Ongoing Dem Debacle Thread: Commander will kill us all

[ImTheCaptain]

i mean, the messaging works but there's still a huge disparity between actually voting. so it's probably fair to still blame nonwhite voters b/c their participation rates are lower

 

[PhDeac]

i mean, the messaging works but there's still a huge disparity between actually voting. so it's probably fair to still blame nonwhite voters b/c their participation rates are lower

That's a class effect, not a race effect. Poor Black people vote at higher rates than poor white people (which is probably good for Democrats). Getting higher turnouts from middle-class and upper-class Black and Hispanic voters isn't going make much difference except around the margins. Either way, the tweet isn't about turnout, it's about who people vote for. The Dem messaging does work on every group except the group with the most entrenched power from centuries of oppression.

Voting Intersections: Race, Class, and Participation in Presidential Elections in the United States 2008–2016

Abstract
Intersectional analyses are increasingly common in sociology; however, analyses of voting tend to focus on only race, class, or gender, using the others as control variables. We assess whether and how race, class, and gender intersect to produce distinct patterns of voter engagement in presidential elections 2008–2016. Per existing research, we find income strongly predicts White voting. However, the class gap in voting is not statistically significant among Black voters. In contrast to common characterizations of Black people as politically disengaged, lower income Black citizens are more likely to vote than their White counterparts. Moreover, the lowest earning Black women vote at dramatically higher rates than any other race-gender combination in this income group. These findings call into question the perceived universality of the income gap in voting and widespread claims that more resources directly facilitate voting. They also have implications for our understanding of political participation, social inequality, and democratic citizenship.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/07311214211059136

 

[Strickland33]

Thoughts?

I mean, I've been beating the "we have a White voters blame EVERYONE ELSE for their voting habits problem" drum for years now. We still have posters who lambast Bernie Bros without thinking for a second about how that messaging was actually really galvanizing for a lot of voters who don't typically vote (young people, particularly young people of color).

Black women are really the only demographic that is overwhelmingly and consistently voting for Democrats, but we have to counter this fact with the fact that Asian and Latinx voters are continuing to bail to the GOP.

The demographic story, as I understand it, is one about age. It's age first and foremost because that's where you see the major distinctions in every racial group and class bracket. Young people are the driving force behind support for the Dems, and yet Dems would rather marginalize their votes and hope that Black women continue to deliver close elections for Dems in blue and purple states.

The more interesting question for me is whether there is a message at all? The Democratic Party leadership appears to be in full nihilism mode right now, which seems really bad for courting "young voters" (which I put in quotation marks because I'm in my mid-30s and am still considered a young voter by a lot of y'all).

The lesson to be learned from the Bernie wing is that young people are moved by issues, by platforms that provide tangible solutions for dealing with inequality (unequal distribution of resources) and inequity (racialized, gendered, etc. disparities in outcomes).

But it all comes back to age. Dems in Congress are, on average, about 20 years older than Republicans, iirc. The institutional prerogative to preserve this gerontocracy at all costs appears to be more important to party leadership than taking a stand on anything (abortion, student loan reform, post-COVID anti-poverty initiatives, child poverty and malnutrition, educational inequality, expanding broadband access and closing the digital divide, a commitment to domestic renewable energy production, the fact that half the government seems to be pro-Coup/fascism, etc.), which in addition to being the right thing to do (sorry board moderates, these are, in fact, the morally right things to do in this historical moment) could also be really helpful in improving the messaging problem for young folks across demographic backgrounds.

 

[Strickland33]

i mean, the messaging works but there's still a huge disparity between actually voting. so it's probably fair to still blame nonwhite voters b/c their participation rates are lower

I think it's a problem that this has become commonsense knowledge. Again, the biggest disparities seem to be a function of age rather than class, which strikes me as a pretty resounding rejection of your claim that the messaging works.

I'd even push you a bit farther and ask you: what is the message exactly? can you state it in a positive sense (e.g., not merely anti-GOP or anti-Trump)?

I live in California and I'm hearing a lot of institutional and popular buzz at the national level for a figure like Gavin Newsom, but I couldn't tell you what Gavin Newsom stands for as a Democrat. He's really great at galvanizing anti-Trump and anti-GOP sentiment through reactionary efforts (like his sponsored gun law that mimics Mississippi's abortion law, for example), but I'll be damned if I could go through his actual record and pull out a coherent agenda (and I invite you to do the same - start with the environmental policy if you want to see how weirdly incoherent his politics are).

If he's the best we have, then what does that say about the message that Democrats are supporting?

 

[ImTheCaptain]

that it sucks

 

[Strickland33]

that it sucks

that what sucks?

our Congressional leadership is enjoying European vacations right now, so I don't think life in the Congressional upper crust sucks

 

[Shooshmoo]

I mean, I've been beating the "we have a White voters blame EVERYONE ELSE for their voting habits problem" drum for years now. We still have posters who lambast Bernie Bros without thinking for a second about how that messaging was actually really galvanizing for a lot of voters who don't typically vote (young people, particularly young people of color).

Super glad you brought this up again, but I don't understand what you are saying here. Can you explain more?

 

[PhDeac]

Posters are lambasting "Bernie Bros" and Bernie Bros are lambasting the establishment for not messaging hard enough to earn their white vote. Meanwhile, Black women and plenty of other groups are showing up.

 

[Strickland33]

Posters are lambasting "Bernie Bros" and Bernie Bros are lambasting the establishment for not messaging hard enough to earn their white vote. Meanwhile, Black women and plenty of other groups are showing up.

I mean, I live in a place that's a lot more diverse than virtually every metropolitan area in the US (now and historically) and if you talk to young people, particularly young POC, you're going to hear a lot of lambasting the establishment for not messaging hard enough to earn their votes. (See the voting data for the recent primary elections in LA City and County for some evidence of this.) My hunch is that you can learn a lot more about the state of the electorate from a place like LA than, e.g., Central Florida.

You and others like to make it about young white, male voters, but "out here in these streets" nobody is happy about the status quo and white people are usually not the majority in these spaces. nobody likes not being able to afford a house, not having access to birth control, not having their rights protected by political leadership, etc. That's not a "white" thing and it seems pretty out of touch to suggest otherwise.

Along these lines, I know a lot of Black women who are pretty pissed about the status quo right now and I'm sure you do, too. From these women, I have frequently heard the sentiment that the Dems take Black women's votes for granted, knowing that they are a group that will reliably vote for Dems regardless of the candidate or platform. That doesn't mean anybody is happy about the message lol.

should it matter that the government doesn't appear to work for anybody who isn't wealthy?

Who are the other demographic groups that are showing up? i haven't looked at the data in awhile, but Black, Latinx, and Asian men have been slowly joining their white counterparts in the GOP. Presumably you have familiarity with these data because you're making the point.

I still think age is the most meaningful demographic category to focus on for this conversation, though, and haven't heard any compelling rebuttals as of yet.

 

[Shooshmoo]

When I read "White voters blame EVERYONE ELSE for their voting habits problem" in that tweet, I read it as white voters blaming non-white voters. Could also be Bernie bros blaming everyone else for not messaging hard enough to earn their vote.

What I definitely don't read it as is white voters blaming other white bernie bro voters.

 

[Strickland33]

Super glad you brought this up again, but I don't understand what you are saying here. Can you explain more?

you quoted a very small part of a fairly detailed post in response to a fairly detailed post by Ph, which included a research abstract. i'm gonna throw the question back at you: can you explain more? what don't you understand?

 

[PhDeac]

The EVERYONE ELSE is voters who aren’t white and “messaging.”

There’s a big difference between complaining and showing up and complaining and not showing up. The tweet calls out white Democrats who blame everyone else but themselves when the problem is not enough white people vote for Democrats. But it’s easier to blame “those people” rather than your shitty uncle.

 

[Biff Tannen]

So it's white people's fault.

 

[Strickland33]

The EVERYONE ELSE is voters who aren’t white and “messaging.”

There’s a big difference between complaining and showing up and complaining and not showing up. The tweet calls out white Democrats who blame everyone else but themselves when the problem is not enough white people vote for Democrats. But it’s easier to blame “those people” rather than your shitty uncle.

yea that's how i interpreted the point, too

and tried to use the boards as an example of this because it happens all the time on here

So it's white people's fault.

shut up already man

 

[Shooshmoo]

you quoted a very small part of a fairly detailed post in response to a fairly detailed post by Ph, which included a research abstract. i'm gonna throw the question back at you: can you explain more? what don't you understand?

I just didn't understand that part of the post -- literally, did not understand the point you were trying to make. I understood the rest of it, and that's why I didn't ask about it.

 

[Strickland33]

I just didn't understand that part of the post -- literally, did not understand the point you were trying to make. I understood the rest of it, and that's why I didn't ask about it.

Cool, so I was just making the point that there are still a lot of folks (some on this board) addicted to re-litigating the 2016 election instead of thinking about other lessons from that election. One big lesson was that young people are driven more by issues/platforms and less by "team affiliations" than older generations. The Sanders campaign was really propped up by young people, whose efforts probably could have delivered Clinton into the White House, had they been engaged in any meaningful capacity at all.

In 2020, the "threat" of Trumpism was so general that you saw a lot of those same voters galvanize a fairly pathetic Biden campaign into a resounding win against a peaking Trump.

My point is that instead of sniping leftists or taking Black women's voting for granted, the establishment might want to think about how to create an actual platform, consisting of planks that speak directly to the many pressing policy issues of our time. Instead, they're propping up folks like Cuellar, endorsing and funding unpopular incumbents in local elections, and generally refusing to take a stand on anything (or even, like, pretend to take a stand on anything - see the Biden admin's responses to abortion and inflation "at the pump" for two very recent examples).

Or, they can just take voters for granted and talk about how young people, poor people, and non-white people are responsible for losing elections.

 

[Strickland33]

seems relevant

 

[ChrisL68]

Moderates should be more like progressives that can't win elections.

 

[Strickland33]

Moderates should be more like progressives that can't win elections.

Progressives are winning a lot of elections if you pay attention to politics that aren't national, and moderates win elections because progressives hold their noses and vote for them.

The voting bloc that people label as progressive is, demographically-speaking, basically young people across a variety of demographic measures.

Just doesn't seem smart to ignore them by doing things like refusing to take stands on shit like the Supreme court overturning Roe, etc. IDK

 

[Kory]

Moderates should be more like progressives that can't win elections.