It is somewhat more important to appeal to the base
It is equally important to appeal to both the base and the center
It is somewhat more important to appeal to the center
It is much more important to appeal to the center
I don’t know
0voters
One meta-political topic is whether it is more important to appeal to the base or the center. While the mainstream media has bought into the narrative that you have to appeal to the center, I lean towards the idea that one of the lessons of 2016 is that it is more important to appeal to one’s political base. This is most obviously played out in arguments over political candidates, where Sanders/Warren have more extreme positions that might be more appealing to Democratic voters and Biden/Buttigieg supporters might argue that Sanders and Warren are too off-putting for centrists, never-Trumpers, and other voters who they believe can be pulled away from Trump.
We could also see this with impeachment, where pro-impeachment forces wanted a strong front that would appeal to voters inclined to become partisan Democrats, whereas those who wanted to be more cautious didn’t want to move forward with the center in tow.
I am certainly in favor of prioritizing appealing to the base even if it means turning off some centrists. We should be building long-lasting coalitions with a firm foundation. What Trump did was peel off a bunch of voters who were uncomfortable with minorities being part of that foundation. Our goal shouldn’t be to get those voters back, but to figure out what sort of re-alignment makes them unnecessary.
But how do we do this? One problem that I see with Democrats is a tendency to want to be the voice of reason. I am in favor of a more populist tone that appeals to emotion rather than reason. We can quibble over what is appropriate, but there is a conscious choice on my part to speak about politics the way that I do. I see the left as sometimes having an ego-driven desire to be seen as smart. I don’t see being smarter than Republicans as a core part of the identity of Democrats, so I don’t feel a need to “prove” that Democrats are smarter. I believe that stoking hate and anger on the part of the left is a key to pushing turnout.
So, the basic question is who the Democrats’ base should be and how do you get them to turn out. If you abandon the idea that the white working class Trump voter is part of the base, then what direction should we go in?
I think that it’s a pretty close question when it comes to winning the election… but what Trump has demonstrated extremely clearly is that the political mandate that you get from appealing to the base and winning is about 1000x stronger than the political mandate you get from being a centrist. Why? Because you get to be an absolute tyrant over your own party. You have an enormous amount of power over your own parties primary voters and can use that like a club to force the centrist members of your own party to do as they are told.
If you want to hold the office because it looks good on your resume it might be better to tack to the center in the general election… but if you want to get stuff done after the election running as your parties champion is massively better.
Let’s be really clear: the only reason Donald didn’t get more done is that he’s an idiot who spent most of his massive political capital with GOP politicians on covering up his own crimes. If he were actually good at this he would have gotten pretty much his whole agenda done and won seats in 2018.
The parties are different and their bases are different. Before the dotard, the GOP base was basically the religious right and weird uncles who sent racist chain mails. Now it’s just a cult of personality, and a cult so large that I don’t even think the base/not base distinction has any meaning for Republicans.
The Democratic party is more diverse and their base is more diverse. I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what the base is. Older AA voters, progressives, hard core lefties, highly educated/filthy rich professionals (ok lol not them), women?
Do you have a basis for those numbers or are you just using a guess that happens to support what you think is the correct course of action?
There’s an argument that the percentage of voters who are true independents is in the single digits. A lot of independents claim to be so because they buy into a myth about their own rationality, when they can be considered to be dependable votes for one party or the other (if they choose to vote). There is a case to be made that self-proclaimed independents who the parties need to appeal to are voters who are turned off more by corrupt and ineffective party establishments and not by extreme policy positions.
I would argue that difference in bases means that the GOP base is constructed so that you only need a single unified message to appeal to them, but Democrats have a more pluralistic base which requires multiple approaches simultaneously.
To put it another way, I think that the GOP message is more consistent with a unified Enlightenment metanarrative and that the Democratic approach needs a postmodernist multiplicity of overlapping viewpoints.
ITT leftists develop elaborate meta theories to pat themselves on the back for not appealing to voters. Per the Fundamental Theorem of Politics (“Win elections.”), you need to appeal to all the voters. If you can’t appeal to all the voters, you need to be better at politics, not navel-gaze about which voters it’s morally preferable to alienate.
Your strat sure worked well in 2000, 2004, and 2016. All kidding aside in the last 20 years you aren’t even batting .500 despite winning the popular vote two out of those three losses. The only positive experiences you’ve produced in the post Reagan era came from highly charismatic candidates in Clinton and Obama. None of the centrists in this cycle are worthy of shining either of their shoes… and that’s only if you decide to call Obama a centrist even though he ran as a proud progressive.
The American people don’t want an establishment centrist. They elected a black guy twice vs establishment centrists followed by a reality TV host. They hate establishment centrists. Stop trying to force them to eat their broccoli already. It’s not even healthy as those establishment centrists have gotten literally nothing good for the median family done.
I don’t think you understood the post. You should be a centrist rather than a leftist because centrism is a great, but ideologically centrist candidates also need to appeal to everyone so they can win and implement centrism.
Elections are won by turning out your base. There are not enough swing voters/independents that can be swayed to make it worthwhile to alienate your base.
So I was going to say something like the GOP under the dotard amounts to a culmination, perfection, and supersession of postmodernist jiggery-pokery that has insinuated into the minds of racists and rubes a contempt for a society based on law, reasoning, and science, but without all of the inscrutable doctoral jargon, but basically you’re right, a base of aggrieved whites is more likely to follow a single unified message than a heterogeneous base of people with a wider range of lived experiences.
It makes sense to campaign with a multiplicity of overlapping viewpoints then, but you’re not going to have the dotard’s Orwellian flexibility to have your voters equally accept true and not true statements so you’re going to struggle with resolving any contradictions that are bound to arise.
It drives me nuts that people can’t grasp this simple concept:
The GOP base is 40%. Look at the polls. That’s a guarantee. 40% will vote for Trump or whoever. It does not matter how much corruption they have, or how little they care about the Constitution. This is the base anyone who doesn’t agree with that base has to beat.
Inside the Democratic Party there is no faction that can beat that 40% by itself. The centrist Democrats are the largest block of the Democratic Party, and the other 6 percent of the old GOP base has moved into being independent. They are aligning with the centrist Democrats, making their base larger not smaller.
So the idea is that we need to be worried about ‘moderate’ GOP people (as of even 15 years ago) abandoning the current GOP for what will essentially be them becoming (without saying) part of The Third Way. ‘Good’ liberals (outside of the mainstream Dem Party) almost always vote for whoever is up in the Party. Therefore, a huge amount of the ‘base’ is made up of centrists and liberals who will vote for whoever the nominee is. This is all to say that if the liberals and centrists who will vote for the nominee keep aligned, it’s really close to 40 percent. This is why the centrists have power. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party will most likely not get to be the overwhelming influence in the party for at least 4 to 8 more years (it ain’t going to be 2020 sorry).
Look at impeachment. 90 Democrats were willing to go on the record about it prior to Mueller testifying. 130 were willing after he testified, and it was slow getting to that point. It eventually got into the mid 150s the more bad stuff Trump did. It wasn’t until really vulnerable people (along with a huge scandal that was an obviously impeachable offense, in addition to the other already obviously impeachable offenses) that most of the rest got on board. The people screaming the absolute loudest on impeachment are all former GOP members who feel like their party was stolen from them. These people are much louder than most of the people in the left wing of the Democratic Party. That’s really disappointing.
Cliffs: Until we can beat the 40 percent GOP base with the voters we have available and reliable, this is irrelevant. Blowing up the system means we will have generations that will be dedicated to what that 40 percent GOP base of the country wants. We have two very old SC justices on the court right now. If you’re looking for a rubber stamp court for the worst GOP policy, blowing it up in 2020 is the easiest way for that to happen. You can’t win long term strategy if you don’t think about the short term first. I’ve given a strong strategy on moving the party left, and none of the blow it up people have countered it with something that won’t end up in a long term disaster for anyone with left leaning policies. Imagine the prospects of the furthest left policies under that scenario.
I deny the premise that trying to appeal to the widest range of voters maximizes votes. Intensity of support matters in trying to turn out the vote, so it can be better to have a somewhat smaller range of rabid supporters instead of a wider range of tepid supporters.
My take is that this is just unanswerable. In some cases this strategy works in others it doesn’t, but way too many moving parts to have a solid theory about it, a priori or empirical.
If most liberals and centrists will vote for whoever is the nominee, then a strong progressive and a moderate are about equally electable. I believe a progressive is more likely to lead to policies that work, creating more electoral support down the road. If short-term is a push and long-term favors supporting a liberal, then a more leftward course is warranted.
That’s what primaries are for. We’re determining which path the ‘bloc’ of the Democratic Party wants right now. I think it aligns with Warren. It could align with Sanders. It could align with Biden. Whoever it is needs to be backed by everyone (I am concerned the Third Way people won’t vote Sanders, but that’s not up to them). I don’t care if a ‘vote doesn’t count’ in a state in the general, we need to send a message. We are bigger than you, and it is only getting worse. To leave that vote in your pocket is like saying you want more of this ‘divided’ country that is not nearly as divided as people claim. The division is 40 percent of voters and will get smaller and smaller by the year.
And this is exactly the right moment to test this. The reality is that DJT is the most divisive candidate of the last hundred years. There is a huge chunk of the electorate that would vote for Lenin over Trump while holding their noses. So the important thing for the Democrats is to turn out the traditionally lower turnout parts of the base. That means young people, poor people, and the disaffected people who think both parties suck. The only way to do that is to be authentic, have a clear message, and offer them something big.
This means not tacking to the center much at all. It means running on free national healthcare, legal weed, decriminalized opiates (along with a major effort to stem the opiate epidemic), criminal justice reform, and if I had my way UBI. Going big here is pretty safe because centrists aren’t going to magically vote for Donald after the last 3.5 years. At worst they stay home.
The one thing I would strongly recommend against is investing much if any effort into talking about social issues like gay rights, or targeting messages at minorities. Not because these things don’t matter or we don’t care about them, but because vs Trump they simply aren’t necessary. Minority voters are going to turn out at an extreme level just to vote Trump out, and the economic populist message has them right in the crosshairs anyway.
Ideally you want to run on class warfare not on racial injustice. The reality is that any policy that you put forward that improves the lot of people in the bottom 60% of the population is going to disproportionately benefit minorities, and whenever we get asked about it we need to make sure we mention that without going into greater detail.
It’s also not commonly known but among poor whites the criminal justice system is not even a little bit popular. Speaking as a poor white dude I’ve known a lot of people who have had extremely unpleasant experiences with law enforcement (and unfortunately I’ve had a couple of my own). The reason poor whites have so much resistance to the concept of white guilt is that they feel pretty oppressed themselves and aren’t interested in hearing about how other people have it worse… because they immediately think that means they’ll have to wait in line to get helped. Let’s not give them any excuses to activate their racism when it comes time to cast their votes. Let’s keep them thinking about what’s in it for them. People who are drowning can’t think beyond that honestly.