To adapt a line from Huey Lewis, I want a new party — one that won’t make me sick.

I have written so often (and so recently) about the ways Donald Trump’s G.O.P. makes me sick that I won’t repeat myself here. It’s enough to say that when the president calls for four elected members of Congress to “go back” to their supposed countries of origin and neither the Senate majority leader nor the House minority leader can bring themselves to condemn it, you know you are dealing with a party that lacks brain, heart, spine, and vital parts further south.

Then I come to the Democrats.

I liked some of what I heard this week from the Democratic debates. I liked hearing a candidate call attention to the fact that if we simply withdraw our forces from Afghanistan, we will invite a humanitarian catastrophe “that will startle and frighten every man, woman and child in this country.” I liked hearing another candidate acknowledge that the only realistic way to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 is to “innovate our way out of this problem.” I liked the candidate who scolded Trump for meeting with Kim Jong-un and giving the dictator “a huge win.”

The only problem: The three candidates I just mentioned — Colorado’s John Hickenlooper, Maryland’s John Delaney and Ohio’s Tim Ryan — are polling at 2.0 percent, collectively. Their chances of winning the Democratic nomination are about as great as mine are of becoming executive director of Greenpeace.

Experienced Democratic hands think the party will have a giant political problem if it nominates a candidate too far to the left. That’s probable but not certain. Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress has made a highly plausible case that Democrats should not expect to win the election simply through a base mobilization effort, at least not when it comes to the states that count. Democrats did well in last year’s midterms thanks to vote switchers electing moderate candidates like Utah’s Ben McAdams. They did considerably less well with turnout campaigns that failed to elect progressives like Florida’s Andrew Gillum.