By being “former officials in the Republican administrations of Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, G.W. Bush and Trump” in other words the Republican party most easily called the Party of Gingrich.
They allowed the Overton Window to be moved so they could declare themselves to be the center.
Come on, you know why. Because it helps conservatives. I mean he won’t actually vote for them, but he’ll urge others to.
Exactly. It seems like this is a way to hurt Democrats more than anything else. Any effort to claim the “center” is bound to hurt Democrats more than Republicans.
The following is my guess based on observation, no polls to back this up. It seems the US distribution of voters is no longer shaped like a bell curve. Functionally we now have a bimodal distribution. Let’s say the far left is at -100 and the far right at 100. My impression of the distribution of voters is that we have one hump around -30 or -40 where most Democrats are, and another hump around 85 or 90 where most Republicans are. The area around 0 (Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema) to 30 and 40 (Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) and even 50 to 60 (Mitt Romney) has very few voters left. They’ve mostly moved to the far right. What this means is that they would mostly be taking voters from the Democrats who are in the 0 to -20 range, because there just aren’t any substantial numbers of Republicans in the 10 to 30 range.
ETA. If they ever do announce policy positions, I bet it’ll be stuff Democrats support. If Democrats call them out on having the same positions, they’ll just claim that they would do a better job of getting those things done than Democrats by “working across the aisle” or some such BS.
Exactly. I suspect your second type is why we have polls that show a majority of Americans are pro-choice. It’s probably because of the people who would never even consider voting for Democrats, who are against gun control regulations, for low taxes, against fighting global warming, and most of the other typical Republican positions, but just so happen to be pro-choice and so they think of themselves as centrist because of that one position. If an actual centrist party ever did pop up, they might take a look, but they would stick with voting Republican.
I will go against the grain here and suspect that this new party could hurt the Republicans more. My thinking is that since there are more D voters than R in the country, the D column can afford to lose a few voters, but the R column cannot, especially for competitive districts.
I also think there are a fair number of conservatives that are all for the fiscal responsibility/small government/strong defense thing and are generally liberal on social issues, but are disgusted with the hate-filled/fear-mongering current iteration of the GOP. The results of the 2020 election suggest this - down-ballot conservatives succeeded but the top of the ticket moron failed. I don’t know that the Democrats have something analogous. This is why I think anything that can siphon-off even a small % of conservative voters could have an outsized impact on competitive elections.
The 2020 results were razor thin. Had Biden lost a few thousands in the key states, it would have gone the other way. And that’s exactly what would have happened if those small government conservatives (who are now much smaller in number, but can still swing things if we’re only talking a few thousand) would have voted for Mitt Romney or John Kasich instead of Joe Biden had one of them also been on the ballot. Those kinds of candidates aren’t going to be taking votes away from Trump. It’s just not going to happen. The only way Trump loses votes is to another far right candidate like Ron Desantis or Ted Cruz.
And maybe that’s the answer. Just cut and paste the Democratic Party platform, and scratch out the “democratic” bit on the cover page.
Just checking to see if they’ve lasted this long. This has to be the worst possible time to start a political party like this, which of course is the most likely time it will happen. I predict a dysfunctional three-party system will be more than 50% worse than the dysfunctional two-party system we have now. That would be assuming this new party succeeds in accomplishing anything, which is highly unlikely, so it won’t be anything additional to worry about. But if we do pretend that this new party catches on, at best it will push the conventional party candidates further toward the extremes, and one of them will win each race, and it will more often be a Republican because they like extremism more than Democrats. Luckily everyone will remember the name Forward Party as long as they remember the last new centrist party name that started up.
All that does is guarantee a win for the Republicans.
ETA. It does also reveal that a huge part of the problem is that Democrats are doing a shitty job of running for office.
David Jolly, one of the chief drivers of this movement, was just speaking on MSNBC. He said the group does not intend to advance any candidates for 2024 but will endorse the ones running who seem to best fit the values of the new party. Meaning Democrats.
If they will just be endorsing candidates, I don’t really have a problem with them.
So a few (folks who will be called) RINOs and some old Democrats will be endorsing Democratic candidates and Liz Cheney. Quick! Get David Brooks and Bret Stephens on the case!
That’s contrary to yesterday’s article.
Forward aims to gain party registration and ballot access in 30 states by the end of 2023 and in all 50 states by late 2024, in time for the 2024 presidential and congressional elections.
Except for oddball states like New York, which allow names to appear on more than one ballot line, ballot access almost everywhere by definition means people not running on another ticket.
Is this their Thursday announcement? Have they abandoned that? What is happening?
I wasn’t paying super close attention and he could have meant only in the presidential race of 2024. I agree more clarification is needed.
What was apparent is they are getting quite a lot of pushback over being a potential spoiler party.
From their Washington Post op-ed, they seem to be the same old rancid both-siderism in new bottles stamped with a current “freshness” date:
On guns, for instance, most Americans don’t agree with calls from the far left to confiscate all guns and repeal the Second Amendment, but they’re also rightfully worried by the far right’s insistence on eliminating gun laws. On climate change, most Americans don’t agree with calls from the far left to completely upend our economy and way of life, but they also reject the far right’s denial that there is even a problem. On abortion, most Americans don’t agree with the far left’s extreme views on late-term abortions, but they also are alarmed by the far right’s quest to make a woman’s choice a criminal offense.
As anyone paying attention to current political reality will recognize, they are contrasting a fever-dream vision of the “far left” Democratic Party with the actual reality of the far right Republican Party.
Maybe they should be called the Strawman Party.
You’re all missing the most important question. What will their animal symbol be? (I suggest either the lemming or the Judas goat.)
So, Democrats?
You know, Democrats without all that woke baggage. Bigoted Democrats, or at least Democrats that accept bigotry. Plus a plan to destroy Social Security and Medicare.
I vote for candidates not parties. And Yang seems so desparate for attention I find it repellant.