The lesson of 2018 for Democrats is not that they need a more moderate message for rural voters

… We’re now firmly in the analysis phase of the 2018 midterm elections, an election cycle in which Democrats slightly overperformed expectations in the House while seeing a net loss in the Senate, winning two-thirds of the contested Senate seats. One of the central questions for the party centers on the missed opportunities, particularly the races in Florida and Texas, where they got close — but not close enough — to victory. Why? What went wrong? …

Members of the Democratic Party are much more likely to identify as liberal than they used to, with the self-identified moderate arm of the party shrinking as a result. At the same time, the party is hoping to serve as a refuge for moderates turned off by President Trump’s embrace of the far right. How should the party thread that needle? And what didn’t work in the South? CONT.

Philip Bump, Washington Post