Policy positions (or how the Democrats can win again)

Politics & Elections
1

I’m making this thread as a companion to @iiandyiiii 's thread on what Democrats should do WRT messaging to win future elections. I was thinking about the opposite while having lunch earlier today. What, if anything, do Democrats need to change WRT their positions? Let’s leave out the messaging, as it’s being discussed in the other thread, and let’s also leave out the specifics of running for office (like a strategy of focusing on state or local elections, fighting against gerrymandering, improving access to the ballot with absentee / mail in voting, etc.). For this thread I’m interested in what the Democrats have wrong WRT the issues themselves. Here are some of the issues and the positions I think Democrats can improve on.

Crime. We all know Republicans run on a “tough on crime” platform. IMHO Democrats should run on a “tougher on crime” platform, but only for violent crimes. In other words stop locking up people for having a couple of ounces of marijuana on them when they get pulled over for doing 56 in a 55. Start getting tough on violent criminals, and sentence the guy who beat up his wife to 20 or 30 years instead of 20 or 30 weeks (which even Republicans do if the offender is a “good old boy”). Trot out examples of Republican DAs, AGs, and elected judges recommending deals or handing out short sentences to violent criminals because the defendant was of a Trump supporting demographic, and say that we support a harsher sentence.

Immigration. Flip the Republican talking point of “we’re catching and deporting criminals” on its head. Yes, some immigrants are violent criminals, and should be locked away for a long time (see above). But most of them are regular people coming here for a better life. Rather than messing with piecemeal strategies like sanctuary cities or a patchwork of state laws in blue states that limit cooperation with ICE to various degrees, let’s deal with it by making it easier to legally immigrate to the US. Go back to the days of Ellis island where ordinary people who are coming here to make a better life for themselves and plan on contributing to their community can show up and be admitted legally. Yes, Republicans will complain, but at least they would no longer have the argument of “we’re just following the law”. Instead they would have to resort to explicitly racist arguments.

Taxes. Focus on taxing the wealthy. Yes, the upper middle class should pay their fair share, but the brunt of the tax burden should be on the truly wealthy, not those who make a six figure salary because they are well educated professionals (doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc.) or highly skilled tradespeople (plumbers, electricians, HVAC repair people, etc.). Talk about how under Trump’s (at least Trump 45, Trump 47 is still TBD) tax code, the government was basically stealing from the middle class to give to the wealthy, and how Democrats plan to reverse that. If that means a wealth tax instead of futzing around with the income tax, then so be it. Don’t try to hide that, instead make it front and center.

Ukraine. This should be obvious, and maybe it is (I’ve been trying to avoid the truly depressing news). Talk about how Trump and the Republicans are siding with the bad guys. Admit that Biden should have been more aggressive and that the strategy should have been (and will be if the Democrats win) to arm Ukraine to the teeth so they can “kick some Commie ass” or something of that sort. Given the environment we’re in, it doesn’t really matter that Russia isn’t really communist anymore. Get creative with it. I’m sure there’s all kinds of ways of campaigning against siding with Russia.

Feel free to discuss these or any other policy issues that Democrats should change in their platform in order to help them win.

2

The major things that the persuadable independents and moderate Republicans are upset about at town halls are Musk’s bullshit and Ukraine. This is a winner, but Democrats need to get their idiot wing on message about it. Obviously the DSA types who are openly pro-Putin and anti-America on every issue need to be kicked to the curb if the party is serious about winning, that should go without saying. But the more “normalized” liberal positions where you can’t say “America is a beacon of freedom and a nation of immigrants” without tacking on a “land acknowledgement” or some grad student bullshit about “settler colonialism” have to stop too. If you want to be the party of American values and patriotism, you have to do it.

Biden, to an extent, did this in 2020 by distancing himself from the unrestrained street violence of the summer, and it helped. By 2024 the bloom was off the lily because the Democratic brand was very tied up with the progressive pro-crime wing of the party - not so much the few national politicians still in on that like Cori Bush or Summer Lee, but rather the deterioration of life in mostly Democratic-controlled cities under local actors.

Yes, it’s true that the few large cities with Republican mayors had the same problems, but there is no Republican mayor who has anything close to the news presence or total number of voters in their metro area of people like Brandon Johnson, Larry Krasner, or Muriel Bowser. The fact that these politicians consider criminals part of their base and law-abiding citizens the enemy was a HUGE factor in voting in 2024, and until they stop being the day-to-day face of the Democratic brand to most voters, the crime issue is going to be a loser.

3

Democrats are not going to agree on policy positions. You can’t expect a Democratic congressional candidate in a district that Trump narrowly won to take the same policy positions as one in a district where winning the Democratic primary is tantamount to election.

As for the Presidential candidates, they will not all agree with each other on policy, nor should they. They just need to treat each other with respect on grounds that only a unified opposition is likely to defeat MAGA.

4

I fail to see how any of these would represent changes in Democratic policy positions.

~Max

5

I believe that prosperous nations welcome newcomers. So I favor the most liberal immigration policies politically reasonable based on polls and focus groups.

If the Democrats nominate a candidate favoring a policy of show up, go through a liberal screening process, and be admitted, I will vote for them. But there is no halfway prosperous country on earth, not even the most left-leaning, that currently has an immigration policy like that. So it’s extremely unlikely this policy would be at all popular, in the United States, outside the most solidly Democratic congressional districts, anytime soon. If the official Democratic platform were to make that the party’s policy, candidates would widely ignore the plank.

6

To be fair, I’m using “Democratic party positions” as shorthand for “the policies that Joe Biden and his administration supported, along with what the typical Democratic candidate campaigned on in the 2024 election”. And I mentioned why those are different than the positions I advocate for.

Biden wasn’t about “arming Ukraine to the teeth so they can kick some Ruskie ass”. He was about a slow drip of weapons, just enough to keep Ukraine in the fight.

Democrats, other than the Bernie and AOC wing, are all about making small adjustments to the tax system so that the bulk of the burden falls on those earning 6 figure and low 7 figure salaries from their own hard work, not from the wealthy who own the means of production.

Democrats have been about the sanctuary cities, patchwork of state laws limiting cooperation with ICE, and long drawn out processes for permanent legal entry or a patchwork of temporary processes with different explanations for people from different nations (Haitians because they are fleeing gangs, Venezuelans because of their oppressive government, Guatemalans because of their limited economic opportunities, etc.).

And I don’t know of any Democrats that ran on being even tougher on violent criminals than what Republicans want, while also wanting to legalize drugs at all levels rather than with the current patchwork system we have.

7

Are you including Kamala Harris’s platform under that heading?

~Max

8

Yes. As best I can tell, she ran on a platform that amounted to “four more years of Joe, only this time the POTUS won’t be a frail elderly person who possibly has dementia”.

9

Maybe there’s a mistake in the above paragraph. Did you really mean to say that someone who takes in a million dollars a year isn’t part of the wealthy who own the means of production?

I do recall reading once that the definition of a rich person is anyone who makes 50 percent more than you do. Or maybe it was twice as much.

I’m no tax expert, but I think it is too easy to move abroad nowadays to have Eisenhower-administration type high marginal tax rates.

As for policy, I would look at hiring, or rehiring, more IRS auditors so the rich at least pay a significant something.

10

It is abundantly clear to me that Kamala Harris presented herself as:

  • tougher on crime (than Donald Trump)
  • in favor of making it easier to immigrate legally
  • in favor of taxing the wealthy
  • on the same side of Ukraine, and of the opinion that Donald Trump is siding with the bad guys

I’m not even a Democrat, and this messaging still filtered down to me.

~Max

11

Withdrawn

12

I think we probably took different messages from what she said. Regarding her being tough on crime, that mostly came across as being tough on Trump himself for his crimes. For immigration I mostly got that she wanted a “virtual” wall with things like unarmed drones, ground sensors, and such, combined with a kinder, more professional ICE. I didn’t hear about opening up new Ellis Islands in Brownsville, El Paso, or San Diego. Same with taxing the wealthy. Her position came across to me as being that we need to keep taxing Warren Buffet’s secretary because Warren himself doesn’t have much of an on paper income. And of course she was on the side of Ukraine and not Russia, but she never mentioned sending hundreds of the newest Abrams, dozens of the newest F-16s, long range missiles in massive quantities with permission to strike in Russian territory, etc.

13

The persuadable voters who voted against Harris did not believe that she was “tough on crime” because they saw Democrats in their cities implementing catch-and-release. This is borne out by the actual polls of voters on what their information and priorities were.

It’s been pointed out before that “the party that alienated 90% of voters by making free trans surgeries for prisoners its brand, but was too incompetent at managing the civil service to actually provide a single trans surgery in four years of controlling the federal bureaucracy” is an encapsulation of everything wrong with the Democrats in 2024. Here’s one that’s probably even worse: The party that would have put Hillary Clinton into office in the 2016 election had a single person in the campaign been connected enough to reality to tell her not to tear through rural Pennsylvania bashing gun owners for the last week of the campaign, cannot actually jail anyone under the gun laws it has passed, because the Philadelphia DA found out that people who carry illegal guns are disproportionately black and refuses to prosecute anyone for it.

14

Sentencing is not a political decision, but is imposed by a judge often times according to a formula. A politician advocating harsh sentences for political reasons immediately loses my respect.

This is a bad idea because the modern criminal justice system is designed around plea deals; while controversial, that is just how it is today. Without guilty pleas, you will have significantly less convictions and probably only a marginal increase in cases brought to trial. And again, sentencing is not political and is often formulaic with only so much leeway given to judges to act on the prosecution’s suggestion. If a sentence is too harsh it can be overturned.

You are referring to acts of desperation by local and state authorities frustrated at the lack of political will to enact a nationwide solution.

No, they won’t. You may be assuming the conclusion here. That is, you seem to assume Democrats can win elections by enacting national policies, when the reason Democrats can’t enact said policies is their inability to win elections.

At the federal level, the top 5% of earners in the U.S. pay well more than 60% of income taxes already. That’s like, $250k and up. Furthermore the top 1% of earners, roughly $750k+, collectively contribute around half of federal income taxes.

~Max

15

I wasn’t talking about enacting policies. That, as you correctly note, can only be done after winning elections. But to win one needs positions that are popular with the voters. And I think a straightforward, “now it’s legal so they aren’t breaking the law by coming here” makes a lot of sense, and could be a better position to campaign on.

Sure. But those top earners are going to be technical professionals in high demand and limited supply jobs, like brain surgeons, or else entertainers. Singers like Taylor Swift, athletes like Dak Prescott (starting quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys and highest paid player in the NFL), or actors like Robert Downey Jr. You aren’t going to find guys like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, amd Warren Buffett on that list. Democrats need to campaign on taxing the latter, not trying to squeeze more out of the former.

Ultimately all those things are decided by elected officials, even if it’s limited to who they nominate to be the judge in the courts that decide such matters. And the courts time should be freed up if they aren’t busy locking up the local drug user, prostitute, slot machine player, etc. That would free up court time and prison space to lock up people for armed robbery, rape, murder, aggravated assault, and such for longer periods of time.

16

Ds should focus almost entirely on economic and bread-and-butter issues rather than social issues. Make it all about taxing the rich, raising minimum wage, knocking out income inequality, bring college tuition down, universal healthcare, etc.

Very, very few Americans are affected by which gender gets to use which restroom. Very, very many Americans are affected by grocery prices and rising rent.

It’s no coincidence that runaway inflation and economic suffering was what swept the Nazis into power in the 1930s.

17

Yes, Ms. Harris failed spectacularly to convince voters she was better on crime. But her actual policy position - former California attorney general, prosecutor of “transnational criminal organizations” - was not lacking, except perhaps on the question of capital punishment (if you suggest a change there). In fact she got a lot of flack for flip-flopping over the years, with 2024 Kamala Harris trying to appear tough on crime.

You didn’t hear about it because it wasn’t and isn’t going to happen. But there was definitely talk about a pathway to citizenship for unlawfully present aliens, funding for the immigration processing system.

That’s how progressive taxes work in this country - they are indirect taxes, i.e. derived from transactions rather than the underlying person or property. Indirect taxes tend to be regressive, with the notable exceptions of income and luxury taxes. Excluding income derived from property, direct taxes on wealth are only legal if apportioned among the states according to population, without regard to the relative wealth of each individual. Which defeats the purpose of a wealth tax.

~Max

18

They did.

Only Rs talked about that.

The economy was great the last 2 years under Biden.

What the Dems should do is take a couple hundred million that they’ve raised and buy some media companies to compete with Fox / Sinclair / talk radio / Joe Rogan / etc.

19

It’s generally not legal to enter the United States by just showing up, so Democrats can’t campaign as if that were true.

~Max

20

The federal minimum wage remains as low today as it was in 2008 - after twelve years of Democratic presidents since.

Tell that to…the many millions of Americans - blue, red, and purple - for whom it wasn’t.