A Climate-Centric Analysis of the Latest Left-Punching Screed
The fact is, more people care about this than the authors suggest. More people will care even more as the years pass because the problem is not only not going away but actively getting worse.
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least among Democratic consultants and centrist pundits, that all electoral ills can and should be blamed squarely on the people who think healthcare should be free. That nefarious subset of political actors who are somehow both vanishingly radical and toweringly influential, the Left — it is always the fault of progressives, often for demanding or doing things that they have not in fact demanded and that have not, in large part, been done.
The latest salvo in this long-running campaign arrived on Monday from a centrist Dem group called WelcomePAC, in the form of a long report they named "Deciding to Win" — after, predictably, a Nancy Pelosi quote plastered up top. Written by three WelcomePAC staffers and founders, it also features a list of acknowledgements for "comments and suggestions" that includes 1992 election luminaries like James Carville; David Axelrod and David Plouffe get a mention, as do various Pod Save Bros; Nate Silver is here, for some reason.
The manifesto's conclusion, based largely on a host of polling data that at times seems misguided and at other times downright irresponsible (in what world do "abolish the police" or "abolish prisons" qualify as "Democratic policies"), is that to win elections and face down the threat to Democracy posed by Donald Trump and the increasingly Nazified GOP Democrats must "maintain an unwavering focus on the economic issues that are the top priorities of working-class Americans while meeting voters where they are on issues like immigration and public safety."
That means, among other things, focusing more on "popular" policies and shifting attention away from "unpopular" ones. There are plenty of ways to poke broad holes, both moral (abandoning trans people as a political strategy is obviously abhorrent and should be disqualifying — read this about a recent Zohran Mamdani ad that does the opposite) and electoral, in this approach — and many have started to do so already. I'm going to zero in on one specific little corner of Deciding to Win: its inclusion and discussion of climate policies and messaging.
