[Edit: I did not mean to write an essay but then here we are…]

If Biden does move left he risks losing the election to the majority of Americans

I agree completly overall, but I want to dig into this particular statement. My view on elections and electoralism has evolved, and at this point, I consider the ‘center’ of Americans to be a fiction. The basic paradigms driving votership in the US has shift to be basically cohorts of distinct voting blocs that have to be corralled into moving together. I think the right have used this understanding to great effect, and because of this they’ve been punching well above their weight class in terms of electoral impact relative to the actual number of people who vote. The right started this strategy in the 1960s with the southern strategy splitting off white evangelicals from Christians more broadly, and building them into a coherent voting bloc. Its more than I want to put the effort into writing down here, but my basic argument is that you don’t win modern elections through broad appeal. You win modern elections by appealing strongly to specific voting blocs and driving those cohorts of individuals to the polls. Bernie used this to almost snatch the primary from Hillary, before the DNC pumped the brakes and put the fix in. He wrangled voting blocs that were otherwise non-voters or more limited in their engagement with the party (leftists, progressives, black, lgbtqia, etc…) to engage a diverse coalition into voting for him, even if they were not individually united in their interests. Trump is doing a similar thing with libertarians, MAGA, qanon, anti-women voters, fascists, christian fascists, neo-liberals, and neo-conservatives. Internally they don’t really have a coherent issue set, but he basically goes to them one at a time, develops an understanding for their priorities, then speaks to those priorities directly. Trump isn’t making a broad appeal to the American center, he’s making a narrow appeal to hyper engaged individual blocs of voters, and its working extremely well. Biden comes from a different generation of neoliberalism (1984-2000) when there basically was 0 diversity in American politics and both parties effectively had the exact same set of policies. It was a unimodal distribution of issues, and so appealing to the center made sense. We no longer have a unimodal issue set or a unimodal distribution of voters. We have something, not even bi-modal, but more like two inverse paretos or poissons. There is almost no overlap in votership or policy priorities for the two parties or for the sets of demographic blocs that are going to show up to get some one elected.

So my overall argument is that an appeal to the center or to moderates is basically worthless because they don’t actually exist any more in the American electorate. There isn’t a silent majority. The unimodal distribution of votership died during/ after Clintons second term. Since then we’ve become increasing polarised as a country and as a votership because we no longer overlap whatsoever in terms of legislative priorities. As such, there is little value in appeals to moderation or centrism, because there are no voter blocs in those locations you can drive out to the polls. And recursive or negative attacks are also of little value because blocs aren’t formed ‘against’ things, they are formed ‘for things’ so you have to be ‘pro-something’ to drive a bloc. I think Trump gets this very much and is using it effectively, whereas Biden and basically all Democrats apart from Bernie simply do not understand how the electorate is formed and what it takes to win a national election at this point. 2020 was exceptional in that Bernie had fully activated a massive bloc of progressive and leftist voters on issues that were priorities for them. Young people and progressives won 2020 for the Democrats, and have been basically rewarded with a punch to the teeth in terms of Bidens policies.

In summary, modern voters don’t like Democrats or Republicans, but are voting based on their particular issue sets or identities and who is speaking to them or prioritizing those issues. Trump figured this out in 2016 and has been using it to great effect. Biden still thinks voters are “Democrats” first, and that their policy positions come second. This view is a holdover from a political paradigm that is no longer present.