The best way to increase voter turnout is the systems they have on the west coast like CA, OR & WA. Everyone is auto registered, everyone gets a ballot mailed to them along with info about the candidates. You fill the ballot out and either put it in the mail, or you can drop it off at a ballot box.
Voter turnout in WA was 79% in 2024. Nationwide voter turnout was 64% in 2024.
But you’re not asking about turnout in general, you’re asking about democratic turnout. Sadly ~85 million may be the cap. Biden got 81 million in 2020, and Harris got ~75 million in 2024.
I made a post here discussing how even though Harris lost 6 million votes vs Biden, over half of that was in 4 blue states that went for Harris anyway. A lot may have been democrats protesting by not voting over Gaza and economic issues, knowing that their state electoral votes would go to Harris anyway.
I feel like even with the perfect candidate, perfect momentum, etc the democrats are going to peak at about 85 million votes. Even then the GOP could run Hitler’s missing testicle on a pro-NAMBLA, pro-’death penalty for being poor’ platform and they’d also get 80 million votes.
I think I know the answer. Obama didn’t force Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire while he could name her successor. Then Justice Kennedy retired and Ginsburg died after Trump took office, Trump got his anti-abortion justices, which flipped the Supreme Court, and Roe V. Wade got overturned.
This viewpoint overlooks a few inconvenient details, but that’s the rationale.
Or, alternately, because the Democrats spent 50 years relying on Roe v. Wade being settled precedent, rather than pursuing national legislation which would have formally legalized abortion.
Which they avoided because it would have handed the increasingly dominant conservative wing of the GOP a stock issue to run on, and despite the fact that there is a majority of the population for at lest some form of pro-choice sentiment even in most ‘red’ states, running on the anti-abortion issue brings out the vote among conservatives and especially Evangelicals who tend to vote in large blocs. And unless “pursuing national legislation which would have formally legalized abortion” means passing a constitutional amendment, (this) Supreme Court could overturn such legislation on the basis that the Constitution says nothing about abortion (or indeed, anything about women as a class) and therefore the legislation extends federal authority over legal territory that belongs to the states, which in fact served as the basis for argument for the various measures to hobble Roe v. Wade prior to striking the prior judgment it entirely in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Women’s rights to abortion and associated care has always been on precarious ground as are numerous other rights that were not conceived of or explicitly mentioned in the Constitution because it was written by ‘gentleman farmers’ (i.e. mostly slaveowners who never actually worked the ground) who understood that social and technological progress would occur but as a group resisted it vigorously, essentially requiring the amendment process to create ‘new law’ de novo.
One thing the Constitution really failed to conceive of is that an entire party would devote itself to completely undermining the system that it ostensibly served. But then, the Founders as a whole didn’t really believe in political parties and their conception of ‘democracy’ was a franchise limited to a relatively small minority of the population. Abortion wasn’t really an issue for them but they’d fit right in line with the most radically reactionary of the modern GOP just fine. Even a crass, puerile personality like Donald Trump wouldn’t really have been out of place in the 1st United States Congress either in terms of bombast or his ability to run a seemingly viable business venture straight into the ground; a shocking number of the ‘Founding Fathers’ were actually terrible businessmen who died virtually penniless or with sufficient debts to require the liquidation of their entire estates.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you; I was just pointing out an argument that I’ve heard from dismayed pro-choice people in the past couple of years.
Sure, and I think there is a legitimate argument that by continuous side-stepping directly engaging in the abortion argument to the extent possible, the Democratic party as a whole is responsible for a trap of their own making. Roe v. Wade was never really “settled law” in any sense of the term as a decision by one Supreme Court can be arbitrarily reversed by a subsequent one, and the failure to even ratify and ensconce the Equal Rights Amendment (which has nothing even remotely contentious in its text) itself poses a pretty fundamental problem with Constitutional governance before you even get to an issue like abortion, which basically received protection under the penumbra of privacy protections. But the problem is that the DNC saw this as a divisive issue (until relatively recently there was a vocal anti-abortion arm within the Democratic party) and also doesn’t really want to fight for comprehensive privacy protections at a national level that might strengthen the penumbra argument because it makes so many of their financial backers really nervous, especially in the online tech (social media) industry space where the collection and ‘commoditization’ of peoples’ personal data is their business model.
I get the impression its only latinos who do this. Black people aren’t switching and becoming republican.
I get the impression that the democrats lost the 2024 election due to 3 voting trends.
Leftists sitting out the election due to Gaza
Latinos switching to republican
Gen Z switching to republican
People in general upset that nothing was improving on the cost of living front
I have no idea what the future holds for all of this. Gen Z are losing faith in Trump according to polls, but that doesn’t mean they won’t vote R in 2026/28 or that they will vote D.
Latinos have historically always been about 60-70% Dem going back to 1980, but I have no idea if the 2022 and 2024 switch to R is permanent or temporary. Even in 2020, latinos voted D around 65%, which is in line with their historical voting trends.
According to PBS, Trump won 16% of the black vote in 2024. Sixteen percent is an astonishingly high rate of black support for a Republican. (McCain got only 3% of the black vote in 2008.)
I agree with Velocity and have repeatedly said that Democratic non-voters in the swing states got Trump elected. Look, in 2024 if you are a Democrat and not willing to vote against Trump for whomever your candidate is because something is happening in Gaza that doesn’t affect you in the slightest, well then you are just looking for an excuse to not get out and vote. And in 2028 it’s going to be another petty excuse. And in 2032 …
Firstly, why are you assuming these voters aren’t personally affected by the genocide in Gaza? Some of them will be Palestinian immigrants, many will have friends and family from there, and Im sure many others will know people who have spent time there, e.g. the numerous journalists and aid workers that have been killed by Israel. They will not vote to support the genocide of their friends and family no matter how much you try to browbeat them.
Secondly, many people did their civic duty in 2020 and voted in a Democrat president, who then spent 4 years more worried about optics and a “return to norms” than stamping out this fascism, leading us back to Trump 2.0. So if people do hold their nose and vote just to get Trump out, whats stopping it happening again in four years time. Do you expect people to just constantly vote for shitty candidates just because the other side is shittier?
Why are the Democrats unable to put forward an actual good candidate/policy?
Been saying, you can’t beat something with nothing, since the '16 election. You don’t need to have the perfect candidate on every last possible issue (so yes, someone or something you or I think is essential may wind up under the bus … eh, life’s unfair) but give “the people” something to vote for. And that has to be something “the people” feel will improve THEIR life and future and they can be glad to support and will feel more satisfying than the other side’s offer of rage and payback.
If Harris had accused Israel of genocide, I would have done a write-in. I’m not interested in arguing over whether this makes me complicit in war crimes, or otherwise a bad person. I’m just mentioning it here to point out that Democrats cannot take positions that the base will like without losing moderates.
That could be an argument for there being is a Democratic turnout ceiling, although I think it is still higher the GOP turnout ceiling.
And likewise, they cannot take some positions that moderates will like without losing “the base”. So why is it that the base are always expected to fall in line, and are met with hostility if they refuse to vote against their principles or interests? You can’t always please everyone, but you can’t expect the ones you dont please to vote for you anyway.
Do you want to respond to the whole paragraph? What’s the point voting in the Democrats if they’re not going to do anything about the fascist opposition?