James Carville couldn’t convince them. Neither could Stanley Greenberg, although his warning comes a bit more recently, but Barack Obama pollster Bendixen and Amandi International sent up the same warning flares on Democratic cluelessness two months ago. Now the Washington Post reports that another Democratic strategist group has sent up red flares not over the 2022 midterms but the 2024 election as well, warning that the party has deluded itself into believing its own spin about an “emerging progressive majority” that simply doesn’t exist. At all:

“A Democratic loss in the 2024 presidential election may well have catastrophic consequences for the country,” they write, arguing that the Trump-led Republican Party presents the most serious threat to American democracy in modern times. The Democrats’ first duty, they argue, should be to protect democracy by winning in 2024; everything else should be subordinated to that objective.

But they argue that the Democrats are not positioned to achieve that objective, that, instead, the party is “in the grip of myths that block progress toward victory” and that too many Democrats are engaged in a “new politics of evasion, the refusal to confront the unyielding arithmetic of electoral success.”

“Too many Democrats have evaded this truth and its implications for the party’s agenda and strategy,” the authors add. “They have been led astray by three persistent myths: that ‘people of color’ think and act in the same way; that economics always trumps culture; and that a progressive majority is emerging.”

We’ll get back to the existential-threat argument about Trump in a moment. First, let’s take a look at the authors of this new analysis about the obvious. William Galston and Elaine Kamarck hold positions at Brookings Institute, and both served in the Bill Clinton administration. More importantly, the pair teamed up after landslide victories by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush to offer exactly the same warning as they are launching now. Democrats pushed too far to the Left in the 1980s too, resulting in the humiliating loss by Michael Dukakis in 1988. Their data-driven work reoriented the party back to the center, promoted the moderate Democratic Leadership Council as a pushback to the New Left, and succeeded in winning the presidency.

This time, they’re also warning not just about progressive-majority mythology but also the party’s condescending treatment of minority voters. In fact, the two are related, and Democrats keep making it worse:

In their analysis of voters of color, Galston and Kamarck give special attention to Hispanics, a diverse community all its own and one that has shown signs of drifting away from the Democratic Party. Hispanic support for Democratic nominees dropped from 71 percent in 2012 to 66 percent in 2016 to 59 percent in 2020.

“Democrats,” they write, “must consider the possibility that Hispanics will turn out to be the Italians of the 21st century — family oriented, religious, patriotic, striving to succeed in their adopted country and supportive of public policies that expand economic opportunity without dictating results.” They note that ultimately, “Italians became Republicans. Democrats must rethink their approach if they hope to retain majority support among Hispanics.”

They also use the case of Hispanic voters to make a larger point. “The phrase ‘people of color’ assembles highly diverse groups under a single banner. The belief that they will march together depends on assumptions that are questionable at best.”

Democrats have made many “questionable” assessments over the past 15 months, the largest of which is the myth of the progressive majority itself. Where did this belief originate? Joe Biden won the presidency by a narrow margin by promising to govern from the center. Democrats won control of the Senate only because Republicans and Trump self-destructed in two Georgia runoffs that they should have won. And Nancy Pelosi lost seats in the House, a rare time in which a first-term president’s party didn’t gain seats in the lower chamber. Just on the math alone, voters only left a narrow centrist path for Democrats to use to accomplish anything.

Of course, we all know this. So does Carville, Greenberg, and now Galston and Kamarck too. For some reason, though, their party’s leadership insists on marching fellow Democrats over not just one but two electoral cliffs. That brings us to their argument on Trump, which is clearly intended as some kind of face-saving option for shining on the progressives. They have to paint a Republican takeover of Washington DC as a catastrophe in order to inspire this insipid version of party leadership to rally against the hard Left, again, in order to Save The Republic As Well As Their Own Phony-Baloney Jobs.

Will that work? So far that hasn’t penetrated, in large part because in their progressive bubble the hard Left is the bulwark against Trumpism. They’re not listening to anyone outside the Academia-driven activists any longer, which is why Galston and Kamarck have found such a profound disconnect between Democrats and the mainstream of American culture and economics, and now even the mainstream of such formerly loyal demos like Hispanics. This delusion will die very hard, in other words.