Derek Thompson

I think an obvious thing to say is that historically low approval ratings for the Democratic Party are embarrassing and horrible.

But there's a less obvious conclusion to draw that I think you were beginning to scratch at, which is that

even though you have historically low approval ratings for the party writ large, in a way that almost frees up individual Democrats to run without just being a chip off the party Borg, like they can be themselves, you can run a socialist in New York, you can run a centrist in Nevada.

Is it crazy for me to think that the party's

national brand being, I won't use the word brand anymore, that because, as you said, there's no party leader who epitomizes what this means, that everyone can essentially run as if auditioning to be that possible party leader.

There's that vacuum frees up

people to experiment at the local and state level.

We'll stick with spaghetti.

Okay, spaghetti, yeah.

The way you just described, you know, sampling...

I don't say sampling policies across the buffet because it's not it's not frivolous.

What you're saying is that you don't you don't feel bound by the straitjacket of some ideological label that like maybe because you are a center left senator that therefore you have to embrace all the positions that some elites designate a center left.

There's so many places that I want to go from this, and I'm just trying to keep things straightforward in my head.

The first place that I think this connects to, the first conversation I think your comments connect to, is this conversation about the value of moderation.

As I'm sure you know, close to my world of policy and polling nerds, there's a furious debate about whether or not Democrats need to moderate, and this word is particularly used for cultural issues, moderate to win.

And there's this knock-down, drag-out debate among cultures and political scientists.

Yeah, I see all the text messages flying forward

back and forth all the time.

You see the text messages, you see the group chat, so I'm not going to belabor this point, but let me, we're not going to make this a Harvard seminar over the definition of moderation.

Let me put it to you really, really simply.