It's rather decidedly a dog whistle presently.

The party isn't doing much lately to encourage the actual democracy part of the name, other than whining about national popular vote every 4 years knowing full well that's now how that process works.

The Democratic Party has some warts, this is for sure, and they have a lot they could be doing to improve participation and input from the rank-and-file. However, attempting to subvert an election by any means possible is not yet one of those warts. This is emphatically not a case where "both sides suck equally."

>subvert an election by any means possible is not yet one of those warts

The Democrats are famous for trying to have 3rd party candidates stripped from ballots. Straining smaller campaigns under the cost of fighting off endless lawsuits.

Democrats invented the term lawfare.

You think the Republicans don't do similar things?

Republicans blazed a new trail in 2021, trying to actually change the outcome of an election in progress through force. This is not comparable to using legal processes. A better comparison might be the series of lawsuits the Republican Party attempted after force did not work. How many years until the guy who lost admitted that he lost? These actions strike at the very foundations of democracy. A non-trivial segment of citizens still think the election was somehow stolen from them, despite an utter lack of anything like evidence. We will be feeling reverberations from these actions for decades.

Whining about the national popular vote every 4 years is literally an encouragement of increased actual democracy.

Scrapping the electoral college would be one of the most lower case d democratic things this country could do.

“Whining” is all you can do when you don’t have the statehouse votes to pass an constitutional amendment.