By and large, defund the police activist are not democrats, so they should not care how their message impacts the electoral chances of democrats. Though i think your analysis that it hurt Dems, is withou evidence.
Just an example, Cameron Webb, the Democratic candidate in VA's 5th District lost to a former Assistant AD at Liberty, Bob Good, who was a complete zero. Webb was far more credentials, a fund-rasing advantage and led the polls for the last month before the election. Good primarily ran on one issue, Cameron Webb and his fellow Dems will defund the police. Even though the allegation was baseless, it had legs because defund the police had become a national issue. Here is an excerpt from a Washington Post article on the subject:
The ad had all the trappings of a left-wing boogeyman fever dream: “He’d defund the police, end Medicare, force you into socialized medicine, double your gas prices with a Green New Deal.”
“Cameron Webb: way too radical.”
The rhetoric, deployed against a Virginia Democratic candidate for a U.S. House seat, is exactly what Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) was talking about last week when she told her colleagues they needed to avoid using language that became fodder for Republican attacks.
“We [need to] look at the things that they say about us,” Spanberger had said in the call with House Democrats, in audio obtained by The Washington Post. “Because whether we think it’s just an attack ad and that’s what it does . . . it doesn’t matter, because it works.”
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We thought we neutralized [the defund the police attacks] with some of our own spots,” Webb said in an interview, referring to advertisements focused on law enforcement and his efforts to treat coronavirus patients during the pandemic. “But that did shift the conversation. And what it did is it brought more national discourse into our race here in the 5th as opposed to focusing on local issues.”
To a lesser degree, Republicans also used “defund the police” rhetoric on Spanberger, who defeated state Del. Nick Freitas (R-Culpeper) by a narrow 2 percent of the vote, according to unofficial returns. They occasionally tried to link the former CIA officer with her freshman colleague, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who does want to defund police and proudly identifies as a democratic socialist.
Spanberger “votes nearly as much with socialist AOC,” charged one attack ad from Club for Growth PAC, which spent millions helping Freitas. “Why would Spanberger take so much money from defund the police extremists if she truly cared about Virginia?”
Spanberger told her caucus Thursday that it needed to do an autopsy on how such attacks affected some of the vulnerable Democrats who lost their seats.
She said Democrats should avoid phrases like “defund the police” and instead explain policies they support more clearly to better protect themselves in 2022 — and posited that they should also “not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”
Elaborating in an interview Tuesday, Spanberger said she was not placing blame on any particular candidate or idea but believes her comments have been mischaracterized as opposing certain progressive policies.
“The position I was stating was we have to better explain what we are for,” she said, contrasting specific police reforms, for example, with the phrase “defund the police.” “Here’s a phrase that doesn’t begin to represent what we’ve actually done. In the cause of equal justice, in the cause of police reform, we in the House of Representatives passed a good bill that every single Democrat voted for, as well as some Republicans.
“And yet if you were to say to your constituents, what is it they have done in the area of police reform? People just won’t necessarily be able to say, because the conversation has been consumed by slogans — and frankly they are also slogans that have been weaponized by our political opponents.”
Spanberger said the millions of dollars spent on “defund the police” attack ads against Webb indicated “there had to be some pollster or some strategist somewhere saying, ‘This is how we will beat that man.’ ”
Some, like House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.) have agreed with Spanberger that slogans such as “defund the police,” as well as calls to ban fracking, for example, hurt Democrats. But others in the party’s more liberal wing said they felt like they were being blamed for losses, or that the voices of their constituents — many of them minorities — were being silenced.
“To be real, it sounds like you are saying stop pushing for what Black folks want,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said to centrist colleagues on the call. Ocasio-Cortez, whose name and face hovered in the background of some GOP attack ads in Virginia, tweeted that the “ ‘progressivism is bad’ argument just doesn’t have any compelling evidence,” noting that many Democrats who co-sponsored Medicare-for-all or the Green New Deal won reelection.
“When it comes to ‘Defund’ & ‘Socialism’ attacks, people need to realize these are racial resentment attacks,” she wrote. “You’re not gonna make that go away. You can make it less effective.”
She added in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” that she was not denying that Republican rhetoric has been effective in hurting Democrats but said the party could be more resilient against the attacks — for example, with better digital campaigning.
“The source for many of the “defund” attacks against Webb stemmed from a television interview Webb gave this summer, when the Democrat expressed support for racial justice protesters and said the “defund the police” language that was flooding the streets then should be used “appropriately.” Thereafter, he found himself repeatedly denying that his comments amounted to support for defunding the police.
But Webb had no regrets about his words, saying he found it important in a conversation about racial justice to at the very least acknowledge the viewpoints of people across the district who both supported and opposed calls for “defunding” police.
“That’s something that is sometimes incompatible with our hot-mic politics, but it’s so important for us to be able to do from a healing perspective,” he said. “The key here is being able to hold space for the range of views that exist and say, how do we move forward?”