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SARCASM ALERT: Third Way $20M "Listening" Tour off to a Brilliant Start

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In the fallout of the 2016 election, Democrats of all stripes have been looking to determine what on Earth voters were thinking when they gave the electoral college to Trump.   

One of the most publicized, and certainly most expensive, of these outreach efforts, was kick started by everyone’s favorite centrist Democratic group, Third Way.   In January, Third Way announced $20 million towards a campaign to “provide Democrats with a path out of the wilderness.” The group would fan out to a handful of states in the Real America to interview Real Americans in order to figure out why sensible, centrist policies seemed to have fallen so far out of favor. 

Well, the results have started to come in, with a new report on a proposed way forward based on interviews with voters from Wisconsin, and the report contains shockingly good news for…...Third Way.  

Incredibly, Third Way found people longed for solutions that dovetailed exactly with the re-heated centrist swill that Third Way has been pushing for years—what we need is more consensus, and bi-partisanship, and most notably, America hates big government.

It’s hardly be news that a think tank flushed $$$ down the pisshole by putting out a report drenched with confirmation bias.  Unfortunately for Third Way, though, ace Atlantic reporter Molly Ball had been fully embedded during their outreach efforts in Wisconsin, and shock of shocks, found that their listening tour was anything but:

The report surprised me when I read it. Despite the great variety of views the researchers and I had heard on our tour, the report had somehow reached the conclusion that Wisconsinites wanted consensus, moderation, and pragmatism—just like Third Way. We had heard people blame each other for their own difficulties, take refuge in tribalism, and appeal to extremes. But the report mentioned little of that. 

Oh, do you mean that Third Way muted the voices of real folks in order to fit their meet-in the middle, economically conservative agenda? (falls over)  It gets even worse.  Ball, who was with the interviewers for every step of their listening tour in Wisconsin, is absolutely flummoxed as to how they squared the viewpoints that were expressed to them with the results that Third Way put forth.    

“Whether the question is about immigration or banks, taxes or welfare, the people we spoke to generally felt that government policies were irrelevant to their daily lives,” the report states. This view is made to sound like one that was broadly expressed, but in fact, we mostly heard it in just one session—the group of curmudgeonly farmers. Almost all of the quotations in this section are drawn from that group. There are no quotations from the people we met who were pro-government, such as the teachers and laborers and activists, who voiced concern that local, state, and federal government ought to be doing more to take care of people.

Read the article.  It is a brilliant piece, and a positively damning read.  As someone who was fully supportive of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election cycle, I do not consider myself an ideologue, and am willing to support a wide range of Democratic voices.   But it is equally hilarious and infuriating the lengths to which Wall Street Democrats will go to reinforcing their unpopular beliefs.

Third Way is spending $20 million to tell themselves that the reason Donald Trump won is that people were yearning for Social Security reform, bi-partisan solutions between Democrats and (insert mythical centrist Republican here) and a religious commitment to the principles of Bowles-Simpson.    

Sad.  


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