The Democrats who love to infuriate their own party were all smiles at their big gathering in Washington. It was easy to see why.
From the June 9, 2025 report:
WelcomeFest had grown greatly since last year’s debut. Such gatherings of anti-left grievance and planning for the future of the Democratic Party are being held all over right now, largely behind closed doors. But WelcomeFest was a slightly more public version of this: Maybe not for the everyman, exactly, but at just $20 a pop, for the politics-adjacent person who lives in D.C. and has the afternoon free to figure out how exactly to reach the everyman in the future, the type who is going to need to be brought back into the Democratic fold—and who moderates say they have the best chance of retrieving.
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“The one thing missing broadly from Democratic politics is normalness,” said Lakshya Jain, a part-time pollster, part-time poster, and full-time engineer. “People that know how to talk to ordinary people.” Said Democratic strategist Andrew Mamo to the New York Times: “The focus is how to not look like losers—and how to not be losers.”
So this was not an event for losers, or weirdos. Nor was it a gathering to discuss the finer points of policy. To these people, the problems with Democrats were progressives, activist groups, college students, cowardice, orthodoxy, and Joe Biden’s appointments to certain positions of Elizabeth Warren acolytes who had forced totally normal moderates to say strange and alienating things. Taking a stance on anything, it seemed, foreclosed an opportunity not to take a stance. Moderates were the normal ones, the winners, even when they lost.
