Yeah BS has talked about this. It’s my belief the moderates use this because they don’t want to campaign on popular economic policy because their donors don’t want it, but jesus fucking christ small donors outraise big donors by like 6-1 now. Fuck them. It’s time to get people in there who are good at winning, not fundraising. And it looks like with Jaime Harris his main qualification is fundraising connections so we’re off to a horrible fucking start.
We can still support popular identity politics like BLM but drop some of the less popular stuff. We just need to lead with popular economic policy. I don’t think we do that while the ghouls who’s main talent is fundraising from wallstreet despite getting swamped by small dollar donors.
The problem isn’t so much we support identity politics, the problem is thats all the fucking dems message on.
This problem is the most depressing element for me because I don’t see how we can change it.
I can imagine a world where Democrats get their shit together and just start promising free shit to people, and win elections as the GOP slides further into insanity. I can’t possibly imagine fixing the leadership. The only way is to primary people who are impossible to primary. Diane fucking Feinstein won her primary in 2018. It is hopeless.
I think this is probaby a pretty unpopular take, and I’ll start by saying I have no evidence for it, but it feels true and emblematic of something to me.
BLM and the surrounding protests were a good thing. They motivated people, the cause was clear, the fact that it looked like people were taking action rather than just saying words was inspiring and I believe a cause of what seems to be a truth: that BLM as a concept grew in popularity and even spiked voter registration.
The probably unpopular take, though is this one:
Defund the Police, on the other hand, was a terrible slogan, so easily miscontrued and weaponized, and alienating even to sympathetic people.
Yep, and seeing who the dems are putting forth in leadership just hammers it in. And we’re going to get to a point where the GOP will build in so many advantages that we will not be able to overcome it when we finally do change.
I’m upsetting my liberal friends on FB with my super pessimistic takes lol They’re all very optimistic but don’t realize WAAF. I’m at least trying to get them to become more active donating and volunteering for local progressives.
I don’t think its hopeless. In fact, the right has already laid out the playbook. I think if we went back and mined the right wing forums a decade ago we would see very similar complaints about the GOP leadership with lots of use of RINOs etc.
Their flank simply put in the work to shift thier leadership and in 10 years there is not a centrist republican in government.
I don’t think thats unpopular. I 100% want to defund the police and 100% agree it was a terrible message. We should have been talking about funding alternatives to take some of the work off our overworked police officers.
I think everyone was super emotional after seeing the horrible police brutally we saw for months, and we kind of screwed the pooch on that one. I think defunding the police had like 20% approval in the lolpolls so probably like 10%.
Yeah we need to walk that one back and just focus on funding better community services to HELP the police.
I think what would be popular is basic police accountability. Even my Suburban Trump to Biden voters think accountability would be a good idea, but defunding the police is insanity.
Yeah I fully except us to get there eventually, we’ve already started. We’re winning more and more. Problem is yeah it’ll take like 10 years and by then the GOP will have a complete and unbreakable stranglehold on government. The 6-3 going forward is going to fucking obliterate voting rights, GOP controlled states are going to ramp up voter suppression to INSANE levels because of voter fraud.
Like if the GOP wins back the governorship in PA/WI/MI we’re probably locked out of the presidency for a good long while and they will be trying VERY hard to do it.
Also I have no idea, but I kind of doubt the GOP was actively trying to destroy the tea party. They probably welcomed the new voters with open arms because they just want to win. They’re fucking welcomining in Qanon. But our side? Nah we need to suppress any excited new voters and anything bad that happens is their fault.
Like did the establishment blame the tea party for Obama’s second term? I highly fucking doubt it.
Yeah I think this is an area where Trump’s political talent is underrated. He realizes that reality is irrelevant, because he is fundamentally a con man. Tell people what they want to hear, it really is that simple.
This ties back to my point on the tea party. Dems have been way too focused on POTUS and basically ignored SCOTUS and state control where gerrymandering takes place. The tea party realized that to set policy you have to have power and they identified a long game to entrench power. Dems are too busy trying to look virtuous to do the in the mud work of entrenching power. I was super guilty of this until recently.
True, but how many of those people turned to right wing ideology on FB or whatever and started to hate dems? It’s certainly not zero and it could actually be a large amount.
Most of those people blame both parties for no stimulus and thats unacceptable. When Mitch refuses to pass new stimulus we need ALL those people to know its Mitchs fault, and our leadership has failed horribly at doing that.
Nancy needs to just put forward a skinny bill that only helps people and let Mitch shoot it down. Minorty party in the senate needs to force the vote.
Biden can now use whatever federal resources he has to help the states. New stimulus needs to be extended UI $600/wk and $2400 for every American and thats fucking it. Or just 2k/month to every American regardless and thats fucking it.
I really hope this isn’t the take away from Trump because while I agree it likely works it has very serious externalities. If leadership is not making decisions and policy based on reality there are almost guaranteed to be serious implications.
Yeah to be fair 2008 was a reckoning for the GOP, ours was 2016.
But honestly this is a deep problem with liberals. I mentioned before, but if you listen to the 5-4 podcast they talk about how when liberal justices dissent, they always assume the Conservative justices are acting in good faith, that they aren’t being political, but that their logic is wildly wrong. Like RGB was fucking best friends with Scalia. Like the conservatives will do insanely political shit like Bush V Gore, Citizens united, striking down the voting rights act. And not once did the liberal justices call them out for their partisanship and assumed they were acting in good faith. It’s fucking insanity.
Meanwhile when the conservatives lose a case, they will straight up attack dems in their dissents and accuse them of being blatantly political.
These idiots really think its a difference of opinion about the law, and not simply about power.
So it’s just some deep seeded brain worms in older liberals and they can’t see the writing on the wall despite how insanely fucking blatant it is. Hopefully 2016 has woken them the fuck up. but how many moderate dems creamed themselves when Joe Biden said he was going to work with Republicans? A whole fucking lot of them.
Dems need good leadership to hammer in that it’s impossible. You know how Jim Jordan and Lindsey etc are all on TV screaming about crazy shit with a passion? We need dem leadership to be doing the same thing about Republicans not passing stimulus to help the people. About being obstructions, and refusing to work together. We don’t need Pelosi going on TV and being boring as fuck and talking about a complicated bill. We need someone on there saying these are direct cash payments to Americans in need and Republicans won’t pass it unless we give money to billionaires.
BTW, I wanted to cosign this. Trolly was consistent and imo correct on this.
Ironically, I think Trump fucked this up too. The “Sleepy/Creepy/Corrupt/Dementia/Radical Joe Biden is bad” approach was stupid.
He probably would have crushed if he’d ignored Biden completely and just continued with a nonstop cycle of:
You’re not racist, America’s not racist, ignore the crazies who say that. Don’t worry.
The economy was breaking all records until CHIYNA and will break more records before you know it. Don’t worry.
COVID is fine. I got a vaccine coming, I kept sports open. Don’t worry.
You guys were so smart to elect an elite businessman. I get things done. Don’t worry.
Basically: Don’t feel guilty about anything. You’re fine. We’re fine. Ignore the crazies. Don’t worry.
He got trapped into thinking he unlocked the cheat codes with his campaign against Hilary and was too dumb and stubborn to let that go, even when I’m sure all of his advisors told him that no one gives a shit about Joe fucking Biden.
Great point. 100% they were trying to get him to do this but the dude thought he was the smartest man in the world and he was why he won, not Roger Stone and Bannon and all the others that helped him craft his message in 2016.
We lucked out we had the dumbest, most narcissistic right wing populist alive.
Also something I don’t think people talked about is the economy was getting better under him. I mean it still sucked but unemployment was cut in like half wasn’t it? So a lot of people saw that and figured it’d keep getting better.
How we do in 2022 will come down to the economy. I think dems know they need to do a lockdown because they absolutely have too, but if they can’t get stimulus to go along with it they’re gonna be fucked. It’s really an impossible spot.
If you do a lockdown without stimulus the economy will tank and the R’s will wafflecrush 2022. But if you don’t do a lockdown you have 3k dead a day under a Biden admin and we get waffle crushed in 2022.
Unfortunately the right play is to not shut down and just blame the GOP for the deaths. Which is massively immoral. My guess is the Dems eat the political damage and shut down with no stimulus.
Even worse than that. She won the general election 1v1 against a much more progressive Democrat, with Republicans actually helping her opponent by voting for him.