Put a bunch of Democrats on the stage and they can’t help but go off the rails: They compete with each other to win the favor of liberal activists, and saddle themselves with unrealistic positions that could leave a nominee vulnerable in the general election.

That was a prevailing Washington media and political class narrative after the first round of Democratic debates in Miami a month ago.

But as Democratic contenders gather on the stage again this week, a competing analysis is gaining power: Going a bit off the rails may be an entirely reasonable track to victory.

“Candidates who look like they are cautious, modulating, have their foot on the brake are missing the moment,” said veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who is coming out later this summer with a book on how both parties have been refashioned in the Trump era.

The moment, according to Greenberg’s polling and focus-group work, has left voters of all stripes clamoring for disruption. Cultural and ideological currents in society — more profound than any given day’s Trump uproars — are giving progressives a better opportunity than they have had in decades to play offense.

This interpretation is notable for the source. Greenberg first drew wide notice a generation ago, with landmark work about how Ronald Reagan captured many working-class Democrats who believed their party’s liberalism was out of step with their lives. He is a veteran of the 1992 “war room” of Bill Clinton — who won two elections precisely by practicing a brand of defensive politics that required regular reassurance to voters that his activism didn’t mean he liked big government, disliked free enterprise or was sympathetic to 1960s-style radicalism.

Notable also are Greenberg‘s friends who disagree with him. Perhaps no one has been more outspoken in warning that Democrats might be blowing their chance to beat President Donald Trump by swerving too gratuitously to the left than former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. In the latest of a series of commentaries and interviews, he complained in a Medium post that he was part of group “shaking our heads” after the Miami debates as candidates “succumbed to chasing plaudits on Twitter” with strident positions on health care and immigration which risk offending “swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio.”

Emanuel, too, is a veteran of Clinton’s war room and White House, and won four House elections and two mayoral elections with his own version of centrism. When he was in Congress, he lived in a basement apartment of a Capitol Hill town house — owned by Greenberg and his spouse, Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.).

To be sure, wearing a socialism label from Republicans is not an experiment that most Democrats are ready to run.

“The country is so far away from where it was under Bill Clinton,” Greenberg said in an interview. “People are desperate for government to show it can do big things.”

Greenberg’s and Emanuel’s worldviews are more in tension than outright opposition. Both are alert to the danger that Democrats project that they are more interested in identity politics than representing a unified national interest. Even Emanuel, who draws scorn from the left, supports robust expansion of government’s role to improve health care and education.

Where they differ — in ways that echo with a broader intraparty debate Democrats are confronting — is on how they calibrate risks.

One thing that hasn’t changed from the Clinton years, Emanuel believes, is that Democrats must loudly make the case of who they are (pragmatists obsessed with concrete improvements in voters’ lives) and implicitly make the case who they are not (smug and impractical ideologues who live in a leftist echo chamber). That’s why he cringed at seeing candidates like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders call for the abolition of private health insurance, and even several avowed moderates call for decriminalizing illegal border crossings and providing health insurance for undocumented workers.

Greenberg, by contrast, believes that the urgency voters feel for shaking up the status quo means there’s less risk for candidates and the party in going too far than in not going far enough.

He believes the 2020 election will be decided by a couple big questions which favor Democrats: Do you support or oppose America’s accelerating change toward a more diverse and culturally tolerant society that gives more opportunities to historically excluded groups? Do you believe in the power of government to challenge entrenched financial power, and make average people better off?

His belief that Republicans are placing themselves on the electorally losing side of these questions is the foundation of a forthcoming book, "R.I.P G.O.P." It is also why he is generally not joining the bed-wetting of many Democratic operatives over the rhetorical and substantive positioning of many Democrats trying to challenge former Vice President Joe Biden’s frontrunner status (Biden for the most part has avoided these extremes, offering himself as a seasoned incrementalist who can beat Trump).

For one thing, Greenberg said, voters properly see most of the Democratic positioning as about making broad statements of values and ideals — not millstone-around-the-neck commitments that eliminate their ability to maneuver as general election nominee or president.

What’s more, he said, recent focus groups conducted for the American Federation of Teachers by the Greenberg-linked Democracy Corps suggest that a historically damaging charge — that Democrats’ plans to expand government amount to “socialism” — is losing some of its potency.

The focus groups with white working class voters outside metropolitan areas in Maine, Nevada and Wisconsin show that Trump uses partisan insults so promiscuously that his rhetoric may be devalued — participants didn’t find the socialism allegation compelling.

To be sure, wearing a socialism label from Republicans is not an experiment that most Democrats are ready to run. But if the focus groups are correct it may reflect a broader truth about the cycles of American politics: When the ideological tides are moving in their favor, presidential candidates may not have to worry so much about their language, or pay an especially high cost for laying it on too thick.

“I do think it’s OK to get a little bit ahead of where the American people are on an issue if we really do believe it” — Pete Buttigieg, South Bend, Indiana mayor and presidential candidate

The best illustration may come from an earlier swing of the cycle, when Ronald Reagan in 1980 dethroned a half-century of New Deal and Great Society dominance of American politics with a brand of free-market, pro-military conservatism that seemed radical at the time. Reagan, many analysts thought, would be doomed by such provocations as launching his general election campaign in Mississippi with favorable references to “states rights,” doubts about his commitment to Social Security, or disparaging environmental laws by saying trees and the Mt. Saint Helens volcano were causing more pollution than anything man-made. Instead, Reagan was seen as right on big questions about realigning the role of government and won 44 states against incumbent President Jimmy Carter.

Even a Democratic candidate this year who by temperament is among the least inclined to rhetorical bombast, South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, recently suggested there’s a lesson in this history — that successful candidates need to both listen to the electorate and push it beyond present boundaries.

In a recent interview with Democratic operative David Axelrod’s “Axe Files” podcast, Buttigieg said ideas about cutting tax rates and shrinking government in the 1970s were considered “preposterous” but conservatives were so successful in “tugging” the country toward them that by the 1990s that even many Democrats agreed. “It’s time for us to work a little harder to tug the country back.“

This year, he told Axelrod, Democrats can’t project that they are simply the party “promising a return to normal” before Trump when this version of normal “wasn’t working” for many voters.

Like Greenberg, Buttigieg said the risks of being a disrupter shouldn’t be exaggerated: “I do think it’s OK to get a little bit ahead of where the American people are on an issue if we really do believe it.”

John F. Harris is founding editor of POLITICO and author of "The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House."