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Hi, y’all. Welcome back to The Opposition. Democrats have spent much of this week debating what role the lefty streamer Hasan Piker should play in the party. If you haven’t heard of Piker before, good for you. That means you’re probably not spending an unhealthy amount of time on the internet. For the rest of us suckers, Piker’s growing influence within the Democratic party has been notable. But not everyone in the party thinks that Democrats should be cozying up to Piker, who has faced accusations of antisemitism. All that’s in today’s newsletter, below.
If you find value in this kind of journalism—candid, searching, and careful—consider signing up for a Bulwark+ membership. There’s no better way to watch the primaries unfold, the general election campaigns get underway, and the jockeying for 2028 begin. Sign up today for a 20 percent discount:
–Lauren
P.S. – Check out our livestream tonight—with my colleagues JVL, Sam Stein, and Mark Hertling—after Donald Trump’s speech, on YouTube or Substack.
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IN THE AFTERMATH of the 2024 election, a few points of agreement emerged among Democrats about where the party had gone wrong. Chief among them was that candidates simply had to ditch the litmus-test culture that had forced them to adopt positions outside the mainstream and led them to avoid uncomfortable or tricky interviews.
Among those most vocally making the case were center-left organizations like Third Way, which urged the left flank of the party to recognize that a winning coalition requires tolerance of a wide range of viewpoints. They begged candidates to stop listening to advocacy groups and to refuse to fill out questionnaires and policy pledges that they argued had pushed the party too far left.
For a good part of the past year, this consensus held. Democrats embraced a just-win-baby! mentality as they branched out to different podcasts and generally avoided the rhetorical and policy missteps that plagued them in 2024.
But as the midterms near, the consensus is now being tested—and it’s Third Way doing the testing.
The group has spent the past few weeks urging Democrats to distance themselves from Hasan Piker, the widely popular Twitch and YouTube streamer. The group’s president and press adviser, Jonathan Cowan and Lily Cohen, coauthored a Wall Street Journal opinion piece arguing that Piker’s “misogyny is indistinguishable from that of far-right influencers” and accusing him of antisemitism, saying that there was “no excuse for putting political tribalism before Jewish safety.” Things escalated last week when Abdul El-Sayed, who is running in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat, announced that Piker would campaign with him on college campuses. Then, this morning, Cowan sent a letter to El-Sayed warning that it would be a “stain” on his character if he followed through with the planned rallies, especially after a Michigan synagogue was attacked last month. The letter lists six questions in bullet points, asking El-Sayed to respond:
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To Third Way’s critics, this was nothing short of abject hypocrisy—a group applying litmus tests to a liberal candidate after demanding that liberal groups drop the litmus tests they placed on mainstream candidates.
“This is so clearly Third Way riling people up in a way that is so disingenuous,” said Amanda Litman, the cofounder of Run for Something, a progressive group that recruits and trains first-time candidates. She emphasized that part of politics is “having to deal with people who say crazy things you don’t agree with—and you have to work with them anyway.”
“Who’s doing the scolding here?” she asked. “I thought we weren’t supposed to be canceling anyone anymore.”
For Third Way, there is nothing inconsistent about its approach. In an interview, Cowan told me he draws a distinction between demanding policy purity from a candidate and moral clarity. He argued that if Piker had said offensive things about a minority group other than Jews, Democrats wouldn’t have hesitated to shun him. For El-Sayed to rally with Piker, he said, is as if George Bush had campaigned with David Duke instead of denouncing the KKK leader.
Most significantly, Cowan made it clear that he’d rather accept some electoral risk than see the party show flexibility on this front.
“If people really are arguing that the price of winning is becoming like a bigoted misogynist like Hasan Piker, then I’ll take not winning,” Cowan told me. “What is the point of reviving the Democratic party so it can compete in an age of right-wing populism, if the price of that is you mainstream bigoted, anti-American, misogynistic voices?”