The smart play on health care would be to ju-jitsu the recent flood of Republican bullshit and declare “We want to work with the Republicans to keep their promise to protect people with preexisting conditions from being denied coverage or charged more.”
The attentive student may note that the Republicans didn’t actually promise the latter even while lying through their teeth. This is a variation on the “Pigfucker Ploy”, named after LBJ’s observation about the value of making the other guy deny it.
Things ebb and flow. The Dems are not a permanent minority party. They just won the House, and they now are governors in almost half the states. They’ve been the POTUS 16 out of the last 26 years. And they were the majority in Senate up until 2014. Red & Blue states aren’t static. Some shift colors over time. Some grow more red, and some grow more blue, and some become purple (Virginia used to be red, and is now more purplish).
As a former Republican, there were times when I tap-danced on what I thought was the grave of Democratic electoral chances, and I was proven wrong. At this point, I do think the Dems fell asleep a little after Obama was elected, and they got out-worked by Republicans - hence, the gerrymandering. But the Trump election woke them up. I think the Dems, in the near term, are going to continue to surge.
Again, what is with all this pessimism? Why are people even bringing up these things as legitimate? We just gained a majority in one House, and you’re trying to argue that we might be a permanent minority? That is literally and factually impossible, because we just won a majority.
I’ve never seen people respond so pessimistically to an electoral victory.
We gained a smaller majority in the house by winning by 6%, than the GOP won by losing by 1%. Thats a problem.
If government truly represented voters equally I wouldn’t feel this way.
But the house, senate and presidency all reward republican voters more than democratic voters. Democrats need to maintain a 3-6% advantage in elections just to break even due to the structural disadvantages they face.
Throw in gerrymandering and voter suppression, and feeling pessimistic is perfectly reasonable.
Throw in the democrats general lack of willingness to use the power given to them by voters, and the pessimism gets even worse.
You probably should read dailykos articles with a little more of a critical eye. First of, whoopdie doo that “a number” of sheriffs lost on ICE cooperation. And wow, Oregan kept a law on sanctuary cities. Thanks Portland, I mean Oregon.
The Dems could probably triangulate a little better on immigration but most definitely on gun control and voter id.
Also, societies usually only trend further and further liberal with time. Sure, every now and then there’s a conservative backlash (i.e., Brazil going Bolsonaro,) but the strong undercurrent of modern history is liberal and liberal.
How about this idea: Democrats should stop focusing on being the party that appeals to urban voters, and instead try to be a party that appeals to a broader cross-section of voters. There was a time Democrats did that. Not shockingly, they tended to win a bit more in Congress.
But, by all means, continue to be the party of the urban poor and those who want to do good by them, and then complain that the deck is stacked against you, because you’ve chosen poorly what you should stand for. Or, rather, please DON’T continue to do that, because it’s what allows the Republican Party to be filled with some real idiots any more.
The democrats are hemorrhaging support from whites w/o a college education lately.
As recently as 1996, whites w/o a college degree mildly preferred the democrats. In 2016 they preferred the GOP by 39 points. When you lose that much support from a group that make up 1/3 of voters, it is going to hurt.
The issue is how do we appeal to them without giving up our values as democrats? If the reason they left the democrats is because they oppose feminism, racial justice, gay rights, etc. how do we appeal to them without giving up our own values?
I have no idea. Hopefully a strong economic message would appeal to a few of them. But I think the democrats have let themselves be painted as limp wristed pussies, which will make it very hard for them to get support from people who tend to subscribe to traditional masculine values.
One should notice that you had to omit the loss of guys guys like “I was anti-immigrant before Trump showed up” Kris Kobach in Kansas to make a point. In any case, as the Atlantic reported, Republican gains in the senate obtained in great part by race baiting can not hide the fact that the xenophobic and anti-ACA Trumpian message took a beating in most house races.
I’m going to do a bad analogy here because I like bad analogies:
I’ve often said that red states never have real fiscal problems, because their fiscal problems tend to come from tax cuts, not spending commitments. So they can solve their fiscal problems just by raising taxes, whereas blue states have to figure out how to get out of fiscal commitments they made that might be legally difficult not to mention politically terrifying.
Democrats have a similar problem as red states. They have a huge reservoir of voters they COULD win, but choose not to cater to them. Solving their political problem is easy: restore the DLC and Jim Webb wings of the party to their former glory. Then they win enough white working class voters to win elections again and the Senate goes back to 2006-era difficulty, rather than the Red Wall it seems to be today. Republicans, on the other hand, can’t win any new voters. They’ve maximixed their voting base and turnout probably can’t get much higher than it is. Their only path to more voters is a longterm plan to change their image. Which would take at least 20 years to really bear fruit. In the meantime, the Democrats could be poaching those Obama/Trump, Reagan Democrat voters.
I didn’t have to omit anything to merely point out a couple of eye-roll worthy pieces of evidence in your quotes. Maybe you should have linked and quoted the Atlantic article rather than some high spirited dailykos sumup.
Okay, first we need to discuss what is meant by throwing up our hands and giving in.
It is a false impression that democrats are for open borders. We are simply for humane treatment of those who are looking to immigrate. So, do we throw up our hands and give our blessing to family separation policies?
We also do think that immigration is good for the country’s economy, and this is backed by numerous studies, do we throw up our hands and concede to having a weaker economy?
We think that the wall is a massive waste of money, it is environmentally disastrous, is a serious problem to american citizens who live on the border who will be having to give up their property to accommodate the wall, will have virtually no effect on immigration, and is a negative symbol the belies our advertising that we are a nation of freedoms. Do we throw up our hands and allow this ill conceived project to continue?
Do we need to agree to amending the constitution to get rid of birthright citizenship, do we need to agree that anyone who was born to a midwife should be suspect of immigration fraud, should we agree to racially profiling people based on the color of their skin (people who can trace their family history back to before the founding of our nation) to enhance enforcement of immigration policies?
What is it, exactly that the democrats are supposed to give in to to assuage the irrational fears of anti-immigrant xenophobes? You tell me what “giving in on immigration” looks like, and I’ll tell you if it is worth it.
Do you really think that by dropping just one issue, suddenly all the other things that the democrats want to do to improve the country will become possible? Even if we get behind building a wall with machine gun nests, condoning separating families who try to come here, weakening our economy by stifling growth, and demonstrating to the world that we are no longer a shining city on a hill, but rather a festering ghetto behind a fence, does that mean that republicans will agree to allowing people to have healthcare?
I do think that you are wrong on that. If we give them everything that they want on immigration, then they will just demand more on tax cuts, on reproductive rights, and on cutting spending. Even if you are right on that, what exactly does it mean to capitulate on immigration, and what kind of healthcare plan do you really think we can get for that trade?
the problem with that, is that most people live in cities. That is why democrats tend to get more of the vote than republicans. Republicans get their support from empty swaths of uninhabited land.
Republicans tend to live in places where people just don’t want to live. There are fewer economic opportunities, so they have to rely on the government to support them.
Unfortunately, the way that our system is set up, it rewards the states that people don’t want to live in by giving the same voice in government as the states that do have economic opportunities that draw people to live there. That there are more states that have low populations that need to receive federal government support to survive and have the political power to force the urbanized states to contribute to their welfare is not the fault of the democrats. he democrats actually worked for the people in those states by trying to strengthen worker protections and unions, but the republicans that the people who were being helped by the democrats managed to get people to support their dismantling of their own protections.
I’ll agree that the right wing has done a good job at making the smear that the democrats only care about the urban poor, but that is not the only people that are represented by the democrats. That there are those who are helped by democratic policies, but still choose to vote for the party who tries to remove those policies is not the fault of the democratic policies.
Nowhere you can show that they were wrong. What you did is illogically shooting the messenger. And I did point from the very beginning that I don’t see how clear the point was from the poster I replied to (Now that, what he said, demanded an eye roll and a reply). He did so by only picking the examples of dubious or close republican gains as reasons for the Democrats to drop their support for immigrants or legalization efforts, while ignoring what took place in the House elections or how the ground is shifting in places like Texas.
Maybe even more than that. The NYT shows the Dems have now won 230 seats, with 13 left undecided. According to 538, the Dems are in good positions in 10 of them.
Final results indicate that this was a very good election for the Dems at all levels except the senate, and even there they won almost all the swing state seats that were up.
Perhaps the Dems should learn that winning the popular vote, especially wrt the presidency is meaningless and instead stop mentioning it and focus on winning the contests the way they actually work? Just a thought.
I don’t think the Pubs have a permanent majority nor are the Dems some sort of permanent minority. US politics just don’t work that way. I think the Dems had the greatest run of control in the past, but even that eventually changed. The Pubs, however, haven’t come close to the longevity of control the Dems enjoyed previously for decades. And I fully expect in the next presidential election the Dems to boot Trump out…assuming they will grasp the concept that winning the popular vote means exactly nothing in the US with our system.
Can I just throw some water on the panic here? Take some deep breaths.
Democrats won the House vote in 25 States this week. Those States have a total of 314 Electoral votes. Most notably, PA/MI/WI/MN all went Democratic by comfortable margins. If Tuesday’s pattern holds in the 2020 Senate election, Dems would pick up 3 seats. That doesn’t include Arizona, so 4 seems realistically possible.
We can’t get complacent, and it’s going to be a tough fight, but we are winning. All the demographic trends are working in our favor. It doesn’t do any good to gripe about ways the system is rigged against us that we can’t change.
