Jonathan Chait is worried about the Democrats. The reason: a new poll from the New York Times, showing that Donald Trump is alarmingly close to the Democratic front-runners in six of the states projected to be the most competitive in the 2020 general election. For Chait, the survey is an ominous sign about the direction of the party. Hijacked by the “left-wing intelligentsia,” Democrats have abandoned the hunt for the median voter in favor of activist-pleasing extremism. As a result, the unthinkable — Donald Trump’s reelection — is now not only possible, but likely. Look into the polls, he counsels the party, and be afraid.

Chait’s warnings, of course, are entirely of a piece with his career as a centrist polemicist. Anything to the left of the glory days of the Democratic Leadership Council moves the party too far afield to win. Yet for Chait-chasers, it’s clear that something subtle has shifted recently. Once, Chait could brag about ignoring the Left, explaining in January 2011 that “I don’t spend a whole lot of time discussing left-wing thought because my interest in ideas is primarily, though not completely, in proportion to their influence on American politics.” Given the amount of time Chait now devotes to explaining why the Left is wrong on everything from political correctness to the word “neoliberal,” things have clearly changed.

Yet what’s abundantly clear is that Chait remains blissfully ignorant of just how much the ground has shifted under his feet. Though Chait portrays himself as the realist struggling with the fantasists of the Left, his argument reveals that he inhabits a fantasyland of his own, in which his own intense antipathy to the Left is reflected across the electorate. Chait represents the electorate not as it is, but as a centrist like himself very much wishes it were.