It’s possible that voters reject Third Way inauthenticity as well as authentic progressive ideologies because most of them are ignorant, fascist, and racist, not because they are super good at picking up on inauthenticity.
There may be no actual winning way forward, but I sure would prefer to take the way you advocate over Shor.
But Obama performed a lot better than Hillary electorally for a reason. It wasn’t that he was more centrist or more appealing to racists.
I don’t think it’s a matter of being more centrist. I think Shor’s point is that you’ve got lots of things that are important to you and distinguish you from your opponent, but there are consequences to choosing among those issues in terms of your public message.
Hillary Clinton “lost because she raised the salience of immigration, when lots of voters in the Midwest disagreed with us on immigration,” Shor said. This is where popularism poses its most bitter choices: He and those who agree with him argue that Democrats need to try to avoid talking about race and immigration. He often brandishes a table showing that among voters who supported universal health care but opposed amnesty for unauthorized immigrants, 60 percent voted for Obama in 2012 but 41 percent voted for Clinton in 2016. That difference, he noted, was more than enough to cost her the election.
Shor is right about how the Obama campaign understood the electorate. David Simas, the director of opinion research on Obama’s 2012 campaign, recalled a focus group of non-college, undecided white women on immigration. It was a 90-minute discussion, and the Obama campaign made all its best arguments. Then they went around the table. Just hearing about the issue pushed the women toward Mitt Romney. The same process then played out in reverse with shipping jobs overseas. Even when all of Romney’s best arguments were made, the issue itself pushed the women toward Obama. The lesson the Obama team took from that was simple: Don’t talk about immigration.
That seems like a compelling argument.
I also think Shor makes a good point (I think this was in a podcast with Matty Glesias) about campaign staffers and consultants and how they can harm progressives. Maybe a stereotype, but these staffers and consultants tend to be more educated and more progressive than the average person. That bias (maybe placement on a spectrum is a more neutral way to describe it) leads democratic messaging to be more extreme than it otherwise would be. But that same bias leads republican messaging to be more centrist than it otherwise would be. So the structure of the campaign/consulting operation leads to republican messaging being more palatable to potential swing voters, while democratic messaging experiences the opposite.
I’m not sure that this is provable, but again this seemed compelling to me.
I don’t find it compelling at all that Democrats lose because their messaging is too left wing. The median voter likes M4A, taxing the rich, paid leave, and free college more than the Dem congressional caucus does. Even pathway to citizenship polls very well.
Look at how they crushed in 2018. Again it wasn’t by pivoting away from progressivism, it was by hammering it.
Messaging should be about narrative, not individual policy positions. Democrats lack a unifying narrative that brings all factions within the party together.
These things aren’t necessarily hand in hand. Like you can fight for 10 policy initiatives and use polls to tell you which ones will resonate most with voters. Many Dems hamstring themselves from the get go by not having any sincere progressve ideology, but the ones that do must also hammer the popular ones over and over again. Bernie is good at this. He just says MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES over and over again because its popular. It works.
They can’t even agree on really obvious ones like “the Federal government is a good thing actually” and “those guys over there are actual Nazis”. Instead we get “BuT hOw ArE wE gOnNa PaY fOr It?!?!” and “those guys over there are our friends and we have to work with them”.
Bernie was winning before the media kneecapped him. He was the betting favorite in all 50 states in the primary at one point after Iowa. Warren, while the lesser of the two, also polled at the top for a time and was near or at the top of the betting lines.
Biden and Hillary won the nomination because the media made them out to be the sensible choice. Also the full thrust of the Dem party machinery was behind them. Meanwhile Bernie was probably going to hang Chris Matthews in Central Park.
Yes the ideas are enormously popular but until you figure out how to defeat the billionaire class propaganda it’s going to be nearly impossible to succeed here. And that’s frankly before you consider all of the new and built in structural problems in our voting, electing and power systems.
Is the entire Dem field most of who had more delegates than Biden all dropping out in unison and backing him angle also overplayed? Guess they all came to the same conclusion at the same time rather than their puppet masters pulling their strings.
How did they know Biden was going to win? He was at like 9c on Predictit and hadn’t finished above 5th in any of the previous primaries. Like you seem like a fine poster but this is just a revisionist dogshit attempt to justify what happened. If it was so obvious you could have made a fortune on Biden in the betting markets.
Bernie was still a sizeable favorite after SC before the rest of the Dems betrayed him on the eve of ST. Biden and him were basically a push on ST AFTER all that. I know. I bet on it and got crushed.
It’s an idiotic election system from top to bottom. Sanders was supposed to sway voters for 6 months that even if successful will net him 0 electoral votes in November.
Progressives just need to get better at gaming the system.
betting markets… oh boy.
it is a complete dogshit stab-in-the-back myth that bernie would have won if not for media. his voters didn’t show up except to high school gym caucuses where they could throw fits until they get their way. yeah it doesn’t quite make sense if you read twitter all day which is full of bernie bros, but the rest of the democrats aren’t swallowing some emails conspiracy just because it’s about the clintons or the bidens.
Bernie was always weaker than his most ardent supporters would concede, and I personally think he loses to Trump a fair bit more often than Biden does, but it is pretty undeniable that the Democratic party saw there was a path to Bernie winning the nomination (his strong 1/3 or w/e of the party supporters rolling up delegates vs. he uninspiring centrist candidates who couldnt consolidate support on their own) and acted to consolidate centrist support around a single candidate including pressuring other centrist candidates to leave the race.
Bernie was always a massive underdog running as a socialist outsider guy from Vermont vs. the anointed Dem establishment pick. The fact that he did as well as he did in ‘16 and ‘20 is a strong testament to how much people like progressive ideas and how poorly the eDem brand is resonating.
Has anyone considered that centrist candidates consolidated around Biden because Bernie wasn’t a good enough politician to discourage them from doing so?
There’s no way Bernie was ever going to stop Pete and Warren from endorsing Biden
I think you can say Bernie has never really tried to be a party guy, for better or for worse, but in March 2020 not sure what there is that he could have done. Closest thing I can think of was unite with Warren at some point sooner, but idk, seems like a real heavy lift.
Also still think if COVID had hit six weeks earlier Bernie would have been the nominee.
Warren didn’t officially endorse Biden until after Sanders did. The Bernie Bros like to be mad about Warren not endorsing Sanders, but he deserves part of the blame for not doing enough to win her over.