I promise that this will be my last article on the “How much of a drag on the Democratic Party are leftists?” question.1 I Might Be Wrong can not/will not become a single topic blog, not when there’s so much Pete Hegseth drama out there and bad movies to shit on when I need an easy day.
And besides: The “do people prefer normie Democrats to leftists?” question is settled. They do. We can debate by how much — maybe it’s a dab, a smattering, or an assload — but it’s something. And this article is about how everything we’ve been debating is just the visible, measurable drag that leftists have on the Democratic Party. I think there’s an entire second effect that’s rarely discussed because it’s hard to quantify, but we can infer that it’s there.
The only thing a person needs to accept to believe in this effect — which I’ll call the “second-order leftist albatross effect” — is this simple equation:
This is a completely numbnuts, Idiocracy-level equation. But I’m presenting it to emphasize that the debates we’re having — about why Troy Jackson did badly, and about what happened to Dan Osborn, and how Roy Cooper somehow became the Elvis of North Carolina — are all about the “personal popularity” part of the equation. But the party’s popularity matters a lot, too, so there’s a whole second way that leftists drag Democrats down.
