Centrist Democrats Want Their Own Midterm Tea Party Rout But Without An Actual Tea Party Or Enthusiasm

The political math doesn’t math.

Democrats consider the 2026 midterms their first and perhaps best chance to escape an electoral grave, but many would prefer not to get any dirt under their nails while digging their way out. Democratic leaders have prescribed a daring strategy of avoidance — keep their heads down, don’t make waves, wait for voters to come to them after Republicans crash the economy and take away their health care.

Centrist Democrats in particular know this plan is working because their most politically active supporters aren’t pleased. In a Semafor article from last week, Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to soon-to-be former Sen. John Fetterman, said, “The backlash that happens online is a sign that you’re doing something right.”

The Semafor article is titled “Centrist Democrats want a fight with the left,” as centrists believe that they lost the last election because the national party caters too much to the progressive left and needs to move back to the center. If this sounds familiar, it’s because centrists say this whenever Democrats underperform. However, it’s much worse now because centrists are suggesting that Democrats outright ignore their own vocal supporters. Look, elected officials should lead not simply follow polls, focus groups, or especially squeaky wheels, but Democrats as a whole are perhaps missing the larger moment.

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‘They see what they want to see …’

The ghosts in the film The Sixth Sense operate under a narratively convenient rule that they only see what they want to see. They don’t accept that they’re dead, and they don’t notice their horrific mortal injuries or that most people behave as if they don’t exist. I couldn’t help thinking about this when reading noted “popularist” Matthew Yglesias’s remarks at WelcomeFest, a centrist version of Lollapalooza. He argued that “Bad Groups Create Bad Incentives For Democrats,” and he offered as Exhibit A, an article about Democratic lawmakers visiting the Salvadoran prison where Abrego Garcia was held after his wrongful deportation. (See below.)

Yglesias presents as fact that it’s bad politics for Democrats to oppose Donald Trump disappearing people without due process. However, Trump’s approval numbers on immigration dropped during the period when Garcia’s detainment was a prominent issue in the news. Once Democrats stopped visiting the Salvadoran torture prison and talking about Garcia, Trump’s immigration numbers rebounded. Democrats should do the right thing even when it’s not popular, but when centrists oppose taking positions that do benefit Democrats politically, it would seem as if “popularism” is not the driving ideology here.

Pollster Lakshya Jain told Democrats, “The base will vote for you anyway. Don’t worry about liberal defections.” Yet mainstream Democrats have blamed liberal defections for their losses in 2000, 2004, 2016, and 2024. In all those elections, Democrats made overt appeals to the center, which ultimately failed.

When it comes to how Republicans have won past elections, centrist Democrats definitely see what they want to see. Republicans have had an overtly base-driven electoral strategy since at least 1994 and arguably even longer (the Reagan Revolution wasn’t a move to the political center but a triumph for the far-right).

Lighting up a strawman, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez from Washington told the WelcomeFest crowd, “If you can financially afford to go to a protest every day, you are a different person than most people in my community.” No one goes to protests every day, like they’re 1980s midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and it’s astounding that Perez would dismiss protesters as bored elites.

I can’t believe I have to say this, but Republicans — not even the so-called “moderates”— never spoke this way about the Tea Party, which they embraced and elevated as representing “normal” middle-class American discontent with government and Barack Obama in particular. (Watch below.)

After Obama led Democrats to a resounding victory in 2008, Republicans agreed that their brand had become toxic but they didn’t believe the solution was working with Democrats. Instead, they seized on the Tea Party’s much-needed energy. Of course, Tea Party supporters were wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and despite their stated concerns about the economy, polls showed that they were “no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class.”

Just 18 percent of Americans identified as Tea Party supporters in April 2010. They were more conservative than most rank-and-file Republicans and viewed Obama as “more liberal” and radical than he actually was. Yet, they would soon dominate the Republican Party. Democrats might consider that a tragedy — if only the imaginary West Wing Republicans had prevailed! — but the 2010 GOP midterm rout doesn’t occur without the Tea Party, a fact that centrists Democrats are desperate to ignore.

If Republicans had spent 2009 and 2010 telling everyone that they didn’t listen to the “extremists” in the Tea Party and that the Tea Party itself was a privileged minority of voters who didn’t reflect the larger electorate, Nancy Pelosi probably would've enjoyed an unbroken streak as Speaker.

Of course, Republicans embraced the “Stop the Steal” movement and pacified its supporters with the passage of so-called “election integrity” (more accurately voter suppression) laws at the state level. Rather than retreat from the Big Lie and January 6, Republicans put Joe Biden and Democrats on the defensive.

Even when a clear majority of Americans supported COVID-19 mitigation measures and vaccine mandates, Republicans backed the minority within their coalition that opposed both. GOP Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson met with a small group of protesters from the “People’s Convoy” who clogged traffic in Maryland and Virginia just before Biden’s 2022 State of the Union address.

Republicans immediately saw the potential for political gain when angry parents marched into Virginia school board meetings in 2021 to protest mask mandates and “critical race theory.” When the Department of Justice investigated violent threats against school officials and teachers, Republicans went topsy-turvy on Attorney General Merrick Garland and accused him of stifling dissent and freedom of speech. That November, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia gubernatorial race.

During a 2011 interview after the midterm “shellacking,” Barack Obama said, “Any time the American people are actively involved in the political process, it’s good. I think it’s important for people to be paying attention. I think what the Tea Party movement has done is forced some questions to the surface about who we are as a people and what can we afford and what kind of government that we want.” (Watch below.)

Obama would obviously never succeed in reaching common ground with the Tea Party, but at least he tried. Centrist Democrats, meanwhile, are actively mocking left-wing protesters. Dave Weigel at Semafor reports that when Rep. Ritchie Torres criticized the influence of “the groups,” protesters from Climate Defiance charged on stage at WelcomeFest with signs reading “GAYS AGAINST GENOCIDE” and “GENOCIDE RITCHIE.” (This has nothing to do with climate change but rather Torres’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.)

The protesters’ message is a little reductive and overly confrontational, yes, but the conference organizers’ response was arguably worse: The activists were yanked out of the room as Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” played on the loudspeakers. This doesn’t seem like the sort of fight that results in a much-desired Blue Wave.