I’m not disagreeing with you. No way the vast majority of the people we elect to serve our best interests, will actually do so. Not with all the money coming in from those industries. We don’t fucking matter at all. The whole system is completely evil. 50 years from now, people will look back on this time and shake their heads in disbelief on how things could be this way. Kind of like how we look back on slavery.
So under Bernie’s plan, when I need healthcare, I go to the doctor’s office. I get treated using my government insurance. Who handles the claim? Fairies?
There is no government insurance. The hospital just charges the government directly.
Bureaucrats.
Can we get off this subject, please?
Today I learned that bureaucrats are considered unemployed. Ignorance fought!
No, they are not. what the fuck are you arguing? Are you thinking that every one of the 2 million insurance workers will just get government jobs doing the same thing?
Newsflash- they wont.
In fact, that is the whole point of SandersCare. To get rid of all the private insurers and streamline the process to make it more efficient.
Yep, there would be a lot of streamlining. Certainly some jobs would be lost. Others would be retained. Things like data entry clerks or claim analysis would be needed. Things like insurance salesmen would have to sell some other type of insurance, or get a different job.
The same number of people will need the same amount of Healthcare. In fact, more people will be able to afford Healthcare, and with it being free, more people would go to the doctor’s; this would need to be recorded and paid for and so on. Yes, it would be more efficient with one provider intent on providing good service rather than dozens intent on making a buck. That’s a feature, not a bug.
I guess we’re going to have to say this over and over and over and over for the next four years.
…the only people I’ve heard “defund the police” from in the last few months are from people like you. Are you going to be personally responsible for reminding us about defund the police over and over for the next four years? Because nobody else cares.
The guy in the article you cite runs a Democratic political consulting firm that ran a focus group that probably got exactly the answers he was looking for. Because that’s how these things work.
If I am referencing what major media outlets are printing, then by definition I’m not the only one saying this.
The Republicans did an “autopsy” after 2012 to explain their losses. It made good sense. Everybody in the party ignored it and they wound up with Trump.
I don’t want the Democrats to end up that way. We’re supposed to be the party of science and reason. Sticking our fingers in our ears and going la-la-la when we hear truths we don’t want to hear is antithetic to future of the party.
I don’t understand why so many here are doing so.
As an anti-Trump conservative (who also doesn’t plan to vote GOP again until / if they ever significantly rehabilitate themselves), I think all of the various early election autopsies I’m seeing about what the Democrats did right vs wrong are focusing way too much on “annoying far lefties.” Here’s the thing: every Republican has known since time immemorial there’s a lot of annoying far lefties in the Dem party. Ever independent has known that as well. This goes back 50, 60 years if not more. My frank opinion is the existence of “bad” political messaging from the far left isn’t sufficient to explain Dem problems with working class voters. The Dems have won tons of elections with working class voters as the base of the party, while still providing an ideological home to the far left.
Likewise, there’s always been extremists in the GOP, your Pat Buchanans, your David Dukes, people who use terms like “legitimate rape” and etc that create terrible optics, but Republicans have won many elections in spite of that. In our two party system both parties are just going to have a lot of people on the fringes who are broadly unpalatable to the rest of the country.
Politics and winning in this environment isn’t, in my opinion, engaging in the quixotic effort to muzzle the people in your own party that say politically stupid things–it’s more about creating messaging that is more powerful and more prominent. There were woke leftists in the Dem party in 2008, Obama simply out messaged them. I was still well entrenched in the GOP in 2008 and actively worked to defeat Obama, Republicans did a lot of work to try to paint Obama as a radical, using his secondary association with more radical Democrats and other radical figures–it didn’t work. It didn’t work because making that sort of thing work isn’t automatic, it requires political operating.
Trump did it in 2020 because he ran simple sloganeering campaigns in working class areas non-stop, targeted Spanish-language media to blast this message at working class Latinos, and Biden ran a basement campaign. Biden’s people weren’t going door to door with their message, Trump was. Biden’s campaign strategy which I think was perfect for Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump, was to let Trump dominate the attention game and turn off enough voters that it ended Trump’s Presidency. In that regard it worked. I’m not sure Joe R. Biden could have actually executed a different strategy. But the unfortunate side effect of such a strategy is you cede a lot of the playing field to messaging that ends up costing you votes in down ballot races.
If Democrats want to begin to peel working class voters off of the GOP (which combined with the GOP’s active repudiation of educated people would massively weaken the ability of the GOP to win elections), they need to craft working class traditional political sloganeering and then execute it using appropriate political tactics, this sounds like a dumb dumb level take of “do politics better.” But the simple fact is it is true, and it’s also not as easy as it sounds. Trump didn’t do well with the working class by kvetching about internal divisions in the Republican party or worrying about Republican politicians who do/say things that turn off lots of Americans, he ignored that and just sold a compelling vision for working class people. The Democrats didn’t appear to craft much of a message for the working class at all.
There was a vacuum in terms of national messaging this year, in part because of the Biden basement strategy (which again, I think was a good strategy for winning the White House given Biden’s personal political limitations), and it isn’t particularly shocking Republicans were able to take advantage of an uncontested field. You don’t have to even look back to 2008, but instead to 2018, to get a better idea of how to appeal better to the working class. Democrats in 2018 were hyperfocused on a few economic and healthcare related issues that spoke directly to the livelihood and pocketbooks of regular Americans. If you care about winning the working class that’s how you do it. You don’t win the working class with nuance, you need to appeal to their base instincts and desires using well developed and historically very normal political tactics that Democrats did not do in 2020.
I think the Democrats actually have a lot of positives to draw on from 2020, the tone in most places I see Dems talking is a negative one of “we won the Presidency but we lost the country.” It isn’t actually all that bad. But I do think if you want to pick something out of 2020 to worry about as a Democrat it should be that you do not want to only be the party for educated and upper class people. The working class voting population is too big, and too important, for Democrats to not work on being more competitive with working class people everywhere, not just in traditionally strong blue communities.
…when I said the " the only people I’ve heard “defund the police” from in the last few months are from people like you" by definition I’m talking about who I’ve heard from, so what I said was completely correct.
Trump won the executive, the Senate, got them 3 seats on the Supreme Court and so many judges I’ve lost count. Perhaps if they had listened to the autopsy then Hillary would have won. Winding up with Trump gave them near total control. Ignoring the focus groups gave them victory.
You’ve taken the wrong lesson from this.
There is nothing scientific about a focus group run by a partisan hack. There is no reason to believe that any of these voters who were allegedly “on the fence” were ever going to vote for Biden. We don’t know how many were in the focus group, we don’t have any data, real science is much more robust than a talking head in an opinion piece.
Because many people here aren’t doing so. A mere slogan isn’t responsible for any (real or imagined) failings of the Dems at the last election. And even if you pretended that it was the reason there isn’t anything you can do about it. You are playing right into the Republicans hands. You are doing their dirty work for them.
How about a cite that he’s a partisan hack, or partisan, or a hack, or anything less than a complete professional?
…I googled him and that was my conclusion. I’m not going to provide cites for my personal opinion.
He even states that he runs a " Democratic political consulting firm." He makes money from the Democrats. Lets not pretend this was some scientific polling of voters. It was the equivalent of a bunch of people gathered around a table explaining why they didn’t like a chocolate bar.
Refusing to acknowledge facts is what the Republicans do. If the Democrats follow them into that hole, it’s the end of the party. I’m battling that to the bitter end.
…nobody is advocating not acknowledging “facts.”
Nobody is advocating “following them into that hole.”
Then perhaps start by recognizing that you can’t control everything that anyone chooses to say. And if the next election hinges on what an obscure activist may or may not say then perhaps you’ve got bigger problems than the movement to “defund the police.”
Figuring out why people voted the way they did is damned near impossible. Look at the polls before the election, and how far off they were. That was professional pollsters directly asking people who they will vote for, and some of them were off by as much as fifteen points. Imagine how inaccurate our post-election quarterbacking based on gut feels and past experience must be.
How big an effect did the riots have? How about the stress and fear from Covid? What accounts for the massive Republican turnout? I understand why Democratic turnout was high - a hibernating bear would show up to vote against Trump if it was a Democrat. But why were Republicans so fired up? I could come up with lots of theories, but in the end I have no freaking idea.
For example, no one is talking about the millions of new gun owners in the places where Trump outferformed expectations. What does buying a gun signal? At the very least, that the person thinks their personal security situation is deteriorating. People who worry about safety and security tend to vote more for Republicans.
Was that a factor? Who the hell kmows? But it’s plausibly a factor, just like a hundred other things. Knowing which ones actually drove the vote is the problem.
while people still refer to Trump’s base as “deplorables”, remember that he got 9% of Black vote in 2016, and more than 11% this time, not to mention over 20% of Latin vote
Do people actually do this? Hillary Clinton definitely didn’t.
Clinton referred to half of Trump’s base as deplorables, in a context where she was talking about Trump’s many sicknesses.
In fact, if you look at his running mate, his running-mate signed a law that would have allowed businesses to discriminate against LGBT Americans. And there’s so much more than I find deplorable in his campaign: the way that he cozies up to white supremacist, makes racist attacks, calls women pigs, mocks people with disabilities — you can’t make this up. …
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
[Laughter/applause]
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.
She got it exactly right. Exactly. While we’re blaming the Democrats for stuff, we need to blame them for not backing her 100% on this.
I think the die may already be cast. I think the Democrats have convinced themselves that they need the AOC vote to survive politically and will pursue things that a lot of voters in the middle will have a tough time swallowing. So if the Republicans can put up someone like Romney or Kasich, the Democrats may lose the middle.
This was a very close election. If that doesn’t tell you something then I don’t know if there is anything any of us can say that will.
The Republicans ran a far right authoritarian, because what this election shows is that 70 million people are coll with that. I’m a lot more worried your Kasich or Romney will be utterly crushed by a just as evil but actually competent Trump 2.0 to huge popular approval.