Democrats Should Stop Freaking Out About Third Way

The party has some real challenges heading into November. But this isn’t one of them.

Everyone needs to take a breath about Third Way.

The centrist think tank announced last week that it’s spending $15 million between now and 2028 to fight the Democratic Socialists of America.

The group’s president, Jonathan Cowan, told the New York Times he’s “preparing for the next war that is coming,” and called Abdul El-Sayed’s U.S. Senate primary win in Michigan “deeply troubling.” Senior Vice President Kate deGruyter went further, telling the Washington Examiner the DSA poses “a mortal threat to Democrats’ ability to win.”

That’s a lot of dramatic language for $15 million spread over two years. For context, that’s less than what a single competitive Senate race spends on TV in the final six weeks. This isn’t a war chest. It’s trolling with a budget.

But it seems to be working. Fox News ran with “mortal danger” in the headline, gleefully covering Democrats eating their own. Bari Weiss’ CBS News also made sure to interview Cowan about the Dems’ identity crisis.

Plenty of progressive media treated it as an existential threat, too. Jacobin, unsurprisingly, went with the headline: “Centrist Dems Really Do Hate the Left More Than Trump.”

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich railed against the group’s “moronic bullshit” and declared that the “most powerful rising force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a rigged economic system.” Crooked Media’s Jon Favreau also took the bait, snarking that: “Perhaps a better use of $15 million would be building a movement and coming up with a vision that actually excites voters?”

The outsized reaction plays exactly into Third Way’s plan (in fact, it’s clearly their strategy). Right-wing commentators are using this to bolster claims that Democrats are rejecting the sane wing of the party for communism (echoing Trump’s message, as I recently wrote about) and are consumed by civil war. Some in progressive media insist it’s proof that the party establishment is coming for them with everything it’s got.

Both need Third Way to be a much bigger deal than it is. Treating a $15 million opposition-research-and-polling budget like a declaration of war does exactly that. It makes a small outside group look like it’s setting party strategy (kind of like what Republicans keep screaming about the DSA). And it’s not.

Third Way traces back to the Democratic Leadership Council, the group that helped elect Bill Clinton in the 1990s by chasing corporate money and swing voters. That brought the party out of the wilderness it was trapped in during the Reagan era. It was a winning strategy 30 years ago. It’s not the party’s center of gravity now, and no amount of well-placed stories in the New York Times changes that.

The group isn’t the Democratic Party establishment — and conflating the two is just sloppy. The group isn’t even really representative of the moderate wing anymore because Democrats have shifted to the left in recent decades. They’re conservatives from the corporate wing — distinct from the Yellow Dog Caucus, the old pro-union, pro-life Dems who have largely disappeared from elected office, except in a few red pockets of America. It’s a faction that used to matter a lot more, but it still has money and a mailing list.

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But Third Way’s actual footprint inside the party is shrinking fast. And everyone knows this.

The Democratic Party is a broad (and often maddening) coalition of interest groups, unlike the GOP, where membership currently is based on how much you love Donald Trump. That means Democrats have a lot of policy prescriptions and ideologies to choose from — which is a good thing. Right now, business groups and adjacent leaders are losing steam with party voters sick of what Citizens United has wrought.

So progressives should welcome Third Way coming to play. El-Sayed just won his primary after being outspent 9-to-1. Debate is healthy in a functional democracy. The best platform will win out in the marketplace of ideas.

However, when former DNC Co-Vice Chair David Hogg says moderates “don’t have the right values” to be in the party, that’s not a call for debate. That’s telling folks you agree with on 80 to 90 percent of issues to hit the road. That’s not a 50-state strategy for the Democratic Party. And that’s not how you win elections, which is why Meidas Touch Editor-in-Chief Ron Filipkowski called it out.

Meanwhile, real establishment Democrats aren’t lining up behind Third Way. Look at who actually endorsed Abdul El-Sayed after he won. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who backed Congresswoman Haley Stevens in the primary, cut a video saying “they’ve got my support as we fight like hell together to win in November.” Kamala Harris endorsed him, too, calling El-Sayed someone who “understands that the power is with the people,” and started fundraising off his campaign the same week.

This is the actual establishment of the Democratic Party. Not a group that may have the NYT on speed-dial, but hasn’t had its finger on the pulse of Democratic voters in years.

The real story out of in Democratic politics last week was the unity rally in Detroit on Friday, where more than 1,000 people showed up three days after a genuinely bitter Michigan primary. El-Sayed thanked both of his opponents, Stevens and Mallory McMorrow, “for an incredible race.” Stevens, who lost by less than a point, hugged El-Sayed at a Thursday event and told CBS she’d campaign “whatever he wants me to do.”

Progressives and establishment Democrats literally linked arms on stage. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (a newly-minted Michigander who’s eyeing a ‘28 presidential run) headlined the event that featured gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson, Secretary of State nominee Garlin Gilchrist, and the whole ticket.

This is what an actual party organizing itself for the fall looks like — not a press release from a think tank with an ideological ax to grind.

So no, progressives don’t need to play the victim here (or in the bowels of Bluesky, where some influential accounts seem to desperately need a party civil war just to boost their engagement). There’s no need to treat Third Way’s $15 million like a hostile takeover. The knee-jerk sniping about it shouldn’t dampen the celebratory mood. The people who actually run and win elections in Michigan spent this week doing the unglamorous work of getting behind their nominee. That’s the story. Third Way is a sideshow.

The party does have real problems heading into the fall — Democratic National Committee money woes, the party’s brand is in the toilet, and a Senate map that still runs through Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Maine, and Michigan. None of those problems get solved or worsened by what Third Way thinks about the DSA.

Republicans would love nothing more than for Democrats to spend the next three months treating Third Way’s salvo as a party-defining crisis. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Save the outrage for something that matters.