Most Democrats want the party to become more moderate, poll finds

[Hortensis]

40. Pew has to be respected, but "more moderate" OR

"more liberal"? Moderate isn't an orientation but rather a degree, which can average out overall conservative or overall wholly liberal or is often various mixtures of both.

Sloppy language has been used against the Democratic Party for decades and shouldn't be accepted. Dozens of polls are now saying we've now moved farther left, when the reality is that polls in the past so consistently failed to reveal what we want that I seriously wonder if some insidious influence wasn't involved, not just profound incompetence.

Even after 2008, when we enthusiastically elected our first black president, who made universal healthcare such a top priority that he was willing to be a one-term president if that was the cost of passing it, how the old questions missed so much wasn't questioned. When Elizabeth Warren sparked new progressive enthusiasm on top of that, the contradictory results of the old poll questions weren't questioned.

Only in 2016, when dissident groups hostile to mainstream Democrats were being promoted by the GOP and then Russia, was it "discovered" and reported that Sanders had supposedly moved our party from their declared apathetic "centrist" liberalism to enthusiastically farther left. Entirely coincidence?

One inexcusable thing we do know is that virtually all polls, including Pew, ask and asked people to self-identify as liberal or conservative. This went on all through the era that Republicans managed to define liberal as such a bad word that people didn't want to associate with it and continues now when the radical left has joined the right in defining liberals as something despicable. Testing for true orientation is expensive, so they still don't, and that alone warps all poll results.

When did 'liberal' become a dirty word?
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-07-29-0707280330-story.html

Hated by the Right. Mocked by the Left. Who Wants to Be ‘Liberal’ Anymore?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/magazine/hated-by-the-right-mocked-by-the-left-who-wants-to-be-liberal-anymore.html