I was Ok with Hillary but not a big fan. I just thought she had a better chance than sanders at beating Trump. I still think that.
But yes, altho Hillary had more support, Sanders support was more hard-core. No doubt.
I lived in Missouri for a total of twenty years starting in the '90s and going until 2017. You are making a ridiculous assertion (or implication, whatever), given how conservative–and popular–Jay Nixon, the governor you reference, was for a Democrat. Even I thought he leaned too far right, to a degree that wasn’t pragmatically necessary (he won his elections so comfortably, he clearly could have sacrificed a few of his crossover Republican supporters). Not to mention that Claire McCaskill, representing Missouri in the U.S. Senate until earlier this year, managed to stick around so long “despite” being ranked among the three most conservative Democrats in the Senate caucus. :dubious:
ETA: And since you reference “the Clintons”, plural, let’s also keep in mind that Bill Clinton is the only Democratic nominee over the past forty years to carry the state, and he did it twice, pretty comfortably. (Obama did come very close in 2008.) Surprised you are so unfamiliar with your own state’s voting history.
In 2000, Missouri voted a dead man into the Senate over the Republican incumbent. Big chunks of the state are Ron Paul / Rush Limbaugh country, but it used to be a swing state despite that. As you say, Obama came close. So when Hillary got blown out, that was on her.
And it wasn’t just Missouri, was it? Face it. Too many Democrats who talk electability don’t know what electable even is. Bernie talked like a New Dealer. Hillary wouldn’t even support a living wage.
So when otherwise intelligent Dopers say we need a “moderate” (implicitly someone who doesn’t demand anything “crazy” like an AOC or a Bernie), I don’t think you understand. To mobilize the poor, you need to talk the poor’s pocketbook issues.
I like this entire post, though I only excerpted parts.
I’d love to see Sherrod Brown on the debate stage, but I don’t want him to win. Why? Because it is imperative that he hold on to his Senate seat.
Winning 50 Senate seats is very important. I think it might be better to have solid D majorities in both houses with an R President, than to have a D President with a split Congress.
It's not enough to defeat DJT. Mitch McConnell must also be cast into the fires of Mount Doom.
**Please please go for the Senate!** Beto? If you're so popular isn't there a Senate seat that's yours for the taking? I don't follow details to know which other Senate seats can be snatched, but I hope some serious strategists are focusing on that.Missouri has become redder and redder over the last 10-15 years. The only reason Obama was close in 2008 was because John McCain ran a terrible race, and he was representing the incumbent party at a time when the voters blamed his party for one of the worst economic crises of the past century. Hillary’s problem was her campaign, which focused on protecting a blue wall (yet didn’t see any reason to visit Wisconsin or Michigan). We’ve already established Hillary ran an awful campaign.
I don’t disagree that there’s definitely more New Deal-ish energy, and that it’s a positive thing for the party. But the party will win more races by being pragmatic. Using Obama as an example, the Democrats wanted a public option, but it got voted down by key members of their coalition. The Dems could have thrown a tantrum and insisted on legislation that would have failed, and had they done that, we wouldn’t have Obamacare today. If you want to make the argument that Obamacare doesn’t go far enough and that we should improve it, I’m in agreement but I’ll take Obamacare over what existed before. Dems win when they are practical.
Just FYI, a friend of mine attended the California State Democratic Convention this weekend in SF, where several of the presidential candidates spoke. (She’s a dyed-in-the-wool ex-hippie progressive.) I asked her which candidates impressed her most? A: Jay Inslee, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren.
She also said that when John Hickenlooper said “Socialism is not the answer” it was met with boos…which will undoubtedly surface on Fox & Friends.
Ugh. :smack: Some progressives are just determined to do what they can to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
I was there, and voted for the dead man (Mel Carnahan, who BTW was the original modern-day politician to have a blackface scandal). But you utterly ignored my points about Bill Clinton, Claire McCaskill, and Jay Nixon, presumably because they so undermine the case you are trying to make. Let’s also note that Missouri has been getting whiter and whiter relative to the rest of the country, as conservative old people retire to the Lake of the Ozarks region.
At the same time, I doubt my wife and I are the only Democrats who fled to another state (Minnesota in our case) because we just couldn’t take it any more. Sorry, pal, but although you’re right that in recent memory Missouri was the kind of state where a “fighting Democrat” could feel like they could make a difference, it’s now a lost cause.
BTW, “New Deal energy” isn’t going to work the way you imagine it will, unless it comes with the racial politics that were packaged with the New Deal, helping FDR get 85% of the vote in Alabama when those voters were almost all deeply racist whites. Once voters of that type start seeing social programs as helping nonwhites, they aren’t so keen on them any more, even if they would personally benefit.
What Beto could most likely do if he ran against Cornyn is lose by three to five points. Compared to what any other Democrat would likely do (lose by double digits), that’s impressive. And it does speak to his political skills and charisma, that could come in handy in an actual swing state. But Texas ain’t that, not yet, so his losing close wouldn’t get us a Senate seat, and it would just stall his career. I don’t know what the best move is for him.
Jason Kander faced the same dilemma in Missouri, as he very similarly shocked observers by coming within less than three points of Roy Blunt. But that too was almost certainly the high water mark he or any Democrat could hit in modern-day Missouri, so what do you do with that? In Kander’s case, he flirted with a presidential run, and then announced that he was stepping out of politics due to mental health issues.
It’s frustrating to see young political talents like that wasted, but I don’t know what to do about it.
Also he not only still lost the state in a year in which he won the national vote by 7, he lost by much more, by 9, in 2012, again winning the general, that time by 4.
MO is currently winnable only in a landslide election.
But sure let’s look at MO. The question I have is why has it shifted more Redward over time? Can that be changed without having Democrats who are outside of what the party stands for?
Doubleposting, but the lesson to garner from MO is not exciting “poor” voters (even though economic populism may be effective as a sales pitch) but winning back some rural support that the GOP now dominates.
Some of that is self-inflicted by Democratic candidates who (perhaps without intent) disrespect rural voters and do not demonstrate any understanding of or even care about their very real issues.
Sanders connected much better with white rural voters than Clinton did, that’s true. And the youngest voters. He whiffed with many others though.
Whoever runs as the D standard-bearer has to message that white rural citizens who are on increasingly on the losing end of increasing wealth inequality, who are not better off with Trump and his trade tantrums than they were before, also matter, and do so in a way that does not message that any other members of the tent therefore matter less.
Do that and the must win Northern strategy states (PA, WI, MI, MN) are won and states like MO and OH are back to being swingable. Undercut his one area of strength and a blow out, with the Senate riding in on coattails, is possible. Don’t and it may be a win but the win will be a relative squeaker.
Look in a mirror.
“Moderate” is fine. But one wins on pocketbook issues. Cutting welfare, offshoring, supporting “efficient” monopolies, supporting anti-union outfits like Wal-Mart—Clintonism doesn’t help poor people nor businesses that might have them as customers.
I’m worried about this too. But the influx of Hispanics into central plains states—Kansas, Iowa, Missouri—probably outnumbers the white retirees. Too bad the party of Jackson doesn’t want them and doesn’t know what to do with them.
One: This attitude is comically easy to campaign against. You just have to point out that someone who makes himself worse off for the hope that someone else will be worse off is a fool.
Two: You’re repeating a Clinton argument. “I had to throw poor white trash off welfare so I could throw poor black trash off welfare to get white votes!” Nonsense. Didn’t work. Destroyed the party.
Beto is a dogged campaigner. He can beat your “most likely.”
I’m not sure we should generalize from a mild-mannered young Jewish guy who used to work for Hillary Clinton. There are personal variables that could help a candidate, but not putting “Satan” at the top of the ticket is probably worth 10 to 15 points.
LOLOLOLOL.
So, one of the co-authors of this piece just accepted the job as the official Spokesperson for the President of the Ukraine, beating out 4,000 applicants in a process which had to start prior to May 1st.
If what the party stands for is NAFTA, TPP, monopolies, Wal-Mart, and Silicon Valley, it will never come back. Not in Missouri, not in Ohio, not nationally.
Great post, DSeid. I liked all of it, but this stood out.
I think that this is a common thread that can cut across the politics of identity - and I don’t want to diminish identity as a thing. But being pragmatic, the key is to hit the fundamental issues that people really and truly care about. It doesn’t matter one’s race or whether they live in the Rust Belt or Sun Belt: people fundamentally know when an economic system is unfair and when they’re being jobbed.
Are you suggesting that Democrats abandon support of free trade completely? Do you think this is genuinely a good idea economically? Free trade isn’t really a huge problem. Automation is probably an even bigger problem than free trade.
Tariffs hurt farmers, and raise the prices people pay at Walmart and Dollar General.
If you really want to bring back white working class voters, or at least stop the hemorrhaging of them, the answer is something very unpopular around these parts: stop being so PC and “woke”.
Do you think that Americans are overwhelmingly against free trade and for tariffs?
They are not. Americans more positive on free trade than tariffs | Pew Research Center
The trade agreements you peg as the death of the party are key for American farmers and rural communities. Tariffs hurt them. They may be hanging on hope that Trump’s trade tantrums will eventually yield better deals as fruits, but they want the deals. They want international trade.
It’s more complicated than that. As I see it, the problem is “base” politics taken to an extreme. There’s nothing wrong with Democrats being “woke” or defending the Dreamers. But even before 2016, Democrats started conceding large swaths of America to the GOP and that was a fatal mistake. They also became way, way too fixated on the presidency and the SCOTUS, and not nearly enough time thinking about a grass roots strategy at the state and local level. That is where the Republicans have been kicking Democrats’ asses for the better part of the last 30 years. There is no reason whatsoever that Republicans should have controlled the state legislatures and governorships the way they did. Until last year Democrats were getting their asses kicked so badly in states that the Republicans were on the verge of being able to call a Constitutional convention. That never, ever should have happened. And it happened because the Democratic party just did not have a strategy beyond the presidential elections. They had no idea what kind of game Republicans were playing and how determined they were to win.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t know if you were intending to strawman me there, but when did I ever say, or remotely imply, that I think Democrats shouldn’t defend the Dreamers? (Answer: never.)
I wasn’t necessarily suggesting that you weren’t for protecting Dreamers, but the whole idea that “wokeness” is problematic. The Democrats can be “woke”; they just need to stop skipping flyover country and writing it off. That’s what they started doing since at least 2008, if not earlier. They fell into the trap of “Blue Walls” and “base” voting. I’m glad to see Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders campaigning in the rural Midwest, but they’re not abandoning their principles to defend minority rights.