House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., talks to reporters during her weekly news conference, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, June 7, 2018. After several questions about President Donald Trump and his policies, Pelosi responded: The President said he was going to drain the swamp. He has become the swamp. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Arthur Wellesly, 1st Duke of Wellington, is thought to have had a very low opinion of the character of the soldiers in his army, most of whom were drawn from the least desirable strata of British society. On one occasion he remarked, “I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.” It seems that Nancy Pelosi is finding herself in the same position.

Nancy Pelosi was featured at a roundtable of Bloomberg reporters and editors on Friday. I suspect more than a few of the attendees were shocked when, instead of getting a pep talk about how the Democrats were going to take the Senate and vanquish #OrangeManBad, they got a warning about the direction the Democrat field…especially media darling Elizabeth Warren…is going.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is issuing a pointed message to Democrats running for president in 2020: Those liberal ideas that fire up the party’s base are a big loser when it comes to beating President Donald Trump.

Proposals pushed by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders like Medicare for All and a wealth tax play well in liberal enclaves like her own district in San Francisco but won’t sell in the Midwestern states that sent Trump to the White House in 2016, she said.

“What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan,” Pelosi said at a roundtable of Bloomberg News reporters and editors on Friday. “What works in Michigan works in San Francisco — talking about workers’ rights and sharing prosperity.”

“Remember November,” she said. “You must win the Electoral College.”

As I posted last week, the only Democrat that polling says can beat Trump is Joe Biden and Republicans are much more excited about voting than Democrats.

READ for background on head-to-head polling and general election climate.

As Impeachment Looms Donald Trump Surges in Major Polls

New Poll Shows Voter Enthusiasm at a 20 Year High and It Has Democrats Nervous

The entire Democrat field is promoting policies from gun control, to Medicare for All, to transexual voodoo, to open borders immigration that are popular in the salons of the upper crust sections of two or three states but leave the average American thinking “WTF, I mean WT-f***ing-F”?

Given the dynamics of Democrat party politics, it is difficult to see how the Democrat candidates break out of this. In order to win the nomination, the Democrat candidate is going to have to stake out some very extreme positions. We have seen even Joe Biden endorse the idea of sending felons to women’s prisons based solely on their self-identification as a woman. Elizabeth Warren has endorsed free sex change operations for felons and it is a matter of time before she will demand that they be enrolled as members of the Cherokee nation. As the field gets smaller, the policies they endorse will become more extreme. While I don’t believe that “run to the [left/right] in the primary and move to the center in the general” has ever worked, it simply can’t work in the internet age where their statements are being lovingly collected by the Trump campaign and conservative 501(c)4 groups.

Pelosi is absolutely right. But the conundrum for the candidates, assuming they even perceive their positions as extreme, is that there isn’t a perceivable path off this roller coaster.

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