I don’t think it’s so much more likely than New Hampshire or Maine, but you make a good point that Clinton Democrats are not doing that well in Minnesota. The “coastal elites” of the Democratic Party need to pay more attention to what people like Keith Ellison have been saying about the Industrial Midwest.
That doesn’t mean abandoning abortion rights or gay rights. It does mean campaigning on economics and then actually governing on those principles, something the Clintons weren’t doing, and Obama didn’t really do either. (Maybe he did more than the Clintons, but not enough.)
I’m old enough to remember when GOP officeholders were very likely to be pro-choice. And the “Christian Coalition” would endorse them anyway.
I don’t think anything Bill Clinton said can speak to what was normal for a Democrat. At the time he was President, Bubba was way to the right of the Democratic Party on multiple issues, including the death penalty and economics. He was like pro-gay Reagan.
Actually, all of the trends that I’ve discussed were already started prior to the election of 2016.
Though we’re rather at risk of wandering away from the topic of the thread, I would just point out that while you may view things this way, not everyone is obliged to agree with you. First of all, my dictionary defines minority as “a group or part that is less than half of the whole”, and makes no mention of stereotypes or persecution. But let’s lay that aside and use your definition.
You list three groups that are not minorities: union members, Catholics, and veterans. Yet all of these groups have endured persecution in the USA. If you don’t believe me, read up on the Homestead strike, the Bible Riots, or the Bonus Army for just a few examples. As far as fitting the stereotypical image of America, that would depend entirely on what the stereotypical image of America is. You may have one stereotypical image of America while I have another and other people have others. That definition gives no objective way to define who’s a minority.
This statement:
Nobody is trying to take away the rights of veterans. When people try to ‘take away’ the rights of catholics, they are trying to stop catholics from taking away the rights of other people.
As for those Catholics, they have a First Amendment right to form charitable organizations and run those organizations in accordance with their religious beliefs. Thus, whenever any federal or state government attempts to stop them from doing so, that government is violating their First Amendment rights. You say that the government is “trying to stop catholics from taking away the rights of other people” but offer no evidence to back up that claim. Needless to say, the Little Sisters of the Poor have not made any attempt to take away any rights from anyone.
Your argument amounts to saying that certain groups arbitrarily count as minorities while others do not, that we should ignore persecution of particular groups, and that the groups that you choose to ignore just have to accept having fewer rights than everyone else. One gets the same basic vibe from the Democratic leadership, which might explain why they’re doing less well in some places than they used to. Minnesota has decent numbers of union members and Catholics and Veterans. So do a lot of other states.
Some other things to remember about Minnesota in 2016:
Keith Ellison (the first Muslim elected to US Congress in 2006) won re-election with 69.2% of the vote.
Ilhan Omar became the first Somali-American Muslim elected to office (MN House) in the US.
Probably worth noting that Bernie won the primary (caucus in MN) over Clinton 61.6% to 38.4%
Other recent elections:
Amy Klobuchar (D) Senator was re-elected to Senate in 2012 with 65.23% of the vote beating the ® candidate by nearly a million votes. She remains a very popular figure.
Melvin Carter III (D) was elected as the first African American Mayor of St. Paul in 2017.
Given all of the above, I find it very difficult to believe Trump could turn MN red in 2020. It will be interesting to see what will happen in Nov 2018 with the special election regarding Al Franken’s vacated Senate seat, and Tim Dayton (D) governor deciding not to run for re-election.
Exactly. This puts the kibosh on the notion that “white working class” voters won’t vote for people who don’t look or worship like them. If their concerns are addressed, they certainly will.
It’s certainly true that Democrats are much more ideologically homogenous on some issues than they were a generation ago; anti-abortion, pro-gun and anti-immigrant positions are now widely viewed as unacceptable for Democratic candidates, at least in most of the country. Whether this is a problem for them depends on whether you feel their shifts reflect or are in opposition to shifts in public opinion. I think you would be hard pressed to argue that these shifts have clearly harmed the Democrats.
Of course they have. They attempted to take away their employees’ right to have the same health care benefits that employees of other companies are entitled to.
That’s a good explanation for how Democrats have lost voters by failing to stand up for the working class. I think they need to correct this, but it’s not an insurmountable problem; certainly the Republicans aren’t doing anything for these voters, either, so if the Democrats return to populist economic policies, almost all these voters should come home.
I believe that the number of working class voters who are so committed to conservative social values that they will vote against their own interests, even if one party is clearly standing up for those interests, is small and shrinking. It’s when there seems to be no difference between the parties’ economic policies that many voters may choose based on their “deplorable” social attitudes.
Anyway, to the OP, 2020 is a long way off and a lot of stuff could happen. Right now, i would be comfortable placing a large bet at even odds that the Democrats won’t lose any of their 2016 states in 2020, but I wouldn’t call it a “safe assumption”.
And of course, the flip side is that pro-choice, anti-gun and pro-immigrant positions are much rarer in the GOP than they were 30 years ago, so the Democrats have presumably picked up a lot of voters for whom these are important issues. So this ideological sorting shouldn’t affect either party’s chances, except to the extent that public opinion on these issues is itself shifting.
Not a Jill Stein fan, but I get really tired of people blaming the 2016 loss on her and her voters. Remember that Gary Johnson got about twice as many votes as Stein, and most of those voters probably would have either voted Republican or abstained if Johnson wasn’t on the ballot. So in an election without third party candidates, Trump probably would have done slightly better than he did.
This is like a football team complaining that they lost because the weather was bad, ignoring the fact that the other team was playing in the same conditions.
The Libertarians always get a small percentage of votes, Ron Paul had a cult following.
I can imagine that Jill Stein may have also contributed to people staying home, leaving the top of the ballot blank, or doing a useless write in. I quite remember The Honorable Shitbag Sanders appointing Cornel West to the Democratic Platform Committee and then West defecting over to Stein and both of them telling everyone that Hillary was worse than Trump.
And I still want to know why a town councilwoman is dining with Vladimir Putin.
Well, the Putin question is indeed very interesting. But again, the Greens always get a small percentage of votes too. Stein’s performance in 2016 was pretty much in line with what the Greens have done in recent elections. Obama was able to win despite losing a handful of votes to the Greens. I don’t get this focus on Stein as though she represented some new phenomenon that hadn’t been a problem for Democrats in previous elections.
It’s similar to blaming the loss on Bernie supporters not voting for Clinton in the general election. No question that those who made that choice were foolish, but `90% of Sanders supporters did go on to support Clinton, which, again, is exactly the level of support for a party’s nominee that we’ve historically seen from supporters of the losing primary candidate. There were Clinton diehards in 2008 who refused to support Obama. There were certainly lots of Cruz and Kasich supporters who didn’t vote for Trump in November.
Winning candidates overcome obstacles. Sore losers point fingers.
If there had been a comparable fringe candidate on the right who took away about as much of the Republican vote, then yes, it wouldn’t really matter. But those voters who should have voted Clinton and did not were the difference.
Scroll three posts up, dude. There WAS a comparable fringe candidate on the right who took away MORE of the Republican vote.
Every voter SHOULD have voted for Clinton. Why the Stein voters come in for more outrage than the Trump voters, Johnson voters and not-at-all voters baffles me.
To be fair, if you were a genuine “values voter” you could have voted for McMuffin. Why any of them stomached trump is incomprehensible. (I mean, I know the answer, judges, but still.)
I’m not sure which is rarer, pro-choice Republicans or pro-life ones. Certainly, not one out of 60 Republican senators in 2009 was pro-life.
On guns, the biggest “scandal” that the Republicans were able to find connected to Obama was that he allowed some people to buy guns, when they thought that those people shouldn’t have been allowed to buy guns.
And on immigration, the current Republican president likes illegal immigrants so much that he married one.
That said, you could tweak the statement to say that the current crop of Republicans are consistently ant-choice, pro-NRA, and anti-Mexican.
Where in the Constitution does it say that employees of any employer are entitled to any particular set of health care benefits?
To state the obvious, there are millions of employers in this country, and the health care that they offer their employees ranges from none at all, to partially covering the cost of high-deductible plans, to completely covering platinum plans. And this all obviously legal. Indeed, the ACA was written specifically saying that employers would have a wide range of choices in what health insurance to provide for their employees. There is no right for anyone to have the same health care benefits that a different employer offers?