(2025-03-02) Centrist Dem Group Rails Against Leftist Identity Politics And Purity Tests

Centrist Dem group rails against leftist identity politics and purity tests. 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,”

produced by the center-left group Third Way

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,

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

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.)

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.

Those gathered then laid out 20 solutions for how Democrats can regain working-class trust and reconnect with them culturally.

The party should “embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery.”

The party needs to “own the failures of Democratic governance in large cities and commit to improving local government.”

Matt Bennett said that, with the meeting coming just three months after the election, “we didn’t expect to have a lot of answers about exactly what the Democratic offer to the working class on the economy ought to be going forward. We were still kind of picking through the rubble here.”
Bennett added, “I think what we discussed there on economic issues was the profound disconnect that we saw between the way that leading Democrats were talking about the economy and the way that people were actually experiencing it.”