Fire The Consultants

The Democratic party must move on from the same old stale, carefully poll-tested politics and get back to solving voters' problems.

There are only three certainties in life: death, taxes, and Democratic party consultants saying the party needs to moderate. This was their advice when Al Gore and John Kerry lost to George W. Bush. This was their advice to Barack Obama even after he swept into office after sweeping into office with a huge margin of victory after running a groundbreaking progressive campaign.

They implored the party to moderate after Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, and again after Biden won four years later. And we find ourselves once again having lost to Trump and once again the centrist consultant advice is unchanged. The party must moderate!

That's 6 presidential elections and Democrats lost 4 of them. If moderating the Democratic party was the key to winning elections, why are we still losing elections after decades of moderation?

I was thinking about all of this earlier this week when a centrist consultant group I had never heard of before released a new report once again imploring Democrats to moderate. On Monday, WelcomePAC, a group formed during the 2022 midterms to support moderate Democrats running in red states, released a massive 352 page report suggesting that Democrats abandon "identity issues" like immigration and trans rights and focus on economically moderate policies in order for Democrats to win more elections.

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The report's lead author is Simon Bazelon, the 22 year old son of journalist Emily Bazelon, and he graduated from Yale with a bachelor's degree in philosophy earlier this year, according to his LinkedIn page. Speaking of LinkedIn, the company's CEO, Reid Hoffman made contributions to WelcomePAC endorsed candidates for state legislature in the past, according to the group's Wikipedia page.

WelcomePAC's report is comprehensive but unconvincing, depending largely on polling to reach conclusions. The acknowledgements list on the report is a who's who of the Obama/Biden leadership. Most of them are already involved in running Democratic campaigns, most of them are most known for their involvement in losing recent campaigns.

A closer look at the PAC's history will similarly reveal anything but won campaigns. In 2022, the group put on a series of press conferences in Ohio with Republicans and former Republicans who were supporting Democratic Senate candidate Tim Ryan over JD Vance.

Tim Ryan lost the election.

That same year, WelcomePAC supported California Democrat Will Rollins in his House campaign against Republican Ken Calvert. Rollins lost. Last year, the group ran ads for Democrat Sherrod Brown in Ohio's Senate race. Brown also lost.

Based on real world results, it doesn't appear that WelcomePAC has the magic formula for real world election wins here.

Nevertheless, Welcome is persisting in reheating the same electoral advice that got us to this place, without an ounce of centrist interest in self reflection. Kamala Harris rolled out Liz Cheney as her closing argument against Trump. She avoided mentioning trans people at all, much less making an argument. She insisted over and over again she would not depart at all from Biden on anything in an international electoral year when incumbents were being dumped out of office all over the world.

Democrats at large tried to run to the RIGHT of Trump on immigration, giving in to nearly every Republican demand on immigration in writing Biden's 2024 immigration bill. Not only did it not pass, but Biden has been forever branded as "open borders and soft on immigration" anyway.

Democrats have been turtling on trans issues now for years, and they're still looked at as "obsessed with trans issues" while every other Republican news story is some fresh conservative freakout about a trans person existing somewhere.

Democrats are ALREADY DOING what Welcome's report suggests they do and they are historically unpopular anyway!

It's extremely frustrating that centrists are still doing this in a year when we've seen a generational campaign being run in New York City. Sure, it's liberal ass NYC, but Zohran Mamdani is running a masterclass in how Democrats can win back voters' trust, and he's well on his way to a staggering margin of victory.

It's not necessarily Mamdani's policies that Democrats at large should be copying, but instead it's his work in getting out and actually talking to voters. He doesn't sit back and conduct endless polling and focus groups and then consulting with corporate donors before proposing new policies, he goes out and talks with the voters he's seeking to represent.

He's out there, walking the streets, hearing stories about how unaffordable his city has become and speaking to that. America is getting more and more expensive every day. The constant capitalist rat race for forever larger profit growth in every sector possible has sucked the life out of this country.

It doesn't matter if it's New York City or Sioux City, Iowa, everybody is feeling the squeeze from ever increasing housing costs. Cars are more expensive than ever, and grocery bills have never been higher. Affordability is the winning election message in every district, blue, purple, or red.

That may not be what the corporate donors funding these centrist think tanks want to hear, but it's true. The rent is too damn high, no matter if you're Black, white, trans, or a migrant.

Meanwhile, it's the centrist candidate in the NYC race, Andrew Cuomo, who is leaning in to social factors, wielding near constant racist attacks on Mamdani's identity. In the NYC mayor's race, it's Mamdani talking kitchen table issues, and the centrist playing identity politics.

The next election will come and go, and the same centrist consultant groups will again call for the party to moderate, no matter if Democrats win or lose. Soon enough, we'll find ourselves in another presidential election campaign.

When that one ends in 2028, guess what the centrist advice will be?

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-Katelyn