Democrats (well both major political parties in the US) are capitalist and, as such, are standing on the conveyor belt of capital interest, which constantly moves to the right. They would have to seriously fight against the forces of capital in order to just appear to stay roughly in one place, which they do not. The last time there was any meaningful resistance to capital interest were the Keynesian reforms to get out of the Great Depression, but that was really only to keep capitalism on life support long enough to roll them back.

Yeah it would not surprise me at all if they took exactly the wrong lesson from this, but I think doing so would make it crystal clear that they're not operating in anything like good faith. The percentage of Republicans who voted for Harris was totally unchanged from the percentage who voted for Biden, and the traditional Democratic base just didn't vote for them. The rightward shift overwhelmingly hurt their electoral performance. If they move even further to the right, that's just an indication that they actually believe in those policies; they won't be able to hide behind the fig leaf of "strategic triangulation" anymore. Most of us here on Hexbear are aware of the fact that they actually want to feed immigrants and poor people into a meat grinder, but I'm at least hopeful that this might be the beginning of more ordinary people waking up to that fact.