(2017-07-03) Mark Pincus And Reid Hoffman Are Launching A New Gr

Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman are launching a new group to rethink the Democratic Party, called Win the Future.

Pincus, the co-founder of Zynga, and Hoffman, the brains behind LinkedIn, want to force Democrats to rewire their philosophical core, from their agenda to the way they choose candidates in elections — the stuff of politics, they said, that had been out of reach for most voters long before Donald Trump became president.

Participants can submit their own proposals for platform planks — and if they win enough support, primarily through likes and retweets on Twitter, they’ll become part of WTF’s political DNA, too.

That means joining the so-called “resistance” — that ever-growing collection of groups that oppose Trump — while challenging Democrats from the inside.

Of course, WTF is hardly the first well-wired — or well-heeled — attempt to bolster the Democratic Party at a moment of apparent character crisis. Among the most infamous is MoveOn.org, the hyper-progressive political organization launched in the 1990s at first to defend then-President Bill Clinton from impeachment. Later, MoveOn.org became a resonant force in national politics, not the least due to its fierce opposition to the war in Iraq

As a general rule, Pincus told me in June, WTF aspires to be “pro-social [and] pro-planet, but also pro-business and pro-economy.”

Tech Billionaire Mark Pincus Admits He Was Blindsided By The Backlash To Win The Future

On July 3, Pincus, LinkedIn cofounder (and fellow billionaire) Reid Hoffman, and environmentalist/entrepreneur Adam Werbach broke a very open secret—formally announcing their insurgency within the Democratic Party called Win the Future,

After firing off that salvo, Pincus and partners are still reeling from the counterattack

the progressive left wing of the party, which responded to the group’s launch with an angry retort: If the Democrats are already too cozy with the wealthy and connected, why get in bed with billionaire centrists from Silicon Valley?

“Pincus sounds like a parody of someone wanting to be in politics but with no sense of how anything works,” writes Chris Nolan, founder of political advertising and analytics firm Spot-On

Politics is about more than what you do, however; it’s about whom you do it to.

“Two white guy billionaires from Silicon Valley, where white guys are getting a bad rap (deservedly) are calling for challenges to the longest-serving member of the U.S. Senate and the former Speaker of the House, both of whom happen to be women,” writes Nolan.

To Pincus, it’s mind-boggling that Democrats aren’t more alarmed at the state of the party, which lost not only the U.S. House and Senate but a slew of governorships and state legislatures during the Obama years