It remains a big problem that democrats are a coalition while the GOP remains much more monolithic. One can argue that the democrats lost voters over supporting trans rights, but they would have lost voters NOT supporting trans rights. Same deal with Israel - there is no way to be on the same page with everyone.
This stuff matters less for Republicans because they have good ol’ racism on which they can all agree.
Dems need a strong pillar that makes disagreement on other issues less important, and it should be workers’ rights and income/wealth equality imo, but nah they’re not going to do that either.
I agree. Seems like the number one goal of the Dems has to be breaking down barriers to the coalition. They have to stop gate keeping membership and allow for people who have different positions on some issues.
NAFTA might have been to the Democrats political detriment, but I’m skeptical they wouldn’t have just lost those same voters without NAFTA. The American working class was always going to lose out to global trade. Maybe NAFTA being tied to Clinton hurts Dems politically but those voters relative standing was going to decline over the same decades, NAFTA or not, and they were going to blame it on something. Probably was always going to be Democrats, immigrants, and minorities no matter what Democrats actually did over that time period.
Like no NAFTA and same trade policies to toward China and the EU since mid 90’s puts the working class in this country in basically the same place and the immigration problem might be even worse as we’ve worsened the economic conditions in Mexico because jobs that shifted there under NAFTA have now gone to asia.
Clinton did a lot of Republican stuff and tried to do even more, including privatize social security. NAFTA was drafted during the George HW Bush admin. The countries all signed the draft. When it was ratified in the Clinton admin, a significant majority of Democrats voted against it.
I don’t think Republican voters are nearly as monolithic as they look from inside a liberal bubble. And they can’t seem to tell the difference between AOC and Nancy Pelosi from inside their bubble.