Democrats don't have the votes to "think big."
If Democrats seem "lost," their first task is to notice where they are. They don't have a mandate for change.
They don't even have a majority.
Joe Manchin said the simple truth. If you want to advance liberal causes, he told Democrats, "elect more liberals."
Democrats had a good chance to elect a liberal senator in North Carolina in 2020. It is a swing state. North Carolina voters elected Tom Tillis, a Republican.
In Maine Susan Collins won 51-42. Collins is a moderate. She sometimes votes with Democrats when her vote is irrelevant, but she is a reliable Republican when McConnell needs her to be one.
In Iowa incumbent Republican senator Joni Ernst had the burden of Iowa soybean farmers having their crop rejected by the Chinese, in retaliation to Trump tariffs. She won anyway, with 52% of the vote.
Democrats had opportunities. Trump was uniquely controversial at a time when COVID cases and deaths were at their highest. Voters rejected Trump himself, but kept Republican senators who backed Trump.
Joe Manchin is a Democrat in a state that loves Trump. West Virginia is rural, White, blue collar, and church-going. Its population is the archetypal Trump voting base. Democratic messaging is clear and consistent that fossil fuels are bad and that coal is the worst of the worst. West Virginia's biggest industry is coal. Green New Deal messaging declared war on coal, and therefore on West Virginians and their way of life, in a state John Denver called "almost heaven."
Democrats need to stop and look around. If a deal is going to get done, it won't have a big Green New Deal component because it needs at least 50 votes. The problem isn't Manchin. He is being who he always was, a Democrat who got elected in West Virginia.
Kristin Sinema represents Arizona. Her issues seem to be taxes and drug pricing. There are a lot of conservative retirees in Arizona, and they are notoriously anti-tax. Her tax position is not surprising. She is also sympathetic to drug companies. Democrats can stop the faux dismay that she gets campaign help from those companies. Every U.S. senator gets financial support from some industry, or two, or three, plus for Democrats, some union, or two, or three. Democrats are unhappy that she is standing in the way of using Medicare's market power to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs.
Democrats have a mixed message. Democrats say that drug companies were a lifesaver when it came to COVID. They employ cutting edge research, and they are trustworthy, very trustworthy, and care about us. Get vaccinated. Meanwhile, drug companies are money-grabbing extortionists who put their own interests first.
The reality is that the American taxpayer overpays the drug companies. In exchange, we fatten up their R&D budgets--and stockholders--and we get more and faster new drugs than we otherwise would. Americans are getting their third COVID vaccine doses, while much of the rest of the world has none. We are paying for that. Kristin Sinema is on the side of continuing that extraordinary subsidy,
Whatever bill gets through will not have a significant change in either coal or drug pricing. Democrats look confused and lost, but they are not lost. They just don't like where they are: One vote short.
Democrats need to face the real problem. Democrats lose by attempting to please their most liberal, woke, point-of-the-spear supporters on cultural issues, and they project a kind of moral superiority over culturally conservative people. It is why Black and Hispanic voters are drifting away, and would do so faster if GOP messaging were not so hostile to them. How do I know that? It is because that is what Trump, Fox, GOP officeholders and GOP candidates all hammer on. They don't defend high drug prices or tax cuts for billionaires. They talk about transgender bathrooms and the left's accusation that all Whites are racially prejudiced, whether they know it or not.
Democrats can console themselves by knowing they are morally right and working to move to a more just America. An emotionally satisfying way to display a superior moral position is to condemn and sneer at the people who "don't get it." Not everyone does that, but there is enough of that coming out of liberal cities and academic environments that this message becomes the caricature of Democratic thinking. Prudent Democrats who want to have majority power in the chambers of Congress could inoculate themselves if they called it out, clearly and forcefully condemning that behavior, but so far I don’t see it happening. They don’t want to offend their progressive, woke base. Social change is happening, but it is happening faster than a majority of people are comfortable with and people don't like to feel scolded. That is how culturally conservative people feel, and they feel it so strongly they will support GOP senators and a narcissistic, autocratic, election-overthrowing, race-baiter for president, rather than trust people who they think sneer at them.