It’s not a matter of smart or dumb, but of the value system of the candidate. When Biden and Harris came out against the 2022 SCOTUS affirmative action decision (" Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College"), I considered that a profiles in courage moment in which Biden and Harris did what they thought was morally right despite it being unpopular.
If Democratic Party politicians had the same value system as mine, they would have taken the more popular position, opposing discrimination, reverse or otherwise. But, on this issue, I think most Democratic Party members of congress sincerely disagree with me. I voted for Biden and Harris anyway due to other issues.
As for “I hope the hiring manager and the HR department will follow all applicable local, state, and federal laws regarding fair employment,” I consider this another dodge. Do they want to keep the current laws as interpreted by SCOTUS, or do they want to change them, perhaps with court-packing?
I am having a hard time coming up with the specific remedy requested in the thread title. If a candidate believed exactly what I do, I honestly think they would be more likely to win. But that’s motivated thinking on my part. Voters often want candidates to stand for something, even if they do not totally agree. Democrats cannot expect to win if they always go against public opinion, but doing so on one or two issues might actually help them, by making them look brave and principled. I’m not sure.
PhillyGuy, I appreciate the candor, but you are conflating two very different legal landscapes.
The Students for Fair Admissions case was about Title VI and university admissions, which operated under a specific “diversity” exception for decades. The Waldo scenario is about a job promotion, which is governed by Title VII.
Unlike the old college admissions rules, Title VII has always strictly prohibited using race as a “plus factor” or using quotas in employment. By jumping to the Harvard case, you’re suggesting that a candidate’s stance on education policy makes their commitment to employment law a “dodge.”
If a candidate says they will follow the law regarding fair employment, they are committing to a framework that already prohibits the very “reverse discrimination” you’re concerned about. Are you saying that for the brand to be “repaired,” a candidate has to go beyond promising to follow the law and actively denounce their party’s positions on unrelated issues like university admissions?
If the “remedy” requires Democratic candidates to adopt a Republican value system just to be seen as honest, then we aren’t talking about brand repair anymore—we’re talking about a brand swap.
Consider the pledge Biden made to appoint a Black woman to SCOTUS. Was it legal for Biden to do that? Definitely. But it showed me that Biden personally opposes the spirit of fair employment, just as he also favors respecting the clear language of law.
From a pure November we-must-win electoral standpoint, if a Democratic candidate is asked about whether they favor reverse discrimination in some specific scenario, they should, just like the Republican in The_Other_Waldo_Pepper’s scenario, answer with one word – NO. If the Democrat talks about the law instead of what they favor, that sounds to me like a dodge.
P.S. Of course, Trump also pledged to appoint a woman to SCOTUS. How he gets away with stuff that would damage Democrats is a whole other thread.
PhillyGuy, you’ve moved the goalposts from a tactical branding question to a litmus test for personal belief.
The scenario was about a candidate facing a “trap” question. If the candidate answers “No” to your satisfaction, they alienate the portion of the base that views “equity” as a proactive goal. If they say “Yes,” they confirm the “anti-white male” brand for voters like you.
Citing the law isn’t a “dodge”—it is the only functional way to uphold the objective standard that applies to everyone. By insisting that a “No” is the only acceptable answer, you are essentially saying that “Brand Repair” is impossible unless the Democrat adopts the Republican rhetorical position.
Regarding the Biden SCOTUS pledge: that was an exercise of executive prerogative in a political appointment, which is a different animal than a standard job promotion. Even so, if your takeaway is that the “spirit of fair employment” is violated whenever a specific demographic is prioritized for a single high-profile seat, then you’ve confirmed the “pickle”: the brand is viewed as hostile not because of a messaging error, but because of a fundamental disagreement on the definition of fairness.
If the remedy requires the candidate to say “No” to the very concept of diversity initiatives, is that “Brand Repair” or is it just the Democratic Party becoming a second version of the GOP?
All the list of grievances that he mentioned were discussed before, and It was clear then that it was almost all an artifice.
Thing is, when the issues in the last election were the economy and immigration, both come now as snake eyes for the Republicans, one has to say this item is not as important as the OP wants it.
The comparable issue now is how Anti-minority the Republicans of today are even with the few minorities that remain loyal to them.
Why the Republican Congress Will Soon Have No Black Leaders
Black presence in the GOP has been scarce for a long time. It wasn’t until former Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy’s very recent push to recruit more Black and brown faces for his party that Black Americans began to see representation within the party.
“When you look at the Democrats, they actually look like America,” McCarthy said back in 2023. “When I look at my party, we look like the most restrictive country club in America.” Things were slowly turning to a more diverse GOP with the elections of the four Black GOP representatives by 2022… Everything changed, however, once President Trump took back the White House.
Actually, Mod/All, I want to apologize for the slight hijack in the last few posts.
I realized that in engaging with PhillyGuy, I was trying to find a “remedy” for a voter who—by his own description—is a Republican with a value system that is fundamentally at odds with the Democratic platform.
While his perspective is useful for seeing where the “gotcha” traps are, trying to “repair” the brand for a committed member of the Republican party isn’t the point of this thread. The goal is to figure out how to bridge the gap with the centrists and moderates who haven’t left the tent yet but feel the brand is becoming increasingly hostile to them.
I figure that when one looks at the most recent polls, one does not need to concentrate on not very important issues that the MAGA crowd usually never would like to be approached about. For Centrists and Moderates? Yeah, there is a lot of fertile ground now that is open to give them a better message.
I think the question is odd. The obvious answer is fight back against the lies, not find a Judo-like way to accept them and work around them.
It’s like someone running for office, and a rumor comes out (pushed by their opponent) that they murder children. How do you get people to vote for you that believe you murder children? You don’t, because you can’t. It’s a ridiculous question. You have to fight back against the lies. If you can’t, you have zero chance.
Similarly, you don’t try to win people over despite right wing lies. You find a way to expose their lies. You might also point out how they are actually even worse in reality than what they are falsely accusing you if being. Republicans are enabling secret police that illegally round up and torture minorities, and murder American citizens in broad daylight with impunity. They are destroying the economy and turning the rest of the world against the US.
Compared to that, who cares about the feelings of a fringe who dislike the idea of losing some privileges? It’s like grumping about not having the good table in the dining room of the Titanic as it’s sinking.
Atamasama, you’re dismissing “Judo” as if it’s a form of surrender, but in politics, using an opponent’s momentum against them is usually called “winning.”
The “murdering children” analogy fails because branding isn’t about a single, disprovable fact; it’s about the structural tone of the party’s entire communication apparatus. When you frame the concerns of these voters as “grumping about losing privileges,” you are actually providing the evidence for the very brand problem I’m describing.
If your remedy is to simply call the other side’s messaging a lie and point out that they are worse, you aren’t fixing the brand, you’re just relying on the “lesser of two evils” defense. That works for some, but it doesn’t neutralize the hostility.
Is there a practical way to “fight the lies” that doesn’t involve confirming the “out-of-touch/hostile” stereotype in the process? Or is your position that the brand doesn’t need a remedy because the voters who perceive a problem are simply irrelevant?
Do you feel the same way about Ronald Reagan pledging to appoint a woman (who turned out to be Sandra Day O’Connor) to the Court? Does that show you that Republicans in general and Reagan in particular also oppose the spirit of fair employment?
Strongly agree. You don’t fight a lie by engaging with it “hypothetically”. That just grants the liar and the lie credibility. It allows the liar to determine the stakes and outline of the debate based on misinformation. It’s kind of the point of lying.
You fight it by calling it a lie firmly, insistently and repeatedly. You change the battlefield. You expose the false information with verified facts and reasoned discourse with the understanding that your opponent likely won’t budge, but there’s always an audience and that’s what matters.
The idea the Democrats are “Anti White Male” philosophically or politically is preposterous on it’s face.
Pointing to the law rather than out and out opposing reverse discrimination on principle may be a good way for Democrats to peel off a few centrist votes without pissing off progressives to the point where they vote Green.
So – a few more votes, but it won’t remedy anything.
As for the idea that centrists actually prefer the middle of the road legalistic formulation on reverse discrimination to an out and out NO, I’m unsure. Somewhere I read that centrists rarely are centrists on each issue. Rather they tend to be strongly left on some issues but right-wing on others. So there may be theoretically reachable centrists who are far right on just one issue, that being white male rights. The Democrats might have to give up on them.
Vari_Hobe, are you influenced by the late great Liberal Patriot substack? Maybe I’m not reading you carefully enough but some of what you write appears similar. Anyway, what I think about that substack is they are excellent on why Democrats do not get as many votes as I might like, but not so good on alternative messaging – mostly because perfect messaging is impossible.
PhillyGuy, I’m going to keep this brief because I don’t want to drag the thread back into another hijack.
First, I’ve never read the Substack you mentioned. These are my own observations based on the functional reality of the current political landscape, not some borrowed manifesto.
As for your point on centrists: you’re right that “perfect messaging” is impossible, but “better messaging” is a low bar that hasn’t been cleared yet. The “legalistic” answer might only peel off a few votes, but in a world of razor-thin margins, a few votes is the difference between a mandate and a post-mortem.
I’m moving back to the broader group now to see if anyone has a remedy that doesn’t involve “waiting for bread lines” or “adopting the GOP platform.”
[Looks at polls again]
Uh, I do think the remedies are taking hold. Again, not much with MAGA, but then again: MAGA is not what is moving to support change: centrists, moderates, and people that sat for the last election are.
> Updated May 2, 2026
Slowly but surely, Democrats are gaining ground in the generic congressional ballot. This week, the party extended its lead to D +5.9 — the highest it’s been all cycle . Before April, the generic ballot had hovered around D +5.4 since the beginning of the year.
What’s driving the growing lead? A mix of polls that show Democrats doing incredibly well — like this D +10 result from Emerson College — and smaller but still meaningful bumps from pollsters like The Economist/YouGov, who had the generic ballot around D +3 in March, but are now showing a D +5 environment.
So the conclusion is: Democrats do not have a problem with white men, and white men who are all stupid racists who vote based on propaganda can continue to fuck off if they think that is the case.
It sure is a big mystery why Democrats keep losing elections.
Look folks it’s simple, if the Democrats want to get out from the yoke of being the Anti-White Male brand all they have to do is return to their roots and become the party they were before the Civil and Equal Rights era!
A woman in every kitchen and a noose in every tree!
Yes, because not doing so just causes the party to end up like the Republicans; the puppet of the white nationalists. Pandering to a group to the point you drive off everyone else isn’t winning, it’s losing. The people who have hollowed you out and taken over are the winners.
Plus as has been said, it’s not desirable to “win” by pandering to such people. There’s no point in “winning” by turning into the enemy.
