Democratic Centrists Make Their Move?

Is there a Third Way?

METAPHOR ALERT: “FAA Halts Flights After Musk’s Starship Rocket Explodes and Rains Down Debris.”

Yes, we do have more important things to talk about: The slapstick on-again-off- dance of the tariffs; the droopy jobs numbers; chaos at the Social Security Administration; Democratic infighting; the Administration’s new attack on academic freedom; and, of course, the dismemberment of the Free World.

But I have to admit that I’m mesmerized by the drama of the “incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and [his] jester high on ketamine.” It’s like watching a impending crash between racing trains filled to overflowing with clowns wearing bright red bonnets festooned with ferrets. Except much worse. You know something awful is going to happen, but you can’t really look away.

Really make sure you watch this if you have not done so already:

"Washington Has Become the Court of Nero"

The laws of human gravity make it impossible for two sociopathic megalomaniacs to occupy the same space, so strain is inevitable. And, lo, Politico is reporting that Trump has begun to clip Musk’s wings a bit: “Trump convened his Cabinet in person on Thursday to deliver a message: You’re in charge of your departments, not Elon Musk.”

I suspect that we’re about to enter the “I’m not going to be ignored, Donald” phase of this bromance.

Happy Friday.

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Centrist stirrings?

Pete Buttigieg thinks Dems should stop sounding like something out of “Portlandia”

Democrats are (obviously) still struggling to find a path forward; and still wrestling with what happened last year. One thing that seems clear is that the GOP campaign to paint Democrats as raving radicals was successful.

An analysis by the Democratic-aligned polling initiative, Blueprint, found that in the final days of the 2024 campaign, swing voters broke for Trump 52% versus just 38% for Harris. Eighty-three percent of those swing voters believed that Harris supported taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants.¹

They also believed that Harris supported:

• Requiring all cars to be electric by 2035 (82%)

• Decriminalizing border crossings (77%)

• Banning fracking (74%)

• Defunding the police (72%)

Democrats never successfully pushed back. And here we are.

**

Earlier this week, Politico reported on a meeting of centrist Democrats who want to bring the party back from the wilderness. Notably, the group released a five-page memo that analyzed the party’s disconnect with working class voters

One of the key ways to win back the trust of the working class, some gathered there argued, was to “reduce far-left influence and infrastructure” in the party, according to the takeaways document.

THE MEMO:

Takeaways on How Democrats Can Reconnect Culturally with the Working Class

1. Move Away from Identity Politics

• Stop addressing voters as identity blocs and instead focus on shared American values.

• Use plain language and avoid jargon or abbreviations that can alienate voters.

• Acknowledge that people have multiple identities (e.g., Black and a veteran) rather than reducing them to one label.

2. Emphasize Shared Values and Cultural Alignment

• Frame rights as about "freedom and justice," not just identity-based concerns.

• Highlight similarities between marginalized groups and mainstream American values.

• Embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery (e.g., farms, main streets).

3. Rebalance the Party’s Cultural Messaging

• Reject fringe positions that alienate the median voter.

• Avoid overly moralistic or condescending messaging; speak plainly and directly.

• Allow candidates to express personal faith and values without fear of backlash.

4. Reduce Far-Left Influence and Infrastructure

• Build a moderate Democratic infrastructure, including media, talent pipelines, and communications networks.

• Push back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging.

• Ban far-left candidate questionnaires and refuse to participate in forums that create ideological purity tests.

**

Some of you may think that, with the world ablaze, this is not the time to indulge in this kind of introspection and finger-pointing. But as David Frum noted, the margin for error is small, and, “The most immediate task for the anti-Trump coalition in these early months of 2025 is to avoid more mistakes.”

President Joe Biden ended his presidency by listening to advice to grant clemency to thousands of drug offenders, including heinous murderers. Who offered that advice? Don’t listen to them anymore! Fight Trump where he’s most vulnerable, not where progressive interest groups are most isolated and most dogmatic. Build unity from the center, rather than indulge the factionalism of the ultra-left….

It’s not yet clear whether Democrats have gotten the memo. At February’s DNC meeting, the WSJ’s Molly Ball noticed “the very pathologies that many critics argue have alienated Democrats from the American heartland were on display: a party captive to leftist activists, obsessed with divisive litmus tests, out of touch with regular people’s concerns and in thrall to a patronizing identity politics that alienates many of the very minorities it is meant to attract.”

**

There are other signs that Democrats have not figured out how to pivot. Just this week: “Senate Democrats block GOP-led bill to ban transgender athletes from women's sports.”

The outcome means the legislation — which passed the House in January and mirrors an executive order issued by President Donald Trump — won’t go any further. But the failed vote is likely to become a political talking point for Republicans in upcoming elections after they used the issue of transgender rights as a cudgel in the 2024 campaign.

Nota Bene: A New York Times/Ipsos poll conducted in January found that 79% of American adults said they “should not” be allowed, while 18% said they “should be allowed.”

And in Wisconsin, Republicans are seizing on a budget proposal by Governor Tony Evers that replaces "woman," "mother" and "wife" with versions of "person who is inseminated," or "inseminated person."

You can argue amongst yourselves about the accuracy and wisdom of this nomenclature, but I would advise against using it in any gathering of working class or swing voters.

**

But, but, but…

There are signs that some prominent Democrats are willing to break with both the language and orthodoxies that have alienated so many voters.

The Liberal Patriot’s Michael Baharaeen notes that Pete Buttigieg, “captured the balance that Democrats will likely need to strike—not abandoning their values of inclusivity and protection of society’s vulnerable but also not reducing everyone to their immutable characteristics.”

Buttigieg said:

What do we mean when we talk about diversity? Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one’s mistreated because of them—which I will always fight for—or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia? Which I have also experienced. [This] is how Trump Republicans are made. […]

If we were more serious about the actual values and not caught up in the vocabularies and trying to cater to everybody only in terms of their particular slice of combinations of identities versus the shared project…if we thought about it a little bit differently, things like diversity would be…an example of how we reach out beyond our traditional coalition.

Then there was Elissa Slotkin, the newly elected Michigan senator who delivered the Democratic response to Trump’s speech this week. The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta reports on the advice she didn’t take:

Slotkin argues that the surest way to heal the country—to defuse identitarian struggles, pacify the culture wars, uncoil our hypertense politics—is by restoring the confidence of working families….

It’s also what brought Slotkin to reject all of the suggestions she received about her speech: that she should use it to take up the cause of USAID workers, of undocumented immigrants, of the transgender community, of the environment, of the Education Department, and so on.

The problem isn’t with any of these particular causes, she said; the problem is that everyone seemed focused more on the people she might name in her remarks and less on the people who would be at home listening to them.

**

The most dramatic shift, however, was Gavin Newsom who broke with his fellow Democrats on transgender athletes. Unfortunately, he chose to unburden himself to the deeply reckless and deplorable — a choice that may overshadow the substance of his remarks.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, embarking on a personal post-mortem of the failures of his Democratic Party, suggested this week that the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports was “deeply unfair.”

The comments by Mr. Newsom, who has backed L.G.B.T.Q. causes for decades and was one of the first American elected officials to officiate same-sex weddings, represented a remarkable break from other top Democrats on the issue, and signaled a newly defensive position on transgender rights among many in his party…

“I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that,” Mr. Newsom said. “It is an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair.”²

He also acknowledged the effectiveness of Mr. Trump’s signature campaign ad, which declared: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

“It was devastating,” Mr. Newsom said. “And she didn’t even react to it, which was even more devastating.”

Since Democrats’ election loss last year, Mr. Newsom has become the most prominent official in the party to lament its position on transgender participation in sports, but he is hardly the first. Hours after the presidential race was called, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The Times that he did not want his young daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” a remark that set off weeks of blowback.

Some have compared Newsom’s remarks on transgender athletics to Bill Clinton’s ‘Sister Souljah” moment. But it is likely to be much more fraught: Clinton never risked losing the African American vote by denouncing violent rap lyrics. In contrast, Newsom will anger a well-funded, well organized, and very vocal faction in his party. It is also likely to come off as an opportunistic move by an ambitious politician.

But it may also open the door to a debate that Democrats have to have. As Jonathan Chait has argued, “Moderation Is Not the Same Thing as Surrender.”

Why not stick to what I’d argue are the clearest, most important cases where trans rights must be protected, while letting go of a handful of hard-to-defend edge cases that are hurting Democrats at the polls—yielding policy outcomes that work to the detriment of trans people themselves? The answer is that much of the trans-rights activist community and its most vocal allies have come to believe that the entire package of trans-rights positions is a single, take-it-or-leave-it bloc. That mistaken conviction underlies the insistence that compromise is impossible, and that the only alternative to unquestioning support is complete surrender.

Matt Lewis and I hash out

ICYMI: Matt and I try to figure out why Trump won. And what comes next? Give us a listen.

Friday dogs

Eli and Auggie want you to know that they are ready for their close-up. (And, yes, I know I used this picture last night. But it’s sooo good.)

1. Anti-transgender political ads dominated the airwaves in swing states. In the days between October 7-20, Trump's campaign and pro-Trump groups spent an estimated $95 million and more than 41 percent of those ads were anti-trans. Some estimates put the total spending on anti-trans ads at more than $200 million.

If you watched any television at all — especially sports — you probably saw this ad:

• Man:

• Kamala supports taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners.

• Woman:

  For prisoners.

• Kamala Harris:

  Surgery for prisoners. Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access.

• Man:

  Hell no, I don't want my taxpayer dollars going to that.

• Man:

  Kamala supports transgender sex changes in jail without money.

• Man:

  Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports. Kamala is for they, them. President Trump is for you.

The ads worked. The party’s failure to answer the attacks clearly damaged the Harris campaign. How much we don’t know, because there were multiple factors in Trump’s victory - inflation, immigration, crime, race, and gender. But the trans issue was obviously a potent wedge, which is why Trump bet so big on it.

2. Via NBC:

Newsom later added that, out of the more than 500,000 college athletes in the NCAA, very few are trans, and he said trans inclusion in sports should be handled with “humility and grace.”

“These poor people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression, and the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with as well,” Newsom said. “So both things I can hold in my hand. How can we address this issue with the kind of decency that I think, you know, is inherent in you, but not always expressed on the issue, but at the same time deal with the issue of fairness?”