In red states, it would appear that this is the case. And since there are more red states than blue states, at least in the Senate things look pretty rock solid for the long term. The Democrats can’t control the Senate without Blue Dogs. And it’s not very easy to control the House without them either.
My point is that the Democrats, unlike the Republicans, can’t win with only their base, because their base is concentrated in just a few places. Plus there’s the founders and their evil gerrymandering plot to draw state boundaries such that progressives could never control the country.
Did you ever take a look at the electoral maps from the last few elections? It *might *be informative.
*State *boundaries? Say what now?
There’s a real movement to make presidential elections popular vote only, which would effectively negate state boundaries for them, yes, but redraw them? IOW WTF?
You’ll never get a popular vote election because the smaller states won’t give up their leverage, and swing states probably won’t be interested either.
But even if you could, the Republicans still have natural advantages in Congress due to the fact that the Democrats are more of a regional party.
BTW, an issue that’s come up in Democratic politics a lot lately that will have serious ramifications on the Democratic brand is the “sharing economy”. Democrats seem torn between their economic regulation instincts and their desire to be the hip pro-science, pro-technology party. Coming out against companies like Uber and Airbnb would damage the Democrats’ brand among the young and technology professionals(who are an important part of the donor base).
As have Republicans if you’re making an apples to apples comparison. In the Obama era, Republicans have been better at winning in blue states than Democrats in red states. Before the Obama era, the opposite was true. Republicans govern nearly the entire industrial midwest now, and Massachusetts to boot. They control all of Congress and the Blue Dogs are nearly extinct, with no prospect for their revitalization because frankly the progressives don’t want to have them in the tent anymore.
Lately the Republicans have shown themselves capable of winning governorships and some congressional and senate seats in “blue states”. Democrats have shown this, to a lesser degree, for “red states”. For Presidential politics, only Democrats have been able to compete in normally unfavorable states for the last few elections.
The Presidency is one office. The singe most powerful, to be sure, but its stock goes down the more the opposite party controls the states and Congress. One only needs to look at the great conservative accomplishments of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford to see how this works.
I was just refuting your silly point about regional parties. It’s ridiculous to claim that the party that wins the presidency with states in every part of the country might be a “regional party”.
For starters, you could stop lumping them all together as the same. I paid 40+% in taxes the same year that Mitt Romney paid… 14%, IIRC. So one of us is paying his way and the other used special treatment in the tax code that’s not available to most.
Warren Buffet famously pointed out the absurdity that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. I think most people can get onboard with the idea that we should fix this, regardless of any “soak the rich” mindset.
Frame the discussion as being limited to only a subset of the rich–those who pay minimal taxes because their income is in the form of capital gains–and you’ll gain more support without losing much in the way of your social goals. Demonizing them all equally means including a lot of wealthy professionals that you shouldn’t really have any beef with.
That’s pretty uncontroversial. I support a lower capital gains rate(economists will tell you the ideal rate is zero), but for those whose income comes almost entirely from capital gains, there should be an alternative minimum tax. Seems that rather than reforming the capital gains tax though, we could just reform the AMT. Just say that if your gross income is greater than $250,000, you pay 25%.
Exactly. Just about everyone can get onboard–except for the Republican party, which depends on contributions from these particular high earners.
Class warfare is a big turn-off to me. Tax reform is sensible. If the end result is almost the same, why not go with the approach that alienates fewer people?
It would raise more than demonizing the 1%, though. That doesn’t raise any money at all, even if it makes some people feel good.
“Very little” seems like an understatement, though. Depending on the reform, it seems like you could raise on the order of a few percent more total revenue. That’s not insignificant.
Also, much of this is about perception rather than reality. Demonizing the generic “rich” makes some people uneasy. But going after tax leeches has the same perceptual effect without losing much of your audience.
I do wonder about this: some in the Democratic Party think Obama has “moved the debate leftward” like Reagan moving it rightward. I’m not so sure. On gay marriage, the sheer speed at which people moved from opposing it to supporting it seems more like people always supported it but simply “discovered it” when it was acceptable to do so in public. Or economics; note how the trade deal got thru. It is true some sentiment shows itself to be to the left than before. But I think the Dems have to avoid moving so far left that they alienate moderates; hence why they’d be shooting themselves in the head to nominate Sanders.
Socially, we keep on moving left. Economically, we keep on moving right. What both things have in common is that we’re moving towards greater permissiveness, tolerance, and individual liberty.
All of these trends that offer addy such febrile optimism have another common fact to bind them together: they all took place before the money Republicans lost control of the troglodyte wing of the party. None of those things matter any more.
Which candidate appeals most to the moderate Republicans: the ones who claim that Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts? Huckabee, who claims Obama is shoving the Jews of Israel into the ovens? Trump, who…is Trump? A month ago, who here would have believed that Trump could wipe his ass with John McCain’s “war hero” rep and get away with it?
I’m about half expecting someone to walk up to me and say it ain’t so, 'luc, you’re having the worlds first year long flashback, and hallucinating the whole thing. And that would be good, that would be a relief, just me nuts, not one major political party behaving like a steel cage death match for meth-addled baboons!
Its like the Monty Python sketch about the Silly Party and the Very Silly Party. Except they aren’t cute and funny, they are angry and uptight. Bad craziness isn’t “conservative”, unless somehow you see Barry Goldwater in motley on a pogo stick screaming “Kitang! Kitang! Kitang!”…
Oh, and they want everybody to have a gun, too. What could possibly go right?
I’m rather late to the game here, but I just read this and have to respond…
Maybe you could explain to them that framing it in racial terms is kind of, you know, racist. The middle and working classes include all kinds of minorities. Are they not “suffering” along with their white brethren?
Gay marriage, the ACA, redistribution of wealth and all that fun liberal stuff has nothing to do with race. Whatever suffering the middle class (white, brown, red, you name it) has endured in recent times has more to do with corporate globalization, by exporting jobs, and the destructive practices of Wall Street in the last decade. Both those constituencies have a heavy right wing Republican bent, yet Democrats get blamed because…they’re anti-white? W. T. F.???
The Democratic brand is just fine, thank you. In the case of your family and friends, it’s being hindered–or rather, twisted beyond recognition–by their racist perceptions.
Take out the word “white” and that’s what the Democratic Party already does! Injecting race into the equation conveniently distracts from that reality.
The primitive tribalist mentality of a good number of Republicans is what needs to change, not the Democratic brand. The sooner the GOP realizes this, the sooner it can restore its own brand and not have to deal with national embarrassments like Trump. The Donald is the logical result of pandering to, and reinforcing, the reptile brains of the GOP base.
With all due respect, suggesting that Democrats should also cater to those whiny bigots is about the worst idea in the history of ideas.
The problem as of right now though is that Democrats are talking about all this stuff in race neutral terms and now Black Lives Matter is demanding that they speak specifically about race. Because they do have one good point: free college and a generous social safety net do not protect them from police brutality. But that’s a fraught issue for Democrats because they have to address the issue without a) being seen as soft on crime and b) making reforms that would make government workers more accountable, which pisses off unions.
So your argument is that there’s nothing wrong with Democrats other than white people don’t appreciate them enough?
If there’s enough of them to cost you enough elections, that changes things. The government serves the people, the people do not serve the government. One of the problems with the Democratic brand is that Democrats have often come off as disappointed that with the people for not being as enlightened as they are.