Much ado has been made about the so-called “blue wall,” a bloc of 18 states and Washington DC which have voted Democrat in all of the last six presidential elections. These states, which some pundits expect will all be won by Hillary Clinton next November, possess 242 of the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency. The thinking of some analysts is that this provides a clear and real advantage to Hillary (or by some miracle, some other Democrat) in 2016, as she needs to take only a couple of swing states on top of her base of 242. In the words of Dylan Byers, a Politico columnist, “this is Hillary Clinton’s election to lose.” Many other experts agree.

Nate Silver, the editor of FiveThirtyEight and arguably the most respected political analyst alive, believes that the blue wall does not exist. He argues that leading up to the 1992 election, the Republicans had a similar “red wall,” which according to Byers should have guaranteed them victory. It collapsed that year, however, handing Democrat Bill Clinton a landslide victory over the incumbent president, George Bush. Byers acknowledges the 1992 shift, but he attributes Clinton’s victory in red states to the poor state of the economy that year and to Ross Perot’s “spoiler” candidacy. At the same time, he ignores the fact that some of the states in the “red wall” have voted for the Democratic nominee in every election since 1992, indicating that the red wall’s collapse was about more than the economy and Ross Perot.

Regardless of whether or not Silver is correct that “there is no ‘blue wall,'” there is really a different reason why Clinton’s 242 electoral votes- even if she truly has them locked up- do not offer her a substantial advantage over the Republican nominee next year. Put simply, swing states tend to overwhelmingly favor one candidate over the other. In all but the very closest of presidential elections, one candidate typically wins nearly every swing state. In 2004, George W. Bush won the popular vote by just 2.4%, but he swept every true swing state except for New Hampshire, because independent voters across the country broke for him in similar percentages. In 2012, another race which was close in popular vote, President Obama triumphed in every true swing state, handing him a massively disproportionate victory in the Electoral College. This is why Hillary’s (possible) built-in electoral vote advantage does not drastically increase her chances of winning the presidency. Unless the 2016 election is a nailbiter like in 2000, with swing states breaking almost evenly for both candidates, it is hard to envision Hillary reaching 270 electoral votes if the Republican nominee wins the popular vote.

And when it comes to the popular vote, Republicans have cause for optimism. Granted, the GOP has won the popular vote only once since 1988. However, the Republicans- assuming that they nominate a competent, qualified candidate- are likely to win the popular vote for the same reason that the Democrats have beaten them in the last few cycles: because the party closer to the center tends to win the presidency. The Democrats now have the same problem that the Republicans have had since Ronald Reagan departed from the Oval Office. What problem? From 1989, when Reagan left office, until 2012, when Mitt Romney was soundly defeated by a failed and unpopular incumbent, the Republican Party as a whole continuously grew more intolerant towards centrist views within the party. This trend climaxed in 2010 and 2012, when multiple unqualified Tea Party candidates defeated qualified candidates in primary races across the country. Many of these Tea Partiers went on to squander very winnable Senate races in Nevada, Delaware, Indiana, West Virginia, Colorado and other states, causing the Democrats to retain control of the Senate in both elections. Often, a Tea Party candidate’s stated justification for taking on a more competent, mainstream Republican candidate centered around just one issue, like immigration or taxes or gun control. Even though former senator Dick Lugar (R-Indiana), for example, is a staunch conservative on virtually every issue, his support for gun control and immigration reform led to a 2012 primary challenge from Tea Party candidate Richard Mourdock, who beat the six-term senator 61-39% before losing the general election by 6 points to Democrat Joe Donnelly because of inflammatory comments he made about abortion during a debate.

This is just one example of a Tea Party candidate losing a red- or purple-state Senate seat, a scene which repeated itself over and over during the 2010 and 2012 elections. Following Romney’s loss in 2012, which experts attributed in part to the sideshow of longshot Tea Party candidates pulling the eventual nominee to the right on a whole slate of issues, the Republican leadership put its foot down and invested significant money and manpower in ensuring that no incumbent senators would be taken out by the Tea Party in 2014. The result was stunning: with qualified, mainstream conservative candidates running all across the country, the GOP finally took back the Senate with a net gain of nine seats and yielded the largest Republican majority in the House since the 1930s.

The fall of the Tea Party does not mean the Republican Party is becoming any less conservative; it is merely becoming more responsible, pragmatic, and realistic about what the GOP can expect to accomplish under the borderline tyranny of our radical liberal president. Ronald Reagan, who is universally recognized as the most conservative president of the twentieth century, consistently compromised with Democrats to advance his agenda. He raised taxes in exchange for spending cuts, he bailed out Social Security when it became necessary to do so in 1983, and in 1986 he signed an immigration reform bill that granted amnesty (yes, that dirty word) to approximately 2 million illegal immigrants in exchange for the adoption of certain conservative immigration policies. This does not mean that Reagan was anything less than a model conservative. It does mean that unlike most Tea Party politicians, he was realistic and pragmatic when he needed to compromise with liberals to get things done. In the 2010-2012 political climate, Reaganesque conservatives, i.e. those who were willing to compromise, were the ones who were targeted by the Tea Party in primaries. Tea Partiers can argue with this assessment from today until tomorrow, but facts speak for themselves. Fact: Reagan signed an immigration bill that included amnesty. Fact: Reagan raised taxes to get Democrats to agree to spending cuts. Fact: Reagan was a vocal backer of universal background checks for gun owners. This is why it is not a stretch to say that if Ronald Reagan was an incumbent senator running for reelection in 2010, he would almost certainly draw a Tea Party challenger in the primary. And like virtually all Tea Party candidates running in competitive general elections, the challenger would lose the seat if nominated.

This brings me back to the Democrats in 2015, and why the “blue wall” may be on its way down. At the same time that the Republicans are finally becoming more pragmatic and credible as a party, the Democrats are running in the opposite direction. The Democratic Party’s leftward shift was on full display in June, when the vast majority of congressional Democrats voted against fast-track trade authority for President Obama, essentially refusing to allow the implementation of free trade between the US and Asia. Some more moderate Democrats voted for the bill, incurring the wrath of labor groups, which subsequently vowed to spend millions of dollars to replace the Democratic incumbents who voted for the TPA fast-track bill, including liberal California Rep. Ami Bera (D). President Obama, the most left-wing occupant of the White House in recent memory, came under fire from fellow Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for not being liberal enough on the issue. In other words, a significant majority of the Democratic Party has become so liberal that it no longer supports free trade. Liberal legislators may claim that they do back free trade in principle, but actions (e.g. their votes against free trade) speak louder than words. Warren, a prominent member of the Senate Democratic leadership team, has also taken aim at some of President Obama’s appointments of financial regulators with ties to Wall Street. She and other far-left senators have whipped up enough Democratic support to successfully derail the nominations of Antonio Weiss and Keir Gumbs to positions at the Treasury and the Security and Exchange Commission, respectively. All this points to the conclusion that Democrats in Congress are moving leftward at a rapid clip. This purist, uncompromising approach to politics is going to hurt the Democratic Party, just like the Tea Party movement knocked the GOP off balance for a few years and contributed to Romney’s demise three years ago.

But are the Democratic grassroots becoming more liberal? Does the rise of Warren and other radical leftists indicate that the party as a whole is increasingly out of touch with a majority of Americans? A recent Gallup poll tells us the answer. For the first time since at least 1992, a full 24% of Americans consider themselves liberal, with fewer Democrats identifying as moderates. It seems as though the “L-word” is coming back in style among Democrats, who for the most part have been wary of embracing the term since the days of Reagan. But my bet is that as the Democrats become more liberal by the day, they are leaving large swaths of the center behind. The independent voters who swing elections in this country are still more comfortable with politicians who call themselves conservatives than with self-professed liberals.

But let’s forget about self-professed liberals for a minute. Try self-professed socialists. Because that’s just what Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), the leading alternative to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary for president, is. Sanders has been steadily gaining momentum since his April announcement, particularly in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Recent national polling has shown Sanders to be the only Democratic candidate besides for Hillary with double-digit support. A recent Quinnipiac poll found the Vermont senator to have 33% support in Iowa, a jump of 18 percentage points since May. His numbers are even better in New Hampshire, where he trails Hillary just 43-35%. Voters in both states give Sanders much higher ratings than Clinton when it comes to judging authenticity.

To make matters worse for the Democratic Party, Sanders supporters are choosing him not just over Hillary, but over Martin O’Malley as well. O’Malley, a former two-term governor of Maryland, is another left-of-Hillary candidate, who is less radical and thus more electable then Sanders, with a compelling resume to boot. But anti-Hillary Democrats are overwhelmingly choosing a socialist septuagenarian instead; O’Malley has struggled to top 1% in recent national polls of Democratic primary voters. This is because many Democratic voters want a radical nominee. On July 1, a Sanders rally in Madison, Wisconsin had what was at the time the largest crowd of any political rally so far this cycle, drawing approximately 10,000 attendees. He surpassed that number this past Saturday at another gathering in Phoenix, topping 11,000 supporters. And they all came out to proudly support an unabashed socialist. This is why I say that the Democratic Party is moving dangerously far left of the mainstream, and this simple truth will certainly hamper Hillary’s ability to win some of the states she will need if she hopes to return to the White House in 2017.

Another indication that the Democrats are facing a Tea Party revolt of their own is the drastic increase of competitive primary races for Senate seats. Last cycle, the Democratic establishment managed to all but eliminate primary battles for competitive seats, bloodlessly propelling their favored candidate in each race to the nomination. Republicans, on the other hand, were forced to spend millions shoring up vulnerable incumbents in contested primaries. It seems that in 2016 the roles will be reversed, with the Democrats facing a number of intense primary skirmishes in states like Florida, Maryland, California, Illinois, and Ohio. Each one of these states features an upstart liberal Democrat taking on the establishment favorite, much like what the Republicans had to contend with over the last three cycles. This time, though, there are few truly competitive primaries on the Republican side; the Tea Party has learned from its multiple general election failures and is leaving Republican incumbents alone. The traction that candidates for Senate like the radical firebrand Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) are getting indicates that the Democratic Party, growing more liberal-socialist by the day, has yet to learn from the GOP’s Tea Party debacle.

None of this means that Bernie Sanders will win the Democratic nomination next year, just as the Tea Party uprising in the Republican Party failed to nominate Ron Paul (another radical septuagenarian) in 2012. Nor does the liberal revolt mean that far-left candidates for Senate like Grayson and Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) will actually win their primaries. But it does mean that centrist Democratic candidates will be forced to tack to the left on a slew of issues in order to fend off primary challengers. We already see Hillary Clinton moving well out of her comfort zone on issues like Wall Street, immigration, and free trade in order to pander to the increasingly liberal base of her party. Just as the experts posit that Mitt Romney’s rightward shift during the 2012 primary fight hurt him in the general election, the Democrats’ post-2016 “autopsy” report may point to Hillary’s embrace of borderline socialism as a cause of her devastating loss to a competent Republican nominee (read: not Donald Trump). And hopefully Democratic voters won’t learn their lesson.

You can follow Yosef at @realyosefstein.