Special pleading about the 2004 vs. 2012 elections. No response at all to the political science paper providing evidence that Obama underperformed in 2008. :dubious:
ETA: And Democrats don’t need to motivate their own side to vote in 2020. Trump does that for us. They just need to avoid motivating the other side.
Someone like Hickenlooper would probably win the most comfortably, but he has no chance in the primaries.
But as I’ve stated before, Biden’s basic decency and belief that most of us want to work together even as we disagree is change and novelty compared to Trump.
And Obama 2012 was no longer the change agent brand.
Lastly of course is that being motivated to vote does not necessarily mean being motivated to vote FOR you.
SlackerInc, here’s the thing. Those who are strongly in Trumps camp WILL have good turnout.
A D wants as good of turnout from their base AND winning swingable voters. really they want both. The question though is which is the more elastic number?
Would that “safe” candidate result in lower turnout more that swingable voters or the other direction? Would the more revolutionary candidate turn off more swingables than they increase base turnout against the evil that is in office?
I personally think that anyone who is sure they know the answer to that is too stupid to realize that they do not know. It’s a best guess we make. It seems to me that the little evidence we have suggests that the swingables are more elastic than the base is. Chasing those who have not voted in the past in the hopes of having the candidate who will get them off their asses seems a losing game.
I’m not sure that Harris would result in Obama level turnout among Black voters. Biden would likely do better than HRC but definitely not Obama level.
Neither will motivate the far left more than removing Trump already does. Warren might but at a loss of swingables that would offset it or more.
Both Biden and Harris are pretty similar in terms of policy positions.
I agreed with almost everything you wrote, but not this part.
There is pretty clear evidence that Trump’s base gets more or less riled up at different times. In many of the special elections a year to 18 months into his presidency, D turnout was way up, but R turnout was also anemic. In Nov 2018, that changed dramatically. D turnout was still very high, and soft Rs and independents broke Democratic. But hardcore R voters came out in droves, seemingly ginned up by the Kavanaugh hearings. As a result, you had weird outcomes like the Ohio Democratic candidate for governor losing, despite getting more votes than John Kasich did four years earlier—and Kasich’s win was considered a landslide!
I agree that there arises from this no single obvious and inarguable strategy, but it’s still important to try to map out the political terrain as carefully as we can.
I didn’t respond to it, you’re right. Please point out where it addresses turnout among minorities and then we have something to talk about. Remember, this is what I asked for a cite on:
I never posited that a white male Democrat wouldn’t have won the 2008 election. I said Obama riled up supporters to turn up in numbers high enough to vote him, despite also riling up opponents. The lesson in this is that candidates who can pull this off are hitting on something important. Instead of treating Obama as a one-off, we should be finding other candidates who can do this too.
See, this is dangerous thinking. Dems damn well need to motivate their side to vote. Too many likely Dem voters sat out in 2016. If it happens again, Trump is guaranteed to win.
Huh? That’s not change or novel. Bipartisanship and working together is standard politician rhetoric. Even Trump says it.
Didn’t have to because he had the incumbent advantage. It’s the challenger to the status quo that has to make a case for a new president. Much easier to do that if voters see you as truly different and better.
Any of the Dems is change and novelty compared to Trump. What of it?
This is covered in another of my cites, from the political scientist who so accurately predicted 2018 election results. Democrats, progressives, and Dem leaners were lulled into believing Hillary was inevitable and Trump would go down in ignominious defeat. Some voted third party, some stayed home. They are now obviously disabused of their complacency and roused to action.
In addition, you have the educated traditional Republicans who reluctantly voted for Trump once but are extremely open to voting Democratic this time as long as the Dem isn’t too scary.
We may well find ourselves in a position that better lends itself to your theory of the case in 2027, depending on what the GOP looks like by that time. But this cycle, safe and boring is the new black.
The what of it is that what is”change” is different in different cycles. Yes any D is a dramatic change agent in the context of Trump in office. When you have something as completely different as Trump in place, someone so disruptive to norms of decency and behaviors in the country and the world, the change that sells is less one of revolution and more one of radical moderation.
The contrast of relevance is not whomever is in office vs the challenger. What helps gin up turnout is the view that a candidate bucks “the establishment”. That view transcends party lines.
Trump ran on being anti-establishment. His supporters saw him as a candidate who would upset the apple cart but in a good way. Obama, by virtue of his background, also convinced voters he represented change. Being youthful, black, and personable gave him an aura of progressivism that complemented his moderate positions. In either case, Obama and Trump voters didn’t just contrast them with the opposing party; contrasts were made within parties too.
Biden—just like like HRC, Kerry, and Gore—is an establishment candidate. His Old Guard credentials as VP is what added “safety” to Obama’s candidacy. To now expect him to market himself as an anti-establishment change agent is unrealistic.
Antiestablishment is not the right play for this cycle. You are fighting the last war. This one should be about restoration, not revolution.
Moving on:
Interesting point made in the Slate “Waves” feminism podcast: a panelist expressed concern that the ways people extol Elizabeth Warren on Twitter—that she is so smart, “the girl in class who helps you with your homework”, “raises her hand”, “happens to always be right”, “it kind of reminds me of the way people would roll their eyes at the smart little girls in class…probably a lot of us were the girls in class whose hands popped up as soon as the teacher opened their mouth”.
Bingo. People who were those girls can’t be blamed for identifying with her and seeing her as the perfect avatar who can fix everything. And if we had an ideal meritocracy, they might be right! But in the real world of politics, that is, sadly, a liability.
I’m not convinced that restoration is actually what the US electorate wants this cycle. Yes, they want to replace our jibbering malevolent dolt in the White House with someone who fits a “normal” presidential profile, but ISTM polling doesn’t show a strong desire for a return to pre-Trump policies except in terms of foreign policy and US standing.
What I’m getting from Kaiser, Pew and Gallup (along with other various older polls from 2018) is that voters -at least those who are not unlikely to vote Dem- seem to want more than a fully supported ACA; they want actual universal health care, and even though most Americans think that means insurance, they don’t want to worry about premiums and deductibles and copays. Voters want and expect real infrastructure spending and trade partnerships instead of trade wars, and they don’t at the moment seem concerned about deficits. Most Dem leaning or ‘not GOP’ voters want positive action on climate change, gun policies and income inequality.
“Restoration,” if it means anything, would probably (IMO, ISTM, etc.) mean “bring back sanity and competence” but probably doesn’t mean “give us back the ante-Trump status quo.”
About the only time it’s not the right play is when you’re the establishment and you’ve got a successful record to run on.
There is no ‘restoration.’ The clock can’t be unwound. Telling voters that if we get rid of Trump, we can just make some minor adjustments and be back to pre-Trump normal - that’s selling them a pack of lies.
They may be comforting lies, and they may even succeed in winning us an election, but then we’ll be handcuffed in a world where control is still largely held by Republicans.
And that’s before we get blown away in the 2022 midterms.
ETA: And what xenophon41 said.
Also what RTF said about handcuffing-- a “safe” candidate that doesn’t scare Republican voters gets us another Dem president who constantly has to maneuver around a hostile Congress. (That scenario was my one major objection to HRC, as she *did *scare GOP voters, but the only alternative we had in 2016 meant an even worse scenario. I would’ve voted for Biden back then, but not for 2020.)
Pardon me if I don’t take this as a given. Certainly not with Russian disinformation campaigns continuing unchecked.
I would prefer Democrats assume that complacency is still a problem and work to combat this. If this assumption is wrong, the risks to winning are minimal as long as their overall campaign strategy is strong and balanced. The alterative is that they smugly assume–like you do–that it’s *not *a problem and so do nothing to protect themselves from it. If this assumption is wrong, the Dems lose the election just as they did in 2016, 2004, and 2000.
Obama’s brand was change agent no question but in no way was he selling “bucking the establishment”. Quite the opposite. His was not a message that the system was irrevocably broken and in need of being thrown away and replaced, it was a message that as much as we disagree on some very fundamental things we have more values in common than we have different and can all work together to make this country and this world a better place for us all, using the established system we have.
Trump was definitely an anti-establishment outsider candidate. Sanders tried to ride the same exact wave. Carter and Reagan both ran as outsiders of the establishment.
But while anti-establishment outsider is a change position it is far from the only one and in the context of having voted in an extreme end of “disrupt the established status quo with an outsider”, which has resulted in what we see, a return to some normalcy is the change that is desired.
And most of those running, at least running well, on the D side are selling that to various degrees. It’s really only Sanders who somehow, despite having been in the Senate for as long as he has, that is selling “outsider” status as the brand. Is it a coincidence that he has failed to catch any fire this cycle? Warren is selling change but as someone who knows how to work and fight within the establishment in normal ways. Buttigieg is an outsider but his branding does not focus on that. It emphasizes his intelligence, youth, and communication skills. And the other outsiders are all in the dumpsters. Harris is an establishment insider with a moderate degree progressive cred.
On policy there is actually fairly little daylight between the directions any of these candidates want to move things, and even less between how far in that direction they could help us get. It has been pointed out before that the ones who advocate for going the furthest in those directions might be the ones least likely to move the needle at all, while those with goals a bit less in pink unicorn territory might actually get the needle moved further.
I think most would love a return to the pre-Trump Obama era establishment, which actually moved the needle significantly despite having to deal with a Party of No constantly. They’d want to keep moving the needle of course. And to address the item that Obama era was ineffective at doing anything about and which has become even worse under Trump - worsening levels of wealth inequality (and therefore power).
Please read this article. You have a party chairman who is saying exactly what I’m saying in this thread, so the beautiful thing is that you don’t have to take my word for it:
Bottom line is that running an candidate that smacks of establishment doesn’t look like a good strategy for wooing Obama-Trump voters. It also doesn’t look the right tack to ginning up the minority vote either.
Erm… while it’s hard for me to disagree with Mr. Brackett about the effect of a “mainstream Democrat” on voter enthusiasm, I’d caution against extrapolating an opinion regarding a single county to the national electorate as a whole.
Also, I don’t think the quote from Chairman Brackett refutes DSeid’s statement about Obama not being antiestablishment at all.
RTF,
So without a Senate majority, as well as keeping the House, as well as winning the presidency, you believe it is completely hopeless. Not quite “may as well have Trump”, but not far off.
Playing out the standard back and forth we’ve had, IF one believes that (and I do not), THEN having the candidate who can best deliver not only the presidency but help deliver Congress as well is THE critical deciding factor.
Yet I’ve heard little from you arguing why candidate X or Y can do that better. I’m really wanting to hear some intelligent discussions of that. You know the key Senate race states. Which of that top list can better help deliver those races, even marginally, over the others, and why? You’ve suggested Harris before but wouldn’t really engage in defending the position. Do you really believe it? IF you believe in the absolute need to capture the Senate or it is hopeless THEN this should be the main thing you are mulling over.
Alternatively IF one believes that there is little hope other than to avoid more severe SCOTUS and courts damage and some by an imperial president abusing executive orders, but that there is that little hope that a few GOP Senators will see their informed self-interest in supporting bipartisan initiatives and in rebelling against McConnell, then that little hope is better than no hope at all … which is what one otherwise has. IF the Ds have the Senate (and by enough to offset Manchin going the other way sometimes) then any D resident can get a fair amount done. And none can get the filibuster removed unless the Senate wants to do it which is unlikely non matter how much a president supports it. Can any of them get anything done without the Senate? Who has the best chance of that and why?
Not Sanders. Maybe someone who has more experience at getting stuff done by negotiating? Biden sells that but Warren and Harris also has some bone fides there, even if they sell it less.
xenophon41 correct in that “transformational” (which what Obama hoped to be, to a similar degree that Reagan was in his direction) is ≠ “anti-establishment” or “outsider”.
And you with the face, an appeal to the authority of Iowa’s Muscatine County Democratic Party chairman Brackett’s opinions and thoughts is a pretty weak argument in any case. I don’t take their word for it either.
That said let’s discuss how to best woo Obama-Trump voters and why Clinton lost them.
Was it mostly because they wanted to vote for change, from an Obama establishment era?
Or was it, as I believe, because they were excluded as a group that mattered in HRC’s campaign as she focussed pretty exclusively on trying to rally turnout of the base and re-energize those turned off by a primary that bruised her, afraid that including them would be heard as less concern for the issues of the base?