Democratic (Party) Direction

I'm sure there are plenty of sun belt conservatives with solar panels on their roof. Most people like the idea of not paying for their energy. Plus there's an "off the grid" appeal for the prepper types.

i disagree. every climate change skeptic i know is a conservative moron

Conservative moronism is not monolithic!

#notallmorans

I'm sure there are plenty of sun belt conservatives with solar panels on their roof. Most people like the idea of not paying for their energy. Plus there's an "off the grid" appeal for the prepper types.

At one point, no matter where you stand on the spectrum, you can’t argue with prices, the moment conservatives will realise they save money in the short term by shunning oil, they will.

I work in solar and it is definitely WAY more bipartisan than one might think, for the reasons cited above and more

and yeah the grid parity numbers don't lie

That's similar to Bernie's emphasis on jobs when he was stumping the Green New Deal. Appeal to people's baser instincts (save money, more jobs) rather than abstract notions of doing good for the climate.

Can it be that the difference and arguments might be more within the lines of does it come from the free market or does it come from ‘big government’?

I really think it's more just that most people like to save money and not have to send their money to big corporations when they can get energy from the sun. Medicare is big government and it's popular, obamacare is more "free market" and it's less popular. Don't add too many layers of abstraction to it, people like ease, simplicity, safety, comfort, and saving money.

I think a lot of the main issues for the rural voters are the same as urban voters, but pivoted:
Healthcare: Expensive, and a lot of rural hospitals and clinics are consolidating or shutting down. It’s not profitable for medical provider networks to run those centers in sparse areas. The thing that comes to mind was a Sanders push for community healthcare centers in several bills, which worked hand-in-hand with the Medicaid expansion. If there aren’t enough patients, the system isn’t sustainable. We need people seeking and receiving healthcare at rural clinics in order to make them viable.The ability to get medical care in your own community is overlooked by people who live within 20 minutes of a hospital
Schools: Again, consolidation and a lack of funding in sparse areas. Part of this is just numbers — there aren’t going to be a lot of high schools out there with 50 people in a graduating class due to monetary constraints, but maybe there should be?

Part of this is the inability to attract new industry to areas where there just isn’t the population, and those areas that are having population growth in the midwest are those that have mostly low-paying, majority-immigrant populations. I have family members who grew up in a semi-rural town that isn’t that far from a city, but they were still shrinking compared to actual suburbs. Then a meat processing facility moved in, and the complaints changed for a while to having a lack of resources for ESL students.
I think the community is doing relatively OK, but.. well, remember all those news stories where a high school basketball team with a majority of students from families of color were treated to assholes from another district yelling racist crap and chanting “Trump” at the game? That kind of shit happened.

And don’t even get me started about that entire Devin Nunes debacle where it became clear that his family’s dairy farm up and left California years ago and now operates in the midwest, with mostly immigrant laborers.

have democrats ever gone "too far left" -- and by too far left i mean too "radical" with income inequality proposals, climate change proposals, offering social services at the expense of the military, corporate america and big donors -- and lost votes because of it?

Maybe in 1968. Losers will claim they did. I tend to think not. I need data, though.

maaaybe McGovern in '72? And they've never recovered since even though things are totally different now, sad lol.

huh thx, food for thought

‘66-‘68-‘72 were a social backlash more than government program backlash

Mondale threatened to raise everyone’s taxes but not to spend more just to lower the deficit IIRC.

yeah, McGovern was not noticeably left-er than Humphrey or LBJ.

and Humphrey in 1948 was more liberal than Jimmy Carter in any year.

I think it's always a bit reductionist to say anyone loses an election by going "too far left" or too far anything. I think it's plausible that Republicans succeeded in branding the democratic party generally with unpopular stances like defund the police, even though there's no candidate-specific evidence (i.e. that any swing candidate who lost supported defunding police).

But "unpopular" is the key there, not "left."

Whichever party more effectively captures the public's feeling of what is wrong with the country seems able to ride that to push things left or right as they see fit. (cue silby's 'people don't vote for reasons' argument)

"Make America Great Again" resonated against "America Is Already Great" because who actually believed the latter?
Obama and Clinton won on Hope and Change challenges to the status quo.
Dubya ran against the moral dissolution of the Clinton White House (least effective counter-narrative, not enough people gave a shit if the President had affairs).
Carter's austerity without hope didn't play well against Reagan's boundless optimism.
Carter/Ford... both just kind of meh in the end.
Nixon's silent majority thought we weren't patriotic enough, didn't love the troops enough, backlash against the decline of American exceptionalism/Manifest Destiny/etc..

Captures in branding*

And Biden ran on "back to normal, don't you want to spend your day not thinking about politics again," resonating against "chaos in the White House" and won.

Can't help but think that americans (and elsewhere!) love that 'let's be united' stuff that Biden sold.

the obvious solution is for the Democrats to run someone with a farther left platform that people actually like

I think it’s a good goal, but we’ve got to also get that going across the house, senate, and maybe more importantly state and city level politicians

The closer you start to the ground, the more we’re going to see how progressive policies work in practice and can be pushed to the federal imo

tbh, any Democrat can choose to run for any office - and can adopt whatever platform they think will appeal to the most voters. It's getting your campaign stood up and organized that's the real hurdle, not a lack of blessing from the Democratic Party apparatchiks.

imo mcgovern (like carter) is secretly much closer to being a prefiguration of the present college-kid democratic party than a symbol of what it’s supposedly reacting to and replacing

(not ideologically, but in terms of post-southern political strategy)

Whichever party more effectively captures the public's feeling of what is wrong with the country seems able to ride that to push things left or right as they see fit. (cue silby's 'people don't vote for reasons' argument)

"Make America Great Again" resonated against "America Is Already Great" because who actually believed the latter?
Obama and Clinton won on Hope and Change challenges to the status quo.
Dubya ran against the moral dissolution of the Clinton White House (least effective counter-narrative, not enough people gave a shit if the President had affairs).
Carter's austerity without hope didn't play well against Reagan's boundless optimism.
Carter/Ford... both just kind of meh in the end.
Nixon's silent majority thought we weren't patriotic enough, didn't love the troops enough, backlash against the decline of American exceptionalism/Manifest Destiny/etc..

― onlyfans.com/hunterb (milo z), Wednesday, 11 November 2020 20:04 (forty-six minutes ago) link

Right, and in this regard, some Democrats may have been hurt by a GENERALIZED perception of Democrats = the chaotic rioting I see on TV, culturally left ideas, disorder, uncomfortable change, lack of authority etc. Which is how the GOP attacks paint them. And I think the success of that probably says more about the voters in the district and the success of the attack messaging than the popularity of the platform.

I dunno, sell clean energy without mentioning climate change, just pure pork.

as you note later on, this is the intended branding of the Green New Deal, and the term "renewables" - a big jobs program that will be long-term sustainable, and happens to have a chance of preserving human life as well. it just needs more oxygen on the New Deal part, so that people who think they're anti-green for reasons can ignore the fact that they don't actually have reasons, and move on to caring about the jobs instead.

From the same article as 'do we want to govern or connect with and motivate voters be internet celebrities': The trio of Democratic leaders in the House — Speaker Pelosi (80), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (81) and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (80) — are "on a glidepath" to another term leading the Party.

gerontocracy is a bipartisan value

Republicans are slightly better about it. Paul Ryan had barely entered puberty.

Malpractice for these decrepit ghouls not to retire

hai guys i heard you had an urban rural divide

http://images.wikia.com/fantasysports/images/d/dc/Hammer_and_sickle.png

https://image.spreadshirtmedia.com/image-server/v1/compositions/111592304/views/1,width=300,height=300,appearanceId=2,version=1465297176/hammer-sickle-t-shirts-men-s-premium-t-shirt.jpg

even

The way the Rs embrace *QAnon* Members versus how the Ds deal with the Squad is really a sight to behold. https://t.co/scfueNcu7e

— Rebecca Katz (@RebeccaKKatz) November 12, 2020

Schumer siding with Warren to pressure Biden to sign an EO for student debt cancellation up to 50 000$ seems to me like the general direction the party is going.

PLEEEEEEASE let that happen

that would mean EVERYTHING to me

10 years ago, on this very forum, i used to argue against student debt relief, on the grounds that if many billions of dollars were going to finally be allocated to help people with financial problems, that money should instead go to the homeless, or toward a truly universal safety net, rather than toward a subset of people who were already well off enough to be in a position to get a loan.

however, now i just really want my student loans to go away.

Crazy fact: US total amount of student debt is higher than what the entire govt of Canada spends in year.

Great idea for an economic stimulus workaround as well

New long interview with David Shor:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/david-shor-analysis-2020-election-autopsy-democrats-polls.html

It is a very solid piece (unfortunately I was sad for like an hour after reading it)

Shor's skepticism about the value of voter turnout efforts is kinda hard for me to square with the amount of voter suppression we're dealing with.

I'm skeptical of one sentence about the weakness of canvassing followed by one about GOTV mail as if they're the same thing - and the Vox article they link to is about phone calls being as effective as in-person interactions (in the context of why it's okay to not canvas during COVID).

I throw away most mail without looking at it, I do not answer my phone for any number that isn't saved as a contact. Both those methods are more likely to miss me than in-person canvassing - which is less annoying than either junk mail or junk calls, and harder to ignore. Does anyone answer phone calls from unknown numbers? That's some landline Boomer shit.

Idk but yesterday I looked up a bunch of NYC races that are happening in 2021 and a fair number of the declared candidates didn't have websites or a cultivated social media presence that showed any awareness of "online" as important. In the year of our Lord 2020 if you don't have a website you are not serious. (Except for that one guy in Coney Island who is probably gonna beat Mathylde Frontus, apparently. The article is stupid and contradictory imo but there are some good quotes in the last two paras.

xp: I answer numbers I don't know because sometimes it is an alternate number from my doctor or vet.

this is really good imo. breezy convo with Dorothy Fortenberry (Handmaiden’s Tale writer). nuanced takes RE current/ future of Democratic Party. gets weirdly naive in the Amy Kony 2020 Barrett section but hey I’m not catholic so...


https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-your-enemy/id1462703434?i=1000496529236