Come One, Come All!*

The Democrats need help. In February, the centrist think tank Third Way convened several dozen political consultants, staffers, and elected officials at a luxury resort off the Potomac to plot the party’s comeback from the wilds of irrelevance. The result? A five-page memo calling for Democrats to push back against the “far-left influence” that purportedly lost them control of the White House and Senate. Three months later, Senate Democrats held their annual retreat in Mount Vernon, accompanied, according to Axios, by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and the data strategist David Shor. Just a few days later, at a Ritz-Carlton just outside San Francisco, Democratic mega-donors huddled with Gavin Newsom and Rahm Emanuel to develop a $20 million initiative—code-named “SAM,” for Speaking with American Men—aimed at recapturing male voters through video game advertisements.

Those sorts of smoke-filled rooms are a political cliché for a reason. Neither you nor I are allowed in them. I was, however, allowed at WelcomeFest, billed as the nation’s “largest gathering of centrist Democrats,” earlier this month. It was, by design, more Coachella than Bohemian Grove. The organizers had even produced a music festival-style lineup poster to match. The crowd—mostly white, younger, and male—wasn’t exactly a cross-section of the American electorate. Still, for the cost of a $20 ticket, anyone with the afternoon to spare could’ve installed themselves in the fluorescent-lit basement of D.C.’s Hamilton Hotel and taken advantage of the open bar.

WelcomeFest’s attendees might not have been demographically representative of the United States, but they came from all corners of the centrist ecosystem: Twitter power-users, Substack writers, and college students. What they shared was a common belief that they were on the margins, especially online. But the WelcomeFesters, of course, weren’t just there to commiserate. They came to reimagine the Democratic Party as rigorously data-minded and unapologetically moderate—as if this was not, more or less, what the party already is.

“I don’t work in politics full-time, and it means that I process information very differently from the way that people in Washington, D.C., do, because I’m a machine learning engineer,” the conference’s first speaker, the data analyst Lakshya Jain, said. The core of his argument was that Democrats desperately need candidates “who know that you’re not trying to win over the activist group on X that retweets and posts fifty times a day.” Instead, they should “instinctively know that the voter you are trying to win over is the soccer mom who isn’t really as concerned with the election on Tuesday as she is with her kid’s soccer semifinal on Saturday.” Jain pointed to the middle-of-the-road Democrat Janelle Stelson, herself in attendance at WelcomeFest, as exemplary of this approach. Though she narrowly lost a House seat in Pennsylvania’s Tenth District to far-right Republican Scott Perry, Jain’s “Wins Above Replacement” (WAR) mathematical model—which predicts how a generic Democrat ought to perform in a certain race and then measures whether a given candidate beat the model’s expectations—ranked her as a stronger candidate than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, cohosted by Senator Bernie Sanders, remains one of the Democratic Party’s few recent signs of life. Then, Jain offered advice for aspiring candidates in the room: “The base will vote for you anyways. Don’t worry about liberal defections.”

These are, on Jain’s part, concomitant errors. As the political scientist Jake Grumbach and his coauthors have demonstrated, the plurality of nonvoters in 2024 were, indeed, Democrats. And while non-voting Democrats tend to be more socially moderate than their voting counterparts—a tension any mobilization strategy must account for—they are also markedly more likely to back expanded welfare programs. They’re twice as likely to be employed by the gig economy, nearly three times less likely to hold a college degree, and nearly twice as likely to make under $50,000. They’re probably not inveterate posters, but they’re equally distant from the Clinton-era archetype of the suburban soccer mom. Jain closed with a parting shot at the dreaded online left: “You’re not fighting fascism, you’re posting on your phone! If you want to fight fascism, go and win elections!”

Matthew Yglesias—prolific blogger and something of an intellectual anchor for the conference—was up next. “Why do Democrats make bad decisions?” he asked. The answer, it turns out, is “left advocacy groups,” which as a slide helpfully underscored, “CREATE BAD INCENTIVES FOR DEMOCRATS.” By pressuring Democratic politicians into politically unpopular stances, he argued, these groups have created “paralysis on the women’s sports issues” and led to “candidates running on late term abortions in red states.” Adopting the public’s view on those issues, he insisted, wasn’t just a matter of political expediency during elections: it can also help Democrats avoid “bad substantive policy.” “Biden was genuinely slow to act on the border,” explained the author of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. 

Few people understand the trials and tribulations of contemporary centrism quite like Adam Jentleson, who had recently wrapped up just over a yearlong stint as Senator John Fetterman’s chief of staff. He was at WelcomeFest to dispense tactical advice on countering the influence of “the groups.” Step one, it turned out, was actually to post more. “Something everybody can do for free is just to speak up more on social media,” Jentleson explained, “because it remains a pretty trying experience in the world to say the types of things that we’re saying here in public. You get, you know . . . people piling on you on BlueSky, on Twitter . . . it’s still kind of a miserable experience.” What’s needed, he said, are “countervailing voices, people cheering people on, who are saying things that we want them to be saying.”

Alongside the ritual denunciations of “the groups” and BlueSky, WelcomeFest’s unofficial message soon shaped up to be, in so many words, “It’s the economy, stupid.” As Tom Suozzi, the Democrat holding George Santos’s old seat, told the crowd, the top five issues voters actually care about are “the economy, immigration, taxes, crime, and health care.” But what to say about the economy? Yglesias and Jentleson had made the case for putting immigration advocates on the chopping block. So far, though, specifics on economic policy were hard to come by. What shibboleths should the democratic party kill there? What economic “groups” have Democrats been too cautious to take on? The feverishly pro-Israel congressman Ritchie Torres, joined by the X power-user and Substacker Josh Barro, took the stage to weigh in.

Barro volunteered an answer: unions. “When I look at policies in New York that stand in the way of abundance, very often, if you look under the hood, you eventually find a labor union at the end,” he told Torres, evoking the  “abundance agenda” currently in vogue among American centrists, which posits that the chief obstacles to decarbonization, affordable housing, and the revitalization of American infrastructure stem from needless regulation. Torres pursed his lips, his gaze shifting to the ground. Attempting to coax agreement from the congressman, Barro continued: “Is there a way to have a pro-abundance Democratic Party agenda in New York without breaking the strong link that exists between the New York Democratic Party and the labor movement?” Torres waffled: “I want to be clear that I do not blame the groups. I blame the elected officials.” (The next week, he posted a short video railing against an unspecified “attempt to portray the abundance movement as anti-union or anti-labor.”)

It would be reasonable, though perhaps naïve, to expect that a convention focused on limiting the role of outside advocacy “groups” in Democratic politics might scrutinize one of the largest groups of them all: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose spending to defeat high-profile pro-Palestinian Democrats in the 2024 primaries tripled that of the progressive groups trying to keep them in office. Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza may not be top of mind for most of the electorate, but it’s hard to argue that pro-Israel advocacy groups are helping the Democratic Party stay aligned with public opinion. A January poll found that 29 percent of voters who backed Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 cited “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” as their top voting issue—with the economy close behind at 24 percent. And in April, a Pew Research Center poll reported that a majority of American adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel.

AIPAC, of course, does not count as a “group” in the imaginary of WelcomeFest’s panelists. (Torres, for his part, has received more campaign contributions from AIPAC than from any other group during his time in Congress.) What does count as a “group” is the activist organization Climate Defiance, whose members stormed the stage holding signs reading “GENOCIDE RITCHIE” and “GAYS AGAINST GENOCIDE.” The WelcomeFesters relished it, blasting Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” once security had dragged the demonstrators off stage. Attendees then rose to give Barro and Torres a standing ovation. Torres, of course, represents the deep-blue Bronx, and there is no electoral reason for Torres to demand, for instance, that Columbia University designate Zionists as a protected class. But, if they were pissing someone off, the WelcomeFesters were doing something right.

Torres squirmed when asked to sign on to the harder edges of the “abundance agenda,” which, to many of its advocates, entails kneecapping the power of unions, which they view as rent-seeking entities demanding undue rights and protections. If Barro couldn’t orient the party around sidelining organized labor, then the centrists would need a gentler flavor of abundance. The next panel—titled “Applying Abundance”—featured Derek Thompson, who authored the eponymous book with Ezra Klein, and Jake Auchincloss, a congressman representing suburban Boston and distant relative of Jackie Kennedy.

It did not go unnoticed that a recent Demand Progress poll had found that voters, especially Democrats and independents, strongly preferred a populist economic message focused on corporate power and corruption over the panelists’ favored abundance agenda. Freud once wrote of a man accused of damaging a kettle who defended himself by claiming, first, that he had returned it undamaged; second, that it was already broken when he borrowed it; and third, that he had never borrowed it at all. The panelists adopted similar reasoning. First, the poll was unfair: “It’s what happens when you test an economics textbook against a romance novel and tell people, what do you like to read better? It’s such a bad faith poll,” Auchincloss complained. Second, Abundance was never meant to function as campaign messaging in the first place. And, finally, voters don’t need a compelling economic message at all: “Stories are for children,” Thompson averred, “Americans need a plan.”

Abundance, they concluded, can’t be judged because it’s misunderstood, shouldn’t be judged because it’s not meant to persuade, and doesn’t need to persuade because persuasion itself is beside the point. As if to underscore the unreality of the whole affair, Auchincloss declared—apparently in earnest—that “I’m pretty unwilling to accept the lecture on corporate power from the left when they are carrying the water for the most pernicious, nefarious corporations in modern history, which are the social media corporations.” Huh?

Like Torres, Auchincloss appeared at WelcomeFest ostensibly as part of the Welcome PAC’s “blue to red” organizing efforts—stemming the Democratic Party’s bleeding in blue states, where its coalition is disintegrating with alarming speed. Per Lakshya Jain’s calculations, Auchincloss’s WAR clocks in at R+0. Torres, for his part, is 1.2 points in the red. (That’s 1.7 and 2.9 points off Rashida Tlaib, respectively.) Their presence on WelcomeFest’s lineup certainly wouldn’t be Jain’s fault. But, if the WelcomeFest project is about forcing the Democratic Party to recognize its “responsibillity to win [sic]” in spite of issue advocates, neither Torres nor Auchincloss nor the abundists are the best candidates to do so. And if voters can supposedly be won to the side of abundance once Auchincloss convinces them of Thompson’s “plan”—but supposedly can’t be rallied to opposing the Trump administration’s relentless abuse of their undocumented neighbors—then what, exactly, is going on here?

The next panel, moderated by Yglesias, featured the Blue Dogs, a caucus of moderate Democratic representatives united by their record of defeating Republicans in Trump country. Ironically, the conference’s most celebrated overperformers were hardly evangelists for the abundance agenda. Contra the abundist fixation with urban politics, Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who recently crossed swords with Ezra Klein, remarked: “We are really tired of having our kids feel like they have to move to LA or New York to be successful.” “I would argue that most Americans are Blue Dogs,” she continued, “in the sense of, like, our demand for economic agency, the kind of nuts and bolts of like antitrust—can I fix my own shit? Can I sell my chickens to who I want to?” If this was the peak of Democratic competitiveness, it wasn’t exactly vindicating the abundists in the room. They’d better hope, then, that public opinion is more malleable than most WelcomeFesters believed.

Next, the pollster and popularist David Shor took the stage, armed with a set of charts and slides proving that Democrats lost in 2024 because they drifted too far left. But if one squinted at his conclusory slide, they’d find a citation of Kamala Harris’s most effective television advertisement: “The cost of rent, groceries, and utilities is too high. So here’s what we’re going to do about it . . . Crack down on landlords who are charging too much . . . lower your food and grocery bills by going after price gougers.” (It had, according to the New York Times, “virtually never been aired.”) Now, this wasn’t exactly Derek Thompson’s “plan.” And it wasn’t certainly wasn’t the “groups” who had led Harris off that message: at the behest of Uber executives David Plouffe and Tony West, the Harris campaign largely discontinued its fighting words against landlords and price-gougers in the final months of the campaign in the hope of winning greater support from CEOs. By October, billionaire Mark Cuban had become one of Harris’s chief surrogates. Mega-donors are a “group” too, and one whose interests were significantly more decisive in guiding the Harris campaign than progressive advocacy groups. (Their thumbs are heavily on the scale for abundance, for one.)

Next, Shor interviewed Michigan’s new senator, Elissa Slotkin, best known for tangling with Senator Sanders over her view that the term oligarchy doesn’t “resonate beyond coastal institutions.” Key to stopping Trumpism, she suggested, was channeling the energy of a football coach. “We’ve just lost some alpha energy,” she said. “In a place like the Midwest, where our idols are the coaches of our professional teams, and people who really command—I think that was really important.” She also advised that Democrats should get more comfortable with the idea of mass layoffs in the federal workforce. “There’s dead weight in the government,” she argued. “It’s too hard to fire people who aren’t performing. You don’t have to hide about that.” Elon Musk’s DOGE, in other words, but make it smart.

WelcomeFest, and the Welcome PAC behind it, draw their names from the principle that everyone ought to be “welcome” in the Democratic Party. “We got so pure that we started kicking people out of the tent,” said the recently elected Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego. “It turns out we didn’t have enough people in the tent to win elections.” But everyone has someone they’d like to sideline. Slotkin believes federal workers should be unwelcome; Torres would like to kick anyone on the side of Palestine to the curb; Barro believes unions should be shown the door; and if one takes seriously the fate of Kamala Harris’s most-effective, never-screened TV advertisement, it, too, implies that the likes of David Plouffe and Tony West should be unwelcome. Indeed, had the Harris campaign maintained its relatively unwelcoming posture toward landlords and price-gougers in August 2024—when her polling lead was highest—we might be living in a very different America. Put simply, you can’t “welcome” everyone and still have a party intact.

After nearly four hours of uninterrupted on-stage chatter, happy hour had mercifully arrived. Strangely enough, there was no music. The crowd, after ninety minutes of networking, scattered. The open bar packed up. Some lingering WelcomeFesters snagged selfies with departing congresspeople. The catering crew quietly cleared away the day’s evidence. Still, the “welcome” project remains in motion: the next day, Musk’s feud with Trump boiled over. It was only a matter of time before party brass put out the welcome mat for the world’s richest man.