Here’s a thought experiment. It’s an off-year election, and the Democratic Party has just spent nearly eight whole months mired in what feels like endless internal negotiations despite controlling the presidency and both houses of Congress. The major bill they’re trying to pass has polled consistently well even after months and months of delay. While it leaves out the big-ticket priorities of the Left, it’s nevertheless full of progressive measures that are both popular across the partisan divide, and ones the party has run on and promised for years — even if most people don’t actually know they’re in the bill. But after eight months of dithering, the Democratic president’s approval rating has fallen to a near historic low of 42 percent. Then, in the weeks and days before voting, the party halves the size of the bill, stripping it of almost every one of its most popular, progressive provisions.

While this is going on, at stake are two solid blue states with a Democratic trifecta. After months of congressional gridlock, both, like the rest of the country, see turnout among left-leaning voters plummet, and turnout among right-leaning voters surge. In one, the party runs a corporate-backed centrist who’d been governor once before, and the party establishment’s leading lights come out to campaign for him; he loses by two points, and the GOP wins the state House. In the other, a progressive governor who has enacted left-wing priorities like a $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, and a millionaire’s tax has the country’s leading socialist politician campaign with him, alongside the establishment figures; he keeps his trifecta and wins by 2.6 points, becoming the first Democratic governor to win reelection in the state in forty-four years.

Is this result: