The argument of who is has the better chance of winning in the general election as the metric of choice is not necessarily the best way to pick the best candidate. It tends to select a product not a leader who inspires, which ironically isn’t the best way to find a winner.
I disagree on many points with the progressive wing and I am thrilled they are making their cases (and they are multiple cases; it is its own tent). If the only argument the center left makes is electability, on what will sell, and not on the merits of the arguments, then to hell with them.
While I enjoy the handicapping game, I don’t want to choose a candidate with near median positions for the purpose of marketing in the general. I want someone who is convincing that what they stand for is correct. Who will lead this country to a better future.
The problem with this thought, in my view, is every ideal has to be filtered through two houses of congress, we saw the most brilliant, inspirational, president of out lifetime take as much flak from the left as the right on the healthcare law he managed to push through congress.
Now at this moment, because of his whole vibe (including the fact that he seems poised to win by double digits in a swing state) Ossoff feels like the guy. But I think we’re lying to ourselves if we believe the narratives about policy won’t be written by the people who don’t know policy.
Harris was attacked from every angle for not having enough policies while Trump had no platform at all. Warren’s worst mistake of the 2020 primary was actually putting a plan on paper for M4A. The problem with both the narrative setting center and the left is they aren’t actually interested in policy, they’re mostly interested in aesthetics. Mostly they want some dude who looks like Graham Platner or John Fetterman that they can use as a blank canvas for the kind of policies it feels like they’d support.
Well yeah. Obama was not the flaming left winger that both the right and the left thought he was going to be. His actually being more middle of the road and actually believing that it was possible to work together, rather than just saying these things as marketing slogans, was not what either extreme was expecting. But he said what he believed and he delivered a healthcare reform that was a flawed compromise that was in the realm of the possible and that has done huge goods. And I hope that this next cycle has us working to move beyond it.
Warren’s problem was that she wasn’t able to convince people who didn’t already agree with her.
I think Harris would have been a fine president but I never got any sense of her believing in anything other than her being president. She tried to sell aesthetics and did it inadequately.
I am not so deluded as to think the average voter will think deeply about policy. And policy that occurs will be the result of compromise (even within one party) and never perfect. And we still need someone who convinces us that the way they are telling us to go is the way we wanted to go, already knew was the right direction to go … they just said it clearly for us. But we knew that.
One thing I noticed in the run-up to 2024, right wing and left wing strategists probably agree on virtually nothing. That’s not news.
But one thing they did agree on verbatim, that I thought was very telling, was that swapping out the candidate at the last minute was a recipe for a trouncing. No chance, at least historically speaking. Even here on this board many were giddy with the prospect, or alternatively very concerned about Biden, and some of the more experienced political hands patiently explaining over and over why it was only Biden or Harris, and … you can’t parachute drop some unknown into the equation; this was going to be an electoral disaster, either for Biden or Harris.
To me electability is most important but more than a slate of policies, I want someone who understands Democrats (and the nation’s) rage at MAGA and isn’t so anxious to turn the page to their vision for the future that that infection is allowed to fester again.
Yes. And not just about rage, but about how to make sure the law and constitution are respected going forward.
This SCOTUS is hopelessly corrupt. It needs to be remade (packed, most likely). The ruling about presidential illegally needs to be reversed. Gerrymandering needs to be outlawed. States need to be added. The electoral college probably ought to be eliminated. The many various corruptions allowed under Trump need to be prosecuted and explicitly outlawed.
SCOTUS is the highest priority - without a non corrupt SCOTUS, nothing else is possible. And without prosecuting Trump and his allies illegality, someone will try it all again.
I’d scrap the whole thing and implement a parliamentary democracy. One immediate benefit would be forcing the Republican party to move back towards the center.
The Democrats would be better off with a blank slate, although one thing Obama and Clinton had in common was promising univeral healthcare. Hillary was tasked with leading the team that would create policy and legislation and that’s when the real hate began, of course. Obama didn’t quite get the ball over the goal line either…wasted opportunities. But run on it, they did.
It’s important how it’s framed, but it’s still a winning issue.
I want a candidate who will win, of course. I’m just coming to the mindset that trying to pick based on that paradoxically isn’t the best way to get there. It is the old sincerity joke?
My most important filter isn’t what message or slogan polls better right now, but if the candidate is able to communicate the message they actually honestly believe in way that it will poll well in the future, as they get a bigger microphone during a general election cycle and beyond.
Agreed. A lot of this can be traced back to Ford pardoning Nixon, and then Papa Bush pardoning the Iran-Contra conspirators. Why should Americans respect law & order when they see The Big Guys getting away with it?
It should go without saying that a world where Democrats have the kind of supermajorities in 3/4 of the states and Congress that would be necessary to rewrite the Constitution presupposes seismic ideological shifts in the American electorate that would make notions like “Republicans becoming more centrist” defined in reference to the current political climate basically meaningless.
It works when the selection criteria is “who is selling what the voters are buying” (Bill Clinton) and not “we can force people to vote for something they don’t want by invoking the You Must Support Veterans rule that we made up” (Kerry). Obviously, “give people someone they never liked and hector them about being racist or misogynist for not voting for them” (H Clinton, Harris) is also a losing strategy. Moving back to “selecting a product” in any fashion would be a massive improvement over the process that produced two voter-repelling anti-products in three cycles.
The additional problem that Democrats have in 2028 is that all of their most popular politicians with the persuadable centrist electorate - Pritzker, Ossoff, Stein, Shapiro- are Jews, and it is extremely questionable whether a Jew can win the Democratic nomination right now. Snuffing out the DSA loons before things ramp up in February 2028 is extremely urgent.
Harris and Newsom are not Jewish. Nor is Buttigieg. Nor AOC. Nor Mark Kelly. In fact none of those you mentioned are polling over single digits.
And, “right now” is not 2028, and Gaza may be way way down on the list of issues by then.
Hillary was a solid choice but no one expected trump. Even the Republicans did not expect trump. trump was less expected than the Spanish Inquisition.
And the Dems did not think they could beat the incumbent Bush. So, pretty much wrong here. Electability did give us Gore, but that election was so damn close, no one can say Gore was a bad choice.
