Actually, you don't get it.

Progressives started drifting away because the party broke faith with them in the late Seventies, nominating candidates further right than their predecessors in every election after 1972.

Jimmy Carter won an election no Democrat would have lost in 1976, and he won it on a solidly progressive platform that he was persuaded to largely put aside once elected. President Carter was a good man, but every unpopular choice his administration made was a conservative policy choice- putting low inflation first and ignoring high unemployment, supporting deregulation of corporate power, increasing the war budget after 1978.

Mondale ran to the right of Carter and had no justification for doing so. Dukakis ran to the right of Mondale-he backed a 6% annual war budget increase, was indifferent at best to labor, refused to back the massive voter registration program Jesse Jackson was advocating, and refused to fight back when the word "liberal" was put under attack, when the voters would have rallied to him if he had made a passionate defense of liberal ideas rather than leaving the attacks on them unchallenged.

Bill Clinton won an election any Democrat would have won, and won as much for his support of healthcare-one of the few issues he was to Dukakis and Mondale's left on- as anything else.

Then Clinton abandoned his healthcare proposal almost immediately and put most of his energy, in his first term, into the reactionary fight to pass NAFTA, a trade deal that benefited corporations and, for all practical purposes, no one else.

He concluded his first term by signing a vicious, punitive, classist and racist "welfare reform" bill-and, while doing so, embraced the right wing narrative which held that welfare was "a black thing" and that the people on welfare could all have got off it anytime they wanted, but they "just weren't trying hard enough".

There was no way to believe, after Bill Clinton took over, that supporting the Democratic presidential ticket no matter what was going to result in the Left winning in "the long game". Once the party had nominated a poorbashing death penalty fetishist, it forfeited any right to ask for automatic Left support of the ticket.

And the Goldwater/Reagan right types never just "fell in" behind any candidate who was odious to them. After 1960, the GOP never nominated anybody whose presence at the top of the ticket would have felt like a personal betrayal to them. They never had to support a nominee who blamed them for all the party's problems and promised to ignore them and keep them out in the cold.

I do support the Biden-Harris ticket, on antifascist grounds, but the Democratic Party needs to clean up its act as to how it treats progressives. If it wants us as part of "the long game", it has to stop treating us as the enemy, view us as partners in a coalition, and stop blaming us for defeats we didn't cause.

A first step would be admitting that Sanders supporters aren't primarily to blame for what happened in 2016. We all know it was never as simple as that, that the responsibility for the outcome is shared by a lot of people-including the huge numbers of regular Dems who either didn't vote or voted Trump, and the bad choices of the Clinton-Kaine campaign itself. For almost four years regular Dems have screamed "it's all YOUR fault" at Sanders people-doing that was never valid OR fair, and refusing to stop repeating that was never going to get anybody who didn't vote for the Democratic ticket last time to do so this time.

What would have worked, and what would STILL work, would be to start treating those voters as people we need, but who can't be expected to just automatically fall in line, who can't be expected to be motivated solely by a "stop the monster" campaign. What would work would be to run FOR, not just AGAINST.