Is the honeymoon already over? Democrats who were basking in the afterglow of wins in Virginia and Alabama got the jitters over the weekend when the victorious candidates—Governor-elect Ralph Northam and Senator-elect Doug Jones, respectively—both sounded a moderate note. The Washington Post reported that Northam could try to leverage his landslide win by plucking “a few Republicans out of the General Assembly—where the GOP is holding onto the majority by a thread—and give them jobs in his Cabinet to tilt the balance of power toward Democrats. He could try to ram through a broad expansion of Medicaid and other Democratic priorities. But Northam says he is not looking to vanquish the other side.” Meanwhile, Doug Jones told Fox and Friends on Sunday that he was not automatically opposed to the Republican tax bill, saying, “We’ll wait and see how it goes.” On Monday, Jones told CNN that Trump shouldn’t resign over sexual assault allegations.

For the Democrats who raised money, canvassed, and voted for Northam and Jones, it was surely disheartening that the men turned so mealy-mouthed even before taking the oath of office. Of the two, Jones’s centrist tone is the more defensible. Alabama is an extremely conservative state, and he won a narrow victory against an accused child molester. It’s easy to understand why Jones would want to placate right-wing Alabama voters. Northam, on the other hand, won by 9 percentage points in a state that his been trending blue for more than a decade. Pushback from liberals on Northam’s Post interview compelled his staff to tweet messages explaining his Medicaid position:

That is why today my budget will expand Medicaid for the Commonwealth of Virginia. — Terry McAuliffe (@TerryMcAuliffe) December 18, 2017

And as he has said repeatedly, @RalphNortham will fight for this as the next #VAGov https://t.co/m0N6o82AaW — Ofirah Yheskel (@ofirahy) December 18, 2017

Northam and Jones are hugging the center at the exact moment when the Republican Party is itself going to extremes by jamming through a plutocratic tax bill and by orchestrating a campaign to defame special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. The two parties are following a pattern of asymmetric polarization familiar since the early 1990s. The Republicans are moving further right, and are ever more willing to violate longstanding norms, while the Democrats position themselves as a conciliatory party open to bipartisanship. The paradox of the Trump era is that the party that controls all three branches of government is deeply inimical to the democratic system while the party that believes in governance is shut out of power.

But perhaps it is precisely because Democrats have so little foothold in power that they are forced to be more propitiative. In their current exile from power, Democrats need to win over more voters, including many who voted Republican in recent years. And the party thinks it know where to find them: the suburbs. But will this tropism toward the center have the negative side effect of alienating the newly energized Democratic base?

Democratic centrism isn’t just a matter of ideology, but is also motivated by political strategy, particularly the belief among Democratic political consultants that the path to victory runs through traditionally Republican suburbs. As The New York Times noted on Monday, “from Texas to Illinois, Kansas to Kentucky, there are Republican districts filled with college-educated, affluent voters who appear to be abandoning their usually conservative leanings and newly invigorated Democrats, some of them nonwhite, who are eager to use the midterms to take out their anger on Mr. Trump.” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel subscribes to this theory, telling the Times, “If you look at the patterns of where gains are being made and who is creating the foundation for those gains, it’s the same: An energized Democratic base is linking arms with disaffected suburban voters.”