You motherfuckers can fight if you want. But I’m mostly posting this because we have a sighting.
> Colin Mortimer, the director of the centrist Center for New Liberalism, said that moderates needed to stop tempering their tone to appeal to voters sick of the status quo.
>
> “It seems to me a lot of energy is on the left, but the big energy we are seeing from the base of the Democratic Party is just a rejection of the establishment and a rejection of incumbents,” Mr. Mortimer said.
u/AuthorityRespecter
Maximilianne on
Remember folks some Dem consultant is probably making $$$ telling them this when they could have learned it for free from us
blueshoesrcool on
Moderate politics are just not electorally viable. Even if we’re not for Medicare for all and taxing the rich, we may need to be pragmatic and embrace such things to beat Trump.
Lux_Stella on
jumpscared by the shrimp sighting
IsGoIdMoney on
Cool yea, what we need in these perilous times is to turn our guns inwards. Fucking clown.
MartinTheOrderly on
I might detest the DSA, but the problem isn’t the DSA.
The problem is a public frustrated with the apparent inability or unwillingness of the Democratic establishment to do anything about the problems people face. You can talk all you want about Bidenomics not getting the credit it deserves, but Schumer and Jeffries don’t seem to spend the same energy spreading that Gospel as they do fighting for military aid to a county whose leader hates them personally.
Liberalism is not just some mealy mouthed middle ground to anesthetize the underclass or assuage the consciences of middle class White women. It is the basic principle of the most powerful country that has ever existed. It is a fundamentally radical thing that rejects radicalism and reaction in turn as slaves to the moment.
But the leaders of America’s liberal party are not radicals. They are anesthetized suburbanites more concerned with their own institutional power than the imminent threat to this country on a fundamental level growing in the halls of power.
The Democratic Party needs fighters and if the Party will not supply them the voters will find them, regardless of their competency.
**Centrist dismisses suggestions of civil war in her party after progressive candidate wins Michigan primary**
Democrats must unite to address voter anxiety about affordability ahead of November’s midterm elections, Virginia’s governor has said, as she brushed aside suggestions of a civil war in her party.
“The task before anyone who is now the [Democratic] nominee in their state, whether it is a Senate nominee in Michigan or any of our House nominees in Virginia, is that they have to focus on delivering for people,” Spanberger said. “Telling them . . . I am focused on the things that matter to you, and this is what I am going to do about the things that impact your life.”
“It is not a question of the contrast within different types of Democrats,” she added. “The question is: How are they working on the things that matter to people that frankly the White House and current members of Congress . . . are not focused on?”
Spanberger spoke to the FT the day after Democratic primary voters went to the polls in five states, including Virginia and Michigan.
Hours earlier, Michigan’s insurgent progressive Abdul El-Sayed had sent shockwaves throughout the Democratic Party establishment when he [narrowly defeated](https://archive.fo/o/5ACHP/https://www.ft.com/content/65633475-0a89-4522-9c2c-5cbd22fd9aac) four-term centrist congresswoman Haley Stevens, who had been endorsed by party heavyweight Senator Chuck Schumer and Michigan’s popular Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer, among others.
El-Sayed was the latest in a series of progressive challengers to defeat more moderate incumbents, after a slate of candidates endorsed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won their congressional primaries in the city earlier in the summer.
Spanberger, a political moderate, famously dressed down fellow Democrats after the 2020 election when the party lost more than a dozen seats in Congress, blaming the party’s embrace of “defund the police” and left-leaning economic policies.
“We need to not ever use the word socialist or socialism ever again,” the then congresswoman said at the time in a leaked audio recording. “Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter.”
On Wednesday, Spanberger dismissed suggestions that left-leaning candidates such as El-Sayed represented the future of the Democratic Party, noting that she and several other centrist Democratic candidates had also won decisive victories in the past 12 months.
Last November, she was elected Virginia governor by a historic 15-point margin, running roughly nine points ahead of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign in the state just one year earlier.
In the same month, Spanberger’s former roommate on Capitol Hill, Mikie Sherrill, also outperformed expectations and won New Jersey’s governorship by a margin of more than 14 points.
“I don’t actually think that we should be saying any one thing is the future of the party,” Spanberger said, adding: “We have to win, and we have to win big in November.”
Ahead of the [midterms](https://archive.fo/o/5ACHP/https://www.ft.com/us-midterm-elections-2026), Trump and Republicans have rushed to tie Democratic candidates to the more fringe policy positions of the Democratic Socialists of America, a leftist group that has endorsed several insurgent progressives.
El-Sayed was not endorsed by the DSA but had the support of democratic socialist lawmakers, including Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Spanberger rejected the Republicans’ accusations and said individual Democratic candidates had a responsibility to tell voters where they stand on the issues.
“It is only a challenge if you allow [Republicans] to paint everybody with the same paintbrush,” Spanberger said. “Any [Democratic] candidate who is running, if somebody is trying to turn you into something that you are not, tell people who you are, and also tell people who you are not.”
Still, the governor acknowledged that she and fellow Democrats faced political challenges. While Trump is battling record-low approval ratings, national opinion polls also show approval for the Democratic Party has plunged to new lows.
“The problem is that people don’t necessarily know: What is the Democratic Party?” Spanberger told the FT. “Conversely, the Republican Party is Donald Trump. The Democratic Party is a broad array of people.”
Spanberger urged fellow Democrats to tell voters that their party “focuses on the needs of people” but acknowledged “that will look different and sound different in some communities”.
Polling shows that the cost of living remains the most important issue for voters ahead of the midterm elections and a liability for Trump and the Republican Party. Some [68 per cent](https://archive.fo/o/5ACHP/https://www.ft.com/content/e8a0a845-c812-4158-ba1b-85613719f861) of voters in a June FT poll said they disapproved of the president’s handling of inflation and the cost of living.
In Virginia, Spanberger’s approval ratings have fallen sharply since she was sworn in as governor in January. A poll conducted in late June and early July by Virginia Commonwealth University showed them to be underwater, with just 38 per cent of Virginians saying the state was headed in the right direction.
Spanberger said the polling underscored the challenges for her and other elected officials in addressing voters’ concerns, especially about the cost of living.
“Everything is hard. People are worried, and it impacts every aspect of how they view things,” she said.
But the governor — who made her debut on the national political stage in 2018, when Democrats picked up dozens of House seats at the halfway point of Trump’s first term in office — projected cautious optimism that voters would turn out to back Democratic candidates up and down the ballot in November.
“In 2026, there are people who are too busy and too tired and too exhausted and too stressed out and too worried about their bills to go out and do the march or show up with the sign,” Spanberger said. “But they are going to vote.”
Al_787 on
I like centrists to win but it seems like these groups are even more guilty of the “terminally online” accusation that they throw at leftists. I’ve said it in this sub before but it’s frankly astonishing that people, who have read *Tocqueville* in full during college and got straight As on their papers, now treat civic engagement with such neglect or even disdain
I read a story on the NYT that Democratic consultants apparently had a fucking lab to test Kamala’s ad, led by people like David Shor. And then somehow the end products were terrible, absolutely disgraceful how they burned through more than a billion doing that kind of shit. Like did you see the “she worked at McDonald’s” ad that tells us nothing about what she’s gonna do as president? You can’t make yourself look more human with cross tabs maxxing, even if you win it’s not sustainable power.
Georgia was turned blue by decades of good old grass roots organizing. Regaining the base for centrists needs to start there. Otherwise, don’t make me laugh, they couldn’t take down a single candidate running in 1 state with $60 million. What do they think their $15 million is gonna do nationally over 2 years, while Mamdani probably got more attention from 1 single video he posted on X? The establishment’s addiction with measuring strength by fundraising has got to stop. I don’t say go shun all the mega donors, but please don’t be dependent on insanely expensive campaigns.
jonawesome on
Feel like the time for the Dem moderates to go to war against the ascendant left would have been BEFORE the left beat them in a bunch of primaries, not during the general election.
Knicksin7bby on
Maybe if they fought a war against the gop and Trump when we had power we wouldn’t be here. I’m not a leftist but you reap what you sow. You pick gutless people like garland to head your justice department, you keep the filibuster in tact and stall out your own agenda, you don’t fight harder against Trump you get this. I will back the new moderate wing once the current establishment is gone.
10 Comments
You motherfuckers can fight if you want. But I’m mostly posting this because we have a sighting.
> Colin Mortimer, the director of the centrist Center for New Liberalism, said that moderates needed to stop tempering their tone to appeal to voters sick of the status quo.
>
> “It seems to me a lot of energy is on the left, but the big energy we are seeing from the base of the Democratic Party is just a rejection of the establishment and a rejection of incumbents,” Mr. Mortimer said.
u/AuthorityRespecter
Remember folks some Dem consultant is probably making $$$ telling them this when they could have learned it for free from us
Moderate politics are just not electorally viable. Even if we’re not for Medicare for all and taxing the rich, we may need to be pragmatic and embrace such things to beat Trump.
jumpscared by the shrimp sighting
Cool yea, what we need in these perilous times is to turn our guns inwards. Fucking clown.
I might detest the DSA, but the problem isn’t the DSA.
The problem is a public frustrated with the apparent inability or unwillingness of the Democratic establishment to do anything about the problems people face. You can talk all you want about Bidenomics not getting the credit it deserves, but Schumer and Jeffries don’t seem to spend the same energy spreading that Gospel as they do fighting for military aid to a county whose leader hates them personally.
Liberalism is not just some mealy mouthed middle ground to anesthetize the underclass or assuage the consciences of middle class White women. It is the basic principle of the most powerful country that has ever existed. It is a fundamentally radical thing that rejects radicalism and reaction in turn as slaves to the moment.
But the leaders of America’s liberal party are not radicals. They are anesthetized suburbanites more concerned with their own institutional power than the imminent threat to this country on a fundamental level growing in the halls of power.
The Democratic Party needs fighters and if the Party will not supply them the voters will find them, regardless of their competency.
I have no idea how this post was approved when the subject matter is arguably “[*American Political Strategizing*](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1vhabej/comment/p23jkuj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)*,”* but whatever I might as well take the time to piggyback off the clickbait title to give some hopium for Democratic unity in these trying times.
# [A Democratic civil war? Not according to Virginia’s governor](https://www.ft.com/content/ba3f0141-93f0-4c47-88bf-14aadf0c21a8?syn-25a6b1a6=1)
**Centrist dismisses suggestions of civil war in her party after progressive candidate wins Michigan primary**
Democrats must unite to address voter anxiety about affordability ahead of November’s midterm elections, Virginia’s governor has said, as she brushed aside suggestions of a civil war in her party.
In a wide-ranging interview with the FT on Wednesday, Abigail Spanberger said [Democrats](https://archive.fo/o/5ACHP/https://www.ft.com/stream/d3022c39-5296-4f1b-bb29-e104acd9e9ee) needed to project a strong contrast between their party and Donald Trump and the Republicans heading into November.
“The task before anyone who is now the [Democratic] nominee in their state, whether it is a Senate nominee in Michigan or any of our House nominees in Virginia, is that they have to focus on delivering for people,” Spanberger said. “Telling them . . . I am focused on the things that matter to you, and this is what I am going to do about the things that impact your life.”
“It is not a question of the contrast within different types of Democrats,” she added. “The question is: How are they working on the things that matter to people that frankly the White House and current members of Congress . . . are not focused on?”
Spanberger spoke to the FT the day after Democratic primary voters went to the polls in five states, including Virginia and Michigan.
Hours earlier, Michigan’s insurgent progressive Abdul El-Sayed had sent shockwaves throughout the Democratic Party establishment when he [narrowly defeated](https://archive.fo/o/5ACHP/https://www.ft.com/content/65633475-0a89-4522-9c2c-5cbd22fd9aac) four-term centrist congresswoman Haley Stevens, who had been endorsed by party heavyweight Senator Chuck Schumer and Michigan’s popular Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer, among others.
El-Sayed was the latest in a series of progressive challengers to defeat more moderate incumbents, after a slate of candidates endorsed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won their congressional primaries in the city earlier in the summer.
Spanberger, a political moderate, famously dressed down fellow Democrats after the 2020 election when the party lost more than a dozen seats in Congress, blaming the party’s embrace of “defund the police” and left-leaning economic policies.
“We need to not ever use the word socialist or socialism ever again,” the then congresswoman said at the time in a leaked audio recording. “Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter.”
On Wednesday, Spanberger dismissed suggestions that left-leaning candidates such as El-Sayed represented the future of the Democratic Party, noting that she and several other centrist Democratic candidates had also won decisive victories in the past 12 months.
Last November, she was elected Virginia governor by a historic 15-point margin, running roughly nine points ahead of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign in the state just one year earlier.
In the same month, Spanberger’s former roommate on Capitol Hill, Mikie Sherrill, also outperformed expectations and won New Jersey’s governorship by a margin of more than 14 points.
“I don’t actually think that we should be saying any one thing is the future of the party,” Spanberger said, adding: “We have to win, and we have to win big in November.”
Ahead of the [midterms](https://archive.fo/o/5ACHP/https://www.ft.com/us-midterm-elections-2026), Trump and Republicans have rushed to tie Democratic candidates to the more fringe policy positions of the Democratic Socialists of America, a leftist group that has endorsed several insurgent progressives.
El-Sayed was not endorsed by the DSA but had the support of democratic socialist lawmakers, including Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Spanberger rejected the Republicans’ accusations and said individual Democratic candidates had a responsibility to tell voters where they stand on the issues.
“It is only a challenge if you allow [Republicans] to paint everybody with the same paintbrush,” Spanberger said. “Any [Democratic] candidate who is running, if somebody is trying to turn you into something that you are not, tell people who you are, and also tell people who you are not.”
Still, the governor acknowledged that she and fellow Democrats faced political challenges. While Trump is battling record-low approval ratings, national opinion polls also show approval for the Democratic Party has plunged to new lows.
“The problem is that people don’t necessarily know: What is the Democratic Party?” Spanberger told the FT. “Conversely, the Republican Party is Donald Trump. The Democratic Party is a broad array of people.”
Spanberger urged fellow Democrats to tell voters that their party “focuses on the needs of people” but acknowledged “that will look different and sound different in some communities”.
Polling shows that the cost of living remains the most important issue for voters ahead of the midterm elections and a liability for Trump and the Republican Party. Some [68 per cent](https://archive.fo/o/5ACHP/https://www.ft.com/content/e8a0a845-c812-4158-ba1b-85613719f861) of voters in a June FT poll said they disapproved of the president’s handling of inflation and the cost of living.
In Virginia, Spanberger’s approval ratings have fallen sharply since she was sworn in as governor in January. A poll conducted in late June and early July by Virginia Commonwealth University showed them to be underwater, with just 38 per cent of Virginians saying the state was headed in the right direction.
Spanberger said the polling underscored the challenges for her and other elected officials in addressing voters’ concerns, especially about the cost of living.
“Everything is hard. People are worried, and it impacts every aspect of how they view things,” she said.
But the governor — who made her debut on the national political stage in 2018, when Democrats picked up dozens of House seats at the halfway point of Trump’s first term in office — projected cautious optimism that voters would turn out to back Democratic candidates up and down the ballot in November.
“In 2026, there are people who are too busy and too tired and too exhausted and too stressed out and too worried about their bills to go out and do the march or show up with the sign,” Spanberger said. “But they are going to vote.”
I like centrists to win but it seems like these groups are even more guilty of the “terminally online” accusation that they throw at leftists. I’ve said it in this sub before but it’s frankly astonishing that people, who have read *Tocqueville* in full during college and got straight As on their papers, now treat civic engagement with such neglect or even disdain
I read a story on the NYT that Democratic consultants apparently had a fucking lab to test Kamala’s ad, led by people like David Shor. And then somehow the end products were terrible, absolutely disgraceful how they burned through more than a billion doing that kind of shit. Like did you see the “she worked at McDonald’s” ad that tells us nothing about what she’s gonna do as president? You can’t make yourself look more human with cross tabs maxxing, even if you win it’s not sustainable power.
Georgia was turned blue by decades of good old grass roots organizing. Regaining the base for centrists needs to start there. Otherwise, don’t make me laugh, they couldn’t take down a single candidate running in 1 state with $60 million. What do they think their $15 million is gonna do nationally over 2 years, while Mamdani probably got more attention from 1 single video he posted on X? The establishment’s addiction with measuring strength by fundraising has got to stop. I don’t say go shun all the mega donors, but please don’t be dependent on insanely expensive campaigns.
Feel like the time for the Dem moderates to go to war against the ascendant left would have been BEFORE the left beat them in a bunch of primaries, not during the general election.
Maybe if they fought a war against the gop and Trump when we had power we wouldn’t be here. I’m not a leftist but you reap what you sow. You pick gutless people like garland to head your justice department, you keep the filibuster in tact and stall out your own agenda, you don’t fight harder against Trump you get this. I will back the new moderate wing once the current establishment is gone.