It's your choice obviously but personally, I disagree. I live in a deeply red state (TN), so it's unreasonable to expect good progressive candidates because it's hard to argue that such people would have any kind of chance here. Meanwhile, one of the biggest faults of Democrats is foreign policy, which isn't an issue in most local races. If Joe Biden was running for state senate of TN on the platform of supporting Medicaid expansion, I wouldn't really have a problem voting for him. If some centrist lib manages to find some magic formula to keep a seat out of far-right hands, then more power to 'em, and I ain't gonna talk shit because I certainly don't know how to make that magic formula work.

More generally, Americans (myself included) have a tendency to see every local race as a micro version of the presidential race, because the latter gets so much more coverage and attention. It's kind of a bad habit because our national politics are always such shit, and because it's not true. Like, Republicans in congress are more than happy to stonewall anything and everything and have zero interest in negotiation, so any sort of compromise is a wasted effort, and their constituants are perfectly fine with that. But that might not be the case in every local government, where people may have different priorities. That's not to say that compromise is good or that running on comprimise doesn't give up a ton of bargaining power - it's just one example of how things can be different at the local level.

Yeah, yeah, I'm a lib, I know.