The Surrender Caucus: How Centrist Pundits Are Building a Democratic Graveyard

Like clockwork, the New York Times has published another guest essay urging Democrats to abandon their most vulnerable constituencies in pursuit of voters who will never vote for them. This time it is Matthew Yglesias, the aptlynamed Slow Boring blogger and self-appointed strategist of the center-left, arguing that Democrats must shed their positions on race, immigration, and trans rights to win Senate seats in deep-red states.[1] The piece is a masterwork of a genre the Times has perfected over the past four years: launder Republican talking points through the vocabulary of strategic pragmatism, present the abandonment of civil rights as sophisticated thinking, and discipline the Democratic Party against its own base while calling it advice.

Yglesias is not offering anything new. He is recycling a thesis that centrist pundits have been pushing with metronomic regularity since at least 2016: that the Democratic Party’s commitment to marginalized communities—particularly trans people, immigrants, and people of color—is an electoral albatross. This thesis has a name in practice. It is the strategy Keir Starmer’s Labour Party adopted in the United Kingdom, where it has produced the most spectacular governing-party collapse in modern British political history. The Times does not mention this. Yglesias does not mention this. They never do.

The Structural Lie at the Heart of the Argument

The foundational dishonesty of Yglesias’s piece is its refusal to engage with the structural reasons the Senate favors Republicans. He frames the Democrats’ Senate problem as a branding problem. It is not. It is a structural problem. The United States Senate gives two seats to every state regardless of population, which means that Wyoming’s 576,000 residents have the same senatorial representation as California’s 39 million.[2] The Dakotas with a combined population of roughly 1.7 million, sends four senators to Washington. Brooklyn alone has a population of 2.7 million people and only gets two senators along with the rest of New York state.[3] This is not a branding failure but rather a democratic failure that systematically overrepresents rural, white, conservative populations.

Yglesias acknowledges the map is bad but treats it as a problem Democrats can message their way out of. He writes that Democrats should change their “brand” by adopting conservative positions on race, immigration, gender, and criminal justice—in effect, becoming a different party entirely—in order to win in states where the structural deck is stacked against them. But this framing elides the actual math: Republicans hold a durable Senate advantage not because Democrats have bad vibes, but because the Senate was designed to entrench the power of small, sparsely populated, predominantly white states.[4] No amount of capitulation on trans rights will make Wyoming competitive.

The same structural logic applies across American elections. Republicans use gerrymandering to tilt the House.[5] The Electoral College tilts presidential elections toward low-population states.[6] These are features, not bugs, of a system designed to insulate conservative power from majoritarian accountability. When Yglesias tells Democrats to adopt conservative positions to overcome these structural disadvantages, he is asking them to forfeit the ideological battle in order to fight a war they will lose on terrain that was built to defeat them.

The Labour Catastrophe: What Happens When You Follow Yglesias’ Advice

If you want to know what happens when a center-left party follows the Yglesias playbook, look at the United Kingdom. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party adopted almost precisely the strategy Yglesias advocates: tack right on immigration, distance the party from progressive positions on trans rights and social policy, and appeal to conservative-leaning voters alienated by the populist right.[7] The results have been catastrophic.

Labour won a massive parliamentary majority in July 2024, but it was a hollow victory built on an anti-Conservative protest vote rather than affirmative support.[8] Labour’s actual vote share increased by a mere 1.6 percentage points. Forty-eight percent of Labour voters said they were voting primarily to remove the Tories, not because they supported Labour’s agenda.[9] Starmer treated this as a mandate for centrism. It was, in fact, a Jenga tower.

That tower has now collapsed. As of March 2026, Labour polls at 16% in the YouGov weekly tracker—tied with the Conservatives and behind both Reform UK at 23% and the Green Party at 21%.[10] The Greens have overtaken Labour for the first time in YouGov’s history. Starmer’s net favorability stands at −57, matching Rishi Sunak’s worst and exceeded in ignominy only by Liz Truss.[11] Only 13% of the British public approves of his government’s performance.[12] An MRP projection from early 2026 estimates Labour would fall to just 85 seats—a loss of 326 seats from the landslide they won eighteen months ago.[13]

The Green Party’s surge is the mirror image of Labour’s collapse. In February 2026, the Greens won the Gorton and Denton by-election—a seat Labour had held for over ninety years—with 40.7% of the vote, pushing Labour to a humiliating third place at 25.4%.[14] The Greens have since gained over 15,000 new members in a single week, surpassing 215,000 total—more than the Conservatives.[15] Among voters under 50, the Greens are now the most popular party in Britain. Among 18–24 year olds, they command 49% support.[16]

This is what Yglesias’s strategy produces. Labour tried to out-flank Reform UK on immigration by making asylum temporary, restricting citizenship pathways, and adopting what the Green Party called a “rehash of an old BNP policy.”[17] It did not win over Reform voters. It hemorrhaged its own base to the Greens. The party destroyed itself doing exactly what Matt Yglesias is telling Democrats to do. A quarter of 2024 Labour voters now say they would switch to the Greens.[18]

This is not a distant analogy. It is a controlled experiment in real time, running on the exact strategic premises Yglesias endorses, and the results are unambiguous: the strategy does not work. It alienates your base faster than it attracts new voters, because the voters you are chasing have an authentic right-wing party they already prefer.

The Primary Problem: You Cannot Sell Out and Survive Your Own Voters

Yglesias’s argument assumes that Democratic politicians can adopt conservative positions on trans rights, immigration, and race without consequence within their own party. Recent primary results obliterate this assumption.

In March 2026, North Carolina held primary elections in which every prominent anti-trans Democrat was blown out. Nasif Majeed, the state legislator who cast the deciding Democratic vote to override the governor’s veto of HB 805 (a sweeping anti-trans omnibus bill), lost to progressive challenger Veleria Levy by over 40 points.[19] Former Representative Michael Wray, who voted with Republicans to override vetoes on both a trans sports ban and a youth gender-affirming care ban, also lost his attempted comeback.[20]

This pattern is not new. In 2024, Texas Democrat Shawn Thierry, who voted for a gender-affirming care ban and called transgender girls “biological males” on the House floor, lost her primary runoff 65–35% to Lauren Ashley Simmons, a Black queer union organizer.[21] In Kansas, Democrat Marvin Robinson, the sole Democratic vote to override the governor’s veto of a trans sports ban, received just 22% in his primary.[22] In New York, Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary on a platform that included a $65 million proposal for trans healthcare access, the most pro-trans platform of any major Democratic candidate in recent memory.[23]

Yglesias imagines a world in which Democratic voters reward capitulation. The actual world works differently. Democratic primary electorates punish betrayal. If you adopt a bunch of conservative policies to win a Senate seat in a small rural conservative state, you risk alienating the much more populous base in metro areas that outnumbers the entire populations of those red states. No one will want to donate to or support such a party. The strategy eats itself.

What Yglesias is pushing is basically a doomed strategy of abandoning the vast majority of the Democratic base in metro areas in favor of a fleetingly small set of rural voters who will never vote Democrat because the conservative media ecosystem has made that structurally impossible. It is a dumb strategy.

The New York Times as Disciplinary Institution

Yglesias’s essay does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of a sustained editorial project at the New York Times to discipline the Democratic Party against progressive positions on trans rights specifically, and minority constituencies generally.

The Times’s record on trans coverage is well-documented and damning. A 2023 FAIR study found that in a full year of front-page trans coverage, the Times largely framed trans issues around the premise that trans people were receiving too many rights and accessing too much medical care.[24] A 2024 Media Matters and GLAAD analysis found that 66% of the Times’s news stories about trans people did not include a single trans voice.[25] More than 100 LGBTQ organizations and over 180 Times contributors signed open letters demanding the paper stop platforming anti-trans misinformation. The Times has officially never responded.[26]

The Times opinion page, where Yglesias’s essay appears, has been particularly egregious. It hired David French, an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization designated as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.[27] It gave columnist Pamela Paul a platform to write repeated anti-trans opinion columns, including a defense of J.K. Rowling published the day after the open letters were sent.[28] When the Supreme Court ruled against trans youth in United States v. Skrmetti, Times articles were cited seven times in the decision to support the stripping of medical rights from transgender minors. The paper then published at least six more anti-trans pieces within twenty-four hours of the ruling.[29]

This is an institutional project of legitimation. The Times launders conservative social positions through the vocabulary of liberal pragmatism such as: “moderation,” “brand management,” “and electoral strategy,” and then publishes them as advice to Democrats. The function of Yglesias’s essay is not to help Democrats win. It is to make the abandonment of trans people, immigrants, and racial minorities appear as the sophisticated position. The Times is not a neutral platform in this conversation. It is an active participant in manufacturing consent for the rightward movement of the Democratic Party.

Some of You May Die: The Asymmetry of Consequence

It is so tiring to constantly see these men who have no actual skin in the game advocating for others to suffer while making millions in Substack revenue, speaking fees, and consulting. It costs them nothing.

Consider what Yglesias is actually asking for. He is asking Democrats to abandon their positions on gender-affirming care for trans youth, on asylum protections for immigrants, on race-conscious admissions, on LGBTQ inclusion in schools. These are not abstract policy planks. They are lifelines. Trans people are currently facing an executive branch that has redefined sex under federal law to erase them, that has directed agencies to withhold funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors, that is systematically dismantling the legal infrastructure that allows trans people to exist in public life.[30] Immigrants are being detained in conditions that human rights organizations have compared to concentration camps. These are people who are under direct governmental assault.

And Matthew Yglesias is not one of them. If the Democrats lose based on his advice—which, arguably, they partially did in 2024—nothing changes for him. He is not losing his healthcare. He is not losing his passport. He is not losing his ability to use the bathroom, or even how he addresses himself at work. He will continue to write his Substack. He will continue to collect speaking fees. He will continue to be invited onto podcasts and published in the New York Times. There is no cost to him advocating these positions. The cost is borne entirely by the people he is asking Democrats to abandon.

This asymmetry is the defining feature of the centrist pundit class’s relationship to the communities they treat as electoral ballast. Jesse Singal, who has built a career on concern-trolling trans healthcare, is not the one losing access to healthcare and having to flee his home and stockpile medication. Pamela Paul, whose Times columns regularly targeted trans people, faces none of the repercussions of increased hate crimes and discrimination. The Third Way strategists urging Democrats to retreat from “identity politics” are not the ones whose identities are being legislated out of existence. They occupy a position of total insulation from the consequences of their advice. They are, in the most literal sense, advocating for other people to die, or at minimum to be stripped of medical care, legal recognition, and civil rights protections. They do so in the hopes that a Democratic Senate candidate might perform two points better in a state that was structurally designed to elect Republicans anyway.

This is the some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make school of political strategy. The people making the sacrifice and the people willing to make it are never the same people. Yglesias will be fine regardless of what happens to trans kids in red states, regardless of what happens to asylum seekers at the border, regardless of what happens to Black students shut out of universities. His material conditions are not contingent on the outcome of the political fights he is asking others to lose. That is cruelty at a comfortable distance disguised as strategy.

Closing Thoughts

The Yglesias essay, like the Times’s broader editorial project, functions as a means of pushing the systematic exclusion of trans people, immigrants, and racial minorities from the protective umbrella of the Democratic coalition. Yglesias presents the abandonment of vulnerable communities as sophisticated strategic thinking. It is not. It is a counsel of surrender dressed in the language of political science.

Labour tried this. Labour is polling at 16%. The Greens took their safest seat. Their prime minister has the worst favorability of any leader in modern British history save Liz Truss, who was outlasted by a head of lettuce. The strategy Yglesias champions does not capture new voters. It ultimately destroys your party.

So what Yglesias is pushing here is basically a doomed strategy of abandoning the vast majority of the Democratic base in metro areas in favor of a fleetingly small set of rural voters who will never vote Democrat because their information ecosystem has made that structurally impossible. Again, it’s a dumb strategy. And the New York Times knows this. They platform it anyway, because the function of the Times opinion page is not to help Democrats win. It is to define the boundaries of permissible dissent within American liberalism, and those boundaries always run through the bodies of the most vulnerable.

[1] Matthew Yglesias, The Democratic Brand Is Toxic in Too Many States, N.Y. Times (Mar. 16, 2026), https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/opinion/democrats-senate-moderate.html.

[2] U.S. Const. art. I, § 3, cl. 1. See also U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts: Wyoming; California (2024).

[3] U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts: North Dakota; South Dakota; Brooklyn Borough, Kings County, New York (2024).

[4] See generally Lee & Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (1999); Lazare, The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (1996).

[5] See Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019) (holding partisan gerrymandering claims nonjusticiable).

[6] U.S. Const. art. II, § 1, cl. 2; see also Jesse Wegman, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College (2020).

[7] Christian Science Monitor, As UK’s Labour Party Tacks Right, Greens Scoop Up Its Spurned Voters (Mar. 10, 2026), https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2026/0310/green-party-labour-reform-uk-byelection-parliament.

[8] Brookings Inst., Back to the Future? British Politics in 2026 (Feb. 2026) (noting Labour’s vote share increased by only 1.6 percentage points despite winning a 174-seat majority).

[9] Id. (reporting that 48% of Labour voters cited removing the Conservatives as their primary motivation).

[10] YouGov/Sky News, Weekly Voting Intention Poll (Mar. 1–2, 2026); see also Bloomberg, UK Green Party Passes Labour and Tories for First Time in YouGov Poll (Mar. 3, 2026).

[11] YouGov, Political Favourability Ratings, January 2026 (Jan. 19, 2026), https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/53907-political-favourability-ratings-january-2026.

[12] YouGov, Government Approval Poll (July 2025) (reporting 13% approval, 67% disapproval); Opinium, Voting Intention (Feb. 25, 2026) (reporting Starmer’s net approval at −49, lower than any modern PM’s worst).

[13] More in Common, MRP Projection (Jan. 2026); see also Brookings, supra note 8 (reporting projection of Labour falling to 85 seats, a 326-seat loss).

[14] Gorton & Denton By-Election Results (Feb. 26, 2026); Brussels Signal, Greens Overtake Labour to Hit Second Place in UK Poll (Mar. 3, 2026).

[15] Green Party of Eng. & Wales, Press Release, Green Party Gains 15,000 New Members in a Week After Historic By-Election Victory (Mar. 6, 2026).

[16] YouGov/Sky News, supra note 10 (reporting 49% Green support among 18–24 year olds and majority support across all age groups under 50).

[17] Green Party of Eng. & Wales, Press Release, Greens Slam Labour Immigration Reforms (Mar. 5, 2026).

[18] Brussels Signal, supra note 14 (reporting that 25% of 2024 Labour voters would switch to the Greens; only 37% would remain with Labour).

[19] Erin Reed, Anti-Trans Democrats Blown Out in North Carolina Primary Election, Erin in the Morning (Mar. 4, 2026).

[20] Id.

[21] Id. (reporting Thierry’s 2024 primary loss to Lauren Ashley Simmons, 65–35%).

[22] Id. (reporting Robinson received 22% of the vote after casting the sole Democratic vote to override the governor’s veto of a trans sports ban).

[23] The Nation, Democrats Can’t Blame Trans People for Their Own Failures (Nov. 7, 2025) (discussing Mamdani’s $65 million trans healthcare proposal and mayoral primary victory).

[24] FAIR, NYT’s Anti-Trans Bias—By the Numbers (May 11, 2023).

[25] Media Matters & GLAAD, Analysis of N.Y. Times Trans Coverage (2024); see also GLAAD, The New York Times Continues to Double Down on Biased, Inaccurate Transgender Coverage (July 2025).

[26] GLAAD, The New York Times’ Bias Continues to Endanger Transgender People (Feb. 16, 2024) (noting the Times has never responded to the coalition’s demands nor hired full-time trans journalists).

[27] GLAAD, N.Y. Times Sign-On Letter (Feb. 15, 2023); S. Poverty L. Ctr., Alliance Defending Freedom (designating ADF as an anti-LGBTQ hate group).

[28] Pamela Paul, In Defense of J.K. Rowling, N.Y. Times (Feb. 16, 2023) (published one day after coalition letters demanding changes to the Times’s trans coverage).

[29] Erin Reed, After Getting the Ruling It Wanted, New York Times Publishes 6 Anti-Trans Articles, Erin in the Morning (June 19, 2025) (documenting seven citations to Times articles in United States v. Skrmetti, 605 U.S. 495 (2025)).

[30]See Exec. Order No. 14,168, 90 Fed. Reg. 8,613 (Jan. 20, 2025) (redefining sex under federal law to exclude transgender people); Exec. Order No. 14,187, 90 Fed. Reg. 11,025 (Feb. 7, 2025) (directing federal agencies to withhold funding from providers of gender-affirming care for minors).