Running on issues that gets you more votes than it loses you. That is definitely not gun control. Get elected, get in power, and then you can pass your policies. Also, pick your battles. Yes, 18 dead kids is very emotionally moving, but it’s not that important in the grand scheme of things compared to, say, a civilization-threatening event like climate change or a democracy-threatening event like the fascist coup we are currently seeing unfold.
It never ceases to amaze me that not only does the democratic party seem to understand that you need to win elections before you can implement policy, but neither do their supporters, either. This is one reason you’re constantly losing to a party that has fewer people supporting it than your party - a complete inability to understand or execute rational political strategy.
Win by margins where one or two conservative democrats can’t stop your whole agenda. I can’t believe “do things that win elections” is so puzzling and offputting to you. But I guess maybe that explains why the democratic party is so incredibly incompetent at being a political party, their base apparently just wants them to DO SOMETHING with whatever is the emotional hot button issue of the month, not actually engage in thoughtful, savvy political strategy.
(The republicans also use emotional hot button issues, too, obviously, but the direction is reversed. A savvy political party is controlling their base with the issues while engaging with evil competence in actual political maneuvers, whereas the democratic party is trying to respond to hot button issues from the base from the bottom up and ends up making political mistake after political mistake)
If the gun control issue is dropped, then the voters that are tired of all this gun worshipping will say that the Democrats are ignoring the problem and pandering to the right for votes. Win-win for the Republicans!
This reminds me of Willy Mays’ quote about how he played the game of baseball so well:
They throw the ball, I hit it. They hit the ball, I catch it.
I understand your point. I just think it’s a tad simplistic. As I’ve said many times in other threads, Republicans dissemble to paint everything they promise the Democrats will do as an existential threat.
They – a tad ironically – are holding a gun to their voters’ heads. The Democrats are still trying to play by Queensberry Rules.
So you believe that in the middle of a fascist coup, where the republican party is completely detached from reality and has become apparent to all rational people is based on nothing but hatred and greed, where we face an existential crisis as a civilization that they want to not only ignore but worsen, where wealth inequality has become so bad that people can no longer afford to live, where we have the supreme court rolling back civil rights for the first tine in American history… if the democrats don’t focus on the divisive issue of gun control, no one would bother to show up to vote for them?
Can you even, in the hypothetical, understand that an issue can be both right (as you see it) and a bad idea to run on politically? I honestly don’t think you can.
You know how democrats always manage to pull defeat from the jaws of victory? How they manage to be outmaneuvered and lose over and over again? Sure, part of that is a lack of ethical behavior on republicans, and the cult-like tribalism of the conservative mindset, but the complete inability to be politically savvy and think in terms of actual political strategy rather than just how you feel about issues is definitely part of it.
If I could use a time machine or some sort of magic prediction device and told you, for certain, that running on gun control would lose you the 2022 elections, would you still insisting on running on gun control because it was the right thing to do? Or would you realize “oh, huh, well we can’t actually implement gun control or any other policy if we lose the election, so I guess maybe we should rally people behind the things that make more people vote for us”?
If that is what I was saying, that is what I would have posted. If you want to understand what I am saying, try reading what I wrote instead of rewriting it to create strawmen.
That is what you were saying. You were saying that democrats won’t bother to show up to vote if they don’t push gun control. That means that you think that the huge array of other massive issues are not enough to motivate the democratic base, that you need to throw an extremely divisive, losing issue on top of it too. Because you’re just engaging in motivated reasoning at this point - you’re desperately trying to justify your stance that the democrats should rally around gun control even though it is a proven loser over and over again.
Because apparently what you truly love is losing elections so you can never actually pass these policies that you insist on running on.
I think it’s safe to say that you cannot understand that the issues on which you are passionate about, the ones that you think are righteous, do not necessarily make good political rallying cries; that something can be both a good idea in policy (I’m not conceding this part is correct, just that it is your view) and not a good idea to actually focus on in an election. Essentially, you have no ability to think in terms of political strategy, and you are basically the poster boy for why democrats lose over and over again.
I guess someone hasn’t noticed the folks that ain’t gonna vote for Dems because the Dems didn’t stop the Supreme Court from destroying medical privacy pay off their student loans (et al)?
At no point have I said that you’re trying to win over republicans. Of course the republicans can spin any democratic initiative as being bad to their cult. And of course it’s easier for some issues than others. “They’re coming for your guns!” is going to be a lot more invigorating to them than “they’re going to try to make college cheaper for your kids!”, but sure, the republican party can spin both as a negative.
People vastly, vastly underestimate how many democrats are pro-gun. I see it all the time, people who are staunchly anti-republican but want democrats to recognize that we’re not going to make major changes on the gun issue and to stop wasting so much energy on it when there are much bigger problems with much more popular support behind them. It’s one of the worst issues you can actually run on as a democrat - it alienates a large portion of your own base, energizes your opposition like nothing else, and realistically - even if you win - it would take so much political capital to do anything about it that you’re almost certainly going to fail, and even if you didn’t, you’d be wasting political capital on it to cause less good in the world than you could’ve done spending political capital in almost any other way.
Edit: This is an aside, not part of my argument but just a thought I’m having:
Sometimes I wonder just how irrational and fixated the anti-gun crowd is on this issue. For example, if I gave you a choice - you can either completely stop climate change, or you can stop all mass shootings, which one would you choose?
If you took even 2 seconds to think about it, you’re completely irrational.
What’s a hive approved adjective to describe your thinking skills? You fools use a ridiculous portion of the board to insult others and always have some ridiculous reaction to the responses you fools instigate. The biggest trolls on this forum are the chronic snark mining pitters.