Democratic (Party) Direction

FWIW the majority of Americans also oppose eliminating private health insurance.

I.e. a lot of people think “Medicare For All” sounds like a great idea but when you poll them on policies that would be implemented under M4A they don’t like it

I thought it was the otherb way around?

The crumb crust is a texture and flavour thing - it just looks more appetising. Also seconding peas in cheese.

accidentally otm

depends which "policies that would be implemented" are being polled, I think. for example, "you get free healthcare forever" polls well. "the GOVERNMENT will tell HARD WORKING COMPANIES they CAN'T MAKE MONEY ANYMORE" polls badly.

the whole party apparatus is like a character in Jurassic Park trying to remain perfectly still as the election (T-Rex) gets closer because they think that's the only way they'll survive.

"the GOVERNMENT will tell HARD WORKING COMPANIES they CAN'T MAKE MONEY ANYMORE" polls badly.

I seriously doubt this is how the poll question is framed, and I’m guessing the reason people don’t want private insurance abolished is that they think it gives them more choices and lower costs, not that they’re concerned about the welfare of insurance companies.

I feel like it's the same reason a lot of people (indeed most people in the US) think public school should be a free, taxpayer-funded option for everyone, but also don't think private schools should be abolished, don't really get why anyone would think of this as a weird or hypocritical or unlikely stance for people to have.

(I think private schools should be abolished)

pvmic

show me one out-of-character post I've made! Actually don't I can think of some

no shade implied; we admire your consistency

they think it gives them more choices and lower costs

than... what? I believe you that a lot of people think this; a lot of people think American has 'the best' health care in the world! but that's just the result of decades of effective propaganda by the insurance industry, surely. i'm not implying it won't be hard to disabuse people of these ideas, of course

crut, you're right that my simplification doesn't capture a lot of the sentiment out there. but we know the whole routine by now and what the counterarguments and counterpropaganda moves are. it would be nice for the democratic party at the national level to look at the M4A polling, recognize the challenges, and participate in the organizing work needed to continue flipping those scripts. this is obviously a fantasy ---- but i'm just saying, i get why the contrast between the poll numbers and the platform votes is galling.

Exclusive: Democrats introduce a bill to fund legal assistance for those facing eviction. https://t.co/ihvF0Dx7HB

— Vox (@voxdotcom) July 28, 2020

this...doesn't really get to the root of the problem

This Alex Morse story is crazy. It seems like this guy (30-something mayor of a small MA city, primarying a Dem incumbent) was accused of using his talks to College Democrats groups as a way to meet undergrads who he'd then try to pick up on dating apps -- there was a huge amount of "it's not against any official rule to treat the audience at your campus visit as a group of potential sex partners, what's the problem here" defensiveness -- but now Intercept is reporting that the whole thing was a setup and Morse was NOT actually doing any of this and maybe even was being catfished by students supporting his opponent trying to gin up disqualifying text messages? What a mess.

yeah these kids should be ashamed and probably expelled. buttigieg canvassers, because of course
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/12/alex-morse-college-democrats-chats/

Timothy Ennis is going to have a long and lucrative career in the Democratic Party.

That story has grown crazier in the last 24 hours.

Wow Taibbi wrote an article defending Morse a couple days ago and I was rmde. Now it turns out it was a frame-job?

I thought this was good:

https://www.vox.com/2020/8/17/21369922/democratic-convention-dnc-speeches-lineup

Low-trust voters are something of a blind spot for the Democratic Party, which is run and funded by a group of people — cosmopolitan, diverse, well-educated, economically secure — who see the world in positive terms and who feel their personal concerns are frequently catered to by cultural tastemakers.

...

Democrats aren’t going to suddenly stop being the party of college educated cosmopolitans, and Joe Biden couldn’t reasonably campaign as a revolutionary outsider. But conventions are about choices and branding, and it’s striking that Democrats are choosing to dedicate so little time to highlighting voices who could speak to any of the demographic groups on the margins of their coalition — the diverse group of mostly young, mostly working-class people who feel the political system has lost interest in them.

We knew former Republican Gov. Kasich would be speaking tonight at the Democratic National Convention. But now there are three more Republicans added to the program: former NJ Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former CA Gov. candidate Meg Whitman and former Rep. Susan Molinari. pic.twitter.com/4QE3A62EO0

— Dan Merica (@merica) August 17, 2020

lol

Weak

they should just set a day of the democratic convention aside for republican speakers

Message: Vote for Democrats because Republicans like them.

or literally build a bigger, larger tent and then have the GOP speakers address the webinar from that extra, added-on area of the tent

lmao at the Morse story

if you're gonna ratfuck someone, don't leave a big paper trail

Also does Meg Whitman even still identify as a Republican? I thought she abandoned the party after Trump's ascension.

not sure, but she did publicly support HRC so probably. She's also the CEO of Quibi and in general is surrounded by a distinct aura of "loser" but is also very rich

Eh, she was also the successful CEO of PayPal and successfully navigated HP into a deal with MicroFocus so it's not really the whole picture to think of her as a "loser" despite Quibi and the deeply misguided run for governor

sounds like the perfect spokesperson for democrats

I do think the wider message behind that lineup of speakers is "successful women hate the shit out of Donald Trump" which tbrr is not a bad message to put out there in a world that operates on actual meritocracy and equal opportunity (and yes, I know that's not the world we live in)

When does AOC make her 60-second speech? Are they letting her handle the Emergency Alert System test?

get the micro machines fast-talker to deliver AOC's speech

I suspect she knows what she's doing and will make her time count (inasmuch as that's possible).

how long was clint eastwood's lecture to the empty chair? that might make a good starting point. make obama sit in the chair and tell him what he has done wrong

The D convention could feature someone addressing a toupee - the empty hair speech.

not ALL American women

RT if you agree that American women deserve better than John Kasich. pic.twitter.com/grZ2DibN4F

— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) April 20, 2016

Eh, she was also the successful CEO of PayPal and successfully navigated HP into a deal with MicroFocus so it's not really the whole picture to think of her as a "loser" despite Quibi and the deeply misguided run for governor

― shout-out to his family (DJP), Monday, August 17, 2020 1:57 PM (two hours ago)

Admittedly I just couldn't resist the childish thrill of calling a billionaire a "loser," but her political track record is pretty hilarious! Not just her own campaign, but she helped with Romney's ('08), McCain's ('08), and Christie's ('16) runs.

Yeah well, there's a reason most business people should stay in business and not get into politics

Yeah well, there's a reason most business people should stay in business and not get into politics

― shout-out to his family (DJP)

because capitalism kills?

Stay in business is a strange euphemism for “be exiled to the bottom of the Marianas Trench”

because capitalism kills?

No, because they aren't good at politics.

Literally everything kills, it's not a useful rubric to demarcate by

I suspect third grade teachers are responsible for closer to zero deaths than any billionaire.

I thought this was good:

https://www.vox.com/2020/8/17/21369922/democratic-convention-dnc-speeches-lineup

― jaymc

i know yglesias' name and know that people here have opinions on him, don't know what they are

but i did think that was an interesting article

what it made me think of was the concept of delayed gratification, the way i was taught it, and the racial biases surrounding the way i was taught it

i guess i'm a little bit of an anomaly because by the criteria yglesias lays out in the article i ought to be a high-trust voter. i'm white, educated, professionally employed. and yet i am a low-trust voter. so when people try to dismiss my views by saying i'm unrepresentative, there's probably something to it? but i also see a lot of people around me who, ordinarily, one would expect to be high-trust voters engaging in speech and behavior that codes to me as low-trust. so there's a certain amount of uncertainty there.

it really does seem like the democrats' platform is based entirely on winning over voters who are ordinarily high-trust, and went over to trump, and i don't know, it might be me, but i just can't understand why someone who voted for trump in 2016 would vote for biden now. that's my challenge. maybe their data reveals vast seas of suburban moms who like and respect kasich but like yglesias points out their data perhaps has some flaws.

(i got like two paragraphs into the new york interview he clicked and had to turn it off, both the interviewer and the interviewee come off as particularly vile and reprehensible human beings and the fact that new york magazine found it really important to interview somebody who just got fired from his job for being a racist piece of shit about the election tells me a lot about their editorial focus.)

and so this kind of... is it wrong of me to find it funny? probably, i guess it's not a matter of right and wrong, but i find it hilarious the way liberals are clinging to the same fucking polls that told them clinton was going to whoop trump's ass. it's like, yeah, but how did the literary digest call the _1940_ presidential election?

(it didn't of course because the literary digest didn't exist in 1940, yet somehow all of the institutions that predicted a clinton win are still hanging around doing the same thing, putting out the same bullshit. i can only surmise that people were smarter in 1937 than they are now.)

anyway the moderates are right in that pandering to an electorate who are incapable of delayed gratification is somewhat unlikely to produce greater results than we have currently. the dnc's major mistake is in believing that there's anybody else left to pander to.

I think there are lots of middle of the road people that placed their bets on Trump, and then realized they'd made a horrible mistake.

I think there are lots of middle of the road people that placed their bets on Trump,

yes

and then realized they'd made a horrible mistake.

would believe this more if i'd heard more than, like, three of them in the past four years say "oh my god, what a horrible mistake i've made"

that's not what i'm hearing from trump voters. instead i hear "grumble grumble you just can't trust politicians"

four years from now they'll flatly deny to you that they ever voted for trump

these are the sorts voters biden is going for

To be fair he only needs like 80,000 of them to change the outcome of the election. it doesn’t seem like the easiest way to win votes when there are millions of people who didn’t vote last time, but it’s not a long shot.