It was almost exactly a year ago that Jonathan Chait claimed that Kamala Harris’s moderate turn was a winning strategy.

“The centrism is working,” Chait wrote at New York Magazine. Her success in the polls compared to President Joe Biden, he added, should be “attributed to the cleverness and unsentimental courtship of the center her campaign has followed.”

Fast forward a year.

Chait now says that it was progressives who controlled Harris’s campaign — and lost the election. The leftward tilt doomed her.

For Chait, the problem with the Democratic Party in the last 10 years is that it’s been run by the far left, and now, finally, that the centrist moderates he’s a part of are reclaiming power. Mystifyingly, he seems to think they’re finally winning.

“After almost a decade of nearly unchallenged supremacy, the progressive movement’s hold on the party is no longer certain,” Chait wrote this week at The Atlantic.

Is the progressive dominance of the Democratic Party in the room with us right now?

The last 10 years have been a near nonstop assault on the Democratic Party’s left from an establishment that wants to crush it at all costs. One of the prime attackers has been one Jonathan Chait.

His assertion today, however, is striking in its detachment from reality. And it relies on making an appeal to the Democratic Party that’s rooted not in a return to centrist politics, but in an embrace of Trump’s demagogic narrative.

Centrists Weren’t Winning?

Over the past decade, Democrats have submitted three nominees to voters for the White House. Two of them, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, explicitly ran against the insurgent left-wing campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

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