Latest news with #WelcomeFest
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Tech billionaire and 'Pedo Island' guest exposed funneling money to very top of Democratic Party
A billionaire who has admitted visiting Jeffrey Epstein 's 'Pedophile Island' after the notorious predator was put on the sex offender registry is funding a conference for top Democrats, the Daily Mail can reveal. Reid Hoffman, 57, is the biggest donor to the Welcome Political Action Committee, a Democrat group which is using his money to throw 'Welcome Fest' in Washington, DC on Wednesday.
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
At ‘CPAC of the center,' Democratic moderates beat up on the left
The Democrats in the room aimed to put a new sheen on — and perhaps some more spine in — what has long been tagged as the mushy middle, arguing that they are the majority-makers the party needs in 2026 and beyond to take control of Congress. It was a wonky gathering where center-left Substack pundit Matthew Yglesias was greeted like a rock star and Lakshya Jain, a data-crunching analyst, detailed a ratings system to show which Democratic lawmakers had the highest candidate-quality WAR — Wins Above Replacement — a term borrowed from baseball analytics. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'This room may be full of nerds,' said Andrew Mamo, a Democratic strategist who attended the conference, WelcomeFest. 'But the focus is how to not look like losers and how to not be losers.' Advertisement This event was not the place to debate the finer points of policy. There was glancingly little discussion beyond what would sell with voters. If some called it the 'CPAC of the center' — after the big right-wing confab — there was far less red meat, and more crudités (a platter of chopped peppers, carrots, and cauliflower was served in the back). Advertisement Instead, the thrust of the day's discussion was dismissing the party's left wing as an anchor to Democratic chances to win national elections. Scattered potshots were aimed at the activist group Indivisible throughout the day, with Representative Jared Golden of Maine, who represents the most pro-Trump district of any Democrat in the House, calling it 'a hypernational organization with a very single-minded agenda.' One of the event's organizers wore a West Virginia University football jersey — bearing the name and number of former Senator Joe Manchin from when he played quarterback at the school. Interns distributed buttons urging people to sign up for a movement to keep the size of the Supreme Court at nine justices. Some of the advice felt like Politics 101. 'A key to success in politics is to talk to people and to find out what they're saying,' Representative Tom Suozzi of New York told the audience. 'It has to be informed by real-life experiences.' A parade of Democrats who had won in hostile districts and swing states offered paeans to pragmatism. 'Being on 'Team Normal' right now really helps,' said Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who was tapped to deliver the party's response to President Trump's first congressional address this year. 'People want practicality.' The conference took place at the Hamilton Hotel in Washington as allies of the Blue Dog Coalition, the most moderate faction among House Democrats, are forming a new super PAC and an allied nonprofit group ahead of the 2026 midterms. The Blue Dogs have long had their own PAC, but never independent entities that can take unlimited donations. The new nonprofit, which has not been previously reported, will be called the Blue Dog Action Fund, with Aisha Woodward, a former chief of staff to Golden, serving as executive director and overseeing a staff of five. Advertisement 'We're willing to get involved in primaries, but our goal is to win the House majority,' said Phil Gardner, who will be a senior adviser to the groups and is a former campaign manager for RepresentativeMarie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state, a Blue Dog leader. 'Which is going to require winning in seats that Trump won.' The gathering Wednesday was organized by Welcome PAC and supported by an array of center-left groups on and off Capitol Hill. Notably absent from the day's panels, discussions, and side conversations, that included a handful of former Biden administration and campaign aides, was the standard Democratic talk about abortion rights, gay rights, and the importance of Black voters to the party. To a crowd that was mostly white, Jain said his research had found that the race and gender of a candidate did not matter. Michael Ceraso, a progressive operative who made his way in, quipped: 'It's a good place to source a lot of white people.' At one point, when RepresentativeRitchie Torres of New York was speaking, left-wing protesters stormed the stage chanting 'Free Palestine' and unfurling banners about genocide. The event organizers blasted the Carly Simon anthem 'You're So Vain,' from the sound system during the interruption. Liam Kerr, a cofounder of Welcome PAC who wore the West Virginia jersey, said the center was newly energized to take on the party's left. 'Going against the status quo is always fun,' he said. This article originally appeared in Advertisement
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Democrats eye a villain-to-ally arc for Elon Musk
Elon Musk has been the Democratic Party's boogeyman since shortly after President Donald Trump deputized him as a top adviser. The billionaire and Trump had a very public breakup this week. After Musk called the GOP's "big beautiful bill" a 'disgusting abomination' and threatened to 'fire all politicians' who backed it, the president mused on Thursday that he didn't know if the two would still have a "great relationship." Musk responded on his powerful platform X, "Without me, Trump would have lost," adding "Such ingratitude." Democrats' portrayal of Musk as a chainsaw-wielding, bureaucracy-breaking villain may be more complicated now — with some saying they should give him another chance. After all, Musk said he voted for former President Joe Biden in 2020 and gave a tour of SpaceX to then-President Barack Obama. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents Silicon Valley and has known Musk for over a decade, said Democrats should 'be in a dialogue' with Musk, given their shared opposition to the GOP's megabill. 'We should ultimately be trying to convince him that the Democratic Party has more of the values that he agrees with,' Khanna said. 'A commitment to science funding, a commitment to clean technology, a commitment to seeing international students like him.' Other Democrats are warming back up to Musk as he leaves the White House and starts to break with his former boss in ways that could benefit the opposition. 'I'm a believer in redemption, and he is telling the truth about the legislation,' said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.). But, he added, Musk has 'done an enormous amount of damage' and 'there are Democrats who see his decimation of the federal workforce and the federal government as an unforgivable sin.' Liam Kerr, co-founder of the group behind the centrist Democrats' WelcomeFest meeting this week in Washington, said 'of course' Democrats should open the door if Musk wants back into the party. 'You don't want anyone wildly distorting your politics, which he has a unique capability to do. But it's a zero-sum game,' Kerr said. 'Anything that he does that moves more toward Democrats hurts Republicans.' Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), the chair of the New Democrat Coalition who earlier this year supported the party's targeting of Musk as the Department of Government Efficiency slashed through federal agencies, said that with his departure from Washington, Democrats shouldn't make Musk their focus. 'We should be talking about what we're doing for the American people,' he said. Still, Musk recently threatened to cut off the money spigot for Republicans. And Democrats would have a lot to gain by merely keeping the world's richest man on the sidelines in the midterm elections and beyond. If Musk makes a mess of GOP primaries, that would work in their favor, too. But Musk's recent heel-turn also risks reopening a divide between progressives and moderates over how to approach him and other billionaires. 'Our caucus has done the right thing and gone toe-to-toe against Musk,' said Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and one of the party's most vocal advocates for making Musk an antagonist on the campaign trail. Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. 'I don't think we should take one ketamine-fueled tweet as evidence of a change of heart,' said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the center-left group Third Way. 'It's more complicated.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Centrist WelcomeFest Was Everything That's Wrong With the Democratic Party
Inside a cavernous, neon-lit ballroom in the bowels of a joyless Washington D.C. hotel, Carly Simon blasts from the speakers in an effort drown out the chants of 'Free, Free Palestine' from protesters who've crashed a conversation with Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) — the gay, Black, self-described Zionist representing one of the most Democratic districts in the country. Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist-supporting political action committee Welcome PAC — decked out in a West Virginia Mountaineers jersey with senator-turned-lobbyist Joe Manchin's name emblazoned across his back — bodies out a bespectacled, man-bunned individual trying to film the scuffle. It would have been a particularly crude piece of performance art depicting the Democratic Party in its present incarnation, but unfortunately, it was real. Organizers of WelcomeFest, an event billed as 'the largest public gathering of centrists,' were expecting disruptions when they convened in D.C. on Thursday — you could even say they welcomed them. Earlier that day, as Kerr kicked off the festivities, he drew a contrast between his own apparel and a t-shirt he told the crowd organizers had on hand for any protesters who might show up. The tee featured a depiction of Babydog, the beloved bulldog belonging to Jim Justice, the West Virginia Republican who replaced Manchin in the U.S. Senate this year, and his slogan, 'Delivering Justice for West Virginia.' 'I am wearing a jersey of someone who stepped on the West Virginia campus 50 years ago on a football scholarship, who is the number one-rated 'Wins Above Replacement' candidate,' Kerr told the crowd of his Manchin jersey. (Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, is a sports statistic that measures a certain player's contributions to their team. More on that later.) The Justice t-shirt was meant to send a message to progressive-minded: If you're not with us, you're against us. Or, as Kerr put it even more bluntly, 'The choice is Jim Justice or Joe Manchin.' Manchin's dark money group, Americans Together, was, incidentally, one of the sponsors of the event. Over the course of the afternoon, speakers at WelcomeFest offered their diagnosis for what ails the Democratic Party, which might be summed up as: too much democracy. Too many people making too many demands of their elected representatives. Onstage, speakers used the shorthand 'The Groups' when discussing this phenomenon. Speaker after speaker blamed 'The Groups' for Democrats' failure to win elections and to govern effectively when they did win them. (Names of the specific Groups in question were rarely invoked on stage, but a recent New York Times op-ed by one of the day's speakers, Democratic operative Adam Jentleson, called out the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sunrise Movement, the Working Families Party, and Justice Democrats as some of the culprits responsible, in his view, for browbeating Democratic candidates into adopting unpopular positions in primaries that Republicans could weaponize against them in a general election.) The blogger Matthew Yglesias flogged this thesis most aggressively in his presentation. To illustrate his point that 'Bad Groups create bad incentives for Democrats,' Yglesias pointed to Democrats' after a Maryland man was illegally renditioned to a Central American supermax prison by accident — some Democrats have traveled to El Salvador to seek Kilmar Abrego Garcia's release and return to the U.S. Besides this being the only moral position one can take on the question of whether the government should be allowed to extrajudicially seize individuals, ship them off to a foreign jail, and refuse to bring them back when ordered by the courts, Yglesias appears to be wrong about this being a politically dangerous position for Democrats to stake out: Media coverage of this case, kept alive by Democrats who continued to raise awareness about it, damaged Donald Trump's image, pollster G. Elliott Morris points out. Approval for Trump's immigration agenda nosedived during the height of the furor over Abrego Garcia's wrongful seizure. While speakers at WelcomeFest generally seemed to agree The Groups' influence was to blame for Democrats' failures, no one seemed to offer much in the way of a contrasting vision for what the party's orienting principle ought to be going forward. Abundance, the airport book that some Dems appear determined to adopt as a policy platform, got only brief attention at the WelcomeFest. Instead of a mission or any one overarching vision, there only seemed to be consensus on the fact that Democrats need to start winning again, by whatever means necessary. The political analyst Lakshya Jain urged reorienting party recruitment efforts to focus on candidates with high 'Wins Above Replacement' statistics. The concept will be familiar to anyone who has read Moneyball, Michael Lewis' book about how the Oakland A's used sabermetrics to identify and recruit undervalued players. Jain's model compares a generic match-up in a particular district with the actual results in an effort to evaluate who overperformed or underperformed expectations for their particular race. To illustrate this point, Jain compared the results of progressive New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's race with that of Janelle Stelson, a candidate who ran in Pennsylvania's 10th district. In his model, AOC, who won her race and outperformed Kamala Harris by six points, underperformed a generic race in her district by two points; Stelson, who lost by one point and outran Harris by four points, overperformed a generic Democrat by nine points. Jain's pitch was that, in the current political environment, which he says is D+6, Democrats have a real opportunity to seize legislative majorities if they focus their efforts on recruiting candidates with high WAR scores — the catch is that these candidates might be unpalatable to The Groups and other party faithful. 'Being very blunt, if we run candidates that D.C. finds appealing, we're probably going to lose. There is an inverse correlation between what you guys all find appealing and what the median voter finds appealing,' Jain told the room. He brought up Blue Dog Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who spoke on a panel with Yglesias and Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) and Adam Gray (D-Calif.). 'A lot of you may say you find some of Jared Golden's votes to be annoying for a Democrat,' Jain said. 'Well, guess what? The choice isn't between Jared Golden and AOC. The choice is between Jared Golden and Paul LePage. So who would you rather have?' It was an echo of Kerr's opening remarks — 'The choice is Jim Justice or Joe Manchin' — and it's a real question that gets at the heart of Democrats' present predicament. Do Democrats — or Americans writ large — need more candidates in the mold of Joe Manchin, the man single-handedly responsible for torpedoing Democrats' expanded child tax credit, a program that had lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty? Unappealing as the choice is, there's also a high probability that it is a false binary too: Jain claimed in his presentation, 'The base will vote for you anyway… Don't worry about liberal defections.' But if the results of the 2024 election have indicated anything, it's that attitude — the attitude that was also adopted by the Harris campaign — is a losing one: We know that demoralized Democratic-leaning voters who stayed home decided the election. More from Rolling Stone 'We Don't Want Them': Trump Cracks Down on Foreign Nationals Coming to America Sean Penn Criticizes Plan to Remove Harvey Milk's Name From Navy Ship Late-Night Hosts Take Aim at Trump's Feud With Musk: 'Blew Up Faster Than a SpaceX Rocket' Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Centrist Democrats want a fight with the left
Centrist Democrats picked a fight with their party's left wing on Wednesday. And the left was happy to punch back. '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 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 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.'
