On Wednesday, the Welcome PAC, a center-left political action committee favored by the proponents of the abundance and popularism movements, held its third annual “WelcomeFest” gathering in Washington, D.C. It was a moderate sort of mess-around, the kind of place where a college student could introduce himself as a former member of the college Republicans, looking for a home in the other party.
Based on what I saw, there were across-the-aisle matches to be made. The first panel’s speakers set a challenge for the day by trying to define what “centrism” is—or at least, what it should be—in 2026. “Moderates seem attracted to incremental, bite-size solutions that seem so much smaller than our problem,” said Steve Teles, a Johns Hopkins professor and Niskanen Center fellow and Abundance champion. “Can everybody in this panel please give me some examples of solutions that you think are appropriately at the scale we’re facing?” What followed were mostly ideas borrowed from Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book that has mostly translated into a deregulatory agenda for addressing the nation’s housing shortage.
Still asked to define what centrism is, most of the speakers could only really define themselves by what they were not. It’s not their fault. Centrism, in reality, is almost always defined by where it lies on the spectrum between two extremes: Its politics are almost monomaniacally focused on arguing that those who stand apart have gone too far. To the WelcomeFesters, in particular, this explains why Democrats are currently out of power. It might be an appealing message to hear among like-minded politicos—those clad in fashionable suits, who follow politics closely, or who work in the knowledge sector, perhaps even running political campaigns in purple and red districts—in a softly lit basement in Washington, D.C. But there are big questions that the organization, and its proponents’ ideas, have yet to answer. This conference turned out not to be the place for it.
Because Welcome PAC is largely made up of Democrats, its speakers spent most of their time distinguishing themselves from the left of the party, especially the ascendent Democratic Socialists of America wing. “Capitalism is the most successful economic system in the world,” said New York Representative Tom Suozzi, who won his Long Island district after George Santos left Congress in disgrace. “It’s lifted more people out of poverty, it’s created more innovation, it’s done more to make people’s lives better than any other economic system. Socialism has failed and has also resulted in a lot of authoritarianism throughout the world, and so I think that this, there’s a very big, I think that [New York Mayor] Zohran Mamdani and the DSA … did a good job of feeding into people’s economic insecurity; they correctly diagnosed the problem, they just have bad solutions.”
The fact that the people in the room all felt the same obsession to set themselves against the monolithic left of their imaginations was made especially clear in the Promise to America—a pact presented by college students and signed by Representatives Tom Suozzi and Adam Gray, two Democratic congressmen from competitive districts—in its “this, not that” formulation on the promises’s taglines.
The people I spoke to in the crowd said it was nice to feel normal and gather with people who weren’t too crazy, meaning both Trump’s D.C. takeover and the rhetoric of the very-online left, who apparently form the bulk of what they encounter as they move around the world.
What the speakers didn’t answer, however, was how capitalism could solve the problems of affordability, inequality, and social mobility, like the inability of young people to buy a home, the skyrocketing cost of childcare, and the fact that too many Americans still can’t access health care easily. Also left unanswered: why the most successful engine of prosperity in the history of the world seems to have stalled out.
On this last point, Mark Cuban spoke at length about his ideas for health care, which rely largely on hoary ideas like HSA spending accounts—like a man who missed the yearslong health care debate leading up to the election of President Barack Obama and the passage of the Affordable Care Act. To better bring Cuban up to speed: HSA accounts have been dismissed in the past because they often don’t work, and other nations have demonstrated that there are much less expensive ways to provide health care to people through public programs. (This is one reason why the left supports ideas like Medicare for All—they’ve seen the proof of concept in the real world.)
Problem number two lies in how removed these discussions are from voters. Throughout the day, attendees heard from elected officials like Suozzi, Gray, and Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, along with other candidates running in states like North Carolina, Texas, and Kansas. Those politicians talked about the kinds of things they hear from voters, but I kept wondering whether those voters would agree with everything being said about them.
The WelcomeFest crowd’s faith-like belief in popularism—the idea that candidates should pay almost exclusive attention to polling to tell them where voters are on controversial issues (especially cultural ones) to determine the optimal position to take—was belied by the somewhat anodyne campaign advice many of the candidates themselves offered: Be authentic, listen to people, be sincere. That’s all tough to do when you are constantly sculpting your personality from whatever a set of polling cross tabs say you should be. To this crowd, what candidates actually believe is less important than wherever issue-polling is on any given day. Stuart Hall once said, “Politics does not reflect majorities. It constructs them.” That’s a premise that Welcome PAC emphatically rejects. They are, instead, waiting for a mystery majority to materialize, to tell them how to walk and talk.
WelcomeFest felt like the main goal of politics in 2026 was to rehash the last few elections—even the last century’s elections—instead of focusing on how to win in the future. Bobby Pulido, a Tejano musician and congressional candidate in Texas, talked about how bad the Trump campaign’s ads on gender-affirming care were for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, New Mexico Representative Gabe Vasquez talked about how even Latinos wanted real solutions to immigration and the flood of asylum-seekers, and San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins talked about how badly her predecessor had handled crime. But that’s how the problems looked last time. What will they look like in November and beyond? How will a pure exercise in hindsight and nitpickery forge the path from Trumpism’s era of destruction?
“The everyday voter is not engaged in politics at all,” Gallego said. “Arizona has 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats, and we’re winning statewide all the time. We’re winning hard races because we don’t wait for the national brand to change. We create our own brand, our own personality, so people know what they’re voting for,” he said. “I think, like this idea that there’s going to be this grand gathering of geniuses that’s going to end up changing the … party, it’s not going to happen.”
There are bigger questions here about what the Democratic Party and its members believe, and what matters to people. Almost all Democrats agree that the economic malaise voters feel and the inflation driven by President Donald Trump’s chaotic second-term decisions are what voters care most about, and all agree that rather than just complain about the bad job Trump has done, Democrats need to offer solutions. Those solutions will likely vary by candidate and the electorate they’re pitching, but the truth is anything that sounds good to voters is likely to win if Trump’s approval ratings continue to drop, the effects of his military intervention in Iran continue to hurt, and inflation remains a preeminent voter concern. Offering real solutions is likely to woo the segment of voters who are struggling financially—and who voted for Trump for economic reasons in 2024.
But there are bigger problems ahead. Between the Supreme Court and Republicans in statehouses across the country, Democrats are being gerrymandered out of a fair midterm fight, and Black voters face outright disenfranchisement. The Trump administration is stealing taxpayer money to enrich Trump and his family and rewarding political loyalists. Congress has happily ceded its own powers to the executive branch, and the agencies responsible for ensuring our safety and well-being are being eviscerated from the inside. The Republican Party is trying to erase all of the constitutional amendments passed since the Civil War.
At the same time, a few blocks away, an enormous crane on the White House lawn was erecting the cage for a UFC match for Trump’s dwindling birthday celebration/hijacking of Independence Day. It may have been invisible from the conference’s cozy rooms, but it was nevertheless a sort of monument commemorating the fact that you can’t duck a fight forever. And there are fights ahead: a fight to take back the issue of immigration from authoritarians, a fight to protect our multiracial democracy, a fight for broader financial security, a fight to save our planet and our way of life from climate change. Fights may alienate some people: Not everyone will feel welcome in the party afterward. These are real problems, where members of the party have their differences but all differ greatly from Republicans. At WelcomeFest, they’re all busy patting themselves on the back and critiquing the past instead of looking ahead at the battle that’s right in front of them.
