It is simply too late to change these voters’ minds. They aren’t buying what Biden and the congressional Democrats have accomplished – including a bipartisan infrastructure law no one has heard of since Russia invaded Ukraine – and they won’t be listening to any talk of a new direction. Biden’s new budget would increase defense spending and funds for law enforcement, and proposes new taxes on the wealthy, all of it paired with deficit reduction. This is meant to illustrate a distinct turn away from his ambitious progressive goals of 2021, and back toward the center. Yet the time to turn to the center has come and gone – it was January of 2021. Instead of accepting the math of their fragile hold on power in both the House and Senate, Democrats deluded themselves and their voters. They stayed silent as violent crime spiked and voters soured on the left’s cultural messaging, dismissing inflation as transitory, crime increases as illusionary, and all the while promising transformational change they didn’t have the votes to deliver.

In a new study that comes three decades after their first one, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution make the case that Democrats are in deep denial. What the authors call “a new politics of evasion” has led the party to increasing political peril because it is “in the grips of myths that block progress toward victory.” In short, the party has abandoned rural America and the working-class whites it once represented to focus solely on urban voters and voters of color, a coalition that doesn’t add up to a majority.

“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,” they write.