LOL if you think I’m a leftist. Pretty sure my posting history on all the various sites we’ve been on tells a pretty different story. But I do think the establishment strategy of running one centrist after another and shifting further and further to the right to keep fighting over these mythical unicorn undecided moderates is leading us to political demise. I laid out a brief synoposis of the electoral strategy issues and you just ignored it.
As for the messaging, again, I think the establishment is just failing hard. They’re not winning over conservative voters but damn if they’re not losing progressives.
My dad is a NeverTrumper who was historically a right-center voter who usually voted for Republicans. He LOVED Bernie last time and was disappointed he didn’t win the primary, then either voted for Gary Johnson or didn’t vote. I’m pretty sure he’s on board with whoever wins the Dem primary, but he’s already made a couple comments about not liking Biden so far. He’s your unicorn centrist, and he doesn’t like the guy he’s supposed to and loves the guy he’s supposed to hate.
Why? Bernie actually has better messaging for him on economic issues!
Good point about Indiana having a Dem senator those years. It feels like it’s impossible for a Dem to win statewide now, but I guess that wasn’t the case when he moved back home.
Yeah, I pretty much agree. I suppose Pete might have a non-zero chance in Indiana statewide, but it’s damn near single digits. He’d need a Roy Moore type opponent to be drawing any liver than that. Pretty sure neither of those Senate seats are up, either.
Dems would need strong democracy reform to perhaps bring Indiana back into play. I don’t recall any specifics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some voter suppression going on there.
Biden is the leading candidate. These aren’t unicorns supporting him. I posted a Vice News clip on the Exiled site of Midwesterners for Biden. One of the ladies said Biden is Obama. Whether or not she supports M4A is moot. Her supporting Biden is effectively her saying she’s fine with Biden’s plan to fix Obamacare right up.
I’m not specifically talking about you entirely. There’s a trend with tankie LARPers and chapocels to deride people as centrist online like it means anything. You point out that centrist are unicorns while they seem to be a real thing because of Biden, and if Sanders is as effective at messaging as you say he should have walked all over Biden by now and won over those people.
The truth is the “left” has been yelling at those people for the past three-ish years. Sanders hasn’t been good at getting through to them. AOC to some degree has done a better job of it. Warren too. So nahhhhh.
I don’t think your points mix, though–I doubt many of the people contributing to Biden’s position in the polls are online enough to even care how the “far left” is acting or pushing their message. I would wager that a lot of Biden’s support comes from people whose thought process is limited to “he was Obama’s VP and Obama was good.” If the left has any hope of making meaningful change in this country, it needs the Bernies and AOCs to drive the public discourse leftward, and this will naturally be pushed further left by the Internet posters but that’s not a bad thing.
One only has to look at the tea party or Trump’s base to see where a subset of people taking extreme positions can drag the main party in one direction. We want the same thing to happen with the Democrats. It also helps that many of the positions being pushed are actually popular with most Americans!
It’s weird how in the last three years Bernie hasn’t done anything to get through to your average dems, and yet every non-Biden candidate is tripping over themselves to pretend they have Bernie’s policies.
Like, in 3 years the party went from adamantly opposed to m4a to having it in the platform. Who do you think caused that? Why do you think mayor Pete calls his public option “Medicare for all who want it” rather than a public option? Bernie is hugely popular, and his policies are even more popular.
I wouldn’t call Obama a centrist. He was moderate and pragmatic, but let’s not lump him in there with the Joe Manchins of the world. Like, maybe we’re being hard on Biden, and maybe a lot of the disdain for him is inaccurate in that it’s not as much about him being that much farther right than Obama… but rather that he just completely does not get it when he talks about stuff like preserving the filibuster.
But I don’t take Biden’s polling to be overly indicative of the left/right leanings of the electorate. Bottom line: to probably 70-80% of voters, he’s seen as an extension of the Obama era, and he has universal name recognition. Those factors are way bigger than anything else.
This is a huge point and really important, and one thing I love about AOC. I don’t actually agree with her on every issue, she’s definitely left of me on at least a few, including some big ones… But she’s dragging the Overton Window to the left rapidly, and the country desperately needed it. I want the Overton Window to be centered around reasonable policy, and on some issues (healthcare is one) that means being left of center by a good margin…
My favorite thing about her is just that I take her at her word and she’s authentic. If she gets something wrong, I tend to believe it was an honest mistake or she was misinformed, and I trust her motives.
But anyway, a healthy democracy needs strong and honest voices coming from left, center and right. We didn’t have enough strong ones on the left even five years ago, now we have a few. The same applies to speaking truth to power and calling out the problems in our system that are not necessarily on a left/right scale. Unfortunately the loudest and most prominent centrist voices tend to be bought and paid for - they’re not for the center as much as they’re for the status quo. But I do believe we have genuine and authentic centrists in Congress, they’re just lesser known.
Sanders is an inflexible old man who has never that I can tell ever changed his mind
That’s because he’s pretty much been right throughout his entire career. Also, I love how Bernie haters always like to add “old” to their insults as if you can’t be young and inflexible
He’s also got no practical plan for how to get anything done, which explains why he’s been ‘right’ (I would argue he’s been wrong a lot too, but since none of his ideas ever get done we don’t have to talk about when he was disastrously wrong because he didn’t manage to do any damage) about a lot of stuff over the years and yet not managed to move the needle. He’s a gadfly who would be a trash president.
He has just as many plans as anyone else, but you’re too focused on age and I guess his yelling to actually listen to what he says. To the extent that he hasn’t accomplished much, that’s because he’s been fighting the establishment for decades. How popular do you think his ideas were to his “liberal” Democratic colleagues back in the day?
Aw, poor boredsocial here can’t come up with intellectual responses so he resorts to sticking his thumb in his ears and calling people trolls. Be sure to wipe the drool off your keyboard before logging off
You’re in denial. Biden voters are online. You saw them a couple years ago with the meme and wanting Obama back all over the place. They’re likely Clinton voters from 2016. You don’t see them now because they don’t want to engage in the cesspool of internet politics.
I was a Clinton voter because I saw a pathway to reforms as something you had to be subtle and slow about. Not because I thought her policies were particularly better than Sanders. I prefer Pete and Warren now because hey seem to be capable of talking to people more effectively than Sanders.
You can keep arguing with me all you want. I don’t really care. You say all these policies are popular but somehow people are choosing Biden over Sanders and Warren. There’s a serious branding issue with Sanders that internet posters aren’t helping to solve.
I just absolutely love when some douche tries to tell me how I actually feel, puts words in my mouth, and completely ignores anything I have to say…
This, guys. This right here is what Cuse was talking about with the toxic way some Bernie supporters talk to supporters of other candidates, especially women, online. You may not have seen it, but trust me, I have. It happens every damned day…and I don’t even talk about Bernie because I try to only say positive things about my candidate (or others, when they do something positive).