Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach’s breakdown of the moderation argument is thorough and compelling. So is their skepticism of prominent “popularists,” who view pivoting rightward as a panacea for whatever ails the Democratic Party. In some respects, though, they may even be too generous. While the moderation argument is most often made in the name of swaying pivotal swing voters, it also serves another function: appealing to oligarchs.

The point is not that Bonica and Grumbach’s analysis is incorrect, nor is it that pro-moderation claims shouldn’t be scrutinized on their merits. The point is that we can’t fully assess the politics of moderation if we neglect the influence of very wealthy donors, who often oppose policy positions that are deeply popular with the electorate. One of those issues is wealth taxation. Last month, billionaire Reid Hoffman, among the largest donors to Democrats and one of the richest stumpers for Kamala Harris, came out against California’s proposed billionaire tax. With their easy access to media megaphones, the mega-rich are able to place their preferences at the head of the queue by framing their goals as a middle course between extremes of right and left.

As Bonica and Grumbach describe, chasing issue polling strips elected leaders of agency and relegates Democrats to reactive opposition. But billionaire-driven moderation is even more damaging. Wealthy donors are quick to point to their issues—from supporting Israel to backing down on economically populist ideas—as the ones that candidates have to moderate on, never mind their deep unpopularity with voters. This approach can steer Democrats astray for little benefit, and it can lead to electoral disaster when it prompts them to forsake an issue for fear of offending the donor class. The result is that, on many issues, popularists fail to follow even their own creed.

Harris’s short-lived campaign was a case in point. While some moderates encouraged Harris to triangulate on stances she had taken during the 2020 primary, others leapt at the opportunity to push Harris away from economically populist positions the Biden administration had embraced.

Hoffman was one of those people. Less than a week after Biden dropped out of the race, the LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist said he hoped Harris would replace fiery antitrust lawyer Lina Khan, Biden’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Harris didn’t pledge to do so, but, as Elizabeth Warren recently pointed out, she didn’t defend Khan either. The silence makes little electoral sense—robust antitrust enforcement is very popular with voters in swing states.

Billionaire Mark Cuban, a major cryptocurrency advocate and one of the Harris campaign’s leading surrogates (“I text or talk with her team almost every day,” he said the month before the election), echoed that message on Khan. He also implored Harris to back off from Biden’s aggressive regulation of crypto. Pundits like Matthew Yglesias echoed the call, claiming it would be a good way for Harris to signal her commitment to moderation. Harris did make her intention to break with Biden and support the industry clear, pledging to encourage the digital assets industry. But the gambit failed to end the industry’s onslaught of support for Trump and seemingly had little electoral effect. One poll released less than a month from the election found that even among men aged 18 to 29—the demographic that Cuban said risked tanking the party’s chances, owing to their supposed embrace of crypto—the issue ranked last out of the twenty-eight studied.

Calls for Democrats to back down on big tech regulation have persisted even after the election. While even moderate, corporate-friendly Democrats like Harris campaign advisor David Plouffe have called AI skepticism a winning issue, Silicon Valley is working hard to scuttle any such messaging. Wealthy donors and their mouthpieces in Washington have poured over $100 million into a super PAC designed to ensure their message is heard.

Calls for moderation may have also been responsible for spiking Harris’s single most effective TV ad of the 2024 cycle. The thirty-second spot, developed by the super PAC Future Forward (whose operatives included leading popularist David Shor), promised to “crack down on landlords who are charging too much” and to lower grocery prices “by going after price gougers who are keeping the cost of everyday goods too high.” An internal memo from October complained that the ad ranked in the “100th percentile” in its tests—implying it did better than all other ads—but had barely been aired.

Its shelving makes little sense unless you consider elite moderates’ uproar when Harris unveiled plans to go after grocery store price gouging. The former chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, Jason Furman, told the New York Times the effort wasn’t “sensible policy”—a message amplified by right-wing media—while Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell railed against it, implying it confirmed right-wing cries of communism. Wall Street donors balked too, and Harris began taking her cues on economic policy from Uber executive Tony West, her brother-in-law. West helped craft the campaign’s economic policy, with Harris reportedly asking staff to seek West’s sign-off on economic talking points—reorienting the campaign’s messaging to align with feedback from wealthy financiers, against the advice of her communications staff.

These moves paid off in campaign fundraising—Democrats and allied PACs outspent Republicans by over $1 billion—but they did little to shore up needed votes in crucial swing states. That’s clear evidence that Democrats should get over their destructive fear of missing out financially. Party elites and strategists tend to stress that whoever raises and spends the most money wins—more bucks, more ballots. In the case of high-level races, where earned media plays an outsize role, the prescription is especially misguided: additional funds have rapidly diminishing returns due to media saturation. The reality is that Democrats can afford to lose a lot of money from high-dollar donors, so long as they make it up in votes by embracing the economic populism so broadly popular in the electorate. That’s exactly what Harris didn’t do. Instead, by indulging moderate donors, she watered down her economic message and squandered her early momentum against Trump.

This same dynamic was on display last June at WelcomeFest, a conference hosted by the centrist, Blue Dog–aligned WelcomePAC and funded by a laundry list of wealthy donors—Hoffman and the Walton family of Walmart among them. Speakers celebrated moderation in just about everything except personal wealth. While electoral overperformers like Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington made the program, it also featured prominent centrist pundits and safe-seat Democrats: Yglesias, Richie Torres, Jake Auchincloss, John Fetterman’s former chief of staff Adam Jentleson, and Abundance coauthor Derek Thompson.

Going to Torres and Auchincloss for strategic advice is odd, to say the least. Split Ticket assigned Torres a Wins Above Replacement score of –1.2 for the 2024 election in New York: he’s an underperformer, even by this camp’s preferred metrics. Auchincloss has even less practical wisdom to share; he ran for reelection unchallenged in Massachusetts. Neither has much of a need to persuade voters in critical districts. But both served the apparent goal of the conference’s organizers, imploring Democrats to punch left and fight “the groups”—the specter coined by Jentleson, Yglesias, Ruy Teixeira, and Abundance coauthor Ezra Klein to criticize progressive advocacy organizations they say are trashing the Democratic brand. In one telling exchange, Auchincloss handwaved away a poll showing that Democrats and independents alike prefer economic populism to abundance.

Slotkin and Gluesenkamp Perez, the actual success stories representing constituencies where Trump won, took a different tack. Neither are progressives, but Slotkin was clear: the key fault lines in the party no longer concern ideology but willingness to fight back against the Trump administration. For her part, Gluesenkamp Perez highlighted economic populist policies like antitrust and the right to repair. Both have built bipartisan voter support in part by relying on economic populism, promising to crack down on price gougers and support antitrust enforcement.

WelcomeFest closed on an especially revealing note. Both Yglesias and WelcomePAC’s cofounder, Liam Kerr, endorsed efforts to bring the profoundly unpopular Elon Musk into the Democratic fold. Attacking the left in the name of moderation surely helps on that front. But whatever the party stands to gain from courting powerful men and wealthy donors, it isn’t the “big tent” majority these pundits say is essential to saving democracy.