Centrists: Better Things Aren’t Possible
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
A group of Democratic Party moderates gathered in Charleston, South Carolina, last Sunday and Monday for an event organized by Third Way, an influential group in the party’s moderate wing. The event, entitled “Winning the Middle,” brought together elected officials, prominent pundits, data gurus, communication savants, and industry figures with one goal in mind: how to block a progressive from winning the party’s nomination for president in 2028. The event’s speakers celebrated their claim that a similar conference hosted by Third Way in the same location back in 2019 helped power Joe Biden—whom they touted as “the most conservative Democrat in the 2020 field—to the White House, recalling that South Carolina served as both the last refuge of and launching pad for the then-former vice president’s flailing presidential campaign. With Democratic popularity at an all-time low, Third Way’s event hoped to galvanize a moderate resurgence and stave off any potential progressive insurgency.
What is immediately apparent watching the event is a total lack of any positive vision. Rather than propose a worked-out centrist platform, or even suggest opposition to the Trump administration, the event largely defined itself in opposition to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
The invite-only event (which was also broadcast on YouTube for me, and approximately 15 others, to watch live) opened with Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, explaining that those gathered at the event stood opposed to, among other things, “open borders,” “modern monetary theory,” “land acknowledgments, identity politics, cancel culture, and more.” The goal of the gathering, as explained by Cowan, was to rebuild the Democratic Party into one that “can win the middle anytime, anywhere.” Winning, if the speakers are to be believed, is trivially simple. The only thing standing in the way of a resurgent Democratic Party that can win across the country—both in blue states and red—is a progressive wing that had soured the public on the Democratic brand.
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Cowan’s agenda was almost entirely negative, focused above all on what his group is against. Explaining their health care vision, Cowan said that the assembled luminaries stood for “universal health care under the ACA, not Medicare for All and the end of private insurance.” While Cowan adopted the left’s rhetoric of “universal health care,” he failed to note that the Affordable Care Act not only has not achieved universal health care, but also only became net popular seven years after its passage, following an attempted repeal by the first Trump administration. The ACA was an improvement in many ways, but it was hardly the easy messaging win Cowan was making it out to be.
On work in the 21st century, the assembled moderates “believe in the dignity of work, not UBI [universal basic income]. And for that work to lead to wealth, we desperately need a new economic bargain for the working class.” On energy issues, Cowan outlined a 2010-vintage vision of “all of the above on clean energy, not just wind and solar,” as if renewables were not the cheapest form of power in history, and oil now shooting past $100 a barrel.
That at least is specific compared to Cowan’s murky vision of a “government that works, not a government that grows” and that they “believe in abundance, results, and the urgency of now, not in bureaucracy, endless process, and red tape.” Advocates of pointless bureaucracy, government that does not work, and the urgency of no results, consider yourself warned. Still, Cowan’s vision might have been compelling to the corporate executives invited to attend the event, including individuals from both Google and Meta, who are eager to see less community input and fewer environmental rules slowing data center construction.
As if the speech were not already vague enough, on cultural issues Cowan stated that “we know we must be reasonable and normal,” and that “we can respect the humanity of transgender Americans while enforcing strict rules to protect kids.” What rules, precisely? Are we talking about right-wing gender inspectors at every middle school track meet? Because that’s how those “strict rules” tend to work out in practice.
Foreign policy was discussed even less. Other than a brief mention of the war with Iran that Trump had launched just the day before, the topic was largely ignored, aside from one panelist later in the day who said that “when you think of a voter and whether or not they’re going to show up in Michigan in the general election, it’s probably not going to be about a foreign-policy issue.” While this analysis might be true in terms of generic “foreign policy,” it is arguably less true with respect to the Biden-Harris policy on Gaza, which some analysis has shown led to mass defection from Arab Americans in the state. And it is definitely less true when foreign policy causes a gigantic spike in the price of gasoline, which Trump’s war on Iran has done.
Though the affirmative vision for the world may have been lacking, confidence in their diagnosis of the problem was not. The fact that the Democratic Party is more unpopular than ever before—even among its own base—was repeated ad nauseam, proof that the party had drifted so far left it had alienated even its own voters. The solution to this historic unpopularity? Coordination between the invitees to lock progressive candidates and groups out of the party.
Just exactly how to go about boxing progressives out was the main thrust of the two-day program. Tré Easton, former legislative director for Sen. John Fetterman, and current VP at the Searchlight Institute, delivered a brief speech to the assembled audience on the need to “say no” to the dreaded “groups,” while Third Way’s Jim Kessler delivered an address entitled “The Indispensable Middle” where he too urged attendees to shun “the groups,” which he derided as “a village of elitists who are out of touch with regular people.” Elite-funded organizations like Third Way, Searchlight, and other centrist firms are, of course, exempted from inclusion in “the groups” despite making similar demands on behalf of their members and funders.
On the comms front, the focus was also on how to undercut progressive messaging. Kessler bemoaned Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s popularization of the term “weird” to describe Republicans throughout the 2024 campaign, claiming that it was in fact Democrats who appeared weird to many voters. Ironically, the purpose of Walz’s attack, which the Harris campaign forced him to discontinue, was to highlight that Republicans are objectively out of step with the American mainstream. And one of the slides from another presentation touted Third Way’s messaging of “overhauling ICE” as 32 points more popular than “abolishing ICE.” A closer read of the polling question shows the bias needed to get this result, with “abolishing ICE” being defined inaccurately as a “halt[ing of] all immigration enforcement inside the country.” It speaks to the enduring popularity of abolishing ICE that 34 percent of Democratic primary voters still chose this second option. The day after Third Way’s event, YouGov released new polling showing abolishing ICE had broken 50 percent (with 39 percent opposed) for the first time on record.
Another analysis by Kessler focused on Zohran Mamdani’s performance with moderates, highlighting how the now-mayor of New York City performed significantly worse among self-described moderates in his general election than did Govs. Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. What was left unsaid was that Mamdani’s primary general-election foe was a former three-term Democratic governor and the scion of a prominent Democratic family, while neither Sherrill nor Spanberger faced any challenge from their own party in the general election.
But the messaging against progressive groups was not limited to prepared speeches with fun slide decks. A panel discussion moderated by Substacker Matthew Yglesias featured perhaps the most overt attacks on progressives of the entire event. During the panel, the district attorney of San Francisco, Brooke Jenkins, who was appointed to the position after the recall of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin, took aim at progressives, saying that she was backed by what she termed a “silent majority”—directly referencing Richard Nixon’s attack on opposition to the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.
The subject then turned to union busting. Jenkins followed up by saying that in San Francisco, they are at a “reckoning point” with unions, for daring to back a California ballot proposition to impose a tax on the wealth of billionaires residing within the state. This was a bridge too far in Jenkins’s book, and she leapt to defend the billionaires, who, in her words, are already “giving more than most.” Yglesias then turned to Congressman Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) and asked him if he felt Democrats needed to be more willing to engage in fights with public-sector unions. Auchincloss, clearly attempting to dodge the question, said that unions could be counted as part of the dreaded “groups” before moving on to issues he felt more comfortable discussing publicly.
More than anything, however, the event focused on using South Carolina, a state Democrats haven’t carried in a presidential election in 50 years, as a bastion for conservative Democratic power. Speakers were vocal about their desire to see South Carolina be the first primary state, or barring that, see it maintain its status as the first state in the South, and they were quick to highlight the fact that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden had all won the state in their path to claiming the Democratic nomination. In an interview later with Politico, Cowan said he felt confident that moderate Black voters in the state would hold the line against a progressive upstart, so long as his “nightmare scenario” of a Kamala Harris candidacy didn’t materialize and divert votes away from the moderate choice.
The event featured multiple speakers and attendees from its host state, and offered messaging guidance to staffers and consultants who may be hired by 2028 presidential hopefuls on how to win in the Palmetto State. While this did include securing the powerful endorsement of Congressman Jim Clyburn, the advice focused on how the state’s Democratic primary voters are more conservative than average and far more religious. The state also has one of the lowest unionization rates in the country, a fact mentioned multiple times throughout the course of the event.
Biden White House veteran and former mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, Steve Benjamin highlighted the fact that the top three progressive candidates in the 2020 primary field—which he defined as Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and billionaire Tom Steyer—received a mere 38 percent of the vote in the state combined, proof of the state’s status as the moderate firewall. It’s hard not to conclude that this was the reason that Third Way selected Charleston as the location for their conference in 2019, and again this year. Under the present system, their ideological enemies must pass through the state, and they aim to organize resolute defenses against the current progressive wave. Whether that will enable MAGA fascism is not a question they are willing to consider.
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