and he has a pretty safe blue seat. He could take the path of least resistance and go along to get along. But he’s also ambitious enough to be thinking about the future and the larger picture and to see that the course Democrats have been on isn’t good enough to reliably contest tough races or to bring growth and opportunity to places like New York.
Join us to hear from Matt and Rep. Torres at WelcomeFest June 4 in DC. Check out a recap of last year’s WelcomeFest.