Keisha Lance Bottoms and the Agonies of Actually Existing Centrism

Moderates are promising a new, ultra-efficent style of politics. What does it look like when they hold complete control over the Democratic Party of one of the most important states in the nation?

“People are missing Joe Biden more and more each day.”

— Keisha Lance Bottoms, 2026

You may not have noticed, but the centrist wing of the Democratic Party doesn’t really talk much about centrism as an ideology anymore.

To be sure, they’ll put on airs from time to time. Sometimes, they’ll try to prove their impeccable normie credentials by talking about how they’re an “an American, goddamnit” and wearing American-flag themed suspenders. Other times, they’ll start saying the word “retard” out of nowhere to show how un-PC they are, as Noah Smith has done since November 2024. I’ve always found it to be a bit contrived, but far be it from me to tell you which of these newfound beliefs and attitudes are sincere or not. The world is vast and unpredictable; for all we know, it really could just be the case that this group of former Warrenite yuppies truly are flag-humping patriots with the same vocabulary as the kid in your third grade class who bit people. But once they get beyond these perfunctory attempts at “vice signaling,” these pundits quickly get to the beating heart of their approach: defeating Trump’s Republican Party at any cost.

At least, that’s the promise on the tin.

As they speak to their ultra-polarized audiences of Trump haters who want nothing more than to live to see the GOP burned to the ground, the post-2024 class of neo-centrists has promised them that they represent something new and different compared to past iterations of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. No longer, they say, will the center wing push politically vulnerable policies just because they happen to line up with the teachings of the neoliberal consensus. Their faction has moved beyond identity politics, liberal immigration policies, and anything else that stands to be a liability for the big tent coalition at the ballot box. Even unconditional support for Israel stands to be on the chopping block—polling permitting, of course. Jared Golden, not Hillary Clinton, will be the model in this new age of hard-nosed electoralism.

I’m not here to argue about the wisdom of this approach—at least, not today. I am instead here to look at whether or not it is even real at all. To do this, I will look at a test case that should, in theory, be very favorable for centrists: last week’s Georgia Democratic gubernatorial primary. If you were to hand-select a place for the party’s center to show off what their new approach looks like, it would be precisely here: a wide-open race in a state where national progressives hold almost no power. The state party’s pre-Trump base of Black voters has always been moderately-inclined party loyalists, and its new Trump-era base of ex-Republican suburbanites have taken their old centrist ways with them. The audience is receptive, the moment is ripe, and the stakes are as high as they can be. If there has been or will ever be a place for our new class of intellectuals to show their data-driven heterodox approach in action and actually improve things in the process, it is in the state of Georgia at this very moment.

So, who’s our ruthless, Shor-pilled rising star ready to turn theory into practice? Who’s the South’s moderate mirror of Zohran Mamdani? Who is set to right the wrongs of the Stacey Abrams misadventure and sweep Republicans from power in a state where they have won every gubernatorial race since before LeBron James was drafted to the NBA?

They don’t exist. But this woman does.

Photo by Ken Cedeno/Sipa USA(Sipa via AP Images)

This woman’s name is Keisha Lance Bottoms. Based on her resume of one term as mayor of Atlanta and a brief stint as one of Joe Biden’s many senior advisors, she was chosen in a landslide to be the Georgia Democratic Party’s gubernatorial nominee in the 2026 election, and I am not happy about it. As longtime readers will know, I’ve long been immensely frustrated with my home state’s Democratic Party, which has never once lived up to the immense hype and credit it’s been given in the national media. Contrary to what you might have heard, the Stacey Abrams era was a complete and utter disaster. Under her rule, Georgia Democrats were an unserious party following an unserious strategy at the behest of an unserious person, and it constantly lost. When Abrams finally stepped back from statewide politics last year, all I wanted was some break—any break—from the way the party had been running on autopilot since the end of the Obama administration.

But that break hasn’t come. There hasn’t been any meticulously crafted data-driven move to the heterodox center, just as there hasn’t been any swing towards an energetic, affordability-minded left-populism. It’s nothing that anyone with a byline has ever reccomended, and it’s got me thinking. As political writers, it can be easy to write about the centrist faction as a coherent, unified bloc, with an intelligentsia that comes up with ideas for elected officials to run on and voters to support. But this has not been the case in reality, at least in the places that really matter this year. Instead, there is a large and growing gap between centrism in theory and Actually Existing Centrism. While the most well-known moderate pundits have had success at publicly reframing the philosophy as something focused and adaptable, the actual moderate voter base has only served as an anchor on the anti-Trump cause over the past year and a half, resolutely supporting unpopular status quo candidates in extremely important elections.

With this in mind, we’re well overdue for evaluating the centrist faction based on what it actually is in the real world rather than what it simply says it is. Over the past number of years, we’ve all seen countless profiles about the likes of Matt Yglesias and David Shor and all of their supposedly game-changing ideas. Now, it’s about time that we talk about what their wing actually looks like in practice by looking at a woman who I believe to be the best possible representation of it that you can find. Without further ado, is the most through overview you will ever find of the life and times Keisha Lance Bottoms: failed politician, visionless functionary, and human proof of just how utterly delusional and ultimately irrelevant the centrist pundit class is.

Who Is Keisha Lance Bottoms? or; The Art of Losing, Matt Yglesias: Part II