But they do stay away from their third rails. The problem is the ring-wing media apparatus just chases after them swinging the third rails at their head. Harris focused her campaign on housing affordability, lower healthcare costs, and access to abortion. It was the Republicans who kept running the "she's for they/them" ads. The pattern repeats itself every cycle: Republicans identify a vulnerable group to hate; they gin up borderline genocidal animus towards [said vulnerable group] among their base; the Democrat says "uh... I'm not in favor of mass graves for [said vulnerable group]"; the right wing media goes nuts about the Democrat wants to sell your children to [said vulnerable group]; "serious pundits" tsk tsk the Democrat for obsessing over identity instead of focusing on "kitchen table issues" despite the Democrat's entire platform being about those issues. We'll do it all over again in a few years, and we'll get a million more takes about the Democrats' "identity politics" problem, as if white nationalism isn't identity politics.
I disagree entirely. Pretending this is true is not going to yield a victory in November. And I think you polled 100 randomly sampled people, they could not tell you what the Democratic Party policy platform is.
That's kinda my point. Those 100 random idiots know what's in their feeds and in the media they consume, which are disproportionately driven by bad-faith Republican operations. The actual speeches, ads, and policy prescriptions of Democrats seeking office is fairly normie stuff focused around healthcare, the economy, infrastructure, etc.
This mentality has yet to pay off in any meaningful victory. If the plan is to keep calling voters stupid until the see the wisdom of a nonexistent platform, then we can expect a GOP midterm win.
I'm not a Democratic campaign manager. I'm not running a persuasion operation. I'm just calling it as I see it, which is that the voters are fucking stupid, and Democrats are getting bodied not by their policy positions, but by a vast propaganda apparatus the Republicans have built up over decades.