The Democrats finally have their groove back—or at least a semblance of a groove.
For the first time since Donald Trump was elected a year ago, the Democratic Party’s general vibe is one of tentative celebration. And why shouldn’t it be? On Tuesday, candidates from very different ideological wings of the party sailed to comfortable victories in three states. And residual excitement from that election was in the air yesterday at Crooked Con—an event brought to you by Crooked Media, which was brought to you by the Pod Save America guys, who were brought to you by the Obama White House—where party strategists and activists shared a stage and mingled over room-temperature soft pretzels.
The convention was held, somewhat awkwardly, at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., and was intended to be the first annual send-up of the Democrats’ big-tent coalition. Gone are the days of choosing between a former intelligence officer and a democratic socialist; the party is now asking: Why not both? And at every panel, speakers repeated the week’s key takeaway like a mantra: “Democrats don’t have to agree on everything.”
But on which issues will Democrats accept disagreement—and on which will they stand firm? No speaker at Friday’s convention offered any real specifics. Meanwhile, the no-shows were notable. “John Bel Edwards is not here. Mary Peltola is not here. Jared Golden is not here,” the panelist and Substack author Matt Yglesias told me about the past Louisiana governor, former representative from Alaska, and current Maine congressman, all of whom have won in red areas. Those lawmakers don’t have a secret sauce—they simply “have more conservative voting records,” Yglesias said. “And people just don’t like that answer.”
The attendees of Crooked Con are exactly the kind of people whom you might expect to buy a ticket to an all-day event in the basement of a D.C. federal building about the future of Democratic politics: progressive activists, Hill staffers, local pro-democracy lawyers, and a river—a flood!—of political reporters. In the main atrium, Crooked Media staff and Human Rights Campaign workers handed out decorative buttons—DEI Hire, Leave Trans Kids Alone, Bodily Autonomy—and asked attendees to use Post-it Notes to offer messages of queer allyship. (For a party newly focused on economic populism, Democrats had remarkably few products related to corruption, billionaires, or taxing the rich.)
The day’s proceedings kicked off with a “big, beautiful breath” guided-breathing exercise, and involved appearances from an array of leaders and consultants, including former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Searchlight Institute’s Adam Jentleson, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, and The Bulwark’s Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell. Most of the panels were interesting or useful in some way, but only one—“Are We Having Fun Yet?”—was a perfect encapsulation of the Democratic Party’s current reality. In it, the host Jon Lovett attempted to moderate a conversation that quickly went off the rails among Miller, the Fox News resident Democrat Jessica Tarlov, the far-left streamer Hasan Piker, and MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend.
The panel started off well: Sanders-Townsend danced onto the stage like Ellen DeGeneres. Piker and Miller joked around, and Lovett made a well-received crack about former President Bill Clinton. They all agreed, to an extent, that a message of “affordability” had worked for Tuesday’s candidates.
Quickly, though, the panelists’ differences intruded: Zohran Mamdani, Piker said, is an example of a Democrat who had successfully centered a campaign on economic populism without compromising on any of the party’s other important causes. Tarlov countered that a big tent means allowing for moderation on social issues: Democrats shouldn’t dismiss concerns from people about trans women playing women’s sports, for example. “I’m not talking about being bigoted,” Tarlov said, but “the country operates differently in different places, and we give lip service to that but don’t always behave that way.”
The audience offered a few tepid claps. Then everything went downhill. Sanders-Townsend explained that such sentiments can make it seem like the party “wants folks to compromise on issues that, for me, are uncompromisable.” Then she, Piker, and Miller argued about whether Trump had appealed to moderates with his MAGA agenda—or whether he’d simply energized his base to win—in 2024. (Maybe both? Lovett offered.) Piker, whose day job is as a long-form Twitch streamer, was soon rattling off his personal political priorities—social housing, a federal jobs guarantee, free college. Miller, a former Republican, rolled his eyes. For a change of pace, Piker asserted that America’s police “don’t do their fucking jobs ever” and fought with Miller about Israel’s right to exist.
Eventually, Tarlov, who’d been conspicuously quiet for many minutes, chimed in, unsmiling: “I just want to say,” she said, “that the last 10 minutes were the opposite of fun.” The candidates who won on Tuesday “were affordability candidates,” she said, and that is how the party should unite.
A big tent is messy and, apparently, loud. In some ways, it’s a nice change of pace—at least for engagement purposes. I can’t remember the last time that I was so entertained by a political panel. “That was a spicy one,” Miller told me afterward. “It’s important to be able to talk about how you can agree and row the boat in the same direction—while having differences.” But did airing those differences help Democrats advance their goal of winning in red America? Miller was doubtful: “I don’t know that a ton of progress was made.”
That’s frustrating for some Democrats, who worry that the party isn’t serious about doing what it takes to actually win. Notably absent from yesterday’s convention, for example, were leaders from centrist organizations and representatives from the Democrats’ Blue Dog Coalition. “Jesse Jackson used to say the Democratic Party needs two wings to fly,” one prominent, moderate Democratic strategist who did not attend the event texted me later. Crooked Con “was a flightless bird.” It was more, Yglesias agreed, “like a medium-sized tent.”
The Democrats are still in a tough position: To win back the Senate next year, their party must win a handful of seats in red territory, a feat that might involve backing candidates who are more conservative than some in the party might like. Democrats have decided to embrace a big-tent mindset. Now comes the hard part.
