jessica 🗳️🇺🇸

In the last 20 hours you have posted three times pitting this as a binary ideological battle between the moderate/establishment “faction” and the progressive/leftist “faction.” So either you were being disingenuous then, or you are being disingenuous now. There is no third thing. You said that since progressive candidates perform led slightly worse than moderate ones — which on balance is accurate but there are many exceptions (including Randy Villegas) and race/candidate/cycle-specific factors at play in individual races that you intentionally and irresponsibly choose to ignore — the party shouldn’t listen to their advice on how to win. Even though the objectively successful “fusion” message employed by the Ossoffs and Talaricos of the world adopted a lot of the economic populist messaging honed by the progressive-left over the last decade or so. And you basically said that anyone that disagrees with you is just stupid (a lot of what ails the left “stems from poor epistemic practices”). I want a party that takes good ideas for all corners of the party (including moderates!). All of this is incredibly nuanced, but you are — and have been, even in the weeks leading up to the election — trying to lay the groundwork for a blunt and deeply unsophisticated “us vs. them” dynamic that serves nobody but people like you who want clicks on your Substack (and any corporate clients you have that would benefit from said debate/outright moderation on policy). You took like a campaign tactic in popularism — which at a base level makes sense — and have contorted it into an entire ideology. It’s just poll- and focus-group tested centrism with no room for outside the box thinking, which — as anyone who has worked in politics or campaigns can attest — is not always the optimal strategy! And I say this as a longtime pollster and focus group moderator!