Deciding to Fold

The latest high-profile centrist memo to Democrats is bad news for the party and the planet, but great news for the oligarchy

Last week, the centrist advocacy group WelcomePAC released “Deciding to Win,” a 59-page memo purporting to analyze what has gone wrong with the Democratic Party and what changes will allow the party to step back from the electoral abyss.

Coming from a billionaire-funded interest group whose founder wears a Joe Manchin sports jersey, it’s unsurprising that the report concludes that the Democratic Party should swerve to the right. More specifically, it argues that “Democrats need to affirmatively moderate our positions” on issues like “climate change, democracy, abortion, and identity and cultural issues”—not just in our communications but also “in our approach to governance.”

To its credit, the WelcomePAC report does not try to defend the full panoply of centrist economic and political doctrines. It accepts that “large swaths of the electorate think the system is rigged against people like them in favor of the wealthy,” a fact that is obvious but has been contested by WelcomePAC’s centrist forebears. And the report clarifies that WelcomePAC’s definition of moderation does not mean reflexively defending “the political establishment, elites, corporate interests, or the status quo.” For many years, this is, of course, precisely what “moderate” has meant in the Democratic Party. But groups like WelcomePAC feeling compelled to say that Democratic fealty to corporations is an electoral problem shows that the populist left is winning the narrative battle within the party. The left should take the W.

Beyond this basic concession, however, “Deciding to Win” is a tendentious mess. Its methodologies are shoddy and biased, its representations are deceptive, its strategic advice is often counterproductive, and its recommendations—which include giving up on the fight for a livable future for humanity—are in many cases morally reprehensible.

For starters, many of WelcomePAC’s claims are based on a metric developed by a centrist data analyst outfit called Split Ticket, which argues that moderate Congressional candidates are much stronger electoral performers than progressive candidates. Social scientists Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach did a deep dive into Split Ticket’s system and found its core findings are based on “a biased metric, constructed in a way that makes moderates look good and progressives look bad.” Essentially, Split Ticket’s formula takes the standard comparison between a Democratic candidate’s vote share and the Democratic presidential nominee’s vote share in the same district, and then adds a bunch of proprietary “adjustments.” These adjustments account for more than two-thirds of the candidate’s score. As Bonica and Grumbach argue, “This gives Split Ticket a ton of leeway to stack the deck in favor of moderates.”

More transparent models, by comparison, have found that moderates receive no vote share advantage or only a modest advantage relative to progressives. Democrats should not be basing their electoral and governance strategy on a set of black-box “adjustments” from an ideologically motivated centrist outfit, particularly one whose founder admitted that he designed a presentation of polling about Zohran Mamdani “precisely to push back against the idea” that Democrats should look to Zohran as a model.

“Deciding to Win” asks for the same blind faith regarding its polling methodologies. The report declares that issue polling “conducted by advocacy groups”—though not centrist ones like WelcomePAC—“substantially overstates support for liberal policies.” Its evidence is a study showing that sky-high polling on an issue does not generally translate to similarly sky-high electoral results for ballot initiatives.

It’s true that in a profoundly polarized political system like ours, public opinion on an issue will take a hit once it enters the partisan gauntlet of an election. But is that really enough to justify WelcomePAC’s claim that “traditional issue polling is broken” and that we should instead trust their—arguably extremely biased—polling methodology, selection of issues, and language and framing choices?

That’s a huge leap, particularly when WelcomePAC’s results contradict so many other surveys. For example, “Deciding to Win” claims “foreign policy issues are of low importance to voters, with ‘War in the Middle East’ ranking as the 30th most important issue to the electorate.” Compare that to polling earlier this year finding that, among voters who supported Joe Biden in 2020 but failed to turn out in 2024, the number one reason they cited, above the economy and immigration, was Gaza—which seems like relevant information for a party plotting its path forward.

Further undermining the notion that “Deciding to Win” deserves the benefit of the doubt are the report’s many claims that are simply not justified by the evidence presented. The report fails to provide compelling evidence even for its most foundational premise—that the Democratic Party has, in fact, lurched far to the left.

For example, the report tries to connect Biden’s unpopularity to the perception that he “governed from the left” by pointing to a poll at the end of Biden’s term that reported a larger share of voters saw Biden as “too liberal” than several polls at the beginning of his term. And maybe a centrist pundit could argue that the shift took place because Biden moved to the left. But that person should at least contend with the other argument: that it happened because Republicans relentlessly shouted that Biden was a communist (as they always do), and the public never got an effective counter-narrative from an enfeebled president or a wildly incompetent White House press shop.

The report likewise points to the increased prevalence of select words in the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform versus its 2012 platform. Again, maybe there’s some connection (though a relatively weak one) between a party’s official platform and its actual campaigning and governance strategies—but can we really draw much meaning from Democrats mentioning the word “justice” 0.54 per 1,000 words more in 2024 than 2012, or “child care” 0.42 more, or “environmental justice” 0.13 more, but “father,” “responsibility,” and “work” 0.23, 0.34, and 0.5 less?

There are dozens of points like this in “Deciding to Win.” One section of the report titled “The Myth of Mobilization” attempts to refute the idea that Democrats can increase their vote share by prioritizing base mobilization, but cites in support of this argument a study finding that “turnout was a fundamental part of the explanation for the outcome in [the 2020 presidential election]” because new voters and third-party switchers to a major party were more likely to favor “greater government involvement in healthcare” and hold “liberal views on immigration.

At no point in this report does WelcomePAC discuss the key to Donald Trump’s electoral victories. Doing so would’ve highlighted the larger deficiencies of the report. Working-class voters didn’t swing to Trump because they agreed with him on every issue. They voted for him, because they believed he would take a wrecking ball to a system that, in the minds of many working-class voters, needs to be demolished. Once a politician has defined themself this way—or defined their party, as is the case to some degree with Trump’s MAGA-fied GOP—then voters who are looking for a change agent seem willing to overlook other disagreements.

“Deciding to Win” focuses primarily on those other disagreements, while giving scant attention to the most important dynamic in American politics right now: Most people have stopped seeing our institutions—the institutions that brought us the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, the hollowing out of manufacturing towns, the unchecked corruption of our campaign finance system, the rise of oligarchs, genocide in Gaza, and so on—as legitimate. This discontent, which Trump used to propel his right-wing authoritarian populism, can also be harnessed by left economic populism. But doing so requires defining the Democratic Party—in the clearest possible terms—as part of a bottom-versus-top axis of struggle. Trump didn’t tack on a half-hearted “us versus them” patina to a standard Republican campaign—he made his vision of a battle between “the people” and MAGA’s chosen scapegoats the centerpiece of everything he said and did. And it worked. Likewise, Senator Bernie Sanders makes his bottom-versus-top struggle against oligarchy the foundation of everything he says and does—and he is the most popular elected official in the country.

When you center your party around that populist tentpole, you don’t need to abandon existentially critical fights just because they’re (according to an ideologically motivated centrist advocacy group) not currently the issues that poll best. For example, WelcomePAC argues—again and again in this report—that Democrats should stop pursuing climate action, not just in their rhetoric, but in their “approach to governance.” It doesn’t seem to matter to WelcomePAC that if we do nothing to tackle climate change, many scientists fear human civilization on this planet could collapse. If there’s a way to win that doesn’t threaten the lives of billions of people, then that seems worth exploring.

Fortunately, there is. Rather than framing climate change as a niche social issue like WelcomePAC tries to do, populists like Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—as well as less left-coded populists like Congressman Pat Ryan—fold climate fights into their larger “us versus them” framework. They place Big Oil executives where they belong—within the oligarchy that “the people” must stand against. And they emphasize the many ways the climate crisis is materially harming working-class Americans. From the millions of families struggling with out-of-control home-insurance rates in climate disaster-prone areas, to the profound human and economic costs of these disasters, to the fact that electricity prices in many regions are skyrocketing because Trump is blocking communities from utilizing the cheapest form of energy (the sun) to force them to spend billions propping up uncompetitive coal plants, climate constantly offers compelling populist fights. But it only works if you have that broader populist tentpole to fit such struggles under.

In the end, there’s a three-part formula for all of this, recently articulated by David Sirota, that I think serves as a useful shorthand for the big-picture dynamics that “Deciding to Win” ignores.

1. If Democratic Party leaders continue to define themselves by the most clichéd, hackneyed version of identity politics, Democrats will have trouble winning in conservative and swing areas, because nobody likes that approach (other than the Democratic elites who use it to defend themselves from left challengers).

2. If Democratic candidates try to define themselves as Republicans, they will also have trouble winning these areas, because voters will choose the real thing.

3. But if the Democratic Party can redefine itself as the party of economic populism—by fully committing to the struggle against oligarchy—then Democrats will be able to win in swing districts and redder states without abandoning climate and other important fights.

The problem for the Democratic Party, as Sirota points out, is that its larger apparatus—its donors, its current Congressional and recent presidential leaders, its revolving door of operatives and media figures, its WelcomePACs—are all set up to reinforce the first or second approaches, rather than the third. We can change that. But doing so requires a clearer, smarter, more ambitious vision than what’s on offer in this report.

The authors of “Deciding to Win” have been framing themselves as courageous truth-tellers as if their gospel of mealy-mouthed moderation isn’t exactly what Democratic elites want to hear. In reality, WelcomePAC’s report isn’t warning leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries that they’re wearing no clothes—it’s complimenting them on their lovely uniforms.

To win back power, the Democratic Party must reorganize itself as an anti-oligarchy party. That means taking on the oligarchic interests funding WelcomePAC and “Deciding to Win,” which have every reason to scapegoat issues like the climate crisis in order to distract Democrats from their real problem: a party establishment that refuses to reckon with the reality of America’s populist unrest.

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This essay appeared in The Nation. It’s a great publication, check it out!