While the curtain falls on Donald Trump’s desperate and frivolous post-election lawsuits, Democrats are rightly asking how they were able to beat Trump but could not regain control of the Senate and maintain or increase their margin in the House. At a time when Democrats should be dispassionately examining the lessons learned from 2020, some in the conservative wing of the party are instead using this opportunity to attack the party’s growing progressive wing.

Soon after the election, centrists began arguing that Democrats lost House seats and most key Senate races because terms like “defund the police” and “socialism” turned off too many moderate voters — despite Joe Biden getting far more votes for president than any presidential candidate in history. In their telling, Biden was Teflon while promising to raise taxes on the wealthy and make major investments in fighting climate change, but centrists who lost House seats and failed in Senate bids were dragged down by Republican name-calling and red-baiting.

On its face, the story is incongruous. In fact, it is so nonsensical that one of the standard-bearers of the “the Left dragged us all down” crowd, former CIA officer and Blue Dog Coalition representative Abigail Spanberger, actually won a higher percentage of the vote in 2020 than she did in 2018.