Democratic (Party) Direction

'coal miner' america is really only isolated to a few states i think, up and down the Appalachian mountains.

By far the largest producer of coal in the US is Wyoming.

But I get the 'coal miner' emphasis.

xpost I am using 'coal miner' here to stand in for all of the forgotten white people that the NYT/WaPo/Trump admin love so dearly. I thought this was obvious??? Ugh. Anyway. I am technically a nyc resident.

how can anyone say we're forgetting those people at this point, reporters are constantly visiting them to find out how miserable and racist they are

I just want to put this here to remind everyone what poor Americans get with “none of them are worth my vote” purity tests and third party challenges “from the left”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/health/maine-medicaid-expansion-lepage.html

I could put some other great examples of Democratic machine bullshit here, because RI, NY, and DC all have plenty of assholes that come to mind, but then there’s Maine. And LePage is just a little Trump actually happening because the checks and balances at the state level are almost nonexistent.

*sigh*

Yes we know how you feel

yeah, too bad all those berniebros wrote in jill stein for governor, otherwise everyone making less than 135% of the federal poverty limit would have subsidized health care, while everyone lucky enough to be making more than $16,500 A YEAR could buy one of those incredible Obamacare plans with a deductible that ensures you won't be seeing a doctor. Truly a neolib utopia.

I think he's referring to the fact that the Maine governor race had a third party spoiler that got 8% of the vote, which was more than the margin btw the dem and the republican candidates.

we've been over this ground before tbh and i'm not sure we're really going to bridge the gap between the "third parties are spoilers" paradigm and the "major parties not getting people to vote for them are spoiling themselves" paradigm. the theories of what voting means and the ethical obligations upon voters are pretty different.

A little old, but worthwhile. (Resistancehole, so relax, it's satire)
Calling All Resistance Members! Roe V. Wade Is In DANGER! We Need YOU To Yell At JILL STEIN About The 2016 Election!

Maine has a history of a strong independent party, hard to say that a third party vote in that state is a "waste." Angus King governed the state as an Independent for 8 years, and obv beat a democrat and a republican in 2012 for a senate seat.

if Dems had been willing to bow out in 2010 there wouldn't have been a governor Lepage

the independent candidate lost by 10,000 votes

we've been over this ground before tbh

Oh shit, did I bring up a tired-ass topic that ILX can’t find consensus on? And on a thread about the Democratic Party? Started by gabbneb?

I guess we found consensus about him, though.

haha wasn't really trying to shush you so much as save us from a 100 post digression that everyone involved will feel weary of even as they're posting

remember when third parties were for libertarians or fascists? good times.

Maine's got ranked-choice voting now, right? Or did LePage manage to throw up more roadblocks

An excruciating story to read. Oh, will someone think of those moderates!

And Stacey Adams is "brainy"!

reassuring to see the US centrists are just as nauseating as their UK counterparts!

Gary Lineker feels their pain tho...

lol, see, they're both extremists, she thinks the confederacy were bad guys!

Hey there was violence on both sides

love how it throws in republican talking points tangential to the actual topic - "The unemployment rate has declined by more than 6 percentage points since the current governor, Nathan Deal, took office in 2011." hmmmmm, wonder what was going on with employment in the years before 2011 and how this number has compared to that in other states, or nationally. ehhh whatever clearly this radical speaking of expanded access to health care should have all sensible georgians - you know, Jeb! voters - quaking in their boots.

so so many thoughts on this but i think it's better for me just to listen

Unified. Vote D for Democracy. pic.twitter.com/0S5oww1kR5

— Operation Wolverines 🇺🇸 (@OpWolverines) July 28, 2018

no real idea who this crowd is or where this came from

wolverines...idk sounds kinda ruskie

Opposite, right? Like from Red Dawn?

canadian

which hand goes with which group though

That has to be a Red Dawn ref

the progressive has very long fingers

the fingers of communism

That acct is torture as I love FDR-era agitprop and it pains me to see it used in this way.

Also, I’ve seen the sentiment both online and IRl that left “factionalism” is bad and we really need to “unify” if we’re going to defeat trump at the polls. This seems so blinkered and acquisient to Establishment power holders as it never gets spelled out who gets to call the shots or define the program folks are supposed to unify behind. “Things we can agree on” is a mealy-mouthed concept and so vague as to be useless, as there are plenty of stances that are completely incompatible.

I tried explaining this to someone today using deliberately older examples that mattered who people are supposed to rally behind, somebody like Paul Wellstone or somebody like Joe Lieberman

How would that work? Older people like me remember enthusiastically supporting both Wellstone and Gore-Lieberman. Didn't feel weird.

I don't think "unify" means "adopt a policy framework with which all Democrats agree" and it definitely doesn't mean "young progressives should shut up and vote because it's not their turn to drive the bus yet." I think what it means is that Dems should run a wide range of candidates who fit their districts and that we should have a lot less "fuck u bernie and jill stein look how much things suck because of you" and a lot more "i have talked to every one of my friends who is 18-30 about the importance of voting and maybe i wrote a check to a state senate candidate who has an unusually good chance to win in an R-leaning district"

Mr. Kemp, 54, is a drawling agri-businessman from Athens who has revived a populist style that has lain dormant in Georgia since the late 1960s.

i wonder what "populist style" this could be!

How would that work? Older people like me remember enthusiastically supporting both Wellstone and Gore-Lieberman. Didn't feel weird.

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

i'm middle-aged and i remember voting green because joe lieberman was such a fucking creep

Hillary won precincts with median income over https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/102293153006530560050k by 27 points. Obama lost them by 12 four years earlier. I think this is why media and political elites underestimated Trump: these tend to be the Republicans they knew; in this small demographic, flight from Trump was very real. https://t.co/NqwELXhkHb

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 27, 2018

https://splinternews.com/the-democratic-socialists-of-america-s-cynthia-nixon-di-1827894468

at which point do leftists figure out that the reason their “organizers” always act suspicious of “outsiders,” especially “leaders,” is almost always territorial bullshit and almost never to do with beliefs or principles?

so many punchable college politics stereotypes in NYC

I mean my town has ‘em too but the difference is we’ve never tried to pretend otherwise

“I think it’s really problematic to say that we need some savior like Nixon coming in, even though she might be wonderful,” Ariel Zakarison, co-chair of NYC-DSA’s labor and strike solidarity working group, told another packed gathering of DSA members in Bushwick on Tuesday. “We need to build power by building movements with the working class, not by electing people to represent the working class.”

lol mine is always like "all we want is life beyond thunderdome."

promising new direction for the party:

My opponent Denver Riggleman, running mate of Corey Stewart, was caught on camera campaigning with a white supremacist. Now he has been exposed as a devotee of Bigfoot erotica. This is not what we need on Capitol Hill. pic.twitter.com/0eBvxFd6sG

— Leslie Cockburn (@LeslieCockburn) July 29, 2018

dying

Also that's not a real name.

call out culture has gone TOO FAR, what's next, alien fetishists in camps?

When will leftists wake up and listen to tombot

Well, NYC DSA did endorse Nixon (sigh) so maybe Tombot was the deciding factor

https://splinternews.com/the-democratic-socialists-of-america-s-cynthia-nixon-di-1827894468

at which point do leftists figure out that the reason their “organizers” always act suspicious of “outsiders,” especially “leaders,” is almost always territorial bullshit and almost never to do with beliefs or principles?

so many punchable college politics stereotypes in NYC

― El Tomboto, Sunday, July 29, 2018 9:09 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean, I followed the DSA Nixon endorsement debate about as closely as you could from outside and I thought there were pretty strong arguments in both directions, and even reducing it to two directions is unfair since there is a "we shouldn't be endorsing anyone" camp and a "we should only be endorsing a very small select few committed socialists" camp on the anti side (people who might have been pro-Salazar and pro-AOC endorsements but anti-Nixon, or pro-Salazar but anti-AOC and anti-Nixon). I mean this goes back to my post above, which you said was helpful. They are an extremely democratically organized group that gets consensus on fucking everything, they have limited resources, and their primary purpose is not as a PAC or electoral organization. If they took sides in every race it would suck up most of the energy of the group and dilute its meaning. And Nixon says a lot of the right things but it is reasonable to question her bona fides imo. She has said some things about labor that have raised an eyebrow for me. I have misgivings about her but Cuomo is a snake.

Also, "we're not going to endorse Nixon" does not mean "don't vote for Nixon" or "stay home" or "Nixon isn't the best option here." It just means the organization isn't going to put its force behind her.

btw Indivisible just endorsed Nixon, that seems kind of big