A quote from Dave Zirin's article in The Nation today (scarily accurate in my opinion):
The Democratic consultant class—the immortal swamp things of DC—only ever seem to have one idea: pitch your campaign to the political center. In 2024, this means trying to win over what are being called “Cheney Democrats”—whatever the hell that means. This strategy apparently requires ignoring your base on domestic issues and horrifying it on foreign policy by funding Israel’s genocide. In our polarized political moment, this is electoral suicide.
The Harris-Walz ticket is running a campaign rooted in the fantasy that there is a centrist wing of the GOP appalled by Donald Trump. For this to work, Trump would need to be an outlier, and a significant section of the GOP would need to be looking for an alternative.
Those reasonable Republicans are gone, if they ever existed. Liz Cheney lost her reelection bid (against a Trumpist stooge) by 30 points, the second-greatest loss of an incumbent member of Congress in US history.
I have always questioned the impulse of Democrats to aim their campaigns to the right, and then blame the ensuing election loss on the left. It seems outright silly to intentionally anagonize people who already want to vote for you, and instead try too woo voters who don't like you and and are unlikely to vote for you no matter what. But the Democratic base doesn't have the insider savviness of the corporate donor/consulting class that always knows better. As I've said before, all they want from the left is their money and their vote; for everything else they want us to shut up.
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