Updated on October 14 at 10:23 a.m. ET.
The age of the conventional Democrat is over. The time of the Democratic contrarian has come.
So says Adam Jentleson, anyway. The veteran political operative and former adviser to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently launched a think tank that asks Democratic candidates to ignore pressure from the far left, take positions outside the “liberal box,” and be a lot more “heterodox” in general. If this seems to you like Beltway speak for asking Democrats to sound more like Republicans, well, you would be at least partly correct. The Democratic Party used to have supermajorities in Congress because it allowed its members to hold a wide range of positions, Jentleson told me. To start winning again, the party needs to bring that back, he said. His new think tank, Searchlight Institute, plans to help.
With its seven-person team, a polling arm, and a $10 million budget, Searchlight promises to offer a “menu” of orthodoxy-challenging ideas for Democrats to run on. “We don’t need to create a new Joe Rogan,” Jentleson said. “We need people to go on Rogan with better ideas.”
Some Democrats are excited about that menu, at least in theory. The party needs to figure out an agenda beyond opposing President Donald Trump, they say. And there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. It’s “like that year in the 1980s when Saturday Night Live fired everybody and kept Eddie Murphy,” Mike Nellis, a party strategist and former adviser to Kamala Harris, told me. “Right now you’ve gotta prove you’re Eddie Murphy or get the hell out of here. So I’m not begrudging anybody that’s trying something new.”
But this attitude does not exist in all corners, and here, as they say, is the rub: Jentleson’s critics, who mostly come from the progressive end of the ideological spectrum, believe that his project amounts to asking Democrats to abandon their values. They have many ideas about what the party should be doing instead. One Democratic strategist, who has worked with Jentleson in the past and who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, thinks the party should sound more like Senator Bernie Sanders and prioritize talking about economic populism. “I wish someone would give me $10 million to say that,” they told me. Others believe that now is the wrong time to moderate. “In a moment in which we are not approaching fascism, but rather living inside its horrific grip,” to argue that America needs “another reactionary centrist think-and-poll tank is really pretty gross,” Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive consultant, told me.
You might be wondering how the creation of a Washington, D.C., think tank could possibly inspire this kind of anguish. The answer is that for many Democrats, this debate goes far beyond the impact of a single organization whose entire staff could fit comfortably inside a Kia Telluride. They see this as a fight about how Democrats can start winning again, which makes it not merely tactical but also existential: Party officials, strategists, and activists have spent a year sifting through the wreckage of an election that was calamitous to the Democrats’ governing plans as well as their very understanding of themselves. And there is no shepherd to guide them. The party’s erstwhile leader, Joe Biden, is widely scorned. Harris, its would-be standard-bearer, is busy promoting a backward-looking volume of grievances.
Now, as the Democrats fumble their way toward the midterm elections, most seem to agree: The only way out of this dark wilderness is through. But choosing the wrong path could make things a whole lot worse.
Let us begin with the think tank of it all. The point of such an entity is to research and poll-test policy solutions to problems, usually for one political party or another. The conservative Heritage Foundation, for example, birthed Project 2025. Way back in 2005, the It Girl of the think-tank world was Third Way, a Democratic Party–aligned group that vowed to pursue not left- or right-wing policy solutions, but a different, third way forward.
This might sound like the Searchlight Institute’s mission, but Jentleson insists that it is not. The group will come up with policy ideas that are both left and right of center. Heterodox, he says, is the word that distinguishes the project. He uses this word a lot. “The heterodox mix that works for Maine is going to be different than the heterodox mix that works for Iowa or North Carolina or Texas, but they all should be heterodox,” Jentleson told me. A Democrat in Maine should have views about guns and gun control that align with the people of Maine, just as a candidate from a border state should feel free to hold a different position on border security than the rest of his party. “No Democrat believes every left-wing position on every issue,” he said, and they shouldn’t pretend to.
The person Jentleson thinks Democrats should take a lesson from is Trump. “One of the most poorly understood parts of Trump’s appeal in 2016 was his heterodoxy,” he said. As a candidate, Trump opposed the GOP’s conventional positions on the Iraq War, trade, and foreign intervention. In response, voters called him an independent thinker and made him president. (Now, of course, the party’s position is whatever Trump says it is.) Democrats should follow that instinct, Jentleson said. Some already do. A few good heterodox party candidates already exist, he said, including Rob Sand, the state auditor running for governor of Iowa, who has demonstrated disdain for traditional partisan labels and who recently told a radio host that he doesn’t think transgender women should play in women’s sports.
Like repeating a word again and again, dwelling for too long on the concept of heterodoxy tends to make it blurry. If every candidate is taking heterodox positions, then wouldn’t those positions cease to be heterodox? And what, exactly, is a heterodox idea? It’s hard to know, because Searchlight has not yet released any. Policy proposals will be rolled out in the coming months, Jentleson promised, as a rotating team of fellows works in a “Shark Tank–style” environment to generate them. The project appears to have plenty of funding, including from a handful of billionaires guided by the donor-adviser Seth London, a venture capitalist and former Obama-administration official. (After the 2024 election, London sent around a strategy memo criticizing identity-based political messaging and calling for the creation of new organizations to support “common sense Democrats.”)
Searchlight’s association with London’s wealthy clients is, in some ways, the soft underbelly of the project—a paunch that Jentleson’s opponents are eager to jab. “We don’t need a bunch of billionaires telling us what they believe is the best direction for the party to win back working-class voters,” the anonymous party strategist told me. However, most think tanks and similar organizations are at least partly funded by the ultrawealthy.
If it’s not obvious by now, many people on the left do not like Jentleson personally. They see the 44-year-old veteran operative—who once advised but has recently publicly distanced himself from Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania—as overly and often performatively hostile to progressives. Pushing back on that characterization is difficult when, in an article announcing Searchlight’s launch, Jentleson came out swinging against the Center for American Progress, calling it “100 percent pure uncut resistance drivel.” (Asked for her response, CAP’s president, Neera Tanden, told me that “this is a bigger moment than coalitional infighting.” On the subject of Searchlight’s work, she added, “I’m old-fashioned. I think think tanks should have ideas.”)
But the main problem that lefties have with Searchlight is that they believe heterodoxy is code for “abandon your principles.” Several Democrats I interviewed for this story complained that Jentleson’s project amounts to sacrificing trans people and other marginalized groups. A more generous reframing of this critique might be that Searchlight is telling Democrats to talk only about issues that poll well, rather than starting with fixed values and working to get people on board. “The purpose of politics is to get elected in order to enact your agenda, not to get elected for its own sake,” Shenker-Osorio told me.
Shenker-Osorio referred to Jentleson’s approach as “pollingism,” whereas Republicans, she says, tend to operate using “magnetism.” Trump and his allies, she said, “have an agenda and doggedly pursue it” until, eventually, they make their priorities mainstream. (Searchlight isn’t going to tell Democrats to take or reject any positions, Jentleson said; it simply wants “leaders to know when they are spending political capital and when they are earning it.” As for the rest of his critics, Jentleson added: “If we were not a disruptive force,” they wouldn’t be so upset. “We pose a really big threat to a lot of the way things have been done for a long time.”)
Democrats in Shenker-Osorio’s camp do not want to cede ground in any of the culture wars. Instead, they’d rather candidates employ a more aggressive message about the economy—think railing against CEOs, billionaires, and the rigged system—like Sanders does on his Fighting Oligarchy Tour and Zohran Mamdani has in his New York mayoral race. If Trump and the MAGA Republicans are going to blame the country’s problems on illegal immigrants and other outsiders, then Democrats need their own powerful counterstory. “The more that Democrats are willing to name corporate villains that are hurting working people, the more bolstered we are from culture-war attacks,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me.
One could easily dismiss the specific debate over Jentleson’s think tank as a squabble among the terminally online. And it is that. But Searchlight is only one horse in a galloping herd of similar new ventures from a party that can’t seem to stop fighting with itself. These other projects, some of which accept funding from London’s clients, include Majority Democrats, a political-action committee backing moderate, pragmatic Democrats; WelcomeFest, an annual gathering of centrist Democrats; and The Argument, a new magazine promoting center-left ideas, launched by the Atlantic contributor Jerusalem Demsas.
It’s all “part of a general reckoning where, if you want to build a majority party, you’ve got to let people have a diversity of opinions,” Lis Smith, who works with Majority Democrats but is unaffiliated with Searchlight, told me. “Goddamn it, if we want to save this party, we have to try new things.” Democratic politicians and thinkers appear to be coming to the same conclusion. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who for years crusaded for all Democrats to support gun-control legislation, said in a speech last month that he was rethinking that position. Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and a co-author of Abundance, called for Democrats to open their minds to running anti-abortion candidates in Republican-leaning states.
Each of these efforts toward a party reset has been met with some version of the criticism that Searchlight is facing. Speakers who gathered at WelcomeFest in Washington, D.C., for example, were derided by some on the political left as lacking vision. Others characterized Klein’s notion of running anti-abortion candidates as a betrayal of women. “This is no time for compromise. To support a ‘pro-life’ candidate—from any party—is morally incomprehensible,” Jessica Valenti wrote in her newsletter, Abortion, Every Day.
In some ways, none of this infighting is new at all. Progressives have been disgusted by moderates since time immemorial, and moderates have always found progressives at least slightly poisonous to the broader party brand. The current debate is simply a fresh iteration of the persuasion-versus-mobilization fight that roiled the party in the late 1980s, when Elaine Kamarck and William Galston called for the Democrats to end their losing streak by appealing to a broad base of voters. Back then, party members used a slightly different vocabulary to ask the same question: What should the Democrats do now?
This time, though, as the Trump administration sics troops on American cities, seeks retribution against the president’s enemies, and threatens to suppress organized political opposition, answering that question feels much more urgent.
* This article originally said Senator Chris Murphy wrote a column about rethinking his position on gun control. In fact, he gave a speech.
