Not just Mamdani: Centrist Democrats can win on affordability, too

Washington Post

7 hours ago

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) still remembers her best tip ever, when she was a college student waiting tables outside Minneapolis for the local NHL team's holiday party.
'Nobody can party like hockey players,' Rosen said, recalling how they showed off their sport's hard-hitting nature by pulling out their fake teeth. 'They drank and spent so much money.'
More than 45 years later, Rosen — who moved to Nevada after graduating from the University of Minnesota — has emerged as the biggest Democratic booster of a signature economic proposal from President Donald Trump.
She co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to fulfill Trump's 2024 campaign promise for 'no taxes on tips,' the type of issue she experienced firsthand when the Minnesota North Stars left her a nearly $300 tip.
A version of that legislation is tucked into the massive tax and immigration bill that Republicans are trying to pass on a party-line vote in the coming days.
While every Democrat in Congress, including Rosen, opposes that broad legislation — largely because of its cuts to Medicaid — the Cruz bill won a unanimous vote last month in the Senate. If the massive legislation fails, Rosen will push her allies in the House to move a stand-alone tip bill to the president's desk.
Her effort, fresh off a successful reelection bid in 2024, serves as a model for Democrats searching for a moderate approach to winning in swing districts and battleground states.
Democrats are deep into internal battles drawn over generational and ideological fault lines and are debating how to use modern communications to get out their message. Many on the left see a model for winning in Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist poised to win the Democratic New York mayoral primary after running an online savvy campaign touting progressive ideas to fight inflation.
Some centrist Democrats have pushed back against Mamdani for his far-left proposals, including free bus service and government-owned grocery stores.
But similarities in the 33-year-old's mayoral bid and the 67-year-old senator's approach show the path to winning coalitions.
Nevada was the only state that had twice voted against Trump but flipped to him last year — from a roughly 2.5 percentage point defeat in 2016 and 2020 to a more than 3 percentage point victory in 2024.
But Rosen beat Trump-endorsed Republican Sam Brown by nearly 1.7 percentage points by embracing an aggressive approach to fighting inflation while positioning herself as an authentic voice, someone who didn't run her first political campaign until her late 50s.
Rosen has held victory parties at Caesars Palace to remind folks that she was a cocktail waitress there. She gives off the political vibe of an encouraging aunt rather than career politician.
'It was really important to me to be present to people, for people, to listen to their stories,' she said in a recent interview. 'My motto is agree where you can, fight where you must.'
In five presidential battleground states that hosted key Senate races, Democrats won four. Rosen was running her second statewide race ever, while Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) were running their first and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) was running her third.
Incumbent Bob Casey, who lost in Pennsylvania, was running his eighth statewide bid in three decades.
Two figures from opposite ends of the Democratic ideology spectrum recently noted Mamdani, a state lawmaker since 2021, offered a fresh alternative to former governor Andrew M. Cuomo, 67, with personal scandal baggage.
'The people are clearly asking for generational change,' Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), a liberal icon, told reporters.
'They are looking for a new generation of leadership,' Slotkin said during a policy address touting her centrist vision.
Republicans take a different view of Rosen's and Slotkin's victories, blaming their big-money donors for not believing in the GOP nominees until it was too late.
'Many didn't believe we had a chance to win. And the money was late breaking there. But I think had we had the resources earlier, Sam Brown would have won,' Sen. Steve Daines (Montana), who chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee last year, said in a brief interview.
Rosen raised about $50 million for her campaign, more than twice as much as Brown's, and outside political groups favored Rosen by an edge of about $55 million to $45 million, according to Open Secrets.
Rosen received 4,000 fewer votes than Kamala Harris did at the top of the Democratic ticket, while Brown fell about 75,000 votes shy of Trump's tally.
Rosen did have better appeal than Harris in what Nevadans call 'the rurals,' lightly populated conservative areas far from the Las Vegas Strip. Humboldt County, in the northernmost stretch of the state, favored Trump by more than 4,400 votes while Brown won by 3,662 votes.
Rosen believes that national Democrats face higher hurdles in rural areas where they never campaign and end up branded with 'all that noise' from conservative media outlets. She overcame some of that as an incumbent senator with time to visit those parts of the state.
'You can't be everywhere. But in Nevada and some other states, people can really get to know you. So it is absolutely an advantage,' Rosen said.
Rosen instantly knew the moment Trump started talking about 'no taxes on tips' that it would resonate in a state where roughly 1 in 4 workers are in the hospitality industry. They probably either receive tips or have close friends and family working for tips.
That industry got crushed during the pandemic, and now inflation has prompted another decline in tourist visits to Las Vegas.
'It's such a variable job. You don't know what your tips are going to be day in and day out. One day good, one day not so good,' Rosen said.
While Harris also supported eliminating taxes on tips, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (Nevada) was the only other Democrat to join Rosen in co-sponsoring Cruz's bill. Culinary Workers Union Local 226, Nevada's largest union, also endorsed the proposal.
Some Democrats on Capitol Hill have been hesitant to embrace the no-tax-on-tips policy, worried it is unfair to workers who receive a regular hourly wage.
Critics of the proposal say the biggest beneficiaries of such a policy are staff at high-end restaurants who are already making high salaries, not the lowest-paid workers in the service industry. It could create a rush on employers shifting their workers into a tipped-wage system, leading to customers facing tip requests in places that rarely used to have them.
But Rosen knew that Nevada, with the lowest percentage of college graduates of any battleground state, would embrace a proposal that appealed to its working-class image.
'We're always trying to find ways to put more money back into people's pockets,' the onetime culinary union member said.
Without a deeply partisan background, she doesn't hesitate to break from her party's orthodoxy on issues including crime and border security. Rosen used her financial edge to start airing ads at least six months ahead of the election that ref far-left ideas such as defunding the police and open borders.
'I work with both parties on things like helping veterans exposed to burn pits and stood up to my own party to support police officers and get more funding for border security,' she said in one ad.
Many of these positions run counter to the ideas embraced by Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).
But some Democrats point to issues Mamdani highlighted as appealing to most voters, allowing swing-district candidates to graft their own policy prescriptions into what fits their voters.
'It's not the left versus the middle — to win, it must be both. Mamdani's focus helps preview many of the issues liberals and moderates can embrace: affordability, quality of life and opposing slashing health care,' Steve Israel, the former New York Democratic congressman who ran the party's House campaign operation for four years, wrote in his Substack after the mayoral primary.
For Rosen, that lesson goes all the way back to the time a bunch of professional hockey players got rowdy and left her a massive pile of cash.
Rosen, who can't remember if she reported that tip on her taxes, moved away a few years later, and the North Stars became the Dallas Stars.
But she always remember that lesson, one that resonates with a huge amount of voters in Nevada.
'Your tips were everything,' she said.