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third way
The Corporate 'Moderates' Had Their Chance—They Blew It
The moderate establishment looks at this moment and offers more of what created it. More of the same kind of visionless hopeless feckless Democrats, ready to dampen hope and block transformation at every turn. Let's offer what voters are actually asking for: a nation and an economy that work for them.
Nov 09, 2025
Every few years—throughout my entire adult life—I’ve watched the same cycle repeat. Democrats lose ground. The party panics. And like clockwork, the same chorus emerges: opinion writers at the New York Times, former senators, think tank executives, wealthy donors.
They all arrive with the same diagnosis and the same prescription: “Democrats have gone too far left, especially on economic issues.”
It’s deeply ironic. Of all the criticisms you might level at the Democratic Party, moving toward economic populism is not one you can actually make with a straight face. The party has remained steadfastly corporate—if anything, it’s become more so over my lifetime.
But what makes this moment so irritating is that it’s not new advice. This is the same playbook I’ve seen recycled over and over. The Third Way in the Clinton years. James Carville telling us to focus on the economy while signing NAFTA. The Heidi Heitkamps and Jon Testers who were supposed to show us the path forward. And now it’s Ezra Klein in the pages of the Times, holding up Joe Manchin as the model Democrat who could win in deep red states.
Let me tell you something Klein and the rest of this chorus don’t want to acknowledge: they’re not offering a new strategy. They’re screaming for more of what we just had. More of what led us to this authoritarian moment we’re living in. And I know they’re wrong because I can read a map, a calendar, and my own lived experience.
I’m from Tennessee. I watched what happened when Democrats abandoned us.
What Had Happened Was
West Virginia held a Democratic trifecta for 84 consecutive years - from 1930 to 2014. My home state of Tennessee had five Democratic House seats out of nine until 2010. These weren’t marginally competitive states. These were solidly blue, built on New Deal economics and strong unions.
Klein looks at this collapse and concludes Democrats need more Joe Manchins. But Manchin didn’t save West Virginia - he presided over its destruction. His winning margin collapsed from 24 points in 2012 to 3.3 points in 2018 before he quit rather than face voters in 2024. During his 14 years in the Senate, West Virginia went from Bush +6 to Trump +42 - the largest Republican margin in the entire country.
The rest of Klein’s “moderate overperformers”? Jon Tester lost Montana by 11 points in 2024. Claire McCaskill lost Missouri by 6 points in 2018. Heidi Heitkamp lost North Dakota by 11 points. Joe Donnelly lost Indiana by 10 points.
Every single example either lost badly or quit. The only one who came close was Sherrod Brown in Ohio - and he was the economic populist, not the moderate. Brown ran on pro-union, anti-corporate economics and lost by just 3.8 points while outperforming Kamala Harris. The progressive did better than all the moderates.
The Real Story: What Changed and Why
These states didn’t flip because Democrats talked about social issues. They flipped because of systematic economic abandonment by both parties.
We were already on a massive coward manufacturing trajectory but NAFTA was the nail in the coffin. Democrats and Clinton passed it in 1994. The results? West Virginia lost 41.5% of its manufacturing jobs. Tennessee’s textile mills closed and moved to Mexico. Now we import from China what we used to make ourselves - a catastrophic policy choice that made us dependent on a geopolitical rival while devastating American communities.
In West Virginia, union membership collapsed from nearly 500,000 United Mine Workers to fewer than 10,000 today. Coal mining jobs dropped from 130,000 to 12,000. 12,000 West Virginians work at Walmart, btw.
And here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: the answer to coal’s decline wasn’t more coal or Walmart jobs. The answer was making good on the promise of good jobs - building the future instead of clinging to the past. But we didn’t do that. We thought market magic would happen. We offered shitty low-wage service jobs and wondered why people went for Trumpism.
In Tennessee, I watched five Democratic House seats become one. Rural counties that voted for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton now go for Trump by 50-point margins. This happened during the era Klein wants us to return to - the era of moderate Democrats, Third Way centrism, and corporate-friendly economic policy.
Klein’s diagnosis is backwards. These voters don’t call Democrats “preachy” because of pronouns. They call us preachy because we lectured them about being on the right side of history while both parties shipped their jobs to China, bailed out banks while they lost their homes, and got rich in office while their wages stagnated.
The Oligarchy Reveals Itself
If you want to understand what the moderate establishment actually cares about, just look at New York City.
The Democratic primary winner, Zohran Mamdani, got the most votes any candidate has ever received in a NYC Democratic primary. On Tuesday, voters elected the democratic socialist to be mayor of the nation's largest city. He was backed by Governor Kathy Hochul, Attorney General Letitia James, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (finally), and the vast majority of major unions.
His opponent was Andrew Cuomo—who resigned as governor after sexually harassing 11 women and is under federal investigation for covering up nursing home deaths. Cuomo lost the Democratic primary badly—and then he lost again in the general running as an Independent against Mamdani.
Mamdani's win is being treated as historic, but who did the establishment back all along the way? Cuomo.
Michael Bloomberg dumped over $8 million into pro-Cuomo super PACs. Bill Ackman, Ken Griffin, Dan Loeb—billionaires and hedge fund managers lined up. Bill Clinton endorsed him. Congressman Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) praised his “character.”
Donald Trump and Elon Musk both endorsed Cuomo, with Trump saying plainly: “If it’s between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m going to pick the bad Democrat.”
The same people lecturing progressives about electability backed the Trump-endorsed candidate who resigned in disgrace over the progressive who won the Democratic primary decisively. Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York City, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York would not even say if he voted for him or not.
This isn’t about ideology or electability. This is the oligarchy closing ranks. When faced with a candidate who threatened their economic interests—who promised to actually make housing affordable and buses free and childcare accessible—the divisions between establishment Democrats, Republicans, and tech billionaires disappear. They united to protect the extraction economy that’s made them wealthy.
An Inheritance Stolen
Between 1930 and 1975, America built deliberately. The New Deal, the Interstate Highway System, rural electrification, the GI Bill, the space program, Social Security, Medicare—these didn’t happen by accident or market forces. They were planned, funded, and executed by a government that understood its job was to build capacity for everyone.
We inherited the world’s largest economy, built by our grandparents’ generation. And then we fucked it up. For the past 50 years, we’ve let centibillionaires and trillion-dollar companies harvest what our forefathers built. We stopped being a country that builds and became a country that extracts.
And now the people telling us how to win are the same people who oversaw this destruction. They’re telling us the answer is more of what created the problem—more so-called "moderation," more corporate-friendly policy, more means-tested half-measures instead of transformation.
Take healthcare. We spend $5.25 trillion a year—more than double what other countries spend per capita. If market magic were going to solve this, that ought to be enough money. But we don’t have enough doctors, nurses, hospitals, or pharmaceuticals. We have supply deserts because the system optimizes for profit extraction, not capacity building.
The Build Back Better approach follows the same failed logic: pump cash into the system and expect the invisible hand to make it work. But between 1930 and 1975, when we needed hospitals, the government built them. When we needed doctors, we funded medical schools. We didn’t subsidize people to pay inflated prices to monopolies—we built public capacity.
When someone like Mamdani proposes that New York City should have free buses and affordable housing, Abigail Spanberger calls it “unrealistic.” In the richest city in the richest country in human history, basic public services are dismissed as fantasy. That’s what 50 years of extraction looks like—we’ve forgotten we used to build things.
The Power Question
Here’s what Klein completely misses: Sherrod Brown didn’t lose because economic populism doesn’t work. He lost because he was alone.
Voters looked at Brown and thought: even if I elect him, what can he actually do? He’ll get blocked by Manchin types, ignored by leadership, buried in corporate money. He’s one guy against the whole system.
MAGA is a team. Trump has 50+ congresspeople coordinating, governors backing him, and judges ruling for him. When Trump says he’ll do something, voters see organized power capable of delivering.
One senator standing alone doesn’t look like power. It looks like someone who’ll try and fail.
This is why my cohort model isn’t about having “more things” like Klein suggests. It’s about visible, organized power - fifty candidates running together on a binding pledge, coordinating resources, primarying corporate Democrats, backing each other up. That looks like something powerful enough to overcome the system.
The Tea Party did this. They ran coordinated primary challenges and took over the Republican Party because voters saw organized power. Klein wants isolated moderates in red states and isolated progressives in blue states with no coordination, no shared strategy, no mechanism to overcome corporate Democrats blocking change.
What Voters Actually Want
Voters understand the system is rigged. They know both parties sold them out. They know their parents had better lives with less education. They know a single income used to support a family, buy a house, take vacations.
They’ve turned to Trump not because his solutions work, but because he at least acknowledges their rage. Our grandparents and great-grandparents inherited the world’s biggest economy and the elite took it and are renting it back to us. At the same time our own lives getting harder every year.
The moderate establishment looks at this moment and offers more of what created it. More pluralism. More internal disagreement. More of the same kind of visionless hopeless feckless Democrats. Politicians ready to damp hope and vision blocking transformation at every turn.
I suggest we offer what voters are actually asking for: a nation and an economy that work for them. One that creates and builds. One that doesn’t start wars. Doesn’t arm and back genocides. One that hears us.
To build that society we need people and political power capable of rebuilding what’s been systematically dismantled. America isn’t ready for hospice care. We can’t rely on market magic and means-tested subsidies. It’s time we build like our grandparents did.
The moderates had their chance. They lost everywhere. West Virginia, Tennessee, Montana, Missouri, North Dakota, Indiana, Ohio - the graveyard is full of moderate Democrats who couldn’t overcome a toxic brand created by 50 years of both parties serving corporate interests.
Klein and co want to try the same thing again and expect different results. I’m saying it’s time to try something that hasn’t failed yet: coordinated economic populism backed by organized power willing to fight the oligarchy that’s strangling this country.
The chorus is loud right now, demanding we go back to what just failed. Time to stop listening and start building.
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Biden National Security Adviser Among Those Crafting 'Project 2029' Policy Agenda for Democrats
"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade," said one observer. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
Jun 30, 2025
Amid the latest battle over the direction the Democratic Party should move in, a number of strategists and political advisers from across the center-left's ideological spectrum are assembling a committee to determine the policy agenda they hope will be taken up by a Democratic successor to President Donald Trump.
Some of the names on the list of people crafting the agenda—named Project 2029, an echo of the far-right Project 2025 blueprint Trump is currently enacting—left progressives with deepened concerns that party insiders have "learnt nothing" and "forgotten nothing" from the president's electoral victories against centrist Democratic candidates over the past decade, as one economist said.
The project is being assembled by former Democratic speechwriter Andrei Cherny, now co-founder of the policy journal Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and includes Jake Sullivan, a former national security adviser under the Biden administration; Jim Kessler, founder of the centrist think tank Third Way; and Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and longtime adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Progressives on the advisory board for the project include economist Justin Wolfers and former Roosevelt Institute president Felicia Wong, but antitrust expert Hal Singer said any policy agenda aimed at securing a Democratic victory in the 2028 election "needs way more progressives."
As The New York Times noted in its reporting on Project 2029, the panel is being convened amid extensive infighting regarding how the Democratic Party can win back control of the White House and Congress.
After democratic socialist and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani's (D-36) surprise win against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week in New York City's mayoral primary election—following a campaign with a clear-eyed focus on making childcare, rent, public transit, and groceries more affordable—New York City has emerged as a battleground in the fight. Influential Democrats including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have so far refused to endorse him and attacked him for his unequivocal support for Palestinian rights.
Progressives have called on party leaders to back Mamdani, pointing to his popularity with young voters, and accept that his clear message about making life more affordable for working families resonated with Democratic constituents.
But speaking to the Times, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake exemplified how many of the party's strategists have insisted that candidates only need to package their messages to voters differently—not change the messages to match the political priorities of Mamdani and other popular progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
"We didn't lack policies," Lake told the Times of recent national elections. "But we lacked a functioning narrative to communicate those policies."
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have drawn crowds of thousands in red districts this year at Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy rallies—another sign, progressives say, that voters are responding to politicians who focus on billionaires' outsized control over the U.S. political system and on economic justice.
Project 2029's inclusion of strategists like Kessler, who declared economic populism "a dead end for Democrats" in 2013, demonstrates "the whole problem [with Democratic leadership] in a nutshell," said Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Mass—as does Sullivan's seat on the advisory board.
As national security adviser to President Joe Biden, Sullivan played a key role in the administration's defense and funding of Israel's assault on Gaza, which international experts and human rights groups have said is a genocide.
"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade: Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Israel/Gaza War, and the 2024 Joe Biden campaign," said Nick Field of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
"Jake Sullivan is shaping domestic policy for the next Democratic administration," he added. "Who is happy with the Biden foreign policy legacy?"
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WelcomeFest’s Billionaire Backers Reveal Its True Mission
Like Third Way and the Democratic Leadership Council before it, Welcome is yet another donor- and elite-driven operation seeking to drag the Democratic Party rightward on economic policy.
Jun 04, 2025
If the Abundance universe is to be believed, the hottest ticket this summer is WelcomeFest.
Wednesday’s confab is the second such annual gathering organized by the centrist group Welcome Party and its political action committee WelcomePAC, with this year’s event touting a distinct abundance flair. The conference boasts a rogues’ gallery of corporate-friendly cosponsors, including Third Way, the New Democratic Coalition, Inclusive Abundance, and the Blue Dog Caucus. A sizzle reel from last year’s event paints WelcomeFest as an Internet Hippo tweet come to life, complete with cameos from A-listers like ex-CNN anchor John Avlon and Democratic influencer Olivia Julianna.
Taken together, WelcomePAC’s leadership and funding are at odds with their claimed opposition to the “buttoned-up [politics] of Washington elites.”
This year’s “Responsibility to Win” session (misspelled on the event’s official poster) has drawn viral attention online—both for its bizarre AI Ghibli promos and stacked lineup of neoliberal pundits, conservative Democratic lawmakers, and wunderkind pollsters serving up Dick Morris’ reheated leftovers.
Speakers include:
- Derek Thompson, co-author of Abundance.
- Matt Yglesias, confidently-wrong pundit and, per Thompson, the “OG grandfather of Abundance.”
- Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who doesn’t think Democrats should use the term “oligarchy.”
- Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), Abundance champion and darling of AIPAC and crypto lobbyists.
- Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), Adam Gray (D-Calif.), and Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-Mich.), founding members of the Abundance-themed Build America Caucus.
- Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash). and Jared Golden (D-Maine), current and former co-chairs of the conservative Blue Dog Caucus.
- Adam Jentleson, anti-”Groups” crusader currently distancing himself from his 14-month stint as Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) chief of staff.
- David Shor, pollster and prolific party animal.
WelcomePAC’s Donors
Campaign finance records reveal that WelcomePAC, the primary organizers of WelcomeFest, has raked in sizable contributions from billionaires and corporate oligarchs:
- Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has given over $1.8 million to WelcomePAC since 2021. A major donor to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign and the pro-Harris SuperPAC Future Forward, Hoffman strongly opposed the Biden administration’s anti-monopoly policies and publicly demanded that Harris fire Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan if she won the election. Hoffman has also bankrolled the Mainstream Democrats super PAC, which spent heavily in Democratic primaries in 2022 and 2024 to defend conservative Democrats like Kurt Schrader and Henry Cuellar and defeat progressives like Cori Bush and Nina Turner.
- Walton family: WelcomePAC has received over $1.1 million from relatives and heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton—the richest family in America.
- S. Robson (Rob) Walton: Rob Walton, the eldest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since 2024.
- Samuel R. Walton: Samuel R. Walton, grandson of Sam Walton and owner of a natural resources holding company, has given $625,000 to WelcomePAC since 2024.
- Christy Walton: Christy Walton, widow of one of Sam Walton’s sons, has given $125,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022.
- Alice Walton: Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton, has given $25,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022.
- Carrie Walton Penner: Walton Penner, daughter of Rob Walton, has given $150,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022. She is also a prolific donor to the anti-public education charter school movement.
- Greg Penner: Penner, the husband of Carrie Walton and son-in-law of Rob, has given $150,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022. Penner is also Chairman of Walmart’s Board of Directors and a managing partner for the Walton family’s private equity firm.
- Bekenstein family: Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein and his wife Anita have given a combined $375,000 to WelcomePAC since October 2024.
- Michael Bloomberg: Billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since August 2024. Bloomberg is best known for his controversial mayoralty (which saw the expansion of racist “stop-and-frisk” policing tactics and anti-Muslim surveillance) and his expensive, widely-mocked 2020 presidential campaign.
- James & Kathryn Murdoch: James Murdoch—the estranged younger son of News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch—and his wife Kathryn have given a combined $2.5 million to WelcomePAC since April 2024.
- Rob Granieri: Granieri, the co-founder of Wall Street quantitative trading firm Jane Street, has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since June 2024.
- Edward Fishman: Fishman, a managing director at hedge fund D.E. Shaw, has given $200,000 to WelcomePAC since February 2022.
- Mark Heising: Heising, the founder of private equity firm Medley Partners, has given $250,000 to WelcomePAC since June 2024.
- David Nierenberg: Nierenberg, an investment manager and former national finance co-chair for Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and his wife Patricia have given a combined $726,600 to WelcomePAC since March 2024.
- Americans Together Inc: Americans Together Inc, a centrist group founded by former Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) daughter Heather Manchin Bresch, has given over $1 million to WelcomePAC since February 2024. A core plank of Americans Together’s policy platform is opposing any repeal or reform of the Senate filibuster (the goal, ironically, of a 2021 book by WelcomeFest speaker Adam Jentleson).
- Bresch, the former CEO of pharma company Mylan, attracted national attention in 2016 for defending Mylan’s EpiPen price-gouging.
Who’s Actually Welcome to the Party?
While WelcomePAC’s donor roster makes clear who the group wants to welcome into the Democratic tent, its website is quite explicit about who they wish to exclude. WelcomePAC blames the Democratic Party’s woes on an “extreme right and socialist left […] conspiring with conflict-driven media to trash the Democratic brand.” In a poorly-aged 2021 Substack post calling for a “Jim Clyburn Day,” Welcome co-founder Lauren Harper celebrated Clyburn’s 2020 endorsement of Biden for “steering the party away from further polarization that would have led to a second Trump term.”
WelcomeFest organizers have explicitly juxtaposed their event with the purportedly left-wing Democratic National Committee, offering a refuge to those put off by the Democratic Party’s current leadership. They firmly reject unspecified “progressive purity tests” (read: having values), but lack a compelling explanation for why swing and red state voters are flocking to the progressive-populist fight against oligarchy.
Bafflingly, for a group that promises to offer “a vision for a depolarized United States,” WelcomeFest only features Democrats speaking about the need to moderate. The group, which proudly touts the label of “centrist insurgency,” has seemingly little to offer a polarized Republican Party—which is perhaps why their previous campaign to convince five House Republicans to caucus with Democrats failed so spectacularly. This has hardly hampered their push for moderation at all costs. In pursuit of this end, the group has even invented a metric that claims safe blue congressional seats are undemocratic, encouraging Republican challengers to pursue previously uncontested blue seats.
Some of WelcomePAC’s top staff have also spent their careers working to move the Democratic Party to the right. Co-founder Liam Kerr previously spent 10 years working for Democrats for Education Reform, a charter school advocacy organization founded and funded by hedge fund managers. Welcome Party board member Catharine Bellinger has also spent her career working for the same pro-charter school groups as Kerr. WelcomePAC’s political director, Daniel Conway, spent nearly six years working for No Labels, the centrist dark money group co-founded by the late Joe Lieberman that repeatedly attempted to recruit a third party candidate to run for president in 2024.
Taken together, WelcomePAC’s leadership and funding are at odds with their claimed opposition to the “buttoned-up [politics] of Washington elites.” Like Third Way and the Democratic Leadership Council before it, Welcome is yet another donor- and elite-driven operation seeking to drag the Democratic Party rightward on economic policy. That “rebranded neoliberalism” approach risks further alienating the very constituencies that Democrats lost in 2016 and 2024, and ceding further ground to right-wing faux-populists like Vice President JD Vance.
Given the WelcomeFest lineup, it’s clear that the donor class views Abundance as key to carrying out this self-serving crusade against populism.
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