For a good while into the second Donald Trump presidency, centrist Democrats were nowhere to be found. Their strategy was, in the immortal words of former Bill Clinton campaign strategist James Carville, to “roll over and play dead” and simply wait and hope that the Trump administration would collapse in popularity without them having to do anything.

A year and a half later, Trump’s approval rating is in the toilet, some of the most divisive primary contests are over, and there are only three months to go until the midterm elections that may well decide not just the future of Trump’s presidency but the entire country’s political trajectory. So the average Democratic voter will be heartened to learn that — as the smoke clears after the bitter Michigan primary contest and its two rival Democratic candidates make up and vow to join forces for the general election — centrist Democrats have suddenly come back to life, gearing up to wage relentless war against their political opponents to the tune of $15 million.

No, not Republicans. The political opponents that have the centrist Democrats newly energized and willing to fight like hell are the democratic socialists who have become a powerful organizing force within their party and some of its most popular national figures. 

That’s according to the New York Times, which reported yesterday that the centrist organization Third Way, in concert with unnamed “moderates,” plan to launch a “discrediting campaign” lasting from now until 2028 that takes aim at the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the group whose members include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and is a key part of the coalition behind the party’s Senate candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. That campaign will see Third Way not just do opposition research into DSA and target its elected officials but also go after politicians like El-Sayed, who don’t identify as socialists but make common cause with the group.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, told the Times about the campaign. This is a month after Cowan and Third Way’s executive vice president, Matt Bennett, warned in the Washington Post that DSA was “not a faction to be appeased,” urging the party to “fight” the group by pledging “money, organization, and spine.”

It’s a well-worn joke at this point that Democratic centrists fight the Left harder than they fight the far right. But here, Third Way and whatever “moderates” are part of this effort are actually giving us an honest-to-God, real-life example of it: centrist Democrats’ big play to push back against Trump’s wrecking ball of a presidency was to literally do nothing. Third Way itself has been largely invisible, other than to make a list of words Democrats shouldn’t use, lead a public campaign against leftist streamer Hasan Piker, and tell Dems to be more hawkish. But now that the Left is winning elections, they are jumping into action, pledging to “fight” a “war” and calling on Democrats to show “spine.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Of course, the Third Wayers frame this around the concern that socialists and the progressives allied with them will cost the party future elections to Trump. Well, too late for that: Bennett himself gushed in 2024 about how Kamala Harris was positioning herself as a centrist, her efforts to win disaffected Republicans, and that “she has not made a single mistake,” all before that campaign handed the White House keys to Trump — and did it by winning fewer Republican voters than Joe Biden had.

You almost start to suspect that maybe there’s something else going on here. Like, maybe, the fact that DSA and its progressive allies’ hostility to big money in politics and support for taxing the rich and corporations might constitute a threat to an organization like Third Way.

After all, as Bennett himself cheerfully admitted more than a decade ago, “the majority” of Third Way’s funding comes from its board of trustees, most of them former Wall Street executives, who “write us personal checks.” Not much has changed: its trustees today overwhelmingly serve in or come out of the corporate world, venture capital, or the world of finance, including private equity firms like Warburg Pincus and investment banks like Morgan Stanely.

A Sludge investigation last year determined that the organization’s donors are still made up of “a web of billionaire liberal megadonors, Democratic dark money funnelers, Fortune 500 CEOs, and corporations with plenty to gain from a more corporate-friendly Democratic Party.”

Meanwhile, the organization has, from the moment Trump took office, explicitly urged Democrats to “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors” — in other words, rely more on the corporate and billionaire money that funds its own work and whose role in US politics disgusts Americans across the political spectrum. You can see why: according to its most recent 990 filing, thanks to this money, the median salary of Third Way executives like Cowan and Bennett is $296,343.

Whatever it is exactly that drives Third Way and its associated party “moderates,” there is no way that their anti-DSA campaign — timed at the precise moment that most rank-and-file Democrats and even its party officials are focused on unity and beating Republicans in the midterms — is not going to hurt their own party and help the GOP. After all, Third Way is explicitly planning to attack the Democrats’ own candidate in a key swing state, while its attacks on DSA more broadly will not just serve as a distraction from key policy debates that hands ammunition to the Right but will also discourage any alliance between nonsocialist candidates and DSA, whose electoral ground game is recognized even by its detractors as uniquely effective.

But this is the crux of it: centrist Democrats are clearly willing to tear apart their own party and hand power to the forces behind Trump, as long as it means stopping the Left from having any power. It’s all especially rich after weeks of establishment pundits accusing socialists of a sinister “factional” agenda that makes defeating centrists a higher priority than beating the Right.

That doesn’t mean this effort is going to work, of course. In fact, it could backfire on them spectacularly. Centrists are in this situation in the first place because their “roll over and play dead” strategy disgusted their own voter base. And they’re now picking this intraparty fight at the exact time that socialists and their ideas have strong purchase within the Democratic Party.

Roughly a third of Democrats and independents who lean toward the party identify as democratic socialists, and 73 percent of Democratic-leaning voters would be fine with the party nominating a self-described democratic socialist (including 20 percent who would be “enthusiastic” about it). Another recent poll found 52 percent of Democrats believe socialists have some good ideas, not much different to the proportion of Republicans who say the same about MAGA politicians. Socialist politicians Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani are, after Barack Obama, the two most popular politicians in the country, beating out the Democratic Party itself.

Third Way’s plan is presumably to try and change this. But a bunch of money and white papers from a Wall Street–funded outfit defaming the party’s own standard-bearers at the precise time its voters are fixated on defeating Republicans may not have that effect. It may just end up making the political dividing lines clearer — and reveal the true priorities of the party’s corporate wing.