How many times will we get this same Politico/media narrative of Democrats’ sales pitch? As long as Democrats keep thinking that their problem is the voters rather than their own sharp ideological lunge to the fringe. In this week’s edition, Politico’s team report that the midterm strategy remains one of messaging rather than listening.

That’s not new, but the results from Democrats’ own polling is:

Most Democrats are worried that Biden’s flagging polling numbers — with an approval hovering in the low 40s — will lead to a thrashing at the ballot box. With historical headwinds and a GOP-dominated redistricting process already working against them, they fear that unless Biden pulls out of his current slide, Congress will be handed to the Republicans in next year’s midterms.

Even the party’s own polling has the president in the red. A poll from House Democrats’ campaign arm earlier this month showed the president down in battleground districts across the country, with 52 percent of voters disapproving of the job he’s doing, according to three party members briefed on the data.

That may understate Biden’s woes. His overall nationwide average on job approval is 42/52 this morning on RealClearPolitics. That in itself is a slight improvement from 41/53 two weeks ago, but not by a lot. It’s a cinch that Biden’s performing worse in the battleground states and districts where Democrats will likely lose their congressional majorities. They certainly didn’t see the election results in Virginia and New Jersey coming a month ago, for instance, and that spoke volumes about Democrats’ disconnect from voters.

Rather than engage in some introspection on how and why that happened, Democrats instead still plan to passively-aggressively blame voters for it. They plan to ramp up their “messaging” in their fabulous progressive agenda … again:

Democrats acknowledge they have a big problem. Their proposed antidote: Finish the battles over legislating as quickly as possible, then spend their next few months talking up their infrastructure and coronavirus relief laws, as well as their forthcoming social spending bill. …

Democrats say once they finally clinch their full agenda, Biden will recover and so too will their prospects for keeping their slim majorities. But there’s plenty of handwringing about where Biden stands. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), for one, said Biden’s recent numbers are “scary.”

“We’re in a difficult period now. One of the challenges we have is, we’ve been legislating this year, as he has,” said Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, whose state represents Democrats’ best chance of picking up a GOP-held Senate seat. “While you’re legislating, you’re not communicating.”

Says who, exactly? The White House has gone full-bore on “communicating” its agenda. Democrats are all over the media trying to sell their agenda, and the media has been happy to amplify it. That’s especially true for Democrats’ social agenda; how many media outlets rushed to the barricades in the last week of the Virginia election to amplify Terry McAuliffe’s “messaging” that critical race theory isn’t taught in schools, anyone who opposes it being taught in schools is a racist, and parents don’t have the expertise to weigh in on curricula? Was there one, outside of Fox, that didn’t repeat that message?

The problem isn’t a lack of messaging. The problem is the product that Democrats keep trying to sell. Democrats passed the massive-spending third tranche of COVID-19 stimulus in March after waving off warnings about inflation even from within their own party. Now they want to pass even more spending while inflation rages above 6% and consumers are losing buying power each month. Their Build Back Better bill isn’t even calculated for economic growth; it’s a progressive hobby-horse bill that prioritizes the kind of social engineering that Beltway leftists love and eventually turns voters into populists.

Add to that Joe Biden’s clear incompetence and dishonesty, and the recipe for disaster is nearly complete. All that’s needed is a sneering campaign that claims voters are too stupid to appreciate Democrats’ brilliance in pursuing these disastrous policies with clueless leadership. And it looks like Democrats — and the media — are about to provide that last missing piece for a midterm collapse.