Centrists Are So Desperate They're Faking Polls Now

A new WelcomePAC report is all the rage in the centrist world. The only problem? They faked their Medicare for All polling.

There’s a new report out from

The Welcome Party

(a.k.a. WelcomePAC) arguing Democrats must move to the right — or “moderate,” as the authors put it —to win elections. Predictably named “Deciding to Win: Toward a Common Sense Renewal of the Democratic Party,” this paper makes the same argument made by The New York Times Editorial Board, which is the same argument made weekly in Slow Boring, which is the same argument made on every episode of The Ezra Klein Show, which is the same argument made on… You get the point. To be frank, I’m tired of debunking the never-ending centrist excuse train. Every entry uses the same boilerplate shoddy arguments and illogic to excuse their humiliating 2024 defeat: First, they claim Kamala Harris lost because she was “too far left.” Then they say this was the fault of progressive activists who control the Democratic Party. Every blog, report, study, whatever-they-want-to-call-it relies on Split Ticket’s WAR methodology, which measures Senatorial and House candidate performance against the party’s presidential candidate performance. I don’t put too much stock into WAR, as presidential candidate performance isn’t a solid baseline. For example, Kamala Harris, the centrist Democratic candidate, lost the election in part by pushing progressive voters out of the Democratic coalition, which, of course, will impact how many progressive-inclined voters cast down-ballot votes. Every argument I’ve seen using WAR cites dubious datapoints ostensibly saying Democrats should moderate. But the one datapoint they all forget to analyze is that centrist Kamala Harris lost to extremist Donald Trump. Funny how that one falls by the wayside.

Whenever the centrists launch another study saying Democrats should moderate.

No matter how they get there, all these impartial, sober, Very Serious analyses reach the same conclusion: despite being dogwalked for over a decade by a convicted felon game show host, the Democratic establishment, and more importantly, the centrist pundits who write these self-reassuring arguments, were Actually Correct all along! Their solution is not to disregard those who led the Democrats to record-low approval ratings, but to listen to the even more. In my mind, losing elections means you were wrong and should probably rethink some things. Thank goodness we have this new report to correct my foolish ways.

Honestly, this argument is such a clear attempt by liberal pundits to salvage their influence, careers, and egos that I was going to skip this report and write about something else. At this point, refuting centrists has the same effect as arguing with MAGA. No matter how many times you tell a Donald Trump fanboy he lost the 2020 election, they’ll point to some irrelevant vote-count irregularity in rural Georgia as somehow definitive proof the election was rigged. Similarly, no matter how many times you remind the centrists their ideal candidate lost the 2024 election, they’ll point to a +.2% vote difference between Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris in Vermont as somehow definitive proof their failed campaign was a success. (Such discrepancies are explained by down-ballot absenteeism, in which a third of voters don’t fill out the full ballot. They are aware of this, but I digress.¹) Going forward, I’m not going to waste your time every time the centrist commentariat opens their echo chamber to the public. But there’s one element of the Deciding to Win report that stands out from the other centrist excuse entries, which is why I believe it’s worth your attention. While I wouldn’t say the 2024 excuse parade features the most honest participants (cough* cough* Matt Yglesias), I have yet to see any of them purposefully cook a poll to get the results they want — which is exactly what WelcomePAC did.

The report’s executive summary offers five changes Democrats should take to win elections. Here’s point #2:

[Democrats should] advocate for popular economic policies (e.g., expanding prescription drug price negotiation, making the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour) rather than unpopular economic policies (e.g., student loan forgiveness, electric vehicle subsidies, Medicare for All).

This jumped out to me, as Medicare for All is not an unpopular policy. Reputable, recent polls have found the program to have a strong net approval (the difference between a polling question’s favorable and unfavorable rating). Morning Consult found net support for Medicare for All at +23, YouGov found it at +30, and The Economist, no friend of socialism, found support at +32.²³⁴ However, WelcomePAC’s poll claims Medicare for All has a net approval of -11. The average of the above non-ideological polls is +28.3, meaning Deciding To Win’s -11 approval for Medicare for All is 39 points away from the average response. I won’t claim to be a polling guru (because I’m not), but such a drastic outlier should make the authors reconsider their results. Which they likely would have, if they were honestly trying to find how American voters feel about socialized health insurance. But truth was not their goal.

When we look into how Deciding To Win framed the Medicare for All question, we see the cause of the discrepancy. Here’s how the centrist think tank presented the question of Medicare For All to their respondents:

Some Democrats in Congress have proposed a “Medicare for All” plan that would spend $2 trillion a year to create a government-run health insurance plan that would cover all Americans and eliminate all existing private health insurance plans. This new plan would eliminate monthly premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs. This policy would be funded by increasing the payroll tax from its current level of 15% of wage income to a new level of 32% of wage income.⁵

In the words of Tyler the Creator, “That’s a fucking lie.”

The Medicare for All bill currently in Congress, the Medicare for All Act of 2025, was introduced by Pramila Jayapal in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate. Neither resolution calls for the +17% increase on payroll taxes Deciding to Win says it does. (Thanks to

Scarlet

for calling this out.) Bernie Sanders has published a list of options to fund socialized health insurance, ranging from a wealth tax on the top 0.1% of earners to a 7.5% employer-paid payroll tax, exempting businesses with annual revenues under $2 million.⁶⁷ So, where did Welcome get this 32% payroll tax rate for their questionnaire? The only place I could find a Medicare for All funding plan with a 32% payroll tax was this 2020 report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Much like WelcomePAC, the CRFB is an anti-progressive, corporate interest group disguised as an impartial, non-ideological actor. Described by one journalist as “a billionaire’s front group that likes to portray itself as a neutral budget watchdog”, the CRFB attacks established and hopeful progressive polices under the guise of fiscal responsibility. If you go to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s homepage, you’ll find arguments supporting Trump’s plan to cut Obamacare subsidies and a plea to “save” Social Security by capping cost-of-living adjustments.⁸ The CRFB is funded by billionaire donation groups such as William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Arnold Ventures, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the political outlet of the late billionaire who served in Richard Nixon’s cabinet. CRFB’s president is Maya MacGuineas, a former Wall Street analyst who advised John McCain’s presidential campaign. Given her ability to disguise hard-right attacks on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as non-partisan issues, McGuineas has a well-earned spot on the

Revolving Door Project

’s Hackwatch database. Though the report doesn’t say it uses the CRFB’s deceitful funding method for Medicare for All, one of the report’s authors,

Simon Bazelon

, admitted they used CFRB’s funding methods after I pressed him on the discrepancy between his poll and the non-ideological consensus.

In other words,

The Welcome Party

found the worst framing of Medicare for All they could from a Republican-aligned think tank and presented it to survey respondents as how progressive Democrats wanted to fund the program. When the responses came in negative, as they knew they would, WelcomePAC featured the cooked poll in their executive summary of the “report,” urging Democrats to move to the right. It’s shocking, but not surprising. What is surprising is how they thought they could get away with it.

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If you read the Deciding to Win report, which frankly, is not worth your time, you’ll find it follows the Condescending Centrist Style Guide: the authors present themselves as sage truth tellers who are Above It All, unconstrained by the ideology and morality that mislead other political actors. The report’s conclusion implores the reader to face “difficult truths” and urges Democrats to moderate so they can win elections and protect Americans from harmful Republican policies. As they write, “The stakes are too high for us to do anything less.” In this regard, I fully agree with the authors of Deciding to Win. The Republican Party is a fascist, pedophilic institution that worsens life for everyone on the planet; capitalists, sex traffickers, and Trump donors excluded. They murder South Americans for boating in international waters, are turning ICE into paramilitary brownshirts loyal solely to the executive, and are openly planning to arrest dissidents and rig upcoming elections. Though my politics are not represented in the Democratic party, I would like them to win to block Republicans from gaining institutional power to do The Worst Things Imaginable. Unfortunately, the authors of Deciding To Win, and the rest of the withering centrist establishment, are not willing to take their own advice and face hard truths that challenge their ideology. Rather than ask voters if they approve of the progressive policy of Medicare for All, WelcomePAC used the worst-sounding funding mechanism they could find for their questionnaire to create a negative favorability rating to support the “move right” story they want to tell. Once the poll delivered the result they wanted, they lied by claiming their bad-faith question was how congressional Democrats planned to fund Medicare for All and featured it as the core of their report. To say this is unethical is a gross understatement. But Welcome’s deceit goes far beyond simply rigging polls.

Co-authoring the report with Simon Bazelon are Welcome’s Co-Founders,

Liam Kerr

and

Lauren Harper Pope

. Almost as soon as Harris conceded on election night, Harper Pope and Kerr began the retroactive continuity attempt (a.k.a. retcon) to place responsibility for the defeat at the feet of progressives. (This report is the latest attempt to build this baseless narrative.) Here’s Harper Pope writing here on Substack last week:

“[Democrats have] shifted from the 2012 platform to the 2024 platform because the Democratic Party has been overtaken by an activist class that works to advance the priorities of progressives – not the sentiments of the median voter.” — Deciding To Win: How We Got Here

That is very different from what Harper Pope was writing last year. Both she and Kerr ran a “Kamala Is Moderate” weekly digest celebrating the Democrats’ centrist bona fides in the run-up to the election. Writing in October of 2024, Harper Pope gushed over the Harris-Cheney rally, saying it “gave centrists all the feels.” She even encouraged the presumptive first female president to staff her administration with centrists, Cheney included.

Do these people know the internet is public?

The reason I decided to write about the blatantly false Deciding To Win report is not that it’s untrue, but that it offers a window into the centrist establishment. JoeWrote has a long backlog of critiquing this ideology, but to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen them go through the effort of conducting blatantly false surveys and then lying about them in highly publicized reports. (Within days of publication, Simon Bazelon was promoting his findings on Vox,

Central Air

,

Slow Boring

, and a slew of other centrist publications.) This is a new tactic, and it shows just how desperate these people are to wrestle control of the Democratic Party away from the progressive wing. And while I find their deceit unethical — and ultimately, a surefire way to lose more elections — their analysis of intra-Democrat dynamics isn’t wrong. The Democratic base is moving left. Bernie Sanders is the most popular Senator in the country, and every politician who’s ever shared an elevator with AOC is being asked if she’s primarying Chuck Schumer. The saga of Graham Platner’s past Reddit posts and Nazi-like tattoo has gotten a lot of media attention, but I think the real story is that Democratic voters are done listening to the voices behind Deciding To Win. It’s been a couple of weeks since Chuck Schumer’s opposition dump landed, and it doesn’t look like voters care. As one voter told the Times, “We’re done taking advice about electability from a party that has so consistently failed to elect people.”⁹ As a leftwing Democratic Party would be hostile to corporate interests, corporations such as Hi-School Pharmacy fund WelcomePAC with the understanding that they’ll publish ‘reports’ like these that protect their profits by throwing cold water on Medicare for All. Other WelcomePAC donors include members of the conservative media mogul Murdoch family (which owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) and the Waltons, owners of Walmart.¹⁰ For a group that claims to want to help Democrats, they sure do seem to take a lot of money and direction from Republicans.

Donation to WelcomePAC, courtesy of Open Secrets.

But this desperation isn’t solely being driven by corporate donors. Like every ideology, centrist liberalism has a cottage industry of pundits, commentators, and commentators posing as data analysts who have a career plan contingent on the Democrats remaining a centrist party. Unlike a Republican victory, progressive wins threaten these ladder climbers. They watched their establishment Republican equivalents be ousted from influence by the Tea Party, and are wary of suffering the same fate. If worst comes to worst, they might have to get a real job — the horror! That’s why they downplay Zohran Mamdani’s resounding defeat of ten other centrist Democrats in the New York City mayoral primary as a fluke. If they acknowledged it for the impressive feat it is, The Welcome Party, The New York Times Editorial Board, The Argument, and the rest of the small-but-loud centrist commentariat would watch their once-iron grip on the Democratic Party slip. As their days of influence appear to be coming to a close, they’re growing more and more desperate to retain their influence, leading to outlandish statements such as this report’s author suggesting Democrats follow the “moderate” example of a literal Ku Klux Klan member.

Personally, I do not consider the KKK "moderate."

While the authors of Deciding to Win positioned their report’s findings as a sober need for Democrats to move to the right, the only thing this report shows is that the Democratic corporatists are feeling the pressure of a rising left. Rather than admit their politics have failed to either improve American livelihood or defeat Republican fascism, they’d rather to lie to your face and mislead Democrats about what voters really want, increasing the chance of GOP domination in the future. If you’re confident in your political position, you don’t need to cook the polls and lie about a presidential election we can all remember. The fact that WelcomePAC, and the centrist establishment, now feels the need to do both says more about the centrist ideology than the progressive one.

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In Solidarity — Joe

1. https://www.usvotefoundation.org/downballot

2. https://pro.morningconsult.com/articles/medicare-for-all-public-option-polling

3. https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/Health_Care_poll_results.pdf

4. https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_haeOEK5.pdf

5. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/15-RD5e9yzHqSu_d-5hgHr71x9xuY76gE_kZt0jWawS4/htmlview#gid=552337549

6. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1506

7. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/options-to-finance-medicare-for-all.pdf

8. https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-social-security-gop-20161209-story.html

9. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/opinion/graham-platner-democrats.html

10. https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/welcomepac/C00786830/donors/2024?start=25&page_length=25