Democrats have an identity crisis. They are perceived to be something they’re not, which is out of the mainstream. They can thank a vocal minority in their ranks — the hard-left — for that perception.
In fact, I refer to the left wing of the party as the “hard-left,” not as “progressives.” That’s because there’s nothing progressive about the hard-left. For example, the hard-left was all in on paying off college debt. Yet, the average college graduate makes $1.5 million more over his career than the average high school grad. Paying off college loans amounts to a huge transfer of wealth from the less well-off to the better off. How is that progressive?
I also like “hard-left” because the “hard” qualifier suggests a rigid, grim, humorless ideology, which is another unpleasant feature of that group.
And yet it’s the minority views of the hard-left that taint — well, trash is a more accurate word — the Democratic Party’s image.
That point has been made by researchers and political scientists for years, but it was made again — and eloquently so — in an article which appeared in The Atlantic last week in the wake of this November’s electoral disaster.
The authors are two researchers from the centrist organization, More in Common. They polled people to ask them what they thought were the top priorities of most Republicans and most Democrats. What they found was that the public as a whole had a pretty good understanding of Republican voters’ priorities. What the general public thought were the most important issues for Republican voters matched up pretty well with what those voters themselves said about their own priorities.
But that wasn’t true for Democrats. The general public thought that Democrats were much further to the left than Democratic voters themselves say they are. It’s important to stop here and make a crucial distinction. We’re talking about how the mass of rank-and-file Democrats list their own priorities. We’re not talking about Democratic politicians or what the official Democratic Party platform might state.
So, the general public thought Republican voters’ top three priorities included inflation and the economy, which in fact it did. And those priorities were correctly identified by all major groups, including Democrats and independents.
Now to quote the Atlantic article: “By contrast, every single demographic group thought Democrats’ top priority was abortion, overestimating the importance of this issue by an average of 20 percentage points. (This included Democrats themselves, suggesting that they are somewhat out of touch even with what their fellow partisans care about.) Meanwhile, respondents underestimated the extent to which Democrats prioritize inflation and the economy, ranking those items fourth and ninth on their list of priorities, respectively.”
Even more striking was the issue of transgender rights. That issue has become a marker for a host of related hard-left views. It’s the reason that Trump’s attack ad with the devastating punch line that Harris was “for they/them” while Trump is for “us” was so effective. It wasn’t just about transgender rights; it implied that Harris was far out of the mainstream on a lot of things. She wasn’t and it wasn’t fair, but it worked.
And here’s the thing. For rank-and-file Democrats, transgender issues aren’t all that important. The issue ranked 14th among their concerns. But the general public? They thought that transgender rights was the second most important issue to Democrats.
And there’s your problem. The problem is that transgender rights and other boutique issues are, in fact, priorities of the small minority that is the hard-left. But that hard-left is over-represented in the general media, social media, among Democratic pols, activists, donors and the like. Because the hard-left is so outspoken, it gets heard and it drowns out the more moderate, mainstream views of most Democrats — much to the delight of Republicans.
That’s why we need an organized Moderate Democratic Party as a subset of the party as a whole. Moderate Democrats, who actually form a solid majority of the party, have to also retake the party. We have to become the voice and image of the party.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
it is like the tail wagging the dog.
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I wonder if what you call the hard left is more accurately over represented in media coverage. After all, it’s natural that both R and D party staff and donors are further to the left or right than the bulk of the population. I don’t believe the hard-left is any more outspoken than the hard-right.
But the disconnect between perception and reality cited in the article could very well be purposefully caused by biased media. I strongly dispute the notion that our “mainstream media” is liberal.
In fact, I argue that the MSM is conservative, and overzealous coverage of fringe far-left ideas isn’t intended to promote those ideas, but is intended to tie those ideas in the public mind to the D party and define the public’s perception. After all, that’s the explicit strategy of the vast and well-funded conservative media empire. They often put some stoned weirdo on camera and act like they’re the spokesperson for the D party. The purpose is to tie those ideas together.
I argue that the MSM does the same, but without explicitly saying so. In fact, it could be that front line reporters who may personally be liberal are hoodwinked into thinking their work is promoting these ideas, when in fact their owners know these stories have the opposite effect.
This is illustrated by reviewing the way actual far-left media companies cover the news, which is nothing like the MSM. The types of stories (but not the tone, I admit, but I contend tone doesn’t matter in this respect) run in the MSM have far more in common with conservative media (who is intentionally attempting to skew perceptions against the left) than far-left media (who is intentionally attempting to skew perceptions against the far-right).
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