I love Lemmy because I can never predict what the prevailing sentiment in the comment section will be lol. One thread over there'll be a brigade of .ml users decreeing Piker as the savior and affirming this meme 100%.

Where the electorate is at dictates everything.

If you can't persuade the electorate to move, then you must reach them where they're at.

And if they're conservative, then you have to slice off enough conservatism to get their vote but still be a liter version of the worse alternative.

The leftists (the most effective ones being SocDems and DemSocs) tend to be the persuaders, possibly helping to move the Overton Window left; the center-right liberals tend to be the compromise when persuasion check fails — an uphill battle these days given the megaphones of billions of dollars of misinformation from foreign and domestic sources.