That's not even a plurality of the party, it's a faction. Very online people are reflective of a sliver of the party.

That's the group that uses the imaginary "electability" metric to discount anybody which is popular but not aligned with their values in order to push forth their preferred candidate by imagining what they think the average voter is.

The earliest example of this I found was an op ed by Walter Lippmann in 1932 claiming Roosevelt was unelectable as he pushed alternatives like Al Smith. He was part of the failed "Stop Roosevelt" campaign trying to stage a convention coup to swap the candidates.

It's one of the very few times it failed so we have it as a counterexample of what happens.

Roosevelt was pretty electable after all.

These people don't have any interest in that however. It's a ruse. Lippmann, like Woodrow Wilson and Al Smith fit the political category of Liberalism (not how people flippantly use it).

This is the ideology of the people who have more or less controlled the party since.

In 1944 for instance, FDR's immensely popular hand picked successor and VP, Henry Wallace, was swapped out for the more "electable" Harry Truman, who almost lost.

Truman ended up firing Wallace after he wrote a letter predicting a nuclear arms detente between the USSR and the US (what we call the Cold war). The Liberals thought the cold war prediction was so absurd and impossible they let Wallace go - their Francis Fukuyama of the 40s moment (remember, they're ideologues and everything comes from that)

Then the immensely popular Estes Kefauver got swapped out during the 1952 DNC and dark horsed with Truman's pick of Adlai Stevenson and they got 1928 Al Smith like results.

Truman actually wanted to run in 1952 but he got his ass handed to him at the first primary by Kefauver and he dropped out. Then he made the now familiar electability argument at the convention.

When the strategy works it's almost always an unusual setup such as 1992 with Perot pulling away the populist (the neoliberals love showing national polls and ignoring state by state polls which show Clinton would have been defeated in the electoral college) or times like 2020, with Covid.

In more normal times like 1988, 2000, 2004, 2016, 2024 it's a failed strategy. But they don't care. They're committed to the ideology more than winning.

They were trying to push Hilary in 2008 and she sure of hell would have lost to McCain.

The advocacy from all of this is to form coalitions based on popular positions and offer the electorate what they want instead of claiming it's impossible like some scolding nanny and presenting an unpopular political project as the only sensible and logical conclusion.

It's always been a dumb move and when somebody actually does it they win. Even if they're a felon who stole things from the Whitehouse and who clearly is going to trash things, they still win.

The neolibs don't want to win, they want neoliberalism. Almost nobody else does, that's the problem.

The paleoconservatives, as a counterexample, learned how to successfully lie to the electorate. I could write an equally long response mapping their rise from groups like America First and the Black Legion to taking the Whitehouse in 1980. But really, go read Rick Perlstein's 2500 or so pages over 3 books on the topic. He explains it just fine.