Sponsored by EpiPens And Dark Money: The Hollow Soul Of WelcomeFest

The Party’s Faction Of “Just Win, Baby” Has No Plan To Win

Recent polling of New York Democrats show that Chuck Schumer is extremely unpopular and that in a theoretical 2028 primary, AOC would crush him if she decides to challenge him in a primary for his Senate seat. He’d be 77 on primary day— at a time when Democrats are already rending their garments over their geriatric problem. “Democratic voters have tended to accept the risks that come with electing older politicians to office, prioritising governing experience over youth and vitality. In 2024, only two Democratic incumbents in Congress lost their party's nomination, and both— Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York— were relative newcomers under the age of 50.”

And that’s another big problem Democrats should be coping with, their aggressive anti-progressive, GOP-lite wing, the corporate Democrats who sprung into prominence along with Bill Clinton and Rahm Emanuel. When Schumer voted to allow Trump’s wildly unpopular budget to proceed, he dragged enough Democrats with him to allow cloture to succeed. Corporate GOP patsies like Maggie Hassan (NH), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), John Fetterman (PA), Angus King (I-ME) and Catherine Cortez Masto (NV) would have crossed the aisle anyway but Schumer made up for Rand Paul’s “no” vote by schlepping allies Dick Durbin (IL), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) and Gary Peters (MI) with him— not to mention Brian Schatz (HI), who needs Schumer’s help to replace Durbin as party Whip in 2027.

You probably remember that Democratic activists and the party’s base turned sharply against Chuck Schumer. He had  initially vowed that Senate Democrats would thwart the “partisan” measure, but backed down one day later, saying the “chaos” of a government shutdown would be a worse option. The reversal stunned and sickened many Democrats, especially House members who had already voted to oppose the bill. Democrats were angry over the bill, which would cut spending by about $7 billion and which they said does nothing to stop Trump's campaign to halt congressionally mandated spending, which is what they were holding out for. Many Dems started calling for him to step down as leader, with one senior House Democrat saying “There was desire for generational change before this... Schumer is just fueling it.” On CNN, Ro Khanna added “The American people are fed up with the old guard. There needs to be a renewal. In Silicon Valley, when a company isn’t doing well, you don’t keep the same team.”

But this isn’t just about generational change. The party has gone way too far in the direction of consultant-run corporate Democrats. Many in the rank-and-file are thinking of themselves as New Deal Democrats. On Friday, The Nation published a piece by Aida Chávez, I Just Got Back From The Centrist Rally. It Was Weird as Hell. My friend Ritchie referred to it as a drag show— Reagan Republicans dressed up like Democrats. “[O]n on Wednesday a bevy of political operatives, technocrats and conservative Democratic lawmakers gathered in the basement of a Washington, DC, hotel for WelcomeFest, a corporate-backed event billed as the ‘largest public gathering of centrist Democrats.’… Who comes to a centrism rally for fun? Someone like Liam Kerr, the cofounder of WelcomePAC, the group that brought WelcomeFest to life. On Wednesday, Kerr wore a West Virginia University football jersey customized with former senator Joe Manchin’s name on the back— a tribute to the conservative Democrat most known for sabotaging his own party’s agenda. What’s a buzzy book at a centrist festival? Abundance, the tome by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has been embraced as a holy text by the Democratic right. (Thompson was also a speaker.) Who’s a big star at a place like WelcomeFest? Someone like Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, a Blue Dog Democrat and one of the few lawmakers in her party who at times votes in line with Republicans.”

Who is absolutely not welcome at WelcomeFest? People opposed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, for one. At one point, protesters from the group Climate Defiance interrupted Representative Ritchie Torres—one of DC’s most fervent backers of Israel—with signs reading “Gays Against Genocide” [Torres is openly] and “Fire Ritchie.” The lanyard-wearing centrists booed. As the protesters were pushed off stage, conference organizers blasted Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” on the speakers. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Torres’s fellow speaker, pundit Josh Barro, fumed. “Enough already.” The crowd cheered once the protesters were removed from the venue, giving Barro and Torres a standing ovation.

That hostility to the protesters was matched by the day’s antipathy toward the left in general. Throughout the day, speakers took aim at progressive advocacy groups— referred to simply as “the groups”— blaming them for the Democratic Party’s electoral losses. Substack pundit and WelcomeFest royalty Matt Yglesias made this thesis the focus of his presentation. To argue that “the groups” create “bad incentives for Democrats,” he pointed to Democratic lawmakers’ recent trip to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man illegally deported by the Trump administration. (Evidence shows that talking about Garcia’s case actually hurt Trump, but no matter.) Yglesias returned to his long-held position that Democrats should moderate even further, and prepare to get yelled at by everyone.

Getting bullied online was a recurring theme of the centrist conference. But attendees were quick to emphasize that they were totally fine with it, really.

“The backlash that happens online is actually the sign that you’re doing something right,” said Adam Jentleson, who is currently distancing himself from his previous role as chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman.

Slotkin, a freshman, already has the worst voting record of any Senate Dem

… There were scattered references to “everyday people” and calls on the Democratic Party to focus on the issues “keeping Americans up at night.” But campaign finance records reveal that the conference and the organizers of WelcomeFest are backed by several billionaires and other corporate interests, including the Walton family, Michael Bloomberg, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, the Revolving Door Project noted. The conference was also sponsored by the dark-money group Americans Together, which was founded by Joe Manchin’s daughter, Heather Manchin Bresch— better known as the former CEO of Mylan who infamously defended the company’s price gouging of lifesaving EpiPens.

Many of the figures involved in the Abundance faction have financial ties to AI, crypto, and Big Tech as well. One self-identified Abundist (yes, that is actually the name), Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, made the absurd claim on Wednesday that the left is “carrying the water for the most pernicious, nefarious corporations in modern history,” referring to social media companies.

As for actual policy substance, most of what the speakers promoted amounted to lightly rebranded neoliberalism. During his discussion with Torres, Barro argued that labor unions were to blame for pushing policies that stand in the way of “abundance” in New York. Other sponsors of the conference included Third Way, the New Democrat Coalition, and the Blue Dog Democrats.

To better understand the centrist mind, I wandered around the WelcomeFest happy hour to see what brought people to the event— and what, exactly, they believe in.

One thing they didn’t believe in: music. The only sounds filling up the space were the many very loud conversations about centrism. I kept hearing phrases like “open borders” being thrown around. The crowd was unsurprisingly male-dominated, but surprisingly young, with many twentysomethings chatting away. Everyone was wearing a WelcomeFest lanyard, and lots of people were toting big backpacks. (I witnessed several incidents in which unsuspecting revelers got whacked by other people’s bags.)

I spoke with an effective altruist, a congressional staffer for a powerful House committee, young men who admire figures like Yglesias and Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper, and a college student handing out brochures for the Madison Coalition, a right-wing advocacy organization pushing an amendment to prohibit court packing and lock in nine justices in the US Supreme Court. They were the sorts of people who said things like “Jake Auchincloss is great.… I love that he reads think tank reports and is a nerd,” or, “I do feel like Kyrsten Sinema was treated badly.”

The House staffer gushed about seeing his entire Twitter/X feed materialize in real life. “That’s been pretty surreal,” he said. I asked if he had a political hero, or a political figure he believed the Democratic Party should emulate, and he cited Ritchie Torres. I asked if he thought the New York congressman’s obsession with Israel was a bit strange. “That’s reasonable,” he replied.

The young men grew visibly uncomfortable when I asked whether the Democratic Party’s handling of the war in Gaza might have contributed to its crushing electoral defeat. After a long pause, one offered, “No, the numbers don’t add up.” The rest nodded. (None agreed to speak on the record.)

Polling suggests otherwise. A poll by the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project found that nearly a third of voters who cast their ballots for former President Joe Biden in 2020 but decided against voting for Kamala Harris in the presidential election based that decision on Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. In April, a poll from the Pew Research Center also found that more than half of US adults now hold an unfavorable opinion of the Israeli state, up from 42 percent before the October 7 attack. But these stats didn’t seem to have made it into centrist orthodoxy.

The effective altruist similarly tensed up when I mentioned Gaza. But unlike the others I spoke with, he eventually offered a hesitant concession: “Showing some empathy to Palestinians is probably good” for the Democratic Party, he said.

If the event were meant to showcase the vitality of centrist politics, it instead offered a portrait of operatives and thinkers preoccupied with online backlash and unable to reconcile their elite backing with their rhetorical appeals to “everyday people.” Their solution to Democratic losses— that Democrats should simply start winning— was less a strategy and more wishful thinking. Enthusiasm never quite filled the room, literally or figuratively, and the centrists I spoke with at the happy hour didn’t seem all that convinced by their message. Or that their movement could resonate with anyone outside the Beltway.

It’s easy to mock WelcomeFest as a tech-bro convention for aspiring David Brocks and washed-out Pod Save wannabes and it would have been tempting to laugh the whole thing off as a glorified Reddit thread with corporate sponsors— an awkward attempt to cosplay as populists while sipping dark-money cocktails and dodging Gaza questions like stray backpacks. But this wasn’t just some harmless networking mixer for overeducated dweebs with Silicon Valley startup money and no sense of irony. This was a vision of the Democratic Party Schumer is actively trying to midwife into being.

The crowd may have been young, but the ideas were as stale as ever: cut entitlements, scold the left, gaslight the base. They dressed it up with hoodies, lanyards, and tortured metaphors about “abundance,” but at its core this was the same dead-end Third Way politics that lost the working class and ceded the culture wars to the far right. And Schumer is all in. Whether it’s elevating Ritchie Torres, protecting Kyrsten Sinema until she bolted, trying to recruit Jared Golden in Maine, the same way he lost seats by recruiting Patrick Murphy, Val Demings and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in Florida, as well as Sara Gideon (ME), Theresa Greenfield (IA), Michelle Nunn (GA), Katie McGinty (PA), Ted Strickland (OH)… or turning a blind eye to Joe Manchin’s dark-money spawn running interference for Big Pharma, he’s chosen his team—and it’s not the one fighting for tenants, labor or peace. 

WelcomeFest wasn’t a fluke or a fringe. It’s what happens when a party’s leadership would rather be embarrassed by a room full of LinkedIn libertarians than empowered by the voters still angry about Gaza, rent, grocery prices or student debt. These people aren’t trying to fix what’s broken. They’re just looking for a new font to sell the same old austerity— and Schumer’s handing them the keys.