The News
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Two days after Joe Biden came to South Carolina to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the primary win that launched him to the presidency, the centrist Democratic group Third Way convened talks about how his party could avoid repeating his experience.
“Yes, age was a problem for Biden,” Third Way President and founder Jonathan Cowan said on Sunday night, on the sidelines of the group’s conference. “These failures had nothing to do with age. To become a party that can win the middle anytime, anywhere, you must convince swing voters that we have learned, that we have changed, and we will act very different if they put us back in power.”
Cowan sat down with Semafor to talk about how his group and its moderate allies would try to shape the next primary, and what he’d say to progressives who think moderation would mean losing to the resurgent, nationalist right.
“It’s crucial to make sure that Democrats, come 2028, realize that Bidenism became synonymous with a bunch of the things that the public doesn’t like about progressivism,” he said. “And that you’ve got to steer very clear of that if you want to get the White House back.”
The View From Jonathan Cowan
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
David Weigel: How do you read a 2028 poll, right now, that says Gavin Newsom is on top, Kamala is right behind her, and AOC is No. 3? Is that just vapor, and it’ll be different when candidates start to move?
Jonathan Cowan: I’ve been in this business a long time. I just do not give credence to those polls. It’s almost entirely name ID. No one’s stood on a debate stage. No one’s had to run a campaign. I don’t buy it.
You made a point to invite people working with other candidates, not AOC, to this conference. What was the goal of bringing them here?
We are now in the middle of a multiyear campaign to get someone more moderate nominated for president, and to make sure to try to block a left-wing candidate. Our view is that parties change direction around their presidential candidates, not around anything else. So, we wanted to gather people around the candidates who could roughly fall in our lane, not the far-left lane, alongside the people from early primary states and the people from battleground states, and get them into a place where two things can happen.
One: We can make our case about what direction the party should go in. Two: They can spend lots of time with each other. And we have people in the concentric circles around all of the would-be candidates — pollsters, operatives, that kind of stuff.
You’ve been calling on candidates to skip the issue questionnaires from liberal and left-wing groups, but a lot of the position-taking that Democrats regret in 2020 came during events that the groups put on and filmed with media partners. Is Third Way trying to move into that arena?
We were the first to call for candidates not doing the questionnaires. That’s a popular idea now, and we want to make sure that by the time people get to that stage of the process, they and their teams will be very well conditioned to think: No, I’m not doing the gotcha stuff. I’m just not going to do it. Don’t take the bait, because it will ultimately kill your candidacy.
People should be ready to take a principled stand and say: I don’t support this idea you’re asking for a show of hands on, but I do support my idea, and for two reasons. That will send a very strong message to voters that you are principled. And if you want to get the nomination, there’s a lot worse things that can happen than getting booed in front of a special interest group making demands. You cannot win a presidential election unless you are willing to take some stances that conflict with your with the loudest voices on your own side.
So if somebody says, Josh Shapiro is cooked, he’s going to get filleted by pro-Palestine protesters…
That’s absolutely wrong. The left would like everyone to believe that the US relationship with Israel is the No. 1 or No. 2 issue for primary voters. It’s not in the top 15.
And if you’re Josh Shapiro, you are not going to win the Democratic presidential primary because you appealed to the anti-Zionist voters. And every successful nominee has a thing that can appear to be a liability, but if they’re smart about it, it becomes an asset, right? Kennedy’s Catholicism, Barack Obama’s race, Bill Clinton’s womanizing — in Shapiro’s case, people will look at him as a guy who won a blue-wall state and is very popular there, which is more important than an issue that’s not in the top 10 that he took a stand on.
Do you think the war with Iran is changing any of this? At this point 24 years ago, moderate Democrats were worried about coming out against the Iraq War. What should they be saying now about Iran?
You should decide your positioning on a war based on what you believe, not on politics. And in this instance I actually think the principle and the politics are completely aligned. I do not see a scenario by which, in 2028, what Trump has done here is popular. I don’t see it as popular enough among swing voters that it would decide the 2028 general election. This does not feel to me at all like the dynamic of Iraq in 2002 or 1991.