This, and dirty tricks WRT to the voting process itself, not even counting on help from the Russians. Restrictive voter registration laws, cutting back on the number of polling places in Dem/minority areas, failing to COUNT large numbers of votes (absentee ballots, for example), and on and on.
But the electoral college is the <gag> trump card. In case anyone has forgotten, Hillary won by THREE MILLION VOTES and still lost the election.
All of the pieces and parts have to work together without obstruction, or at least they have to overcome/work around obstructions. Massive turnout of voters against Donald is absolutely necessary, but it may not be enough. Just sayin’.
I have to agree. Dubya won in 2000 only due to a SCOTUS intervention, then failed to prevent 9-11, got us into two wars and still got reelected. Trump won more decisively in the EC in 2016, has not gotten us into any wars and the economy is (seen to be) humming along. If the Dems nominate a dud, I could easily see Twitler win reelection.
I keep hearing this, over and over. Please stop it.
The extreme left, at least as represented by me and nearly everyone I know with similar views, doesn’t want to “hijack” the party, nor is it engaged in some ridiculous purity contest. We just want to be a PART of the party, and not marginalized with continual statements of how everything we believe in is impossible, unworkable, and only benefitting the Republicans.
There is no reason that voices on the extreme left cannot contribute to the party. The Democrats have a deep, fear-driven belief that only a centrist candidate can win. Fine; elect a centrist candidate, and I’ll swallow my disappointment and vote for him / her. But please stop threatening us with Trump every time we voice an opinion to the left of yours.
I know there are some Bernie Bros out there, and there are a some ideologues who do engage in the purity nonsense. But there’s no reason the leftward of the two parties, the one that is supposed to be the big-tent party, can’t have room for the left wing as well as the center.
There is plenty of room for people on the left in the Democratic Party. I for one am much further left than most of the party leaders. But the left does have an element of “purity police” and it isn’t just Bernie supporters. This past weekend Dale Peck had a very nasty piece on Buttigieg in the New Republic. Harris has been attacked as not being “black enough” and because she worked as a prosecutor. I have heard a lot of people say no way will they vote for Biden if he is the nominee for no reason other than he is a white male. This kind of crap will accomplish nothing more than getting Trump elected to a second term so no, I won’t stop saying it.
Did you even read the article by Thomas Friedman I referenced in my post? There is a link to it there and in the post made by ThelmaLou that I quoted. It explains very clearly why this is a huge problem. Whoever the Democratic nominee is cannot win without getting votes from independents, particularly in the Rust Belt states. If the party goes hard left those people will likely sit out the election or vote for Trump. Either way he gets a second term and we ALL lose - probably for years to come.
Note that Sanders more or less got everything he wanted as far as the parties platform in 2016, yet his Bros continued to bash Hillary and didnt vote for her.
So, yes, the party is willing to give the Left the platform it wants, but we have to run a candidate who can win.
This is the whole point of Trump picking a fight with AOC and “The Squad.” It forces the democratic candidates to either break from the squad, which will make that candidate an outsider, or embrace all the purity points on the list to stay in the running.
The squad is being positioned as the new face of the democratic party. It marginalizes Bernie, makes every other candidate toe the new party line, and regardless of Pelosi’s attempt to moderate and control the shift to the left, gives Trump another term. He is using these politically inexperience freshman congress persons to paint a new face for the party that can be an easy target. I really don’t think that Trump is smart enough to think up this strategy, but it will work.
More media people are seeing the danger in this. Yesterday from The LA Times.
No, Hillary did not win; by the agreed upon rules which have been followed for nearly two centuries, she lost. Saying that she “really” won and that the official outcome was mere gamesmanship is like claiming your baseball team “really” won the World Series by 25% more runs, even though they lost 4 games out of 7.
[QUOTE=Bret Baier]
All of these things – when these resolutions come up, it’s just a political maneuver so that the opponents can say that on this vote, so-and-so stood with what they’ll call 'racist tweets. And it’s a campaign commercial in the making."
First of all, let’s not look to third parties as a potential savior. Besides Wallace, Anderson, Perot, and Nader there have been no significant third party candidates in recent decades. It just isn’t going to happen.
How about we all stop panicking? This was not a master political stroke of genius. This was the racist ranting of a stupid primate. All the racists are already going to vote for Donald in 2020 just as they did in 2016. Democrats are not going to run in terror because four people in the party are a little more left than most people. Anyone who genuinely believes AOC represents the Democratic Party as a whole is a Republican. All this racist stuff is doing is motivating the Democratic base.
Look on the bright side: Hillary is not on the ballot. How many people who voted for Donald were actually just repulsed by Hillary? A lot of those people will come home in 2020. How many people stayed home thinking the race was won? How many were complacent and stayed home thinking the the US electorate wasn’t stupid enough to vote an infant into office? These people all know better now. The 2020 turnout will be a record, which will be great news for the Democrats.
Lastly, we all fucking know how the Electoral College works. Don’t act like you’ve discovered gravity when you point it out. It sucks ass, but that’s the way it is. Hillary got more votes, that can’t be denied except by a certain moron in Washington. The Democrat WILL get more votes in 2020, beyond any doubt. The pertinent question is will enough people flip in PA, WI, MI, and/or FL and IA to restore sanity?
…do you actually think that Dale Peck’s nasty piece on Buttigieg represents views from the “far left”?
The “black enough” comments aren’t necessarily coming from “the far left.” And people are quite rightly criticising Harris’s work as a prosecutor. We should hold those standing for office up to scrutiny, don’t you think?
So here’s a quick question for you: are any of these things you’ve just talked about coming from “the squad?” Why are you conflating all of these views with the far left? How do you plan to stop people expressing fringe views when all it takes to express them is 30 seconds and 140 characters? We all have a platform now. And if some random person on the internet types on twitter " no way will they vote for Biden if he is the nominee for no reason other than he is a white male" what do you plan to do about it?
But this “kind of crap” isn’t coming from the squad. It isn’t coming from Omar, or AOC. Its the “kind of crap” you aren’t going to be able to stop. So either you get over it and start actually doing something constructive to win the next election or you spend the next year curled up in the fetal position ranting and raving over something you have zero control over.
Freidman expressed an opinion. A stupid opinion in my opinion. It was a load of fucking nonsense in my opinion. Fear-mongering and purity-politics in my opinion. Thomas Friedman and people who express opinions like him are the actual real huge problem in my opinion.
But thats just my opinion.
We all have opinions. But there was nothing objective in his opinion.
The election will probably come down to exactly the same thing as last time: a statistical handful of voters in a small number of swing states. Worry about them. Work to push back against voter supression, fight to get people out to vote, fight to get the government to take election security seriously. Vote these fuckers out of office at every level, not just at the next election. There is so much more you can do to get rid of Trump than begging random-person-number-144435 to stop posting on twitter.
One could very well argue your viewpoint is as much “purity policing” as those on the so-called Left. Do you not see this irony? You’re criticizing others’ opinion—not on factual grounds, not on merit—but ultimately because of the “what will people think” fear.
There is a name for this condition: respectability politics. African-Americans and homosexuals are quite familiar with this, because it’s what happens when a stigmatized group is stereotyped by others and has internalized their own stigma such that they’ve convinced themselves that if only others in the group would stop being stereotypical, the group would gain social acceptance. Not only is this thinking delusional, but it sets up a situation in which members of the stigmatized group contort themselves into the most twisty of pretzels to earn the measly approval of the mainstream, all the while shaming and marginalizing those who deviate from conformity in the smallest of ways. Ultimately all this does is create anxiety and in-fighting, not social progress. Or election wins.
What does “hard left” mean in the era of Trump? Just espousing the idea that healthcare should be accessible to all and immigrants shouldn’t be tortured is enough to get one branded a Communist nowadays, but that doesn’t make it so objectively.
It’s evident you’re looking at liberals through the biased gaze of conservatives and not liking what you see. But me? I’m looking at all these independents whose votes you’re fretting over and only see danger in policing ourselves to make ourselves more attractive to those who think a progressive in the office is worse than an unapologetic racist who, by the way, has also probably raped some kids and colluded with Russia.
I agree. He has a 40% base that won’t change their minds but 40% is unlikely to be enough. A fair amount of his base may still be in favor of him but may not bother to go vote, some portion of them might be dead or too infirm to vote. On the other hand, plenty of people who are freaked out and upset about the xenophobic, authoritarian direction their country (and the West generally) has taken will be motivated to vote. Trump won’t barely squeak by like he did in 2016.
I agree. I’m not saying that Trump is intentionally doing it or being crafty in some way, but the way the left keeps harping on it alienates the Democrats that need to vote Democratic this elections: the conservatives in PA, WI, MI, and MN.
I’m not debating at all the correctness or propriety of what he said. The SDMB is not a microcosm of society in these places. I grew up around conservative Democrats in WV. Believe me, when someone like Omar who grew up in Somalia (of all places) comes to the United States, becomes a naturalized citizen, and enjoys success here, but then uses that success to complain that we are evil, that we torture people, have concentration camps, etc., these voters that the Dems need are not impressed.
When a U.S. President stands up and says that if they think this country is so bad, why don’t they go back where they came from, this is not something that outrages these needed voters, but something that encourages them to vote for that president.
Further, when the left keeps on saying that the attitude that these voters have is racist, bigoted, and xenophobic, maybe the left is right, but that still doesn’t stop the voters.
