I used to listen to the NYT podcast "The Daily" every morning, but somewhere along the line, it lost me badly.

And I hadn't listened to any episode in months. I'd stopped even looking at the episode titles, which is something I was doing even after I'd stopped listening. I was looking at episode titles and rejecting them unheard. Something about the Trump Era made me resistant to what they were putting out. But I happened to listen this morning.

The episode is: "The Field: Iowa’s Electability Complex/As Iowans prepare to cast the first votes of the 2020 Democratic nomination process, they’re asking one question: Who can win?" ("Traveling around the state, we found anxious Iowans asking one question over and over: Who can beat President Trump?")

This was worth listening to, and, for me, it's worth blogging about because it made me think of what was missing. You have all these people in Iowa putting tremendous effort into picking one of the Democratic Party candidates, and the number one thing they're wracking their brains about is how other people will think. They're imagining the interior life of people who are inclined to or capable of voting for Trump.

But here's what's missing: Their imagination is pathetic and — though they all seem like such nice people — morally deficient. No one speaking in that podcast had any real feeling for Trump supporters as fully dimensional human beings. Trump supporters are ciphers who might as well be piled up in a basket labeled "deplorables."

Now, the podcast nudges us to think that it would be best for the people of Iowa to pull back from wondering what other people want and just ask themselves what do I want. That is, forget about electability. That's the too-hard-to-answer question of what everyone else wants. If each individual goes for what he or she wants, then there's a chance of aggregating that into a sensible picture of what people in general want.

That may be a good idea, especially if the alternative is to rely on inept thinking about what other people want. To me, what was missing from the podcast was a recognition of the poverty of the Iowa Democrats' thoughts about how voters in the middle might feel about various Democratic Party candidates. If there is any substance at all, it seems to be that some of the Democrats are actively offensive, others are sort of innocuous, and if they serve up one of the innocuous candidates, maybe enough of those voters in the middle will go along with it.

But there is another option for these Iowa caucus-goers (and others engaged in the Democratic Party nomination process): Accord full humanity to the Americans who are capable of accepting Trump and try to understand them as real people whose thoughts and feelings matter. This would be an arduous path, and it's almost surely too late to start. I don't think the Democrats involved in the nominating process even know how to find their way to the beginning of that path.

ADDED: They can't find their way to the beginning of that path because they are so deeply invested in demonizing the other side. They want voters in the middle to go with the Democrats because the GOP side is demonic. To demonize is to disbelieve in the possibility of connection with the real humanity of the people you want to convince. There's only a hope that some of the demons are getting tired of being demons.

Yet this demonizing is itself tiresome. And I say that as someone in the middle, someone who could go either way and 2020 and who voted against Donald Trump twice in 2016 (in the Wisconsin primary and in the general election).