It was neoliberalism all along.
If you couldn’t snag a ticket to WelcomeFest, the “largest public gathering of centrist Democrats”, don’t worry. We’ve got the must-see moments from Abundance Coachella right here.
Perhaps the most viral moment at last Wednesday’s conference was a revealing exchange between pundit Josh Barro and Abundist Rep. Ritchie Torres, in which Barro said: “When I look at policies in New York that stand in the way of Abundance, very often if you look under the hood, you eventually find a labor union at the end that’s the driver.”
A visibly nervous Torres (who is mulling a bid for Governor of New York) tried to shift focus away from unions and towards his preferred targets among “the Groups” – including anti-war protesters who had interrupted Torres earlier for his extreme (and increasingly unpopular) support for Israel. Shortly after the conference, Barro published an article entitled “In Blue Cities, Abundance Will Require Fighting Labor Unions.” On Tuesday, Torres hastily released a short video arguing the opposite.
Most Memorable Moments
The Barro/Torres exchange wasn’t the only accidental Abundance confession at WelcomeFest. While the conference was billed as a gathering to “broaden the Democratic tent”, many of the event’s actual speakers couldn’t help but give the game away:
- Confidently-wrong pundit Matthew Yglesias gave a dubious list of culture-war issues he claimed were holding back Democratic candidates nationwide, including “paralysis on women sports” (the writer Ettingermentum has chronicled the largely-losing history of anti-transgender politics), “late-term abortions” (just the opposite, per the “Dobbs effect”) and school closures during covid (an issue unlikely to have political salience five years on, except for the pundits who keep bringing it back up.)
- Yglesias also pointed to Democratic lawmakers’ support for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador in March, as evidence that “bad groups create bad incentives” for Democrats. In fact, polling data shows the public broadly opposed Garcia’s abduction, and that Democratic lawmakers’ calls and visits to free Garcia actually drove down Trump’s immigration approval ratings.
- Andy Rotherham, a fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council-founded Progressive Policy Institute, told attendees it was a mistake for Democrats to publicly oppose Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ unpopular “Don’t Say Gay” law. The law was so unpopular that 40% of Florida voters parents polled said it made them want to move out of the state.
- Amateur pollster Lakshya Jain encouraged WelcomeFest attendees to ignore concerns about losing support from the Democratic base when moving rightward on policy, saying “The base will vote for you anyway […] don’t worry about liberal defections.”
- Jain went on to say that he didn’t understand why “being a reliable vote” would be factored into reviews of candidate quality. In 2023, a Democratic member of North Carolina’s statehouse switched parties, enabling Republicans to override the Democratic governor’s veto. In 2017, Senator Jim Justice (R-WV) was elected to the governorship of his state as a Democrat before switching parties.
- Adam Jentleson, the former Chief of Staff to Senator John Fetterman, appeared at the event just a day after launching his new centrist consulting firm Searchlight. His messaging guidance for attendees was to revel in online ire, “The backlash that happens online is actually the sign that you’re doing something right.”
- Jentleson’s firm is being advised by Seth London, a former venture capitalist and corporate lobbyist who has been pitching Democratic donors on resurrecting the Democratic Leadership Council.
- During a conversation with Derek Thompson, moderator Marshall Kosloff asserted that Abundance, Thompson’s book with Ezra Klein, was an attempt to rebuild bridges between the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley. Thompson nodded along and did not disagree.
- Derek Kaufman, the Founder and CEO of Inclusive Abundance (an abundance group that cosponsored WelcomeFest) and the former Senior Managing Director of the hedge fund Citadel, told attendees that he envisioned a world where college students would choose not to join College Republican or College Democrat clubs, but instead opt to join “the college Abundists.”
- Throughout the day, WelcomePAC co-founder Liam Kerr sported a custom-made football jersey with former Senator Joe Manchin’s name on the back. Manchin’s daughter Heather Bresch (famous for being the ex-CEO of EpiPen-gouger Mylan) is the founder of Americans Together, a major funder of WelcomePAC.
- In one of the most confusing moments, Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) stated “I’m pretty unwilling to accept a lecture on corporate power from the left when they’re carrying the water for the most pernicious, nefarious corporations in modern history – the social media corporations.” This statement appeared to confuse the moderator, but no follow up was given.
- Auchincloss’ statement is baffling not only for the claim that the left is carrying water for social media companies (quite the opposite), but also because the abundance faction has extremely close ties to Big Tech. Some have pointed out that this could be in reference to civil liberty groups opposing age verification mandates online for privacy reasons, but Auchincloss himself did not elaborate..
New Branding, Same Old Slop
If WelcomeFest had one uniting theme, it was moving the Democratic Party to the right at the behest of wealthy corporate donors. We reported last week that WelcomePAC has taken huge donations from Reid Hoffman, Michael Bloomberg, and the Walton family – ultra-wealthy donors who have spent their careers fighting against antitrust enforcement and labor rights. WelcomeFest speakers did little to challenge the idea that they were unwilling to go against their donors’ policy preferences.
This strategy has little to do with “broadening the Democratic tent”, despite what some might have you believe, and everything to do with moving the tentpoles to exclude non-elites. It’s been the Democratic Party’s guiding philosophy since the 1990s, when the Democratic Leadership Council pushed the same “Republican-lite” agenda (and laid the groundwork for Trump’s rise). Abundance, as our Dylan Gyauch-Lewis noted last November, is just the latest rebrand of the same old neoliberal slop. The backdrop of sponsors listed on the WelcomeFest stage read like an inadvertent admission of this, beginning with Third Way and ending with Inclusive Abundance.
If you’re seeking electoral success (WelcomePAC’s record is questionable there too), courting billionaires and mythical moderate Republicans at the expense of a working-class base is a doomed strategy. As our founder Jeff Hauser wrote this week in The Prospect, focus group-tested moderation is the very approach that led Democrats to ruin in 2024 – effectively telling voters the party has no principles and stands for nothing.
In the days since WelcomeFest, speakers Matt Yglesias and Liam Kerr have illustrated this point perfectly by arguing that Democrats should court Elon Musk after his split with Trump. Nevermind that Musk is an unstable and politically-toxic crook, or that Democrats have spent the past six months savaging him for his self-serving destruction of the federal government. As long as he still has money in the bank, WelcomeFest’s brightest minds would like Democrats to sell themselves out rather than tap into voters’ anti-oligarchy energy.
Putting Abundance Coachella and the Fight Oligarchy tour side-by-side, the contrast between what Beltway elites and actual swing-district voters want from Democrats couldn’t be clearer. Party leaders would be wise to ignore the siren song of billionaires and Dick Morris wannabes blaming others for their own failures. Their music has long gone out of style.