The democratic party had consistently failed us, at least since the continuation Reaganism under the Clinton administration, but that's just my lifetime and probably started before then.
We can't drop them till there as bad or worse than Republicans. But we need to actually show some solidarity and engagement to get them to work to be better than Republicans and better than they are. Which most leftists are loathe to do. If we're going to have a path to rank choice voting, multi-party systems, and more small d democratic representation. The path to that is through Democrats.
Obviously the strategy of voter shaming is acceptable to a lot of people.
I despise voter shaming. The politicians have to EARN our votes. Always. No exceptions.
Some folks are trying to flip this dynamic on its head, where the politician will do nice policies but only if we're going to be good little boys and girls, shut up, stop making demands, and just vote for the billionaire-approved functionary.
And the reason why it was allowed to get this far was exactly that attitude of "as long as they're not as bad as the other team, they have my vote".
Every time the Republicans moved right, the Dems moved with them, always chasing those (increasingly rare to the point of almost being extinct) "undecided" voters who are considering voting Republican but wouldn't rather die than vote Dem.
As the Overton window has moved with the major parties, we now have literal fascists and anarcho-capitalists being described as if they were just your standard legitimate conservatives and a DEM president that governs to the right of Reagan on almost everything and to the right of everyone since Truman (or maybe even Hoover) on Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, except for the Mango Mussolini himself.
All of that could have been avoided if people had held the people supposed to represent their best interests accountable beyond "I'll vote for you as long as you're even a tiny bit less bad than the alternative".
All of that could have been avoided if people had held the people supposed to represent their best interests accountable beyond “I’ll vote for you as long as you’re even a tiny bit less bad than the alternative”.
Nope. The one and only thing that can move the overton window to the left is for Dems to win multiple elections in a row.
Yeah, because THAT will ever happen when they insist on sticking to the 1992 strategy of targeting only undecided almost-republicans, a dwindling and already tiny portion of the population 🙄