Two small points re. ongoing debates over "popularism" and @davidshor-style arguments for Dem message discipline and selective issue moderation, in the spirit of reducing the propensity of folks to talk past each other:
1.) The context of polarized partisan parity + Dems' growing structural disadvantages under American political institutions seems to me central to the popularist case in specific strategic disputes, though in a way that underscores the rather grim limits of the implicit vision.
Polarization and competitive partisan strength turn contemporary elections into brutal games of inches, and Dems' growing structural problem means that *every extra vote they can possibly scrape up* matters existentially.
Given this, so the argument goes, the historically small proportion of swing voters doesn't make the task of winning them matter less--it matters more! "Because we might be dead in the next split second, maybe we gotta be extra careful what we do."
The common retort to popularism that aggregate opinion and esp. voting dynamics in a polarized era are *largely* fixed and immune to messaging and issue appeals is accurate but nonresponsive to this focus on marginal shifts. Shorites see Obama '12 as the goal, not Reagan '84.
2.) *So much* of the Shorite/popularist analysis should be read as aimed at activists, staffers, and funders in the para-Democratic progressive world. (Pols largely come in for direct criticism only when, like Warren '20, they're alleged to have been captured by those actors.)
They target activists and nonprofit pros both because they think it's regrettable to do advocacy ineffectively--see @mattyglesias's recent post on climate activism--AND because of an important if underexamined implicit premise about those actor's political agency & significance.
That premise is that, now much more than in the past, the rhetoric and behavior of party-aligned activists have ambient effects on pols' electoral performance independent of what the latter actually do or say. 
I suspect there's real force to this claim--it tracks with the general nationalization of politics (press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…) and comports with @daschloz and my argument about the pathologies of "hollow" parties dominated by headless paraparty networks (cambridge.org/core/books/can…).
But as far as I can tell the evidence for the *increasing* party-branding effects of such activism is circumstantial. I'd love to see some more direct and rigorous empirical study of the question (and if there's anything out there I'm missing, I'd love to know about it). /end
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