Speaking of direct contradiction, this statement directly contradicts your weird idea that there’s really no difference between right wing and left wing populist voters.
That’s going a lot further than I said. There are definitely left wing and right wing populists (i.e. Bernie and Trump) but most Americans aren’t policy wonks and don’t care a bit about left vs right political philosophy. These aren’t centrists because they aren’t on the line at all. However, a whole lot of those Americans have begun noticing that their money is somehow being taken by a tiny minority with obscene levels of wealth. These are the people that either sit out elections, or vote for a “reform” candidate. Trump, disingenuous as he is, effectively ran against the political establishment of both parties in 2016, while Hillary ran as a competent manager of the status quo.
What happens when the Democratic party runs after so called centrists with an establishment candidate is that they make right wing populism more attractive than left wing, and that’s where Trump’s base comes from. It’s not unique to America or post 2k politics, it’s how fascism always gets a foothold. It’s all just 1930s Germany all over again. It’s really not a dynamic that is well illustrated by a one dimensional line from left to right. A lot of voters that get categorized as the extreme right are the most conducive to populist left wing politicians. A Bernie Sanders gets a far better response from them than a Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton ever will.
That’s not true at all.
Actually it is true, but I can’t find the study at the moment. It’s specifically about House races, which I do admit are a bit different from the Senate or Presidency. Two seemingly contradictory things are actually true. Progressives do tend to lose in redder districts more than establishment candidates, but they also tend to perform better when measured against typical outcomes for that district. The resolution to that contradiction is that the establishment fiercely fights to keep progressives out of districts that Democrats might win so, the average district progressives run in is more republican than the average district establishment candidates run in. What’s true in almost every race is that progressives do better at outperforming local historical outcomes in almost any district. Whether that gets translated into a better win/loss ratio is dependent on which districts progressives get to run in.
Here are a few of links I did come across when looking for that study. They don’t address it directly, but they do illustrate how the press struggles to map election dynamics to the left-right spectrum.