Tom Suozzi & Adam Gray Discuss The Promise to America

The only two Democrats who flipped Trump seats in 2024 talk capitalism, fiscal discipline, patriotism, and why the party needs “a new kind of old-fashioned Democrat.”

At this year’s WelcomeFest, Matt Yglesias sat down with the two House Democrats who pulled off something no one else in the Party managed to do in 2024: flip districts Donald Trump won. Rep. Adam Gray represents California’s 13th in the Central Valley. Rep. Tom Suozzi won back New York’s 3rd, the Long Island seat once held by George Santos.

Alongside Felix Frisch and the Promise to America fellows, a team of seven college students frustrated with the state of the party, Gray and Suozzi became the first signatories of the “Promise to America,” a set of plainspoken principles built around economic security, a government that works, fiscal discipline, and patriotism.

Since WelcomeFest, eight additional Members of Congress and five candidates for Congress have signed the Promise to America. The team of fellows has tabled the Promise outside of a farmers market in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and met with countless state legislators from around the country. The Promise has been featured on Fox and Friends, The Washington Post, and a mix of local and state networks.

From The Washington Post:

The group says centrist Democrats need to assert their own vision for the party as forcefully and effectively as the left.

“We’re seeing a lot of results from the country from the far left and the far right, and they’re organized. I mean, you have to give them credit,” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) said. But “that kind of campaign and that type of ideology is not going to play with the people in our districts.”

As Yglesias put it, these are the people actually winning in the seats Democrats need: “If people in the world want takes on how Democrats can win, they should be listening to the people who are winning in these kinds of seats.” The Promise to America is a call for moderate over-performers to organize and articulate their vision for policy.

Tom Suozzi on why “capitalists, not socialists” shouldn’t be a controversial thing for a Democrat to say:

Capitalism is the most successful economic system in the history of the world. It’s lifted more people out of poverty, created more innovation, done more to make people’s lives better than any other economic system. Socialism has failed and has also resulted in a lot of authoritarianism throughout the world.

Zohran Mamdani and the MAGA movement, Donald Trump, they did a good job of feeding into people’s economic insecurity. They correctly diagnosed the problem, they just have bad solutions. Adam and I, who consider ourselves good Democrats, believe that economic insecurity and people’s concern about their financial health is very real. We’ve created an enormous amount of wealth in our country in the past 50 years. The problem is that wealth has not been shared with the people who go to work every day. We have to get back to a place, as Democrats, where if you’re willing to go to work every day and work hard, in return you make enough money to buy a house, educate your kids, pay for health insurance, and retire without being scared.

Adam Gray on the “inauthentic word salad” that holds Democrats back:

We’re capitalists. That shouldn’t be a bold statement. This is the greatest democracy on the planet, and we’ve had many great successes that have not only made our lives better, they’ve made lives around the world better. People shouldn’t be afraid to just say that.

Too often our Democratic colleagues, whether they’re in a rural part of California where I’m at, or in New York where Tom’s at, or anywhere in between, there’s just this kind of inauthentic word salad. I’m afraid to say this, I’m afraid to say that, I can’t use this word, I have to parse that word. One of the important parts of this promise is to say we’re just going to speak clearly and plainly.

Gray on why “a government that works” is the part populists miss:

People don’t experience politics through white papers or conventions. People experience politics when they’re on hold trying to get a health care procedure approved, when they’re in line trying to get a permit or a license or a service. Government exists to make us safe, but it also exists to make our lives better, to make things easier.

In the private sector, when things get more expensive, they oftentimes get better. You could stay at the Holiday Inn, or you could stay at the Ritz-Carlton. The Ritz-Carlton is more expensive, but the service is pretty good. The same thing is true in government, except things get more expensive and the service gets worse, and people say why?

Suozzi on talking about immigration and crime instead of avoiding them:

I had a special election in February of 2024 where I won a seat held by George Santos, and I was talking about the need to secure the border. A lot of Democratic consultants and senior people said, Tom, why are you talking about immigration, that’s a Republican issue. I said, no, it’s not. That’s what everybody’s talking about every single day.

We have to be, as Democrats, talking about what the people are talking about, and recognize that not everything’s perfect the way it is. They’re concerned about crime, they’re concerned about an open border, they’re concerned about what’s going on in the world, and we have to speak to them about those things.

Suozzi on fiscal discipline, in the terms a CPA would use:

I’m trained as a CPA and a lawyer. There’s only two things you can do with the deficit: you can either raise revenues or cut expenses. To actually make a deal in Washington, you’re probably going to have to do both. It’s not a bunch of jargon. You’ve got to raise revenues and cut expenses. That’s it. Those are your only choices.

Big deficits cause higher interest rates, and higher interest rates make it impossible for you to buy a home, or lease a car, or for a business to borrow money. Lower deficits are not some ephemeral thing. Big government deficits make your life more expensive by causing interest rates to go up.

Suozzi on his father’s immigrant story and Democratic patriotism:

My father was born in Italy. He came to the United States as a young boy, the first kid in the neighborhood to go to college. He fought in World War Two as a navigator on a B-24 and got the Distinguished Flying Cross. He came back as an Italian immigrant veteran and went to Harvard Law School on the GI Bill. He couldn’t get a job at a law firm because he was Italian. So he started a firm with another Italian guy, ran for city court judge, and at 28 became the youngest judge in the history of New York State.

America is the greatest country in the world, and there are so many stories like that with so many different families. We have a challenge constantly to make it a work in progress, to form a more perfect union. We have not done things perfectly from day one, but we’re still the best operating system in the world that combines free markets and democracy together. I’m proud of our country and our history, and we need to say that proudly as Democrats.

Suozzi on the long game, and the labor expression he keeps coming back to:

The left right now and the far right are very well organized, and they have a lot of energy. If we’re going to move forward as Democrats without playing into this extremism, we’ve got to have some principles, and we have to be organized. It’s not enough to do our one conference today. It’s to identify a dozen members of Congress that think this way, 20 candidates that think this way, 200 state and local officials, and thousands of people in the community throughout the country.

There’s an old labor expression: don’t mourn, organize. We need to organize the people that feel the same way we do about these general principles.

Gray on the three-part test for whether a policy actually works:

I used to work with a state legislator, an old guy from Southern California, who had a great three-part test every time he went to support a bill. One, is there a problem? Two, does your proposal solve that problem? Three, does your proposal not only not solve the problem, but make it worse?

Socialism is not building houses, it’s not solving anybody’s problem. It may make people feel better to rant and rave about it, but if we’re going to focus on results, people will know when the problem’s solved, when they have the house, when they can afford a better life.

Suozzi on the closing note: working with the left, and with the right:

Every problem we face in our country is complicated. You need really good people, smart people of good faith, who want to make things better, who may disagree with each other, to sit down and find compromise. There is none of that going on right now, because everybody’s just yelling and screaming at each other.

The Democrats that are on the left, we have to work with them as well. We may not agree with everything you say. We don’t want to get in a fight with you. We want to find common ground to solve the common problems we’ve identified. We’re proud to be Democrats, proud of the Democratic tradition, but we need to emphasize certain aspects of it that have been lost in this yelling and screaming.

Learn more about the Promise to America.