It fails to change their minds because Democrats make their policies suck by watering them down, means testing them, and other bullshit.
Infrastructure was supposed to be this massive bill that invested in the future. It got neutered to just over $1 trillion over 10 years.
And don’t get me started on Obamacare. That was a Heritage Foundation idea prototyped by Mitt Romney. Democrats had 60 senators at the time. SIXTY! That’s the best they could do?
And while the media obviously sucks, it is a lot easier for them to let these races become about bullshit when the Democrats nominate losers like Terry McAuliffe. And John Kerry, and Al Gore, etc. The establishment leadership is bought and paid for. They’re laughably corrupt and refuse to let authentically compelling candidates see the light of day. They fucking hate AOC and Bernie, way more than Republicans.
Why do you think the less watered down version polls worse, especially with the type of voters you think it will win over?
Wait, what?
Stuff like paid family leave and a higher minimum wage and higher taxes on billionaires are overwhelmingly popular.
The full BBB bill that progressives support is way less popular than the bill that passed that some progressives voted against.
Do you think AOC and Bernie are corrupt/not good and that’s why Trump would crush them with the white working class? Or maybe something else is going on.
i always thought it was erroneous that bernie supporters portrayed his platform as somehow bucking the dems. yeah he blamed corporations and inequality in a way that was passionate and genuine, and evidently was needed in the age of rising polarization, rather than an appeasement tack to the center. but you can listen to ted kennedy’s 1980 convention concession speech and he’s at least as left and as populist as bernie, even though by all measures ted was the party “elite,” who was taken down by the corporate wing platform of checks notes jimmy carter. and then appreciate the fact that by 2000s everyone remembers jimmy carter as the socialist, and kennedy is still fighting for federal money to pay off contractors on the big dig. i think a more likely explanation is that bernie’s ideas were already there, mostly in the democratic party, but we don’t have good memory or judgement about ideology even within our own wing of politics.
i agree that democrats played this poorly in the long run, but i would not have wished at the time that democrats gerrymandered and/or captured the judiciary first. track record of parties that start stacking the courts is decidedly authoritarian, and pretty much escalate culture wars as a way to get there. i can’t think of any recent countries where the judiciary system was changed without an angle like that and the democracy score increased, or inequity lessened.
in hindsight, how do you prevent federalist society from ever forming, or corporations eventually seizing mechanisms of public opinion? i guess without some forms of political repression. ianal, but doubting a “law” or a bill could have saved us.
That’s because the media on both sides hammer it and call it socialism and centrist dems do nothing to counter that message. The individual policies still poll super high.
Even if we granted that Democrats are implementing effective infrastructure then most of those would be too abstract for most voters to give credit to the Dems.
It’s more that they’re too fucking inept at messaging to make it clear to voters…
Even my passing curiosity in history lets me know that the key to being effective at leading a popular political movement is hammering a simple message over and over. Yet dems are either silent on popular shit or doing long convoluted nonsensical shit.
Most people don’t even realize they owe the last stimulus checks and child payments to dems.
The gerontocracy is so out of control people even wanted Bernie Sanders to be president!
The issue is the rampant status anxiety in America. Like “economic anxiety” became a punchline but there are broader anxieties. It’s there on a national level with crumbling infrastructure and institutions and military empire increasingly slipping from America’s grasp. It’s there on a cultural level for a lot of rural white America. It’s there generationally for Boomers. And for a bunch of swing voters it’s there economically too. Even for those who are relatively well off, what matters is relative change in status rather than absolute status.
The problem for Dems is that even if they acknowledged this, which most of them never do, they have no villain to pin it on. You can see the psychic hunger for clear villains being expressed in QAnon. If you don’t want the villain to be immigrants and black people, it has to be someone else. And it can’t be Dangerous Donald because that makes no fucking sense. The only option for creating a villain from a left-wing point of view would be class warfare, and in particular the indictment of the Washington neoliberal consensus.
The Dems are a million miles away from turning the neoliberal consensus or the ruling classes into the villain of the day. AOC wearing an Eat the Rich dress is not getting it done. The villainy of the ruling classes can’t be expressed in urban liberal cultural terms.
DSA
these people have completely lost their minds
loldidn’tread but a dude that graduated from my school is still married with multiple kids to a girl that he dated when he was 18 and she was 16 and her parents pushed the issue. Sex offender for life.
So they went from “sex offender” to “adults who commit sexual offences”?
Is that terrible? I’ll cosign on unnecessary.
how does that work for Thxgiving? Or did the daughter cut them off?
I don’t know them. Just have friends of friends that have told me they are still together in last few years so that’s almost 30 years of marriage. Can’t be much worse than my family holidays lol.
Doesn’t seem to bad overall. More of a mountin out of a molehill either way. None of the laws are changing and they’re changing sex offender to person who commits sex offenses. Hardly pandering to sex offenders there. Recidivism reduction is probably overblown
Reached for comment, the Senator replied “I’ve always loved cinnamon.”
You’re like 500 years old leave it to your fucking kids and let them decide jfc you already have more money than you can spend.
Make it make sense. Why sell it? Seriously someone explain