Democrats Assemble A New Band of Centrist Dimwits to Help Them Lose Elections and Insult Harry Reid’s Legacy

By Jacob Weindling | September 17, 2025 | 11:48am

Photo by The White House

Elections Democratic Party

Democrats Assemble A New Band of Centrist Dimwits to Help Them Lose Elections and Insult Harry Reid’s Legacy

“A new Democratic think tank wants to curb the influence of liberal groups” reads a headline in the New York Times today. This is led by one of the Democratic Party’s premiere peacockers for billionaires, Adam Jentleson, the former Chief of Staff to Senator John Fetterman who would very much like you to only remember him as a Deputy Chief of Staff to the late great Senator Harry Reid, and the Times acquiesced. There are three references to Jentleson’s time with Reid that ended in 2015 in this writeup, versus just one of the last job he held as a much more powerful figure in John Fetterman’s orbit. This article is another profile as stenography, a specialty of political media, where they frame an entire story about someone through the lens that person would want it shot through.

Jentleson wants you to think that Democrats are under threat from the dreaded “groups,” just not his group. The other groups. You know. Those ones. Those lefty loony tunes who lost Democrats the 2024 elections and…uh…also helped drive perhaps the largest youth voter turnout ever in 2020 that Democrats like Jentleson never ever want to talk about. The story this wing of the party tells itself is that Democrats went woke in early 2020, lost in 2024, and we’re not going to talk about anything that happened in between. I am so sick of having this same nonsensical debate with a group of powerful people with far more control over the party than like, Sunrise Movement. The belief is that somehow small organizations like that are more responsible for why Kamala Harris lost Michigan than Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party is, who supposedly had no choice but to adopt these supposed narrow issues the “groups” like that lost Democrats the election.

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We are in a period of genocide denial by prominent Democrats, as if you actually want to talk about the many reasons why Kamala Harris lost Michigan, this country’s largest Arab American community being horrified by a genocide in Gaza fueled by Joe Biden and tacitly and tepidly endorsed by Kamala Harris on the campaign trail is one of them. The salience of Israel’s genocide and the Biden administration’s full support for it and refusal to do things that Ronald Reagan and many other presidents did to try to rein Israel in has completely vanished from these people’s perspective on politics. There is a simmering rage within them over our rage at the genocide, and there is a notion that those of us who spent the year trying to pressure the Biden administration to pressure Israel divided the party and cost the Democrats the election. The people perpetuating the genocide and literally signing off on the bombs that fuel it somehow are not seen as party dividers, though. How convenient how these people’s politics always flatter those in power, and these people always find themselves with a cushy job.

I can report that in the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention, our wing of the party spent a lot of time just asking for a spot on stage and nothing more, and was denied even a token speaking spot on stage next to anti-abortion Republicans and Uber executives who apparently are more welcome in the party than the anti-genocide coalition. Now just eight percent of Democrats support Israel’s actions in Gaza, and Jentleson and the other Democrats like him stand opposed to the groups on the side sharing one of the most overwhelmingly popular positions in the party, telling a totally incoherent story about what happened over the last two years, while claiming that his group actually knows what is popular and what is not.

An estimated 19 million Biden voters from 2020 did not show up in 2024. That was not all due to the genocide, but it certainly had a lot more impact in places like Michigan. Instead of accepting fault and trying to move forward with a coalition that has provably won them a presidential election just five years ago, Democrats like Jentleson are lying about Harry Reid’s legacy to pursue their craven careerist motives of hoarding as much billionaire cash as possible. Jentleson’s new think tank, Searchlight Institute, is starting with an annual budget of $10 million, funded by “a roster of billionaire donors highlighted by Stephen Mandel, a hedge fund manager, and Eric Laufer, a real estate investor.”

The name Searchlight is an homage to Harry Reid’s hometown, and this has now reached the stage with Jentleson lying about a great man’s legacy where people who also knew Reid well need to push back on this bullshit. Reid, one of the Democratic Party’s climate champions, would almost certainly not agree to create a billionaire-funded pushback against “organizations focused on climate change, gun control and L.G.B.T.Q. rights” as the NYT paraphrased Jentleson. This is disgusting, and the degree to which Jentleson has long leveraged Reid’s far more accomplished legacy to enhance his puny one is just flat out gross.

It is one thing to be close with another person, by which all accounts Jentleson and Reid were, but to brand your fetid cowardice you call politics as Reid’s genuinely accomplished politics is to spit on a great man’s political legacy. Reid said in 2019 he wanted to kill the Senate filibuster to pass sweeping climate change legislation, an official position of the dreaded group, the Sunrise Movement. He said Republicans were “puppets” of the National Rifle Association in 2015 after a mass shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, and as the minority leader, pushed to try to do the impossible and get background checks legislation on the floor for a vote. The Human Rights Campaign said after Reid’s retirement in 2015 that the “Senate under Harry Reid fundamentally changed the lives of LGBT Americans.” Everything Jentleson stands opposed to right now, Reid stood for.

Photo by Office of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Jentleson is fighting against part of the foundation of his former boss’s legacy in a bid to follow the mindless mantra of popularism, a new notion adopted in the Democrats’ abundance crew of doing popular things that is not new, other than it finds new ways to not understand how polling works. Popularists like Matt Yglesias were telling you earlier this year to stop talking about Trump illegally deporting people to foreign concentration camps because it’s a net +4 issue for him. Now they’re silent on it.

YouGov/Econ has Trump’s net approval at -35 with Hispanics and young voters — as bad as he’s doing with post-grads
www.economist.com/interactive/…

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— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris.com) September 17, 2025 at 8:17 AM

Searchlight says they will conduct their own polling, because apparently the aggregate proof around them from every pollster is not enough data to demonstrate that their popularism theory is just flat out wrong and they are simply just picking and choosing supposed popular policies that neatly overlap with what their donors believe. “Leaders should be clear on where the public stands, and not be fooled into thinking an issue is popular when it is not,” exhorts the Searchlight Institute’s mission statement. “Interest groups cherry-pick the results they release, and shape question-wording to produce their desired results.” Their only example is about student loan forgiveness under Biden turning out to be unpopular, and they use it as a springboard to claim this vision can be extrapolated to an “all-terrain populism,” whatever the fuck that consultant-invented pablum means. These people will never succeed at any kind of politics until they learn how to speak like normal humans.

Searchlight is explicit that this wing of the Democratic Party, which has already had its central thesis proven wrong this year on immigration, gets to dictate reality. Not data scientists like G. Eliot Morris or Nate Silver or even basic political science degree holders like me who have long written about how the more specific polling questions don’t always translate to the topline figure, and you can actually get out ahead of trends by digging further past the yes/no questions that popularists like Jentleson treat as fixed and unchanging figures right up until they change and Matt Yglesias starts deleting tweets.

Hey @mattyglesias.bsky.social why did you delete this tweet?

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— Jacob Weindling (@jakeweindling.bsky.social) April 30, 2025 at 9:56 AM

This is a grift the same way that all Democratic consulting is a grift. It’s a bunch of (white) people like Adam Jentleson and Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias with a very narrow and extremely superficial vision of politics only shared by the rich people whose funding they covet. All that places like Searchlight Institute do is sell liberal out of touch rich people’s ideology back to them as wise and brilliant. The story this kind of politics tells is completely incoherent, because Democrats won an election doing the woke stuff they hate and lost the one where they backed a genocide to the dismay of all the woke folks who voted for them in 2020. Democrats even unexpectedly held on to the Senate in 2020, which enabled them to pass half of Biden’s key domestic agenda, something so impressive it makes Barack Obama jealous.

Democrats like Jentleson have to lie about Harry Reid’s legacy and the nature of linear time to create their own safe space, because like with the GOP, reality does not fit the story that flatters their preconceived notions. The left actually has helped get stuff done, it’s called the Inflation Reduction Act, and Harry Reid was long one of the Senate’s more liberal members. Contrasting Reid to his feckless friend Chuck Schumer proves how there is a kind of Democrat who knows how to utilize their power for good. Even though he constantly wraps himself in his former boss’s flag, Jentleson has proven he far prefers Schumer’s brand of braindead triangulation in service of a fictional centrist family he made up in his head.

Naming this billionaire handout after Reid is gross, but what do you expect from a staffer who ran cover for the most unpopular person in the Senate until even he saw which way the wind was blowing, and then ran to his friend at New York Magazine and stabbed John Fetterman in the back by disclosing his mental health issues to the entire world. Jentleson is an example of why everyone hates Washington D.C. and says it is filled with disgusting swamp creatures who believe in nothing other than their own inflated egoes, and if this insult to Harry Reid’s legacy has any serious influence in the Democratic primary of 2028, then the Republicans will rule forever.