Democratic (Party) Direction

really think they only have two options: either move legitimately Left (Warren should be the baseline), or just start murking white ppl over the age of 60.

except basket-weaving hippies

who is the base?

people who need the government and know it.

All these groups want the same policies in place, don't they?

I would say no, though of course there's substantial overlap.

I'd love to see the venn diagrams or the basic explanations of where they don't overlap.

Racism?

For example.

'College students' covers a pretty large spectrum of ideologies (and levels of privilege), 'suburban liberal moms' is a niche that's pretty heavily slanted (expand to 'suburban moms' and you've got the basic ideological split that led to a majority of white women voting Trump), etc..

I guess I'm saying I legitimately have no idea who people are talking about when they talk about "the Democratic base," and I kind of think different people mean different things, and furthermore I kind of think most people are thinking "people like me."

people who think the govt should help ensure their income and health

you know, there are a lot of suburban moms who _really_ love guns.

Lots of Republicans think the government should help ensure THEIR income and health.

Kansas 4th district
2016: 60.7% R / 29.6% D (-31.1%)
2017: 52.5% R / 45.7% D (-6.8%)
A 24.3 point shift towards the D's

Montana at-large district:
2016: 56.2% R / 40.6% D (-15.6%)
2017: 50.2% R / 44.1% D (-6.1%)
A 9.5 point shift towards the D's

Georgia 6th district:
2016: 61.7% R / 38.3% D (-23.4%)
2017: 51.9% R / 48.1% D (-3.8%)
A 19.6 point shift toward the D's

South Carolina 5th district:
2016: 59.2% R / 38.7% D (-20.5%)
2017: 51.1% R / 47.9% D (-3.2%)
A 17.3 point shift toward the D's

don't fuck this up next november!

eephus, i'm not so sure

(at least that's not the Republican base.)

Democrats looking for a boost going into the midterm-election year of 2018 will rely on their solid prospects in the two states holding regular gubernatorial elections in November, New Jersey and Virginia.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/the-democrats-losing-streak-will-likely-end-in-november.html

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/ghost-candidates-are-not-acceptable

I dug this. Gets into why you'd want to run an electoral campaign even if you're not sure you'll win.

you guys realize all kinds of people live in the suburbs. Fred you have to lay off looking for the boogyman chill the fuck out sometimes. you are talking suburban Atlanta and you are living in Denmark. give me a break

adam otm

Yep

I live in the suburbs. Please be nice to me. :-)

How's the racism out there

Everyone here realizes all kinds of people live in the suburbs.

In my outer ring NYC suburb it's just me and 750,000 clones of me

All kinds of people are evangelicals too, but 80% voted for Trump. So even though 16% voted for Clinton, people just say evangelicals went for Trump. It's how people talk about voting blocs, in generalizations.

That sounds like literal hell, Treesh.

Nah it's chill

nobody like me lives in the suburbs

because I don't have a driver's license

Commie.

can we now divest ourselves from the notion that blind obedience to party above all else is exclusively a feature of the right?

yeah, probably not, you're right

some things worth remembering

I’m going to give you millstones around the Democratic Party neck that are milestones.

The first big one was in 1979. Tony Coelho, who was a congressman from California, and who ran the House Democratic Campaign treasure chest, convinced the Democrats that they should bid for corporate money, corporate PACs, that they could raise a lot of money. Why leave it up to Republicans and simply rely on the dwindling labor union base for money, when you had a huge honeypot in the corporate area?

And they did. And I could see the difference almost immediately. First of all, they lost the election to Reagan. And then they started getting weaker in the Congress. At that time, 1980, some of our big allies were defeated in the so-called Reagan landslide against Carter, we lost Senator [Gaylord] Nelson, Senator [Warren] Magnuson, Senator [Frank] Church. We had more trouble getting congressional hearings investigating corporate malfeasance by the Democrat [congressional committee] chairs. When the Democrats regained the White House [in 1992] you could see the difference in appointments to regulatory agencies, the difficulty in getting them to upgrade health and safety regulations.

The second millstone is that they didn’t know how to deal with Reagan. And the Republicans took note. That means a soft tone, smiling … You can say terrible things and do terrible things as long as you have [that] type of presentation....

Increasingly they began to judge their challenge to Republicans by how much money they raised. You talk to [Marcy] Kaptur from Cleveland, she says, we go into the Democratic caucus in the House, we go in talking money, we stay talking money, and we go out with our quotas for money. …

As a result they took the economic issues off the table that used to win again and again in the thirties and forties for the Democrats. The labor issues, the living wage issues, the health insurance issue, pension issues. And that of course was a huge bonanza for the Republican Party because the Republican Party could not contend on economic issues. They contended on racial issues, on bigotry issues, and that’s how they began to take control of the solid Democratic South after the civil rights laws were passed.

Raising money from Wall Street, from the drug companies, from health insurance companies, the energy companies, kept [Democrats] from their main contrasting advantage over the Republicans, which is, in FDR’s parlance, “The Democratic Party is the party of working families, Republicans are the party of the rich.” That flipped it completely and left the Democrats extremely vulnerable.

As a result they drew back geographically, to the east coast, west coast and so on.

And that created another millstone: You don’t run a 50-state [presidential] campaign. If you don’t run a 50-state campaign, number one you’re strengthening the opposing party in those states you’ve abandoned, so they can take those states for granted and concentrate on the states that are in the grey area. That was flub number one.

Flub number two is what Ben Barnes, the politically-savvy guy in Texas, told me. He said, when you don’t contest the presidential race in Texas, it rots the whole party down … all the way to mayors and city council. So it replicates this decadence and powerlessness for future years.

When they abandoned the red states, they abandoned five states in the Rocky Mountain area, and started out with a handicap of nine or ten senators....

[Another] millstone is they could never contrast themselves with the Republicans on military foreign policy – because they were like them. They never question the military budget, they never question the militarized foreign policy, like Hillary the hawk on Libya, who scared the generals and ran over [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates who opposed her going to the White House to [push for] toppling the regime, metastasizing violence in seven or eight African countries to this day.

So they knocked out foreign and military policy, because they were getting money from Lockheed and Boeing and General Dynamics and Raytheon and so on. Even Elizabeth Warren when she had a chance started talking about maintaining those contracts with Raytheon. Here’s the left wing of the party talking about Raytheon, which is the biggest corporate welfare boondoggle east of the Pecos.

[Another] millstone is: Nobody gets fired. They have defeat after defeat, and they can’t replace their defeated compadres with new, vigorous, energetic people. Labor unions, the same thing. They [stay in positions] into their eighties no matter how screwed up the union is. You don’t get fired no matter how big the loss is, unlike in the business community, where you get fired....

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/25/ralph-nader-the-democrats-are-unable-to-defend-the-u-s-from-the-most-vicious-republican-party-in-history/

I'm sure everyone will discuss Nader and his positions v reasonably here

that's why i left his name out of it

seems otm to me tbph

in case it wasn't clear enough that dem platform language on health care is bullshit

Dems control every major office in America's largest state -- and used their power to do this. These are indisputable facts. https://t.co/VcZLqBnDGH

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 27, 2017

400 billion dollars is twice the California state budget, and there was no funding included in the bill. 'Details', I know.

Also, since for once I can use this line, as someone who used to live in California, shut up about something you clearly can't know anything about, you dirty foreigner!!!

(You are a foreigner, right Simon? Or am I confusing you with someone else?)

However, the report estimated that the other $200 billion could be funded by moving state payroll taxes up to 15 percent , a levy the report said “would be offset to a large degree by reduced spending on health care coverage by employers and employees.”

plus no one dies or goes bankrupt from the costs of care. sounds fine to me.

poor phrasing there but you get the point.

But significantly that tax increase wasn't then included in the bill, because it would take two thirds of the senate to vote for it, which would mean all 27 Dem senators, and a tax hike of that magnitude wasn't likely to pass.

hey if he doesn't tank a revised bill I'd be happy to be wrong

Rendon probably shelved the bill because the senate wasn't going to pass it anyway, and he feared it was more about setting the assembly members up for a vote that could then be used against them during primary season. He then took the heat. And #RecallRendon started trending on twitter.

I think single payer as an ideal is a non-brainer, btw, but it comes with trade-offs, tradeoffs that are absolutely worth it to make. So... Just include all the tradeoffs in the bill from the start, and work to get it passed 🤷 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I unfortunately fear that there won't be a revised bill, because the senate doesn't want it.

Reagan won in 1980 because Democrats took corporate PAC money in 1979?

Not exactly how I remember it but ok

yeah that's exactly what RN said

strawmanning forevah

The first big one was in 1979. Tony Coelho, who was a congressman from California, and who ran the House Democratic Campaign treasure chest, convinced the Democrats that they should bid for corporate money, corporate PACs, that they could raise a lot of money. Why leave it up to Republicans and simply rely on the dwindling labor union base for money, when you had a huge honeypot in the corporate area?

And they did. And I could see the difference almost immediately. First of all, they lost the election to Reagan.

i don't see how it's possible to interpret that in any way other than "Reagan won in 1980 because Democrats took corporate PAC money in 1979"

"The second millstone is that they didn’t know how to deal with Reagan..."

I think you can make a better argument that the Democrats were so humiliated after Carter and Mondale that the idea of taking corporate money seemed perfectly fine - any port in a storm! - and when Clinton won in 1992 it was seen as a justification of that change in approach, and the DCCC, DLC (rip), DNC etc haven't been the same ever since.

Now there might be a chance to pivot away from courting banks and tech firms for everything but first we'd need a convincing victory by an unorthodox campaign

Come on, mark zuckerberg, you're our only hope