Ever since Pat Caddell became famous as the wunderkind pollster of the Jimmy Carter campaign, it seems as if there's always been a data geek of the moment who becomes both a guru and a lightning rod within the progressive movement. Today's DGOM is David Shor, an obsessive number cruncher who worked for the Obama campaign in 2012 and then achieved notoriety by getting himself fired last year from Civis Analytics, a progressive data science firm.
Today it's Ezra Klein's turn to interview Shor. Let's listen in:
At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe....Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity. The chain of logic is this: Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.
All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.
Unfortunately, this doesn't go nearly far enough. It's simply not possible in the era of Fox News to talk only about what you want to. The opposition gets a vote too, and Fox News will relentlessly hammer progressives at our weakest points even if we could, miraculously, get everyone to agree to shut up about our less popular views.
The problem with progressives today isn't messaging. It's our actual views. Let's run down a few of the more obvious examples:
Immigration. As recently as 2013 liberals were mostly on board with the compromise immigration bill backed by Marco Rubio. Today it would be a laughable nonstarter. During the Democratic primary debates, there was barely any daylight at all between the center of gravity of Democratic opinion and a policy of full-on open borders. Within the progressive movement, you will almost never hear even the slightest support for any kind of immigration enforcement.
The Great Awokening. Can we all agree, at a minimum, that woke culture has gone a bit too far? No? Not even that?
OK then, can we agree that, to an average, ordinary, nonpolitical, middle-class man on the street, wokeism has gone too far? That it's become more than just a few college kids blowing off steam and it needs to be reined in?
It's instructive that Shor himself became famous for being fired due to a lack of sufficient wokeness. What was his sin? During the George Floyd protests last year, he cited research by a Black scholar showing that while nonviolent protests helped Democrats, violent protests hurt them. This was judged beyond the pale and Shor was let go.
The Welfare State. There's nothing new about this. Democrats and Republicans have been at war over the social safety net forever.
But there's something that progressives simply refuse to admit about it: we won. Over the past few decades safety net spending has skyrocketed to nearly a trillion dollars a year—and that's just federal spending. What's more, it's not being hollowed out or chipped away or anything close to it. Spending has gone steadily up, up, up, and it's stayed up even though Republicans may hate it.
Despite this, progressives relentlessly insist that welfare spending is on the verge of collapsing, and that poor people in the US are practically sleeping in the gutters. None of that is true. There are, obviously, people at the very bottom of the income ladder who are truly in terrible need. But not that many. Even near the bottom, the average poor household receives something like $35-40,000 in cash and government benefits.
Despite that, we remain so obsessed with the poor that we've almost entirely given up on the middle class. Is it any wonder they've given up on us?
I won't go on about this forever. I assume I've made my point, and I assume it's every bit as unpopular as I think it is.
But it's for real. A lot of progressives don't really get this because they're college educated and all their friends are college educated too. They simply don't have any friends who are working or lower middle class that they can talk to honestly. If they did, some of this stuff would be a whole lot more obvious.
To accept all this, you don't have to be the kind of person who thinks "Defund the Police" was responsible for Democratic losses in 2020. You merely have to be outside your bubble enough to acknowledge that it sure as hell didn't help. Are you?
The problem is that everyone likes tax cuts. They come off as fiscally responsible even if they're anything but. Yet, they give the Right the leverage to paint D's as tax and spenders, because, well, you kind of are. Yes, the R's are too, and they're even more dishonest about it, because at least the D's try to pay for their spending, but it doesn't matter if no one believes you.
So, here's a 4-point plan.
1. Learn how to talk about tax cuts and the economy, not just as welfare for the rich, but as a serious thing that is incredibly damaging to the country. This will be hard, you'll have to learn new words, but it'll make a difference. FFS, I'm tire of seeing you clueless twits get owned on a topic that you actually have the higher ground on.
2. Try defunding the choo-choo train of nothing going nowhere fast. It'll make you look like adults instead of clowns, and that train, definitely a clown show of epic proportions.
3. You could try something crazy like, instead of spending the entire $3.5T, earmark some of it for deficit reduction. You'll still get hit with, "gosh, they're still wasting $2.5T" but at least you'll have some semblance of appearing as a responsible actor. And, it'll force a new, and different discussion that can frame you as more responsible adults.
4. Gerrymander the F out of everything. You want to get the court to step in, well do it a thousand times worse than is being done by the R's, and they'll step in. Don't even bother pretending. It's the only way to stop this abomination. Gerrymander's are going to destroy this country if it isn't figured out.
You guys gotta wake up, grow up and get serious or we're just F'd.
instead of spending the entire $3.5T, earmark some of it for deficit reduction.
This makes absolutely no sense.
It doesn't go far enough. Congress should pass a bill appropriating $25 trillion to get rid of the deficit completely!
28,428,899,839,341.20 as of about 18 hours ago.
1. No.
2. Babble.
3. No.
4. Makes Sense
2. The clue is the screen name; the reference is to the high-speed rail link between, what, Bakersfield and Chowchilla? I don’t have an opinion, but I think there is reasonable argument about the viability of the project.
Also... I think KD would do well to write a post explaining his views on immigration.
I say this because he now on a fairly regular basis says the Dems are in favor of "open borders". Huh?
Only a few weeks back I listened to a NYT "The Daily" podcast saying that the Biden administration's immigration policies weren't much different from the Trump administration's.
And just this summer Kamala Harris -- Kamala Harris! progressive identity politics incarnate! -- said in a speech in Guatemala (right?), "Don't come, just don't come".
This is open borders?
Now, back in 2018 I was following this fairly carefully, and the issue coming out of the "kids in cages" controversy was should we "decriminalize" border crossing. This is one of those things, like "defund the police", where if you followed the debate closely, you had a different understanding of it, even if the slogan that emerged was both unfortunate and misleading. More to the point, the issue surrounding "decriminalizing" border crossings was that, with decriminalization, it was no longer possible, legally, to separate kids from their parents. But to some minds -- including, oddly enough, KD's -- a legal maneuver aimed at stopping the separation of kids from families ("decriminalization") became an affirmative police in favor of "open borders". I always found that a little strange.
Anyway, I see no evidence whatsoever the Dems are in favor of open borders, de facto or not. And I don't think it helps the cause to have highly respected writers such as KD saying they do.
*policy, not police
It’s not so much that dems are in favor of open borders… the practical effect of their rhetoric and actions is to allow asylum for almost any reason at all. That’s why they come.
And the position that we will not deport anyone for an immigration violation unless they commit another crime, which was expressed by Hillary in 2016 and by the WH recently- is within spitting distance of open borders.
Here's what I see in the comment threads thrown at liberals in the local paper : socialism, socialism, socialism, leftie, leftie, communist, fascist(!), authoritarian(!), stealing, CRT, CRT, Hillary, Obama, Sleepy Joe, dead-brain Joe, voter fraud, voter fraud, voter fraud and BLM has destroyed all our cities with arson.
I'm pretty sure most of these people are middle>upper middle class and their about half "Libertarian", half "Republican".
They hate the Democrats so much they want democracy to fail.
Can't we just hope their participation in the no-vax death cult culls the herd down enough to make a difference in swing states?
You left out the part about how wearing masks is going to traumatize our kids and ruin them for life.
Lol you mean anti-vax liberals pushing new age quackery????
If they were a large constituency, but they're not.
We don't know how large they are because no Dem has tried to mobilize them for political purposes.
Thankfully.
From the outside, it appears to me that roughly a third of Americans want an authoritarian white nationalist government, roughly a third want some flavor of social democracy but can't agree what kind, and the rest couldn't give a continental. The unrepresentative makeup of the Senate and the electoral college put a thumb on the scales for the first group, which also has an enthusiasm advantage at the moment driven by fear and resentment.
Consequently elections are likely to be decided by random factors that defy rational explanation, but are sufficient to move a few hundred thousand votes one way or the other close to election day. "Data analysts" are playing with themselves. America's best hope is that the Republican Party collapses into factional brawling when Trump dies, allowing Democrats to get enough seats in Congress to reform the electoral system. Failing that, I can only see America becoming increasingly violent and ungovernable.
White Nationalism??? There are 100 different versions of that. You don't get it.
Nah, just one.
Re; The unrepresentative makeup of the Senate and the electoral college put a thumb on the scales for the first group
Not really. They don't get to enact their program either. The only significant legislation to pass Congress in Trump's four years was the tax cut-- something none of those groups was agog over, though the people and corporations who pay for our elections certainly were.
"Even near the bottom, the average poor household receives something like $35-40,000 in cash and government benefits."
"Average" is doing some very heavy lifting in this sentence. Not every state is California- Texas and a number of other states have no cash assistance programs other than TANF. Yearly Texas TANF cash expenditures amount to about $1.50 for every resident in the state. About 60% of all Medicaid expenditures are for the Aged and Disabled. Other means tested programs (EITC, SNAP, WIC, SSI) amount to around $300b per year. Average SNAP family benefits per month are under $250 in Texas.
Maybe the average family at the bottom of the heap is getting $40k worth of bennies, but a lot of families get a fraction of that, especially in states not California. You need to show your work.
Most of the “benefits” are medical spending. Medicaid and Medicare do benefit poor families… but it’s not like you can eat Medicaid or use Medicare to pay for housing. So it’s entirely possible for a poor household to have gotten tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical benefits every year, and still be unable to feed or shelter itself.
> I won't go on about this forever.
Great. Enough already.
> poor people in the US are practically sleeping in the gutters. None of that is true.
When there are people in the US who are literally "practically sleeping in the gutters", yes, it's true. Have you driven through Oakland? Do you really not have that part of town where homeless people find places to sleep?
I don't hear progressives talking about those things. I hear them talking about Climate Change and Homelessness.
I am an educated solid liberal who lived in a trailer until I was four, in one of the poorest (and now Trumpiest) parts of a purple state. My family is still there and I visit regularly.
Kevin is right: progressives do not understand these folks, especially the ones (mostly women) who are not completely lost in the Fox abyss. We need some of these people to win, and “wokeness”, illegal immigration and the fact that they PERSONALLY know people scamming the welfare system are right at the top of the list of things that pose them off about liberals. They are clearly irrational, but liberals need to play the ball as it lies, not wish it were on the fairway.
Scamming the welfare system is not a new feature. It's older in the hills. Your to obsessed with Trump. Let him go and understand the trend with these counties has been going on since the 1970's and aided by manufacturering consolidation, Democrats direct adoption of Roe after the 1980 election. The party that Wilson and Bryan putt together in 1912 died in 1963 at a assassin's bullett. In Ohio, JFK is considered by many as the last true Democratic President.
LOL, fake news.
Real news. Acceptance is hard.
On the contrary, Dems understand them quite well. As you have demonstrated. There is a difference between knowing them and coddling them however. We might know they are stupidly anti-vaccine, does that mean we should join in that delusion? Nope.
As of an article I read from yesterday "Healthcare workers have been gradually coming around to COVID-19 vaccines, with one-third more people vaccinated since earlier in the year, but 27 percent of them are still unvaccinated, and 15 percent of the unvaccinated group are firmly opposed to immunizations."
How about anti-vaccine liberals??? Do you get them.
Yawn. Old White Man yells at cloud.
Shor isn't saying anything new, it's basically Clinton-era "triangulation". And other than a brief peiod in 2008, Democrats have followed that playbook anyway. President Obama quickly compromised in 2009, starting with a scaled down recovery plan, continuing the wars, and then the Mitt Romney Healthcare plan from the 1990s. In 2016 Dems chose another Clinton, one who'se entire reputation was that she triangulated. And in 2020 Dems chose another centrist - Joseph Biden.
So ya, Dems are already following that path. It doesn't work particularly well, but arguing that Dems have suddenly become an all out Progressive/Socialist Party is Fox level Fake News.
Re: and then the Mitt Romney Healthcare plan from the 1990s. '
Which was what he campaigned on, more or less. He didn't suddenly come up with that in 2009.
When in doubt, Kevin, punch left!
Elissa Slotkin is the Rep for a swing district just south of me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elissa_Slotkin
She's a pleasant-looking matron with an impressive CV and reliable Biden Democrat views. This may be the first time you've heard of her.
Because she's not the hot kid from the Bronx who's never had an unvoiced opinion. If she was on TV more, the middle class might have a more realistic image of the majority of Democratic legislators.
She's impressive, at least from what I can glean from her Wiki bio.
Not sure why Kevin acts as if Dems lost in 2020. Dems won the Presidency by a hisotric margin. They won the House. AND they won the Senate, even in previously Red States.
No they didn't. Even popular vote wise, was hardly impressive. Try harder.
Dems were running against the worst, most incompetent, most unpopular President in history. Result? Squeaked by in the Presidential race, tied in the Senate, and lost House seats. If someone like Romney had been running for the GOP in 2020 instead of Trump, Republicans would control the Presidency, House, and Senate right now.
+1
No they wouldn't. Romney was crushed in 2012 for a reason. He and Republicans like him simply cannot draw the proverbial MAGA voter to the polls. As much as I scoffed at the whole "missing white voter" theory. It turned out to be true in 2016 and Trump 2020 was the high-water mark of that. What hurt Hilary in 2016 was poor turnout among Dems constituencies and not enough Republicans to compensate for it (which they hoped to pick up). In 2018 and 2020, Dems benefitted not only from bigger turnouts but a good chunk of Republican crossovers on the Presidential voting level, the kind of split-ticket voting we don't see much of any more. The question is how long this MAGA voting surge will last with Trump a). not on the ballot, only endorsing candidates and b). Trump running and winning the GOP nomination in 2024. As much as people fear Trump, it may well be the only way Biden is re-elected is Trump running again.
Seven million popular votes and 304-232 in the EC is not "squeaking by".
"It's simply not possible in the era of Fox News to talk only about what you want to. The opposition gets a vote too, and Fox News will relentlessly hammer progressives...."
This, surely, is the big argument against Kevin's suggestion: even if the Democratic party nominated Kyrsten Sinema and a whole platform of Republican ideas, Fox News and the right would simply redefine "socialism" to include Sinema and her views and the attacks would continue.
For someone who had made a career attacking Fox News, Kevins seems naive about how that network would respond to a more Republican-leaning Democratic Party. Does anyone remember Obamacare, a Republican proposal that was excoriated by those on the right once Obama advocated it?
Perhaps, rather than becoming moderate Republicans, Democrats need to make the case for how Democratic policies help the middle class. If we can't do that, then we are forever stuck between being too "left" to win, or too "centrist" to actually do any good when we do win.
+1!
This points up the mistake Manchin and Sinema are making in the haggling over BBB - focusing on a number is foolish, because the Republicans will always favor an even lower number. You’re never going to win on that turf. Focus the debate on the benefits, dammit! To his credit, Biden is trying to do just that.
You need to be careful. ACA's problem was just the general lack of excitement for any health care reform in the post financial crisis era. It was a force job.
Not. Even. Wrong. Healthcare costs were a hot enough issue in 2008 that every candidate was compelled to put forward a plan, even the Republicans.
The problem with healthcare is there's a huge majority in favor of general reform, but there's never much enthusiasm for any particular plan.
Distinction between the Satanic Temple and the Church of Satan,
https://i.redd.it/s8hklbxhaas71.png
Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, came right out and said it's 'just Ayn Rand's philosophy with ceremony and ritual thrown in'.
So, exactly as you'd think.
Or, rather as you'd think without the extra italics.
Much to take issue with here, as many commenters have. One thing to add is that Kevin is very selective about what he quotes from the Klein interview with Shor. The transcript offers a lot of skepticism about Shor's numbers and his analysis -- where his data may be shaky, what he overstates, what he ignores. Kevin takes a few quotes and offers them as gospel truth, as if they prove Kevin's thesis about Democrats. He ignores the many notes of caution in Klein's write-up. He also ignores some of Shor's suggestions for Democrats that don't match Kevin's priors. My take on Kevin's take: some cherry-picking and confirmation bias.
That said, I would not be happy if Democrats were campaigning on "defund the police," open borders (even though I lean that way), or more violence in the streets. But is anybody doing that? No. Why imply that they are? Dems may have some messaging problems, but there's no need to compound the problem by misstating where the party stands (or mistaking some fringe radical for the party mainstream).
I don't believe in anybody's ability to predict the future, especially elections that are 1+ and 3+ years away. Even polling experts with tons of data. Our most recent big election was the California recall. The average of those state-of-the-art polls on the eve of (and during) the election showed a margin of 15.8 percentage points. The (nearly) final margin was 23.8 percentage points. That's not very close. We should take what the pollsters say with a big grain of salt.
I generally agree with Kevin on this. My feeling is that many of today's progressives have been raised in comfortable urban or suburban settings, and they don't have much of an idea how hard the many of the less fortunate have to work to be considered middle-class. My own background is from a small (white) town which I would describe as gritty. My parents had to work very hard to raise us. Fortunately, there was a path to a less difficult life for us, and we were lucky enough to be able to take it. I do know that many of my former classmates mistakenly think that all it takes is for a person to be willing to work hard. They seem blind to the fact that many minorities have two strikes against them from the get-go. Nevertheless, I can see how Democrats need to show concern and channel some aid and resources to them, as well as to those who experience systemic discrimination.
On the other hand, I know of those of my peers who have been greatly helped by government programs to a better life. I find that at least some of them now have migrated to the Republican Party because they feel that GOP politicians are more likely to safeguard their gains. The sentiment is 'I've got mine, and I no longer care if others get theirs'. Even worse is the rationalization that they have succeeded entirely by their own efforts, and government assistance and good luck have played no role. Such people will just take any future government assistance for granted.
Maybe I'm just one of a small number, but this wraps up my feelings quite nicely. I'm 50, white collar, bisexual, have a PhD and work at a small college, married but with no kids, make roughly 60k per year. I check a lot of boxes that say "reliable Democratic vote." I hate the Republican Party and Donald Trump with a passion, but when I look at the Democratic Party, they have zero to offer me. Wokeism, climate change, asylum for all, more targeted programs for the poor like the EITC and subsidized rent, Medicaid spending, subsidized day care and child tax credits that completely miss anyone like me. My taxes would actually go up slightly under Biden's plan. Democrats seem to think that the only people who matter are those with kids, those who are poor or immigrants, and those who are over 65. I voted for Biden due to Trump, but I doubt that I will vote in 2024.
Your self-description is close to mine, except that I make more money. But I have no job security. I've twice ended up on ACA Medicaid because my job went away, and it took a while to land a new one. That can happen to almost anyone.
" A lot of progressives don't really get this because they're college educated and all their friends are college educated too. They simply don't have any friends who are working or lower middle class that they can talk to honestly." True. But there's always been a generation gap. Since I can remember. And we're not just out-of-touch, we college-educated; we're willfully out-of-touch for the most part. How do you have a conversation with, much less get to know, someone that's failed to do college? As smart as we are, we're incapable of that. Drum here and there has reliably been proving the point for the better part of 30 years now and shows no signs of slowing down. And he's fucking right. We are, all of us, so much better off today than when we were born that the best we can do is the least we can do. I'm functionally okay with that. I can live with that. It's tedious and stultifying and boring. But as troll SpadesOfGray here would say: that's my fault. Put up of shut up. So, I'm willing to see Biden's agenda fail in its entirety since is fails to pass my purity test. Whatever happens or not, we're still living in the best of all possible worlds. We've no recorded evidence of the planet melting down before. It's frozen up before, but not melted down that I can recall. A meltdown, like Noah's flood. Maybe the moderates are right and that would be good for all of us. Clean the slate and start over. We'll all be dead before it makes any difference to us and our college educated friends.
Re: We've no recorded evidence of the planet melting down before.
In recorded human history, No. In fact not in human history at all. But the Pliocene when even the Arctic hosted tropical vegetation and animals was six million years ago. A hotter Earth is not unprecedented.
We’ve been listening to the so called middle class for decades and they don’t have any clue what they’re doing.
Their time is up.
The classic middle class has been in decline since the 1970's as a percentage of the American population.
Call it a long-term cultural reversion to the mean - historically the middle class was just a thin slice of society.
The term itself is fairly recent, and while you can parse it objectively by household income, most Americans self-identify as middle class for social reasons rather than economic.
The wisdom of David Shor:
https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1447297258861563904/photo/1
I would much rather live in a world where we see a 4 degree rise in temperature than live in a world where China is a global hegemon.
Not sure this is the guy we need the Democratic Party to listen to.
Progressives need to start using their brains. They should have given Biden a victory by passing the infrastructure bill as soon as it was returned to the House. Just exactly who do the progressives think they're helping with their stalling. And then, they should have been prepared to compromise big time on the spending bill. There's too much wokeness. There's too much #metoo. And too little political savvy in the Democratic party, especially on the left.
Progressives need to start using their brains. They should have given Biden a victory by passing the infrastructure bill as soon as it was returned to the House. They're only helping republicans take over the house and senate next year. And then, they should have been prepared to compromise big time on the spending bill. There's too much wokeness. There's too much #metoo. And too little political savvy in the Democratic party, especially on the left.
Only a fool thinks that the passage of a bill in Congress makes a difference to those people listening to right-wing propaganda.
There is only one bill that matters- Voting Rights. Because, as you seem to forget, Democracy itself is under attack and all your contempt for actual social equality doesn't matter at all, one bit.
I'm having a hard time supporting politicians who talk about "pregnant people."
I'm horrified that feminine boys (often in conservative families) are being put on puberty blockers and giving up all semblence of a healthy long life long before they are old enough to understand what it means to not father children and not enjoy sex. Some of the parents would rather have a trans daughter than a gay son. Other parents are being told if they don't transition their kid ASAP the kid will kill themselves (there's no evidence to support this, studies that claim to support it are of very low quality). Check out SEGM.org and Genspect.org for information.
I went to phone bank for Elizabeth Warren but was put off by the pronoun circle. There's a lot of crazy in the left these days, the backlash is coming.
Progressives didn't create preferred pronouns- the teenagers did. We just listened.
This is the social movement of our time: gender fluidity. Get used to it or at least get out of the way. It's not important that you and I understand it fully.
I'm sorry- when was the last time that the GOP actually did something for the middle class, instead of screwing us?
You do realize, Kevin, that virtually all of the progressives donating money, signing petitions, volunteering time, and putting pressure on elected officials... are in the Middle Class, right?
Who do you think they are listening to?
Let's start with David Shor to begin with.
I don't think Shor should have been fired for retweeting a study but I don't believe that's why he was fired to begin with. If he was a beloved, respected colleague whom everyone got along with and liked, one tweet doesn't fire you. If a straw breaks a camel's back it's not because of a single straw but lots of them. Like Caddell, if people keep calling you brilliant, especially at a young age, it's likely you're going to believe them and act accordingly. And as anyone who knows the Pat Caddell story knows, his brilliance was destroyed by his arrogance and a general asshollery to people around and him and worked for him. Thus he was alienated from the political world because no one liked him and wanted to work with him and thus he became a Trump supporter as MAGA became a "suppository" for those on the outs with the establishment. For Caddell, being anti-establishment became an ideology to itself.
Now, I do think Shor makes some interesting points, especially when it comes to education which are better expounded on in this Politico article (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/09/david-shor-democrats-privileged-college-kid-problem-514992). I also agree with Steve Phillips quoted in this article that the problem is in part too many of this young-many of these young whippersnappers are white. But even if you had a more diverse crew of political workers that still doesn't solve problem. We have a real generational divide in this country, as bad as as it was in the 60s and early 70s. Biden doesn't win the nomination without the support of older Black voters. Younger Black voters by in large supported Bernie. Same is true in a lot of different groups: old vs. young. And what's worse is one gets the sense there's an added level of mistrust as well, as older voters, who are more than likely going to be less educated, distrust those young folks and their technology and their smarts and think people are constantly trying to pull fast ones on them (which in some cases is literally true with all the scam artists out there preying on old people).
It's just one of the many paradoxes the Dems have to deal with which makes it hard for them to govern. If you believe Shor, the Dems have to do better in states like Iowa and Ohio in order to have majorities. I agree. But the Dems who get elected to office in those states are going to be more moderate than liberal on the whole. In other words more Joe Manchins and Kristen Synemas. How is that going to help negotiations over infrastructure bills? Like it or not the Dems have to be a diverse party in order to rule but it makes it hard to have governable majorities when you have real differences in opinion over spending and other programs and priorities. And it doesn't help when socialist snakes like Dave Dayen and Ryan Cooper constantly rip the party in print (Cooper ridiculously called the Democrats the party of mass death in a recent column) from the Left even which only calls out their impotency in trying to build a Left-wing political structure (a party or such other group) that would be an effective replacement for the Democrats. There's already far-Left party in our politics, the Greens. They're just spoilers riven with the same sectarian divides that rent all Left-wing parties. I guess you can support your local DSA assuming your small town or suburb has a chapter which in many cases they don't.
That brings up another problem the Dems have. Isn't it amazing that very few if any major Dem politician supports "Defund the Police" or "Critical Race Theory" yet they're constantly tagged with it? Why? Because thanks to GOP abandonment of big cities and their school districts, those areas can and do operate with a politics far to the Left of center of the median voter. And there's nothing establishment Dems can do to sidestep it. Because those persons on city councils and school boards in big cities have to make policy and often times those policies are to the far Left (as we've seen in San Francisco and Minneapolis for example). Now there are sensible liberals in such places and they can and do effectively police the fringes but by then the damage is already done. Most such cities have put money back into police forces but the horse has left the barn because there are actual office holders, not just activists in the streets, who hold views that call for the abolishment of police and prisons. And the problem with such liberals is they're often associated with and funded by downtown big business interests and they've failed to make effective, sensible policies regarding such topics as policing and thus have opened the door to more radical solutions (R.T. Ryback, Garcetti in LA, Ted Wheeler and Bill DeBlasio come to mind). And because these big cities with lots of media located there, such political questions get more media coverage than rural areas where local GOP craziness often times goes unnoticed.
Still, for all these problems, its amazing how much navel-gazing goes on in the party. Everyone's got advice, everyone thinks an election a year off is going to be a disaster and everyone thinks its doomed (these were all the headlines which I read in major metropolitian dailies and political websites) and yet somehow it survives because in a Federal political system it has to survive for those groups which vote for it to win (something the white parlor-socialists like Dayen and Cooper don't seem to get). The question is can it govern and if can't as a moderate-liberal hybrid, then what? Joe Biden or any Dem administration can certainly make the trains run on time but to be a transformative administration is virtually impossible in a polarized polity. Either those who "think big" have to understand this reality and keep their "big thinking" to the local level where they can bring about change from the group and leave the national party alone, or continue to be frustrated and lash out all the time in the media which just makes the situation worse, not better. It's up to them but I know what I would choose.