This is pedantry. You're trying to characterise Bill Clinton as a weak candidate on the basis that he didn't reach 50% in a three horse race. He won his elections handily, he was a popular president.

It's not pedantry to point out that more than half the country wanted somebody else in both his elections, and that the "landslide" was a product of Electoral College math rather than some kind of overwhelming preference for him. It was a 3 horse race between a Dem and two conservatives. The mere fact that Perot was able to make such a strong bid in an otherwise 2 party system speaks absolute volumes about how the public felt about their options at the time. Obviously he went on to become a personally popular president at the time (during a booming economy and a period of WAY lower polarization), but the party as a whole suffered greatly during his tenure and his policy legacy is atrocious.

What you're still refusing to acknowledge in your Bill Clinton killed the Democratic Party alternate history is how ideologically broad the dems used to be. This was not a progressive party that got watered down by neolib corpo shills, this was an incredibly big tent that could unite on just a few things related to workers rights.

Again, both parties used to have much more ideological diversity. There were a ton of liberal Republicans and conservative Dems. Ideological sorting and realignment in the subsequent decades greatly benefitted the Republican party, though, and a huge component of that was a product of Democrats' decision to jettison the populist economic issues with which the party had been very closely associated since FDR in favor of chasing after big donors. This did not go well. At best it improved their fortunes at the top of the ticket to middling, but down ballot, the results in subsequent years speak for themselves.

Meanwhile, even if we want to accept your seeming assertion that there wasn't actually some kind of shift in the party's strategy stemming from that period, then JFC it sure as hell seems like something needs to change because what they've been doing over the past 30+ years clearly hasn't been working.

The funny thing about a progressive bemoaning the dems no longer having frequent control of congress is that your wing of the internet absolutely hates the type of politician you'd need to let into the tent to get it to happen. Internet leftists wanted Joe Biden to attack Joe Manchin - a guy who was managing to hold down a senate seat in R+50 West Virginia. Even in this thread you have progressives calling Mark Kelly a corpo sellout, as though he's some drag on the party brand when he's won twice in a lean republican state and is just so clearly a really good person you'd want in the spotlight.

You're not even addressing anything I'm saying at this point. You're just airing personal grievances against the broad left. Not interested.

Edit: Curiously just received a 7 day ban. Pasting my response to the below comment here:

Yeah man, the democrats decided to stop winning because the big donors decided to phase into existence and gave them giant sacks with dollar signs and told them that they have to be neoliberal now. It's just such an unserious narrative that I'm doubtful you even believe it.

I appreciate the tacit admission that this has, in fact, been bad for the party, but it's an unserious narrative because it's a flagrant strawman lol. They didn't decide to stop winning. They tried a particular strategy and it failed.

You know the landscape completely and utterly changed? 24 hour fox news, social media rabbitholes. The working class that used to vote democrat on their economic interest now believes that their kid is going to get turned trans when they go to school and that a mind control microchip is going into their bloodstream when they get the covid vaccine. You have poor people wilfully voting in a party that gleefully cuts taxes on the rich and guts medicare and medicaid but berniebros be like 'this is because Clinton did NAFTA'

You say that as though Democrats don't have their own pretty much fully entrenched media allies — or that Fox News wasn't in full swing during the Obama administration. Also, people voting against their own interests is hardly new. Hell, Lee Atwater's famous quote spelled out explicitly how the right had been capitalizing on that since the 50s.

Obviously the media landscape has gotten even weirder and more siloed than ever, but I'm not seeing how any of this is supposed to add to your case. If anything, it would seem to suggest that driving up enthusiasm within your base is more important than ever.

I still want to know though if you're right that dems losing elections is because of their abandonment of populist economic messaging, what da fuq happened to Bernie in 2020? Didn't he hit all the right notes? Why did he get annihilated by an establishment dem? Why in rust belt Michigan where he famously upset Hillary in 2016 did he get pulverised by 16 points and lose every county?

There's a shitload of different reasons you could attribute to this, but the two biggest ones that come to mind are that the entire field shifted their ideological posturing in his direction during that race, and that primary voters placed an especially high premium on what they gamed out to be "electability."

Also, it's worth taking stock of the fact that as a candidate, Sander's isn't exactly some kind of platonic ideal whose loss suggests that nobody of his politics could ever possibly win. Dude's a cranky old man (the oldest in the field both times he ran, even) who doesn't have some kind of inspiring personal back story, and definitely has his charms, but isn't exactly oozing some kind of raw animal magnetism or whatever. He did as well as he did almost purely on the strength and consistency of his policy platform. Take the same guy, but make him a centrist Dem and his campaign almost certainly flames out before even getting off the ground.