DO DEMOCRATIC CONSULTANTS EVEN WANT DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES TO WIN?

Last night I clicked on an MS NOW story about the Texas Senate race:

James Talarico has a new ad — with millions behind it

Texas Democrat James Talarico is jumping headlong into his Senate bid against Republican Ken Paxton with a multi-million dollar ad buy, MS NOW has learned.

The Senate candidate, who is hoping to become the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas since 1994, is launching what his team is labeling his first “major” ad of the general election....

Not just a new ad, but "his first 'major' ad of the general election," "with millions behind it"? Wow! Talarico's team must have worked really hard on the ad, right? With this kind of investment, and with the campaign proudly displaying the spot to the national media, the results really ought to be special!

They aren't. The ad is terrible. It's generic Chuck Schumer/Hakeem Jeffries-style mush.

In the 30-second spot, shared first with MS NOW, Talarico talks straight to camera while exiting a Red & White food store, a brown paper bag of groceries in hand. The campaign notes that the truck on screen is his own.

“Too many Texans feel like they’re drowning. The cost of groceries, gas, health care,” he says, pledging — if elected to the Senate — that he will “keep fighting to lower your costs.”

We're told, "The spot notably doesn’t directly mention Talarico’s general election rival — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton." Talarico does say, "I'll take on corruption," which we're supposed to understand as an extremely subtle jab at Paxton, but why not mention his name? Instead, Talarico brags about how bipartisan he is: "In the state house, I brought both parties together to make life more affordable."

Are the consultants who created this ad and decided to spend millions on it releasing it to show Democrats nationwide how hard they're fighting to win this seat? Or did they create and promote this ad to reassure billionaire Democratic donors that Talarico isn't one of those Democrats -- the ones who want to tax the rich and stir up (justifiable) populist anger?

Talarico has campaigned at times like an economic populist. If you go to his campaign site, the first video you see is one he posted in September, in which he says the following:

The biggest divide in our country is not left versus right. It's top versus bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other so that we're not looking up at them. The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power. So, their social media algorithms and their cable news networks tear us apart. They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion so that we don't notice that they're defunding our schools, gutting our healthcare, and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It is the oldest strategy in the world. Divide and conquer. But we will not be conquered.

The consultants might say that this was a good message for a Democratic primary, but the affordability mush in the new ad is a better message for a general election in a Republican-dominated state. That's nonsense. Every voter now thinks there's a powerful "they" in charge of everything. Solidly Republican voters believe the powerful "they" are sinister Democratic elitists, but everyone else in the electorate is up for grabs. They know someone is thriving while they're drowning. Talarico has a chance here to speak to that anger, but the consultants don't want him to.

I've begun to believe that the Democratic consultant class thinks the greatest danger facing America is not corpo-authoritarian Republican extremism, but rather the possibility that left-populists might win real power in a Democratic White House or Congress. They fear the Democratic Socialists of America more than they fear the Heritage Foundation. They want Democratic candidates to suppress populist anger, because the rich donors whose interests they serve are afraid of where that anger might lead.

Or maybe they just have an outdated view of what swing voters want: nothing unsettling, nothing bold, just empty talk about affordability. And while they insist that they're trying to solve the problem of the Democratic Party's broad unpopularity in America, it seems clear that they're a main reason for that unpopularity. So they might be leading the party into a period of sustained powerlessness, squandering the opportunity to persuade voters that Democrats are the party of real change, at a time when the leader of the other party is the most widely despised politician of the century.