Democratic (Party) Direction

Hillary needed an argument other than "I'm not Trump"

Have you met any middle-aged women?

never trump conservatives were hard to persuade into voting for the traditional enemy

Not in my experience. They all vote in blue precincts though

i think they overestimated Hillary's appeal!

― nomar, Monday, March 13, 2017 12:04 PM (fifty-four minutes ago)

this, sadly. you can cut it up however you want, and misogyny definitely played a big part, but hillary was personally repugnant to a huge swath of voters - mostly die-hard republicans, but also dems, independents & the undecided. same could be said of trump, but he managed to turn his negatives into strengths in the minds of his supporters, and hillary never did. at best, she "overcame" them.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/14/14908272/trump-greenberg-democrats-neolib

I thought this was pretty good, a podcast ep talking about the structural problems and shitty media culture the Dems have right now:

http://www.thisisfine.net/2017/03/23/episode-1-8-any-organized-party/

In this week’s podcast, we talk with writer, academic, activist, and erstwhile Twitter-opinion-haver Freddie DeBoer

lol kingfish what are you doing

I mean, Freddie? Really?

DeBoer is so enormously shitty. Recently he had someone doxed for criticizing Michael Tracey too much.

Jeff Stein‏
@JStein_Vox
Below, @justicedems's list of all House Dems not sponsoring Conyers's single-payer.

3 Ds heavyweights not on board: Pelosi; Hoyer; Crowley

https://twitter.com/JStein_Vox/status/847069350402117633

cool I didn't know there was a single-payer health care bill

can we get the Russians to hack it? maybe then Dems will back it

bernie would've gotten it through amirite

stop eatin Mark Russell's lunch, AB

xp

Polis did a reddit AMA yesterday, looks like he dodged on why he's not co-sponsoring

not sure what the goal of a single-payer bill at this particular time is - to make the GOP look bad? to keep the idea in the public eye? Not sure it accomplishes either.

to lure the demented trump into 'working with the democrats' to win the adulation of the people

lol like Trump pays attention to random bills in Congress

i support Single-Payer and hope this bill gets the momentum for it started, but I'm a bit mystified by the timing, strategically, of this push for Medicare For All NOW. ACA just avoided an existential threat, was declared law of the land by Paul Ryan, and the current President is vowing to sabotage it or to 'let it implode'. seems like Dems would want to defend ACA and try to build a coalition to improve some the many shitty parts (maybe a public option). if ACA had been repealed i would understand, but I just don't see the timing. is this just inertia from ppl who had expected repeal to pass? it's going to be difficult for Dems who have defended this law for 8 years and just finally permanently succeeded to say, actually, here's this other thing that we didn't do in 2008 but now think is better. maybe ACA and single payer are more compatible than I think, and they can sell it as an additional arrow in the quiver?

not sure what the goal of Nancy Pelosi at this particular time is

her stated goal for staying in office was to block ACA repeal

p sure she's done after this term

How much policy work did she do as speaker of the house? The recent stories of the way she whipped for votes for ACA were pretty great, though.

Pelosi didn't really write bills, she did what a Speaker is supposed to do: keep her caucus together, count votes, and get shit passed.

^ otm. Speakers don't introduce many, if any, bills and are sparing in their co-sponsorships. Ryan's sponsorship of the AHCA was more the exception than the rule. He put his prestige on the line, tripped and fell flat on his face. Which is why speakers don't introduce many, if any, etc.

Ok. So her not being the world's biggest ideologue might not be such a big surprise?

*siiiiiiiiiiiigh*

it's more that her (and Hoyer) not co-sponsoring a bill (which, in case anyone was unclear, has no hopes of passage) is not remarkable

cue Morbz link re: her killing single payer in initial run-up to ACA House votes

https://twitter.com/LanaDelRaytheon/status/847755420168994817

pelosi is a parliamentarian. something ryan sucks at, if you didn't notice.

XP yep those are two screen shots.

4 screenshots

Oh yeah, sorry.

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/03/how-trump-won

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/upshot/a-2016-review-turnout-wasnt-the-driver-of-clintons-defeat.html

Survey data, along with countless journalistic accounts, also suggest that voters switched in huge numbers.

Throughout the campaign, polls of registered voters — which are not subject to changes in turnout — showed Mrs. Clinton faring much worse than Mr. Obama among white working-class voters.

The postelection survey data tells a similar story: Mrs. Clinton won Mr. Obama’s white-working class supporters by a margin of only 78 percent to 18 percent against Mr. Trump, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

In the Midwestern battleground states and Pennsylvania, Mrs. Clinton had an advantage of 76 percent to 20 percent among white working-class Obama voters.

The survey data isn’t perfect. It relies on voters’ accurate recall of their 2012 vote, and that type of recall is often biased toward the winner. Indeed, the C.C.E.S. found that Mr. Obama had 54 percent of support among 2012 voters, compared with his actual 51 percent finish.

uggggh

How much policy work did she do as speaker of the house? The recent stories of the way she whipped for votes for ACA were pretty great, though.

― Frederik B, Friday, March 31, 2017 1:25 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Pelosi didn't really write bills, she did what a Speaker is supposed to do: keep her caucus together, count votes, and get shit passed.

― Οὖτις, Friday, March 31, 2017 1:26 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ otm. Speakers don't introduce many, if any, bills and are sparing in their co-sponsorships. Ryan's sponsorship of the AHCA was more the exception than the rule. He put his prestige on the line, tripped and fell flat on his face. Which is why speakers don't introduce many, if any, etc.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Friday, March 31, 2017 1:55 PM

Pelosi is by far the most effective speaker -- by any definition -- since Rayburn.

But in a system that accords undue weight to a few states which had a disproportionate number of voters Trump had a particular appeal to…he wasn’t a weak candidate at all. I’m becoming more and more convinced that a Clinton/non-Trump race would have meant a better popular vote showing but an Electoral College loss for the Republican Party.

Scott Lemieux otm.

well this is going to endear her to many

@thehill
Pelosi: Abortion rights "fading as an issue" for Democratic party http://hill.cm/p8IijCJ

also

So: It was the Obama-Trump voters, in the Rust Belt, with the economic anxiety. Disaffected workers in deindustrialized America, who believed that Trump was a genuine populist — and sympathized with Bernie Sanders’s critique of the Democratic Party — cost Clinton the election.

But then, so did insufficient Democratic turnout. Here’s McClatchy again:

Democrats are quick to acknowledge that even if voters switching allegiance had been Clinton’s biggest problem, in such a close election she still could have defeated Trump with better turnout. She could have won, for instance, if African-American turnout in Michigan and Florida matched 2012 levels.

And so did white America’s discomfort with the anti-racist, multicultural vision of our country that the Clinton campaign embraced. Analyses of postelection survey data have revealed that in 2016, the American electorate was more sharply polarized along lines of racial tolerance than it had been at any time in recent memory — and that “individuals with high levels of racial resentment were more likely to switch from Obama to Trump.”

And Clinton’s defeat was also, probably, caused by James Comey, as she herself claimed today; and by the candidate’s own fatal combination of oratorical weakness and a (fair or unfair) reputation for coziness with malign special interests; and sexism; and her campaign’s distaste for deep canvassing; and its neglect of the Rust Belt.

When an election is decided by 80,000 votes, a plausible case can be made for the decisive impact of a wide variety of individual factors. And there is some evidence to support virtually every popular narrative for Clinton’s defeat.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/it-was-obama-trump-voters-in-the-midwest-with-econ-anxiety.html

https://newrepublic.com/article/142334/tough-love-letter-left

review of Hegemony How-To, the Jon Smucker book that kingfish recommended on another thread (social activism in the age of Trump, iirc):

Hegemonic contest means being unafraid to engage with political structures and symbols that already exist. On this view, running in Democratic primaries is better than insisting on our own ballot line; changing the meaning of the American flag is better than burning it. It’s not that the Democratic Party is good or burning flags is wrong. Rather, it’s that the Party’s infrastructure and the flag’s symbolic potency are both too useful to cede to our opponents. As Max Berger, an organizer with “All of Us” recently told me, “The left will never control America the country if we can’t take control of ‘America’ the idea.”

Loomis on that piece: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/05/just-win-baby

No, the leftist candidate in 2020 needs to be someone else. Elizabeth Warren is fairly obvious the best choice as she probably would unite the party like no other. Keith Ellison would be a fascinating candidate. Perhaps more likely would be the left getting behind someone like Kirsten Gillibrand running a really progressive campaign. The great fear of course would be the left settling on someone else, calling Gillibrand a hopeless neoliberal, and we relive 2016 all over again, even after seeing 4 years of Trump. In fact, I don’t think there’s much evidence that won’t happen, especially if the left doesn’t take Adler-Bell’s advice to heart. The movement has to be big, it has to unite a lot of different kinds of people, and it can’t primarily about making sure you are happy with a candidate’s purity.

The great fear of course would be the left settling on someone else, calling Gillibrand a hopeless neoliberal, and we relive 2016 all over again, even after seeing 4 years of Trump.

this is obviously exactly what's going to happen

Increasingly I see no other choice but Warren.

warren is perfect

she's gonna be like 71

and?

warren is perfect

far from it, but there are no workable alternatives I can spot

she's one of those people who seems way younger than her age though. a john stamos or mbah gotho type. xp

i'm holding out for oprah

maybe i'll run