Do said friends of yours know about the means-tested $1400 stimulus check potentially being snatched by landlords/debt collectors? Even my lib mom who usually gives Dems much more credit than they deserve acknowledged that that was bullshit. Set aside the pussyfooting around the minimum wage issue, that alone should be enough to sink Congressional Dem majorities in 2022.

Instead of putting forth ideas of what the Democrats should be doing, you should instead explain to your LGBT+ friends and those with disabilities how what they have been doing so far in 2021 fails to meet the barest expectations of people who aren't conditioned to expect less than the bare minimum, who aren't used to being marginalized and backstabbed. People aren't about to forget that the Georgia special elections which (just barely) won the Dems their Senate majority were won in part because Biden promised another $2000 lump sum to every American.

Get them to remember (if they're old enough, that is) what happened to the Democratic congressional majority in the 2010 midterms, the aftermath of Obama's and Pelosi's leadership they squandered their majority. We can blame sabotage by the GOP and by Koch-funded campaigns against the ACA ("death panels" projection) all we want, but it was ultimately the Dems who sold out to the insurance companies and castrated a flagship bill that was supposed to introduce a single-payer health insurance system. It was Obama et al. who chose to adopt the hybrid Romneycare model. We can't forget that Obama had the billionaires and bankers responsible for the 2007 housing market crash - and the auto industry executives - by the balls in 2008-2009 and chose to bail them out instead of prosecuting anyone besides Bernie Madoff. Not everyone took the Tea Party propaganda and reactionary distortions of these betrayals at face value, but they sure as hell remembered these betrayals of "hope and change" when deciding whether to vote or who to vote for in 2010.

Longtime Dem voters who do so out of a bitter sense of obligation and learned helplessness will accept the same sorts of excuses we heard in 2009-2010 that we're hearing now and will continue to hear until 2022. "But Joe Manchin!" features echoes of "But the blue-dog Democrats!" Let's also not forget that Nancy Pelosi is responsible for the "pay-go" rule that imposes an artificial budgetary constraint on new spending bills (requiring cutting equal funding from something else to add that funding to a program), not any Republican budget hawk. The Senate Parliamentarian is a new excuse that I don't believe the Dems have used in living memory, but the Parliamentarian is so easily overruled by at least one of Biden or Harris (the VP is also "president of the Senate" according to the 1789 constitution) that to blame the Parliamentarian - which is a relatively new unelected position (20th century!) not often taught in grade-school civics - is to indirectly blame both the president and the vice president.

Like Obama's "hope and change", Biden's "healing the nation" rhetoric was always an empty platitude. Your friends, clearly arguing from a position of learned helplessness, may hear neoliberal Dems say "Biden owes you nothing" in response to those "naive" enough to demand better and say "Duh! Of course they have the power to say he owes us nothing with impunity, we voted for him as a form of harm-reduction/damage control to keep the fash out of power and we had no choice but to do that because he was the only viable option to defeat Trump."

Voters not keeping up with the daily political spectacle, who hear about obscure bullshit technicalities like the Parliamentarian and correctly intuit that these excuses are mostly bullshit, having naively interpreted these platitudes and associated election promises at face value and turned out in droves last year expecting a more responsive approach to the economic/public-health crisis than what Trump had to offer. These voters not constantly tuned in to the latest gossip/spectacle on blue-check Twitter or CNN/MSNBC, they expected a meaningful and swift change from this administration and congress, they expected the Democrats to have enough power to unilaterally use executive and legislate power to do what needed to be done. They heard Biden and Dems say that they would "listen to science" unlike Trump and assumed that would translate into the dramatic WWII-style mobilization that would be necessary to combat covid effectively, rather than the same sort of quarter-assed response they've been putting forth to deal with the longer-term existential threat posed by climate change.

Put simply: It's not just a matter of Monday-morning quarterbacking here which your friends object to. The historical precedent of the 2009-2010 congress supports that argument and you should consider framing it as an "is" statement rather than a mere "ought" statement, e.g.

If Dems continue falling short of the specific expectations that Dems encourage voters to set for them, then those voters (who actually expect something materially substantial in return for their votes) won't turn out for Dems enough for the party to keep either of the House or Senate majorities.

I'd be curious to know if said friends can explain why conditions now aren't sufficiently similar to conditions in 2009 to yield the same sort of 2010-style upset in 2022, without invoking the Supreme Court. (See the response to this comment below regarding what the Dems could have done but didn't in order to reduce the GOP's ability to pick replacement justices.) In which case you should remind them that the congressional Dems could have used the same filibuster powers from a minority position to block Trump's SCOTUS nominations, that the GOP used to block progress when they were in the minority from 2007 to 2010. Remind them of the evidence that within recent memory (Obama and Trump admins) the GOP has repeatedly demonstrated a tendency to secure every advantage possible and to mostly play for keeps in pursuit of conservative/reactionary policy goals regardless of setbacks, while the Dems haven't typically demonstrated much willingness to do likewise for the sake of pursuing progressive policy goals. Raise the question, why is this the case? Ask them what Biden, Harris, Pelosi, and Schumer stand to gain electorally by behaving this way, if they don't stand to lose electorally.