From The Comments: Getting Caught Trying

@Brian, There's something important to the "get caught trying" aspect of it.

IMO, elected Democrats are afraid of "getting caught trying" because they know that the reference point on what they'd get praised for "trying" is vastly different between the base and swing voters.

It's not that the two explicitly disagree, though. That'd be too simple, and I think this is where a lot of analysis on our side gets confused. What I mean is, the base and swing voters BOTH want to see Democrats actually give a damn and investigate cases where Republicans undermine America like they have with the Hunter Biden thing, or with the J6 hearings. Most pundits mistakenly think they disagree; but they really *don't*, as AOC demonstrate in this interview.

The thing is, swing voters generally DO respond to these investigations. They SAY they hate them, they hate the partisanship, but they also can't unsee the bad things that get revealed. And unlike Republicans' BS fishing expeditions, ours have the benefit of actually being true.

The difference is, our base does a lot of things that are off-putting to swing voters. As is natural human behavior, we celebrate our petty victories. We also worry and concern-troll our petty victories, because we care more about our own side winning. But these actions signal to the swing voters that even WE don't think we deserve to win, when the truth couldn't be further. It's because we have self-doubt, because we care about not being wrong, that we don't project the same confidence the other side does even when they're more full of shit than us -- it's the classic "nice guy vs. confident asshole" conundrum.

Moreover, the things that the base criticizes are NOT the things swing voters would criticize if they were inclined to. The base criticizes our actions for not going far enough, not being ideologically pure enough. There's the inevitable splash damage, as base voters complain about unrelated gripes that turn off swing voters ("see, we wouldn't have had this if we had... [insert extreme liberal goal]"). This also confuses our elected leaders' moral/political compasses: They can't easily tell what aspects appeal to either group out of any given partisan investigation we carry out.

At the end of the day, the net effect ends up signaling to our elected Dems that all of this stuff falls flat with voters -- it doesn't seem to motivate the base enough, and doesn't seem to move the needle with the swing voters, so let's just focus on "kitchen table issues".

Fundamentally, it's not a *wrong* conclusion on their part -- if the kitchen table issues are the only place we get any real traction, then we need to play to our strengths in the here and now. But we ALSO need to solve the long-term issues of how our base undermines its own goals and our electeds can't tell what's paying off and what isn't.