I just finished watching Mehdi Hasan’s interview with Matt Yglesias from a few days back, and it left me with such a horrible taste in my mouth that I felt the need to dissect it, and perhaps address the Matt Yglesias issue once and for all.

Yglesias, if you’re not familiar, is a centrist pundit who emerged from the early 2000s blogosphere and went on to found Vox alongside Ezra Klein. He now mostly spends his time writing a very popular Substack, Slow Boring, which reportedly has an audience at senior levels of the Democratic Party. 

Matt is in some ways a bland pundit and in others a godless creature of myth; less a man than an emblem warning us of what man might become left untethered by principle. His politics, if you can call them that, are a hollow shell. Yglesias has carved out a niche as a proponent of “popularism” – the idea that the Democratic Party should focus on the popular parts of their platform and de-emphasize more divisive issues. So while many on the left aim to tap into popular outrage about the Trump administration, Matt thinks that Democrats should be downplaying issues like immigration and focusing on mainstream kitchen table issues like affordability.  

I’ve written about this style of politics before, and Yglesias is maybe its most prominent champion. The main trouble with it is that it is almost devoid of affirmative vision. It treats politics as a method for gaining power rather than exercising it for good. Rather than demonstrating leadership, you end up following public opinion around like a dog on a leash. Politicians become empty vessels.

But just as importantly, the arguments for popularism are shaky on their own terms. What Yglesias presents as common sense politics is frequently clunky and convoluted. He is an auteur of sound bites that fall apart on close inspection. Considering the debate is a microcosm of the one dividing the Democratic Party right now, I think it’s worth breaking it into some of its component parts.

One of the most common criticisms of popularism is that it’s hard to see how the civil rights movement could emerge from this school of thought. Civil rights legislation was divisive when JFK first proposed it in 1963, and his approval rating fell from 70% to 59% – including a 7% decline outside of the South. Matt presumably would have looked at those polls and told liberals to avoid the issue altogether. 

Hasan pushes him on this point (a quick note that all of the interview excerpts here are edited for brevity):

It’s pretty clear from his response that Yglesias doesn’t have a great answer for this. All he can do is gesture vaguely at the idea that politics was different back then, and hint at some nuances and confounding variables that complicate the analysis. 

This exchange went poorly enough that he felt compelled to write about it, but his written piece suffers from the same basic problem. He writes that “[t]he shift from federated, state-centric parties with ideological overlap to nationalized, fully sorted parties…means that tactics that made sense in 1954 don’t typically make sense in 2026.” Which is true in the general sense, but it’s not an actual explanation. (It’s also a little strange to me that Matt would point out that this era had different party dynamics without mentioning that it was the civil rights movement that facilitated the end of those dynamics).

Yglesias once outlined his basic position as “[Democrats] should get on the popular side of political issues rather than the unpopular side and try to raise the salience of their most-popular stances rather than their least-popular ones.” That is nearly the opposite of what JFK and LBJ did in championing civil rights laws. They took a divisive issue, forcefully took a side, and pushed public opinion until it was in their favor. If we’re taking Yglesias seriously, the strategy that resulted in some of the most monumental legislation in American history is now a fool’s errand. I find that hard to believe.

There’s a similar disconnect in how Yglesias talks about civil rights era activists and activists today. If you ask him about the civil rights activists of yore, Yglesias will say that they were playing a valuable role in the political ecosystem, even if their position was unpopular. Martin Luther King’s disapproval rating polled as high as 75% by 1968, but Yglesias speaks positively of him and gives him credit for helping change public opinion. But when Mehdi Hasan asks him about anti-ICE protestors in Minneapolis, Yglesias says it would have been better had they stayed home – despite the protests polling very favorably among independents.

At the very least, Yglesias seems to see nuance in history that he doesn’t see in the present. He discusses modern political issues as cut and dry exercises of common sense. But when he’s asked to explain the past, he hems and haws and digresses; politics are suddenly very complicated. More to the point, if your theory of politics struggles to account for the greatest legislative accomplishments of the last century, you might want to rethink it.

Back in 2022, Yglesias wrote that Democratic candidates should reject calls from activists to endorse ideas like a deportation moratorium. That made some sense at the time: immigration was a disaster issue for Democrats, both extremely salient and extremely unpopular. The same basic calculus carried forward into 2024, when immigration was Trump’s strongest issue. It was sensible for Democrats to avoid highlighting it where possible.

But then Yglesias took that same sensibility into 2025, when reports of the administration’s violent immigration policy generated widespread outrage. Democrats, rather naturally, tried to harness that energy, and Yglesias publicly stated that it was a mistake. Here’s Mehdi Hasan pressing him on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man Trump sent to a Salvadoran gulag without due process:

So, if you’re following Yglesias’s argument, Democrats were wrong to draw attention to immigration, even if the result was to bring Trump’s approval on the issue into the negative. It’s better that the public’s attention be drawn to issues where Trump performs even worse.

This is a bit of a Yglesias specialty. He will often bundle relatively common sense takes with much more controversial ones. Sure, as a general rule it may be better to avoid talking about your opponent’s strengths, but Yglesias wants you to believe that the time Democrats spent achieving a 20% decline in Trump’s net approval on a high-salience issue was not a win for Democrats. Again, I find that pretty hard to believe. 

It’s also a little odd to me that Yglesias speaks as though this is conventional wisdom when in reality the opposite is true. Attacking your opponent’s strongest issue is a popular political strategy – Karl Rove built his whole career on it. It’s slightly counterintuitive, but it’s not exactly rocket science.

Yglesias also oversimplifies some key political dynamics. He says that drawing attention to immigration raises the salience of the issue. But that’s not necessarily true. Salience and attention aren’t the same thing. Most people who say immigration is their number one issue want more restrictive policies – hence their support for Trump. As media coverage reveals the failure of Trump’s immigration policies, not only does their support for his handling of the issue go down, but their support for restrictive immigration policies in general declines, which makes the issue less of a priority for them. In other words, as Democrats complicate Trump’s immigration narrative, anti-immigration voters become less engaged on the issue. So Yglesias has this backwards: by drawing attention to Trump’s failures on the issue, Democrats have likely reduced the salience of immigration.

Just as importantly (and somewhat related), “immigration” is not actually a single issue. Yglesias consistently says that drawing attention to, e.g., ICE tactics or deportations, Democrats are drawing attention to immigration, Trump’s strongest issue. And it’s true that if you ask people about “immigration,” Trump will poll better than he does on other issues. But immigration is really an umbrella term for a set of issues, some of which Trump is strong on and some of which he’s not. If you ask about border security, his approval is around 50%. If you ask about ICE tactics specifically, people disapprove by a 2:1 margin. Given that, Matt’s statement that “driving attention to the immigration debate hurts Democrats” seems less like common sense and more like an oversimplification.

Yglesias’s style of political calculation often gets him accused of amorality, which Hasan hits him on a bit, too:

It should go without saying that Matt does not answer Hasan’s final point, because it would mean saying out loud the trade-off he’s proposing: sacrificing the real, tangible suffering of a large number of people in exchange for an intangible, difficult-to-quantify electoral benefit somewhere down the line.

That said, in general I’m sympathetic to the idea that “you gotta win first” – there are a lot of important goals that should be, in practice, subjugated to the larger goal of winning elections. But in this particular case, as Mehdi points out, it’s not actually true. Democrats didn’t have to win first – they were able to get Abrego Garcia home without winning an election. 

Moreover, it’s hard to imagine a world where Democrats completely ignore an issue for three years and then, upon winning power, manifest the political will to tackle it head-on. And yet that is what Yglesias seems to be proposing across a host of issues: ignore public outcry from your base until they have lost all faith in your commitment to the issue, and then, upon winning the next election, reveal that you were secretly committed to it all along. Politics 101.

This is in a lot of ways the essence of Matt Yglesias. If you accuse him of endorsing an amoral style of politics, he rolls his eyes and says that he’s just being practical and exercising common sense. But what he parades as common sense is really a narrow, clumsy view of politics. What you’re left with is the worst of both worlds: not principled enough to be moral, and maybe not savvy enough to win.

And whose victory would it be, anyway? A lot of centrists try to present the issue as a simple calculus: if Democrats adopt more popular positions, they will win more elections. But “they” in this case isn’t referring to all Democrats exactly, it’s referring to a specific coalition within the party. 

In 2025 there was a centrist conference called WelcomeFest, and Yglesias gave a presentation. His thesis was that Democrats should stop listening to “the groups” – his catch-all term for progressive advocacy organizations – because they pull the party toward unpopular positions. He specifically mentioned environmentalist groups that promoted plastic straw bans and immigrants’ rights groups that sought the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. One group he didn’t mention was the pro-Israel lobby, despite it fitting the basic criteria of a powerful interest group pulling Democrats toward an unpopular position. If he had, I’m not sure the crowd would have liked it much – they booed pro-Palestinian protesters at the event. 

At the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like Yglesias is concerned about winning elections as much as he is about winning the factional dispute within the Democratic Party. His popularist concerns wax and wane from issue to issue. If Democrats followed his advice, it’s not certain that they’d win, but it is certain that the party would mirror the priorities of its centrist wing. 

It wasn’t long ago that people on the left were told by centrists that leftist priorities like universal healthcare, while good in theory, were a political pipedream. The last decade or so has made it clear that that’s not true; the scope of political possibility is wider than it once appeared. The right has embraced that fact, and leveraged it to entrench fringe reactionary policy for a generation. Instead of seeing this and putting forward an affirmative vision for this country, many centrists continue to portray politics as a narrow thing, and chastise the left for not thinking the same. I don’t think that Matt Yglesias has a compelling understanding of how to win elections, but even if he did it wouldn’t matter; what’s the point of winning elections if your politics have no ambition?