General Discussion

That is to say, you are right that this turns the process over mostly to the primaries, and that can be a problem.

But the more important question is WHY? If you look at the long term trend, most of the growth of "independent" has come from penle deciding to no longer identify as Democrats.

But poll after poll says that they STRONGLY support the things that Democrats supposedly support (environment, economic fairness and opportunity, transparent government, common sense gun violence reforms, single paper HC, affordable education, and so on.) They want all the things we talk about, but they don't want to be associated with us!?

What does that tell us? The issue is not progressive policies. The issue is that the public does not trust Dems to do anything even when we do have majority control.

This is perfectly crystallized by where people stand on the Senate filibuster rule. There is no more anti-democratic thing anywhere in our system,, and the filibuster is the central barrier to all major progress in the past 40 years. Yet when anybody says "Maybe the DNC should only back candidates who are committed to ending the filibuster, we get the Party insiders coming out in the open saying "Oh dearie no. We must not have any 'litmus tests'."

We can't have it both ways. We can't insist on archaic rules that prevent us from making progress and also complain that people are disassociating from us.