I'm Charlie Sykes.

Welcome to the To the Contrary podcast.

You know what I often talk about being distracted by the bright, shiny objects.

And right now, there's really no brighter or shinier object among Democrats

than the new mayor of New York, Mandani. And we're going to talk about that. So we are joined

today by the executive vice president of Third Way. Matt Bennett, good to talk with you, Matt.

Thanks for having me. Well, you have a memo out that I should have talked to you about this a couple of weeks ago,

10 reasons why Memdani's politics will not win outside of New York City.

But before we do that, there's got a lot of fans out there.

Just talk to me a little bit about what your organization third way is. I want to establish the

credentials. You are a senator-left organization that seems devoted to trying to convince

Democrats to stop losing elections. Would that be a fair way of putting it? That would be a

fantastically pithy way of putting it. Yeah, we've been around for 20 years. This was our

anniversary this year. And we kind of

helped define what it means to be center left, to be a moderate Democrat. There's a lot of ways of

putting it. Nobody much likes any of those terms, but we are, you know, we are stuck with them.

And I think it's important to emphasize that sometimes when people think about moderates, especially, you know, our name is third them. And I think it's important to emphasize that sometimes

when people think about moderates, especially, you know, our name is third way. We named ourselves

after the Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, philosophy of government back in the 90s. But people think that

somehow the center left was trapped in amber in 1992.

And we can't change and we haven't changed despite the fact that in 1992,

China was a poor agrarian country.

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