I'm assuming pretty much the opposite of reasonable times and rational actors.
Just not in the case of the Democratic party. Don't be coy.
I'm hard pressed finding anything in the Democratic party platform or even in Biden's speeches and media appearances that would appeal to hard-right Republicans, never-Trumpers or otherwise.
Well as long as you ignore the leaked paid speeches to Comcast, Comcast execs, Third Way contributors, and the financial sector, where he was unaware he was being recorded and/or transcribed which makes them as close to hot mic moments as one can count in the dark ages of campaign finance. Are you going to deny he said he wouldn't "demonize" the rich and "nothing would fundamentally change"? Are you going to deny the financial sector is hard right altogether, throws its money behind whichever candidate offers them the best deal, and in the course of it pulls the Democratic party (and the Overton window, which I cannot help but notice you brought up) rightward?
Once again, the similarities between 2016 and 2020 surface, as this was
also Hillary's model of finance networking and fundraising, and her's and Bill's $153m worth of Wall Street speaking fees, and speech recordings/transcripts, bit her right in the ass too.
Or, are you going to pretend "white suburban voters" aren't the single-biggest Republican voting bloc in the country? Specifically white suburban
women, who swung for Trump with 53% about whom so much ado has been made this year?
Regardless, everything you've described above actually fits quite neatly into conventional electoral politics.
And what did I say was the
problem with "conventional electoral politics"?
It still boils down to turning out the base; the only real difference is that you see the entire self-identified "moderate" voter bloc as committed Democratic voters who won't be swayed or put off anyway, and the progressives as the ones the Democrats actually need to appeal to.
It's never a good idea to take an electoral bloc for granted. Democrats did precisely that with progressives in 2016, and it cost them; regarding "moderates" as automatic Democratic voters would be a similar act of electoral self-sabotage.
The difference between now and 2016 is that care of four years' worth of pervasive cable news bullshit, the Democratic party has a newly-minted bumper crop of low-infos who would vote for literally anyone to oppose Trump. Invariably, they fall into the "moderate" camp and their votes are not in question. And rather than shore up weaknesses with blocs that are
actually at risk, Democratic policy elites and strategists have taken it upon themselves to circle the wagons, double down, and tack right. If you're looking only at Biden and not his media surrogates (in an election year where the campaign has allowed surrogates to represent him as opposed to speak regularly), and even then a curated sample of Biden's post-nomination campaign speeches rather than the totality of his Presidential bid let alone his career as an elected official, you're not seeing the big picture.
That's the
opposite of coalition-building. That's tilting at windmills, chasing demos that don't exist and appealing to demos that, best case scenario, will stay home. That's trying to re-litigate 2016, using the 2016 playbook when it was a proven failure, with the same professional wrong people that wrote the 2016 playbook, the same donors who paid 2016's jobbers, virtually the same scandals with
worse outcomes in terms of anger and demobilization as 2016, the same polling and demo tracking as 2016 to date, but expecting different results.
What I'm advocating is that progressive voters recognise that some kind of revolutionary realignment is not going to happen in one electoral cycle, and that they do not command the power to make that happen. They do have the power to shift the Democrats to the left (if the Democrats prove open to it) via electoral coalition-building: the only electoral strategy through which any meaningful progress has ever been made in the States.
First, Democrats have proven consistently they're not, and second, you fundamentally misread the progressive tenor if you genuinely think that to be the case. Progressives want a transparent platform with transparent and accountable leadership, that comes with a guarantee of action and an action plan, that will survive first contact with the enemy let alone bear the rigor of negotiation to yield progressive
policy. And, we want an executive who can and will use the bully pulpit and full force of the 21st Century unitary executive to advance the party's platform, indeed against the fringe right of their own party who treat the platform as a square of used toilet paper, if need be.
This fundamental issue is why Democrats have zero credibility, authority, or legitimacy in the eyes of progressives least of all after eight years of Obama; the Democratic platform is purpose-built to fail. See, my commentary up-thread about negotiation.
After a quick Google to confirm, Obama in 2008, who succeeded by building an electoral coalition of progressives and "moderates", and whose party platform is pretty comparable to Biden's.
Can't help but notice not included in your calculus was the PUMA movement and that 25% of Hillary voters flipped to McCain in November. A 6% swing in the American electorate (25% of Hillary supporters equates to 12.5% of the Democratic electorate, in turn translating to 6.25% of the American electorate) should have been immediately damning to Obama's campaign, but it
wasn't -- and in fact, despite this Obama won in a landslide.
Did Obama pivot post-primary to shore up the Democratic center? Sure. Did he pivot all that much from running a campaign founded on progressive and populist core values, with a strategy of energizing and turning out young, first-time, and minority voters? No. Did his pivot substantially impact his platform? No, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup did that.
Obama's campaign read the tea leaves right. They realized they were going to lose a quarter of Hillary's voters (those numbers were in as early as March and stayed consistent throughout the campaign), and the majority of Democratic voters were voting Democratic, regardless. The Hillary voters were a sunk cost, and there's no benefit to appealing to voters who are already guaranteed turn-out, so they made a calculated risk appealing to the left and it paid the biggest returns in a Presidential election since the Southern strategy.
(A bit convenient to say "since 1968", too, since 1968 itself was higher, and was won by Nixon).
I thought I'd be nice about it. That's only the election year when RFK entered the race to block Eugene McCarthy and got a sudden case of lead poisoning, the convention was thoroughly ratfucked causing mass riots, McCarthy who was the clear frontrunner didn't get the nomination and Humphrey who barely participated did, Wallace went third-party and carried most of the South, and Nixon cruise controlled to victory.
Would you like to talk about '64 when the Texan won a landslide promising to continue the legacy of an assassinated President, against a nuke-happy lunatic? Wanna talk about '60 when it was Nixon versus
Jack Kennedy? Wanna talk about '52 and '56 when Eisenhower won landslides -- wanna compare Eisenhower's platform to today's Democratic platform and see how it stacks up? Of course before any of them were Truman and FDR, the forefathers of the contemporary Democratic party, but if you want to talk about them you can be goddamn certain I'd love to have a chat about Henry Wallace, too.
