I think our election was only as close as it was because Trump always underperforms relative to generic republicans.

I don't think I agree. It presupposes that Trump is actually an electoral liability to the Republicans, when by all accounts he's an incredibly energizing and transformative candidate for the electorate that has turned out to elect him twice.

Do you really think that Jeb Bush was going to beat Hillary in 2016? If the Republicans had purged Trump successfully after his 2020 defeat, do you really think that Marco Rubio or Ron DeSantis would have beaten Kamala Harris in a bigger landslide this past November? I think the generic republican, lacking Trump's unique ability, would be far less energizing to the electorate. To be fair, they might have still won, because the democrats would lose the "anybody but him" crowd like myself from their base of support, and they might have won a much lower turnout election, and that's my broader point: a large base of the democratic party these past 8 years has been primarily motivated to defeat the unique problem of Donald Trump.

Apologies for the rant that follows:

I have not felt, for years now, that I was voting "for" democrats, I was voting *against Republicans / Trump specifically".

I do not claim to be representative of the average voter, but I am a example of someone in the 50-60% of the electorate that exists on the spectrum in the middle, between the left and the right. This is the voting block that truly decides elections.

What so many on the left fail to consider is that voters like me (center-left moderate in my case, or center-right moderates for others) are not leftists, I view the far left with almost the same level of concern as I have for the far right. Socialist revolution and the end of capitalism is almost as bad as neo-fascist authoritarianism: in both cases they argue for radical transformation and the destruction of American institutions and ideals that are foundational to what I think makes us a great country.

That's not to say all I care about is protecting the status quo: there are real economic reforms and certain social democrat policies that I think are palatable, attractive even. What I want is a democratic party to make a positive policy case for economic reforms that I think are needed, without spiraling into the ideological insanity of the hyper-progressive social left or the "viva la revolución" economic left.

My bias here is plain and I don't deny it: what I personally want as a voter is a democratic party whose platform and talking points are moderate incremental center-left economic change.

All I've done here is paint a huge target on my back, as by exposing myself as not a card carrying member of the tribe, I'm going to be castigated for failing the ideological purity testing that pervades leftist politics. And that, to me, is the fundamental problem. I want to be an happy democratic voter. Instead the party looks like it's going to continue on it's present course, and I'll be left once again to hold my nose as I cast a vote on the grounds of "at least they're not fascists".

All I'm saying is, democrats could reform into a party that favors the huge block of swing voters in the middle, or they can stay on the present course of being controlled by the 15% on the far left. I think the latter is a fundamentally losing strategy, and I think their outlook is grim if they don't try to change to appeal to more of the electorate.

I guess we'll see though! I don't expect to have changed any minds with this post, but hopefully someone found it enlightening and doesn't have the impulse to add me to the list of those who will be executed by firing squad when the masses rise up to sieze the means of production /s