Democratic (Party) Direction

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/07/608649799/republican-fears-about-holding-the-senate-start-to-sink-in

so, i know how trump voters feel about me ("think" is not an appropriate word here, i don't believe) and i feel just about the same about them. where do we go from here?

maybe start talking to the 231,556,622 eligible voters in the US that didn't vote Trump

er, the 46% of that total. that's a hell of a lot of people ignored

how? a lot of them are deplorably rude. the insult-to-decent-thought ratio among "conservative" friends and family who didn't vote (or didn't vote for donnie moscow) is often difficult to respect, leaving aside the general anti-intellectual / anti-expert / anti-fact stance

maybe i didn't express myself clearly, i don't know. my question is this - are there personal consequences to dismissing tens of millions, at minimum, of people as irredeemable human garbage? if so, what are they?

You may not be invited to Thanksgiving dinner at your uncle Sal's house.

i was thinking more along the lines of building up into a spiral of misanthropy that's left me wanting to resign my membership in the species, if you know what i mean, a fair amount of the time

but sure awkward family dinners probably factor into it too

how many times can we have this same discussion

holy shit at those senate fundraising numbers xxxp

If you want a friend, get a job. If you're cute, sit next to me.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/09/politics/cnn-poll-generic-ballot-narrows/index.html

Generic ballots don't matter now. Enthusiasm does.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/09/politics/cnn-poll-generic-ballot-narrows/index.html

― reggie (qualmsley)

yes let's all obsess about the polls because that worked so fucking well in 2016, and also because those polls were totally dead-on about that asshole in west virginia so we should definitely panic at every time there's a slightly unfavorable trend in a poll

getting people registered is the only important thing right now. what people think or believe doesn't matter until october at the earliest.

a Nate Silver story from April 2010:

A couple of weeks ago, we examined the potential upside case for Democrats in November’s midterms. If the party were able to limit their losses to about 20 House seats and 3-4 Senate seats, it might not have as deleterious an effect on their policy agenda as you might think.

But that is the upside case for Democrats. It is not the base case, and it is certainly not the worst case — both of which look as grim as ever. Although I think people may somewhat underestimate the probability of a shift in momentum back toward the Democrats, they may simultaneously be underestimating the magnitude of losses that might occur if momentum fails to change, or moves in the other direction.

For starters, let’s look at the state of the generic congressional ballot. The Real Clear Politics average now shows Republicans with a 2.3 point lead. How does that translate in terms of a potential loss of seats for the Democrats?

Let’s suppose for a moment that, in November, the Democrats lose the national house popular vote by a margin of 2.3 points. It is actually not safe to assume that a 2.3-point deficit in generic ballot polls translates to a 2.3-point loss in the House popular vote — but we’ll get to that ambiguity in a moment.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/generic-ballot-points-toward-possible/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/upshot/unable-to-excite-the-base-moderate-candidates-still-tend-to-outdo-extreme-ones.html

Annoyed by the over-interpretation of this I saw on twitter from centrist moderate types. Not enough discussion of funding and the role that plays in getting primary votes. Also "extreme" defined so widely it could mean anything. But DCCC establishment types will interpret this how they please.

The frequency with which Booker Brown Gillibrand Harris Sanders Warren et al team up in a way that pushes the Democrats' legislative agenda to the left while neutralizing the goofy bickering between their whackjob stans is actually quite heartening. Our children is learning.

— Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) May 9, 2018

hmm....

otm!

Sean’s otm. It’s a good sign but I’m reticent about being optimistic.

You know what we say about Rubio? Booker is that, but Yale.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) May 9, 2018

I would guess Booker’s presidential campaign would be about as successful as Rubio’s. “Presidential” from afar or maybe in limited moments but flop up close and weirdness exposed amidst the duration.

saw him speak at a dinner and flop up close is otm

His whole Newark projects story felt like something preconceived to make the perfect This American Life episode. Or maybe campaign stump story.

His story/schtick works at college graduation events-- I saw him do one (until you realize he delivers the same one everywhere and look into his past. But we're tougher on our candidates flaws than Republicans are on theirs).

Meanwhile rich Republicans using their tax cut to try to stop any blue wave

Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has cut a $30 million check to the House GOP-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund, a massive cash infusion that top Republicans hope will alter the party's electoral outlook six months before Election Day

well I would obviously vote for him for pres if he were the nominee and wouldn't be loudly talking shit about him at that stage, but I don't see him as a likely all that viable candidate. Although it's not like there's anyone in the pool that looks like a clear winner right now.

I've never warmed to Booker. I'm Team Kamala all the way at this point. I'd be happy with Gillibrand too. Bernie and Biden are too old and doddering.

I'll take Harris but I still want it to be Duckworth more

Kamala's prosecutor instincts are a deal breaker for me. I'm pretty sure I'm in the tank for Gillibrand at this particular juncture.

Booker's a whore.

I’m fairly close to self identifying as a “Gillibro”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/11/17340502/kirsten-gillibrand-immigration-border-stop-bill

gillistan

Brand Gillibrand

I like her. It's still hard to get a sense of her as a candidate, especially running against Trump.

Yeah it’s honestly too hypothetical until primary actually begins.

Summer Lee, a candidate for state representative in southwestern Pennsylvania, runs her campaign out of Milton’s Top Notch Hair Salon, in downtown Braddock. On a recent Saturday morning, three dozen volunteers, most of them bearded, white millennials, were eating bagels and studying canvassing packets, preparing to go door-to-door to convince residents to vote for Lee. Among them was Arielle Cohen, who was wearing a T-shirt that read “A Woman’s Place is in the Revolution,” and Adam Shuck—“like corn or oysters”—who co-chair the Democratic Socialists of America in Pittsburgh, which endorsed Lee at the end of last year. If she wins, Lee will be the first African-American woman elected to the state legislature from southwestern Pennsylvania. But this race is also notable for the way that it pits Lee, who is thirty years old, against Paul Costa, a popular state representative who has been in office for nineteen years and is a member of a Democratic dynasty around Pittsburgh. (One of his brothers, Jay, is a state senator; another, Guy, is a city official; and his cousin, Dom, is a state representative.)

Here in this tiny race is the larger, existential battle over the future of the Democratic Party that is taking place across the country. Will it be centrist, establishment candidates who lead the much-anticipated “blue wave,” or will progressive insurgents sweep them aside? In Texas, Tennessee, California, and Hawaii, a Democratic electorate is pushing back against the Democratic machine’s support of the old guard. Many, like Lee, see the Democratic Party’s faith in centrists, like Costa, as having already failed; the increasingly radical right means that there’s no meaningful middle in which to meet.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/a-tiny-state-legislature-race-that-represents-the-future-of-the-democratic-party?mbid=social_twitter

And Emily's List, which is about as establishment Democratic as you can get, endorses Stacey Evans in the Georgia gubernatorial primary over Stacey Abrams, who some analysts say "might have broader appeal with white moderates and thus a better chance of winning a Georgia general election."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/politics/emilys-list-midterm-elections.html

In fact, both candidates are significantly further to the left than most of the Democratic figures who are endorsing them. Abrams sells herself as the progressive firebrand with a national fan base (she was endorsed by EMILY’s List, where she’s been a favorite for years) who can galvanize tens of thousands of African-Americans to go to the polls for the first time. Yet she served in the Georgia House for 11 years, seven of them as minority leader, and has a reputation as a pragmatist willing to do deals with the Republicans who’ve controlled state politics for almost two decades. Between February 1 and March 31, the latest campaign-finance-reporting period, she outraised her opponent three to one.

Evans, who has the support of much of the state party’s ruling class, is a color-inside-the-lines consensus builder. “I see myself as a champion for common sense,” she says. “Sometimes that makes me moderate, sometimes that makes me liberal. Maybe every now and then it makes me a conservative.” Yet Evans is almost exclusively basing her campaign on an all-out defense of the Hope scholarship, the most progressive entitlement program the state has ever enacted.

I love this country!

But dig deeper: There’s unease in the air. In Georgia elections, “race is a factor that sits in the corner of the room all the time,” says Davis Fox, a political analyst in DeKalb County, one of the Atlanta suburbs gradually undergoing a shift to the left. “I’m very worried that this is a bitter train wreck between a black and a white.”

Jim Galloway, a longtime political reporter and columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says that the choice is between “immediate gratification and fundamental realignment” of the Democratic Party. Will Democrats make the safer bet and go with Evans, who many think has a better shot in the general election because of her embrace of Trump-disaffected moderate Republicans and rural whites? Or will they tap Abrams as their homegrown Obama?

“I’ve talked to white Democrats and black Democrats — they’re very unsettled by Abrams,” Galloway says. Then he adds, unsettling me, “She’s not just female, she’s unmarried. That’s an issue.”

https://i.imgur.com/fm72dKp.jpg

hi it's me, jim fucking galloway

Just got back from early voting for Abrams.

And Emily's List, which is about as establishment Democratic as you can get, endorses Stacey Evans in the Georgia gubernatorial primary over Stacey Abrams

Ya mixed up your Staceys. Abrams got the endorsement.

Stacey Evans is basically a wet noodle of a candidate, white or not.

It’s cute that her divorced parents have started dating each other because of the campaign, though. That would be solid gold rom-com material back when Michael Douglas was in everything.

then the ex/new wife would accuse him of rape

Yeah I too got confused by the two Staceys, sorry, I said the exact opposite of what I meant. Emily's List endorsed Abrams.

maple cocaine is owed royalties at this point

.@SenGillibrand talking up importance of women in power at CAP conference: “If it wasn’t Lehman Brothers but Lehman Sisters we might not have had the financial collapse."

— Cameron Joseph (@cam_joseph) May 15, 2018

As we all know, women are never greedy or unscrupulous.

I know it's just a line and not a policy plank or anything but man that does not inspire confidence

Because she’s not owning up to the fact that capitalist speculation inexorably leads to boom-bust cycles and ruined lives? Or just because it sounds lame?

Lehwoman Sisters

Because she’s not owning up to the fact that capitalist speculation inexorably leads to boom-bust cycles and ruined lives? Or just because it sounds lame?

Both of those, but also the whole idea that hiring women CEOs/execs is any kind of structural fix to much of anything is pretty popular and also wrong