WelcomeFest III: Building to Win
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Five years ago, we gathered some likeminded people together in an office basement for a half-day of learning and plotting. There were ten of us. Then nine, because someone tested positive for Covid. Crazy times!
A week after the 2022 election, there were about 80 of us. We asked a red-district candidate to share what we could do to help him next time:
“Outgrow this room.”
That’s how 300 of us ended up together - still in a basement, although a much bigger one in a hotel - for the first WelcomeFest in 2024 under the theme For The People in the Middle. Jared Golden presented how he’d win again that cycle (he did, in a district Trump won by 10 points). Milan Singh, during Peak Brat Summer, explained why Democrats would actually lose ground with young and non-white voters in 2024 (they did, for the reasons he said). Matt Yglesias held a prescient discussion on the pitfalls of immigration, energy, and education with Senators Chris Murphy & Michael Bennet. Sarah Longwell and WelcomePAC-endorsed Janelle Stelson discussed how PA-10 would be in play from the art of persuasion (it was nearly the median district nationally, after being uncontested in 2022).
We were building. Not we, Welcome. Something bigger. And it was fun!
Then 600 of us gathered last year, with the theme Responsibility to Win. More than two dozen candidates were in the room, including the majority of Trump-district over-performers. All of a sudden, everyone noticed. With nicknames to boot:
“The Totally Normal Party” - Slate
“Who’s-who of center-left Democratic politics” - Politico
“CPAC for the Center” - The New York Times
“Centrist Coachella” - MSNBC
And, best for last, “Boring Man” (New York magazine). And the haters, of course (“The Centrist WelcomeFest was everything that’s wrong with the Democratic Party” read a wordy headline from Rolling Stone).
But one day making headlines isn’t the point. The point is the building.
WelcomeFest 2026 Theme: Building to Win
We spent years studying the far left entrepreneurial ecosystem. And as much as we thought intersectional maximalism and tent-shrinking dickery was terrible for both America and the Democratic Party, we admired how effectively they built organizations. As we learned in Centrist School, they had the hallmarks of a dynamic ecosystem that builds: the easy flow of ideas, talent, and resources.
WelcomeFest is designed to make that flow even easier. And after five years of basement gatherings, this community is building. Not just growing, but really building programs that can depolarize our politics and empower the center of the country to win sustainable majorities.
We need that impact - the electric collision of ideas, talent, and resources - to match the scale of the problems we face within this party, society, and country.
And the problems are massive! We fell short in the 2024 election. Then we didn’t affect the trajectory of the party enough in the months following, allowing the current state of Trump-induced disaster to allow more Resistance energy to ride the Blue Wave toward a potential repeat.
Three Tracks
In those early Basement gatherings, we would focus on three major challenges or opportunities. Each would have a pre-reading, and partners would lead conversations on the dynamics. Here are three for this year’s WelcomeFest this community must address to continue Building to Win:
I. Telling Our Story
There were two clear critiques of WelcomeFest last year: it focused too much on hitting the left, and it lacked a larger ‘story.’
These critiques aren’t just about WelcomeFest, though. These are larger community and faction-wide problems.
On hitting the left, some of it is the nature of the media. Even if just 10% of programming critiques the left, that is the juiciest material for reporters on the hunt for conflict. And there’s no way to study over-performers, ask them what they need help with, seek to amplify those lessons & actions … and not have the organized left come out looking badly. It would be disingenuous to try teaching the lessons of the Democratic Party’s most over-performing candidates while obscuring the challenges presented by the left. And, obviously, if climate protestors rush the stage harassing speakers, the left is going to look bad.
But we can be more explicit in framing leftist activists as what they are: an obstacle on the path to building a community that wins majorities and governs well. Hitting leftist activists is not the goal. Overcoming them is just a necessary part of getting to the goal.
That is part of the overall storytelling problem. Marshall Kosloff goes deeply into it in this piece, our first recommended reading before WelcomeFest.
II. Getting Uncomfortably Specific
“Specificity is a character issue this year,” proclaimed George Stephanopoulos during the 1992 presidential primary. It is safe to say that specificity has not been the central theme of 2026. After years of lurching leftward with great specificity, we’ve entered a period of vague moderation interspersed with radical phrasing.
We may not have the intersectional maximalism of the left, but we’re also not defined solely by opposition to the extremes on left and right. We can engage in disagreement and debate, and come out stronger for it.
Our first recommended read in this category is Jared Golden’s keynote on The Rise of Progressive Conservatives from the first WelcomeFest, in which he articulates a specific vision (that many centrists would disagree with!)
Second picks up on a theme from the second WelcomeFest: Varieties of Abundance from Steve Teles of the Niskanen Center, a typology of seven groups, including the lamely-named Moderate-Abundance Synthesis (in keeping with the above storytelling theme, all the other groups have cool names like the DSA’s Red Plenty and MAGA’s Dark Abundance).
Third is the 1990 DLC manifesto The New Orleans Declaration, which is shockingly difficult to find on the internet - the past link we’ve used can now only be found on the Wayback Machine (in an instance of symbolism that hits a little too close to home).
III. Investing to Win
Philanthropy and fundraising have always been major topics in the basement. Since we just launched Investing to Win last week, we’ll keep the pre-reading light here. But the ecosystem doesn’t spin into a major flywheel with just ideas and talent - it takes resources, too.