Candidly, I find the debate about moderation mostly exhausting and the armchair agonizing over what candidates “should” do in order to win mostly pointless.

First, what does “moderate” even mean? While I agree with a lot that Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach say, they are no less evasive on this point than their targets. There is no clear definition, no set of values you could point to, no singularly defined list of positions that one could take that would mark you as moderate. You can rhetorically punch left or right, but even those advocating for moderation as electoral strategy cannot clearly articulate what that looks like in practice. Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams was a moderate; so are Representative Jared Golden of Maine and former Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. But do all of these figures hold the same policy positions? Do they have the same political vision? I think not! Their only true alignment is that they all would describe themselves as not like other Democrats—the political equivalent of the pick-me girl.

Second, even if one accepts the premise that the national Democratic Party brand needs to be more moderate in order to help Democrats win elections in red states—a premise I’m not sure I agree with—what is anyone supposed to do with that knowledge? There is no secret cabal behind a curtain that can meaningfully control what candidates and electeds say or do, nor can anyone control what activists do. Money matters, of course, and there’s definitely too much of it in our politics. But money isn’t everything—if it were, we’d never see someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley in 2018, or Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo in 2025.

The point is that imperatives saying Democrats should do X, Y, or Z are empty demands if they don’t clearly specify actors who can pick up the work. Filling that in would clear up some basic confusions. Should voters in New York City really pick their mayor based on what a mythical swing voter in the Midwest might think of the party? Should Californians choose a governor or Illinoisans a member of Congress based on who will help us win a Senate seat in Iowa? Some in this debate might say, “Yes, that’s exactly what should happen,” but that’s not how most voters see their role in the process, so good luck convincing them otherwise.

Third, the debate seems to miss how the vast majority of candidates actually exist in the world—and how voters experience them. Candidates are not just walking policies and talking points (although I’ll grant, perhaps the bad candidates sound like that); they are people with personal stories and roots in the community. Policy positions—and the values those policies reflect—are just one component of what makes up a candidate’s broader brand. Two elected leaders can advocate for the exact same policy—consider that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both argued for Medicare for All and a tax on the rich—but be received wildly differently, with Warren understood to be a pragmatic wonky regulator and Sanders perceived as a revolutionary. Who the candidate is and how people feel about them matters.

I agree with Bonica and Grumbach that we don’t know much about what campaign tactics work anymore in 2026—if we did, we wouldn’t have spent billions in 2024 only to lose, and we certainly wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. But one thing is clear: authenticity (or at least, the perception of authenticity) is fundamental to capturing attention, which in turn is absolutely necessary to win votes. Relentless poll-testing, dictating exactly what a candidate can or should say, runs counter to voters’ hunger for authenticity. People may not like Trump, but plenty of his voters clearly found him more authentic than even other Republicans.

Finally, perhaps the biggest reason I find this argument exhausting is that most of the people having it have never tried to convince someone to run for office, and boy does it show. There are very few people eager to get in the arena only to run on a platform of “better things aren’t possible.” As cofounder and president of Run for Something, I’ve spent most of the last decade building the largest candidate pipeline in politics—we run and cultivate a list of a quarter million young people interested in running for office. Our focus is local first-time candidate recruitment and support; we are the top of funnel for the democratic process.

Through our political program and endorsements, we’ve helped elect more than 1,600 of those new leaders to local offices across 49 states. Our candidates range across the center-left to far-left ideological spectrum—from Andrew Harbaugh, a former Republican in rural Pennsylvania, to Kelsea Bond, a Democratic Socialists of America leader in Atlanta, and everything in between. Last year we won 165 elections, including 43 red-to-blue flips.

In other words, we’ve built the big tent everyone talks about wanting by being tight on values and flexible on policy. A candidate for state legislature in a Democratic stronghold will talk about reducing gun violence very differently than a candidate for city council in a Republican town—but as long as both are striving toward safety, we’re all good. Some of our candidates identify as moderates or centrists. Others identify as progressives, leftists, or something else entirely. What we encourage them to do is to know themselves, know their communities, and to keep campaigns local and focused on what’s in it for voters if the candidate wins.

The inconvenient truth of politics is that most voters don’t consistently position themselves on an ideological spectrum: if you’re talking about a cohesive frame for your politics, you’re absolutely not the normal American voter. Rather, voters have problems; they want solutions. They want people they can trust to get things done, and they want to not think about any of this so much.

The key word in all this is trust—which is why authenticity matters. It’s not a matter of optimizing the perfect platform or ideology, as compelling as Bonica and Grumbach’s “anti-corruption” message may sound. They’re on much better footing when they note that “policy positions are downstream of the relationship” that voters have with a candidate. That’s why so many voters have stuck by Trump regardless of his flip-flopping, as Bonica and Grumbach stress. He earned their trust, as crazy as that may seem to more than half the country.

The good news is that trust can be lost—Trump’s approval ratings right now are plummeting—and it can be earned, or re-earned. But Democrats won’t build it by chasing some mythical ideal ideology, much less by arguing about which public opinion poll we should really be listening to. We have to focus on the connection: Do voters in this person’s district or state trust that this candidate will do what they say? If so, they’re a good fit. If not, why—and what can we do differently? Getting that right, above all else, is how we win in the deep red places we need in order to have governing majorities.