Latest news with #SlowBoring
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
"What it means to be a partisan centrist": At WelcomeFest, a billionaire-backed vision for Democrats
Centrist Democrats are trying to replicate the movement politics that drive the progressive wing of the party, but it's not clear that the party's moderates — boosted by billionaire donors — can build the same sort of grassroots support that has driven more left-wing campaigns. A political consultant and co-founder of the Welcome Party, Lauren Harper Pope, told Salon that 'WelcomeFest,' kicking off Wednesday in Washington, D.C., is the 'largest public gathering of centrist Democrats.' The goal, she said, is to seek 'advice from Democrats who overperformed this cycle' and discuss "what it means to be a partisan centrist." 'We respect the very robust and multifaceted effort on the progressive faction of the party over the last few years. They had a lot of clear coherency behind it, and there was a lot of action,' Harper Pope told Salon. 'We are essentially just trying to emulate that faction of the party.' The 2025 event, the theme of which is 'responsibility to win,' features elected Democrats such as Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash. The event also includes some notable figures from the party, like Adam Jentleson, Sen. John Fetterman's, D-Penn., former chief of staff; Derek Thompson, a columnist at The Atlantic and co-author of 'Abundance'; and Matt Yglesias, proprietor of 'Slow Boring' on Substack. Harper Pope described the Welcome Party and an associated PAC as an attempt to organize and support centrists in the Democratic Party, mirroring efforts by those on the more left-leaning side of the party. In terms of strategy, Harper Pope described a formation similar to that of the Justice Democrats, except instead of supporting progressives, the Welcome Party would support centrists. And, instead of putting up primary challengers against incumbents in deep blue districts, the Welcome Party would support candidates in purple districts where they think a more liberal candidate, who might prevail in a Democratic primary, would be at a disadvantage in a general election and might also be a mismatch for the district. Another key point of comparison is the funding behind the groups. While the Justice Democrats PAC received over 25,000 donations in 2024, a cycle when they were not even supporting new candidates, the Welcome PAC received just a few bulk of the PAC's money came from a handful of donors with familiar names, like James Murdoch, the liberal-leaning son of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Combined, James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn Murdoch, donated $2.5 million to the Welcome PAC in 2024, according to FEC filings. Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn founder and critic of former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, donated $671,000 to Welcome PAC in 2024. Samuel Walton, the grandson of Walmart founder Samuel Walton, donated $825,000 to Welcome PAC. Joshua Bekenstein, a co-chairman of Bain Capital, alongside his wife, Anita Bekenstein, donated a collective $375,000. Harper Pope said the goal, shared by centrist think tanks like Third Way, is to win by meeting voters where they are. A recent Gallup poll found that 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning moderates want the party to move toward the center. 'We want to be representative of the party overall, and I think the majority of those voters are people who are less progressive,' Harper Pope told Salon. 'If the centrist faction of the Democratic party can be strong, robust and vibrant, it can help us not only win more elections but also help us have the liberal democracy we aspire to.'
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Matthew Yglesias: Why New Jersey's Democratic Field Needs an Education Reform
A version of this essay appeared on Matthew Yglesias' Slow Boring, a site dedicated to offering pragmatic takes on politics and public policy. Normally, Virginia is the interesting off-year gubernatorial election, and New Jersey is pretty boring. But not this year. One reason is that Virginia has trended bluer across the last few presidential cycles, while New Jersey has gone in the other direction. Kamala Harris got a slightly higher share of the vote in the Old Dominion than in the Garden State, which is a sign of a new era. Plus, Virginia Democrats have an uncontested primary, and the nomination is going to Abigail Spanberger, a sensible moderate Democrat who seems perfectly suited to winning the state. Virginia currently has a Republican governor, so the state's soft Democrats don't have to worry about any backlash. And not only is the president a Republican, he's hammering the state with layoffs. Unless Spanberger screws up, she should win. Virginia's race is also not that interesting from a governance perspective. Even though Virginia is now pretty solidly blue, the Democratic Party has rarely held a trifecta, so the policy status quo is pretty clearly to the right of the electorate. Being a smart moderate Democrat in Virginia basically just means supporting the reasonable, politically viable progressive ideas and not the crazy ones, which requires good sense but not a ton of tough decision-making. New Jersey is different. The state is still solidly blue, and you'd expect the Democratic nominee to win, especially with Trump in office. But New Jersey Democrats face meaningful political headwinds, and if Kamala Harris were in office, they might be at real risk. The question of what to do as governor of the state is also trickier. Phil Murphy is wrapping up his second term, and Democrats controlled the state legislature for both terms. A same-party successor always has a tougher job in a situation like this, because the low-hanging fruit of the Democratic agenda has already been picked. New Jersey has a minimum wage of $15.49, indexed to inflation. They have legal marijuana. They have a generous Medicaid program. New Jersey has the second-highest taxes in America, according to the Tax Foundation's rankings. It's less obvious what the next Democratic governor is going to do here than in Virginia. And the field is large, with six primary candidates running. There are good choices in the mix. Mikie Sherrill is a smart, pragmatic member of Congress who's talking about the abundance agenda and seems to be leading the pack. Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, is a YIMBY champion who has walked the walk in a major way. Josh Gottheimer, another House member, is not my personal flavor of moderate, but he's got support from colleagues like Ritchie Torres, Tom Suozzi, and Jared Golden, who I respect a lot. I feel torn between Sherrill and Fulop, but honestly, it's an embarrassment of riches to have a field where Gottheimer is my No. 3 choice. Another of the candidates is Sean Spiller, president of the New Jersey Education Association — i.e. the state's teachers union. The New York Times recently had a piece on how unusual this situation is, with the union's super PAC spending $35 million to try to elect Spiller and rendering the polite myth of non-coordination between campaigns and super PACs unusually untenable. What the Times didn't talk about, though, was the part that I find genuinely odd, which is that nobody in the crowded field is taking the opportunity to smartly differentiate themselves on education. Democrats often seem reluctant to propose ideas that teachers unions don't like, because they want their support (or at least non-hostility) in a primary. But I'm pretty sure the NJEA is going to back Spiller no matter what Sherrill or Gottheimer or Fulop say, so why not be bolder? As covered previously on Slow Boring, one of the most underrated developments in recent political history is that Democrats have lost their traditionally large issue advantage on education. I think it's also worth noting that voters rate education as a pretty important issue — more important than the issues related to climate change, abortion and child care that have dominated the progressive agenda in recent years. The other thing about education is that while of course Democrats can't, and shouldn't, give up on trying to come up with smart, politically appealing things to say about immigration and crime, those are longstanding areas of GOP issue advantage. Fundamentally, voters want 'tough' policies on these issues. Even in 2020, the number of people who said the criminal justice system is not tough enough outnumbered those who said it was too tough by a 2:1 ratio, and mass opinion was more right-wing than that in every year both before and after 2020. And Democrats are just not the party that's seen as 'tough.' Education, though, is a classic liberal issue, like health care. The hard part for Democrats should be persuading the public to care more about education than about immigration, not convincing them that Democrats can be trusted to handle education policy. That loss of trust is multi-faceted, but I think it has to do not only with pandemic school closures per se, but with a larger vibe around school closures whereby Democrats started signaling that they don't really think education is particularly important. The prior cohort of Democrats wildly overpromised on education as a tool for achieving social equality, which unfortunately led the party to completely walk away from the question of how poor kids are doing in school. This was a mistake, because the evidence is overwhelming that school quality does, in fact, matter. Good schools don't generate equal outcomes for everyone, because students differ in their innate abilities and their life circumstances. But good schools still generate better outcomes than we'd see without good schools. And while I believe in the value of differentiated instruction, we don't face a sharp tradeoff at a systems level. During the era when education policy was overwhelmingly focused on low-end performance, students did better across the board. In the more recent era, low-end performance has declined precipitously and the performance of the top students is essentially flat. Related Weaker students and students from poorer families are, in practice, the canaries in the coal mine, because they're the ones who really depend on public policy rather than parental supplementation. But there's clearly a problem here, and Democrats should re-engage, because I think there are some pretty obvious ways to make things better: Make sure advanced coursework is fair with universal testing and default enrollment, but don't eliminate it in a misguided push for equality. Reform teacher compensation: Raise entry-level pay, reduce regulatory barriers to entry, stop giving raises for low-value credentials, start giving raises to above-average teachers (and even bigger raises to above-average teachers who are willing to work in tough schools) and reduce job security for the weakest performers. Allow (indeed, encourage) the most effective charter schools to expand, while shutting down the least-effective ones. More abstractly, though, I would love to see a return to the Obama-style message that education is important — certainly too important to trust to Republicans, who don't care and just want to cut and privatize everything, but also too important to spend money on without asking about results. On education, the candidates I like in New Jersey are … fine. Fulop, as a housing-forward candidate, is very interested in school segregation: Despite being the most diverse state in the country, New Jersey has the dubious distinction of having some of the most segregated schools in the country. The next governor needs to address this issue head-on as a 'fair & efficient education' includes diversity. In Year 1, Gov. Fulop will impanel an independent board of educators, activists and state leaders tasked with producing a comprehensive, statewide plan to address segregation, including economic and social factors. I agree with him that this is important and that it's a noteworthy aspect of the New Jersey status quo. But an expert panel is going to tell him what he already knows, namely that school segregation is largely downstream of housing market dynamics. And Fulop knows the score on housing. But if anything, I think this linkage just goes to show that YIMBYs need to think more about K-12 education. The vast majority of anti-YIMBY arguments are nonsense. But a clearly true fact is that if more people lived in your town, some of them would send kids to your town's public schools. If the school system does a good job, this is a pure logistics issue — more students requires more classrooms and more buildings. But a lot of suburban Americans are relying on socioeconomic segregation as their de facto education policy. Democrats in particular often seem more comfortable zoning low-income families out of whole communities than they do guaranteeing that schools will have reasonable discipline policies, ability-appropriate math coursework and best practices in literacy instruction. New Jersey needs better housing policy, but to get there, state officials need to take these questions of functioning public services seriously. Sherrill says: Across New Jersey, students in every district continue to face post-pandemic struggles with mental health and learning loss. That's why I fought to bring back federal funding to safely reopen schools and get kids back on track, including by introducing legislation to provide high-quality tutoring to students. As governor, we'll expand on this progress by supporting effective programs — like high-impact tutoring — that address learning loss. We'll address the mental health crisis by increasing the number of school counselors, psychologists and mental health services in our schools. And as a mom of four, I know that kids learn better when their stomachs are full. I will make school meals available at no cost for every student in New Jersey because we know good nutrition is essential to academic achievement. If a candidate asked me for a bunch of K-12 education ideas that make sense on the merits but won't provoke any clashes with unions or the progressive education establishment, this list is basically what I'd give them. But thinking about it seriously, if we're talking about learning loss (and we should be), shouldn't we be talking about the old education reform standbys of standards and accountability? High-dosage tutoring is a good idea, but it's weird to put all the responsibilities for improving outcomes on tutors rather than everything else that happens in school buildings. More mental health inputs sounds like a good idea, but are we going to measure the outputs? We know that across the board in education, more inputs usually help. But just adding inputs is no substitute for measuring outcomes. The centerpiece of Gottheimer's whole campaign is that he wants to cut taxes and largely pay for it with government efficiency undertakings. He can't do that without taking on some entrenched interests, and K-12 education is obviously one of the biggest line items. 'Cut wasteful school spending so you can cut taxes' is not my favorite brand of moderation (I would rather reinvest the money in making schools better), but it's not an unreasonable idea. Again, though, Gottheimer doesn't call out any specific education changes or cross any union red lines. The education reform spirit is not entirely dead within the Democratic Party. Recently, Senators Cory Booker (whose star is back on the rise thanks to his talking filibuster), Brian Schatz (a leading contender to succeed Chuck Schumer) and Michael Bennet (who's running for governor of Colorado) were the Democratic sponsors of a bipartisan bill promoting charter schools. Both Fulop and Sherrill have made friendly visits to charter schools in the terrain they represent — they're not wild ideologues on this issue or, as far as I can tell, any other. But the sense that it's cool to occasionally be at odds with teachers unions has definitely vanished. In the 2016 primary, Hillary Clinton broke with Barack Obama on education reform to score union support against Bernie Sanders, and Sanders lacked the creativity or ideological flexibility to make lemonade and present himself as more moderate than Clinton on this. In the 2020 primary cycle, Booker's record as an education reformer was seen as a problem for him, and he never really ran on it. Joe Biden seems to have sincerely disagreed with Obama about this and did not stand up for the Obama-Biden administration's legacy on education. I thought Julian Castro, who was in the Obama cabinet, might pick up the baton, but he went the other way. I was disappointed by the trajectory of education policy in both of those cycles, but I did understand what everyone was thinking. The New Jersey gubernatorial primary, by contrast, seems like a situation where there is an objective incentive for someone to take some positions fearlessly, without regard for union politics. For starters, it's a six-candidate field. The latest poll I saw had Sherrill leading the field with 20%, followed by Fulop at 14%, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka at 12%t, Gottheimer at 11%, Spiller at 9% and former state senate leader Steve Sweeney at 8%. In a field that big, almost anything you can do to stand out from the pack can be helpful. You also don't need to take positions that a majority of Democratic Party primary voters agree with. Of course, taking positions the general electorate finds toxic would be a bad idea, but that's not what we're talking about here. And, again, to end where I began, the head of the teachers union is literally a candidate in the race. If the union is already committed to beating you, why not try to reap the upside by showing some refreshing boldness and independence of thought? I think it was a mistake of Sanders not to seize this opportunity in 2016, but I get that he is literally Bernie Sanders, not someone who is inclined to take a heterodox position on a union issue, even if the relevant union is trying to beat him. But Fulop and Gottheimer and Sherrill are not Bernie Sanders — this seems more like passivity than ideological rigidity. People forget that until recently, we had a lot of education reform Democrats, and it's not as if they got knocked off in droves in primaries. The Obama legacy was abandoned at the presidential level for quirky, contingent reasons, and abandoning it hasn't worked out well for the party. This weird Spiller ego trip is both a reminder that unions sometimes make bad calls due to weird leadership priorities and also an opportunity to assert a common-sense approach to public services. You can respect public school teachers and labor unions and also understand that the job of the union is to advocate for the interests of the service providers, while the job of an elected official is to advocate for the partially overlapping interests of the people who use the services. In fact, I feel like the New Jersey field includes multiple candidates who almost certainly get this. So why not say it?
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Dem Overseeing ‘Digital Assets' to Hold Luxury Retreat With Crypto Kingpin
Freshman Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego was recently named the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee's new subcommittee on 'digital assets,' which will oversee cryptocurrencies. Next month, Gallego will hold a ritzy donor retreat alongside one of the crypto industry's biggest cheerleaders and investors, Marc Andreessen. The prolific political blogger Matt Yglesias will be a featured speaker at the Gallego event alongside Andreessen, a co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, according to an invite obtained by Rolling Stone. The invite suggests donations of $5,000 to attend the retreat, which is set to take place over three days at the luxury oasis L'Auberge de Sedona. (The cheapest accommodation available for out-of-state visitors that weekend, according to the resort's website, is $1,809 per night, with a two-night minimum.) Donations will benefit Gallego's leadership PAC, called Juntos PAC. Representatives for Gallego did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Rolling Stone, asking if the senator thought it was appropriate to hold a fundraising retreat with one of the major funders of a pro-crypto Super PAC while also serving as ranking member on the Senate subcommittee overseeing the industry. (Andreessen Horowitz and Yglesias did not immediately respond to inquiries.) Andreessen actively advised Donald Trump as he assembled his new pro-crypto administration. (Speaking on Bari Weiss' podcast in December, Andreessen said he'd been spending half his time at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort. 'I've been trying to help in as many ways as I can,' he said.) His VC firm recently drew headlines for hiring ex-marine Daniel Penny, who was recently acquitted after choking a homeless man to death on a New York City subway on video. A crypto industry Super PAC called Protect Progress spent $10 million boosting Gallego's 2024 Senate campaign. Protect Progress and its parent organization, Fairshake, received $138 million last election cycle from Andreessen, co-founder Ben Horowitz, and their firm, which has invested in crypto for years and lobbies extensively on crypto issues. 'The crypto industry has very quickly become one of the major players in the campaign finance system, and crypto money has been deployed in very aggressive and strategic ways,' says Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer and deputy executive director at the watchdog group Documented. 'Throughout the 2024 cycle, we saw crypto money deployed to take out crypto critics and support crypto backers, and this might be an indication of how crypto not only attacks its enemies, but also also rewards its friends.' Yglesias, who runs the blog Slow Boring, noted in a 2023 disclosure that he 'knew [Gallego] a little in college' and that he is very close with the senator's former chief of staff. Gallego recently took over the Arizona Senate seat vacated by Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat-turned-independent. Gallego's entrance into the Senate race was seen as a victory for progressives, who were infuriated by Sinema's repeated efforts to obstruct President Joe Biden's policy agenda. While Gallego effectively forced her out of the race and into retirement, he ended up campaigning as a moderate — and cozying up to the crypto industry. The freshman senator is now the ranking member on the Senate's subcommittee on digital assets, which has jurisdiction over cryptocurrencies, crypto trading platforms, and the agencies that regulate them. Sinema, for her part, recently joined the global advisory council of Coinbase, a crypto exchange that invested heavily in the industry Super PACs that supported Gallego's bid. More from Rolling Stone Patrick Mahomes Debunks Trump's Weird Lie About His College Career Kanye West on X: 'Elon Stole My Nazi Swag' 'Thrown Out Like Garbage': Inside the Last Days of USAID Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
