To be fair, the GOP did make an effort to expand the coalition back in the 2000s. The Bush administration, especially, made some sincere attempts at Hispanic outreach and even tried pushing for immigration reform. But, as so often happens in the Republican Party, the loudest, most obnoxious voices, the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Coulters etc. and their ilk in the halls of power, sabotaged those efforts, and anyone who tried countering those blowhards was pretty quickly slapped down. The big problem with the GOP it seems, is that its leaders were unwilling or unable to keep the yugest assholes in the party’s ranks from running roughshod.
Bush Jr. certainly did do better with Hispanics during his time. If I had to place blame for things ending up this way, I wouldn’t blame Bush Jr. or even Trump. IMHO Mitch McConnell bears the largest share of the blame for things ending up this way. He was the one who decided he would never cooperate with Obama. He was the one who refused to hold hearings on Merrick Garland. He was the one who rushed ACB onto the SCOTUS. Yes, Trump is a blowhard, bigot, and has a remarkable talent for rallying his base, but Mitch McConnell is the one who got us to this point.
This is it. I hate MM with every fiber of my being, but he is a master political operator. He saw early on that Obama being elected represented the rising tide against the Republican demographic, and shrewdly co-opted the Tea Party movement (which was originally vaguely bipartisan) that was furious with the bailout situation that Bush started, and Obama was forced to continue. This was an embracing of the uneducated grassroots voter combined with thinly veiled racism and easy Islamophobia that fueled the far right movement and obstructionism that Gingrich and Limbaugh were already moving towards. He knew that the only red hope was to go with the platform of fear and hatred thinly veiled as Christian Conservatism for as long as he could, and rig as much as he could along the way so that his eventual minority would still have influence and power. He also knew that most people could be easily duped election cycle after election cycle through the same tropes and lies. He basically saved the R from fracture by pandering to the Jim Jordan’s of the world instead of the relatively sane John Boehner’s. Trump is the manifestation of all of this, and hopefully the culmination and endgame.
FWIW- there is an interesting interview with Boehner done after his retirement that gives some visibility into this.
And it is important for the Democrats to be public as to why. They need to point out that they permitted hundreds (if I recall correctly) Republican changes to Obamacare under the guise of “A bill that affects so much of the economy needs to be considered” only to have the Republicans turn around and outright reject any conversation with Democrats on modifying it. So, this example times 1,000,000. Make it clear to the public that the Republicans have made it clear they are not interested in bipartisan cooperation. They destroyed this element of American political discourse, and the calls for a return to civil discourse is a steaming pile of crap.
Right? I keep seeing articles about “forgiveness” and “mending fences” however the election goes, and I always have the same reaction: Why the fuck would we go that way after the last 12 years?
I don’t think either party will be permanently defeated; forever is a long time. No matter what the outcome of next week’s election or what the Dems do in 2021 if they win the election, the losing party will be back in the game by 2050 if not sooner.
However, the next year is the real deal. One party will win for a long time to come, and the other will lose for a long time to come.
Why? Because the GOP has been rigging the game for a decade now, in order to preserve power despite getting increasingly further from being able to win majority support.
If the Dems win and do the things they need to do in 2021 (kill the filibuster, expand the courts, outlaw the barriers to voting that the GOP has thrown up, drastically limit gerrymandering, add a couple of states, and make people’s lives tangibly better so that they do decently in 2022), there’s hardly a chance that the GOP will be in a position to come back anytime soon. It’ll be like 1932 all over again.
But if Trump somehow holds onto power, the GOP will rig the game far beyond the levels we’ve seen, and will be able to hold onto power into the 2030s at least.
The tricky parts are the in-between scenarios, where the Dems win this election but don’t take full advantage of their win. The real danger there is climate change: the Dems need to seriously wield power to deal with that, including killing the filibuster and expanding the courts. If the Dems fail to deal adequately with that, by 2050 it’s gonna be a pretty crappy world, no matter who’s running it.
Depends on who we’re talking about. Mend fences with the average Joe and Jane Idiots who voted for Trump, but no forgiveness for elected Republicans, party apparatchiks, Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media machine, or anyone preaching violence and waving guns around as a response to the possibility of being out of power. Fuck all of them. Hard. With rusty farm implements. Large ones.
I doubt this because the two-term effect will kick in in 2024 even if Trump is reelected. It’s quite difficult for a party to hold on to the White House beyond eight years as voters want change, and with a narcissist like Trump, the fatigue is twice as strong twice as quick.
Should Trump be reelected, then by 2024, the Democratic vote would reach such tsunami levels that it would swamp any ‘rigging’ the Republicans could do.
With you 100%, but that’s an insane agenda for a two-year period. Obama had a Senate supermajority (for a year, anyway) and didn’t have to contend with a pandemic or a hostile 6-3 SCOTUS, and he barely got one major initiative passed.
The one advantage Biden may have that Obama didn’t is the support of an electorate that now has a much clearer picture of who the opposition really is.
If the Democrats take the Senate, hold the House and win the presidency, are they planning to change the rules so that Republicans can never win again? Because court packing has about 30% support in America.
I am reminded of Bill Clinton’s first election, where Democrats claimed they now had a permanent ruling majority and a mandate for fundamental change. Hillarycare was going to transform health care.
Then came 1994, when the Republicans won 54 seats in the house and 8 in the Senate, and they completely stopped the left’s agenda in their tracks.
In this case, if the Democrats tried to pack the court, it woild probably take them a year or two to get it done - then they would need to wait until they had issues before the new court before they could change the law. But then they could lose the midterms to the Republicans, who would simply block everything they could at the Senate level. And if they got the Presidency back in 2024, they could use all those new precedents the Democrats set to really screw them over.
Have the Democrats learned nothing from the debacle of Harry Reid ending the judicial filibuster? If it was still in place, you could have stopped all three Republican picks. Now you want to pack the court, which is deeply unpopular, and end the legislative filibuster. Good luck.
Not changing the rules so that Republicans can never win again. What they need to do is deliver on legislation so that all future elections are fair and that people realize that it’s the Democrats who deliver on things that actually make the country a better place. The Democrats are facing something much different this time compared to Newt Gingrich’s 1994 tsunami or even the 2010 Tea Party election.
The Republican Party has basically admitted that they intend to make the US a dictatorship if they win this year. Even if they lose this year, they will restart where they left off in 2024 should they win then. For the Democrats to not do everything in their power to prevent that would be gross negligence. From the Democratic perspective, what needs to happen is for the Republicans to give up on the idea that their 40% base can dictate to the other 60% how they can live their lives. Ideally this would mean the Republicans abandoning the bigotry at the core of their party.
How? What’s the process? And if they wanted a dictatorship, why did they put three constitutional originalists on the Supreme Court?
It’s pretty notable that one of the ways that the originalists on the court have been unable to constrain an unconstitutional, authoritarian takeover is in the fact Trump’s USPS has sabotaged itself months before an election where millions are going to be voting by mail.
The process is that any election challenges will be decided in favor of the Republican candidate regardless of the facts of the case or what the relevant law or section of the constitution says. Is Trump behind? They will vote to keep the polls open. Are mail in ballots Trump’s last hope? They will vote to keep counting them until Trump comes up victorious. Is Biden behind even though all the votes haven’t been counted during the initial round of counting? They will vote to stop the count early.
Any laws dealing with elections will be struck down if they make it easier for people to vote. Kavanaugh and ACB may call themselves constitutional originalists, but they are not. They are Trumpists and will do everything in their power to keep Republicans in power and undermine Democrats at every turn regardless of what the constitution says. I have some slight hope for Gorsuch, but not much.
So this is just your dark fantasy then? Do you have any evidence that the judges in question have behaved in such a partisan manner before, ignoring the clear meaning of the law when it benefits Republicans?
You do know that the ‘conservative’ justices vote as a bloc much less often than do the liberal justices, right? For example, in the 2019 session there were 67 decisions. The liberals in the court voted together on 51 of them, while the ‘conservatives’ only voted together on 37, or a little more than half. That’s because the Republicans try unconstitutional stuff too, and when they do the ‘conservative’ justices will oppose them.
Part of my hypothesis is that this is going to be something different going forward. The only decision I can point to so far is the recent 5-3 decision limiting the counting of mail in ballots in Wisconsin to those received by Election Day. I am claiming that this is the opening shot, so by definition there won’t be anything prior to that I can point to. The addition of ACB to the court is what will now enable this behavior by the SCOTUS going forward. If we have election challenges that this court decides in favor of Democrats, I will return to this post and admit my hypothesis was wrong.
Nice - maybe you’d like a pony too.
Let’s face it… In 2024, Republicans are going to be campaigning on the “fact” that Joe Biden caused the Covid 19 virus, and his administration did not do anything to stop it happening in 2020. And their voters will eat it up.
Democrats can’t control how Republicans will campaign in 2024. They can do their best to have a good message backed up by promises they delivered on to counteract the Republican message. I’m not saying the Democrats will accomplish those things. What I am claiming is that if Democrats don’t do those things, they will lose future elections. Democrats can no longer rely on inertia, or demographic changes, or that they “deserve” to have someone’s vote because that person is Black, or gay, or a woman, or whatever. They will have to earn those votes going forward. If they don’t do those things, they will lose, and the victorious Republicans will make legal changes to voting system that will make it even less likely that Democrats would have any chance after that.
I think that if the Democrats win and also take the Senate, there will be moves to change the electoral college to represent the actual numbers residing in a given state - that will return a far more representative Executive and likely permanently install a Democrat majority.
It cannot be right that in the world’s poster child for freedom and democracy and in a literal two party race the minority party obtains power.
There will be appeals by individual states about having their collegiate numbers reduced, but the Democrats can simply counter either that the Government is not Constitutional because it does not truly represent the will of the people, or they can simply allow Red States to maintain their numbers and just increase the numbers in higher population states.
More funding for elections might also be a consideration, in the UK when we have an election you will, find polling stations far closer together - you generally don’t have to travel more than a couple of miles - the fact that in the US you have to travel for a few hours for a hugely over quota single station where people stand in line for hours to cast their vote speaks volumes to me about how the US is supposedly built on the vote of the people but fails to finance the most basic part of its own existance. Postal votes, electronic votes are merely a symptom of a badly funded voting system.
In the UK at the very busiest times you might wait perhaps 10 minutes but most of the time you just walk in and out within 2 minutes.
I wish we were still the world’s poster child for freedom and democracy. Now that title would likely to go New Zealand or Canada or, ironically, Germany.