Of course they do.
President John F. Kennedy would not be allowed in the Democratic Party today. He was pro-gun, anti-abortion, but favored labor unions, working class citizens and free speech.
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From YAHOO! News:
President John F. Kennedy would not be allowed in the Democratic Party today. He was pro-gun, anti-abortion, but favored labor unions, working class citizens and free speech.
Centrist Dem group rails against leftist identity politics and purity tests
Centrist Democrats produced a five-page document of takeaways at a retreat organized by Third Way.
From YAHOO! News:
Centrist Dem group rails against leftist identity politics and purity tests
Adam Wren
Sun, March 2, 2025 at 12:10 PM CST
3 min read
13
When several dozen Democratic political operatives and elected officials gathered at a tony resort off the Potomac River last month, frustration boiled over at the left wing of their party.
Democrats had become too obsessed with “ideological purity tests” and should push back “against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging,” according to a document of takeaways from the gathering produced by the center-left group Third Way and obtained by POLITICO.
The group of moderate Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials and party leaders who gathered in Loudoun County, Virginia for a day-and-a-half retreat, where they plotted their party’s comeback, searched for why the party lost in November — and what to do about it. Much of what they focused their ire on centered on the kind of identity politics that they believed lost them races up and down the ballot.
One of the key ways to win back the trust of the working class, some gathered there argued, was to “reduce far-left influence and infrastructure” on the party, according to the takeaways document. That included building a more moderate campaign infrastructure and talent pipeline, pushing “back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging,” and refusing to participate in “far-left candidate questionnaires” and “forums that create ideological purity tests.”
The gathering resulted in five pages of takeaways, a document POLITICO obtained from one of the participants. (Not all attendees endorsed each point, and the document — and Third Way — kept the identities of participants private.)
“In the wake of this election, where it became so evident that the things that the left was doing and saying deeply hurt [Kamala] Harris and down-ballot Democrats, a lot of people are looking to us, not just Third Way, but the moderates in the party, and saying, ‘We got to do it your way, because the other way ain’t working,’” said Third Way’s Matt Bennett, who helped organize the February retreat.
The document itself is perhaps one of the most comprehensive and sweeping of its kind following the election — both in its analysis of what went wrong and how to fix it.
The retreat's conversation centered on the party’s disconnect with the working class. Among the causes of that detachment: weak messaging and communication, failure to prioritize economic concerns, overemphasis on identity politics, allowing the far left to define the party, and attachment to unpopular institutions such as academia, media and government bureaucracy.
If Trump’s first term energized the party’s progressives, there are early signs his second term is doing the same for Democratic moderates.
The party chose the battleground-state moderate Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan to deliver its response to Trump’s address to Congress and the nation on Tuesday. Slotkin outperformed Harris by more than a full percentage point in all but 28 of the state’s 83 counties, according to a Detroit Newsanalysis.
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