A decade ago, Center for American Progress CEO Neera Tanden spent her time arguing with leftists on Twitter. 

Her life doesn’t look too different today: After four years holding senior roles in the Biden administration, Tanden is back at CAP and once again arguing with the far left on Twitter, now called X. 

Though she faced a torrent of online hate from the so-called “Bernies Bros” in 2016, Tanden was not alone among Democrats in staking out a line against the more insurgent, left-wing vision for the party promoted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during his unsuccessful primary campaign that year against Hillary Clinton. (Tanden, a longtime Hillary Clinton aide, held a senior role in Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 primary campaign.) The Clinton wing, of which Tanden was a proud member, won the ideological war within the party, at least at the time. 

Tanden now finds herself fighting a much more solitary battle against the ascendant left flank of the party. She has called out far-left candidates challenging incumbent Democratic lawmakers for taking positions well outside the party’s mainstream. And at a time when some in the party are calling to make the Democratic tent so wide that it includes even activists and candidates who have flirted with antisemitism, she has taken to X to push back. 

“Sorry if I think it’s important to state out loud on here my disagreements with a guy who says it’s ok to murder people, Jews are inbred, America was responsible for 9/11 and Russia was right to invade Crimea, amongst other insane things,” Tanden wrote on X in April after “Pod Save America” interviewed Hasan Piker, the far-left, antisemitic political streamer who has in recent months campaigned with several Democrats, including Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Chris Rabb, who last month won the nomination in Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District. 

After The New York Times reported on Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner’s history of abusive relationships in early June, Tanden took to X to attack those who described the reporting as a hit job by pro-Israel activists who opposed Platner. “People who create Israel conspiracies around a Maine Senate race are no different in their antisemitism than Republicans who blame Jewish space lasers for the weather,” Tanden wrote. 

Yet aside from several tweets criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his close ties to President Donald Trump, Tanden has largely stayed quiet on the question of U.S. support for Israel. At CAP’s Ideas Conference last month, which was billed as a convening of “the broad center-left’s leading thinkers and doers,” Israel was not discussed at either of the event’s two conversations about foreign policy. 

During Joe Biden’s presidency, CAP was run by Patrick Gaspard, a former U.S. ambassador to South Africa and aide to President Barack Obama. In the 18 months after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, Gaspard became increasingly critical of American support for Israel. In May 2024, he published a set of guiding principles on Israel and Gaza that reflected his growing frustration with the status quo and Biden’s continued military support for Israel. The document sharply criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza and called for U.S. arms transfers to Israel to be paused. 

Tanden did not respond to requests for comment, and a spokesperson for CAP declined to say whether the Israel principles authored by Gaspard still represent the position of the organization. 

Institutionally, at least since Tanden’s return last year, CAP has avoided getting involved in the thorny debates about U.S. aid to Israel that are now causing turmoil among Democrats. The group is seeking to help chart the future of the party — the who’s who of big-name Democrats attended last month’s gathering, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger — while leaving intra-party bickering over Israel aside. 

More than a decade ago, Tanden hosted Netanyahu for a conversation at CAP. The 2015 event, which followed Netanyahu’s monthslong campaign against Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, earned Tanden significant pushback from the progressive wing of the party, including some of her own employees. She weathered the storm and stood by the decision; she continues to defend it in the face of occasional criticism on X, even as she tweeted recently that she “would like Netanyahu to lose his next election.”

While Tanden and CAP may be staying out of the Israel fracas, Tanden’s social media posts reflect a penchant for the more pragmatic wing of the party, and an aversion to far-left candidates — including those who take a hard line against Israel. 

A critic of the Democratic Socialists of America, Tanden recently weighed in on a slate of contentious Democratic primaries where DSA was hoping to elect aligned candidates.

She expressed support for Washington, D.C., mayoral candidate Kenyan McDuffie before he lost to his democratic socialist competitor, Janeese Lewis George, and called on New Yorkers to “get it together” instead of voting for Darializa Avila Chevalier, an anti-Israel student activist who ousted Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY). 

Both of Tanden’s preferred candidates lost. But whether her vision for the party — comprising the “broad center-left” — wins out will not be clear until Democrats pick their next presidential candidate.