James Carville and Stanley Greenberg say they aren’t worried that their party is positioning itself too far to the left.

The Democratic Party of New York City is not a microcosm of the nation. Recent trends leave us confident about Democrats. In primaries this month in New Jersey and Virginia, Democratic voters nominated moderate and progressive candidates for governor with broad appeal. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, a retired Navy helicopter pilot, and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, a former CIA officer, each flipped Republican-held House seats in 2018. They made affordability their top priority. . . .

The great majority of Democratic voters hate the activist, elite agenda that dominated the Democratic Party under President Joe Biden.

The authors go on to say that the outlook for 2026 looks bright for their party.

Okay but . . . how did that “activist, elite agenda” come to dominate that party? The Democrats did well in 2018, too. And there were more Sherrills and Spanbergers who won that year than there were Mamdanis (or Ocasio-Cortezes). Two of them were Sherrill and Spanberger themselves, as the authors note.

The problem came later. It was the Squad who set the perceptions of the party, both inside and outside it. Many of the party’s presidential candidates — including, fatefully, Kamala Harris — acted as though the primary voters of New York City were the kind of voters they most needed to win over. Carville and Greenberg don’t want that history to repeat, and maybe it won’t. But they don’t give us any reasons to doubt that it will.