[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by PeteMoss

Pulled to the right compared to what/when? Their election promises is about the only accurate comparison because they are further left then they've been in a long time on almost all issues.

Yeah, it might help if Rube outlines economic policies he thinks would be popular with working class voters.

Here’s the Economist’s take on where the Democrats have gone wrong,

Wake up, Democrats!

For the good of America, the governing party urgently needs to take on its own activists

… The Democrats therefore rightly see themselves as the only remaining guardians of America’s political system. The country needs parties that actually represent voters, few of whom belong to the extremes. And yet Democrats too have fallen prey to their activists.

Fringe and sometimes dotty ideas have crept into Democratic rhetoric, peaking in the feverish summer of 2020 with a movement to “defund the police”, abolish immigration enforcement, shun capitalism, relabel women as birthing people and inject “anti-racism” into the classroom. If the Democrats are defined by their most extreme and least popular ideas, they will be handing a winning agenda of culture-war grievance to an opposition party that has yet to purge itself of the poison that makes Mr Trump unfit for office...

…the party also needs to ditch cherished myths that empower its idealists.

One is that a rainbow coalition of disaffected, progressive voters is just waiting to be organised to bring about a social revolution. The truth is that those who do not vote are politically disengaged and not very liberal. Some black, Hispanic and working-class voters may well see each other as rivals or have conservative views on race, immigration and crime.

Another myth is that winning over centrist voters is unnecessary, because Democrats’ fortunes will be rescued by grand structural reforms to American democracy that are tantalisingly within reach. The constitution biases the Senate and electoral college towards rural America, and thus away from Democrats. Some in the party dream of using a congressional supermajority to shift representation in Washington towards the popular vote by adding states to the union, amending the constitution or packing the Supreme Court. Yet even in better times, there is a slim chance of that actually happening.

The greatest myth is that the party’s progressive stances invigorate the base and are off-putting only to the other side. Consider the governor’s election in Virginia in 2021. After favouring Mr Biden by ten percentage points in 2020, voters elected a Republican whose signature campaign pledge was ridding schools of critical race theory (crt). That concept has become a catch-all term for conservative gripes, some real and some fantastical. Republican attacks on Democrats as out-of-touch socialists ring true to many voters in the centre...

… He needs to be louder and clearer in defending ideas that used to be uncontroversial: rising crime is unacceptable and the police force is needed to contain it; legal immigration is better than the illegal sort, and borders should be kept secure; the study of racism belongs in the school curriculum, social-justice praxis does not. It is not enough for Democrats to bemoan Republican disinformation. They need to counter the idea that they themselves are in thrall to their own extremes.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/20...their-extremes