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Ongoing Dem Debacle Thread: Commander will kill us all

still time to do this, it would be great

 
I mean no way it will go anywhere but would be the perfect time to experiment with UBI. Even great for people that kept their job, pay off student loans, dumb all those years missing money into retirement and so forth.
 
With leaders like Bernie Sanders, the Dem Party is in constant disarray--"it is unfair to say everything about Cuba is bad" or how about Nicaraguan left-wing Sandinistas strongman Daniel Ortega as "an impressive guy!"

Then there is of course addled Joe Biden who said "We talk about China as our competitor? We should be helping them and benefitting ourselves by doing that. But the idea that China is going to eat our lunch, give me a break!" No they are just going to kill us with a virus Joe!

Easy win for Trump in Nov--Dems do not have anybody who can beat him. Trump will be in office till Jan 2025.
 
TownieDeac said:
still time to do this, it would be great

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Trump is going to slink out of office with those in his pocket. I mean, they'll have his shitty profile on them.
 
If putting trump’s face on the coins was all it took I’d take that in a heartbeat
 
Nice interview with Sean Mcelwee in Politico. I think Data For Progress is great, one of the best and most important things to come out of the progressive left this cycle.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/16/sean-mcelwee-interview-aoc-sanders-191702

MCELWEE: If you had to boil it down to one problem, it was the belief the Sanders people articulated early on that in a big field, they could win the nomination with 30 percent of the vote. You know, elections tend to be won with 50 percent of the vote. If you’re not even trying to attract 50 percent to your vision, it leads to this view that you don’t need to persuade anyone, you just need to lock in the base and mobilize new voters. That’s setting yourself up for failure. And it’s inspired some very pernicious thinking in the progressive world: Those people who don’t believe what we believe, we can’t win them, so fuck them. You saw this most aggressively on Twitter, where you saw people say: “We need to crush these people, they’re forever lost to us.”
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MCELWEE: Some people are like oh, Twitter, that’s not real. But the campaign articulated the same strategy! When we shut ourselves off from conversations about how to persuade voters, we’re making it a lot harder for progressives to win elections and deliver on progressive policy goals. Talking about which policies could work politically in Trump districts is not a fun conversation to have, but we need to have those conversations.

Look, one problem with running a campaign as a movement is that movements exist outside public opinion. It’s notable to me that Sanders and Warren both chose not to rely too much on pollsters. They got a lot of praise for that, but politics is about creating a nervous system for public opinion. You need constant feedback on your issues. I think one reason South Carolina and Super Tuesday came as such massive surprises was the campaigns focused on what moves small-dollar donors on Facebook and Twitter and so forth. Yeah, a viral ad with heated rhetoric can raise millions of dollars, but you don’t see the Americans who get turned off by it. There’s no emoji for that. They just go about their daily lives and don’t vote for you; you’re not even trying to reach them.
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MCELWEE: I’d propose a focus on paid family leave and childcare; ambitious climate action and clean energy; and lowering drug prices. You’ve got to narrow your agenda, because it’s hard to get voters to focus on too much. They have a lot going on their lives, from the Vanderpump Rules to getting their kids to school. With just those three priorities, you can show voters an agenda that will make their lives better, weaken major industries that are harming them, and put more money in their pockets. Why not focus on things that are popular?
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MCELWEE: Again, I think the first thing the left and Biden need to understand is that the progressive agenda isn’t just a mobilization agenda; it can be a persuasion agenda. There are core groups with progressive voters but also persuadable voters, and I think those policies I mentioned can really help.

Take young people, A lot of young independents and Republicans who pulled the lever for Trump in 2016 are worried about core elements of Trump’s agenda, especially climate change. I think a strong climate agenda that emphasizes job creation as well as equity issues can be a central element of a persuasion agenda. And remember, not all African-Americans and Latinos are Democrats. We need to hit those voters with compelling messages that fit with their lived experiences, and a focus on environmental justice and clean water and clean air can be very persuasive.

The next group I’d look at are suburban women. They’re not all Democrats, either, and plenty of the ones who voted for Trump are now persuadable. A paid leave and childcare agenda could really speak to the rising economic costs they’re facing. And then you’ve got older persuadables. Trump has absolutely failed to deliver pharmaceutical reform or reduce drug prices, and Democrats could make inroads on those issues. So I’ve named you a bunch of progressive policies that poll at 70 to 80 percent. Those would be some great issues where Biden could be looking to embrace the left.
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MCELWEE: My view is that politics is the slow boring of hard boards. Really, that view almost overstates how quickly political change happens. Look, in 2020, mistakes were made, but the basic problem was that the progressive movement wasn’t yet powerful enough to win a Democratic primary. We’ll be back at it in four or eight years. Eventually, we will be powerful enough, and we’ll have the opportunity to pass a lot of laws.

I’d like to see progressives focus on building the infrastructure and policy support for our priorities. I do worry about the lack of dedication to learning the nitty-gritty details of how the process works. I’ve worked on legislation in New York state, and I’ve seen how the simplest thing, like changing voter registration from opt-in to opt-out at the DMV, can require an incredible amount of bureaucratic competence, technical capacity, things like that. Progressives need to dedicate ourselves to learning how those bureaucracies function, or we’re going to be woefully unprepared to implement our agenda.

I also think progressives need to focus on building power down ballot. We always complain that Obama failed to do this, but we seem to forget it the second we start thinking about our own movement: This year, a progressive came within four points of beating [conservative Democratic congressman] Henry Cuellar. Every progressive who’s doing an autopsy of the presidential primary should be doing an autopsy of why we didn’t invest more in that race. There’s been an utter neglect of down-ballot work.
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That’s a great interview. Good discussion of short term and long term strategies for progressives and Dems as a whole.

He said things many of us have been saying for five years but board progressives (who think the rest of us aren’t progressives) ignored.

Suburban women are an important area of growth on the left? No way.

Bernie attempted to win a primary by demonizing the party hosting the primary? Whaaaa?

Much of Bernie’s rural working class white men support in 2016 was a “not Hillary” vote? Shut the front door.

Are we sure this guy is a progressive?
 
PhDeac said:
That’s a great interview. Good discussion of short term and long term strategies for progressives and Dems as a whole.

He said things many of us have been saying for five years but board progressives (who think the rest of us aren’t progressives) ignored.

Suburban women are an important area of growth on the left? No way.

Bernie attempted to win a primary by demonizing the party hosting the primary? Whaaaa?

Much of Bernie’s rural working class white men support in 2016 was a “not Hillary” vote? Shut the front door.

Are we sure this guy is a progressive?
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Meh. Sean does kind of suck.
 
haha sean is reviled by a lot of online left because his display name used to be "abolish ice" and then he started working for warren and took it out of his handle because she didn't want to abolish ice

i'm not sure why Ph continually puts up straw men instead of just asking people's opinions, but i like sean and think he does good work, have posted his stuff lots of times
 
How is referring to specific discussions over the last 5 years a “straw man?”

Do a search for my posts about suburbs. You’ll be specific conversations between me and the other M bro where he mocks me for saying Dems should go after suburban women.
 
I'm saying rather than argue with people you'd prefer to argue with imagined or actual previous arguments, and that's not productive.
 
TownieDeac said:
I'm saying rather than argue with people you'd prefer to argue with imagined or actual previous arguments, and that's not productive.
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It's not meant to be productive - it's schadenfreude. Somehow both Sean McElwee and PH both think that trying to pursuade moderate voters with incrementalism is this wild new idea that we Bernie Bros just weren't aware of. Ultimately, Bernie was targeting voters who didn't show up - who never show up. All this excellent discussion is just Monday morning quarterbacking.

We get the strategy of incrementalism, really, but progressivism is never going to take hold in this country if every goddamn election is just reactionary culture war partisanship. Leftists won't resign ourselves to these shitty wave election cycles between racist conservatives and scared neoliberals. Yes, Trump is terrible. W Bush was terrible, the *next* Republican president in 2024-or 2028 will also be terrible. Their cabinet will be terrible, rinse, repeat. The Republican Party has been Trumpian for at least 40 goddamn years now, since Nixon. There is no "normal" that I want to go back to.
 
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Ongoing Dem Debacle Thread: It's still a debacle

What a terrible take. It’s not about incrementalism. The only way my posts or that interview it could even seem like incrementalism are if (sigh) Bernie = Progressive and the man > policies.

It’s about building a movement based on convincing people we all want and need the same changes to the system. It’s not about bashing people for not having been convinced yet by one specific person. Or even worse bashing people who already agree but think that one specific person isn’t all that great.

Progressives are even worse than mainstream Democrats at marketing and branding.
 
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“I do think healthcare is important, but the old man yelling about it was, frankly, gauche.”
 
PhDeac said:
It’s about building a movement based on convincing people we all want and need the same changes to the system.

.
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Suburban women don’t want and need the same changes to the system that the poor, homeless, working class, incarcerated, disenfranchised want and need. No amount of branding will get them to vote against their class interests.
 
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