I wonder how many Dem pols who lost or are complaining about losses due to “defund the police” effectively made sure voters knew that their GOP opponent was aligned with QAnon?

Early on, @AOC & others pointed out the political failures of Dems who didn't support defunding the police. The focus has this been on it as a defensive failure, not educating voters, not running good digital programs.

But if the point from centrist Dems is "politicians can lose elections because things their allies say but they don't believe" it's an offensive failure too.

There were many QAnon supporting GOP candidates this cycle. That all Democrats didn't use QAnon to define and attack their GOP opponents - regardless of whether they were Q supporters - is definitely a failure.

Some political maxims are "Define your opponent before they define you" and "Create contrast." It sounds like a lot of Dems were defined by GOP as being for defunding the police when they weren't, while failing to attack their opponent with low hanging fruit on QAnon.

Obviously this is a question of political practice - there's no comparison between a bold civil rights policy demand and a violent anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. But Dems have been hitting activists in the political domain, blaming a slogan for electoral outcomes

It's the job of politicians & their staff to win campaigns & enact laws. It is the job of activists to demand a better world. These often overlap quite heavily, but they are not in fact the same. It's not activists' jobs to run politically competent electoral campaigns for pols.

Rather than go after civil rights activists for having a policy demand, I really wish Democrats were spending more time asking why they weren't able to better define their Republican opponents, or why they let the GOP define them.