The New York Times Says "Centrism Is The Way To Win!" Reality Begs To Differ.
Trust me bro, centrism will work THIS time. Just one more chance. Please bro, I promise it'll work.
It’s not often I compliment screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. I’ve found most of his creations bland and condescending, if not harmful. His iconic show, The West Wing, convinced a generation of liberal politicians and staffers that politics was won through Facts, Logic, and moving speeches underscored by dramatic ballads. Hopeful Democratic operatives took the Sorkin worldview to Washington, where it left them unprepared for reality. Not only does the Republican Party not care about truth, but they’d rather kill their constituents by defunding rural hospitals and refusing Medicare expansion than work with a Democrat. Obama, Biden, and Harris all tried to embrace the GOP to appear like Respectable Bipartisans, only for the Republicans to spit in their faces. When Sorkin returned to political television with Newsroom, his unrealistic worldview (and rampant misogyny) guided his portrayal of American media. But at least he cooked with the opening scene, in which the main character asks a liberal pundit: “If liberals are so fucking smart, how come they lose so God damn always?”
For all Sorkin’s faults, he certainly understood what was wrong with the Democratic establishment. No matter how many times they get trounced by the Republicans, they insist that they’re The Adults In The Room who know how to win. Instead of facing the obvious conclusion — that the current centrist model of free market economics,1 imperialist foreign policy, and social progressivism is weak against the modern Republican Party — they retreat into pseudo-intellectual explanations for why centrist losses are actually victories. I’ve written about this extensively in the wake of the Democrats’ 2024 defeat, but the latest attempt from The New York Times Editorial Board cannot be ignored. Entitled The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win, this analysis displays how out-of-touch liberal thought leaders are and how they misunderstand political reality. It’s advice like this that sets the Democrats up for failure, and ultimately hands control of the United States government to Donald Trump and his band of fascists.
The basis for the the Times editorial is the chart below mapping Congresspeople who won their 2024 race in a district that voted for the other party’s presidential candidate. The horizontal axis shows the 2024 presidential election vote margin. Trump-dominated district (+10 R) are on the right and Harris-dominated districts (+10 D) are on the left. The vertical axis shows each candidate’s margin of victory. As you can see, they argue that the candidates who won in close districts were centrist moderates.
Here’s how the NYT describes the findings:
American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes. President Trump is carrying out far-right policies, while some of the country’s highest-profile Democrats identify as democratic socialists. Moderation sometimes feels outdated. It is not. Candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left.
What the NYT mistakes (or possibly misrepresents) is that its horizontal axis, representing the 2024 election, is not a left-right spectrum. Kamala Harris was a centrist candidate. We know this because centrist pundits such as Matt Yglesias and Jonathan Chait loudly proclaimed that Harris’ campaign was centrist and scolded those who wanted it to be more progressive. (Both have since tried to pretend she was a progressive to excuse their defeat.) If Kamala Harris were a left-wing candidate, the above chart would make sense. If the contest was between the left and the right, and the right wing presidential candidate won while the congressional Democrats who won in Trump-voting districts were moderates, that would validate the author’s claims that centrism is the Way to Win. But that’s neither what happened nor what this visual shows. This model isn’t a left-right spectrum that shows the path to political victory lies in the center. It is a center-to-far-right chart that accurately reflects the binary choices Americans were given last November (and every election previously). Americans were asked, “Do you want President Donald Trump, who admits your problems are real and offers insane solutions pulled from The Turner Diaries? Or, do you want President Kamala Harris who pledged to uphold the status quo?” By now, we should all accept that Americans will chose the former. It is ridiculous to argue “the center is the way to win” when, in an election between the center and the right, the center lost! You can’t model-away reality. Not only does this essay never address that Kamala Harris was a centrist who lost, but it never addresses that these Democratic moderates lost the House! If this argument were correct, then Democrats would control the Presidency, the House, and the Senate. After all, the Democrats are a centrist party competing against an extreme right-wing party. Do they control the Presidency, House, and Senate? No. They lost all three, and the Supreme Court because tepid liberalism has neither the awareness nor the will to fight for power outside of biennial elections in a managed democracy.
The article doesn’t say it explicitly (because admitting the centrist candidate lost would undercut the whole argument), but the author’s subtext is the unfounded claim that progressive or leftist candidates would have lost by more than the centrists. To make this point, the author misrepresents the leftist position and blames the faults of the Democratic Party — which is run by centrists — on the left. In portraying the progressive electoral strategy, the NYT builds this straw man:
Left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans have spent years trying to tell a different story. They claim that reaching out to swing voters is overrated and that the better strategy involves turning out the base by running pure, ideological campaigns.
The term ‘left-wing Democrats’ is hazy, but this is not what the progressive and socialist candidates believe. What the left actually believes is that there’s a whole swath of Americans who don’t bother with politics because neither party speaks to their needs. In our opinion, a bold economic agenda that address Americans’ material concerns — running on Medicare for All, guaranteed sick leave, and a higher minimum wage, all of which are extraordinarily popular — would activate these potential voters and put them over the top. The evidence for this strategy is well-founded. Last November, Donald Trump received seventy-seven million votes, Kamala Harris received seventy-five million, and over ninety million voting-eligible Americans chose “neither” by not casting a ballot.2 While the centrist strategy was to pursue the mythical suburban swing voter by moving to the right, a leftist candidate would have tried to turn some of those ninety-million voters into supporters.
New voter activation is a central tenet in left-wing campaigns. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign focused on new-voter turnout: 25% of all early voters in the Democratic NYC mayoral race were first-time participants.3 As a result, the democratic socialist won a landslide victory over ten other centrists, including the incumbent mayor and the former governor. Progressive messages activate inactive voters at the national level, too. When Obama ran in 2008 on a progressive platform of Hope & Change (before governing as a moderate), new voters were the key to defeating Hillary Clinton in the primary and John McCain in the general election.4 As a Project Vote report found, 69% of first-time voters cast their ballot for the ostensible progressive, with a total amount of first-time voters exceeding his general election margin of victory by a million. Without new voter turnout for the Hope & Change platform, Obama might have lost.5 Though their portrayal of left wing tactics is incorrect, the NYT author doubles down on the straw man with this explanation for the lack of progressive victories across the country:
Many progressives have tried to wish away these warning signs and insist that they can win by quietly retaining all their unpopular positions and emphasizing economic issues. But they cannot point to a single member of Congress or governor from swing districts or states who has pursued this strategy and won. Their favorite examples are all from deep blue parts of the country. The failure of the motivate-the-base approach is hiding in plain sight.
When leftists say Democrats should “motivate the base,” that obviously does not mean speak only to die-hard socialists and hope enough of them turn up for a victory. That’s nonsensical, and the only way this “let’s try centrism one more time!” argument sounds good is if you misrepresent the alternative. In our view, base motivation is useful because it turns voters into volunteers. If a core group of voters strongly supports a candidate, they will knock on doors, phone bank, and go to bat for them in their everyday lives. This in itself is threatening to the centrist establishment, as more volunteers reduce the need for consultants, who make money on every hour of “work” and every television ad that airs. As for the claim that progressives don’t win in swing districts, I wouldn’t challenge that. Progressives don’t really run in swing states. Unlike centrists, left-wing candidates don’t have the financial backers to support those elections. Progressives are a smaller, less-entrenched movement, so it focuses on blue areas where the chance of success is higher. This doesn’t mean left populism can’t work in purple or red districts (it frequently does), just that left wing politicians don’t have the capital to expend there in an expensive primary and likely more-expensive general. And least not yet. The money issues also warps how The New York Times is defining “moderates” and nonmoderates. Their methodology reads:
Moderates were defined as candidates who received campaign donations from one of the following PACs: Welcome PAC, Blue Dog PAC, New Democrat Coalition PAC, Bridge the Gap PAC, Republican Governance Group PAC, Republican Main Street Partnership PAC and the No Labels PAC. Nonmoderates were defined as candidates who received money from none of those groups, as well as a small number who received money from both a moderate group and a progressive group (such as Sunrise PAC) or a right-wing group (such as House Freedom Fund).
This raises a whole other set of questions: if a nonmoderate is someone who didn’t getting funding from one of these seven PACs, that implies moderates were getting more funding than nonmoderates, which increased their chance to victory. The Times, or rather Split Ticket, the data firm that provided the modeling, doesn’t say they controlled for each campaign’s finances. It’s indisputable centrists are better fundraisers than progressives. They’re friendly to corporate interests, while progressives are generally hostile. If the argument is that centrist candidates raise more money, and that money is key to political success, then they should make that argument. But that’s not what The Times argued. They claim most Americans want centrist policies, which is disingenuous to argue if you’re using election results as a measure and not controlling for the resources available to moderates vs. nonmoderates campaigns. We should also note that the data firm that provided these results, Split Ticket, has an ideological bias against the left.
, the founder of Split Ticket who is quoted by The New York Times, is also head of polling at , a billionaire-backed neoliberal publication replicating the business model of Bari Weiss’s The Free Press.6 Yesterday, Jain published an article featuring his polling that argued Zohran Mamdani’s left-populist campaign wouldn’t work outside of New York City. He writes:“Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular unpopularity suggests that his ideas are not to be used as a national party template for a larger, more general audience.”7
Yet Jain’s own poll found Mamdani had the lowest unfavorability rating of any of the politicians polled.
Not only is this a mischaracterization of the findings, but The Argument is shady about what their polls actually found. The study’s findings haven’t been released, and when they are, The Argument puts them behind a paywall. This is very different than how professional polling works, where results, sample size, margin of error, and other validating metrics are publicly published. Given this person provided the modeling for this New York Times editorial, which is also misrepresented, it’s clear this dubious argument for centrism is coming from a place of ideological zealotry, not sober analysis to find a winning political program.
But I must reiterate, this is a moot point. While progressive might not have run in every swing state, you know who did? Centrist darling Kamala Harris. And she lost Every. Single. One.
Aside from the nonsensical modeling, this essay is plagued by the same fallacy and centrist brand management that has dominated the establishment commentariat for almost a year. Somehow, through Calvin Ball logic, these pundits argue the failures of the centrist Democratic Party are actually the fault of the left. First, we get this gem:
Last year, [Trump] broke with prominent Republicans and said he would veto a national abortion ban. He also focused his 2024 campaign on areas in which the Democratic Party had moved left over the previous decade and was out of step with public opinion, such as immigration, transgender issues, and parts of education policy. Voters noticed. Polls in 2024 showed that most voters considered their policy views to be closer to Mr. Trump’s than to Kamala Harris’s.
“Voters liked Trump’s positions more than Harris’s.” Yeah — because Kamala Harris is a FUCKING CENTRIST. You just undercut your entire argument! This logic is absurd: “The center is the path to victory. We’ll prove it by showing you the centrist lost to the radical.” Did no one think this through? We should note that opinions from the “Editorial Board” are usually written by one or two editors, who then use the anonymous byline because they don’t want to put their name on it. Which I can’t blame them for. I wouldn’t put my name on anything as absurd as this:
Yet many Americans see the Democratic Party as too liberal, too judgmental, and too focused on cultural issues to be credible, and voters are moving away from it. “Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot,” The Times reported this summer. Perhaps most worrisome for Democrats, younger voters, nonwhite Americans, and immigrants, all growing parts of the electorate, have shifted from the party.
I’m sorry. Who led the Democratic Party from 2020 to 2024? That was a full presidential term, so it should be easy to figure out. Was it Bernie Sanders, who ran for the 2020 bid on a bold economic platform? AOC? The Sunrise Movement? DSA? Was it the dreaded The Groups? No. It was Joe Biden, the centrist butcher, who stupidly announced he’d pick a woman running mate and a black woman Supreme Court nominee, ensuring whomever he chose would forever be labelled as a “DEI hire.” The “focus on cultural issues” doesn’t come from the left. That comes from the centrists who use it to appear progressive without adopting left-wing economics that would upset their donors. Staying with the example, Joe Biden promised a Black woman justice to make primary voters forget he was friends with literal segregationists. Every one of these boiler-plate centrist excuses features this claim that Americans think the Democrats are “too liberal,” as if they’re not the ones who controlled the party brand. Putting aside the fact that liberalism is not leftism, this is an attempt by the defeated centrists to claim that going further left would yield worse results than what they delivered in 2024 — Though I’m unsure how that’s possible considering they lost all three branches of government. The author condemns Democrats for being “too judgmental” and “too focused on cultural focus.” But that doesn’t come from the left. It comes from the center who use the over-the-top, annoying elevation of specific identities to appear like progressives without adopting their economic platforms, which irks corporate donors and threatens the centrist establishment. Biden announced he’d pick a female Vice President on the Democratic primary debate stage to seem more progressive than his left-wing opponent, Bernie Sanders. Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer posed in Kente cloths, a virtue signal to appear like they were on the side of Black radicals while ignoring their demands for police reform. And who can forget when Hillary Clinton criticized Bernie Sanders’ plans to break up the big banks as something that “wouldn’t end systemic racism.” So when voters say the Democratic Party is “too liberal,” they’re exactly right. Modern liberalism is the belief in social justice values, neoliberal economics, and an imperialist foreign policy (particularly in Palestine). As centrist Democrats have moved right over recent years under Chuck Schumer’s failed strategy of “picking up two suburban moms for every blue collar worker they lost,” they’ve had to amplify the social justice message to absurd and ultimately worthless degrees to mask their conservative, unpopular economic agenda. This has triggered a right-wing cultural backlash, angered progressives who see through the naked cynicism, and even upset the marginalized groups the overly-aggrandizing wokeness is supposed to represent. As the NYT author notes, “younger voters, nonwhite Americans, and immigrants, all growing parts of the electorate, have shifted from the party.” I have no idea how someone can write that sentence while arguing the Democrats should maintain their current centrist ideology. I hope they stretched before doing all those mental gymnastics.
The reason this argument only makes sense to centrist media and political figures is that they’re the only ones who believe people lie on a traditional left-right political spectrum with the most concentrated in the center. The Median Voter Theorem, as this is called, dictates that in a one-on-one race, the politician closest to the median voter will win. The New York Times takes this view, writing:
Polls show that most voters prefer capitalism to socialism and worry that the government is too big — and also think that corporations and the wealthy have too much power. Most voters oppose both the cruel immigration enforcement of the Trump administration and the lax Biden policies that led to a record immigration surge. Most favor robust policing to combat crime and recoil at police brutality. Most favor widespread abortion access and some restrictions late in pregnancy. Most oppose race-based affirmative action and support class-based affirmative action. Most support job protections for trans people and believe that trans girls should not play girls’ sports. Most want strong public schools and the flexibility to choose which school their children attend.
The cardinal flaw of this theory is that it relies on a theoretical model. Median Voter Theory might be a useful political science model, but it fails to capture the realities of modern politics. Everything The Times presents above is on a binary spectrum, leading to the belief the center is where voters will lie. But, in reality, people weight issues differently, certain positions are disqualifying, and non-voting is an option. When the author says voters prefer capitalism to socialism but think corporations have too much power, that may be true. But by trying to triangulate her way to this mythical middle ground, Kamala Harris moved too far right and voters who would have voted for her had she run on a populist economic platform stayed home.8 Voters Harris needed prioritized populist economics more than other issues, so when the Democrat moved too far from their top issue, they stayed home. We obviously know Median Voter Theory doesn’t translate to political success, because of all the issues presented above Donald Trump and the Republican Party is in the middle of none of them. If this were the path to success, far-right politics would be obsolete. Considering the U.S. government is currently murdering any South American who sets foot on a boot, this is clearly not the case.
In addition to the above ways we’ve disproven this silly editorial, one reason I feel confident in saying centrism doesn’t have a good chance of winning elections is that self-avowed centrists are trying to co-opt progressive positions. The Times writes this:
Mr. Trump’s victory over Ms. Harris was telling in another way. The moderation that has worked best in recent years is not a sober, 20th-century centrism that promises to protect the status quo. It is more combative and populist. It tends to be left of center on economics and right of center on social issues (with abortion being an exception). “Angry centrism is a very potent way to run,” said Lakshya Jain, a founder of Split Ticket, a political data firm. Rather than locating itself midway between the two parties, this new centrism promises sweeping change while criticizing the two parties as out of touch.
I’m sorry, what? Who are these “centrists” running on left economic populism? They provide a sole example, Marcy Kaptur, and cite a campaign ad in which she criticized “greedy corporations.” So did Marco Rubio!9 If saying you don’t like corporate greed makes you a combative populist, then everyone is a left-populist. Kaptur’s largest non-PAC donor is a real estate developer, and her largest donor comes from the Israel lobby.10 She’s certainly a centrist, but a passing critique of corporate greed while being funded by corporations is not “left of center” economic populism. And it’s not just The New York Times trying this sleight of hand. During his Abundance book launch,
stated he was “trying to win the intra-left coalition fight within the Democratic Party” for the centrist camp. That fight doesn’t have looked to have gone his way, as he’s now rebranding under “Touch Grass Populism.” The two “populists” he features are Jake Auchincloss and Spencer Cox, whose top donors are almost exclusively venture capital firms and real estate developers. Both politicians also support Israel, an incredibly anti-populist view. As for centrist Democrats facing left wing opponents, Seth Moulton has rhetorically moved left on foreign policy with a hollow promise to reject AIPAC money, and Michigan Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow, who is trying to fend off left challenger Abdul El-Sayed, claims to be for “universal healthcare” — but not Medicare For All.If centrism is the path to victory, why not run on it? Why are centrists trying to trick voters into thinking they’re progressives and populists if their ideology is The Way to Win, as they so proudly claim claim? Why is The New York Times mischaracterizing centrism as ‘left on economics”? Why is Thompson, who until now has positioned his Abundance project against the populist left, now claiming his project is the populist one? Why does McMorrow need to deceive voters by claiming a public option is “universal healthcare,” when it’s clearly not? I’ll tell you why: Because, no matter what the centrist political establishment and its media allies try to tell themselves, no matter how many times they write this same article, and no matter how many unfounded models they create to avoid they inescapable conclusion that they lose to a convicted rapist dotard, they know that Americans don’t wants centrism. So, they delude themselves with pseudo-intellectualism that confuses their readers with pedantic arguments that never address the reality that their ideological zealotry has shrunk the Democratic coalition. Even when they admit what everyone knows, they can’t accept it. The Times writes:
Moderates are hardly blameless here. They have too often promoted a bland technocratic centrism and backed uninspiring candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mr. Biden, and Ms. Harris.
Oh, you mean the Democratic Party’s last three presidential nominees? Who were either uplifted or outright anointed by the centrist establishment of the Democratic Party? If you’re going to argue centrism is the Way to Win, maybe don’t name three centrists who lost to the far-right Donald Trump, and one guy who likely only beat him because of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. The cognitive dissonance is breathtaking. They know that centrism loses, yet they can’t accept it because it would shatter their political identity. Centrist pundit
said something similar recently (also in The New York Times) when speaking about Andrew Cuomo:This campaign has been painful for me as a political centrist because Cuomo, the purported standard-bearer of the political center, has no vision and is the architect of many of the state-level policies that have led to the disorder in the city he now decries.
Yeah, man, that’s not just Andrew Cuomo. That’s every centrist. They don’t have a vision for the country. They are centrists because they believe the status quo is good — that’s what puts them in the political center!11
Unfortunately, this won’t be the last time we hear this argument. Political actors of any belief, especially those who are financially invested in one, aren’t known to admit they’re wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. I’m sure The New York Times or The Argument will run this same excuse essay again in a few weeks. They’ve been doing it for the last ten months, so it’s their niche at this point. Thankfully, most Americans are tired of the out-of-touch intelligentsia. The average person is much smarter than essays like this give them credit for. I doubt The Times lecturing them about how the centrists who lost were Good Actually convinces anyone. In fact, I bet it pisses them off. Voters are increasingly moving towards left-wing and populist candidates, who are speaking to their needs while standing against Republican fascism (which is why centrists are trying to co-opt left wing language). Don’t let the media confuse you to what’s happening on the ground across the country. I’ll continue pushing back on these nonsensical narratives as long as they’re published, so subscribe if you’d like to see them debunked.
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In Solidarity — Joe
The market is rarely free, but that’s a conversation for another time.
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-15/how-many-people-didnt-vote-in-the-2024-election
https://gothamist.com/news/nearly-a-quarter-of-nycs-early-voters-hadnt-voted-in-a-democratic-primary-since-2012
https://www.edisonresearch.com/turning-out-new-voters/
https://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/FINAL-First-Time-Voters-in-2008-Election.pdf
https://www.aol.com/libbing-silicon-valley-4m-substack-195317581.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAK-FWO3xfsKTUXTLYZ38MzTCdz0oN6D38GEgSnnRqT5KbqsZ-rM5WxrHQ8awC7gn-fcnUYLdjeoMoBwlE84c8eczke1YXauJYzjaE58_VVUADmZDN4ivi7ZXVCgMugrZRC50dwFfkASLxH6vpUQHDvf_zV8leVWtmePMHVx8hlA8
Jain, Lakshya. Can Domcrats Actually Learn Anything From Zohran?
https://waytowin.docsend.com/view/rnv5sptpzsqxy6k4
https://nypost.com/2021/04/25/corporations-that-undermine-american-values-dont-deserve-gop-support/
https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/marcy-kaptur/summary?cid=N00003522
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/opinion/nyc-mayor-debate-mamdani-cuomo-sliwa.html
Yes!!! Thank you for this thorough debunking of the centrist bs that just keeps losing. In 2016 my very red state had an huge amount of people of all ages but especially young people very excited about Sanders. Guess what? They either voted for you know who or sat it out. Centrism is dead, we have got to move on for the very survival of this country and its people. Keep preaching!
“The author condemns Democrats for being “too judgmental” and “too focused on cultural focus.” But that doesn’t come from the left. It comes from the center who use the over-the-top, annoying elevation of specific identities to appear like progressives without adopting their economic platforms, which irks corporate donors and threatens the centrist establishment.” Utterly correct! Dead-on accurate. Terrific analysis, Joe.