Outgoing FBI director Robert Mueller speaks during an interview at FBI headquarters on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2013, in Washington. The nature of terrorism has changed in Robert Mueller’s dozen years as FBI director, but his concerns for the future are much the same as when terrorists struck on Sept. 11, 2001, merely a week after he’d taken over the bureau. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The Democratic Party is now facing a major dilemma ahead of the 2020 campaign cycle.

Many Democrats and their allies at the major news networks were caught up in the idea that Robert Mueller would give them a silver bullet against Trump, something that is easy to campaign on when it came time to run against him in 2020. That dream is now all but dead, with some of the bitter clingers grasping at the idea of obstruction being something they can prove when Mueller’s report indicates it is impossible to.

On the other hand, the fringes of their party have gained more voice and more power, led by politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and they are pulling the Party as a whole further and further left. The candidates of 2020 are having to publicly embrace policies they only whispered about before – the Green New Deal, late-term abortion, getting rid of the electoral college, and so on. These are policies that, when polled in context, receive little to no support from the country as a whole.

The Democrats’ best hope ahead of 2020 was to be a moderating force against Trump. They could have made inroads into the communities that didn’t like the extremes of either side, forcing Trump to either moderate himself or, more likely, alienate the moderate voters and force them into the Democrats’ waiting arms.

Instead, they seem more and more likely to jump headfirst into the far-left ideology that scares the moderate voters a lot more than Trump does.

There has been a miscalculation on the part of the Democrats, and they have allowed the most vocal and extreme of their base dictate the future. This is the perfect set-up for Trump’s 2020 campaign. Not only did they fail to beat him in 2016, but they failed to prove he cheated to win that election. He can tell the American public that his victory was legitimate and the Democrats have been sore losers.

Then, he can tell them what the Democrats want to do. They want to ensure that children can be killed any time during a pregnancy. They want to take away all of your private health insurance. They want to make sure your vote doesn’t count if you don’t live in an urban city in a blue state. And all of it is true. They can’t really argue it. It’s right there in the platform of virtually every candidate who has announced so far.

Sure, they can try to talk about obstruction, but if that had a clear cut answer, it would have been made public pretty quickly. There will be no further indictments, no further investigations by Mueller, and no more accusations about 2016 that the Democrats can really use to make their case.

They have to go all policy now, and their policies scare the moderate voters way more than the Democrats want to let on. You can expect that they’ll be walking back their platforms soon enough, but they have notihing to fall back on at that point.

As someone who had no interest in Trump winning, it’s pretty clear to me right now that his path to re-election is much easier that it was before Mueller’s report came out. The Democrats know it, too, and they are stuck because of it.