Some Democrats Are Horrified That They May Win and People May Like Them

Kamala Harris only won New Jersey by six points. Biden won it by sixteen in 2020. Some of the biggest swings in the entire country towards Trump took place in and around the area this Democratic strategist called “America’s most liberal city.” Again, you see the conservative ideological project couched as savvy dipshit centrism exposed in this kind of loser Democrat ethos, because they are claiming to want to speak to disaffected Trump voters in New York City while also slamming them as spoiled and out of touch liberal elites. It’s all so stupid and transparent and I feel bad for anyone still falling for this shtick. And believe me, it’s a shtick. Talk to anyone working in D.C. politics and ask them what TV show most resembles their day to day reality and they will almost universally say Veep. We really almost got the Selina Meyer presidency.

You want to know why centrist Third Way-style Democrats are like this? At least one of two reasons.

First, Third Way types are natural folders and are not like their actual centrist Bulwark brethren who have established themselves in the fighter contingent of the party with many to their left. It’s inherent to Third Way-style ideology where you don’t plant your feet in the ground outside universally opposing the left, and you stick your finger in the air to figure out what you say you believe. Ask any offensive line coach and they’ll tell you that this is a recipe to get steamrolled by a determined pass rusher. Where the Bulwark-style centrists diverge is they actually do still believe in many of their conservative principles, while accepting that us on the left had a point about things like abolishing ICE. When you are a centrist not because you do actually test as moderate in political science studies, but because you advertise yourself as the Very Serious midpoint between two competing unserious ideologies, you are abandoning your own beliefs in order to position yourself relative to others. If the positions are “we want to give everyone free healthcare” and “exterminate the vile other,” centrists are going to find themselves in some morally perilous positions they did not find themselves in previously, all while trying to advertise themselves as the adults in the room as they change their fundamental beliefs every four years.

Voters can easily sniff this out as fraudulent, and that’s a big reason why we’re in this mess. Zohran Mamdani has positioned himself as the likely next mayor of New York City in large part because he has practiced an old fashioned retail style of politics to directly connect with voters that would be recognizable to some Democrats like Joe Biden, but not to the detached technocratic wing fronted by groups like Third Way. There is an alien quality to this whole mess, where differing visions of how humans fundamentally operate are in competition. One is informed by centuries of political science, the other, cable news.

Third Way dumbfucks are also like this because they are just doing what any good Veep character would do and protecting the position of power they have created for themselves in the party. It’s a lucrative business they’ve established with similarly out of touch donors who like to pay people to tell them that they are cool and awesome. Their problem is that the Clinton memberberries are loosening their grip on the party in a world where Jeffrey Epstein is an increasingly salient issue among a growing voter base who can’t even remember 9/11, let alone Monica Lewinsky. Third Way is like this because they see the left as competition, so they’re trying to put their competition out of business before it can even get started. If Mamdani’s promises of free buses and city-run grocery stores and universal childcare manifest into reality and make the lives of New Yorkers better, that invalidates a lot of Third Way’s ideological project of telling their donors that you can win elections with better things aren’t possible rallies.

“It is clear to anyone with a glimmer of intellectual honesty that we have to rebuild our brand and move to the center if we ever hope to win red and purple seats ever again,” Legacki said. And it is clear to any political scientist with a glimmer of intellectual honesty that centrism is plotted on both an X and Y axis, not the one-dimensional x-axis world that braindead consultants like Legacki and many other tertiary Veep characters inhabit in the flattened Beltway discourse. This Democracy Fund Voter Study Group study of 2016 voters is what America actually looks like before you even get into the vast and incoherent complexities of what many people really vote on, not this Third Way cable news-brained left-right rigidity that would fail them out of every political science 101 class in America.

A lot of people like to call themselves economically conservative and socially liberal so as to satisfy this wrongheaded view of ideology established by Very Serious Centrists on TV, but when you actually demonstrate intellectual honesty and measure it instead of talking about it, you find that those voters are scant and at least half of them vote libertarian, as the bottom right quadrant proves. These are the voters Third Way has long said are the key to winning elections, and this chart provides some insight into why they’ve had such difficulty doing that.

If we want to be intellectually honest about winning back voters who swung towards Trump, we should look to the states where voters swung hardest towards him, and no state swung harder towards Trump than New York did. It’s true that not all of Mamdani’s policies in a city where registered Democrats greatly outnumber registered Republicans can be extrapolated nationwide—but that’s not what this attack is about. This preemptive dismissal of his entire platform centered around the affordability crisis is about retaining their status as the Very Serious People that Democratic donors pay for bad advice, as well as their lifelong ideological commitment to never commit to anything for longer than four years. This is what being allergic to winning looks like.