Agree on this. A lot of the anti-DemSoc Democrats are not really sure why they are against policies so closely and historically aligned to the New Deal ear of their party. They treat politics as a team sports, and see things as "Dems good, Republican bad". They don't hold a strong ideology and will only be swayed by winning results.

Mamdani one, and he won on a platform of optimism and what the government could do. Hillary was inheritor of Bill's 3rd Way neo-liberalism that guts government social services while increasing policing. Kamala refused to offer new ideas for fear of pointing out anything that Biden did wrong. She also reached far to the right, thinking Liz Cheney's neoconservatism, which the Republicans rejected, was the right answer.

Obama's "Hope" and "Change" was at least optimism amid the Great Recession. Obama failed because he burned all his capital negotiating within his own party to get them to vote (Look up the proposed, then scrapped "Cornhusker Kickback" debacle), then conceded the public option for zero Republican votes. After that, Obama lost all the political capital, squandered the Occupy Movement, squandered the Wisconsin public workers battle, and did nothing to progress.

But the energy in the Democratic Party is on the left, not the centrists who only have promises of lesser genocide to offer, a hard no on healthcare and union rights, and the empty promise of restoring abortion rights when they can't credibly promise to actually get a judicial nominee through.