Last week was a momentous one for left-wing politics in America. In a testament to his newfound influence on Capitol Hill, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced his “Medicare for All” single-payer health care bill with 16 co-sponsors. Even former Senator Max Baucus, a moderate Montana Democrat who helped kill a public option in the Affordable Care Act, is now on board. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank may have been exaggerating when he claimed that “Democrats have become socialists,” but there’s a reason that David Duhalde, deputy director of the Democratic Socialists of America, told him “this is a high water mark” for his ideology. “The left is the rising force in the party,” Michael Kazin, the Georgetown University historian and editor of the leftist Dissent magazine, told me. “It seems to be the part of the party that has ideas—the part of the party that stands for clear reforms.”

But plenty of Democrats aren’t ready to join Sanders in pulling their party left—including the woman who beat him in the 2016 primary. Promoting her new book in an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein published Wednesday, Hillary Clinton distanced herself from “the far right and the far left, both of whom want to blow up system and undermine it.” She said, “I think we operate better when we’re kind of between center right and center left, because that’s where, at least up until recently, most Americans were.” A decreasing number of Democrats in Washington occupy that band in the political spectrum, but they exist—people like Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall and Third Way vice president Jim Kessler. In the face of an ascendant progressive populism—one credited with injecting big, bold policy ideas like single-payer and free college into the Democratic bloodstream—these moderates reject the idea that Democrats are (or ought to be) all socialists now. And they say they’ve got their own ambitious ideas for the party’s future, ones that can actually appeal to parts of the country that handed Donald Trump the presidency.

“We need big and systemic changes in this country,” Marshall told me. “That doesn’t mean they need to be social democratic imports from Europe.... Part of what’s curious about my friends on the left is they think America’s destiny is to become a European-style welfare state.” As an alternative, Marshall is touting “radical pragmatism,” which he defines as “an approach you take when you don’t exactly know the best way forward. Problem solving involves a certain degree of experimentation and trial and error.... We may share the same goal. Unlike them, I’m not saying I know the perfect way to achieve it.” Marshall calls his new group, New Democracy, “a ‘home base’ and support network for pragmatic Democratic leaders” whose mission is “to expand the party’s appeal across Middle America and make Democrats competitive everywhere.” That’s not to say he wants a war with leftists. He simply believes, in the words of New Democracy’s mission statement, “It’s time for Democrats to pitch another big tent.”

“I think the party has to have a broad path—room at the table for both wings of the party to put forth their ideas but not require either side to reflexively take them,” Kessler told me. He says Democratic economic agenda should focus on the “concentration of opportunity in America”—as opposed to focusing on income inequality—with the goal of seeing “that everyone everywhere has the opportunity to earn a good life.” Back in March, he told The New York Times, “How to make the forces of technology and globalization work for people and not against them is the biggest public policy challenge in America.” And Kessler is adamantly opposed to the hottest Democratic idea of the moment: single-payer. “It’s is the wrong policy for this country,” he said. “Forget the politics, which I think don’t work at all.” His view is that transitioning to the new system would be “extremely expensive and wasteful” and “massively disruptive” at a time when the Affordable Care Act has brought the country closer than ever to universal coverage. “We’re at the 10-yard line,” he told me, “Let’s not go back to our own 10-yard line and have to drive 90 yards starting over.”

Democrats across the ideological spectrum seem to agree that their party lacks a clear message in the Trump era—one that can appeal to working-class Americans of all races. House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley, when pressed on the subject in July, hesitated before saying, “That message is being worked on. We’re doing everything we can to simplify it, but at the same time provide the meat behind it as well. So that’s coming together now.” The public apparently agrees: A poll that same month found that 37 percent of Americans believe the party stands for something, versus 52 percent who said it just stands against Trump. And the release in late July of A Better Deal, the Democrats’ new agenda, hasn’t quelled this concern.