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A group of center-left Democratic strategists, politicians, and commentators met at "WelcomeFest" in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to figure out what went wrong in 2024 and how to compete in the future. The event is put on by Welcome PAC, a group that says it wants to "reach out to mainstream Americans — not just those who pass all the progressive purity tests." (I guess progressives aren’t welcome in the Welcome Party.)

One of the speakers at the event was Matthew Yglesias, who has become something of a supposed moderates-whisperer for Democratic candidates and strategists over the last year. His short speech to the conference focused on how activists who say loud, left-leaning things push the public to view Democrats as more left-leaning, when voters want the party to be in the center. The theory is that this hurts the party at the ballot box.

According to Yglesias, one of the ways activists do this is by manipulating polling data. Quoting from his presentation:

The main theory of act…