The News
DENVER — The race for the next Democratic presidential nomination has begun, with a festival of agreement.
There was Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, telling the What’s Next conference that voters demanded action, not “shallow litmus tests or where we fall on some political spectrum.”
There was Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, explaining that voters did not want “marginal change” and Democrats weren’t in a battle of “progressive versus moderate.”
And there was Pete Buttigieg, who’d noticed the Democrats borrowing his formula. They wanted to pass cost-cutting, pro-family bills with their new majority, then convince voters that they would never go back to pre-Trump neoliberalism.
“It sounds good. It’s easy to say,” said Buttigieg. “Everybody thinks they already agree with this.”
The post-midterms conference, organized by Majority Democrats, was a payoff of a two-year investment by moderate donors. Two years before strategists and elected officials landed in Denver and grabbed their lanyards, the venture capitalist Seth London circulated a memo about how new candidate and media investments could steer the party away from “race and group-based identity politics,” and toward “prosperity for more Americans.”
This year’s Democratic landslide carried along every kind of candidate —the ones plugged into the Majority Democrats network, and the ones who worried it was a big-money ploy to defeat the populist left.