One Thing Is Clear: Democrats can win elections without appealing to Republicans.

[qdouble]

48. Kara Eastman was never elected before.

Saying the only reason the incumbent won was because she supported M4A doesn't make much sense to me. You have an extra Libertarian candidate that took 3% of the votes that wasn't there the previous election and you have the national trend of red areas getting redder.

Regardless, M4A isn't really the main focus of my general argument. What I'm saying is:

If the popularity of policy X is high, we should pursue X.

Now if you think X is not really that popular, then we can sideline it for something else because policy X doesn't pass the test.

The tricky situation we're in going forward is trying to walk a tight-rope with republicans when their campaigns are mostly straight distortions. For example, very few democratic politicians ever publicly supported the "defund the police" movement... but the GOP ties anything BLM does to being part of the Democratic Party.

Constantly playing defense when the opponent doesn't care about the truth of the argument is not going to energize the base. What are we going to do if we're not facing someone vile like Donald Trump next time? The Republican Party surrogates sat there with a straight face telling everyone that the nightmare we've experienced in 2020 was Joe Biden's fault... they're not operating under any sense of having to acknowledge reality.