Is Activist Vocabulary Hurting the Democrats?

A few days ago Third Way, a “centrist” think tank, published a memo with a list of 45 terms that they think Democrats should stop using. The terms, from “unhoused” to “pregnant people” and “LatinX,” largely originate with academics and activist interest groups and are, per Third Way, alienating to voters.

I’ll admit that I think there’s some truth to this. The broad left does incorporate language from academia and activists into its vocabulary, and some of that language is, at the least, unfamiliar to most voters. If I were advising a political campaign, I’d probably want my candidate to avoid using most of the terms in Third Way’s list.

The problem with Third Way’s memo is that elected Democrats don’t use those terms, or at least not much. Lindsey Cormack, a political scientist, searched the DCInbox archive of over 200,000 official congressional e-newsletters, spanning from 2010 to present, to see just how often these terms appear. Here’s a quick summary of her findings:

• A dozen of the terms identified by Third Way, from “heteronormative” to “body shaming” and “postmodernism,” have never once appeared in a congressional e-newsletter;

• Several terms, like “othering” and “cisgender,” appear just a tiny handful of times, and are used evenly by Republicans and Democrats;

• Several other terms, like “birthing person” and “critical theory,” are used exclusively by Republicans who are mocking the use of the terms;

• A small number of terms, like “pregnant people,” “food insecurity,” and “unhoused,” are in fact used both (1) predominantly by Democrats and (2) a significant amount.

I wanted to add my own (fairly unscientific) analysis to this discussion, and so I searched the transcripts of Kamala Harris’s two most-viewed public appearances during the 2024 campaign: her speech at the Democratic National Convention, and her debate with Donald Trump. She didn’t utter a single one of the forbidden terms (with the exception of saying both “privilege” and “violence” in colloquial contexts).

To dig a bit deeper, I also searched the transcripts of Meet the Press, going back several years. Meet the Press, for the uninitiated, is a weekly political discussion show known for conversations with elected officials. It’s not as influential as it once was, but it should give us a glancing sense of politicians’ public-facing vocabulary. Some highlights:

• The term “othering” was said once on the show, by Senator Raphael Warnock this June;

• “Microaggression” doesn’t appear once;

• “Unhoused” was spoken a handful of times, each by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in a single December 2022 appearance;

• “Centering” appears three times;

• “Food insecurity” was mentioned once, in October 2022;

• “Housing insecurity” doesn’t appear once;

• “Pregnant people” doesn’t appear once;

• “Cisgender” doesn’t appear once; 

• “Deadnaming” doesn’t appear once; 

• “Patriarchy” appears one time, spoken by a Tennessee state representative in April 2023;

• “LatinX” doesn’t appear once.

You get the picture. There’s very little evidence here that these terms are a notable part of Democrats’ vocabulary. And that’s important, because the problem that Third Way is identifying is that Democrats overuse language that alienates regular people. But if you look at this data, the problem takes a different form. 

The actual problem is that the Democratic Party is associated with a host of terminology that it doesn’t actually use. The reason for this is almost certainly right-wing propaganda designed to link those terms to Democrats (note, again, that Lindsey Cormack’s analysis found that many of the offending terms were found in Republican newsletters, being used to disparage Democrats as out of touch). To quote Cormack, “the Third Way memo reads less like an audit of Democrats’ language and more like a list of terms Republicans tell us Democrats are saying.”

We’ve seen this same pattern play out in other forms. When Kamala Harris lost in 2024, many center-right politicians and strategists looked to pin the blame on the left. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres said after Harris’s loss that “the far left” had alienated voters with “absurdities like ‘defund the police’.” Representative Henry Cuellar said Democrats weren’t serious enough about border security. 

Those criticisms are detached from reality: Kamala openly rejected the idea of defunding police during her campaign, and Democrats, looking to flank Trump, tried to pass some of the most restrictive immigration legislation in history in 2024. The dilemma being presented to Democrats is not about policy. The dilemma is that the popular understanding of their agenda is filtered through a right-wing lens.

So, what’s going on here? Is Third Way really so oblivious that they’re publishing memos telling Democrats to do things that they’re already doing? Maybe. But I have another theory. 

First, it’s important to understand what Third Way actually is. That’s not easy to do, because the “About” section of their website borders on incoherent. They say that their work is guided by three “core operating principles”: principle, politics, and pragmatism. This is an organization so substantively vacuous that their first principle is principle (which almost distracted me from the fact that the second principle is just “politics”).

Third Way purports itself to be a Democratic think tank, and it does have ties to the party – in the past, the organization would gift various Democratic electeds the title of “honorary co-chair.”  But in 2013, a spate of investigative reporting revealed that Third Way’s donors included a major health insurance company and hedge fund managers who raised money for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. That reporting came on the heels of an op-ed published by Third Way operatives in The Wall Street Journal encouraging Democrats to move away from “economic populism.”

More recently, journalist Donald Shaw dug into Third Way’s filings and found that the group is supported by an array of corporate interests, including the Business Roundtable (a nonprofit whose members are exclusively the CEOs of large companies like Apple and JPMorgan) and companies like Meta, Johnson & Johnson, Verizon, and Amazon.

A couple years back, Third Way had both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema listed as honorary co-chairs. When those two came under fire for stifling progressive legislation, Third Way quietly dropped its honorary co-chair program entirely. 

Third Way’s memo conveys what reads like useless advice to elected Democrats. But that’s because Third Way is not in the business of giving good advice to Democrats; Third Way is in the business of representing corporate interests within the Democratic Party. The point isn’t necessarily that Democrats win, but that the balance of power within the party tilts to the favor of big business.

A few months ago they published another memo stating that Democrats should “[m]ove away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate.” In the context of the group’s funding, the implication is clear: small donors should be ignored and corporate donors should be listened to.

That same memo said that the party needs to “feel more comfortable saying NO to activist groups[.]” In that frame, the latest memo – the one about Democrats’ vocabulary – makes a little more sense. Policing the use of activist terminology by elected Democrats is a secondary goal. The primary goal is to wrest control of the party away from liberal interest groups on behalf of corporations.

There’s a lesson here about the exact contours of the challenge facing the Democratic Party. The people looking to shift the party right want to present the struggle for the party as existing between overeducated activists and regular people. Many commentators have argued that the party is too intertwined with “the groups,” their term for a broad network of progressive interest groups. Ritchie Torres said last year that Democrats are beholden to “a college-educated far left that is in danger of causing us to fall out of touch with working-class voters.” 

This creates the impression that when power is stripped away from activists and interest groups, it will naturally settle into the hands of ordinary, working-class folk. But what will actually happen is that it will accrue to the corporate patrons of Third Way.

I’m not certain that liberal interest groups are responsible for alienating voters from the Democratic Party. After all, the year in which activist language was most prominent – 2020 – was the year Democrats actually won. What I’m certain of is that groups like Third Way are presenting you with a false dichotomy. They want you to believe that you must choose between liberal activists and ordinary voters. But Third Way doesn’t represent ordinary voters, they represent CEOs. If you kick out the activists, Third Way’s corporate allies will step into the void, ready to pick the party’s bones.