It’s an incredibly stupid strategy, but there’s a couple factors that cause Dem leadership to keep trying it over and over.
First, and primarily, turning right tends to square better with what their corporate donors want.
They’re also stuck in the past, they think we’re still in the early 2000s where there was a broad, bipartisan consensus on interventionist foreign policy and taking away privacy rights and such. They think Trump is a bizarre, random fluke, and that there are countless moderate Republicans who still believe in that consensus. In reality, some didn’t ever believe in it, some just followed whatever they were told to believe, but a lot became disillusioned when that consensus failed miserably, with decades-long wars accomplishing nothing.
Part of the problem is that they stay in their bubbles, and that “moderate Republican” perspective is disproportionately represented in elite, Beltway circles. People like Dick Cheney are almost universally reviled outside of those circles, but the Dems aren’t even aware of it.
Then there’s this “conventional wisdom” that puts everyone’s political views on a one dimensional spectrum and concludes that the most moderate candidate will always win. Completely ignoring mobilization, enthusiasm, Trump’s multiple wins which fly in the face of the theory, the ability to change people’s political views and identities, the fact that politics is way more complex than one dimension (for example, the effect I mentioned before with Hispanic Trump voters).
It’s an incredibly stupid strategy, but there’s a couple factors that cause Dem leadership to keep trying it over and over.
First, and primarily, turning right tends to square better with what their corporate donors want.
They’re also stuck in the past, they think we’re still in the early 2000s where there was a broad, bipartisan consensus on interventionist foreign policy and taking away privacy rights and such. They think Trump is a bizarre, random fluke, and that there are countless moderate Republicans who still believe in that consensus. In reality, some didn’t ever believe in it, some just followed whatever they were told to believe, but a lot became disillusioned when that consensus failed miserably, with decades-long wars accomplishing nothing.
Part of the problem is that they stay in their bubbles, and that “moderate Republican” perspective is disproportionately represented in elite, Beltway circles. People like Dick Cheney are almost universally reviled outside of those circles, but the Dems aren’t even aware of it.
Then there’s this “conventional wisdom” that puts everyone’s political views on a one dimensional spectrum and concludes that the most moderate candidate will always win. Completely ignoring mobilization, enthusiasm, Trump’s multiple wins which fly in the face of the theory, the ability to change people’s political views and identities, the fact that politics is way more complex than one dimension (for example, the effect I mentioned before with Hispanic Trump voters).