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"PLEASE! BRING US BACK!!"
Symone Sanders Townsend, an on-camera personality for (the cable channel formerly known as) MSNBC, was pleading with Jon Lovett, an on-microphone personality for "Pod Save America," to take back the helm of the discussion he was moderating. Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer and anti-Trump political commentator, was feuding with Tim Miller, a podcaster for the Bulwark publication and anti-Trump political commentator, over Israel. Piker was praising Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who'd just been elected mayor of New York, for (sort of) implying that Israel "has a Jewish ethno-state project" when Mamdani said Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights and representation for all people.
"Is that true for Qatar, or just Israel?" Miller interjected.
"No, I don't care," Piker said. "I mean, yeah, okay, no nation has a right to exist, including Qatar. I don't know why you're bringing up Qatar as though I'm going to be like, ‘Oh my G od, Qatar, like, they pay me so much money.'" The audience cheered as they spoke over each other.
"Qatar's an ethno-state," Miller shot back. "Iran's an ethno-state. Jordan's an ethno-state. Saudi's an ethno-state. I'm okay with criticizing Israel-"
"So you're okay," Piker cut in. "So you're okay with all of these other countries being ethno-states then, and you're not just using it as a de-flec-tive mechanism to move the attention away from Israel, a country that literally receives more aid and more political support from the United States of America than anyone else?"
Folks, welcome to the party. The anti-Trump coalition of professional liberals, progressives, independents and former Republicans have spent the past year gathering in Washington to talk about their grim new reality. For much of the year, Crooked Media's Tommy Vietor told me, "It was not a debate over whether we're f---ed. It was a debate about, 'How f---ed are we?'"
The venues and vibes have varied - at one, there was a plastic tub with heaps of gummy bears representing the 11,000-plus Trump voters a Democratic congresswoman won in her district; at another, there was a cocktail called "Epstein Didn't Tequila Himself" - but the basics of these gatherings are more or less the same: Professional take-slingers offer their prescriptions, elected officials make brief appearances, and donors mingle with consultants and Capitol Hill staffers. Imagine a giant Thanksgiving dinner where all you do is talk politics. And where the idea is to reach some kind of consensus, rather than just retreat to the couch to watch TV and slip into a food coma.
"We don't need to all be rowing in the same boat, but at least rowing towards the same direction," said Tory Gavito, president of the donor network Way to Win, in late September by the Wharf, an upscale development along Washington's southwest riverfront. Nearby, a boat named Hopeless Wanderer bobbed placidly on the water.
Metaphors about wayward vessels and sinking ships are tempting. But maybe the more apt metaphor is this: Democrats are sketching out renovations to their big tent. Except, unlike the president with his new ballroom, America's center-left coalition lacks a leader who can simply tear down old structures and build new ones to suit his fancy.
Hence the panel discussions. Hence the arguing.
The argument between Miller and Piker was happening in a ballroom, incidentally - on Nov. 7 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, where the progressive media company Crooked Media was holding the latest confab: its first Crooked Con, a meetup of fellow travelers of the liberal and progressive movements and avid listeners of the company's podcast offerings. ("A lot of White people here," Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona said at one point, attempting to explain lowrider cars to the audience.) The panel, which also included Sanders Townsend and Jessica Tarlov, a liberal co-host of "The Five" on Fox News, was titled "Are We Having Fun Yet?"
"The last 10 minutes were the opposite of fun," Tarlov remarked after the lefty Twitch streamer and the former Jeb Bush campaign staffer exchanged volleys about ethno-states and the Middle East.
Conflict isn't always comfortable, especially among family. "I have an easier time on 'The Five' than I did on that panel," Tarlov told me afterward.
Is having fun the point of these summits of blue-America electeds, consultants and pod people? Is it solving problems? Is it simply having the argument?
What is the point?
"They are mostly self-serving for the organization hosting it to position themselves as experts for funders," said Amanda Litman, president of the candidate recruitment group Run for Something, though she noted that being around everyone in person was nice. Annie Wu Henry, a digital strategist, said she liked seeing people whose work she appreciated but that "it does feel like it's all of the takes we're posting on Twitter in real life on various stages." Or maybe the point was to get people to disagree better, said Ezra Andres-Tysch, a digital strategist. "Having to talk to the person that you've been feuding with in the press and online for years or months, you can't be an a--hole the same way."
Here's a thought that's been going around all year: Maybe professional Democrats need some practice convincing voters that they are not a--holes.
"If we want to be a party that you want to join," Lovett said, "we have to be having parties people would want to attend."
In June, Welcome Fest billed itself as "the largest public gathering of centrist Democrats." Inside the swank Hamilton Hotel, some 100 attendees noshed on crudités and granola bars and discussed the virtues of moderation.
At that event, people like Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-New York), Democratic consultant Adam Jentleson and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Washington) argued that the country actually wanted centrist policies like tough borders and stronger policing, and that Democrats should stop listening to advocacy organizations pushing them to the left. "The backlash that happens online," Jentleson said, "is the sign that you're doing something right."
Matthew Yglesias, author of the blog/newsletter Slow Boring, put up a graphic arguing that "bad groups create bad incentives for Democrats" (progressive issue-advocacy organizations are often referred to, collectively, as "the groups"). Later, a group of pro-Palestinian activists stormed a discussion with Torres over his pro-Israel stances, carrying signs that said "GAYS AGAINST GENOCIDE" and "FREE RITCHIE." Security forcibly grabbed and shoved them. Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" began to play loudly enough to drown out their chants.
"Freedom is a beautiful thing!" Torres declared from the stage. "Thank G od for freedom!"
Freedom is a beautiful thing, but disagreement can leave you rowing in circles. How to work it out? In September, another group of professional liberals flowed into another Washington event space - by the Wharf, overlooking the water - for the Persuasion 2025 conference, hosted by Way to Win and Swayable. The government was set to shut down the next day. By then, the mood was growing urgent. Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-California), in an opening speech, told the crowd that they'd have to be the ones to figure out how to win. "The cavalry is not coming," Simon said. "It is in fact here in this room."
Who was in the room? Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), who worried that Democrats were seen as too cozy with the wealthy. "I mean, for G od's sakes, we were not able to get rid of the carried interest loophole," he said in an interview onstage, referring to a favorite tax end-run of Wall Street cats. Sarah Longwell, a former Republican strategist who is now publisher at the Bulwark, did not seem impressed. "I listened to the first few speakers, very nice," she said during a panel that followed. "What did he say about a carried tax loophole or whatever? That's the plan?"
In an interview between panels, Gavito, the Way to Win president, underlined a broader point Longwell had made. "Boy, do we need to talk like normal humans," she told me.
One solution was to recruit candidates who looked and spoke like normal humans. Graham Platner was in the room. Platner, the oyster farmer challenging Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, has lately found himself in rough water over how he talked in old Reddit posts, where the Marine veteran made a variety of inflammatory scribblings, such as calling rural White Mainers "actually" racist and stupid. He has disavowed those old posts, explaining that he wrote them back when he was still influenced by the "crude humor," "dark feelings" and "offensive language" that were a "hallmark of the infantry when I was in it." Platner has also faced questions about a tattoo resembling a Nazi police symbol. He's explained that he got the tattoo when drunk with his Marine buddies and was unaware of its history. (He has since had its skull design altered into an animallike figure.)
All this had yet to come out when Platner spoke at the Persuasion conference. At the time, he was simply a Rugged Guy underdog with a voice fit for a Chevy Silverado TV commercial. But the subsequent controversies added texture to the message he conveyed to the Persuasion crowd: Democrats, he said, should support candidates who "come from the real world." He didn't have to "figure out" how to talk to rural voters, he said. "I am a f---ing rural voter."
Earlier this month, at Crooked Con, Crooked Media's Jon Favreau told me that the Democrats' big tent should be designed to accommodate the Platners of the world (though he noted he was open to supporting Gov. Janet Mills, one of Platner's primary opponents). "We should make room for redemption stories," Favreau said. In Platner's behavior, he saw reminders of "a lot of the young men we've been talking about how we lost them over the last year."
"If we're just talking politics," Favreau added, "I think most of the people in the country have gone through similar challenges, have made similar mistakes, have said things they didn't know."
Judge not, or at least judge less. Is that the plan?
Concepts of a plan for a Democratic comeback seemed to emerge this month, when the party notched its first tangible wins of the year. Mamdani won in New York, and other Democratic candidates captured governorships in Virginia and New Jersey, as well as many downballot races. In California, a proposal to draw a new congressional map - meant to curb the effects of recent Republican gerrymandering in other states - passed by a huge margin.
Electoral victories can be more clarifying, in some ways, than postmortems. Crooked Con was the first Washington gathering of blue America's advisory class since the Democrats' big night. Organizers said over 2,000 people filled the Reagan Building; later in the evening, VIPs socialized at the Waldorf Astoria downtown, formerly the Trump International Hotel.
The panelists seemed to agree that a strong message about affordability had been the sturdiest tent pole for Democrats of all stripes, buttressing the campaigns of an immigrant democratic socialist (Mamdani), an ex-Navy helicopter pilot (Mikie Sherrill, New Jersey's governor-elect) and a moderate former CIA officer (Abigail Spanberger, Virginia's governor-elect). And there was a takeaway there for the shutdown fight, said Gallego, the senator from Arizona. "If we aren't here to give, provide and protect affordable health insurance, what is our cause?" he said onstage.
Ah, well - about that. Two days after the conference, seven Democratic senators and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) split with their caucus to support a deal that paved the way for the end of the shutdown. The agreement wouldn't extend the health care subsidies that Democrats, for weeks, had been saying were essential to prevent premiums from skyrocketing for millions of Americans. It immediately divided the party.
For Litman, the Run for Something president, those touting an affordability message as a solution to the party's problems were missing a crucial point: Unlike the state and local politicians who won this month, Democrats running for Congress in 2026 would have a hard time arguing that they could make life less expensive for voters, given that Trump would still be in the White House. The only thing Democrats could really promise was to keep fighting the president.
"They just undercut their own argument, and now they're going out there on TV and saying, 'Well, we learned that we can't really stand up to Trump,'" she told me afterward. "What the f--- are you doing?"
Democrats had made the shutdown fight about cheaper health care, she said, and they didn't even get that.
"It is infuriating," Litman said. "We got six days of feeling good about the Democratic Party. It couldn't even give us a week."
Another year until the midterms. In the meantime, the panels will continue until morale improves.