Every 2020 primary debate news cycle was seemingly about how somebody annihilated Biden from the left starting with Kamala BEING THE GIRL ON THAT BUS even as Biden basically never was threatened in the polls by anyone but Bernie who never really attacked him until later on. Then the actual primaries were Buttigieg-Klob-Bloomberg pushing the Biden juggernaut into overdrive as most of those candidates were irrelevant, with Kamala dropping out before the primaries and Warren not even winning her own state (guess she didn't have a plan for that) being the most prominent examples. Blacks especially never went for any of the "left" candidates because despite what the experts tell you Blacks love America and like capitalism, they're upset about it not living up to its promises like most of us are not fundamentally upset about its existence.
Great example of how much of the pundit-politico class doesn't understand their own base. It's one thing for them to botch understanding the R's, it's another when it's the people they're supposedly speaking for. And they did it
twice. They completely misfired on Bernie, for much the same reasons as Trump rather than the specifics of the two men, and then overcompensated completely into thinking the far-left academic-non-profit-media elite bubble is the D coalition. And Biden won both primary and general because he rejected their thesis which stemmed from Hillary's campaign and none of these people ever abandoned. That there was a part of the electorate that would jump back either from Trump or from not-voting if you spoke to their issues. Trump was happy to cooperate by both shooting himself over COVID and believing the same "just energize the base" nonsense Hillary and the elites lost with.
Saw kinda the same thing here in Michigan whereas Whitmer put more effort into trying to expand the map into the suburbs rather than writing them off even though the R's were only barely winning them in the first place when the D's didn't nominate candidates who'd only win in the cities. Yet the D's had been doing this for how many years all over the state except in the UP. I can't remember all the times the D's blew wave elections in the suburbs around Lansing because they'd run a leftie before they finally found Whitmer-Slotkin like candidates. Whitmer became my State Senator and Slotkin my House Rep because they said things like "I respect Mike Rogers but strongly disagree with him" rather than how he was a traitor and stuff like prior candidates.
edit: I think the bulk of the population is "center-left" on economics and "center-right" on socialcultural positions, Trump's power in 2015-16 is that through sheer confusion he was able to appear as if he held these positions. He got everything to focus on free trade and immigration, so he appeared to Hillary's left when she championed global capitalism. On the other axis, she and the media were so insistent on portraying him as far-right on all this stuff when a decade earlier he was to
her left on everything that it actually helped sell his new conversion to what was actually not the minority position.
Trump has since abandoned all this to chase his cult (and because he never really believed anything in the first place) which, because the Republicans have to chase him, has ceded all that ground to the Biden-Whitmer Democrats and even Obama is more comfortable there than many to his left or even in the same area as him. DeSantis made essentially the error of trying to hop to Trump's socialcultural right when Trump picks all his positions ad hoc and he's one of the few people who can get away with this. The other Republicans can't win because they're stuck to the old center-right Republican economics and in a primary Trump won't cede the opposition grounds. I think DeSantis' socialcultural focus was because he was trying to finagle this to seem loyal to the old guard and also loyal to Trump's idiosyncratic positions that are actually more in line with most Americans.
I think Biden running again is bailing out the Democrats from fighting over this much as Trump is essentially helping the Republicans also avoid this. Now nobody has to learn anything about the Bernie-Trump tag team until 2028 when probably some other candidate is going to surprise all the "experts" by operating within this majority sphere. I'd favor the Democrats as having this candidate simply because everyone else will run so far to the left that it will incentivize a candidate to target that part of the primary. Bloomberg had the right idea but was the wrong guy for it because he's mostly the inverse of this sphere and weird. (Obviously not to my extent in either case.)
