Forget ‘Lanes.’ The Democratic Primary Is A Whole Freaking Transit System.

If you’ve read our Slack chats or heard our podcast, you’ll know that I get annoyed whenever the discussion of “lanes” — such as the left/liberal lane versus the establishment/moderate lane — comes up in the context of the Democratic primary. Without getting too far into the weeds,1 I basically have two beefs with most of the analyses I see.

Beef Numero Uno: These analyses tend to treat voter preferences as being frozen in time — they’re about who the voter supports now, and perhaps who the voter currently lists...