This sneering neoliberal attitude is literally what I’m talking about the republicans not doing. You’re proving my point with every post more and more. When your refusal to ask for ANY accountability from the DNC leadership leads to 2016 again, much like in 2016, you will blame the left, which has no power in the DNC, not the party that failed you and lost because they insisted on running an unpopular candidate.
And you won’t care because you’re more interested in running interference for your “team” than any specific electoral or policy outcome. The DNC cannot fail; it can only be failed.
No, if Biden loses I will not blame the left. Just as I didn’t blame them when Dukakis lost, Gore lost, Kerry lost, or Clinton lost.
The left, unfortunately, are irrelevant. They are simply too unreliable to form the base of a coalition. It is like blaming the youth for low turnout: what did you expect?
Which is why Democrats nearly always pivot towards moderates/independents when trying to build a coalition. This strategy has worked for most elections but not all, and when it fails the candidate must take the ultimate blame.
Finally, I am certainly interested in policy outcomes. Probably most of the same policy outcomes as the left.
However, I don’t demand that the DNC do everything I want right away. Being in a successful coalition means accepting that you will only get some of what you want. It means understanding that durable change is slow and incremental, and not wavering when faced with disappointment.
Biden has done a couple things I wanted, but by no means as much as I wanted. Yet a couple is good enough to keep my support. Because I’m not the main character either.
“Young people and minorities don’t vote anyway” is my favorite piece of Biden dem copium. Name the last dem who won a presidential cycle with promises of centrism and no significant youth support?
Biden promised checks, HBCU loan forgiveness, a minimum wage increase, and expansion of the child tax credit and got 50% young voter turnout with an 80% bias and won
Hillary Clinton promised the neoliberal status quo and underperformed with youth voters by 5% versus Obama 2012 (roughly 50%) with a truly pathetic 55% bias, almost tying Trump, and lost
Obama 2008 promised card check, the most labor lefty lefty policy humanly possible and turned out an amazing 66% of all youth voters FOR him and won
Kerry 2004 promised literally nothing and only 47% of young voters showed up to vote at all and he lost
Please continue to tell me how centrism wins presidential elections for dems and the youth vote isn’t determinative… This is a fascinating work of political science fiction!
I never said you can (or can’t) rely on youth to prefer Democrats.
What I said was that you should expect youth turnout to be relatively low, in general. Which is true.
In 2004, youth (18-24) turnout was 42%. The national average was 58%. Over 65 was 69%.
In 2008, youth turnout was 44%. The national average was 58%. Over 65 was 68%.
In 2016, youth turnout was 39%. The national average was 56%. Over 65 was 68%.
In 2020, youth turnout was 48%. The national average was 61%. Over 65 was 72%.
Politicians don’t go to where votes might be. They go to where votes have been. And looking at those numbers, it is entirely rational to favor policy changes that affect over 65s, because they are more likely to vote. Hence policies like reducing drug prices by allowing imports from Canada.
Except older voters overwhelmingly break republican, so you can’t win an election with their votes as a democrat. Other than that your logic is impeccable.
You win elections by winning votes. You can equally improve your chances by increasing your margin by 5% or by reducing your opponents margin by 5%. So even if Biden doesn’t have a majority of over 65s, he still needs to appeal to them.
The only people he doesn’t need to worry about are those who don’t vote.
We will see if the “get GOP voters who we’d prefer were our voters over the hippies who vote for us” strategy works this time. It did for Clinton and Obama on the re-election cycle, but they’re both VERY talented politicians who had capable teams that kept their bases MUCH happier while selling them out and a massive bank of democratic working class whites in the midwest who are now Trump voters.
Winning over republican voters will be especially hard for Biden. He has no political talent. He rode on incumbency for 40 years. That’s why Obama had to bail him out after coming in 3rd to 5th in every pre-SC state in 2020’s primary and why the DNC won’t allow there to even be a vote in many states this cycle.
Biden additionally has an overtly WAY worse team that can’t go a week without chaos like his Secretary of Defense ducking out for a nose job on the brink of WWIII while the deputy is in Puerto Rico on the beach without telling anyone. While this is probably going to be a record low turnout general election, so the dynamics could be ahistorically weird and maybe it will work out for you this time, historically low turnout has favored the GOP. Trump is literally a religious figure to these people. I’m skeptical his core of voters is going to stay home, and there are just more of them than there are of you relatively upwardly mobile suburban neoliberals who have decided the DNC is your team post-Trump. You delivered better than expected, but still losing, performance in 2022, so a low turnout election where Trump is actually on the ballot will almost certainly favor the GOP unless “actually the economy is good, you’re wrong” is a way more persuasive argument than it seems.
Yes, ultimately we will see if Biden’s strategy works.
That said, Clinton and Obama are hardly the only politicians who preferred the “appeal to independents strategy” over “get the lefties to vote strategy”. Democrats won many difficult statewide elections using the former strategy, most recently the Kentucky governor, the Georgia Senate, and the Arizona Senate races.
Meanwhile, the most prominent statewide/national politicians using the latter strategy were Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Warren won, but Massachusetts should not be a difficult election for Democrats to win. Whereas Sanders has shown that relying on lefty support won’t even win a national primary (and I consider “the 2016/2020 DNC primaries were rigged” as unpersuasive as “the 2020 presidential election was rigged”).
We were talking about presidential races, but I’m glad you’re finally falling back to state-level races because you realize you can’t make your case in a national race. I’m sure if our roles were reversed, you’d gladly vote and volunteer for a party that hates people like you and will never give your side a primary win, other than by occasional sheer hubris, for 30 years. I guess I’m just not as forgiving as you are. If you can keep the GOP at bay without us lifting a finger, I’d honestly prefer that. It’s not like I WANT to stand out in the November cold for 10 hours while I watch the GOP poll standers get catered meals and hope the SEIU or AFLCIO shows up with the grossest sandwiches you’ve ever seen around 5PM in the same week I walked 8 miles of city blocks knocking on doors for a center-right party that hates me, believe it or not.
This sneering neoliberal attitude is literally what I’m talking about the republicans not doing. You’re proving my point with every post more and more. When your refusal to ask for ANY accountability from the DNC leadership leads to 2016 again, much like in 2016, you will blame the left, which has no power in the DNC, not the party that failed you and lost because they insisted on running an unpopular candidate.
And you won’t care because you’re more interested in running interference for your “team” than any specific electoral or policy outcome. The DNC cannot fail; it can only be failed.
No, if Biden loses I will not blame the left. Just as I didn’t blame them when Dukakis lost, Gore lost, Kerry lost, or Clinton lost.
The left, unfortunately, are irrelevant. They are simply too unreliable to form the base of a coalition. It is like blaming the youth for low turnout: what did you expect?
Which is why Democrats nearly always pivot towards moderates/independents when trying to build a coalition. This strategy has worked for most elections but not all, and when it fails the candidate must take the ultimate blame.
Finally, I am certainly interested in policy outcomes. Probably most of the same policy outcomes as the left.
However, I don’t demand that the DNC do everything I want right away. Being in a successful coalition means accepting that you will only get some of what you want. It means understanding that durable change is slow and incremental, and not wavering when faced with disappointment.
Biden has done a couple things I wanted, but by no means as much as I wanted. Yet a couple is good enough to keep my support. Because I’m not the main character either.
“Young people and minorities don’t vote anyway” is my favorite piece of Biden dem copium. Name the last dem who won a presidential cycle with promises of centrism and no significant youth support?
Please continue to tell me how centrism wins presidential elections for dems and the youth vote isn’t determinative… This is a fascinating work of political science fiction!
I never said you can (or can’t) rely on youth to prefer Democrats.
What I said was that you should expect youth turnout to be relatively low, in general. Which is true.
In 2004, youth (18-24) turnout was 42%. The national average was 58%. Over 65 was 69%.
In 2008, youth turnout was 44%. The national average was 58%. Over 65 was 68%.
In 2016, youth turnout was 39%. The national average was 56%. Over 65 was 68%.
In 2020, youth turnout was 48%. The national average was 61%. Over 65 was 72%.
Politicians don’t go to where votes might be. They go to where votes have been. And looking at those numbers, it is entirely rational to favor policy changes that affect over 65s, because they are more likely to vote. Hence policies like reducing drug prices by allowing imports from Canada.
Except older voters overwhelmingly break republican, so you can’t win an election with their votes as a democrat. Other than that your logic is impeccable.
You win elections by winning votes. You can equally improve your chances by increasing your margin by 5% or by reducing your opponents margin by 5%. So even if Biden doesn’t have a majority of over 65s, he still needs to appeal to them.
The only people he doesn’t need to worry about are those who don’t vote.
We will see if the “get GOP voters who we’d prefer were our voters over the hippies who vote for us” strategy works this time. It did for Clinton and Obama on the re-election cycle, but they’re both VERY talented politicians who had capable teams that kept their bases MUCH happier while selling them out and a massive bank of democratic working class whites in the midwest who are now Trump voters. Winning over republican voters will be especially hard for Biden. He has no political talent. He rode on incumbency for 40 years. That’s why Obama had to bail him out after coming in 3rd to 5th in every pre-SC state in 2020’s primary and why the DNC won’t allow there to even be a vote in many states this cycle. Biden additionally has an overtly WAY worse team that can’t go a week without chaos like his Secretary of Defense ducking out for a nose job on the brink of WWIII while the deputy is in Puerto Rico on the beach without telling anyone. While this is probably going to be a record low turnout general election, so the dynamics could be ahistorically weird and maybe it will work out for you this time, historically low turnout has favored the GOP. Trump is literally a religious figure to these people. I’m skeptical his core of voters is going to stay home, and there are just more of them than there are of you relatively upwardly mobile suburban neoliberals who have decided the DNC is your team post-Trump. You delivered better than expected, but still losing, performance in 2022, so a low turnout election where Trump is actually on the ballot will almost certainly favor the GOP unless “actually the economy is good, you’re wrong” is a way more persuasive argument than it seems.
Yes, ultimately we will see if Biden’s strategy works.
That said, Clinton and Obama are hardly the only politicians who preferred the “appeal to independents strategy” over “get the lefties to vote strategy”. Democrats won many difficult statewide elections using the former strategy, most recently the Kentucky governor, the Georgia Senate, and the Arizona Senate races.
Meanwhile, the most prominent statewide/national politicians using the latter strategy were Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Warren won, but Massachusetts should not be a difficult election for Democrats to win. Whereas Sanders has shown that relying on lefty support won’t even win a national primary (and I consider “the 2016/2020 DNC primaries were rigged” as unpersuasive as “the 2020 presidential election was rigged”).
We were talking about presidential races, but I’m glad you’re finally falling back to state-level races because you realize you can’t make your case in a national race. I’m sure if our roles were reversed, you’d gladly vote and volunteer for a party that hates people like you and will never give your side a primary win, other than by occasional sheer hubris, for 30 years. I guess I’m just not as forgiving as you are. If you can keep the GOP at bay without us lifting a finger, I’d honestly prefer that. It’s not like I WANT to stand out in the November cold for 10 hours while I watch the GOP poll standers get catered meals and hope the SEIU or AFLCIO shows up with the grossest sandwiches you’ve ever seen around 5PM in the same week I walked 8 miles of city blocks knocking on doors for a center-right party that hates me, believe it or not.