Yes, you do. Democrats aren’t in lockstep, and it takes work to get them to vote for bills. Every time you reach out to a senator that is more moderate to vote for something progressive, you make it harder to reach out to them again.
You say this like there is a monolithic entity called “Democratic politicians” rather than dozens of different people with different priorities who were elected by constituents with different needs.
So you make deals between them: “I’ll support your educational grant expansions, if you support my health care expansion”. And then you pass both. And all the rest of the platform that the people voted for you to pass.
Then you are using stacking incorrectly.
But Biden didn’t run against Kinzinger or Cheney. He was running against Donald Trump. Who the Republican party nominated twice as its presidential candidate (and may nominate a third time).
The Democrats aren’t the problem in American politics. You want normal pragmatic decent candidates? They’re in the Democratic party. Stop trying to find them in the Republican party.
Stop trying to fix the Republican party and join the party that doesn’t need to be fixed.
Okay you’re right that the term I was misremembering was “packing” the court. But that’s what I thought we were discussing.
Don’t back down. This is no sidetrack even if it is a hijack. Counterattack like a lumberjack.
“Packing the court” gets 270,000 hits on Google.
“Stacking the court” gets 301,000 hits on Google.
Packing the court as a term is used by multiple major news organizations today. Its provenance is huge: packing the court was the term used by FDR’s enemies in 1937 when he suggested increasing the court’s size.
Stacking the court is also used by multiple major news organizations. I can’t see any pattern for the different uses. They seem interchangeable; perhaps just the result of internal style guides.
Personally, I would use packing, because of the historical implications of Roosevelt’s “court-packing scheme.” However, neither is wrong in today’s usage.
You’ve misdiagnosed the problem.
In order for normal, pragmatic, “decent” Republican to win the Presidency, they first have to win the R nomination, and for that to happen, we first have to “heal”.
Strike that - we can’t heal that quickly - we have to have decent conservatives come to their senses and stop supporting the MAGA insane and the anti-democracy zealots who want only the right votes to count. (Pun intended). America can’t heal until the infection is purged. Electing a sane Republican then becomes a possibility, but not a requirement.
He’d have easily won against them Hillary would have won against them.
No, If Johnny Gun Nut starts his campaign as psycho on guns but sane on everything else, that will just push the other Rs to adopt his gun policies.
And their fear of cultural displacement, of losing unfair privileges they perceive as rights. The so-called “values” war.
Political capital is whatever it takes to get others to vote for your agenda when it is against theirs’. See how Kevin McCarthy spent his political capital to get the Speakership and what solid footing he’s on now that he won that election.
Political capital can be negotiations to get members of the other party on board, or get members from other districts who won’t benefit, or something to get the Bernie’s on board so you can accomplish something.
Political capital was Susan Collins and Joe Manchin holding up the Democratic agenda for months.
Yes, they used to do that . . . one guess why it’s no longer all that popular.
Well said.
Packing is one way to “stack” (put odds unfairly in your favor), but there are others, like the delay during Obama’s last year.
TBH, David Frum – former speech writer for GW Bush – said it much better:
If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
But … thank you 
So, I hadn’t heard about this guy, and decided to look up him and his views, and holy shit! He’s got solidly conservative views on a bunch of topics, but he’s also sane? He was against anti-Obama conspiracy theories in 2009 (despite being firmly against Obama and having voted for McCain); he was against the right’s backlash towards the Affordable Health Care Act; when gay marriage was legalized he came out and said “I reexamined my own beliefs on the case against gay marriage and have realized that when tested in reality my case falls apart, therefore I am now pro-gay-marriage”; he even wants the Surgeon General to put out a report on exactly what the health impact of being a gun owner is.
I thought sane conservatives were extinct, but he certainly has all the marks of one. It’s a shame that people like him have less influence on the modern Republican party than Hunter Biden’s laptop…
They’re not extinct; they’ve just been shamed or forced underground for refusing to agree to a bunch of claims that would immediately burn out the logic processing unit on you Electronic Monk.
Stranger
If a strain of political thought only exists among those who are unwilling or unable to express it in the public sphere, it may not be extinct yet, but it’s headed there
“We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” --Republican Senator Lindsey Graham
The GOP aggressively mined the red states and areas, spreading enough venom to increase voter turnout. It worked once. It nearly worked a second time – too nearly for my comfort.
How do you pivot from these borderline insane die-hard MAGA/January 6th/Proud Boy types to a platform that will retrieve the likes of George Will, David Brooks, Pat Buchanan, David Frum, and Bill Kristol?
I don’t think old school conservatives are a) as numerous as the rabble that the GOP has roused, or b) as patient and forgiving as the deplorables. I don’t see having your cake and eating it, too. I think you have to pick a target market.
And I think the GOP has.
Meaning only one thing: more vile and odious marketing efforts and ‘culture wars’ from the RW.
They have to view these latest election results as being pretty much within the margin of error. Their losses, IMHO, would have to have been cataclysmic for them to consider a major course correction. They weren’t.
What do you call the guy who gets creamed in the popular vote but wins in the Electoral College?
POTUS.
I’d imagine that the insidious and deleterious “culture wars” don’t have a sunset provision, haven’t lost their utility to the GOP, and are the only thing they have that might be able to prevail in EC math yet again.
The wise, old, Republican elderstatespersons … are still asked to keep their seats.
I don’t know… I think if in 2024 and 2026, the Republicans continue to have lackluster performance, the party poobahs will figure it out, and start running more moderate, pragmatic Republicans again, and basically sideline the virulent right-wing of their party. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing, all else being equal.
That’s a big if though; right now, the Republicans have managed to alienate a lot of the moderates who are on the fence about things (although how you can be on the fence is beyond me), and the trick will be for the Democrats to NOT alienate them as well. The last situation that we want is for people to have to look at both parties evenly, as if they are both equally offensive/attractive.
We (those of us who value democracy and the rule of law) want the situation to be one where until the Republicans pull their heads out of their asses or implode into permanent irrelevance, the Democrats offer people in the middle a combination of sanity, inclusiveness, and common sense, with a taste of progressivism, instead of frothing anger, fear, and backward looking viewpoints.
I tend to think moving too far left is pulling away from them, and leaves a vacuum for either those undecided people to choose more willy-nilly, or for a more moderate Republican to step into and take a large proportion of those votes.
I also think the Democrats’ emphasis on the electoral and popular vote differences sounds an awful lot like sour grapes/whining and likely turns a lot of people off. “But she won the popular vote!” doesn’t mean squat in the actual political system we have. The popular vote doesn’t matter, no matter how much you might think it should, and that it would be just.
It’s like saying that a team would have won, if not for the ref, the weather, or any number of other things that were woulda, coulda, shoulda type things that don’t actually matter in the end result. Just suck it up and admit that you lost, and figure out how to win the next one.
To me, it’s like saying we’d should have a more moderate Al Qaeda, both Al Qaeda and the GOP attacked America, the Republicans just did more harm.
I also reject the idea that there has ever been a moderate Republican Party, pandering to white racists has been a part of their strategy for the past half century, Trump was just more overt than most. As the impact of climate change begin to be felt, the trend will be for more fascist extremism from the Republicans, not less.
You say “them” as if the word has a commonly-agreed upon definition.
Democrats are almost as much a coalition of parties as the Israeli Knesset. Women vote heavily Democratic. College-educated vote heavily Democratic. Youth vote heavily Democratic. Blacks, both men and women, vote heavily Democratic. It’s not likely that each group skews Democratic for the same reasons or responds to the same policies.
Urban voters also are tremendously blue, even if they are in the midst of deep red states. Their power is gerrymandered in legislatures but they are increasingly winning statewide elections, like Georgia Senators or Wisconsin, Kansas, and Kentucky Governors so that minority voting is not the one factor.
The Republicans built their power on angry local voters, moving up from school boards, county offices, and state legislatures to national power. Top down did not work for them, as Newt Gingrich discovered. The Democrats need to replicate this, looking to local values, whether they are moderate, liberal, or progressive. And then learn to work together. New York is in the middle of a war between the moderate governor and the progressive wing of the legislature. A disaster for all.
Politics used to work because of compromise. (“Work” in the sense of getting bills passed. Whether those bills worked for much of the population is hotly argued.) The Democrats have to run and govern as if only one party existed. Pull all the wings together and compromise internally, since no compromise with the Republicans is possible.
Biden is running on “freedom”. That’s a good choice for a national election. It can be carried over even to school boards. Yet it’s a mean rather than an end. Democrats have to articulate some ends and then get everyone to act on them. The more bills pass, the more voters approve of the party that can get things done.
No Republican for any office anywhere ever.™
I think the “party poobahs” have figured it out, but their faces have already been eaten by the leopards. They no longer have the capability to sideline the crazies.
But the “poobahs” have figured it out. National Republicans knew that Walker, Oz, and other Trump-supported Senate nominees in 2022 were terrible candidates. But they had no ability to stop them.
The power of the national party to stage manage the nomination process has drastically eroded. The state parties – who actually conduct primary elections and provide the grass roots volunteers who go block walking and shuttle primary voters to polls – have been taken over by Trumpists. Candidates no longer depend on the RNC or leadership PACs for funding due to the explosion of small-dollar donors. And many of the “poobahs” are dedicated Trumpists – he appointed much of the current RNC leadership and staff.
Republican “poobahs” aren’t riding the tiger – it’s already bucked them off and eaten them whole.
Edit: or what @Chronos said much more succinctly.