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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
“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.”
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.
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