The fundamental problem with the Democratic Party is that they aren’t for anything in the eyes of most voters. Ask 100 people on the street what Democrats want to do and you’ll probably get a lot of different answers, but most of them will almost certainly be based on Republican framing and messaging. “Higher taxes,” “welfare,” “socialism,” etc. And while we rightfully complain about the media, that’s fundamentally the fault of Party leadership for not having a consistent message. Ask 100 people what Republicans want to do and I guarantee the answers will be highly clustered, again around framing beneficial for the GOP. “Lower taxes,” “strong military,” “strong economy,” etc.
Complaining that the other guys are terrible is not a good strategy. At all.
The analysis like the one above looks at things that are happening (Hispanics bolting for the Republican Party, for one) as just things that magically are occurring. No, that’s happening because Democratic messaging is fucking dogshit. And its dogshit because of the leadership.
My stepdad was a fairly racist not-very-political union mechanic from Texas. His line was always, “I’ll say one thing for the unions, at least they try to do something for the working man.”
When Dems lost the unions they lost their message with the working class.
Right. You have to just give people shit, period. When every program is a technocratic orgy of subsidies and credits and means testing, you don’t get credit for it even if the program actually benefits people.
JUST GIVE PEOPLE MONEY. It isn’t hard. Biden should just wipe away student debt by executive order. Who fucking cares if its legal, DO SOMETHING and make the GOP oppose it.
Gallup polling shows party affiliation (Rep/Ind/Dem) as of Nov 9th, 2016: 27/40/30. As of Oct 27th, 2020: 31/36/31. Even if ‘affiliation’ and party registration are like, completely divorced, just straight uncorrelated, I don’t see how this person can be correct when Trump improved his numbers among registered Republicans.
I don’t doubt that it’s true that some ‘moderate Republicans’, whatever that means, were Trump>Biden. It’s even possible that the number of those switchers > Biden’s margin of victory. But, as in 2016 and indeed as always, Presidential elections are massive affairs with many moving parts and zeroing in on any one as fully determinative is always, always, always either idiocy or ideological predisposition.
The numbers aren’t all in yet, it’s way too early for a definitive analysis. But there’s every reason to be highly suspicious of any Demwonk ghoul who managed to be wrong about fucking everything going in to the election taking all of their mistaken assumptions about turnout, about vote share, about voter demographics etc and weaving them into a story about how they were right all along about the only viable path being to woo moderate Republicans. I don’t fucking buy it and neither should you.
I’m skeptical on his claims. Just from quickly skimming open secrets his opponent received most of her money from in the state while half his money came from out of state. She also got triple the amount of small contributions compared to him so a lot more regular people gave her money. He on the other hand raised almost all of his money from PACs lol
Also he ran against the local businesswoman in an election that seems to have brought out a lot of people siding with businesses and the economy.
I’m not saying he didn’t have people talk to him about socialism and all that but I know he sure as hell didn’t talk to all the voters and making those claims off of select few convos seems fishy
He should do what he can. Student loan forgiveness also happens to be very effective economic stimulus. It’s true that it’s not fair to people who didn’t go into debt for school, but it’s going to be life changing for a lot of working class people who dropped out of college.
We really have to stop caring so much about whether or not something we have the power to do is fair or how it’s going to be received. If it helps people and doesn’t hurt anyone we should just do it.
Besides that the college educated voters are a demographic we need to shore up as much as we can going into 2022.
This is absolutely the answer. Dems keep putting out half-assed measures that if you dig deep really do help people, but look like a pile of shit to the average voter. ACA? Sure, helped a bunch of people, like 10 or 20 million. But the other 200 million see a convoluted mess when if they just did even a public option it’s easy to see from the general public how it helps. Wiping out student loans is another big one. Or giving people UBI. The dems need to actually do a sweeping measure that’s going to help people, really all people (except the rich). But instead we’ll get some watered down version of a republican measure instead.
Hard to sell your ideas to people when they’re wrapped up in a bunch of technocratic bullshit that they can’t understand. “We want to give you free healthcare, free schooling, and take care of your basic neccessities”, and then do it, even while the republicans are screaming about socialism. They’re going to scream about it whether you do it or not so you might as well do it.
One thing you can always count on on European day tours is the idiot American who asks the tour guide how much they pay in taxes, to “prove” how much better America must be.
I absolutely loved Oslo, btw. Near the top of the list for cities I wish I could retire to.
Shor is right. So is AOC. They aren’t mutually exclusive things! What Shor says happened did, in fact happen. But that doesn’t mean we should never talk about lefty policies. It just means we need to talk about them better! I can’t understand why we’re fighting about this.
