Warning shots sounded like broomsticks last Tuesday, when Republican Glenn Youngkin led a clean sweep of Virginia’s executive offices — all with Democratic incumbents — for the GOP, which also wrested control of the House of Delegates from Democrats, enjoying their first majority in the chamber in 22 years. Democrat nominee and former governor Terry McAuliffe clocked in a result 12 points lower than President Joe Biden’s showing a year ago. In the other headline race, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy lagged the 2020 pace by 13 points in winning re-election, an outcome leaving Democrats exhaling in relief more than reveling in victory.

True, the elections occurred against a grander backdrop of tanking approval ratings for Biden nationwide, particularly among independent and swing voters. But on the surface, Virginia in particular was poised to play stopper, the quintessential target state for a modern, genteel Democratic Party, especially in contrast to the stylings of former President Donald Trump. Its “Panera moms” typified the 2018 blue wave that flipped the U.S. House of Representatives. Growing in diversity, particularly in the suburbs, the Commonwealth is among the most educated states in a country becoming increasingly politically polarized on that axis. Its economy has rebounded well during the coronavirus pandemic, boasting an unemployment rate under 4 percent, outpacing the nation’s bounceback overall. No Democratic presidential nominee has lost Virginia since President Barack Obama became the first to win it since 1964, and no Republican had won statewide office there since 2009. Even a remarkably synchronized wave of state party scandals in early 2019 seemed like a distant memory, with Gov. Ralph Northam posting solid, if tightening, approval marks.

Nor were there any glaring candidate-specific idiosyncrasies. Youngkin ran a disciplined campaign, though he was known more for sporting fleece on the campaign trail than being charisma incarnate. McAuliffe, long a fundraising titan, left office with high approval ratings and roughly tracked Northam’s favorability throughout the campaign; his famed Rolodex seems to have been as effective as usual. Always eager to identify a perceived gaffe, the racehorse media’s explanation has painted high-profile school board clashes as the crux of the race and highlighted McAuliffe’s debate remark that “parents should[n’t] be telling schools what they should teach.”

The facts belie such sensationalism. Education was an important issue in Virginia, no doubt, but not at 12-point-swing levels. Exit and pre-election polls consistently showed economic issues as higher priority, and respondents rated McAuliffe statistically tied or slightly ahead on education, even in dead-heat polls toward the end of the race. Youngkin’s overperformance was remarkably even, not confined to more- or less-educated areas. And the similar swing in New Jersey, where property taxes were a more hotly contested issue than critical race theory, serves as a control sample against the simplistic school-focused thesis.

So what, then, was the issue? I was. Or more precisely, messaging that only targets people like me was. I’ve been a Good Boy of a Massachusetts Democrat for as long as I can remember. Growing up, my family’s car radio always switched to NPR at the top of the hour on road trips. At 12, I spent most of my time not watching SportsCenter, and posting comments on barackobama.com blog posts. At 14, during the day, I would sketch out provisions I wanted to see in a more progressive TARP bailout bill on school programs, in between singing hymns during morning assembly. At night, I would work on BlueMassGroup writeups arguing Massachusetts should have a more progressive tax system. At 15, I spent the summer phone banking and sending out mailers for Gov. Deval Patrick’s re-election bid, and at 16, I started working for a Democratic Boston City Council office. I’ve been a registered Democrat for as long as I’ve been able to vote, and I spent my last pre-pandemic trip canvassing for then-candidate Biden on a whim in South Carolina.

But elections don’t swing because of people like me, and I have never seen a Democratic Party as insular in its communications as today’s edition. The party’s decades-long decline among rural communities and voters without college degrees has been well-documented, with modern reverberations in comments about those who “cling to their guns and religion” and constitute a “basket of deplorables.” Losing nearly 1,000 state legislature seats — a hit still largely unreversed and now feeding into redistricting processes nationwide — hasn’t chastened the party. It has experienced enough fleeting top-line success to paper over the cracks, though, with liberal condescension towards the supposedly unenlightened continuing apace.

A whole cottage industry in the 2010s sustained itself on the theory that Democrats didn’t need to speak to these voters because they didn’t need them, period. Data scientists cooked up models arguing swing voters didn’t exist, and dissenters were canceled. Commentators predicted an enduring Democratic majority composed of progressive whites and a growing set of voters of color, their theories parroted by sympathetic media members who believed in the catchline “demography is destiny.” Comically, some even suggested Democrats’ floor was backstopped at the presidential level by a “blue wall” running through the middle of the country.

These theses were wrong the day they were concocted, and critically, they misunderstood Democrats’ successes as much as their defeats. Take the highly successful 2018 midterms, for example. The cycle may have brought superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to power, but it was not marked by heavy Democratic gains among minority voters. Rather, Democrats lost ground among Black and Latino voters relative to 2016, with those combined populations also making up less of the electorate than two years prior. Their biggest favorable swing was among college-educated white voters, but almost as strong were their gains among non-college whites, muted losses mirroring the overall shift. Democrats had fever dreams of a purple Texas in 2020 after Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s unexpected star turn in 2018, and data bear out that that success came from persuasion much more than world-beating GOTV efforts.

The Perma-Blue Majority believers learned the opposite lessons, leaving Democrats smarting after an underwhelming 2020, despite securing the flimsiest possible triumvirate at the federal level. Sure, suburbs shifted even farther away from Trump. But the former president made modest inroads with Black voters and surged with Hispanics, critically in Florida and southern Texas. The loudest Democratic voices spent the summer leaning into the Squad’s lingo of defunding the police, and Republicans even in faraway local races serially cut AOC’s likeness into ads as the face of the party. The New York congresswoman can’t be blamed for her talent in publicizing her honestly held beliefs, but her party’s failure in marketing moderate voices critical to their 2018 success — and left most vulnerable by the leftward messaging shift — should be. Theories that certain leftist ideas, unpopular even in the communities they were meant to benefit, would boost the favorability of moderately liberal politicians, just by “shifting the conversation,” fell flat.

Most troublingly, signs of weakness emerged on the suburban side of Democratic support, too. Orange County, a Most Valuable Region for the party in the midterms, fell to a “red riptide” down-ballot, with tickets split at an abnormal rate for modern times. A reasonable observer might have feared that newly Democratic suburbs were driven by distaste for Trump’s crudeness more than adoption of progressive values wholesale, with the California results presaging future fragility.

Last week, those latent cracks widened into a GOP earthquake. Youngkin sliced into McAuliffe’s suburban margins, despite high Democratic turnout, while winning MAGA-oriented counties at a clip higher than President Trump did. In New Jersey, Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli pushed the incumbent governor Murphy to the brink by solidifying Trump’s gains in Hispanic areas. Democrats lost a majority-Latino State House district in San Antonio. The New Jersey State Senate President lost his seat to a furniture delivery driver who spent $2,000 on his campaign. Seattle picked its first Republican city attorney in 32 years over a police abolitionist. And so on and so forth.

The messaging failures of the past year were of a different flavor, if on the same theme, as those preceding the general election: more malaise than sound and fury. Where before there was Bernie Sanders telling fracking workers it was their “moral responsibility” to cede their jobs to a Green New Deal, now we have a president hammering out a social spending bill behind closed doors. In normal times, there’d be nothing wrong with shying away from fireside chats to play a little inside baseball, especially with a growing economy. But when the bully pulpit falls silent today, the Democrats with the most “annoying” messages—as CNN’s Van Jones put it last week—fill the vacuum. They flood the void with advocacy on low-salience or deeply entrenched issues. Fringe figures like those harassing Senator Kyrsten Sinema in the bathroom become national news. The outspoken wing of the party claims those who oppose their policies must be driven by hate, as if the decisive voters who brought Trump to office weren’t former Obama supporters. Party leadership dutifully marches into the morass of the January 6th Commission—an important normative commitment, but shadowboxing yesterday’s ghosts is hardly a winner of hearts and minds—all with the dim hum of mask- and vaccine-shaming activists getting into arguments online.

It’s all very dreary, with limited upside. Nonvoters aren’t especially progressive, so these efforts only mobilize supporters like me who were already fairly committed to the party line. As to persuasion, there’s double trouble: core MAGA supporters will turn out for Trump clones and moderates alike, still feeling perpetually snubbed by Democrats and hungry for a return to power. Meanwhile, moderate-posturing candidates like Youngkin or Ciattarelli (pro-choice and supportive of drivers’ licenses for the undocumented) can respectably distinguish themselves from Trump in tone and policy. Or at least enough to transform some swing and suburban voters’ turns toward Democrats into one-offs rather than conversions, placing even purportedly safe politicians in peril.

Demography may be destiny, but it’s no match for a strategy from hell.

And so, Democrats find themselves in a familiar spot, blaming everyone but themselves and echoing that familiar refrain of the jilted: Why Don’t They Understand? That volatile response of the rejected, the zig-zag between beseeching and denigrating, might let out some catharsis, but it doesn’t let in any votes. Congressional leaders are doing what Congress does, thinking it’s about them, as if the median undecided voter tracks the minutiae of reconciliation and dual-track bill progress on Politico—that’s for junkies like me—or even concretely votes on identifiable policy issues at all. Talk of persuasion is noticeably absent, leaving scant optimism that anything has been learned. Tellingly, when DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison was asked about his midterm plans, he focused not on changing anyone’s mind, but on hopes Democrats would physically move into Republican regions.

We shouldn’t expect institutions like Yale to supply a core of young new leaders to solve the problem, either. If anything, university culture exacerbates the issue, with young undergraduate alumni, lockstep in homogeneous thought, ready to staff up campaigns and put out messages in an indecipherable language only they can understand. For example, the Law School, the university component perhaps most tied to politics, offers few laboratories for students to build their persuasive skills in. There are plenty of opportunities for advocacy in the public interest, sure. But learning to advocate in front of expert, neutral judges—bound to listen to your entire argument—is a fundamentally different endeavor than communication targeting a skeptical public that owes you none of their time. This isn’t a Yale-specific issue by any means; at Harvard Law School, there’s as many politics workshops (one) as there are classes entitled “Progressive Alternatives: Institutional Reconstruction Now.” It’s not nearly enough that curricula merely cover political stances rising in prominence, like when a Criminal Law class discusses police abolition, if they don’t cover the fact that those positions are unpopular too. If the argument for such topical inclusion is that the law is inextricably intertwined with politics, that’s fine, but then the discourse should do all of the politics. Anything less than that promotes students essentially talking to their reflections.

Zooming out, any party of coast and campus alone, and of purity and propriety in thought, puts a hard structural ceiling on its electoral potential. (How many Senate seats can such a party win long-term? 40?) Without better messaging, no combination of support for its policy positions in isolation can prevent its political strength from being less than the sum of its single-issue parts. The window of opportunity isn’t all the way shut quite yet, though: Democrats look to be in the endgame of interminable negotiations over two large spending bills that would be, in the words of a certain former Vice President, “big . . . deal[s]” by virtue of size alone. The impact of that spending likely wouldn’t be felt by voters in full before next year’s midterms. Still, nothing is preventing the party or its backers from affirmatively rallying support for these proposals in advance, even starting right now. Supply chain hiccups and inflation may well ease next year, and the Delta variant seems to have only one last gasp left before a largely immunized nation loosens restrictions. But a more moderate Democratic Party has governed over cleaner, more sustained economic recoveries before, only to meet iffy public reaction. If the current version doesn’t communicate its successes effectively, Republicans may be fighting for their lives in the comments — as they say in TikTok parlance — but pulling out victories at the ballot box.

AKSHAT SHEKHAR is a second-year student at Yale Law School from Boston, Massachusetts. Contact him at akshat.shekhar@yale.edu.