Seems like Democratic candidates are clamoring over each other to be further left, and I don't quite understand it. I supported Bernie in 2016, and even he is now too far left for my tastes.
Democrats lost the centrist vote in 2016, not the left, and if they don't take a hard right turn after the nomination we'll have 4 more years of Trump.
> Democrats lost the centrist vote in 2016, not the left
They lost huge numbers of working class manufacturing industry workers in the Midwest, who perceived HC as a tool of Wall Street, and rightly or wrongly, instrumental in the secular economic decline of their jobs and communities. This was literally reflected in a schism of working class vs professional class counties in the midwest, with the former going for DJT and the latter going to HC [1]
Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin didn't swing to DJT because centrist's didn't have a candidate that spoke to their concerns - that candidate was definitely HC. Even many centrist Republicans who couldn't bring themselves to vote for DJT voted for her.
Those states swung because DJT at least spoke to the working class' economic concerns in a way that at the time seemed authentic, while also invoking their repressed cultural anxieties about demographic and social changes.
Democrats should stay the heck away from the racism and xenophobia that motivated part of his coalition, but they would be fools to ignore the economically-left sentiment that put him in office.
And since DJT's actual economic policy has turned out to be the same Republican trickle down, tax cuts for the wealthy approach, the Democrats have an opportunity to expose that and run against it.
Democrats lost the centrist vote in 2016, not the left, and if they don't take a hard right turn after the nomination we'll have 4 more years of Trump.