This primary season, most of the energy and attention on the Democratic side has been on progressive candidates who overperformed in races around the country, sometimes despite steep funding disadvantages. Beltway moderates are ready to fight back: In August, Third Way announced a $15 million campaign against democratic socialism between now and the 2028 election. On Thursday, the centrist think tank released its opening salvo in that campaign.
The 20-point agenda, called “A New Economic Bargain,” is a master class in nibbling around the edges. It dusts off liberal ideas from the Before-Trump Times, and thus reads like a watered-down version of the platforms released by progressive groups earlier in the campaign season—that is, when it’s not indulging Republican delusions of rampant government fraud. Which is to say, while Democratic voters this year have shown time and again that they want bold ideas and a party that will fight for them, Third Way has decided what they really want is middle-of-the-road incrementalism.
The logic of releasing an agenda that addresses Americans’ most pressing economic concerns is unassailable. Voters gave President Trump a second term, at least in part, because they remained upset about post-pandemic inflation and an economy that is increasingly unfair to workers. Of course, he appealed to them by pointing the blame at immigrants rather than his billionaire friends. But that anger is still valid, and it’s what Jim Kessler, Third Way’s executive vice president for public policy, said his group wanted to address. “This this is a country where the majority of Americans are just not satisfied about what’s going on in their economic lives, and it’s been going on for a long time,” he told me.
The plan contains plenty of inoffensive, even sensible, ideas. It nods to the abundance agenda with multiple references to cutting red tape, in particular for building new housing and energy production (though it characteristically does not mention a preference for a particular kind of energy production, whether renewables or fossil fuels—so one can assume it’s the outdated Obama approach of “all of the above”). It also proposes cutting tariffs on “family essentials,” capping energy bills, and expanding apprenticeships and alternatives to college. And it has one genuinely new idea: to provide an FHA-like car loan program for used cars, which would help tackle one of the biggest transportation costs many Americans face.
The agenda also tries to tap into the fury at Big Tech for colluding with local governments to build data centers in their neighborhoods, hogging electricity and raising energy bills—but it comes up short. Third Way’s plan would force tech companies to work with communities when building data centers, including “significant investment in the local electricity system, no increase in household utility bills, enough new tax revenue to cut local property taxes, good jobs for local workers, transparent negotiations including a ban on NDAs, and straightforward community engagement.” But it doesn’t call for a halt on new data centers, which even some Republican governors have done.
On health care, the agenda proposes a “health care bill of rights” made up of “sweeping but simple guarantees” to limit out-of-pocket costs, provide access to basic care, get rid of surprise medical bills, and give patients the right to see any doctor they want. But it doesn’t explain how it would do this. The massive Affordable Care Act attempted to tackle many of these problems, with decidedly mixed success; the agenda is short on specifics on how a simple “bill of rights” would accomplish what that massive, ambitious legislation could not. What’s clear is that Third Way thinks that just a few tweaks, rather than an overhaul of the system, will do the trick. “We don’t need to tear down the health care system and start over,” the agenda states. “With the most comprehensive health care protections in history, we can make health care affordable, easy to use, and reliable for everyone.”
An item titled “Universal Child Care Coverage” simply promotes the idea that families could have affordable options within their work by building out the existing private system, without spelling out how it would do so. “Let’s guarantee every family at least three affordable child care options within 15 minutes of their home or work,” the agenda states. Who would object to that? But then it adds: “We’ll get there by significantly expanding private sector options.”
Even worse, the agenda reinforces the idea that there’s massive fraud in the federal government. The group argues that the government could save billions by cracking down on waste, fraud, and abuse, and says that the savings could be returned to taxpayers as a dividend. But fraud is not widespread in most government programs, including nutrition assistance such as SNAP. It is also an odd note to strike given Trump’s historic level of corruption, which costs taxpayers much more.
But the item that perhaps best encapsulates the agenda, and Third Way’s politics broadly, is the one calling for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour and then indexing it to inflation. The so-called Fight for $15 launched in 2012, at the beginning of President Obama’s second term. Progressives have long since moved on from that goal. Instead, some of the former Fight for $15 organizers have launched campaigns for true living wages across the country, which in some cities are as high as $30 an hour. It’s hard to imagine voters being excited to go backward on those numbers, especially considering the cost of living has increased dramatically since then.
A New Economic Bargain comes after a series of progressive plans released earlier this year, such as The Working Families Party’s first national platform, the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s New Affordability Agenda, and the Democratic Socialists of America’s “Worker’s Deserve More.” Almost all focused on major affordability issues that resonate with voters: health care and childcare costs, worker pay, and affordable housing. But these organizations want to expand government health care programs like Medicaid or Medicare to cover everyone, not a patient’s bill of rights; they want states to step up and actually provide child care instead of trying to subsidize families’ use of the private market; and they want to rein in landlords who charge high rents and bring back public (or social, in the new framing) housing, rather than just allowing developers to build more. The DSA goes further to promise a utopian future without any bills to pay at all. Almost all of them, though, would get there by taxing the wealthy more and using it to strength the government itself, not shore up the private market.
The progressive agendas urge big, fundamental changes to how the U.S. provides these services and strengthens worker power—namely with more robust government involvement in these marketplaces, which is a radical departure from the Clinton-era neoliberalism that continued to define Democratic politics until 2016. Third Way’s plan is a throwback to that era, both in terms of policy and policymaking. It wants to bolster the private market and find a middle ground between conservative and liberal economic ideas, and it wants to work with whatever already exists—to tinker around the edges rather than forging a new path.
In our interview, Kessler presented the agenda as one of several sets of ideas that will be argued over during the ideas primary leading up to the 2028 presidential nomination. Democratic primary voters will decide, he said. “I’m not going to criticize anybody else’s ideas out there,” he said. “We’re going to have a wide-open race for president in a Democratic primary, and let the ideas flourish, let the gardens grow, let people, you know, pick the harvest that they choose,” he said. “What we’re looking at here is what are the biggest things that you can do that are also ruthlessly pragmatic that could conceivably get done.”
It’s hard to imagine, given the wreckage of the Trump era and the increasingly broken economy, that Democrats will be craving ruthless pragmatism. They certainly haven’t been voting that way of late. They’re increasingly backing candidates with the biggest, boldest ideas, who are promising—as Trump did—to blow up the establishment and upend a system that they feel is rigged against them. This 20-point plan doesn’t rise to the anger of the moment.
