The Search for an Exciting Moderate

**Jon Favreau** (0:20)
Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. On today's show, writer and founder of the slow boring newsletter, Matt Yglesias.
We've had a lot of people on the show critique the case for why the Democratic Party should move to the left, and a lot of progressive candidates who represent that direction. We've also had plenty of people, including us, critique the Democratic establishment. We haven't really had someone on, at least in a while, make a full-throated case for a center-left politics that emphasizes moderation. I know that probably sounds exciting and not at all annoying to many of you.
Matt recently wrote a piece titled, How the Center-Left Can Come Back in 2028, that's based in part on a series of critical, tough questions that Nate Silver recently posed to the center-left. I found both Nate's questions and Matt's response really useful in understanding where folks like Matt are coming from, and what they're looking for from the party in 2028 and beyond. I also had plenty of questions of my own, so I invited Matt on to see if he had some answers, and he did.
We talked about how important issue positions are in a presidential primary, the role of charisma in the ability to get attention, why Democrats have lost in recent elections, and who on the current bench might be able to win in 2028 It was a great conversation, and we will get to it in a moment. Before we do, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to Friends of the Pod. Subscribers unlock ad-free episodes of all their favorite Crooked Pods, including Pod Save America, all our great subscriber-only newsletters, and exclusive subscriber-only podcasts like Pod Save America Only Friends and Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer. Plus, becoming a subscriber is the best way to support your favorite pro-democracy independent media company. Head on over to crooked.com/friends to subscribe. Matt, welcome to Pod Save America.

**Matt Yglesias** (2:02)
Really good to be here.

**Jon Favreau** (2:03)
So I wanted to talk about the factional debate within the Democratic Party over how to actually win some national elections and thought, who better to do that with than the online left's favorite pundit who can faithfully represent the views of the neolib shill faction?
And I think a good place to start is with your recent piece about how the center left can come back in 2028, where one big answer is that the center left needs a 2028 presidential primary campaign that articulates its critique of the status quo. Before we get to the critique itself, why a presidential campaign?

**Matt Yglesias** (2:41)
You know, I think something we see in politics is that political parties are really defined by their presidential campaigns and by their leadership. Everybody, I mean, you, me, people with all different kinds of ideological viewpoints are frustrated about where Democrats are at now, and they want them to be clearer and have a better message.
But realistically, there's just not that much that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries can do. You're herding cats on Capitol Hill. It's presidential campaigns. Donald Trump comes in, he wins the nomination. It totally redefines what the Republican Party is about for good and for ill. And that's what's going to happen in 28, right? There's going to be a contest, somebody is going to win it. That person will be the leader. What Democrats stand for is going to be largely whatever it is that person stands for. And until then, you try to have good candidates in the key races, you hope they win.
Everyone's going to have some who they like more than others, but it's like it's going to be a mess.

**Jon Favreau** (3:41)
Yeah, I thought about that after the 2025 off-year elections, when everyone had this Goldilocks view of it where they're like, well, you had some more center-left moderate candidates winning in some places, and Mamdani wins in New York, and so it's all great. We don't have to fight that much. It's like, well, yeah, it's easier to do in a midterm or a set of off-year elections than a presidential election. That's where the rubber hits the road. So you make clear that this center-left critique is a critique of what you call the Clinton-Biden-Harris-Schumer status quo.
How would you describe that status quo, and what is your critique of it?

**Matt Yglesias** (4:17)
Sure, so I think there's been some pretty dramatic leftward moves in the Democratic Party since Barack Obama's second term.
And this has not been like the left, quote-unquote, Bernie Sanders, his people, taking the party over. It's been establishment stewardship. But they've shifted on a lot of different things.
Some of them minor, some of them big. I mean, I think a notable one that I read about in the piece is education policy, where without really like a huge rankerous debate about it, ideas about performance pay for teachers, ideas about supporting high-performing charter schools, that the Obama White House had championed, and it was controversial at the time inside the party, just sort of went in the other direction. And then we had a lot of discussion about this around COVID and school closures and different things there. But Democrats had an identity as a party of reform of the public sector that has sort of gone away in that regard.