I think Lauren Elizabeth was making a general comment on Democratic spinelessness. And that spinelessness goes back decades.
Establishment Democrats spent the vast majority of the post-1972 era using the same failed playbook: let the Right control the narrative, slowly tack further and further right, abandon the economic justice issues that won them working-class support from 1932 to 1968; go out of their way to alienate and distance the party from the pro"fightback" wing of the labor movement, from Black and Brown people other than a handful of prosperous tokens, the poor or all races, young idealists and long-term progressive activists alike, by both making it clear that non-wealthy, non-elite and non-suburban will have no say in who the party nominates; that progressive candidates will no longer be allowed in the vast majority of contests above seats for the state legislature, a level where there is little if anything progressive anyone can achieve due to pointless restrictions like mandatory balanced budgets at state level- while simultaneously demanding that progressives MUST support whatever bland passionless corporate centrist the party nominates for president because the Republicans are so terrifying now that the party can't fight for anything beyond beating the GOP in name, and certainly can never enunciate anything like an inspiring, transformational vision of the future where the wounds inflicted on tens of millions of Americans by the status quo are finally healed.
(BTW, if anybody is wondering why I didn't mention the 1972 campaign, the race that seems to have convinced Establishment Democrats that the strategy I described above is the only possible way, here's my take on that: McGovern was strong on those economic justice issues, more a New Deal revivalist than any other Democratic candidate, but the party was doomed to lose in a landslide that year, no matter who it nominated, by three factors 1) Edward Kennedy's self-destruction as a presidential candidate as a result of Chappaquddick; 2) the Nixon "China Trip", which made him look, falsely, like a master of global statesmanship, and 3) the assassination attempt on George Wallace during the Maryland primary, which threw the 12%-15% of voters who were likely to vote for Wallace over to Nixon as a bloc. Nothing in McGovern's platform played any significant role in the outcome, which was pre-ordained by the factors I listed above).
They seem to have forgotten that the only times they've won the presidency in THIS century were when they broke with the failed 1980 Carter/Mondale 1984/Dukakis 1988- Gore and Kerry "we have to surrender to win" approach and do what I've always said Democratic presidential candidates usually refuse to do- come across as if the party is FOR something, not just against the worst that the GOP offers. Barack Obama was elected in 2008 because he seemed to invite the activists, through participation in the Obama movement, back in from the cold- the party lost control of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014 largely because. having promised a presidency that would fight FOR, not just against, Obama's team immediately locked the activists back out in the cold as soon as the votes were in and wouldn't work with them even to get his major priority, the Affordable Care Act through Congress without it being watered -down to nothing, as the final version was- and 2020, where Biden won in large part because, after decades spent running for re-election as an economic royalist and panderer to white suburban racial paranoia, he ran as an antiracist and at least something of a New Dealer- though he did unnecessarily compromise on that aspect of his policies by agreeing to leave the poor out of getting any benefit from the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act.
The 2008 and 2020 results prove that Democrats can win if fight for the many. 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004, and 2016 prove that the "play it safe/say nothing/don't fight back when they attack" model will always lead to defeat.
