Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment. Earlier this week, welcome an organization that seeks to elect centrist Democrats running in red and purple states released a post-2020 election autopsy titled Deciding to Win towards a Common Sense renewal of the Democratic Party. We're still waiting for the official Democratic National

Community Autopsy, so deciding to win is a great data-driven articulation of the Democratic Party's

Centrist factions, POV, on what went wrong in 2024 and what should come next. So for today's

episode, I interviewed Welcome co-founder Liam Kerr about the report in the broader state of the centrist project.

Liam's a longtime realignment listener, so he knows some of the riffs I've been trying out the past few months.

So our conversation contextualizes deciding to win through the lens of my interest in the need to have an ideological story,

but where the country has been

and where it's going, why it's key to start from the assumption that the status quo is broken

when it comes to voters, and how divided fractions, and how divided factions from the center

left to left can unite together. I was so excited to talk about Liam's work in the context of the realignment, that we

actually took a bit longer than normal to talk about the actual findings of the report,

so I wanted to offer a quick set of takeaways that they offer in the executive summary.

You can find all this linked in the show notes.

So, quote, to give ourselves the best chance to win, we recommend the following changes

to our approach.

Democrats need to, one, focus our policy agenda and our messaging on an economic program

centered on lowering costs, growing the economy, creating jobs, and expanding the social

safety net.

Two, advocate for popular economic policies, such as expanding

prescription drug price negotiation, making the wealthy pay their fair share and taxes, raising the minimum

wage to 15 an hour, rather than unpopular policies, such as student loan forgiveness, EV

subsidies, and Medicaid for all.

...