Mark Stehle/AP Photo
Al From, founder and CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council, second from left, and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, right, speak to reporters alongside other Democratic leaders, June 6, 2003, at the Park Hyatt Philadelphia.
Both Politico and The New York Times have reported on a four-page memo written by Seth London, a former Obama administration official and adviser for some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors. They described the memo, dated November 11 and addressed to “Discouraged Democrats,” as primarily a rejection of identity politics, with a hint that London wants to build a faction inside the party to support “charismatic, moderate officeholders.”
The memo, which the Prospect has obtained, has an explicit model in mind: the Democratic Leadership Council. Founded in 1984 after a 49-state re-election landslide by Ronald Reagan, the DLC was a beachhead for conservative Southern Democrats seeking to promote a market-friendly agenda more in line with the right-to-work states they represented. The DLC’s fiercest critic, Jesse Jackson, promptly won several Southern states in the 1988 presidential primaries. The generational political talent of Bill Clinton, with an assist from Ross Perot (Clinton never won an electoral majority), eventually brought a DLCer inside the White House. Democrats then lost the House for the first time in 40 years, and began a 30-year movement away from the party’s working-class roots. The DLC officially shuttered in 2011.
The DLC is strongly associated with Robert Rubin’s view of international economics, emphasizing unfettered free trade, financial deregulation, faith in markets to solve societal problems, privatization, military escalation and intervention, and austerity budgeting. Historian Nelson Lichtenstein painstakingly documented this era as “a fabulous failure” in a recent book.
A 1.5 percent loss (and a one-seat gain in the House) is not a landslide. Yet London is reintroducing the DLC banner at a moment when the Democratic Party is leaderless and the opportunity to capture influence is high.
London maintains that he doesn’t seek to replicate the policies of the DLC, but rather the organizational model, shaped by elected leaders working across election cycles to reshape the party brand. But the ideas and personalities London affiliates with in the memo make perfectly clear that he wants to build a DLC for the 21st century, with the same enemies to its left and the same comfort with business interests at its core.
A venture capitalist, corporate lobbyist, and high-level fundraiser thinks he has the secret formula for Democrats to reconnect with ordinary people.
London’s personal history further reinforces these aims. After working on both of Barack Obama’s campaigns for president and as a legislative assistant in the White House, London joined a D.C.-based venture capital firm founded by ex-AOL chief executive Steve Case called Revolution LLC, which is currently invested in a series of AI and fintech companies. His second VC job, with Tusk Ventures, focused on startups in “highly regulated markets.” Bradley Tusk was Mike Bloomberg’s campaign manager for New York City mayor in 2009 and was an early adviser to Uber. One of London’s few public statements was an op-ed in Politico with Tusk calling for a federal grant program to pay cities to create “a more startup-friendly business environment.”
In 2017, London co-founded Ground Control Partners, a consulting firm that works with “corporations, start-ups, trade groups, and family offices” to “navigate federal, state and local government policy.” This is a euphemism for lobbying; in fact, “direct lobbying and relationship building” is one of the firm’s main selling points. While a full list of Ground Control’s clients is hard to find, the current CEO (a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer) boasts on LinkedIn that he recently “managed all aspects of a major national advocacy campaign on behalf of the US airlines industry.” (London now runs his own firm, London Strategies, that appears to be substantially similar to his other efforts, helping “entrepreneurs and philanthropists achieve political and policy outcomes that strengthen our democracy.”)
In other words, a venture capitalist, corporate lobbyist, and high-level fundraiser thinks he has the secret formula for Democrats to reconnect with ordinary people.
IN THE MEMO, WHICH IS REPRODUCED HERE and in full below, London argues that the Democratic coalition today is “too small, too geographically concentrated and too captured by its own special interests to reliably win.” Those special interests are not named overtly, but in context London is referring to “core party activists,” and explicitly rejects “race and group-based identity politics” and the need to “racialize every issue.” The memo states that ideological conformity should be resisted, “even on seminal issues like guns, the environment and abortion.”
The inclusion of abortion may surprise some, given the successful role of reproductive rights in the 2022 midterms and in issue-specific campaigns deep in red America. But generally, the break with “the groups” and proposed return to a “common sense” agenda has been prominent in many post-election suggestions from moderate factions of the party. Indeed, London writes that his movement should be “focused less on adherence to a set policy agenda than a willingness to fight against elements within the party who would rather maintain the status quo (even if they profess otherwise).”
While much of the vision is laid out in vague platitudes—“a future-focused narrative,” “rooted in hard work” and “the pursuit of the American Dream”—where he is most clear, London aligns his movement with the “abundance agenda,” pushed by a series of groups favoring supply-side liberalism through removing regulatory barriers to a host of common needs, while rejecting the concept of “socializing” the provision of health care and housing and education. (London has consulted for Arnold Ventures, a key funder of the abundance agenda, led by former Enron trader and hedge fund manager John Arnold.) The memo commits to “social insurance for those who need it,” an unconcealed reference to means testing.
Seeking to learn from those who overperformed the Harris-Walz ticket is a commonsense idea, and London wants to “cultivate a fighting spirit” personified by those overperformers. But the idea that you can place those winners in a moderate, VC-friendly box neglects the number of frontline Democrats who won races with populist, pocketbook messages.
The DLC’s preference for new-economy, market-friendly policies led to deregulation that helped trigger the global financial crisis.
Where the London memo gets interesting and revealing is in the sketching out of how to create a “party within the party” to fight for prominence for its ideas. The idea that party leaders should control the Democrats’ direction may be preferable to a jumbled, decentralized coalition of issue-based silos. London wants to arrange a “committee of federal and state elected officials” who would elect a leader from within, hire a staff to do fundraising, polling, media outreach, and policy support, and draft an organizing statement and platform for the midterm elections of 2026, while running public events to promote it.
But London already has people in mind to cohere toward this goal. He talks up the Democratic Future Fund, a PAC led by Lis Smith (Pete Buttigieg’s lead consultant in his presidential race, as well as an adviser to Andrew Cuomo) and former congressman Steve Israel. London says the concept “proved out” and should be “scaled up,” but the Democratic Future Fund only donated $11,600 in the 2024 cycle to three House Democrats, one of whom, Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), gave up her seat because she’s running next year for governor of Virginia. (There’s an allusion to the “opportunity” of that Virginia gubernatorial race to show a different way of running for office, but Spanberger is running for the nomination unopposed.) Welcome PAC, an explicitly moderate PAC for House Democrats, is also mentioned; of the ten candidates it supported in 2024, eight lost.
London then says he needs “an institution to resource the intellectual capital that will enable Common Sense Democrats to effectively engage and ultimately win the battle of ideas.” In other words, after spending a lot of time condemning outside groups for poisoning the well of the party, he demands a new group aligned with his preferences.
Next, he seeks funding for a new or existing media platform to “become a megaphone for the larger effort,” similar to The New Republic’s role within the DLC, or National Review’s for the New Right. (For some reason, he cites Dissent as playing this role for progressives.) “At the moment, we have The Liberal Patriot, and several excellent Substacks including Matt Yglesias’ Slow Boring, Noah Smith’s Noahopinion [sic], the Realignment podcast and Jonathan Chait’s column.”
This is a collection of people who have argued explicitly for a more conservative Democratic Party for a long time; The Liberal Patriot’s co-founder, Ruy Teixeira, is a senior fellow at the foundational conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. They also by and large supported Kamala Harris’s “brilliant” campaign, which was guided by Wall Street executives, followed through on the lion’s share of the principles London articulates, and lost the presidential popular vote for the first time in 20 years.
THE DLC WAS REALLY A CAMPAIGN TO REGAIN the presidency that ignored down-ballot concerns and eventual erosion. London, too, cites influencing the policy debate in the 2028 presidential primary as a “medium-term yardstick for success.” He concludes that the effort depends on politicians “who know what they want, know what they stand for and who are willing to lead public opinion and not just be led by it.”
Politicians should certainly know what they stand for. The question is whether they stand for picking fights with activists for fighting’s sake, and renewing a march to the right that contributed to a loss of working-class support that was fatal in the 2024 election. The DLC’s preference for new-economy, market-friendly policies led to deregulation that helped trigger the global financial crisis, deindustrialization that further weakened unions and worker power, and de-emphasis on government intervention that told the public that government had no role to play in their problems.
Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, warned recently that the DLC’s effort to edge toward Republican ideas came at a long-term cost. Centrist politics “can result in a party leaving behind traditions that remained at the heart of its appeal to most supporters,” Zelizer writes, and “can dissuade parties from the hard work of really reimagining their ideas and constituencies in bold ways that are usually essential to realignments.”
The tough loss in 2024 does demand a reckoning about the narrowing of the party into highly educated clusters on the coasts. Turning to like-minded elites whose policies precipitated this narrowing to grow the party back seems like a dangerous option.
The entire four-page memo is below.
