 So I think that by now it's safe to say that the 2020 election is a repudiation of the centrist Democrats' strategy. Running to the center, pandering to Republicans, is not an effective strategy. In fact, it's a horrible strategy. Because House Democrats underperformed. They will retain control of the House, luckily, but they still lost ground. And when it comes to Senate Democrats, we still don't even know if they're going to control the Senate. This is going to come down to two runoff races in Georgia. But still, in states where Democrats were expected to excel in Maine with Susan Collins, they lost. So they underperformed. Now I know what you're thinking, but Joe Biden still won the presidency. And sure, I'll grant you that, but keep in mind, Joe Biden underperformed. And even if he didn't underperform, this election wasn't necessarily about Joe Biden. This election, the presidential election anyways, was a referendum on incumbent presidents handling of a global pandemic and a subsequent economic crash. So it's not about Joe Biden. I think he could have performed better had he run a more progressive campaign. But still, he won because people rejected Donald Trump. So the question is, what exactly led to Democrats losing? And it's obviously the left. That's what they're saying. No, I mean, obviously, centrist Democrats, the strategy that they have been using for more than two decades now, it was a colossal failure. But of course, they're going to blame the left as they usually do. And look, it doesn't matter if every single centrist lost their reelection campaign and every single progressive won their reelection campaign. The narrative was already predetermined. They'd still say, well, this is just proof. It validates our claim that you have to be more centrist and you can't be too progressive. You can't support policies that are very popular like Medicare for all. So they're going to say that whatever happens reinforces their worldview. But when you look at the numbers, that's not correct. And I don't know if they're dumb or disingenuous, but either way, what we're hearing from Democrats is wrong. And the people that were elected that kept their seats are centrist. There's no question in my mind about that. Spoken like a true loser. Now, we're also getting electoral advice from Claire McCaskill, who lost her reelection campaign in 2018. And regardless of what strategy you think is better, why don't we all just collectively agree to not take advice from people who lost their elections? Stop letting people who did not successfully run their campaigns tell us how to successfully run campaigns. I mean, isn't that common sense? Don't listen to losers who have been demonstrable failures. But I don't want to beat up too much on Donna Shileda here because she lost. There are other Democrats who agree with the sentiment that it's really not centrists who did anything wrong. It's the left that hurt us. Even though we ran terrible campaigns, the left, they're the ones that actually hurt us. For example, third-way Democrat Abigail Spanberger said this, quote, she expressed outrage with the left reportedly telling fellow Democrats, don't say socialism ever again, while warning that if the party continues moving left that in 2022, we will get fucking torn apart. But she's not alone because House majority whip Jim Clyburn reportedly said, if we are going to run on Medicare for all to fund the police, socialized medicine, we're not going to win. Now, let's just pause for a moment and think about how idiotic what they are saying is. Jim Clyburn is saying if you run on Medicare for all, you're not going to win. Has he seen a single poll? Medicare for all is overwhelmingly popular. There are some polls that show a majority of Republicans support Medicare for all, but in almost every single poll, a plurality of Republicans supported because surprise, surprise, people want health care. They want good things for themselves. People do not like their employer based health insurance, especially during a pandemic when they're losing their jobs. And as a result, they're losing the health insurance that's tied to their employer. So the argument that they're saying here is, look, if you adopt these really popular policies that 55 to 70% of the electorate supports, that's a losing strategy. Do they even hear themselves? Now you can agree with him or not, but the data doesn't validate this point of view. In fact, the DSA actually filled in the blanks for us. And as you can see here, it is demonstrably false to say that Medicare for all is a losing issue because guess what? House Democrats that supported Medicare for all, they won even in red districts. Whereas Democrats who did not support Medicare for all in blue districts like Donna Shalala, Debbie Mercasul Powell, Abby Finkenauer, they lost. Voters rejected them even though they did exactly what Abigail Spanberger and Jim Clyburn said they should do. They ran as centrists and they still lost. But yet they're saying, no, it's the left. They're the ones that are responsible for us losing, even though the leftist incumbents got reelected. I mean, does this make sense? Of course, it doesn't make sense. No, of course, this is a small sample size. But understand that when you look at the numbers, the more conservative the Democrat was, the more they lost by. And this is common sense because if you run away from a policy that a majority of Americans support, obviously you're going to be worse off. Now, overall, Max Kennerley shows why this is the case. So he says, here's the dem vote margin for the 24 vulnerable House Democratic candidates compared to their GovTrack ideology score. There's of course a million caveats here, but in the aggregate, the more conservative their record in Congress, the worse they fared at the polls. So he provides you with the list. These were the 24 most vulnerable Democrats and many of the ones that lost were the most conservative. And as you can see here with this spreadsheet, the more conservative the Democrat, the more likely they lost. I mean, it's again, this isn't rocket science. If you are against a really popular policy, well, of course, you're going to do worse, especially if you are running in a party that their base really wants that policy. I mean, look at this, some of the most conservative Democrats, Colin Peterson, Max Rose, Anthony Brindisi. They voted more often than not with Republicans and they lost by the largest margins. Now, as Max Kennerley goes on to explain, six sponsors of Medicare for all one reelection in swing districts, South Dakota, Montana and Mississippi legalized marijuana. Florida raised its minimum wage. There are no majority centrist districts. The districts are polarized and the independence aren't centrists. Fact is there are very few districts in which it makes electoral sense to please newspaper columnists and cable news hosts. Stand for something, fight for the people and furthermore, many centrist Democrats ran terrible campaigns. In 2018, Dems flipped 41 house seats. 13 of those new members leaned so hard to the right, they won awards from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Six of them just lost. One's too close to coal. Another is Spanberger. She blames the left and Black Lives Matter for her tough race. And when you dive deeper here and you look at the types of Democrats who lost and the ones who won, you start to see a pattern emerge. Centrist Democrats had a lot of issues getting reelected, whereas all of the incumbent progressives won their reelection every single one of them. Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, AOC, they all won. Now, it is the case that outsider Democrats who were not elected, who were not incumbents, a lot of them were progressives that lost. But when it comes to incumbent Democrats, they simply did not turn out the vote. And as Max Kennerley points out, I mean, when you see this sort of polarization, how many people are in the middle? Nobody's a centrist. Nobody's in the middle. Nobody is, you know, in the middle directly of the Republican and Democratic Party's ideologies. Everyone is either on one side or the other. And each election is going to come down to whether or not the Democrat in that particular district was able to excite their base. And it's not just about policy and ideology. There's more involved as well because AOC actually looked into this and a lot of centrist Democrats, they just ran terrible campaigns. Not only was the messaging off where the ads not substantive, but they didn't even bother to really organize and get out the vote. She explains here, there are folks running around on TV blaming progressivism for Democratic Party underperformance. I was curious, so I decided to open the hood on struggling campaigns of candidates who are blaming progressives for their problems. Almost all had awful execution on digital during a pandemic. This is insane. Underinvestment across the board, some campaigns spent $0 on digital the week before the election. Others who spent did so in very poor ways. If I spent only $12,000 on TV the week before an election and then blamed others after, you'd ask questions. That's how it looks seeing this. Ideology plus messaging are the spicy conversations a lot of people jump to, but sometimes it's about execution and technical capacity. Digital execution was not good. Polls were off. Ironically, the DCCC banned the firms who are the best in the country at Facebook because they work with progressives. Also, the decision to stop knocking doors is one people need to grapple with and analyze. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib never stopped and may very well have helped deliver Biden the presidency because of it. There are swing seat Democratic incumbents who co-sponsored the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, etc. And if I'm not mistaken, every single one, one reelection. So the whole progressivism is bad argument just doesn't have any compelling evidence that I've seen. When it comes to defund and socialism attacks, people need to realize these are racial resentment attacks. You're not going to make them go away. You can make it less effective. How do you make it less effective? Invest in year-round deep canvassing. Data shows that this kind of work helps blunt the force of racial resentment at the polls. If you're always running away from conversations about race, then the only people owning it is the GOP. You'll lose. And on this hand-ringing about slide POC increases for GOP in some areas, this is also an area with answers. But honestly, when it comes to Latinos, the parties just never seriously made an effort. Mexicans, Central Americans, Caribbean, Chicanos, Cubans are not the only important communities. By the way, if white communities are getting more comfortable with overt racism or cultural resentment, if that's what they're rebranding it now, it's only going to get harder for POC turnout to save everyone. Real organizing and strategy is needed that disarms bigotry, not avoids it. You can't just tell the Black, Brown, and youth organizers riding in to save us every election to be quiet or not have their representatives champion them when they need us, or wonder why they don't show up for midterms when they're scolded for existing, especially when they're delivering victories. And by the way, I'm happy to seed ground on things that aren't working in some areas, but finger-pointing is not going to help. There's real workable and productive paths here if the party is open to us. After all, I got here by beating a Democrat who outspent me 10 to one who I knew had bad polling, and there you have it. Centrists ran terrible campaigns and they ran against policies that are incredibly popular. Even the Green New Deal, even if it's been demonized relentlessly by Fox News and Republicans and even some centrist Democrats, it's still very popular. There's a reason why people voted against Joe Biden in Florida, but yet still voted simultaneously to increase the minimum wage. Policies matter. Joe Biden supports the $15 an hour minimum wage. If he actually ran ads in Florida saying, I stand with people who want to raise the minimum wage, he could have won that state. So you have to put policies front and center. You can't pretend to be a Republican because that's going to suppress your own base. They don't want to come out and vote for a Republican light. They're just going to stay home if they see no discernible difference between you and the Republican. So this isn't that difficult. Again, it's frustrating because we're telling them what seems like it's common sense. But the issue is that they, they're paid not to take our advice. They're paid to lose because they're paid by their donors to support specific policies. They're not supporting policies based on their popularity or just being good policy like Medicare for All. Individuals like Abigail Spanberger, she takes money from large multinational corporations, health insurance companies and those companies would stop giving her money if she actually did support Medicare for All. So it's convenient for her to say that being citrus is a winning strategy even if that strategy is a demonstrable failure. It's convenient for her to say that because then she could be corrupt, take money from large multinational corporations, not change a thing and then blame everyone else for her own party's failures. Well, we're going to push back against this because what you're saying is laughably stupid. Again, if you run away from popular policies, you're hurting yourself. You can't blame the left for being energized. Blame yourself for not doing enough to organize your own constituents, to energize your own constituents. And I'll leave that there. Individuals like Jim Clyburn, Abigail Spanberger, Donna Shalala, they're clowns. And the quicker the aggregate Democratic Party stops listening to people like that who consume nothing but mainstream media, the faster they'll actually be able to win elections. I mean, isn't this what you want? Do you want to just perpetually be an opposition party? Or do you actually want to take back power and have a real mandate from the people?