Centrist Democrats Are Rolling Up Their Sleeves and Punching Left

In the wake of Abdul El-Sayed’s insurgent victory in Michigan’s US Senate primary last week, the Democratic Party rallied to support its newly designated nominee in a striking show of unity, despite a singularly bitter and expensive establishment crusade to secure his defeat. El-Sayed’s chief rival for the nomination, Representative Haley Stevens, delivered a swift and gracious concession statement, and a clutch of big-name aspirants to the 2028 presidential descended on Detroit for an El-Sayed kickoff rally, further driving home the party’s determination to stand behind its nominee in the race to win a swing-state seat pivotal to its hopes for a Senate majority this November.

There was one countermovement seeking to squelch all this post-primary Kumbaya momentum, though: the centrist advocacy group Third Way, which seized on the victory of El-Sayed and two other left insurgent House candidates in the Michigan balloting to announce a new $15 million campaign to discredit democratic socialism in this midterm cycle and the 2028 national election. In touting this effort to New York Times political correspondent Shane Goldmacher, Third Way president Jonathan Cowan claimed that the group wouldn’t be targeting individual candidates but rather the Democratic Socialists of America, which he deemed “a mortal danger” to the Democratic Party, thanks to its hard-left positions on issues such as the Gaza war, crime and justice, and the top-heavy American political economy. Cowan also wasted little time in undermining his own above-the-fray messaging by citing the Michigan primary results as a call to centrist arms: “It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states.” As Goldmacher writes, the new Third Way campaign will “include opposition research into D.S.A., polling, social media programs and educating Democratic activists and leaders. It would target both proud democratic socialists and those such as Dr. El-Sayed, whom he derided as performing the ‘D.S.A. dodge’—flirting with democratic socialists enough to get their organizing manpower and support while remaining distant enough to avoid the explicit label.”

It’s a novel strategy, to put things mildly, for a putatively Democratic think tank and advocacy group to devote such a massive outlay of resources to discrediting an ascendant popular movement in the Democratic Party during a high-stakes midterm cycle. But since its founding more than two decades ago, Third Way has hewed to the prime centrist directive encoded in its name, which stems from the 1990s conservative leadership putsches in the Democratic and British Labour Parties: Always punch left.

The organization actually began life as Americans for Gun Safety, a difference-trimming advocacy group financed by tech billionaire Andrew McKelvey; its chief objective was to discredit the long-standing, and legally sound, position that the Second Amendment doesn’t sanction individual gun ownership, and focus more on incremental measures like closing the gun-show loophole to instant unregulated firearms purchases. Americans for Gun Safety won the substantive policy debate in the Democratic Party in short order, and the US Supreme Court formalized its victory when it endorsed—or more accurately, fabricated—a right to individual gun ownership in the disastrous 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling.

By then, Third Way was in full swing. Still captained by former Americans for Gun Safety President Cowan, the group swiftly set about foisting a structurally identical agenda of faux-savvy capitulation to the right on the Obama White House, offering up platitudinous defenses of the failed 2012 “grand bargain” to preserve regressive tax cuts and institute permanent austerity in social spending. When first-term Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren produced a plan to expand Social Security benefits the following year, Cowan and his Third Way colleague Jim Kessler howled (in The Wall Street Journal, of course) that the proposal was “disastrous” and “reckless,” a species of “populist political and economic fantasy.”

That would be the verdict from a group overwhelmingly funded by Wall Street bankers, healthcare companies, and DC lobbying clearinghouses. As Lee Fang reported for The Nation in 2013, Third Way relied on the fundraising prowess of the DC lobbying behemoth Peck, Madigan, Jones & Stewart as a sluice gate of corporate funding; its other marquee clients included Deutsche Bank, Intel, the Business Roundtable, the International Swaps & Derivatives Association, PhRMA, and the US Chamber of Commerce. As if that weren’t enough, the group’s board included Daniel Loeb and Berek Kaufman, two hedge-fund executives who were major donors to Mitt Romney’s 2012 Republican campaign for the presidency. As a dark-money political group, Third Way isn’t obliged to disclose its donors, but a recent RealSludge survey of its tax filings discloses the same basic plutocratic profile, with Bill Gates’s sustainability network Breakthrough Energy and the big-tech investment fund Arabella Advisors among the lead givers, alongside other corporate stalwarts such as the US Chamber of Commerce.

These, in other words, are the same forces that have held socialism, and social democracy, to be anathema since the first Gilded Age. What’s striking, though, is that this time out, Cowan and his cronies are decidedly on the defensive. They’re no longer issuing disciplinary broadsides to freshman populist senators from the secure battlement of The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed section—they’re seeking to influence electoral outcomes in a political environment that’s shifted radically since Barack Obama’s second term.

A moderate agenda for the Democratic Party simply isn’t an electoral selling point any longer—that’s the key finding in a recent working paper by political scientists Jacob Grumbach and Adam Bonica, which finds that in an acutely polarized political climate, moderate appeals are less the campaign game-changers of Third Way’s fond imaginings than nonstarters. It’s true that “extreme” candidates don’t necessarily perform better, the authors note, but on balance, voters are more responsive to appeals within preexisting ideologies, which produce the dynamic that just played out in Michigan: “More progressive Democratic and more conservative Republican candidates increase the turnout of their respective partisan bases.” These shifts have also altered the ideological composition of both parties, as MSNow’s Zeeshan Aleem observes in his breakdown of Bonica and Grumbach’s research: “plunging trust in institutions and the collapse of the neoliberal consensus have made the banner of ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘populist’ positioning more salient than conventional ideology, as well as changed what constitutes ideological extremism.”

Since groups like Third Way represent the body and soul of the dying neoliberal consensus, they have little choice but to target DSA, which aspires to be their political undertaker. But another $15 million in tendentious attack ads and opposition research stands little chance of arresting the momentum of El Sayed, who has already overcome a nine-to-one spending disadvantage to secure his Senate nomination. In the face of a populist uprising on the left, all Jonathan Cowan and his Beltway colleagues can do is throw more money at what they imagine the problem to be. That’s why their response to the new insurgent politics in the Democratic Party is less telling than their prescription for a party revival in the wake of Kamala Harris’s crushing 2024 defeat: to scuttle the preferences of small donors in the party, and ensure that Democrats become more aggressively “pro-capitalist” and stop “demonizing wealth and corporations.” “GOP messaging suggests they want voters to be rich, while Democrats are seen as focusing on redistribution rather than wealth creation,” read one bullet point. “Have a prosperity gospel aimed at the working class,” went another.

The Clinton era version of third-way politics marketed itself as pragmatic and realistic above all things. Third Way’s think tank bromides today come across as nothing more than desperate plutocratic wish-fulfillment fantasies. To borrow the rhetoric of another prominent Democrat continually vilified by Wall Street for his anti-capitalist sympathies, the leaders of today’s resurgent Democratic left should welcome their hatred.