On a recent panel of progressive activists analyzing what went wrong in the 2024 election, the author, activist, and failed political candidate Qasim Rashid spoke with confidence about the way forward for the Democratic Party. The problem, he insisted, was not that Democrats had strayed too far from public opinion but that the party had grown too solicitous of it. “Saying the right thing timidly,” he proclaimed, “is less effective than saying the wrong thing loudly.”
Rashid’s argument was anything but timid, and it certainly played well in the Washington, D.C., room where the progressive donor network Way to Win was holding a confab called Persuasion 2025. Yet Rashid meant for this event to be more than just a pep talk among allies. His call for a confident, undiluted progressive platform is “how you see people flip red seats to blue,” he said.
Rashid’s track record as a candidate does not quite bear out this confident assessment. He has run for office three times, falling short every time. In 2020, he lost his race for Congress by 16 points in a district Joe Biden lost by four. He went on to found a firm specializing in “relational messaging to inspire and mobilize communities to advance economic justice, social equity, climate action, and protect our democracy.” It’s called, unironically, Just Win.
The purpose of this conference was to reassert the left’s strategy for regaining control of the Democratic Party and, at least in theory, a national governing majority. Yet beneath the bold proclamations, one could detect an undercurrent of defensiveness. After almost a decade of nearly unchallenged supremacy, the progressive movement’s hold on the party is no longer certain.
At the end of the Obama era, most Democrats (myself included) saw liberalism’s ascent as nearly inevitable. Accordingly, they saw little cost in getting ahead of where public opinion was obviously headed. When Senator Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton from the economic left in 2016, she replied by outflanking him to the left on social issues while breaking with the Obama administration’s moderate positions on trade (she opposed President Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership) and education (she backed away from his support for charter schools and other reform measures).
In 2020, nearly the entire presidential field raced leftward. Sanders, having seen Clinton’s supporters attack him on race and gender, incorporated identity politics into his messaging. Senator Elizabeth Warren competed to be seen as no less progressive than Sanders, and other Democrats tried to keep up with them both. Progressive activist groups served as referees, rewarding candidates who endorsed their ever-growing list of policy demands. Debates turned into contests over who could treat undocumented immigrants more generously or promise a more sweeping domestic agenda. Biden, whom most Democrats and reporters alike had left for dead, won the race largely because he, as the only well-known candidate who had not abandoned the Obama legacy, occupied the ideological ground where most of the party’s voters remained.
In that context, Kamala Harris’s promise to the ACLU that she would support taxpayer-financed gender-transition surgeries for prisoners and detained migrants received little attention—it was just one more edgy, leftist policy commitment in a campaign that consisted of little else, and her floundering candidacy soon dropped out of sight.
This promise seems to have played a large role in Harris’s doomed presidential campaign five years later. Harris, whose position on the ticket was itself a sop to activists who had demanded a Black, female vice president, was already an awkward fit as the default Democratic nominee. Her defeat forced moderate Democrats to reckon with the ways progressive activists had not just driven the entire field leftward but also pressured Harris to adopt a position so toxic that it inspired the Trump campaign’s most effective ad. This lone commercial, with its potent tagline—“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”—moved viewers by an estimated 2.7 points, a shift larger than Trump’s margin of victory in most swing states.
Moderate Democrats have since staged a counteroffensive, complete with a new think tank (the Searchlight Institute), a moderate caucus (Majority Democrats), a magazine (The Argument), and an organizing conference (Welcomefest, which held its first gathering in 2024 but attracted far more attention this year). What unifies these various outfits is that they all blame progressive interest groups for relentlessly pushing Democrats to adopt positions well to the left of what the general public wants.
Persuasion 2025 was the leftist retort. Representative Greg Casar, a progressive Democrat from Texas, rebuked all who “blame progressive organizations for the Democratic Party’s problems.” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder of Way to Win, called for an “alignment of party and movement forces,” which apparently means bringing Democrats closer to progressive positions, rather than avoiding positions and rhetoric that alienate a majority of the electorate.
Numerous speakers warned against throwing any progressive constituency “under the bus,” a phrase that has become a term of art in the factional battle. It stands for the idea that Democrats should not retreat from positions taken on behalf of allies, however unpopular they may be. No compromise with the electorate was the conference’s standing order.
This doctrine might sound irrational to anyone who recognizes that winning elections demands the support of that very electorate. But progressive activists have developed a coherent, if not persuasive, argument for it.
First, they deny that polls showing any left-wing positions as unpopular convey meaningful information. Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive strategist, roundly dismissed the relevance of polling as “pollingism,” and rejected the very notion that politicians can win support by heeding public opinion. “We know that humans are in fact irrational creatures,” she explained from a panel at Persuasion 2025.
What’s more, where voters do support regressive positions, Democrats should dismiss this as a kind of false consciousness. As various speakers argued, working-class voters facing economic stress tend to lash out at vulnerable targets. “When people are psychologically insecure, they are incapable of being welcoming to people who are different than them,” the activist Erica Payne said. “This is about money. Money, money, money, money, money, money, money.”
Attempting to disarm right-wing attacks by abandoning positions that are unpopular with these and other voters is not only unnecessary, but also futile. “You cannot feed your opposition’s narrative,” Shenker-Osorio argued. She is even more absolute on her website: “Conventional wisdom says to meet people where they are. But, on most issues, where they are is unacceptable.”
Rapidly transforming the American public’s beliefs is a daunting task—all the more so if you dismiss their current values as unacceptable. The Democratic Party’s pragmatic wing has been pleading to broaden the tent, ideally before the Trump administration stamps out all opposition. The party’s progressives seem determined to reeducate the public rather than compromise for their votes. This is a seductive approach if the goal is ideological purity. It is a problem only if the party hopes to win elections.
