Lol, this video of a drunken, shirtless Bernie Sanders singing “This Land is Your Land” with a bunch of Soviets while on his honeymoon in Moscow was just released. Can’t wait for the campaign, which oughtta be lit.
This is why I find her to be a masochist of unparalleled proportions. After almost 30 years of insane abuse on an international stage, an unfathomable defeat two years ago following an opposition campaign coordinated by the Russians, and a party and electorate that had shown no signs of wanting her to run again, any normal person would fade quietly into retirement with their grandbabies. But not Hillary! She’s putting out feelers!
It would also help if he didn’t so often run against Vermont Democratic candidates over the course of his career (14 times, by my count), and didn’t repeatedly, even insultingly, insist he isn’t a Democrat except when he thought he might get the party’s nomination for President.
It’s easy to keep your hands clean if you’re not getting any work done with them. It isn’t necessarily a good thing.
With Democrats leaping to the left, I think the N.Y. Times opinion, “The Loneliness of the Moderate Democrat” is a must-read. Gina Raimondo, Governor of Rhode Island, says ‘It takes a lot of spine to be a centrist in America today’!
I don’t want to squash the dreams of progressive youth. But victory in November 2020 is essential to their future. Is a ‘socialist’ platform the best way to guarantee victory?
IMHO.
Gillibrand,Biden and Gabbard tack left: From 'illegal' to 'abolish ICE': Gillibrand grapples with past conservative immigration views
It is a reasonable debate but maybe.
With Trump having driven the GOP brand way way Right into fascist territory centrists and moderates (and I am only slightly left of center myself) along with party loyalists, are going to vote against Trump in any case.
Turn out of Millennials will be important and a real change message excites them. Wealth inequality as an issue to attack also attracts working class whites these days.
To be cynical it is not much different in form than appealing to racism and xenophobia. Just a different other, the extremely wealthy who control most of the money and power. Somewhat less inaccurate though.
I’d personally find a more moderate position more attractive but change is what sells best. To vote for anyway. Then voters get anxious about change and balk.
There’s also a *possible *view among moderates that the right has pulled us so far back in recent years that a round of leftism is necessary to correct it and get us back to moderation.
And “socialism” is basically what left-wing populism looks like, and it seems likely that populism is the way to win this election.
Yes. Look how few ideological moderates, as opposed to swing voters, there really are. As for platform, the New Deal was a “Social Liberal” platform & very popular, in its day. Label it what you want: populist, social-democratic, progressive; it’s not too hard to sell people on a new & better deal.
USA “democratic socialists” are finally being seen as being like Bernie, AOC, & Rashida Tlaib. Pretty normal, pretty likeable, maybe actually more normal & likeable than other politicians since they have less of a stick up the butt than a lot of corporate yuppie types. The image is not just some sad old white man with a stack of pamphlets or some socially awkward Afro-centrist anymore.
Some of the erstwhile centrists seem to get it; this is where the votes are, & this is where the volunteers for your campaign are going to be.
Among top politicians, there seems to be a bimodal curve these days. Massive tax hikes on the rich is a theme of AOC et al. The Gopsters’ highest priority is massive tax cuts for the rich. For liberal Democrats, combating climate change is a major priority. The Gopsters say “Let it burn!” and would pillory scientists if they could. This bimodality, this sharp divide, seems more extreme than in the past.
But is the American public really so bimodal? Ignoring the shrillest voices which naturally come from the extremes, don’t the great masses of voters probably fit a bell-shaped curve on many issues? Many ordinary voters say “Why can’t the parties work together?”
Do ordinary American voters reflect the same bimodal schism we see in the public debate? Or are they more evenly distributed with many “in the middle”? It would be easy to find the answer by studying the raw data from Pew Research surveys. Good news: The Pew data from 2016 is available for free download. Bad news: The data is in ‘R’ format and it seemed a detour too far for me to cope with that. Anybody else want to try?
Post a link. I might fall asleep soon, but I’m sure there are plenty of data junkies here.
I keep hoping she’s just doing this to troll the Republicans. “I might run…no, wait, I’m not…OR AM I?”
I kept saying to Sanders supporters at the last election that the Republicans and their foreign handlers have a MASSIVE amount of mud ready to fling at Sanders and that their insistence that Bernie would have carried the day instead of Hillary failed to take that into account. Seriously, I like Sanders but the avalanche of bullshit poised to fall would bury him.
Here is the first link that shows when Googling “Pew Research Download.” You will need an account to download. (When I did it, the account didn’t require a credit card, just a “Dear sirs, I’d love to download your data because …”) I’ve still got a few ‘zips’ left from when I downloaded, but it might be simpler (and properer) for anyone interested to do their own download.
I’d have pursued it myself if I knew the correct tools! I ended up doing some R_to_Excel conversion followed by an Excel_to_csv conversion, by which time the data had been so mangled my patience was out. R could probably do anything I can do, and more, but the thrill of dusting off my own hand-written statistics tools was part of my incentive in the first place. 
Hard pass.
Maybe his campaign leaked it to show the hipsters he’s cool like Beto:p
No.
In a sense, in policy there is no true middle and there are no true moderates. There are different policies; those may be combined arbitrarily where they do not conflict.
Political identity is hollow, with policy fitting into it. But neither is really a point on a one-dimensional spectrum.
So, at best, there are “moderate” voters who wish we would all get along. Their wish is easily thwarted by an organized faction of those who refuse to compromise. The GOP is anti-moderation now, and since every GOP politician is pledged to be just like every other politician in the caucus & vote the same way, so long as the GOP get in, compromise is stymied, even compromise with them.
Concur.