Centrist Democrats want a fight with the left
'Places like City Hall and Albany and even Washington, DC, are more responsive to the groups than to the people on the ground,' New York Rep. Ritchie Torres said at WelcomeFest, held at a downtown Washington hotel and billed as a forum to help the party find more electable candidates and messages.
Seconds after Torres' shot at 'the groups' that have become intra-Democratic shorthand for excessive left-wing influence, protesters from … the group Climate Defiance charged on stage with signs reading 'GAYS AGAINST GENOCIDE' and 'GENOCIDE RITCHIE,' attacking his support for Israel's war in Gaza.
As the activists were yanked out of the room, conference organizers played Carly Simon's on the loudspeakers in the room.
The mockery was part of the point. Welcome PAC, the main organizer of the conference and one of several outfits that have emerged in recent months to try to reverse the party's post-Obama losses, was happy to be accused of embracing a pro-growth 'Abundance' agenda or attacking progressive urban policies.
'Any time someone is against something like 'abundance,' it means that they're afraid of something. They're afraid of losing power,' said Welcome PAC's Lauren Harper Pope, a former Beto O'Rourke adviser. 'If the left feels threatened by what we're doing, then I say: 'You're still welcome in our coalition.''
To speakers in the basement of the Hamilton Hotel on Wednesday, the message of the 2024 election was clear: Voters were sick of left-wing ideas. Candidates and members of Congress described struggles to overcome what they described as their party's toxic brand or to deal with protesters angry at their occasional votes with Republicans.
'If you can financially afford to go to a protest every day, you are a different person than most people in my community,' said Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, defending her vote for House GOP legislation that would require proof of citizenship from every voter.
Asked about recent polling from the progressive group Demand Progress that found pro-business 'abundance' ideas faring worse than anti-corporate 'populism,' WelcomeFest speakers scoffed.
'It's what happens when you test an economic textbook for the Democratic Party against a romance novel,' said Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass. 'It's such a bad poll.'WelcomeFest, which had grown exponentially since its first in-person conference last year, put a conversation that has been unfolding in exclusive donor retreats in front of a public audience — selling tickets that topped out at $25. (The protesters did not pay.)
Attendees saw polling on voters' dim view of the party and heard advice for Democrats to move on from topics where they lacked credibility. Torres took aim at his party for stretching 'right to shelter' laws too thin in his home state and for being insufficiently tough on crime.
After sharing a set of data on Democratic vulnerabilities, pollster David Shor told Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., that her vote for a repeal of California's electric vehicle mandate had been savvy.
'People don't like 'defund the police,' but voters really hate electric cars,' said Shor.
'They don't hate electric vehicles,' replied Slotkin. 'They just don't want to be told that they have to drive an electric vehicle, particularly when the infrastructure hasn't kept pace with need.'
DC did not lack for center-left Democratic groups before Welcome PAC or its eponymous conference. Many grew from the ashes of the Democratic Leadership Council, founded after Ronald Reagan's two landslide wins to find viable center-left candidates and ideas.
Shuttered in 2011, the DLC survives in its spinoff think tank PPI and in centrist groups that have taken up part of its past mission.
Andrew Rotherham, a fellow at PPI, told WelcomeFest that Florida Democrats had erred in fighting the state's GOP 'parental rights' bill — what opponents called the 'Don't Say Gay' bill — instead of fighting for inclusiveness from a stronger position. It was 'actually supported by a majority of Democrats,' he said.
Other sponsors of WelcomeFest included the Blue Dog Democrats, the 30-year-old caucus for the party's centrist members of Congress; the New Democrat Coalition, founded two years later to build on Bill Clinton's mixed success; Third Way, founded 20 years ago after Democrats lost the popular vote to George W. Bush; and NewDEAL, founded 14 years ago to elevate 'pro-growth progressives.'
Their shared goal now is simpler: win at least some arguments inside the party.
'The backlash that happens online is a sign that you're doing something right,' said Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa. He recently founded a new think tank and messaging group that urges candidates to weather the Trump-era 'sh*tstorm' and come out with more defensible, popular positions.WelcomeFest's less single-issue enemies have highlighted the Republican and pharmaceutical-industry pasts of some of the conference's donors, arguing that it's naive to think billionaire donors could save the Democrats.
The Revolving Door Project, which has campaigned to keep Democrats with corporate ties out of powerful positions, called the whole project a 'self-serving crusade' against popular politics.
'A billionaire-funded movement to keep billionaires happy with Democrats by wielding only poll-tested language that billionaires are okay with is a sure path toward a President Vance,' said the project's executive director, Jeff Hauser.
Dan Cohen, the strategist who conducted Demand Progress' abundance-or-populism poll, said that the party wasn't facing a binary choice and could incorporate some more pro-growth 'abundance' ideas into a successful populist campaign.
'That kind of conflict is unhelpful because it's just wrong,' Cohen said, calling for a broader focus on 'strengthening a Democratic Party that's trying to get its sh*t together again.'To oversimplify things, politics is basically about conflict. And Welcome PAC's theory of politics — expand the tent and let Democrats run on heterodox agendas in tough seats — is not that controversial inside the party.
So WelcomeFest leaned on the self-generated tension created by the appearance of a zero-sum centrist fight against progressive purity tests. It's proving to be a godsend for media attention.
You could see this unfold on social media on Wednesday, as the Revolving Door Project and other progressive groups posted from the conference to portray it as one big surrender, trading away liberal values in the hope of winning over a couple of Republicans.
That wasn't really the theme in the room, though.
Democrats who spoke at the event about their failure to break through on the trail said that they were close to a winning formula. It just required a mixture of distance from the least popular causes of the left, and the credibility that any campaigner gets by spending two years talking to voters.
Implicit in every argument was this view: It would not be enough for Democrats to wait for President Donald Trump to fail, then take advantage of that failure, a notion propagated by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others in the party.
That's because, as much as they may not like it, centrists and progressive Democrats are confronting a much more popular Trump than they did eight years ago.Jonathan Chait's influential in The Atlantic — that the book has sparked a useful 'civil war' inside the party — has informed every successive take from the left. 'Their theory of American politics depends on empowering the very groups the abundance agenda identifies as the architects of failure and barriers to progress.'
Semafor one of the first interviews with Welcome PAC's Lauren Harper, two summers ago. 'Instead of creating a third party, why don't we just create a Democratic Party that can appeal to a broader range of voters?'
In his Political Currents Substack, Ross Barkan looks at how weak the 'professional left' has become, through its struggle to get traction in New York this year. 'They have been proven to be impotent.'
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