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Ytlaya posted:While this is all true, I think it would be useful to compare with the data from policy that was successfully passed. In other words, having most of the country support the details of a policy may not be necessary to getting it passed. It seems very possible to me that policy that Americans vaguely support but disagree with once described in more detail is still entirely viable. A huge portion of Americans will automatically say no to anything that involves increasing their taxes (even if it reduces their overall spending), but once you actually pass the policy they may end up supporting it. I agree in general, but Obamacare isn't really a good example for that. Apart from the mandates and taxes, most of the provisions in Obamacare are popular, even among Republicans. Exchanges, subsidies, and expanded Medicaid all had 80% favorability in November, for example, and banning insurers from dropping people over pre-existing conditions had 69% favorability. The only widely-polled aspects of the plan that drop below 50% favorability are the individual mandate and the new taxes. That might even be a big part of the problem with Obamacare - because it's such a please-everyone heavily-focus-grouped bill, it didn't do so hot at fixing the actual problems with the healthcare system, and many people haven't seen payoffs that they feel justify the unpopular components like the mandate. They'd much prefer to keep the exchanges and subsidies and expanded Medicaid but dump the mandates and taxes, but the bill is built such that it can't function without the mandates and taxes. I'm just saying that in general, we can't rely on pointing at polls and saying "this general policy idea polls well, so we can just charge ahead on it with no trouble at all". Hell, this is particularly the case in healthcare, where the left's been doing nothing but losing ground for decades. I found that the SSA, surprisingly enough, summarizes the problem with polls very well while discussing Truman's attempt to push through a public option (which polled even better in the 40s than it does today) as part of the Fair Deal: quote:From time to time, political writers in this country have asserted the well-meaning but idealistic notion that America's Government is, or should be, controlled by public opinion--that legislators should behave as though public opinion polls are instructions on the part of the voters. Thus, if 59 percent of the electorate favor Government health insurance, the argument runs, it should be passed forthwith. But what if the 59 percent are only mildly in favor of the proposal, while the other 41 percent are strongly opposed? Incidentally, Truman's public option failed to pass, even though polls in the preceding years had shown the public option polling as high as 74%. Dr. Fishopolis posted:So polls are unreliable because when you start talking about the downsides of the thing you're polling for, people tend to change their minds. Read more closely - the people said that they would change their minds if they heard the other side talking about such disadvantages. The opposition typically doesn't like to cooperate with your marketing. What I'm saying is that a public option has enjoyed support from a majority of Americans in polls since FDR floated it as part of the New Deal, yet again and again, healthcare reforms of all kinds have failed in the face of withering pressure from the opposition and weak interest from its supporters. At this point, saying "well, it polls well" means exactly jack and poo poo.
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Feb 20, 2017 20:02
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:Sure, I get that, which I explained in my earlier post. I think it's fair to say they don't want UHC. They'll take it if it's given to them, but there's no real pressure from the public to put it in place. Alter Ego posted:Where do you draw the line, then? What would you have done back in 2009-10 when Joe Lieberman was jerking the Democrats around on the public option? Or when Bart Stupak kept threatening to put a Hyde Amendment-like provision into the bill so none of the plans offered on the federal exchange would cover abortions? Lieberman wasn't a Democrat, though - he was primaried in 2006 and ran as an independent instead. WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Medicare itself isn't single payer, so I don't know why people are using Medicare-for-All as the basis for calls for single payer. Because Medicare itself is popular, so saying your healthcare reform is "like Medicare" gets your plan 5 to 10 extra favorability points in the polls.
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Feb 21, 2017 00:34
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:Given that I've provided evidence to the contrary, I think it's fair to ask you to do the same if you'd like to make that point. I'm also curious what "pressure from the public" looks like in your mind, and why it's necessary to see before proposing policy. Have you not read a single one of my posts? I've explained it repeatedly already: it doesn't matter if more people answer "Yes" to a poll than "No" if it turns out that the people who answered "No" care a lot harder about the issue than the people who answered "Yes". The SSA itself sums it up quite well: quote:Evidently, the "balance of pressures" had ultimately militated against health insurance. The renewal of AMA pressure against the measure (which was felt acutely by the Congress (18) contrasted strikingly with the lack of strong pressure in favor of it from either the public at large or any major interest group. Moreover, the social security bill had run into difficulties in Congress, just as its supporters had feared. Professor Schlesinger noted that, in the early months of 1935, the bill "seemed hopelessly bogged down in the House of Representatives."(19) quote:When the revised Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill was first introduced, its supporters felt the time was propitious for passage. America had just won a great war. The United Nations was being born in a mood of optimism about the postwar world. The incumbent President had committed himself to press the health insurance issue vigorously. In addition, wartime public opinion polls had indicated broad public support for Government health insurance. A 1942 poll by Fortune magazine had found no fewer than 74 percent of the respondents in favor, and in the following year a nationwide Gallup poll recorded 59 percent in favor. Of course, that's just a historical story. But if you ask me, the fact that we have no public option (in spite of the fact that polls have shown that a majority of Americans have favored it since before Donald Trump was even born) should be evidence enough, unless you think folks like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson were conservatives unwilling to engage in meaningful economic reform.
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Feb 21, 2017 00:53
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:This really underscores the situation we have right now. The fact that there was a non-zero section of the population who supported both Trump and Sanders indicates that populism and rejection of the status quo isn't about party politics as we understand it. Both parties had the same opportunity to ride that wave, and Clinton chose to dismiss it with condescension rather than embrace it. The game now is not about policy. More than ever, it's about throwing easily digested concessions to the frothing crowds, and the left has a lot of that to offer if we can package it properly. If the public won't accept a whiff of compromise, then they'd better give one party seventy-plus seats in the Senate and a hefty House majority because that's the only way poo poo gets done without compromise. And that one party is almost certainly going to be the Republicans, because "kick out all the browns and give their jobs to Americans" is a hard proposal to beat with just easily-digestible soundbites.
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Feb 21, 2017 06:05
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Fados posted:I do agree with you on this point. To me this does indicate, not just some miscalculation in the polling techniques, but that the system which we use to predict political results is no longer accurately describing reality. In some sense our (political) ground is changing, might Hillary's campaign have looked to Europe and she would've found multiple polling upsets in various parliamentary elections and other plebiscites in favor of populism: Brexit, Syriza in Greece and Podemos and Spain with meteoric rises at the cost of the fall of center-left liberal parties. The very fact that some obscure senator from Vermont ended being a significant challenge to her primary might've indicated that something was amiss. In the US, there really haven't been a lot of recent opportunities to test those assumptions and systems on a national scale. 2012 and 2008 were overshadowed by the Great Recession, and in 2004 Bush was a wartime president whose war was still fairly popular. A lot has changed since 2000, and a lot of the modern data-driven strategies Clinton relied on are only a few years old. In particular, I think there was a tendency to look at things that worked for Obama in 2008 and assume that his win was an indication that they were good tactics...without accounting for the fact that Obama was a very charismatic and effective speaker and campaigner whose opposition was deeply tied to a very unpopular war and an economic meltdown just months before the election. And the Democratic president before Obama was Bill Clinton, a centrist triangulator who swung right in his second term. SKULL.GIF posted:What have people like Reid, Pelosi, and Feinstein given us? I'm sick of being governed by ancient wrinkled Methuselahs (obviously Reid is gone, but I have a political memory longer than a goldfish's) who will scold us for not building sufficient political capital in the face of goddamn fascism. Where the hell are the Gen X, where the hell are the Millennial politicians who will actually fight to improve the lives of all Americans instead of burning endless political capital on incrementalism? Why are they being locked out of the party? That's not really an accurate portrayal of either Reid or Pelosi. As for the millenials, the only things locking them out of Congress are the minimum ages imposed by the Constitution for Congressional seats and their own failure to win elections.
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Feb 21, 2017 18:51
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Crowsbeak posted:The thing is that you could instead go for people who are less republican lite. But still not be fully in support of the democratic party line if only there was more attempts to interact with the rural states populations this would be pretty obvious. The real question isn't "should we primary Cory Booker", it's "who, specifically, should run against Cory Booker in the primary". He's beaten people in primaries before without the help of incumbency advantage, and now he's an incumbent with a solid approval rating and a poo poo-ton of campaign money and donor ties. Is there any rising star in New Jersey politics who wasn't around in 2013 but is now up to challenge him? It's ultimately up to the voters to decide who holds these seats, and the Bookers and Feinsteins seem to have no problem winning election after election.
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Feb 21, 2017 21:29
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Cease to Hope posted:I am referring specifically to Dean's 50 State Strategy, which did seek to elect blue dog Democrats on the presumption that they were the only ones who could get elected in "red" states. Really? I thought Dean's fifty-state strategy was based around building up the party at the state and local levels, leading to gains not only in Congress (where the Dems were able to pick up districts in places like Kansas and Arizona) but also in governorships and state legislatures.
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Feb 21, 2017 22:00
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:This circles back to the top down / bottom up discussion around the DNC chair position. I think we have to talk about both at once. Presenting a candidate as the de facto leader of the party, whether it's DNC chair now, or Presidential nominee in four years sends a message all the way down the line. It's a lot easier to build a progressive bench when you have, for example, Warren or Buttigieg as the mouthpiece of the party, and a lot harder when it's Booker or Cuomo. Top down and bottom up can't really coexist that well, because they're inherently contradictory. It eventually comes down to one basic question: when it comes time for Congressional Dems to decide how to cast their vote, are they going to go talk to their constituents and figure out what the Dems in their own community want, or is the national party leadership halfway across the country going to dictate a one-size-fits-all policy to districts all over the country? An organization can mix and match the two strategies to some extent, but at some point they will come into conflict, particularly on the growing wedge issues within the Democratic Party (like guns and Israel).
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Feb 21, 2017 22:14
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Cease to Hope posted:We are standing in the remains of that strategy. Fighting in Kansas and Arizona and Virginia and Ohio is important, but "a Democrat is anyone who isn't a Republican" is not an inspiring rallying cry. What remains? Most of the senators who won seats in the 2006 wave still hold their seats, and while I haven't run the numbers for the 2006 House freshmen, it's not even slightly surprising that the Dems would lose seats in red areas after they dumped Dean and the fifty-state strategy and abandoned those Dems to fend for themselves with minimal funding or support. Most of the prominent centrists who caused problems for the Dems, like Lieberman and Feinstein, date back to 2000 or earlier. Manchin, on the other hand, was elected in 2010.
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Feb 21, 2017 23:03
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snyprmag posted:Deportations, arrests, police brutality and war happened under democratic governance. Democrats keep running on those issues and then not fixing them and then wonder why people don't show up to vote for them. With over 40 per cent of voters in my generation describing themselves as independent, our future as a party will depend on reminding people how their lives have been improved by good Democratic policies, and when a voter thinks that isn’t true in her life, we had better listen closely and try to understand why. When it comes to my part of the country, we will recover our ability to reach people only when we take them seriously, connecting our plans to their actual, personal lived experience rather than focusing on The Show. We need to invite individual people to assess how their individual lives changed — how their safety, their income, their access to health care, their gun rights, their marriages — have actually been affected, if at all, by what goes on in Washington. Taking people seriously also means treating the constituency groups that traditionally support Democrats as more than a disconnected patchwork of interests to cater to, served by a great political salad bar of something different for everyone. The various identity groups who have been part of our coalition should be there because we have spoken to their values and their everyday lives — not because we contacted them, one group at a time and just in time for the next election, to remind them of some pet issue that illustrates why we expect them to support us. Laundry lists will not inspire.
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Feb 21, 2017 23:55
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Crowsbeak posted:I know me and you, really don't agree on alot. ALso I know I fit a bit outside any group> But this is a great idea. It has to be a message that unites all together. Lightning Knight posted:Isn't that a Butt Mayor quote? Yeah, it's a direct Buttigieg quote. I think it's exactly where the party needs to be going...but the last time I posted it, someone got real mad at it because it mentions guns 
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Feb 22, 2017 00:23
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Ytlaya posted:I get what you're trying to say here, but this is a dumb argument. "Well can you think of a specific person who can win? No? Then you can't criticize this person!" On the the other hand, if you focus too hard on getting people out and not hard enough on who you're going to put in their place, you get a disaster like the Walker recall...or, for that matter, the 2016 presidential election.
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Feb 22, 2017 01:35
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The Kingfish posted:So the jobs that can't be automated go overseas when the economy dips? And the trade deals have nothing to do with this? The automation doesn't necessarily lead to job losses right away. Even though the automation infrastructure that gets added may allow the same amount of work to be done with fewer people, it's rare for executives to recognize exactly how many jobs they can trim right off the bat. Typically, things will slide along with maybe more workers than are absolutely necessary for a while...at least until something (like a recession) puts a dent in profits or sales and sends the executives scrambling for ways to trim costs and increase efficiencies. That's typically when layoff waves start happening as they recognize that they can leverage the existing automation to reduce headcount more than they already have. When first implemented, automation is potential job losses, and doesn't get converted into actual job losses until something shakes up the business a bit.
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Feb 22, 2017 03:19
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khwarezm posted:Its legitimately depressing to me some of the attitudes I'm seeing here and elsewhere from people how'd probably describe themselves as hard left with regards to some of their attitudes towards black people or other minority groups. It's easy for a freshly-minted white socialist who doesn't have a whole lot of exposure to the real world to take "all warfare is class warfare" a bit too literally, notice that discriminated-against groups tend to be poor, and come to the conclusion that racism and other kinds of discrimination are just proxies for class warfare rather than real problems of their own. It's been a problem in the left for a long time, it's just been more visible than usual lately.
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Feb 22, 2017 16:38
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snyprmag posted:If the Dems track record is so good why do they keep losing elections? There's that many people who are just cry babies in your opinion?
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Feb 23, 2017 01:41
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SKULL.GIF posted:So basically there's an incredible amount of room here for the Democrats to enact progressive policy without losing too many votes. Just do sensible things that will improve the lives of our citizens! Automating jobs is fine if it comes with fundamental economic changes to address the fact that "everyone needs to work in order to live" and "the job market is entirely private and the government will not intervene in any way to make sure everyone is able to have a job" are fundamentally incompatible without accepting that some portion of the population will starve through solely due to bad luck and unfortunate turns of events. The current generation of automation (thanks largely to computers and in particular the internet) has led to consolidation of jobs rather than expansion, and American society has essentially just papered over these festering problems in the economy with welfare, debt, and allowing banks to invent money out of thin air. That is why the Dems didn't hit the bankers hard - not because of campaign donations or big donors, but because half our economy is essentially fictional and bringing the banks down would break the illusion and bring the current economy crashing down. They're willing to make small changes, but the economy as we know it is fundamentally hosed, and for twenty years or more the economy has been nothing more than a high-class casino, with the entire finance class playing a game of fiscal chicken using dollars as their chips. Taking something like that down isn't just a matter of reforms - it means needing a whole new economy to put in its place, and American society largely hasn't even admitted that a problem exists. People generally sense that bankers have done bad things and hosed stuff up somehow, but it doesn't seem like people are in any mood to challenge the very nature of employment yet.
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Feb 23, 2017 22:13
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JeffersonClay posted:The democratic base is as angry and engaged as it has ever been. This has occurred despite a bare minimum of authentic leftist engagement activism rhetoric from the DNC or the neoliberals or whoever. If you think the people at the town hall meetings who are screaming at the republicans to do their job and investigate trump are secretly mad and fired up about a lack of real leftism in the party, I don't know what to tell you. The base is calling for an anti-trump strategy. We're in no position to deny them what they want. The base is calling for an anti-Trump strategy, sure...but each person's preferred anti-Trump strategy is whatever they thought the best political strategy was pre-Trump, only harder. The left's preferred anti-Trump strategy is to turn left, the center-right's preferred anti-Trump strategy is to turn center-right, and so on. Trump has certainly created enthusiasm among the Dems, but all of it boils down to "the Dems should do what I've always wanted them to do, only better". It also doesn't necessarily have any staying power - sure, the base seems pumped and is able to mobilize big protests now, but where were all those anti-war protesters in 2004?
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Feb 24, 2017 15:50
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Fiction posted:THEN Because organized labor loving loves him and college progressives aren't the only demographic the Dems want to rebuild their relationship with, especially since by all accounts this election was decided by the votes of a few hundred thousand union voters in the Rust Belt. I guess that isn't as attractive as conspiracy theories about the establishment plot to thwart progressive ascendance, though, because the left insists on seeing this as a battle between "the left" and "the center", and acknowledging that other factions exist hurts that narrative. It can't be all about a battle to reunite two factions if we admit that there are at least five or six different factions in the Democratic Party, and a dozen or more demographics that they try to keep the approval of. SKULL.GIF posted:This is something I see brought up a lot when talking about rallies, OWS, anti-Iraq War protests... why do you think they didn't vote? Why is "the people who cared enough to spend days of their lives traveling and protesting, didn't care enough to vote" the default assumption, and not "they cared enough to vote, but other people who didn't care enough to protest probably also didn't care enough to vote"? When did I say "vote"? I didn't. I said 2004, and you just assumed that I was talking about voting in the presidential election a year and a half after the protest they marched in, because that's all politics was to the left over the last two decades: go march in a protest, go home, and then go register your disapproval in the voting booths at the next presidential election.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:51
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Raskolnikov38 posted:which is why SEIU, AFL-CIO and the teamsters endorsed Ellison And several other unions endorsed Perez. They both have union endorsements. However, the Democratic Party isn't the only institution where the balance of power has shifted too far toward a top-down leadership which got out of touch with the membership. They endorsed Hillary too, and look at how well that worked - union leaders voted Hillary, union members voted Trump. Perez, on the other hand, is popular among union members, not just the top leadership, and I recall a fair amount of people calling foul over AFL-CIO's "decision" to endorse Ellison. WampaLord posted:WELCOME TO POLITICS! Lying about having solutions for workers worked pretty well for Obama and the Dems, right? Let's repeat that all over again
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Feb 24, 2017 19:12
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WampaLord posted:He won 2 terms, so yeah. Look what the backlash of eight years of Democratic failure to live up to Obama's promises got us. By becoming the standard lying politician who never brought the promised prosperity, he fed the populist backlash that led to Trump.
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Feb 24, 2017 19:16
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axeil posted:Except ~*Brands*~ Matter. I don't care if the thing is nothing like Medicare, but Medicare is super popular and if you call the thing Medicare For All it's going to resonate well with people. If there's some alternative branding that is extremely popular then go for it, but we know everyone likes Medicare, so why not use the branding? At some point people are going to notice that they're not even slightly similar. Marketing doesn't rewrite reality.
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Feb 24, 2017 19:17
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Cerebral Bore posted:You can use Russian hacking as a good talking point but as for factors that actually influenced the election it's pretty drat far down on the list, which is why using it to claim that Dear Abuela Did Nothing Wrong is loving idiotic. Aside from Podesta and Brock, I don't think anyone's claimed that. The Russian hacking thing keeps getting brought up because the Republicans used to make a big deal about Russia, and the Democrats loving love to steal issues from the Republicans so they can turn them around and point to the Republicans being hypocrites. Of course, the problem there is that it's stupid and counterproductive and doesn't work, since taking the Republican side and then pointing at the Republicans to say "you're not the real Republicans" is actually really dumb and no one really cares that the Dems are calling them out for hypocrisy. But it's got nothing to do with relitigating the election.
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Feb 24, 2017 21:12
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WampaLord posted:Now you're taking away Grandma's Medicare. look at how well "you'll be able to keep your current insurance under Obamacare" and "everyone will pay less for health insurance under Obamacare" worked out. lying too much does eventually backfire the problem with the ACA wasn't the marketing or the messaging, it was the fact that Democrats didn't have the will to engage in real healthcare reform or even meaningfully change the private healthcare industry. they passed a poo poo law and no amount of saying "Medicare Medicare Medicare" was gonna cover that up. single-payer didn't fail because of public opposition, it failed because Dems came into the fight ready to throw things overboard at the slightest sign of trouble and let the biggest recipients of healthcare industry donations write the bills messaging is nice, but it's not going to make up for poo poo policy. and the reason Dems aren't doing single-payer isn't because they can't find the right messaging, it's because they're shitheads who don't plan to meaningfully upend the current healthcare industry
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Feb 24, 2017 21:27
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JeffersonClay posted:One of the mistakes that portions of the left made was reflexively diminishing and opposing Clinton's argument that Trump was a Russian puppet. Some of them still are. No it's not. No one really cares. It's not the first time foreigners have tried to influence elections, and it's not the first time Americans have elected a president who took a different course in foreign policy from their predecessors. There was plenty of evidence that Trump was cozy with the Russians before the elections. no one cared then, no one really cares now. the only reason Dems are still bringing it up is to try to delegitimize Trump and make the Republicans look like hypocrites.
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Feb 24, 2017 21:29
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Alter Ego posted:I think that while some folks in this thread aren't applying it, there is a strong case to be made that with a good campaign Bernie Sanders could very well be President right now. It's entirely possible that he could have won with a good campaign and the right messaging. However, that's kind of a pointless observation to make, since it was also entirely possible for Hillary to win with a good campaign and the right messaging.
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Feb 24, 2017 23:30
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Wraith of J.O.I. posted:I just don't get the case for Perez here. It seems like they have way more to lose by him winning and alienating the sizable and very vocal Sanders wing—and it doesn't seem to me to matter whether or not that is actually warranted. This seems like a no brainer, and yet it's looking like Ellison will lose. Would love to be surprised though. The Sanders wing may be vocal, but it's not really "sizable". The Ellison vs Perez fight is usually portrayed as though the Dems were formerly a single entity that has been split in two, but that was never the case. The Dems are a big tent with dozens of factions, groups, movements, and wings of voters. The core Sanders base isn't the second-largest or even the third-largest faction under the Democratic umbrella, and they weren't even close to being the most important factor in the result of the 2016 elections. Each of the establishment candidates in the DNC race was chosen because the establishment thought they would appeal to demographics that the Dems have been losing lately. Bernie's successes - and failures - were the result of his appeal (or lack thereof) to other Dem factions besides his core "progressive college kids" base. While Bernie's base obviously went for Bernie's choice for the race, that doesn't mean that every group that voted Bernie will support Keith or that every group which supported Clinton will support Perez. For example, we can probably expect Ellison to markedly improve on Bernie's weakness with racial minorities, but Perez is known for his appeal among the Midwestern factory workers Hillary had such trouble with. Really, Perez would be a great chair, if not for the fact that he seems to be a poor campaigner who was slow to grasp that this is different from the usual DNC chair race, and has generally done poorly with cameras and even worse with surprises. SKULL.GIF posted:As spectators, we're all operating on incomplete information. But from the outside, we can see that Perez has already caved to the loyalists once in this campaign for DNC chair. Ellison seems much less tractable. Ellison has caved to the establishment at least three times - he backed down on banning lobbyist donations, he changed course on Israel and BDS, and he endorsed an establishment donor in the Florida DNC chair campaign. And each and every time, the same people who argued that Perez is a corrupt shill for the establishment had plenty of excuses to make for Ellison. Funny how that Sanders endorsement functions as a perfect impenetrable barrier against the taint of the establishment.
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Feb 25, 2017 22:48
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Trabisnikof posted:Really, not immediately entering the race is shady? They did have a candidate lined up from the beginning. Ellison had a number of prominent establishment endorsements before he even officially entered the race.
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Feb 25, 2017 22:55
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:I don't care what would look shadier or whether it actually was or not. What I'm saying is that it doesn't look good, and you shouldn't brush aside people worried about that as being literal children like a lot of you are doing ITT. These are valid concerns that should be addressed, and brushing them off as being just wrong is what makes people stay home and not give a poo poo and the dems will continue losing elections. There's a direct correlation in this that you're missing. There were two establishment candidates in this race, and they both won, to the detriment of grassroots candidates like Buttigieg.
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Feb 25, 2017 22:58
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Epic High Five posted:imho the best thing to ensure Perez is given a fair shake that the Dems could do is have like Manchin and the other DINOs come out hard against him Why would Manchin care which progressive is handling the donor money? He doesn't need it, and he already knows neither Perez nor Ellison have any intention of cutting off the cash flow to centrists.
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Feb 25, 2017 23:13
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:B-b-b-but we gave them a platform and the deputy chair, what else could they possibly want, other than for us to step down because we've demonstrated over the past decade that we're incapable of winning elections anymore and it's time for someone else to at least try, but who could possibly want that, right? If the left is so good at winning elections, maybe they should start doing it instead of loudly begging for the people who actually won elections to step down and hand their positions to leftists. Start taking over these committees instead of throwing tantrums about how senators currently serving their third or fourth term just don't realize how unelectable they are.
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Feb 25, 2017 23:28
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The Kingfish posted:If pragmatic centrism is so good at winning elections, maybe they should start doing it. Worked pretty well for Feinstein, Schumer, and all the other Democrats who currently hold elected offices despite being centrists.
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Feb 25, 2017 23:36
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:Excuse me, which elections did clinton win, again? I'm curious, please show me how her track record was better than anyone's. Is this some kind of trick question or are you really that stupid?
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Feb 25, 2017 23:41
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Ze Pollack posted:Good ol' Chuck "We'll gain two suburban republicans for every working-class voter we lose" Schumer, that guy really knows what's up. Seems to do fine getting himself elected, at least, even though he's a centrist! LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:Hey, gently caress you for saying Feinstein is good. She wins because no one dares primary against her because of how high up she is in the DNC, and since she runs in California that means she's never going to lose her seat until either she or the universe dies. If you're arguing that you need to be a centrist to win in California, you're smokin some great stuff. I didn't say she was good, I said she wins elections. She won in 1992, 1994, 2000, 2006, and 2012, facing and crushing primary challengers in each and every one of those elections. Do you need to be a centrist to win in California? I have no idea, but it clearly hasn't hurt her much, even though California is a solidly blue state.
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Feb 25, 2017 23:52
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Ze Pollack posted:It's almost as if the skillset to get elected from a major metropolitan cocktail circuit and the skillset to get elected Literally Anywhere Else are contradictory. Sure would be a shame if there was a recent election that demonstrated this in a crushingly embarrassing fashion. There was a recent election that demonstrated that centrists can't win elections outside of states with cities while leftists can? When? Because 2016 certainly doesn't fit that description. The Kingfish posted:It's a really job that doesn't involve winning an election. Well, Perez won one today!
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Feb 26, 2017 00:12
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:What on earth is the difference between a Perez chair/Ellison co chair and a Ellison chair/Perez co chair? Ellison's name has to be first so everyone knows the left won and the center stinks!
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Feb 26, 2017 00:17
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Condiv posted:no it's the worst possibility. ellison out of congress, and given a position with no real power in exchange for it. Why is it a problem that Ellison is out of Congress? His district is super blue and clearly has no problem voting for a progressive. Sounds like a good opportunity to get another leftist into the Democratic roster to me.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:19
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Rodatose posted:That was more DWS's fault, assuming that because Obama won everything was fine Wow, the narrative has gotten really disconnected from the facts, hasn't it? DWS didn't become DNC chair until mid-2011 (after the big losses in 2010), and Obama was the one who appointed her to that position in the first place.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:30
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Rodatose posted:DWS, kaine etc Yes. Because Obama won and then installed idiots like Kaine and DWS to run the DNC, while also yanking funding from state and local parties as he dismantled the fifty-state strategy in favor of using big data to target money only into highly competitive races (just like he did in his presidential campaign) and dismiss red areas as just a waste of resources. Moreover, his own personal popularity and campaigning skills hid the effects of these policies, allowing the Dems to think they were riding high based on their gains in 2008 and 2012 - even though they got walloped in the midterms when his name wasn't on the ballot. Also, his crappy performance as an executive left Congressional Dems with not much to run on in the midterms, because he did poo poo like spend most of 2010 debating austerity plans and signalling that he was open to cutting SS and Medicare, while leaving easy progressive moves like DADT repeal until after the midterms.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:48
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readingatwork posted:Is it really so unreasonable to expect a party to at least pretend to care about you if they're going to demand your vote like it was their God damned birthright? If they won't even make symbolic gestures to people like me why should I make any effort to support them in turn? They don't care. The party thinks there are more important demographics to win right now than "dedicated leftists". That's the secret. The Democratic Party is more complicated than just "the left" and "the center". There are certainly important demographics that voted for Bernie that the Dems are worried about losing, but "leftists" aren't one of them. That's why they didn't bother to throw a bone to progressives.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:09
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readingatwork posted:If that's the way they want to play it then fine I guess? However if they're really going to dump the left in favor of chasing Republican votes then they don't have the right to bitch and moan when the left dumps them in turn. They're not bitching and moaning. They don't care. Leftists are a tiny group compared to racial minorities, the working class, and so on. Of course, leftists have many priorities in common with those groups...but their priorities aren't identical, which is why the Bernie endorsement (which matters a lot to leftists but not very much to minorities or workers) didn't play a significant role in the DNC chair election.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:24
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