Yeah I am at a loss for what Dems should actually do because they have backed themselves into a corner. Their idea of peeling away the affluent educated from the GOP is plainly not working AT ALL, the Latino vote is slipping from them, women weren’t enough even in the wake of Dobbs, young voters are abandoning them, even the Black vote is not as solid as it was. It’s not that they lost this election. It’s that all the trendlines are negative and they don’t have any positive ones, nor any idea of where one might appear from.
You are on balance likely right that a Trump backlash keeps them afloat one more cycle, but then what? I am not dumb enough to think I can predict politics eight years into the future, but I just don’t have any ideas.
Not well but Trump went on Rogan and then won, so I guess it’s 50/50, it works or it doesn’t.
Don’t fight an uphill battle in the culture war. Dems can’t win by trying to get people to vote D because they are women or because they are black or because they are latino, etc., etc., etc.
What people want from Dems is the stuff that Rs call SOCIALISM. Obamacare. Social Security. Medicare. Federal programs that deliver real stuff to people that they personally get and that helps them with their real tangible daily problems. These are massively popular. Dems are conflicted because their main donor base is rich people that don’t want to build on these programs because they don’t want to pay more taxes. This election should prove, among many other things, that fundraising is too high a priority for Dems and kowtowing to their rich donor class is a fatal mistake.
It’s really hard to figure out what to do at this point. I think we’re all looking around, pointing out the thousands of terrible things that Trump and Republicans have done and want to do, how Trump is a mashed potato-brained con artist, and seeing people still thinking he’ll do a good job, and all we can do at this point is:
Yeah, this is completely delusional. Biden just did this! His entire economic platform was centered on full-employment, wage growth for workers, reshoring good jobs. Wages for the lowest income people rose faster than median wages, and wages for professional types actually fell. And people absolutely fucking hated him.
It’s also extreme cope to imagine that any progressive legislation is possible in the foreseeable future. If you’re hoping for some Great Society-style legislative program, the best bet is that Democrats will have the chance to reenact Medicare after it gets repealed.
I think this is sort of true but not enough in itself. You need good branding. What did Hillary Clinton stand for? Not googling a list of policies, but what was her mission, in a nutshell? Biden wasn’t much better and Kamala was (by design I think, as they were trying to run her as a generic D) a complete vacuum. Not since Obama have we had a Democrat with a successful brand, and he ran on “Change” and then totally failed to deliver any.
What you want is something like “The Fair Deal for Workers” (fine, we can work on the name) encompassing like paid sick leave, increased minimum wage, more vacation time, parental leave etc etc, something for everyone. You campaign on all these issues under this one brand. When you enact something from it, you release statements under that name. You stay on-message.
Plainly the Dems did not want to be a left-wing party and thought they could hold together a cultural coalition instead, and now that the result of this has been to drive the entire culture to the right, they are screwed. They have been telling working-class men they are pieces of shit for eight straight years now and their brand is poison. I mean who knows, never underestimate the American public’s ability to forget stuff. But when was the last time anyone can say “I voted Democrat because I wanted X, and then they got in office and gave me X”? Even if Biden’s policies were quite progressive, which I think they were, they were just too amorphous. I don’t know what they could promise now that anyone would believe. At least with Trump, When was the last time anyone can say “I voted Democrat because I wanted X, and then they got in office and gave me X”? Even if Biden’s policies were quite progressive, which I think they were, they were just too amorphous.
He did it the way the current Dems do it - he enacted policies that created good outcomes for people, but that people are completely incapable of connecting the dots on. People don’t like social security because it is a set of policies that result in the creation of retirement income sources, they like it because they get a check in their hands.
Kamala’s branding was “opportunity economy” which really doesn’t mean anything to anybody. I was starting to get a visceral reaction every time I heard her say that because it seemed like something a bunch of consultants came up with in a room and high-fived each other and then ran the entire campaign on it. On multiple occasions here, while we were live watching various big events (convention speech, debate, etc.), I asked why she wasn’t listing out a bunch of things they’ve done and will do.
This just feels like triangulation, only for pop culture instead of policy. Maybe if Kamala goes on Rogan and then does a few Kick streams with Nick Fuentes she can peel off some incel Neo-Nazis? I don’t have a better idea, but those people are not going to vote for the diet coke version of what Trump and the alt-right are selling.
Their achievements were real but very technocratic, the typical voter would never be able to understand their policy achievements because they just don’t think like that. They don’t talk about what they will do for the same reason - the big impactful things that that might do that people will really appreciate and understand (more government direct subsidies, transfers, and payments to households) are things that their donor class tells them are third rail deal breakers.
What makes you think it will be democratic (actual democratic, not sham votes)? I don’t see any reason to think it will be. The older generation of Trump voters (including 96% of registered Republicans) are completely fine with voting for an authoritarian strong-man who had already attempted to violently overthrow one democratic election. Then the younger generation clearly don’t have any qualms about authoritarianism, they seem to love it. Hanging out outside the Trump campaign watch party on election night really shook me. The number of young men and women who were gleefully running around supporting Trump wearing t-shirts with his mugshot and pictures of him with his bloody ear was completely soul crushing. These aren’t rednecks or people without degrees. This are buttoned up young professionals and college students. I don’t see any stopping this train. And once Biden hands over the keys, they will all support whatever retribution the Trump White House and Republican Congress go for. They will see it as fair and just, too! They have fully bought into the idea that Trump was wrongly prosecuted and will be cheering for even the most violent, authoritarian methods of retribution. The supposedly decent conservatives either won’t pay attention, because they don’t pay attention to any media that will honestly report what’s going on, or they will just blame the Democrats whom they already believe are authoritarian monsters because of 40 years of right-wing propaganda.
I’m not in a very good place rn, if you can’t tell.
The Biden admin was the most pro-labor, pro-working class one the Dems have had since Carter, loads of union endorsements, etc. Didn’t help. Sherrod Brown is on old-school, labor-friendly Dem, he got blown out by a car salesman. Possibly the Dems haven’t gone far enough and/or they’re not messaging it in a simple enough way for voters to understand. The other terrifying possibility is that this just isn’t what median voters want in 2024.
The Dems don’t offer any solutions to the problem on a federal level. The idea that it’s a “winning issue” for them presumes voters are complete and utter morons(might be true) who actually think Kamala or Democratic congresscritters are going to do something about it.
These people belong to the algorithm now. Good luck to Democrats as we have entered the Idiocracy phase. Unless they take my advice and run Matt Damon for president its so over.
It’s terrifying. My only advice is to take care of yourself and your loved ones the best you can and try and ignore this mess. There is literally nothing stopping the worst people in our country from doing whatever they want for the forseeable future. Our only hope is that they are more benevolent or lazy than we think.
+1. I think part of the problem is that the Democratic Party has an ingrained self-image as a party of well-educated smart people. That sounds good, but it’s pretty bad. For one, many Americans are dumber than average and working class people are even less book-smart than average. Many minorities who are a key component of the coalition aren’t well-educated. It’s hard to build a durable coalition with people who suspect that you look down on them, especially if they’re sort of right about that.
The more concrete problem is that smart people are generally more ideologically extreme because their intelligence allows them to build out a consistent structure of beliefs rather than just believing some mish-mash. To be sure, in most groups the very smartest person will be anomalously moderate on the issues, but in general smart people are extremists. People like this are allergic to the implicit contradiction of including “but” in a sentence, which makes it easy to bait them into disastrous positions. Trans sports is a perfect example. The correct position is: “People with gender dysphoria really suffer. LWe should empathize with them and demand that they are treated with respect and decency if they choose to transition. BUT that doesn’t mean we can ignore the biological realities of testosterone and athletic competition and allow trans athletes to compete in leagues that were meant to provide a fair playing field for cis women and girls. It’s a tough situation, but all we can do is try to navigate it with common sense and compassion.” Regardless of whether that is the morally correct thing, a viable political party has to be able to say it, and, not only that, anyone who disagrees has to be a fringe, outcast figure. Politicians know to say something like this, but regular liberals are vehemently saying the opposite, voters are smart enough to understand that the politician is probably just pandering.
I picked that example because it’s the most uncomfortable, but there are lots of others. Mainstreaming Latinx/BIPOC/other weirdo vocabulary; low-key generalized skepticism towards men and white people; destigmatizing all sorts of anti-social but nonviolent offenses; the idea that socialism as a label shouldn’t be toxic. Smart, educated people have to accept the leadership of the dumb, ignorant folks who their party is supposed to be for. Once in a blue moon, the smart people can get away with using their positions to force through an unpopular position on something like climate change, but you can’t do it all the time, or your voters will all quit.
Democrats have been able to defy this logic for a long time because minorities voted for them out of the correct belief that the GOP is extremely racist. But that’s starting to lose traction. Every plan for buying off the stupids with free checks or propagandizing them more effectively is just a symptom of the fundamental problem.
Maybe if we are lucky there is a special place in hell for people like Joe Manchin, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bidens, RBG, Anthony Weiner, and a whole host of other complete and total cowardly ghouls who got us here.
There are always going to be fascists. Always. Blaming them for this mess is ignoring the fact that there were a million offramps along the way for the Dems and they refused time and time again to take any of them. And they did it for their own power and enrichment under the guise of “norms”.
The Dems have taken for granted all of their voters. Young people, women, POC, the working class and on and on. They have offered nothing except empty promises time and time again. Is it shocking these people didn’t show up and/or switched their votes to someone who actually will do a lot of what he says? Not really.
Not living in reality. On the one hand, yes, Obama “only” implemented Romney’s healthcare plan when he came in on a D wave. On the other hand, even Massachusettsans were so opposed to what he was doing that that they used the death of a freaking Kennedy as an opportunity to send in a sub-replacement level R to kneecap the bill as the final touches were being put upon it.
America is a declining (from
extremely lofty heights) center right country that likes to swing back and forth every couple of years. Even monumental, historic fuckups like the Iraq War + overseeing the Great Recession only result in a wipeout for a cycle or two. So results are largely out of the control of the parties but what they can do is keep their ears to the ground to see what messages are resonating at the moment and then send a charismatic leader in to parrot those thoughts back to the electorate, preferably in an “authentic” manner.
