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The Democratic Party Needs a Soul, Not a Focus Group
The moderate wing of the Democratic Party, however, has come away from the 2024 bloodbath with substantially different lessons. In their reading, the error of 2024 was not that Biden ignored the progressive flank of the party; rather, it was that he was too supportive of it. Moving forward, these pundits argue, Democrats should pivot back to the center to capture a larger proportion of voters and thereby seal future electoral victories. The latest addendum to this line of thinking is the splashy Deciding to Win report, a project by Welcome, a corporatist, centrist think tank. While the report has garnered a great deal of coverage, and online adherents, a closer look reveals a void, words without signification, and another excuse to heap blame on progressives without any data to undergird their claims.
Who Are the Corporatists Running Welcome?
Everything you need to know about the Deciding to Win report can be gleaned by clocking its provenance. Welcome, and its PAC, the Welcome PAC, are largely funded by donors who are firmly ensconced in the superstratum of the ultra wealthy. Big funders include David and Patricia Nierenberg—David was a national finance chair on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign—and Michael Eisenson, a managing director of a private equity firm.
Welcome trumpets its electoral victories and ardent support for “pragmatic” candidates, that favorite designation of the moderate persuasion, but their electoral record is breathtakingly poor. In the last cycle, Welcome PAC made independent expenditures in nine congressional races; only one of its supported candidates, incumbent Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez (D-Wash.), won. A win rate of roughly 11% is not exactly a strong leg to stand on when making pronouncements about how the Democratic Party should be reorganized. For all its bluster about charting a new course for the party, Welcome PAC’s spending on behalf of candidates seems to largely follow longstanding patterns that have been criticized for enriching consultants while doing little to engender real support for its candidates: slick ad buys and astroturf campaigns. Deciding to Win even takes an aside to fire shots at canvassing and phone banking, the bread and butter of grassroots campaigning. In short, this does not appear to be an organization particularly curious about anything other than business as usual.
A Guide to Popularity
Deciding to Win’s central thesis is that, in 2024, Democrats adopted unpopular positions, mostly forced on them by the party’s progressive wing, and that those positions doomed them with the broader electorate. To support this argument, they point to “moderate” candidates who overperformed 2024 trends while running on more “popular” platforms. The authors devote a great deal of time to enumerating which positions are popular and which are not.
Some of these arguments are laughably flimsy. In one section, the authors report, gravely, that certain Democratic positions are so devastatingly unpopular that they should be abandoned at once. These include proposals to “abolish the police,” “abolish prisons,” and “provide free healthcare to undocumented immigrants.” That the current Democratic Party—or any in the past—has advocated for the abolition of prisons or police is laughable.
Progressives do agree with the report’s authors that the Democratic Party has trust issues; however, we have long argued that Democrats’ trust problem stems not from ideology but from hypocrisy.
These straw-man slugfests are punctuated by some neat sections of statistical cherry-picking. In the fourth section, for example, the authors present a tidy graph of policy support among swing and nonvoters. It ostensibly shows that both groups are aligned on which policies they support, meaning Democrats could capture them by running on “popular” policies while eschewing the unpopular ones.
To underline this, they highlight two data points: “increase refugee admissions,” which polls around 8%, and “expand prescription drug price negotiation,” which polls above 95%. The logical extension is that Democrats should ignore policies pushed by progressives—like comprehensive immigration reform—and instead stick to those preferred by moderates.
But the problem with this analysis is that there isn’t a coherent trend among the hundred-plus policies the report polled. Some policies with similarly low support include “increase police funding” and “end all government benefits for undocumented immigrants.” Meanwhile, expanding Medicare coverage polls above 90%, a policy that, elsewhere in the report, the authors imply is unpopular and untenable. (Perplexingly, the survey also records near-universal approval for “ban birth control” and “launch a national Trump-branded cryptocurrency.” Surely the authors don’t think Democrats should run on those planks.)
All that this scale of popularity for more-than-100 policies really points to is the general indecision of voters. As surveys around the popularity of Medicare for All, for example, have repeatedly shown, voters are responsive to both positive and negative messaging around policies, sometimes in ways that are contradictory. Rather than present a clean narrative of which policies are popular, and should therefore be adopted, the report’s authors have merely reinforced how fickle public opinion can be.
Trust Me, I’m a Democrat!
The authors assert that Democrats are less trusted on the issues voters care most about—and they take it for granted that this is because the party has moved left on these issues.
To drive home this message, the Deciding to Win authors present data that purports to show that Democrats are trusted less on issues that voters prioritize, whereas Republicans are trusted more in those categories. In one table, “drug abuse and addiction” ranks as the top issue that voters care about, although Democrats trail Republicans by just one percentage point—hardly dire. The next issue, “income inequality,” shows Democrats with a two-point lead. Meanwhile, “race relations” and “the environment,” dismissed elsewhere in the report as fringe concerns, poll at 38 and 37% importance, respectively, and are areas where Democrats enjoy five- and ten-point advantages.
Does this really paint a foreboding picture for Democrats on the ideological front? The argument is unconvincing. Of the top 10 most important issues, Democrats are net positive on 5, according to the report’s own data. And with only a 15-point spread between the most and least important issues, voters’ concerns are varied. There’s no single issue dragging the party down.
Progressives do agree with the report’s authors that the Democratic Party has trust issues; however, we have long argued that Democrats’ trust problem stems not from ideology but from hypocrisy. A Democratic senator will decry wealth inequality on the Senate floor, then attend a lavish fundraiser hosted by titans of capital that evening. That disconnect, paired with the consultant-approved language that defines mainstream Democratic messaging, does more to erode trust than any policy position.
Moderate For Whom?
Having dispensed with establishing which policies are popular and which are not, Deciding to Win’s authors devote much of the rest of the report to an inducement to moderation in Democratic candidates. They urge Democrats to “moderate” on cultural issues like gender and queer rights, but then later note that banning discrimination against LGBTQ Americans in housing and employment enjoys clear majority support.
This incoherence continues as the authors try to define what a “moderate” candidate is. A moderate is someone who simultaneously, somehow, is critical of the status quo but against radical change of any sort. They are at pains to note that “frustrations with the status quo are not the same as a desire for socialism,” making sure that the reader knows who the real enemy is—and it’s no coincidence that these are the same enemies MAGA Republicans describe. The report goes on to say that “large majorities of Americans continue to have positive views of capitalism… [and] negative views of socialism.” While the reports the authors cite do show an overall preference for capitalism among all Americans (roughly 57% approval versus 39% disapproval) they fail to note that among Democrats, there is actually a higher preference for socialism than for capitalism, per the same studies.
The real question is whether Democrats want to be the party of careful calibration or of conviction.
The studies the authors cite only go as far as 2022; more recent polling, conducted this year and by the same pollsters, shows that just 42% of Democrats approve of capitalism, with 66% preferring socialism, the reverse of the trend the authors are trying to depict. While it’s not clear why the authors relied on older studies and didn’t update their report with newer polling, it’s obvious that more recent reporting significantly complicates the idea that socialism isn’t popular among Democratic voters.
Elsewhere, moderates are celebrated for their ability to overperform electorally while “extreme” candidates underperform. The authors point to candidates who beat the trend-line swing from Democratic to Republican support in districts around the country, but don’t appear to be taking factors like incumbency, local conditions, or individual campaign contexts into account. This logic has long been echoed by pundits eager to reduce politics to electability charts. But all it really says is that maintaining the status quo is easier than changing it—an observation so banal it borders on platitude.
The real question is whether it’s worth pushing for change even if it’s harder. Joe Biden’s 2020 reassurance to wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” may have been politically clever on the heels of the first chaotic Trump administration, but should that really be the bedrock of a party now hemorrhaging enthusiasm and credibility? Or, should the party push for progressive policy—much of which, even Welcome’s authors concede, is “popular”—and try to win voters back with an ambitious vision for the future?
Joe Who?
Part nine of the report, “Lessons from the Biden Years,” briefly addresses what most party insiders now recognize as Biden’s catastrophic decision to run for reelection. The section also faults Democrats for failing to focus on inflation and “kitchen-table issues,” yet never mentions the administration’s enabling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In fact, the entire document refers to Israel and Palestine only once, in a footnote claiming foreign policy is not of significant voter interest. That would be news to the 101,623 Democrats who voted “uncommitted” in Michigan’s primary to protest Biden’s Gaza policy. Kamala Harris went on to lose Michigan by just over 80,000 votes.
The authors and Welcome backers also fail to acknowledge that they represent the exact political tendency that, in the run-up to the 2024 election, insisted that Biden was the only viable candidate to defeat Trump. While progressive organizations were sounding the alarm about Biden’s abysmal polling and the enthusiasm gap between the parties, corporatist “moderates” insisted that staying the course was the only reasonable way forward. After Biden dropped out, these same voices were those arguing against an open Democratic primary and enabling Harris’ hasty coronation as the party nominee. Deciding to Win, predictably, is devoid of any self-reflection or criticism of the role that the party’s conservative tendency played in this train wreck.
While deriding Harris’ inability to break away from Biden’s lackluster economic policies, the authors invoke Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) as examples of effective economic messaging, citing their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. They even concede that left-wing economic populism gets “some things right”—though, predictably, they never specify what it supposedly gets wrong. Instead, the report returns to its old refrain—that unpopular positions are unpopular—circling endlessly back to itself.
A Different Way Forward
What Deciding to Win and similar analyses miss is that the Democratic Party’s core challenge isn’t that it has moved too far left, but that it doesn’t seem to know what it stands for. The party is collapsing under the weight of its endless focus grouping and message testing without an ideological core to orbit around. Progressives and moderates alike agree that Democrats have lost ground with non-college-educated voters. But this erosion isn’t the fault of progressives pushing economic populism; it’s the result of the moderate wing’s long-standing bet that such voters could be replaced by suburban professionals—an experiment whose results are now in.
In the end, Deciding to Win reads less like analysis and more like self-justification for a faction of donors and consultants eager to blame the left for their own failures. The report’s core message—that moderation is always safer, that populism is suspect, that electoral success can be engineered through triangulation—may comfort those who fund it. But it offers little insight into the actual dynamics reshaping American politics.
The real question is whether Democrats want to be the party of careful calibration or of conviction. If the former, they may continue winning the occasional race while losing the broader argument. If the latter, they’ll need to stop listening to reports like Deciding to Win and start deciding what they actually believe.
Why Is the NYT Editorial Board More Worried About Progressivism Than Fascism?
Yet at the nation’s paper of record—whose headquarters sat literally a stone’s throw away from the New York City No Kings march route—the protest was deemed not important enough for a front-page story. Two small below-the-fold photos were offered instead (10/19/25), with the accompanying article buried on page 23.
It’s true that the New York Times has a history of downplaying protests (FAIR.org, 9/24/25, 9/12/25, 1/25/24). But it’s also true that it’s only certain kinds of protests that they downplay. When right-wingers under the banner of the Tea Party movement held in 2009 what the Times (9/12/09) described as “the largest rally against President [Barack] Obama since he took office,” they drew a crowd two orders of magnitude smaller than No Kings, but its coverage got the same placement from the paper: front-page photo, article inside. Just one month after the Tea Party rally, a major LGBTQ march of equal or possibly even double the size was not noted on the paper’s front page at all (Extra!, 12/09).
Will it be possible in 2026 for Democrats to win at the ballot box, regardless of ideology? That’s very much up for debate.
The Times isn’t exactly an outlier in that respect; nearly all corporate media have a long history of downplaying major protests over women’s rights, war, genocide, and the climate crisis, while offering much more ink and airtime to right-wing rallies like the Promise Keepers and the Tea Party.
But the Times deserves special attention—partly because it’s seen as the standard-bearing “liberal” newspaper in the country. And as the standard-bearer, it sees its role as establishing the ideological boundaries of the Democratic Party, most notably by drawing the line in the sand on the left that the Democrats must not cross. And this in turn is why, two days after the massive pro-democracy marches, the New York Times editorial board published a forceful message of its own—not against fascism, but against progressivism.
‘The Center Is the Way to Win’
In both its news and opinion sections, year after year, the New York Times‘ mantra has been that for electoral success, Democrats have to move to the right, and any electoral losses must be caused by excessive progressivism (Extra!, 7–8/06; FAIR.org, 5/27/15, 7/6/17, 11/14/19, 7/16/21). In a sprawling new iteration of this “move to the center” motto, the paper’s editorial board (10/20/25) announced: “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win.”
The piece frames itself as talking to “partisans,” but it makes only the faintest nods to Republicans, and the last 2,000 of its 3,000-odd words are directly targeting Democrats. It opens:
American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes. President Trump is carrying out far-right policies, while some of the country’s highest-profile Democrats identify as democratic socialists. Moderation sometimes feels outdated.
You could probably just stop right there, based on the absurdity of comparing the “extremes” of Trump’s unprecedented authoritarianism to democratic socialist Democrats. New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, the highest-profile of the latter at the moment (and certainly top of mind for the city’s largest newspaper), has focused his campaign on freezing the rent, making city buses free, and adding 2% to the tax bills of the wealthiest 1%.
But even if you make it past that to the paper’s evidence for its centrism argument, it’s full of holes. The main argument is that “candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left.”
The centerpiece of their evidence is an analysis of swing districts where a Democratic congressional candidate won and former Vice President Kamala Harris lost. The Times looked at what PAC endorsements the winning candidate received, and came up with the result that all could be classified as moderates. “No progressive won a race as difficult as any of these,” the paper declared. It also says its analysis shows that “moderates” outperformed Harris, while “nonmoderates” underperformed. Ergo, moderation must be the key to success.
‘Zero Additional Seats’
The question of the impact of ideology on electoral outcomes is hotly debated among academics and pollsters. Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica, who runs the site On Data and Democracy (10/20/25), ran the numbers and found that “even using the editorial’s own data, Democrats would have gained zero additional seats by running more moderates in competitive seats.”
Part of this is due to the fact that Democrats most often run right-leaning candidates in swing districts already. But there are other factors that are probably more important. Bonica’s own research has found that incumbency matters far more than “moderation” for election outcomes. Looking at a range of measures of ideology, rather than the Times‘ single indirect measure of PAC support, he found that
the electoral benefit of a major ideological shift to the center is either small or statistically insignificant. The advantage provided by simply being an incumbent, by contrast, is a reliable 2-3 percentage points.
Using the most straightforward measure of all—voter perception of ideology—he found the benefit of moderation was exactly zero.
Bonica then analyzed every competitive district race from 2016-24, using the composite measure of ideology. “If every progressive candidate on the list had been replaced by a moderate in 2024,” he found, “the expected net change in Democratic seats would have been zero.”
The Times also argues that progressives “cannot point to a single member of Congress or governor from swing districts or states” who has won by “quietly retaining their unpopular positions and emphasizing economic issues.” Meanwhile, they say, look at Wisconsin, for instance, where Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers “won by running to the middle.”
But Bonica points out that in surveys, Baldwin was actually perceived by voters as “progressive.” Wisconsin Capital Times associate editor John Nichols (10/21/25) agrees, writing that Baldwin, the first openly LGBTQ member of the Senate, hardly ran to the middle, as the Times claimed, but defended trans rights (an issue Democrats are “out of step” on, according to the Times) and “borrowed heavily from a progressive populist tradition.” Baldwin and Evers, he wrote, were portrayed by their opponents as “radical.” It’s an example that undermines, rather than supports, the Times‘ argument, and also shows that defining and measuring ideology is a tricky thing—which the editors acknowledge, right before proclaiming that they possess the “true picture.”
‘Too Liberal, Too Judgmental’
But if the New York Times‘ evidence is hardly convincing, its diagnosis of why moderation wins is even less so. The piece insists that the main problem is that “many Americans see the Democratic Party as too liberal, too judgmental, and too focused on cultural issues to be credible, and voters are moving away from it.”
The popularity of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, the Times says, is simply too niche; their fans “are not nearly numerous enough to flip the places required to win the presidency and Congress.”
Legacy media regularly work to say this until people believe it; in the 2020 Democratic primaries, Sanders won many early states, and not just deep blue ones, despite concerted media efforts to downplay and diminish his campaign (FAIR.org, 8/15/19, 1/28/20, 1/30/20, 5/1/20). When Joe Biden eventually overtook him, exit polls showed voters still preferred Sanders’ political position, suggesting they were responding not to Biden’s ideology, but to the incessant media narrative of his electability (FAIR.org, 3/16/20). According to a recent YouGov poll (4/16/25), Sanders is currently the most popular active politician in the country by a substantial margin.
NYT's Ideal Platform
Now, as then, the Times claims that moving to the center will make voters “see [Democrats] as credible.” What does that look like, concretely? The Times attempts to establish what moderation looks like in this crucial paragraph, which sets forth much of the paper’s own ideology in clear terms:
America still has a political center. Polls show that most voters prefer capitalism to socialism and worry that the government is too big—and also think that corporations and the wealthy have too much power. Most voters oppose both the cruel immigration enforcement of the Trump administration and the lax Biden policies that led to a record immigration surge. Most favor robust policing to combat crime and recoil at police brutality. Most favor widespread abortion access and some restrictions late in pregnancy. Most oppose race-based affirmative action and support class-based affirmative action. Most support job protections for trans people and believe that trans girls should not play girls’ sports. Most want strong public schools and the flexibility to choose which school their children attend.
This is the ideal Democratic platform that Times envisions: an end to affirmative action, refusal to grant women full autonomy over their own bodies, policing trans kids’ participation in sports while their very existence is under attack. They want politicians who promise “robust policing” without the police brutality that accompanies it, who talk about curbs on corporate and billionaire power but won’t challenge capitalism, who express support for “strong public schools” while allowing private schools to siphon off the money needed to make those public schools strong.
In other words, they want Democrats to throw their core constituents under the bus while making vague, contradictory promises they can’t fulfill. This is the paper’s suggested path to credibility?
Captured by Elites
The example the Times offers of how moving to the center will make Democrats more “credible” and “effective” in confronting Trump is that “most voters disapprove of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies—and nonetheless trust his party on the issue more than they trust Democrats.” A more “moderate” position on immigration would make Democrats better able to “combat” him on the issue.
But when the Times itself calls Biden’s immigration policies “lax”—when they were far more cruel and draconian than any recent president besides Trump—and frames them as the other side of the extremist coin to Trump’s “cruel immigration enforcement,” it shapes that public perception. It’s hardly a surprise that many voters think the Democrats are “too liberal,” when that’s what all of the country’s biggest news outlets have hammered into their heads for decades.
In fact, a recent poll shows that the Times‘ advice is fundamentally self-defeating. The paper is correct that Democrats’ approval ratings are abysmal, and also that some polls show voters say Democrats are “too left wing and too focused on niche issues.” But those polls give respondents pre-written choices, suggesting to them what the appropriate answer might be, which can skew responses. What happens if you ask voters directly what they think about the party, and let them fill in the blanks themselves? A recent poll of Rust Belt (read: swing state) voters did just that, and analyzed the unprompted answers. Here’s what they found (Jacobin, 10/15/25):
Contrary to many analyses that have blamed Democrats for holding extreme positions on social and cultural issues that alienated swing voters, the dominant theme we observed was voters’ anger at the Democratic Party for failing to deliver. Among Democratic and independent respondents, the most common critique of the Democratic Party was its perceived inability to carry out policies that help ordinary people.
“Wokeness” or ideological extremism was a concern for only small minorities, even among independents (11%) and Republicans (19%). “The evidence suggests,” they wrote, that
most voters who hold negative views of the Democratic Party are motivated less by the culture war than by a broader judgment that the party is captured by elites and not delivering tangible gains for working people.
And what happens when you ask them directly about progressive policies? Turns out that, on many issues, voters are much more progressive than the Times would have readers believe. Polls regularly show large majorities in favor of a wealth tax, a $15 or higher minimum wage, and Medicare for All, all key progressive demands that corporate media regularly lambaste.
Anti-Democratic Power Grab
Equally important, the Times‘ argument imagines that a Democratic push to the center can overcome the structural obstacles to competitive elections that this authoritarian movement is rapidly laying down. Trump and his allies are working furiously to undermine election integrity for their own benefit, using a variety of strategies that the Brennan Center for Justice (8/3/25) details:
- Attempting to rewrite election rules to burden voters and usurp control of election systems;
- Targeting or threatening to target election officials and others who keep elections free and fair;
- Supporting people who undermine election administration; and
- Retreating from the federal government’s role of protecting voters and the election process.
GOP-controlled states are ramming through new gerrymandered maps at Trump’s behest to generate more safe seats. And the Voting Rights Act is currently before a Supreme Court that seems eager to eviscerate what little remains of it, which would allow further gerrymandering to give the GOP up to 19 more House seats.
Will it be possible in 2026 for Democrats to win at the ballot box, regardless of ideology? That’s very much up for debate. It certainly appears to be Trump’s goal to make it impossible, no matter how popular Democratic candidates might be.
Yet nowhere in its lengthy tirade against progressives does the Times mention this anti-democratic electoral power grab. It’s a key omission, and it brings us back to the paper’s downplaying of the No Kings protests. The Times in its editorial laments that Trump “threatens American democracy,” but it imagines the ship can be righted by retaking Congress with centrist Democrats.
If the Democrats have shown us anything under Trump 2.0, it’s that seeking to moderate and accommodate—as they did in confirming his extremist cabinet nominees and failing to block his first continuing resolution in the spring—only gives Trump and his enablers more power. Stopping the authoritarian machine is going to require all the levers of democracy that can be pulled—not just at the ballot box, but also on the streets.
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