Assymetry

 Is this a fair picture?

Several people in the Democratic Party have told me they believe the party’s voters — especially its Black voters — saved them from a debacle by selecting Biden as the nominee, rather than any of the candidates vying for progressive-activist approval. The dynamic is an inversion of the structure of the Republican Party, in which the donors try to promote slick, broadly acceptable candidates while voters routinely flock to the angriest and craziest candidate they can find. “The Koch brothers are strategic; their voters are bananas,” one leading Democrat confided. “Our voters are moderate, but our funders are crazy.”

The scheme works best if a pundit of the Blue persuasion identifies with centrist voters while imagining the Red team almost exclusively in terms of its rightest wing. Otherwise, we could as easily say that the core of Dem elected officials are strategic, while their loudest proselytizers are bananas, and that centrist Republicans are moderate, but the QAnon Shaman and his crew are crazy. The way I see it, the middle mass of voters, who increasingly call themselves Independent, are repelled by both the Squad and QAnon, while the moderate Blue and Red wings would be happy to call themselves the natural homes of the Independents, and even think of the Independents as the "centrist wings" of their respective parties:  "our voters."