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Inside a cavernous, neon-lit ballroom in the bowels of a joyless Washington D.C. hotel, Carly Simon blasts from the speakers in an effort drown out the chants of “Free, Free Palestine” from protesters who’ve crashed a conversation with Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) — the gay, Black, self-described Zionist representing one of the most Democratic districts in the country.
Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist-supporting political action committee Welcome PAC — decked out in a West Virginia Mountaineers jersey with senator-turned-lobbyist Joe Manchin’s name emblazoned across his back — bodies out a bespectacled, man-bunned individual trying to film the scuffle. It would have been a particularly crude piece of performance art depicting the Democratic Party in its present incarnation, but unfortunately, it was real.
Organizers of WelcomeFest, an event billed as “the largest public gathering of centrist Democrats,” were expecting disruptions when they convened in D.C. on Thursday — you could even say they welcomed them. Earlier that day, as Kerr kicked off the festivities, he drew a contrast between his own apparel and a t-shirt he told the crowd organizers had on hand for any protesters who might show up. The tee featured a depiction of Babydog, the beloved bulldog belonging to Jim Justice, the West Virginia Republican who replaced Manchin in the U.S. Senate this year, and his slogan, “Delivering Justice for West Virginia.”
“I am wearing a jersey of someone who stepped on the West Virginia campus 50 years ago on a football scholarship, who is the number one-rated ‘Wins Above Replacement’ candidate,” Kerr told the crowd of his Manchin jersey. (Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, is a sports statistic that measures a certain player’s contributions to their team. More on that later.) The Justice t-shirt was meant to send a message to progressive-minded: If you’re not with us, you’re against us. Or, as Kerr put it even more bluntly, “The choice is Jim Justice or Joe Manchin.”
Manchin’s dark money group, Americans Together, was, incidentally, one of the sponsors of the event.
Over the course of the afternoon, speakers at WelcomeFest offered their diagnosis for what ails the Democratic Party, which might be summed up as: too much democracy. Too many people making too many demands of their elected representatives.
Onstage, speakers used the shorthand “The Groups” when discussing this phenomenon. Speaker after speaker blamed “The Groups” for Democrats’ failure to win elections and to govern effectively when they did win them. (Names of the specific Groups in question were rarely invoked on stage, but a recent New York Times op-ed by one of the day’s speakers, Democratic operative Adam Jentleson, called out the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sunrise Movement, the Working Families Party, and Justice Democrats as some of the culprits responsible, in his view, for browbeating Democratic candidates into adopting positions in primaries that Republicans could weaponize against them in a general election.)
The blogger Matthew Yglesias flogged this thesis most aggressively in his presentation. To illustrate his point that “Bad Groups create bad incentives for Democrats,” Yglesias pointed to Democrats’ outspoken opposition to a Maryland man was illegally renditioned to a Central American supermax prison by accident — some even traveled to El Salvador to seek Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release and return to the U.S.
Besides this being the only moral position one can take on the question of whether the government should be allowed to extrajudicially seize individuals, ship them off to a foreign jail, and refuse to bring them back when ordered by the courts, Yglesias appears to be wrong about this being a politically dangerous position for Democrats to stake out: Media coverage of this case, kept alive by Democrats who continued to raise awareness about it, damaged Donald Trump’s image, pollster G. Elliott Morris points out. Approval for Trump’s immigration agenda nosedived during the height of the furor over Abrego Garcia’s wrongful seizure.
While speakers at WelcomeFest generally seemed to agree The Groups’ influence was to blame for Democrats’ failures, no one seemed to offer much in the way of a contrasting vision for what the party’s orienting principle ought to be going forward. Abundance, the airport book that some Dems appear determined to adopt as a policy platform, got only brief attention at the WelcomeFest. Instead of a mission or any one overarching vision, there only seemed to be consensus on the fact that Democrats need to start winning again, by whatever means necessary.
The political analyst Lakshya Jain urged reorienting party recruitment efforts to focus on candidates with high “Wins Above Replacement” statistics. The concept will be familiar to anyone who has read Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ book about how the Oakland A’s used sabermetrics to identify and recruit undervalued players.Jain’s model compares a generic match-up in a particular district with the actual results in an effort to evaluate who overperformed or underperformed expectations for their particular race.
To illustrate this point, Jain compared the results of progressive New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s race with that of Janelle Stelson, a candidate who ran in Pennsylvania’s 10th district. In his model, AOC, who won her race and outperformed Kamala Harris by six points, underperformed a generic race in her district by two points; Stelson, who lost by one point and outran Harris by four points, overperformed a generic Democrat by nine points.
Jain’s pitch was that, in the current political environment, which he says is D+6, Democrats have a real opportunity to seize legislative majorities if they focus their efforts on recruiting candidates with high WAR scores —the catch is that these candidates might be unpalatable to The Groups and other party faithful.
“Being very blunt, if we run candidates that D.C. finds appealing, we’re probably going to lose. There is an inverse correlation between what you guys all find appealing and what the median voter finds appealing,” Jain told the room.
He brought up Blue Dog Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who spoke on a panel with Yglesias and Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) and Adam Gray (D-Calif.).
“A lot of you may say you find some of Jared Golden’s votes to be annoying for a Democrat,” Jain said. “Well, guess what? The choice isn’t between Jared Golden and AOC. The choice is between Jared Golden and Paul LePage. So who would you rather have?”
It was an echo of Kerr’s opening remarks — “The choice is Jim Justice or Joe Manchin” —and it’s a real question that gets at the heart of Democrats’ present predicament.
Do Democrats — or Americans writ large — need more candidates in the mold of Joe Manchin, the man single-handedly responsible for torpedoing Democrats’ expanded child tax credit, a program that had lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty?
Unappealing as the choice is, there’s also a high probability that it is a false binary too: Jain claimed in his presentation, “The base will vote for you anyway… Don’t worry about liberal defections.”
But if the results of the 2024 election have indicated anything, it’s that attitude —the attitude that was also adopted by the Harris campaign —is a losing one: We know that demoralized Democratic-leaning voters who stayed home decided the election.
