The day after the inauguration I thought there was no way Trump will get a second term. Voters that stayed home will come out and vote against him. Now I am not so sure. In a recent interview James Carville said pretty much exactly what I’m thinking.
He nails the whole problem with the primary process right now.
Old man yells at clouds.
This gets an “OK, Boomer” award.
Leaving left and right out of it, student debt and things like the shortage of affordable housing and lack of good jobs are things affecting a large part of the population. These aren’t just kids, these are people now in their thirties and even forties. These are not problems that only developed in the last few years. The Democrats haven’t exactly been there for them.
I think winning them back is important, not just to win elections but to bring back the ideals I was brought up being told the Democrats stood for. Unfortunately I don’t know how long it would take to re-engage people. Ignoring them might in fact be a good short term strategy for winning. But I don’t think it’s a good long term one.
Not sure if this belongs here, but it’s mentioned in the OP and touches on what Carville is complaining about: ISTM that “voters who didn’t turn up” as a reason for the loss is a myth generated in the immediate aftermath of the election. From what I can see, 2016 turnout wasn’t all that low - same as 2012. The notable anomaly was black turnout, which dropped noticeably but only to pre-Obama levels.
This strongly argues against “energizing the base” strategy and supports the “get swing voters” strategy. Imho.
Even through some of the worst press coverage, I’ve never had Trump’s reelection odds at much less than 50%, and that was strictly based on the power of incumbency.
We already know that partisans aren’t going to change their votes one way or the other, so once again we’re left to predict how first-time voters and perpetually confused voters will vote. And I can tell you that for the majority of them, when looking at candidate A vs candidate B, the question that voters start out with when voting for or against Trump is this: If (we assume) that he’s going to leave office in 4 years anyway, what’s the urgent need to replace him with someone else?
If the economy is doing well, many of these confused and anxious voters are going to be convinced that it’s better to just play it safe and deal with the SOB that you know rather than taking a chance on someone else.
The first bit of bad news is that the economy is actually doing well - at least in purely statistical sense. In the short term, Iowa made compounded this problem for Democrats because it made for terrible optics: if a party can’t be trusted to run a simple statewide election, why should they be trusted to run the country? I could see voters forming that conclusion based on what happened.
But the real problem is that Trump’s rise and his presidency have polarized the left. The progressives keep talking about the perfect candidate who can unify the party, and to be honest, I don’t know if that guy or that gal exists. It sure seems like a lot of Yang’s and Steyer’s voters went home rather than offering to join another candidate’s caucus in 2nd round voting. And many of Bernie’s voters seem just as bitter and chair-throwing mad as they were in 2016, so I could see many of them refusing to support the Democratic nominee if it ain’t Bernie. However, I don’t think it’s just Bernie Bros either. I’m not sure if Biden’s or Bloomberg’s supporters are going to be that enthusiastic about voting for Bernie Sanders either.
Right now I’d put Trump’s reelection chances over 50%.
Spot on.
And this is why I’m firmly in the Bloomberg camp. I think he understands messaging. He understands how to beat Trump. Maybe it takes a good billionaire to beat a bad one.
One would think that is good news…
It would be if it weren’t an economy that’s primarily benefiting the wealthiest people in this country.
I don’t know how this fits into this thread, but it’s what popped into my head when I read Carville’s interview (which I do pretty much agree with): People like Bernie and AOC et al are good at pure organizing, not governing. And by that I mean, they have their ideas and they organize around those, “victory” be damned. Because, win or lose, they’ll keep on organizing. If they win? Look at what we can do when we work together! If they lose? We need to keep on building our power because we’re getting beat; “they” are out to get us!
For a pure organizer, 0% of a win is better than 50%, because you can spin a total loss to your benefit. It’s harder to spin and further organize around a compromise.
Nominating organizers to lead our country *is *a damn scary idea. It’s what we have now in Trump. We need a leader, an executive, a govern-er, a horse-trader, a bureaucrat, a wonk, a successful delegator, or someone with some combination of those qualities.
So the fact that we have another pure organizer now pulling out into the lead *is *a tad scary, because I believe they’d rather burn the shit down in order to organize another day rather than compromise or govern effectively. Almost any of the candidates would be better than Trump or Bernie at governing, I believe. Yet, we’re now faced with a growing possibility of either Trump or Bernie. Obviously I’ll take the organizer that isn’t batshit insane and shares my values, but I wouldn’t be necessarily pleased to see Bernie at the helm. (And please don’t read this as me saying Bernie’s as bad as Trump. Bernie is and would be much better than Trump just by the fact he’s a better person. But it doesn’t mean he’s what I want running the country or as the de facto head of the Democratic Party.)
Right now against most of the field I put Trumps chances at about 50% as well. Maybe a little higher against Warren. 100% 2nd term if it’s Bernie. My state will go Dem no matter who is the candidate and the primary is late so I’m basically a spectator at this point.
Hmm, it’s kinda Ok, Boomer but not totally. It definitely seems like the Dems have moved past some of the nutty stuff that was coming out of the early debates.
It seems like the debate has moved towards more affordable college rather than canceling student debt which is a winning issue. Canceling student debt I think brings to mind to many voters some 25 year old with a masters degree from a private school sitting in a Brooklyn coffee house on a MacBook Pro whining on Twitter about the world and how unfair life is.
I’m tired of hearing about turnout in Iowa. I’ll scream until I’m blue that 2008 was a rare aberration. The caucus were January 3, which was a Thursday right after New Years. Lots of people are off work those weeks of Christmas and New Years making a pain in the ass caucus not a big deal. A Monday night after the Super Bowl when you’ve got work the next day is different.
On your student debt point: For about 75% of the adult population, student debt isn’t a concern because they don’t have it. Only about 7% of the total population (44 million out of 327 million) have college debt in our country. Hanging your hat on the nail of eliminating student debt isn’t necessarily one that resonates with most Americans.
Now career prep would be something to get behind (trades, community college, re-training and, yes, more affordable/free public college), but free college or eliminating college debt on its own is not something that affects a majority of the population. It really is a stupid and elitist thing to make a pillar of one’s message.
And also: What’s with the idea that people who struggled to pay their college tuition, or their kids’ college tuition, will automatically resent policy changes that make it easier for other people to pay for college in the future? For a lot of people, their lived experience of a problem makes them want to SOLVE the problem for others, not insist that everyone else also has to suffer exactly as much as they did.
When you say “what’s with the idea” are you doubting that anyone would feel that way? No one is saying “automatically”.
It’s hard to say, but people are funny that way. And it seems to be an acceptable media narrative to amplify people saying they would resent it, even if they are in the minority.
Overall, most of what Carville says is standard “get the messaging right” stuff. But he is discounting the fact that the early campaigning is all about trying out a lot of different stuff and seeing what resonates. Later on, like right about now, the messages should start coalescing. And I can’t help but wonder if when he’s decrying urban elitists he’s not able to see himself?
Much of the rest is expected from someone like him, he is firmly in the Democratic establishment “Never-Bernie” camp.
What a stupid thing to say. So kids entering college today are just meant to bend over and get shackled with ever greater levels of student debt because a bunch of fucking boomers with better jobs and lower mortgages were able to clear theirs? Because to offer them debt relief wouldn’t be fair to the boomers? Fuck that! Life’s not fair. We just have to make the best of it. And if boomers like the moron who accosted Warren want to stymie debt relief measures just because they can’t benefit from them…well, it’s just another example of that generation’s characteristically pathological selfishness, isn’t it? It deserves to be opposed. And yeah, that might cost the Democrats at the ballot box, but guess what? Being a bunch of milquetoasts with no principles beyond pandering to the fucking boomers is gonna cost us at the ballot box, too.
Since the last Democrat candidate lost the most winnable election ever to a rapey, half-retarded gameshow host, despite running everything she said through a dozen focus groups, maybe this time we could try basing our positions on principle, rather than on what a bunch of spoilt boomers want to hear.
Well, Carville’s argument seems to be that trying to do anything about college tuition is a losing issue because people who have already struggled to pay for college will resent it, so he seems to be assuming this is the automatic, universally shared reaction to the idea that someone might get a benefit you didn’t get. I don’t think it is. (I recognize that some people do have this reaction, but a lot of the time, those are people who weren’t going to vote for a Democrat anyway.)
Trump is running on the Carville mantra
it’s the economy, stupid
It is getting tiresome about these people bemoaning the “lurch to the left”. Voters were not enthused by Clinton seeing just another corporcrat. Remember Obama’s 2008 campaign ad? “Hillary Clinton will say anything and change nothing.”
Biden is just more Clinton. Bloomberg is pretty much the same. Bill Clinton’s Third Way politics swung the democratic party to the right and Hillary was 100% on-board. Look what their war on drugs did to minorities. They gutted welfare. Made bankruptcy harder to get and so on. Far from closing the wealth gap they have exacerbated it and helped it along.
Medical costs spiraling out of control. Education costs spiraling out of control. Infrastructure crumbling. Prisons overflowing. Democrats have done precious little to correct those problems.
Democrats used to be the party of the working man, the middle class and they have managed to cede that to Trump. Trump of all people!
And now Clinton and Carville are bemoaning a “lurch to the left”? Seriously…fuck those guys. It is taking the party back to where it should have been all along, the champion of the middle class and blue-collar workers. That is where Sanders is going and, so far, it appears to be working. Trump edged out Clinton because he appealed to those working class voters in a way Clinton and Biden and Bloomberg never can or will. How Trump managed it is remarkable. Sanders, on the other hand, has been championing their cause his entire career and never wavers.
In 2016 Trump’s own pollster said that had Sanders been in the general election instead of Clinton Sanders would have won. Sanders consistently wins polls in a matchup against Trump. Sanders isout fund raising everyone else and doing so without PAC money (Bloomberg is writing huge checks to himself). Sandersconsistently draws large crowds that his opponents only dream of. Sanders won the popular vote in Iowa and is looking good going in to New Hampshire.
Yet we have Carville sitting there bitching like crazy about Sanders. The damage is not coming from Sanders moving things to the left. It is coming from Carville and Clinton and their ilk. Have a seat Carville, you had your turn…for decades, and look where we are now. Sanders clearly appeals to working class voters in ways no other candidate does except (maybe) Buttigieg.