The survey data is clear: one of the biggest threats to defeating Donald Trump in the upcoming election is a Democratic enthusiasm gap. It exists, in part, because Democratic voters spent the last twelve years voting for change, and now they are exhausted after they kept getting a status quo that gratuitously kicks the face of humanity. The enthusiasm gap also exists because Joe Biden has seemed more focused on trying to court Republicans in ways that can demotivate Democratic voters.

Progressives sounding alarms about these facts are periodically depicted as seditious Russian-backed assets nefariously trying to throw the election to Trump. But many of the lefty jeremiads are more like the jeers I heard at Veterans Stadium as a childhood baseball fan.

Back then, many Phillies fans booed my favorite player Mike Schmidt, the greatest third baseman of all time. They booed him so incessantly that at one point he jokingly wore a wig on the field to try to hide his identity. It was heartbreaking to me as a kid, but I came to understand the boos as not so much coming from a place of nihilism, but instead coming more from a place of sadness. Philadelphia’s notoriously unforgiving fans booed because they were bummed out by the Phillies’ losses. They wanted Schmidt to do better and wanted the Phillies to win ball games.