A Comm for Historymemes

https://news.gallup.com/poll/656636/democrats-favor-party-moderation-past.aspx

Okay what the shit democrats? That's definitely one hurdle to clear no matter what direction you do end up taking, but I believe (with no evidence at all other than faith in humanity and an appeal to Bernie) that it can be cleared.

Which should point out how useless polling on policy is for predicting electoral support. People will say they support a policy, but the moment it's actually proposed, find some little detail to justify to themselves why they shouldn't support it when it could actually happen.

That's... fair. However Bernie for example was able to get nationwide support—sometimes even from conservatives who would later vote for Trump—by running on progressive policy, so there's reason to think that policy not being linked to electoral success is at least partially an issue of how the DNC operates and campaigns rather than an inherent property of the American electorate. Also if you throw a wide enough net you should be able to make them vote for one policy even if they don't like the others, for example promising pro-Palestine policy for young college students and liberals, police reform for poor black people, union support for the working class, etc. Theoretically it should be possible to get around the culture war by promising to make real change in people's lives such that they'll reluctantly accept the other stuff.

Dems form the leftmost demographic of the American electorate. And polls of independents continually and repeatedly confirm that.

You're not going to get better numbers for progressive policy looking outside of the Dem Party. If your view is that a progressive party is the way forward, and can attract a large number of people, to the point of challenging the current two-party system, you have to square that with the facts, which would seem difficult.

Fair enough. However, by a simple appeal to the normal distribution it should be possible to count on some left-leaning independent support, since independents are more than just centrists. Most Democrats (which either want progressive policy or have nobody else to vote for) + left leaning independents + most minorities (think 2008 Obama numbers) should be enough for a coalition. The minorities part is important because minorities have significantly less turnout than white people and they all lean left.

Would you be open to evidence challenging this?

The poll I linked has options to filter by race, gender and age; I should've mentioned that. You can play around with it, but it seems to be black > hispanic > other > white in descending order of support, and all demographics show more than 50% support as of November 2023. Edit: If you have evidence showing otherwise then okay sure, but I think the poll's results are pretty clear-cut.

Yet as pointed out by your own source, 2020 had some of the strongest Black support on record for the Dems. You point to a systemic problem inherent in the basis of the party itself. If so, we should see a decline from whenever you think is most appropriate to peg the main change at; instead, we see a sharp drop without movement towards the problems you point as plaguing the party (correctly point at as plaguing, in my opinion, but incorrectly weighting their importance), and, indeed,

I'd peg the main change at Obama for building the Obama coalition under his platform for hope and change, which then proceeded to slowly disintegrate. 2020 was an outlier because Biden to an extent appropriated some of the policies that got Obama elected and Bernie widespread support, and partly because Trump fucked up his handling of Covid so hard. Black people are also the most pro-Democrat demographic in the country for historical reasons. I can't for the life of me find voting data for minorities in general by election, or for black people, but I did find this for Hispanics: https://www.gzeromedia.com/gzero-north/graphic-truth-latino-voters-and-votes-since-1980.

despite moving left considerably in the past ten years thanks to the influence of Bernie and Berniecrats.

The party didn't move left. They dabbled in leftwing politics once in 2020 (which won them the election) and that's it; the general party platform has either mostly stayed the same or shifted to the right depending on the issue (see: most lethal military in the world).

Continues below.