1) Cities tend to be monolithically left, and monolithic groups become more extreme, so that urban discourse is significantly to the left of the American center, or indeed, the modal Democrat.
https://twitter.com/JoshuaTMcCabe/status/1324449911778222080
2) "Mainstream" media and academia are even more extremely left-skewed, which removes a natural check on the tendency to talk left. (This problem is becoming more apparent on the right as they disengage from mainstream media)
3) Primaries make it costlier to "talk right", especially as symbolic cultural politics dominate more and more of this intra-institutional jockeying for power.
4) As cultural issues dominate, they're harder to finesse; you can have an abstruse and fairly complicated economic agenda with lots of gradations ($5 billion for schools or $10 billion?) but you're either for gay marriage or not.
5) As parties have weakened the power of activist groups has grown, and for various reasons their incentive is to push you to extremes on their issue, even if it dooms your chances of re-election. Iron Law of Institutions at work.
6) Politics has been nationalized, which makes it harder to dissociate yourself from a national party. In part because it's in everyone's face all the time, and in part because while most people in your district may be center-to-right, most Democrats may be pretty far left.
7) This:
The culture of the party is being shaped by its *most* left cities, just as the culture of the GOP is being shaped by its *most* right rural districts.
https://twitter.com/RexDart1/status/1324454264693993472
The culture of the party is being shaped by its *most* left cities, just as the culture of the GOP is being shaped by its *most* right rural districts.
This is also a problem for the GOP, obviously--not quite the same, but lots of similarities--but that wasn't the question asked.
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