Three Year Flywheel

Recommitting to growing a community that wins

At our first in-person gathering, an attendee remarked “either we’re crazy, or everybody else is crazy.”

That was back in 2021, when the writing was on the wall, but denial blinded progressives to reality.

Three years ago today, we committed to writing a consistent newsletter that would capture our reflections of our work on the ground.

Originally published every Sunday morning, the goal was to engage a growing community focused on strengthening a centrist faction that wins and governs effectively. The earliest pieces are relevant in the aftermath of November’s election:

• The first - Popularism, but for Organizing - urged pragmatists to move from arguing with leftists to organizing our own faction: “Debates over the best Democratic message may be intellectually appealing, but the real impact lies in recruiting center-left leaders and community members to deliver that message.”

• The second called for stoic focus. Democrats swing from naivety to bitterness: Democrats are on the brink of catastrophe. We must discern what is in our control and do something about it.

• The third asked But don’t “The Democrats” do that? We need to recognize that message discipline is unavailable at the party level and that, in our modern hollow parties, “The Democrats” are whoever steps up and does the work of organizing.

Three years on, it’s pretty clear: our community isn’t crazy.

We just need to be bigger.

Today, we are re-committing. And we hope you’ll join us.

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Early Flywheel

As we enter our fourth year, we feel similar to how Matthew Yglesias framed the fourth year of his Slow Boring newsletter. There is a strong case for optimism for an increasingly coherent faction:

Building more media outlets that actually care about pragmatic, workable politics is a necessary part of fixing the overall landscape — there is (I hope) a flywheel between media work, policy work, electoral work, and organizing and fundraising.

In Flywheel Optimism, we described the concept of a flywheel and its accelerating speed. That post was about the multi-faceted Janelle Bynum, one of the candidates we supported this cycle. But that acceleration can also be seen in the Welcome community:

• In our first year, we wrote 50 posts that yielded 63,511 views. We hosted a handful of private gatherings with ~100 people and engaged in campaigns in three geographies.

• In our second year, we kept the same footprint of weekly posts and a few private gatherings. We saw growth - more attendees, more subscribers, and about double the views (142,333).

• A year ago, we committed to growing this community. We shifted to posting three times per week, turned on the ability to become a paid subscriber, engaged more intensively on social media, and shared links to support candidates.

We can feel the flywheel accelerating:

• Our community is now more than 17,000

• Views grew by an order of magnitude, to more than 1.5 million 

• You contributed more than $500,000 directly to Win The Middle candidates, and invested millions more in WelcomePAC supporting them

• Driven by the inaugural WelcomeFest, our first public event, more than 600 people joined our gatherings over the last year

This is the flywheel.

But we really need to push it faster. Why?

We Are Still Out-Organized

Our faction is still losing to those who deny reality or focus on problems outside of our control.

After the midterms in 2022, the sides were clear and the facts were on our side of the argument: if we stayed on the current path, we would lose.

Welcome and partners made the case at the highest levels, with clear facts. Like in The New York Times articles Democratic centrists lament missed opportunities and What Really Saved the Democrats This Year?

But we lost to Hopium. As we wrote in CNN,

The biggest obstacle to President Joe Biden’s reelection is not that polls show sharp declines in support among important Democratic demographic groups from 2020 to today. It’s denying this reality.

The phenomenon of Democrats dismissing the polls in favor of misplaced optimism has been termed “hopium” by data journalist Nate Silver. Its most prominent booster, Simon Rosenberg, has made this anti-polling case on CNN and in other major outlets. But it is not just Rosenberg who has injected this overly rosy perspective into the national narrative. Biden’s closest advisers also reportedly buy into the thesis that polling is misleading.

We are in a new media and technology world.

Do arguments made in The New York Times and CNN matter? Sure. But that’s not nearly enough.

To their great credit, Team Hopium did what we said needed to be done: organize, not just debate.

Sure, they shut down all efforts to inject reality, ignoring data and skewing poll averages. They were ridiculous, famously melting down and threatening to leave a New Yorker interview when confronted with basic facts.

But they organized, and so - like the far left overall - the model works despite the thesis being proven wrong.

The metrics are clear: they have 125,000 subscribers and more than 10,000 paid subscribers. They raised $5 million for candidates. WelcomeStack ranks 314th on Substack’s politics leaderboard. Hopium is 17th.

We need to organize to win.

Rebuilding Together

This can be an invigorating time.

As those who joined WelcomeFest or our private gatherings know, there is energetic joy in an insurgent community. To further fuel this community, we are stepping up Welcome programming.

Six months from now, we’ll be together at the second WelcomeFest in DC with more than 500 of you (Save The Date here). We are going to keep growing with you, and in support of the leaders we need. Much of that will be engagement with paid subscribers, so please become a paid subscriber today.

Your support drives our community, and our work. This year, Lauren produced our first multimedia project, The Depolarizers, featuring leading politicos and academics. Welcome Democracy Institute produced cutting-edge research into empowering voters and leaders who can overcome polarization.

We are strengthening the community of knowledge necessary to win and govern effectively.

Join more than 50,000 following us on Bluesky, on Threads, and on Twitter to amplify our work.

In our first post three years ago, we cited future Depolarizers guest Eitan Hersh. The political science professor who coined the term “political hobbyism” made this observation:

The ratio of organizing to debating is still out of whack. Join us to change that. We’re grateful for each of you and thank you for being part of our community of practical depolarizers.