My guess is that it’s a combination of two things.
The demographic trends do favor the Democrats.
The losses are excused as having candidates that lack charisma. In particular Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, to a lesser extent John Kerry. I still believe that if someone like John Edwards (without the affairs) had been the nominee in 2000 and Joe Biden the nominee in 2016, we’d be going on a continues streak of Democratic presidents since 1992.
After the Nixon resignation and Ford pardoning Nixon, many thought the Republican brand would be dead for years (myself included).
Just a scant 4 years later we learned just how wrong we were. Once Trump is done there will some other dink to take his place. The biggest problem will be if he/she has some credibility.
FlikTheBlue, help me on this one. I keep hearing this, and I don’t see it. As we know, young people don’t vote. Older people due tend to get more conservative as they get older, and Hispanics culturally and religiously are more Republican than Democrat (although immigration in breaking that currently).
Can you help me understand the demographic issue? Because I’ve been hearing that since I went to college in the early 1980s and 35 years later there are more Republicans in office across the country than there are Democrats.
In general, people don’t get more conservative as they get older. That’s a myth.
Sure. The current face of American Conservatism is Joe Biden. All of his policies are strongly Conservative. Any American voter who actually votes for Conservative policies will be voting for Biden.
The path forward for American Conservative politics is for Biden and the Democratic party to win decisively in 2020, and repeat in 2022. If the Democratic party wins big for the next 8 or 12 years, they will be able to repair some of the damage done by the GOP over the past 30 years. Then, if the Trumpublican party is a toothless rump, only capable of destroying the economies of a few unfortunate states like Kansas, the Democratic party can schism into the Conservative, or Clinton/Obama/Biden wing, and the Liberal, or Sanders/Warren wing.
Maybe they were, before the pandemic. He seems to be pushing more radical changes these days. For one example he now proposes tuition-free college for families that make under $125k; earlier in the year he did not.
~Max
Is there any nationwide metric of elected officials besides the US House or Representatives where the Democrats are ahead of the Republicans? I grabbed a quick source off of Google, and it looks like the Republicans are firmly ahead at the state level.
Voters tend to be leaning towards the Democratic Party after four years of Trump. But then, there was the same shift in preference away from the President’s party after eight years of Obama. Note the big decline in the states metric from 2008 to 2012 according to Gallup.
I’d bet that high Democratic Party preference in 2008 was also due to a swing during the GW Bush presidency. Also note that the movement is from split preferences or Lean GOP to Lean Dem. Core GOP remains consistent.
So Democrats aren’t winning at the state levels, and while they have had gains in party preference, like the House of Representatives, that’s a swing against the party of the President that also happened to Obama. Show me the Democrats are actually winning at the grass roots level and I may believe your premise. Otherwise you’re sounding like a coach giving a pep talk to his team about how they’re going to win due to their fighting spirit while the other team has a better record and better players.
That’s really only a radical concept to folks who need decades of discussion before actually making tiny changes.
I agree with @spifflog here where he says that Hispanics generally skew conservative. As you recall, W Bush won the Hispanic vote pretty handily in both of his elections even though he was weak on immigration policy. Obama was able to get the plurality of Latinos in both elections, even though he was tougher on deportations than any president previously. I believe that Trump would have a lot more support if he hadn’t been so awful on immigrant affairs. Neither party should think they have that growing voter bloc tied down.
I have been following the gallup party identification poll for a couple years, updating incoming numbers every month in a spreadsheet, with a small stat chart. The trendlines mapped from 2016, 2012 and 2004 to present is slightly less favorable for the Democrats than for the Republicans. Both are long-term negative, by really close to the same slope, but in all three sets, the D side never shows a better trend than the R side.
The Ds started out a little higher, but they are doing ever so slightly worse. My 12-month projection shows the Ds still leading by 28.2% to 24.9% with the neithers at 44.1% over the long term.
Which is just the party thing. People are becoming increasingly disgusted with parties and, I think, want solutions to be reached by consensus/compromise rather than by fealty/fiat. I suspect that Americans want less overall divisiveness and are tired to being put in boxes.
I’m not so sure that people get that much more conservative as they get older. I think that the increase in turnout as people age outweighs any increase in becoming more conservative.
OK. The 2019 Democratic takeover of the Virginia State legislature was pretty epic.
It just one example, but I find it inspiring. But one reason it’s hard for Democrats to get back in once they’ve lost is excessive and blatant gerrymandering in state and local districts.
I don’t think people get conservative as they get older, at least not for today’s definition of liberal / conservative. I was in a way more conservative place on the spectrum 12-15 years ago, but in many ways the spectrum moved more than I did.
I also moved away from “socially liberal but fiscal conservative “ POV because I learned that the common definition of fiscal conservatism is a lie. Republicans aren’t fiscally conservative, they just have an objection to seeing the government give any sort of assistance to individual citizens.
This leads to tight-fisted fiscal decisions that inflect lots of misery on individuals while they are using their other hand to throw money without compunction to banks and businesses and corporations. My conversion was rather sudden and happened during the financial crisis - I watched conservatives …well, everyone really, gleefully throw trillions of dollars at their pet banks and insurance companies.
But at the very instant someone suggested giving some relief directly to individuals the Tea Party was born.
Unfortunately, this attitude, which is the essence of what is called fiscal conservatism, will never die because most people ( in both parties) are small-minded. I’m seeing it now. There has been wide support for all sorts of wasteful coronavirus spending directed at businesses - both in the form of supply procurement and economic relief. But their is huge pushback on the enhanced unemployment. The only explanation for that is when a company fleeces the government out of 3 billion dollars, most people don’t get outraged because they don’t really grasp the essence of what happened. But if you send their next door neighbor $300 when they don’t get anything they go ballistic.
I think things like highly subsidized health care and college make good fiscal sense. First, they insure the security and stability of the work force and lead to higher productivity. They also free up a lot of income that people could use for discretionary spending…between my insurance and copayments my health care cost more than my housing and I’m healthy. This would provide an enormous stimulus. I think looser immigration rules also make economic sense, low wage immigrant workers help in keeping food prices affordable.
And I’m consistently annoyed that Democrats don’t use prosperity arguments to make their case for these programs. The bottom line isn’t that their policies are bad, it’s that they are lousy salespeople.
This is like a Trumper claiming that Romney or McCain are/were “strongly liberal.” It says more about the speaker than the subject.
I think that they do. It’s just that it is more complex to explain how you can benefit when other people are getting things too.
People like simple explanations, they like simple solutions. They don’t mind that they are wrong.
I have to disagree with your accusation of bothsidesism.
Biden is pretty conservative. He sits on the right side of the Democratic party. I wouldn’t say that he’s the face of American Republicans, but he does represent what conservatives claim their values are better than nearly any conservatives in office, and he does get quite a bit of criticism from the liberals for not being nearly liberal enough.
As someone who would probably agree to most of what conservatives claim their values are, I see him as being pretty representative of that.
Now, he’s certainly not the face of the modern American conservative, with looting the treasury to pay their patrons and removing any form of labor or environmental regulations, using fear and single issue voters along with anti-democratic strategies to gain and hold power. That would be the people in power now.
But conservatives really did use to stand for something real and honest, and I don’t think that it is that much of a stretch to say that Biden holds those values.
When Trumpers are saying that about Romney or McCain or Kasich, they are insulting them, claiming that they are the real conservatives, and that anyone who abandons Trump is a Marxist. It is not meant to be an observation, but a scathing insult.
When most liberals say that Biden is a conservative, it’s not nearly the same insult. At the very most, there’s a bit of disappointment that they have no one who represents a more progressive agenda, but it is not with the dismissive hatred that leads Trumpers to demand loyalty or face banishment.
Many liberals join with me in the hope that Biden will be the face of conservatives going forward, with Bernie being the face of the liberals. Making up two new parties, picking up moderate republicans into the conservative wing, and representing the liberals who have been without representation in the progressive wind.
Republicans don’t want that, they want a one party rule with fealty to their leader.
So, no, it’s not just the same. When people claim that they are the same, that does say more about the speaker than the subject.
You mean those people who know about basic microeconomics such as supply and demand and recognise that subsidising demand without constraining prices or increasing supply will simply result in higher prices for only a slightly higher supply of the same goods?
Biden’s initial plan for supporting community college programs and post-high school vocational training was smart. Those are largely educational areas where there are gaps in skilled work that doesn’t require a Bachelors or Masters degree. There may be some utility in increased grants for targeted majors such as STEM subjects and nursing. It could even be a hybrid where a community college preparatory course was subsidised, and successful CC graduates would have there next two years of their Bachelors degrees subsidised. But carte-blanche for the middle-class to have free university education for their kids with no expansion of supply and no requirements on useful degrees? That’s just a way for pumping more money into universities with only tertiary societal benefits.
That’s a nice data point for the Democratic Party. But it doesn’t disprove the overall trend that at the state level, the Republican Party has much better numbers than the Democratic Party. It also doesn’t negate the trend that opposition parties to the US president tend to do better in the non-presidential elections than in the presidential elections.
In 2018, there were three Republican gains against Democratic seats in the House of Representatives. In isolation, that’s an encouraging fact for Republicans. But clearly, the Democrats had a much better HOR election. I’d view the Virginia State Legislature change of majority party in the same context.
Why do you assume that there would be no expansion of supply?
If there are more students going to college, then colleges would need to increase their supply. New ones would have to open, and existing ones would learn to teach more students.
We manage this for 13 years of each child’s life. Why are another 2-4 years impossible?
I don’t think that we should be paying for private schools, just as we do not pay for them in K-12.
Maybe you encourage more people to do 2 year degrees. When I was in HS, a 2 year degree was considered only slightly better than dropping out of school.
Many 2 year degrees allow you to move on to a 4 year degree.
So, rather than most students going directly to a 4 year college, they could go to a 2 year, and if they graduate from that, and want to continue, then they can. Seems that would save a bunch, in not putting people in 4 year colleges that don’t belong there.
And, just as there are private schools for k-12, people can pay to go to private colleges, if they want to.
Increasing online learning, something that we are being forced to practice at this time, can also dramatically increase the supply. Even the biggest lecture hall I ever attended could only hold a few hundred students. Record that lecture and put it online, and now it can be seen by anyone. There is no scarcity there.
I would also not say that there are any useless degrees. However, I would say that there may be unaccredited programs.
If a program is unaccredited, it is either not up to the standards that the workplace needs, or the workplace does not have enough demand for those skills to create and enforce those standards.
If a program is accredited, that means that there is some demand for that in the workplace. We don’t just need STEM majors, we need creative types as well. We need people to write music, books and movies, and we need people to be able to create those performances.
One of the current most one sided industries in terms of trade imbalance is arts and entertainment. We export far more than we import.
I would say that we should pay for all accredited programs, and if someone wants to take underwater basket weaving, and there is no accredited program for that, no road to employment, then they can pay for that themselves.
In classic microeconomics discussing demand/supply curves, a subsidy represents a move of the demand curve to the right. That means more people are willing to pay higher prices for a commodity. so more people are willing to supply that commodity at the higher price, but it doesn’t represent a move in the supply curve. Therefore it’s inflationary.
Marginal pricing then determines whether there is a net economic benefit from the subsidy. If the supply curve is generally flat, meaning prices are inelastic, then marginal price increases resulting from increased demand are low and there is an overall economic benefit. Since there seems to be a lot of complaints about the high prices and increase in prices of US university education, the prices aren’t inelastic. They’ve increased because there is higher demand. Simply increasing the demand without taking any supply side actions will result in a nominal increase in the number of people receiving degrees, but at a higher average cost of each degree.
The non-economic social issue is to what extent society should subsidise it’s higher earners who have benefited from higher education. Also, what moral hazard should those university attenders who’ve not benefited from higher education have? It’s all very good to support a student from a poor or middle class background who decides to become a civil engineer and has gone through four or six years of school to get a degree and start a great job. What isn’t clear is how much money should be paid by his mate who decided to become a plumber instead. Presuming the civil engineer is being paid higher wages after five years post high school, why is his education being paid for by the plumber? And if the civil engineering student doesn’t actually become a civil engineer, but instead becomes an ordinary worker, why should society have paid a high price for his degree? It sucks if you’re the person who’s graduated from college and has to pay off a lot of college debt. It sucks worse if you chose not to go to college because that was the fiscally responsible decision and you’re paying for someone else who made an irresponsible decision.
I notice nobody in this thread is even suggesting conservatism has any life left in it – not in terms of political viability, but in terms of having any benefits to offer society.
Until “conservatism” is recovered as a vision that provides a moderating effect; a pointing out that yes there may be good things in the way they already are and you don’t have to throw away everything because you want progress on something; a party to a healthy dialectic with progressivism towards a synthesis of what is and should be the policies in the now, what is today being called by that name is not providing a positive benefit/cost result.