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Notes -
It's worth calling out that this was the lesson they learned from Obama. Obama campaigned as a moderate then, twice, betrayed the expectations of people who wanted a moderate. He was expected to do things like help heal racial divisions, not just by being a black man in power, but by actively holding the door open to black Americans to enter the political mainstream. Instead he said Trayvon Martin looked like he could be his son. He was expected to reform American healthcare (a very key issue at the time, when lots of people were losing access to employer provided health insurance during the Great Recession) but ended up creating (what was perceived as) a complex and expensive left wing boondoggle.
This pissed a lot of people off, but only people who were paying close attention. Republicans cleaned up in the House in 2010 and in the Senate in 2014 because only the people who care about politics enough to pay attention voted in mid-terms. Democratic strategists noticed and they started to reconsider the Clinton strategy of actually being a moderate and thought about, instead, just looking like a moderate in election season. They felt like the learned the wrong lesson from 1996, where Bill's hard turn right had led to him recovering his popularity and resoundingly beating expectations after becoming the first Democratic President to lose Congress in half a century. Gore, despite his obsession with global warming, was nevertheless one step above a Blue Dog in a lot of ways and Kerry was considering an acceptably moderate alternative to John Edwards. It was only when Obama swept in 2008 and then still won re-election 2012 that it was decided that actually being moderate wasn't what mattered.
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