Of course you can never be the problem, it is never because you and Dem staffers/donors are to the left of 96% of the country. The open border is completely a result of these people who have run roughshod over an 82 year old President. His staff is a major problem.
I agree with you on why D elites being ideologically further from the median voter than the D base
than their R counterparts are is bad. But lower-engagement voters (and normies more broadly) don't really care exactly which D figure(s) right-wing cable news make(s) the subject of their Two Minute Hate.
These people are still going to be fairly meh on Whitmer and Shapiro types, so long as they feel that the entire Democratic party and media-industrial complex is gaslighting them on how low the unemployment rate is when white-collar PMC employees keep getting laid off, or how many new jobs are being added when a lot of people are working several part-time jobs or gig contracts to get by.
(I don't actually know how many potential voters fall into this category. But it's my psychology-based hot take on why many of the lowest-propensity post-1990 and/or POC voters are relatively R, beyond being more likely to live in Titanium D locales and feeling like their vote would be wasted.)
The Democrats are going to come to crossroads and will have to make a decision on which way to go. Right now, their current coalition cannot stand because so many of their various voting blocks have interests diametrically opposed to each other. We are already seeing the fissures with these campus protests.
Put it bluntly, you cannot be a party that appeals to both upper class suburbanites and young leftists & minorities. It's basically the bourgeoise and the proletariate in the same party which is laughable and no one with common sense thinks that can possibly stand.
Hmmm... I actually think a pure suburban strategy could work, given they are like half the US population. Like 40% of voters graduated college, so in theory, they put you in a good position just by themselves. It's the continuation and possible recent enhancement of sectionalism that's really hurting Democrats here. If they were winning The Woodlands and Wesley Chapel and Overland Park by the same margin as Westchester, Montgomery, MD and Concord, MA, it wouldn't matter what the rural vote did. But they just can't quite close the deal in the Sunbelt to the point where they stop needing the WWC vote up North.
It is interesting to speculate what a realignment from ancestry + religion polarization to pure educational attainment polarization would look like across several cycles. Not that this is something Dems would (or should) want, even if non-college grad voters remain more evenly split than college grads.
First, you can't build a winning electoral coalition with only college educated voters. This coalition is an advantage in midterm and off-year elections, but not in a general election when most people are going to vote. They are still outnumbered 2 to 1, and the number of young Americans choosing to earn a college degree will decline in the coming decades as the value of a college education declines. Choosing to appeal to minority voters without a college education based just on racial fear tactics will be less effective as younger Americans have no connection to the civil rights movement and no memories of the Reagan presidency.
