In the months since the Democrats’ underwhelming performance in last year’s election, we’ve more or less been able to figure out why the party did so poorly despite a historically unpopular opponent and the two world-historical crises he presided over.

As I’ve argued before in this space, Joe Biden and the Democrats repeated the same failed campaign approach they had tried in 2016, hoping the pandemic and resulting economic devastation would make up for its flaws this time. They had no audible economic message, allowing Trump to easily paint the vote as a false choice between either wrangling the pandemic or maintaining a robust economy. And their decision to forego in-person door-knocking hurt their turnout efforts, especially with Latinos, while letting energized Trump supporters persuade and mobilize voters of all kinds without challenge. This all combined with the steady march of partisan polarization and class dealignment that’s been accelerating since 2016.

Surprise, surprise: a new 2020 postelection autopsy comes to many of these same conclusions — conclusions that observers on the Left have been stressing for months, pulling their hair out as the Democratic Party’s CIA caucus sought to publicly put the blame on the party’s handful of socialists, and popular, commonsense ideas like Medicare for All. But what genuinely is a surprise is who authored this particular autopsy: Third Way, the corporate- — especially Wall Street– — funded think tank that exists to shape Democratic policy for the benefit of tycoons like the Kochs.