Did about two minutes of research and discovered that since 1988 (when George H Bush succeeded Reagan), not a single time has a nominee of the same party succeeded the incumbent.
So maybe presidential elections are simply reactionary to the party in power and no further dissection is required?
If the pattern holds true, presuming there’s an election in 4 years and presuming that Trump hasn’t changed the law so he can be president forever (and he will be 82 for god’s sake), odds are good that the next president will again be a Democrat.
Makes me wonder if there isn’t a strategy of letting off the pace of pushing social change to allow the troglodytes to catch up and only hammer the economic justice message alla Bernie.
The other thing I’ve been thinking about is the racism angle. We all agree race is a social construct and being racist is a learned behaviour but when he see it in our opponents we tend to treat it as somehow essential to their character all of a sudden. I wonder if we can’t change our strategy there some too.
Most people just vote for the party of their parents, friends, family, the one they’ve always voted for…so we’re just talking about the margins.
Some people will be motivated by hope and change and some by helping the poor and oppressed and some by fear of outsiders or crime or collapse of their way of life or whatever. How that’s going to shake out with different candidates is pretty hard to predict.
I hope this is right. But it can only be right so long as liberal democratic ideals hold. Trump, and his closest supporters, are distinctly opposed to upholding liberal democratic values. The rest of his coalition doesn’t really seem to care about those ideals either, so I’m having a hard time imagining a world where Trump and his allies try to end liberal democracy in the US and they fail because his coalition isn’t ok with it.
Good news is that with Trump winning the popular vote by 1.5% and the tipping point state of PA by 2.1%, the electoral college disadvantage has been reduced to almost nothing.
In the current age where your opponent is really misinformation, not the Rs, one of the best mindsets the Dems could adopt is to provide more SS type benefits that just land checks in peoples’ hands. They need policies that have basically no vulnerability to misinformation, where there is no plausible deniability that the voter is not personally benefiting from the policy. The folks like Ezra Klein will say no, no, no you can’t do that, it’s not sound policy, you need to “build a coalition” with a thousands little tweaks here and there, but Trump will just say the trans MS-13 woke mob is eating your cats and dogs and the voter will just say “ho hum, I can’t really follow if Dems are actually getting anything done for me and all I see online is that they’re a disaster, so I will vote to save the dogs and cats from being eaten”.
I keep hearing this, but before I buy in, I’m going to need someone to practically explain to me how you get everyone to “let off the gas.” How do you stop a gay person that wants to have input into their partners’ medical decisions from suing a hospital that doesn’t want to listen to them? Should Kamala have said she would disobey a court order that required prison to provide gender affirming care (a court order that, btw, was also followed by the Trump Administration) in order to prevent Trump from being able to run the They/Them Ad? How do you make sure that noone ever says anything on social media that can be clipped by Libs of Tik Tok?
I guess my point is even if the Democratic Party tries to moderate there are millions of people just out there living their lives every day and the right wing media does a great job of attributing a lot of the fringiest behavior to the party when the party leadership doesn’t support it and can’t control the people who do it… So, in that environment, how do you slow the speed of change when in many situations you aren’t really the one with your foot on the gas or the brake?
Everyone doesn’t control the political messaging of the DNC. They do. Of course we don’t want people to stop advocating for change locally. It’s just an idea for the national campaigns.
The Dems really don’t push the gas hard at all on social issues, it’s all just BS messaging from Republicans. Harris/Walz barely mentioned trans people other than to say “uh, I’d follow the law.” It took them until Obama’s second term for them to jump onto gay marriage, and that was mostly due to a gaffe by Biden.
The fundamental problem is the GOP has a lock on messaging and pop media, they get to define the Dems any way they want and push the Overton Window, Joe Rogan fell for the kitty litter in schools fake story and millions of people think the Dems have lost their minds.
But that’s my point. There are a few (very few) situations where the DNC or Biden was leading the charge. In a lot of situations a local politician does something popular in their area, or a private citizen brings a lawsuit or a group of protestors comes up with a slogan and those actions are then ascribed to “the Democrats.”
How hard can/should the DNC push back on these things in an attempt to distance themselves from them?
