Do WelcomeFest Democrats even know what's popular?

Centrist activists at the heart of a new push to control the direction of the Democratic party insist that they want Democrats to adopt positions that track with public opinion. But, as it stands, there is sparse evidence that their preferred platform is actually popular, according to researchers, with the advocates for a more centrist party also failing to recognize the impact that leaders can have on public opinion.

Last week, centrist Democrats gathered in Washington, D.C. for an event billed as the largest public gathering of centrists in the Democratic Party, “WelcomeFest.” The event served as a celebration of Democrats (and former Democrats) like former Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.V., who represented the party’s center-right flank. 

The co-founder of the centrist billionaire funded Welcome PAC, Liam Kerr, even walked out on stage wearing a Joe Manchin West Virginia University Mountaineers football jersey, before delivering an opening statement in front of slides which surmised the group’s vision for the party going forward as “dogs,” referencing Blue Dogs; “data”; and “Slotkin,” referring to the freshman senator from Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, who Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has taken a shine to.

The closest thing to a thesis statement for the event, however, came from Lauren Harper Pope, a founder of the Welcome Party, the political organization behind the event,  who described the group’s mission as making sure “Democrats are on the right side of public opinion.” 

G. Elliott Morris, a public opinion researcher and the proprietor of the Substack blog, “Strength in Numbers,” said in an interview with Salon that “it's very obvious, if you're a student of public opinion, that public opinion is very malleable and also very subject to the questions you're asking and the way you're measuring the thing you're trying to measure.” He suggested “those two nuances are just not compatible with activism among these groups,” referring to those who attempt to position themselves on the "right side" of public opinion.

In practical terms, however, being on the right side of public opinion appears to mean adopting more conservative policies on issues where a more conservative position appears to be more popular, like on immigration or the participation of transgender people in sports. In economic terms, the group has pushed towards the “abundance agenda” which focuses on rolling back regulations that proponents say limit things like the construction of new housing.

The problem, however, for the burgeoning centrist movement is that there’s not a lot of evidence that the key tentpole of their centrist platform — rolling back regulations and saying no to advocacy groups in the pursuit of the abundance agenda — is popular.

Josh Barro, a journalist and the proprietor of the “Very Serious” Substack blog, touched on this in an interview he did with Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., at last week’s centrist event, where he asked Torres, “Is abundance actually popular ... in a place like New York?”

Torres answered, saying, “I feel like we need strong leadership, and look, we've seen the YIMBY movement gain momentum even in California and New York.”  The YIMBY (“Yes in my backyard”) movement refers to pro-development advocacy that stands in opposition to NIMBY (“Not in my backyard”) positions that often limit development through restrictive zoning laws. This wasn’t, however, the last time the issue came up at the event.

When asked a follow-up question by Salon, Torres responded in an email saying “A government that builds more affordable housing, more clean energy, and more infrastructure is not only good government. It’s good politics.”

Later, in a panel featuring Derek Thompson, a co-author of “Abundance,” and Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., Marshall Kosloff,  co-host of “The Realignment” podcast, Kosloff confronted the panelists with polling from Demand Progress, a progressive polling firm, that tested whether the abundance message or an economic populist message resonated with respondents better.

When presented with descriptions of both the abundance agenda, which focused on peeling back regulations, and an economic populist agenda, which focused on dismantling corporate power, the poll found that Democrats and independents preferred the economic populist message while Republicans preferred the abundance message.

Auchincloss responded, saying that it was “a bad-faith poll” and that the results are “what happens when you test an economics textbook against a romance novel and tell people, ‘What do you like to read better?’”

In the survey, the abundance agenda was described as: “The big problem is ‘bottlenecks’ that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges.” The populist agenda was described as: “The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our government.”

The survey found that 32.6% of Democrats, 68.8% of Republicans and 40.6% of independents said that the abundance message would make them more likely to vote for a candidate. The populist message, on the other hand, led 71.5% of Democrats, 39.6% of Republicans and 55.4% of independents to say they were more likely to vote for a candidate delivering that message. The survey did not test for the partisan affiliation of the candidate delivering the message.

Economic messaging wasn’t, however, the only place where centrists appeared to be adopting a minority opinion. When Torres was interrupted during his speech by anti-war protesters, organizers at the event started playing Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” and the Welcome Party’s associated Substack called the protesters “vain clowns.”

While the “popularists” mocked pro-Palestinian sentiment, Democrats have increasingly sympathized with Palestinians, with a recent Gallup poll finding that 59% of Democrats now sympathize with Palestinians more, while just 21% sympathize with Israelis more. In the general population, more Americans, 46% sympathize more with Israelis, compared to 33% who sympathize more with Palestinians, though sympathies have been shifting away from Israelis and towards Palestinians in recent years. However, in terms of concrete policy like legal actions taken against Israel, this shift has been more dramatic.

Another survey from April, conducted by John Zogby Strategies, found that in terms of practical policy, 44% of respondents agreed with the International Criminal Court’s findings that Israel’s war on Gaza is tantamount to genocide, compared to 28% who disagreed with that statement.

They’ve also begun to carve out a minority position in regards to the labor movement, advocating for pushing against unions at a point when Americans’ approval of labor unions is near an all-time high. A 2024 Gallup survey found that 70% of Americans approve of unions while just 23% disapprove.

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At one point during the event, Barro asked, “Is there a way to have a pro-abundance Democratic Party agenda in New York without breaking the strong link that exists between the New York Democratic Party and the labor movement?” The thinking goes that giving out contracts to unionzied companies, or requiring developers to do so, can increase labor costs for projects and potentially discourage development.

Torres responded indirectly, saying: “Everyone’s voice should be heard, but no one’s going to have veto power.” Barro has since gone on to advocate for “fighting labor unions” in the name of abundance.
Beyond staking out minority positions, the mission of staying on the “right side of public opinion” also misses that the way that leaders can shape the way the public views on an issue.

Research conducted by Morris alongside Verasight, a survey research firm, found that priming respondents with information about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a wrongfully deported Maryland resident, resulted in a reduction in support for the deportation of all undocumented immigrants.

The survey found that, without priming, 44% of respondents supported blanket deportations of undocumented immigrants while 38% did not. Among respondents given information about Abrego Garcia’s case, however, just 39% supported blanket deportations, while 43% reported opposing the deportations.

Morris also tracked Trump’s approval rating on the issue of immigration alongside how much attention the Abrego Garcia case was getting in the press. He found that Trump’s approval rating on immigration decreased in correlation with an increase in the attention that was being paid to the case.

“It seems more sales tactics to me than a commitment to actually tracking and representing the average person,” Morris said of the centrist movement. “They have their own set of beliefs that, for the past 15 months, have been supported by majorities in the particular ways that these polls have asked majorities those questions. But that’s not necessarily going to be true in the future, given events, so they are now put in the situation where they have to assert that these things are popular,” Morris said. “They just have a commitment to these values first and a commitment to the public second.”

Kerr, the co-founder of the Welcome Party’s PAC, when asked by Salon what happens when public opinion shifts on an issue, and whether Democrats should adopt a new position to reflect that shift, called the conundrum a “classic political theory question.”

“The Burkean response — a representative ‘owes you not his industry only but his judgement, and he betrays you if he sacrifices it to your opinion’ — has some merit. But also you have to get elected in the first place,” Kerr said in an email. “Most prominent issues are not ones where the public opinion has been rapidly shifting beyond where candidates were standing firm. The story of the last decade is more about candidates zooming past where voter opinion was. And the answer to that problem is candidates with deep values and the confidence to authentically represent those values both to voters and in how they vote in Congress.”