This is the major reason why it makes no sense to try and chase voters. They are totally incoherent and believe a million mutually contradictory things. What people respond to is integrity (or in the case of trump insane overconfidence masquerading as integrity). Set out your stall and fight for it. Only stump for policies you actually fully believe in and want to get done no wishy washing backing nafta then denouncing nafta then backing it again as the wind changes. If you support it say why and try to sell your vision. Thatâs what leaders are supposed to do. Voters donât fucking know what nafta is but the know a flip flopper when they see one.
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I am more about prioritizing economic issues over social issues.
I think I didnât explain that last part well (itâs late). Lately it seems like if you arenât for Bernieâs specific M4A plan (or something that completely eliminates private insurance) and you arenât for free college for everyone, the far left doesnât want to consider you progressive.
Like, âoh, they are against M4A and against free college, so theyâre a goddamned centristâ is the most common gatekeeping I see.
If youâre saying metastasized cancer is a symptom of death, sure. If youâre saying that you have a headache, bloody stool, and other symptoms of metastasized cancer, no itâs not even remotely the same thing and that is what he is saying.
Heâs a person who thinks the GOP is the disease, when itâs the symptom. Their policies are leading to this. Trump is a result of all of these symptoms, because they couldnât get tired of âwinningâ by cheating, or selling out everyone to meet their goals. Sorry, itâs the truth, and this has been going on since the early 80s. Four words, Council for National Policy.
Iâll admit, I was sort of going off George Lakoff there, and a takeaway is the morality, values, and language we use is much more effective than policy nuts and bolts. I know heâs persona non grata around here, but one of the thing that Pete has said from the beginning is that if you explain your values to people, they are much more likely to come along with you than if you throw a bunch of policy in their faceâŚeven if they donât agree with you on those policies
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Sure. Iâm all about the big gestures rather than the nitty gritty. But âvaluesâ still feels wishy washy. You donât need to get into the weeds of policy (and you shouldnât) but you should be able to confidently say everyone in a modern developed country will have free healthcare no caveats and no mean testing or risk pools or mandates just free healthcare for you and your kids and your granny forever.
I wouldnât be too worried about the tribalism of Bernie bros. Iâve argued with a few online who want to make the case that Warren isnât progressive and that Sanders is the only true progressive in the race.
You can only do so much to tout your own candidate. Eventually, you hit a ceiling where the only way you gain more votes is by driving up your opponentsâ negatives. Maybe, Buttigieg should want to embrace that and create separation between himself and Warren/Sanders while trying to make Biden look less electable so that he becomes the non-left alternative.
The GOP didnât become the way it is because of Trump. Trump capitalized on the way the Republican Party was trending because the party establishment was lagging too far behind. (By the way, the CNP seem to have backed Ted Cruz in 2016.) The shift of the Solid South from Democrat to Republican put this in motion. The Council for National Policy seems more like an attempt to maximize the new coalition that Republicans were working towards as they picked off southern Congressional seats one by one. It didnât create the modern GOP, it just worked to organize it into a more effective machine.
The Republican Party in its current form was created by the white backlash against the civil rights movement. For a long time they used dog whistles and didnât say the quiet parts out loud. Trump was the first to show them maybe you didnât have to be quiet, but if he hadnât come along, someone else eventually would have. Maybe it was because the less racist economic conservatives had gotten so used to associating with racists that they had gotten used to being in their company and maybe even soaked up some of their values, so it bothered them less when racists said racist things.
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Where is the disconnect? I am not saying that the GOP became the way it is because of Trump. I am saying Trump is the end result of what the GOP has been since the early 80s.
I wouldnât use âvaluesâ. What I would say is that narrative is more important than individual policies.
I donât understand why you feel a disconnect with Cactus on this particular point. It feels to me like you are going out of your way to avoid agreeing with him.
Duuuuuuude, you just said that I said the GOP did not become the way it is because of Trump (you are calling Trump the symptom and the GOP the disease by phrasing it that way, when the GOP is the symptom and Trump is the result). That is 180 degrees the opposite of what I said. As I just said, Trump is the result. I am 180 degrees opposite of this on Cactus like I am on every single piece of strategy he is floating. Please stop misrepresenting my position.
If I am misrepresenting your position, it is because I donât get your distinction between the symptom and âthe resultâ. You may show certain symptoms as having a result of a disease.
As I see it, you both agree that Trump is the effect and not the cause, if we strip this of any medical analogy. You may disagree on what the cause is, but probably not on the need to attack the cause. Where am I going wrong?
He is the END, NOT THE MIDDLE. Iâm so out of this thread.
To put this a different way:
I am saying the GOP is the cigarette, and Trump is the lung cancer.
He is saying Trump is the cigarette, and the GOP is the lung cancer.
I feel like Cactus is saying that a corrupt and broken system is the cigarette and Trump is the lung cancer. Where he differs from you is in seeing the Democratic establishment as part of the cigarette.
IIRC under Obama anyone caught at the border and sent back was counted as deported while under Bush they were counted under a different heading. Thatâs why deportations under Obama seemingly skyrocketed.
Probably not. Pro-life will likely override minimum wage+environment.
In both cases we have to ask is what we can offer them enough that they will prioritize progressive issues over their non-progressive views. We donât offer the homophobe the right to discriminate or promise he can keep his assault rifle because a) itâs the right thing to do and b) would cost way more progressive votes than it gets homophobic/gun lover votes.
The last paragraph is delusional. The first half of Obamaâs term was spent passing a huge stimulus bill, then engaging in a protracted, politically damaging war to secure healthcare reform legislation. I know you all donât like Obamacare, but you should at least recognize that it passed with precisely 60 votes, the minimum allowable number to override the filibuster and that the features of the plan you donât like (no public option) were dictated by genuine RINO but also indispensable vote Joe Lieberman, not Obama. In fact, Obama had less than 60 votes after Scott Brown was elected, but used procedural trickery of the kind that the Dems purportedly never do to secure passage of the conference legislation through the reconciliation process. Nevertheless, Obamacare was the biggest progressive legislative victory since the Great Society. (Also Dodd-Frank, Lily Ledbetter, DADT repeal.)
Itâs also important to understand that the GOP landslide in 2010 was, in part, a response to the unpopularity of Obamaâs progressive legislation (including Scott Brownâs special election). Thereâs nothing wrong with that (the point of winning elections is to do policy), but itâs a martyrdom fantasy to imagine that you were somehow betrayed by Obama centrists in 2010. The reality is that, at a broad level, Obama used the filibuster-proof majority in the Senate while he had it to pass a bunch of progressive legislation at very significant political cost, and, while you could certainly question how tradeoffs between different progressive priorities were made, thereâs little reason to believe that a more progressive president could have done more. In particular, if you think that President Sanders could have gotten M4A through the 2008 Senate, youâre just wrong.
Matt Yglesias often makes the point that primary debates about legislative priorities are dumb, because Sanders or Warren are not going to be able to pass legislation that Klobuchar or Harris opposes because they need those votes and more. This is why the appeal a lot to everyone principle is important, even though, as @microbet suggests, it lacks a bit in terms of specific content. At least it doesnât have wrong content,
The other benefit of the appeal-to-everyone theory is that it escapes these bad-faith meta-debates. If you assume that you should select your policy positions to maximize electability, you entangle a question of principle with a pragmatic question. Literally 100% of people approach this entanglement by coming up with bad-faith arguments to âproveâ that their principles just happen to be the keys that will unlock massive electoral success. (Another Yglesias point.) And then the electability argument sabotages the argument about the substance of policy by diverting it into a supposedly resolvable factual question about electioneering. But everyone is arguing in bad faith, so nothing gets done. And thereâs no genuine debate about policy either. At a first approximation, a voter should cast a primary vote for the candidate who maximizes P(primary vote changes outcome) * P(preferred candidate wins general) * (marginal value of policy preferred candidate can achieve once elected). In a two-party general election, you should vote for the better candidate.
For candidates and their advisors, itâs much more complicated, because you need to make everyone like you more. A pathology of the left is that effective campaigning is viewed as a stab-in-the-back betrayal. This is also a pathology of open primaries, particular large-field ones, because the only way to command a strong following is to have unique star power or else to just tell a subset of voters exactly what they want to hear. But in a broad election, politicians should tell everyone what they want to hear (so that everyone will like them more), or at least emphasize points of commonality while downplaying contentious issues (to avoid making anyone dislike you). For example, even if you think M4A is the best policy, itâs fairly obvious that you should campaign on a robust public option, because: (1) M4A canât get through the senate, and (2) a robust public option polls much better than M4A. This is heresy though, so candidates are vying to tie themselves to a political loser position (that is not realistically enactable) and will then be handicapped when they try to run a broader campaign in the general. Senseless.
This is normally where people start rambling about a revolution and leadership and a bunch of other nonsense. Because the electability debate is inherently bad faith, itâs hard to tell whether this is just a bad-faith argument (made in good faith, if that makes sense? People donât understand why theyâre making these terrible arguments) or whether they are really delusional, but if you think thereâs going to be some political revolution that activates transformative forces on the scene⌠shouldnât there be mass demonstrations and general strikes in support of Sanders going on? It reminds me a bit of the Ron Paul rEVOLution, where there were endless predictions of how moneybombs were going to trigger a wave of support from voters who werenât captured in the polls because they didnât have landlines (I swear!), but really it was all just a grift.
And, I have made this point before, but if you want a revolution in American politics, the answer is not electing President Sanders to try to enact M4A. Itâs unclear how that leads to a revolution, and it will actually lead to a thermostatic swing in favor of the GOP, a la Obamacare. What would be both more electable and more transformative would be a Democracy 2020 agenda supported by Democrats up and down the ticket to clean up some of the countermajoritarian tactics that the GOP relies on: New Voting Rights Act, DC/PR statehood, anti-gerrymandering initiative (perhaps state-level proportional rep?), popular vote interstate compact, election security, etc. Those initiatives are easy to sell to all and would have a huge, lasting impact on what is possible. The problem with trying to campaign on socialism as a transformative ideology is (and this is disappointingly simple) that itâs not very popular. You may well say that this is just prejudice and when you explain to someone that socialism really means that everyone gets healthcare and an education, then they like it. But unless you are going to talk to every voter (and make sure no one else talks to them and says that socialism is really workers controlling the means of production), then why arenât you just starting with the popular things that you are going to equate socialism to anyways?
EDIT: Trump is a bad candidate to use as an example for anything, because he is very unpopular and lost the popular vote by a historic margin, but the way he avoids being even more unpopular is largely by downplaying his unpopular base positions (lower taxes on the rich, cut healthcare for the poor) and emphasizing popular positions (make healthcare great somehow, make America great, boo foreigners [who, it must be noted, canât vote!]). Itâs not by selling hard-right policies that are unpopular. The unpopular hard-right policies come in the back door, while the most popular ones are up front entertaining the guests.
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You make a lot of good points but the fact remains that virtually nothing was accomplished after a huge electoral win. And I donât think it was Obamaâs fault as much as it was the other party members who were elected. With a super majority you should be able to accomplish things your voters wanted. They didnât. Sure some of it was due to the circumstance but a big part of it was there was no appetite amongst some of the Dems to really do anything.
Which is kind of my point. You canât achieve what most of us want just through winning elections. That is just one half of the equation (and a very important one).
Now consider how pathetic it is that the biggest legislative victory for the Democrats with a Democrat in the the WH, control of the House and a super-majority in the Senate is to roll out Romneyâs Massachusettes healthcare initiative nation-wide.
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