I don’t know how. I feel like there is this mentality that if the democratic party appeals to the most liberal 10-20 million voters, that that will cause them to win elections. But I don’t buy that. You don’t win a coalition of 80 million voters in presidential elections and 60-65 million voters in midterm elections by appealing to a small fraction who are polarizing.
For whatever reason, that tactic (appealing to your most polarizing base members) works great in republicans. But I don’t know if it would work with democrats. Democrats are a large tent largely made up of various progressives and marginalized groups. I don’t know how to expand the democratic party that holds the coalition together.
I don’t know what the answer is honestly. No matter how bad the GOP fucks up, they are guaranteed 75 million votes due to identity politics. I don’t know how the dems build a coalition to overwpower them at the polls.
No: you are thinking of it as all or nothing. Just include the left wing in the big tent. Give us SOMETHING rather than alternately taking us for granted and blaming us for your election losses.
Universal Health Care for reals would be a nod to the left and broadly popular. Start there.
Fair enough, the left are taken for granted and are under electoral capture. UHC would be a good idea.
I guess my point is that the dems need 80+ million votes in presidential elections, and 60-65 million votes in midterms. Whatever helps them get that is what they need to do. But I don’t know what will work.
The democratic party to a large degree seems like a coalition of progressives and various marginalized groups. I’m not sure how to build that coalition to 80+ million.
There’s this pervasive notion that weak policies are more “centrist” and therefore popular with “the middle”, and that strong policies are more “wing” and therefore unpopular with “the middle”. But a lot of that “middle” is where they are because “both parties are the same, neither ever really does anything meaningful”. And whenever anyone looks likely to make any big changes, the middle flocks to them. That’s how Trump was able to win. It’s our own attempts to court the middle that are what’s losing us the middle. We need to court the left wing, not just to get the left wing, but because that’s what would also win us the middle.
That’s a huge lift. Like a huge lift. The biggest thing that progressives fail to understand is you take over a party by voting in election after election after election until your support is indisposable. Progs don’t act like base voters.
Evangelicals (aka MAGA) spent 30 years becoming the base of the Republican party by showing up in every single election no matter who was up there. Likewise the current base of the national Democratic party is black voters who’ve been voting 90%ish for dems every election since 1964.
MAGA took over the party because they’re the default primary voter. They don’t beg to be inspired by a candidate. Every single MAGA is going to put on their shoes to vote for Susan Collins on election day.
If this started gaining any momentum, expect to see things like a very long residency requirement before new residents are allowed to vote.
/quote
The Supreme Court ruled in Dunn v. Blumstein (1972) that residency requirements must be brief and serve a legitimate and compelling interest. Anything beyond 30-60 days would violate the 14th Amendment.
Progressives DO vote D in election after election, and the support is indisposable (and indispensable). It’s also, however, taken for granted, as it is known we will never vote for Republican. Since we don’t feel included or represented, we probably vote less than we should (see also: youth vote).
I’m not saying “Institute Universal Health Care and then we’ll see.” I’m saying add one or two of our issues, the ones most likely to be supported by others, to the platform, and campaign on it as if you mean it, and I guarantee we’ll show up in greater numbers. If you don’t want to tackle health care, maybe take the climate issues seriously.
Right now, we’re told “shut up, the grown-ups are talking,” and election after election we see the money rewarded and Overton Window shifting. We just want to be taken seriously as a wing of the party, like everyone else, but we’re aggressively marginalized as if we don’t belong. I don’t know if that’s leftover anti-Communist sentiment (and I’m not a Communist, but I am a lot more socialist than Americans can usually stand) or just a fear of upsetting the status quo, but we’re not treated the same way that other groups within the party are.
Edit: I just re-read your post. I don’t think we want to take over. We just want to join and contribute to the dialogue in a meaningful way. I don’t think America can actually ever have a progressive major party. It’s just not possible in this culture.
I want to make sure I’m keeping this kind of on topic. Because this is a defeat MAGA thread, and I don’t want to veer to far away from that.
But universal healthcare is the crown jewel of a multi decade project. It would be the equivalent of Evangelicals/Maga getting Roe repealed. (In time/energy/dedication req’d obviously not actual merit)
The problem is that progs are neither as uniform or as focused. The Biden admin had a lot of big things they did for progs (stimulus/ended drone war/infrastructure/green energy/billions in student debt relief/consumer protections/labor rights/ended war in Afghanistan/cut child poverty in half/went after rich tax cheats/imposed minimum corporate tax) and for the most part they hated him for it.
Progressives want everything everywhere all at once. And wherever they aren’t getting instant that’s the avenue they’ll attack their allies for not working fast enough or being morally pure enough. There’s no winning.
I appreciate your wanting to keep the thread on track. Maybe we can discuss this in another thread, but this is again slandering progressives as more naïve / immature than centrists, which I don’t think is fair. Going back to the OP:
To defeat MAGA, you need a resounding victory at the ballot box. There is no reason to think that the Democrats need a progressive agenda to do this. Your point about Biden is well taken; personally, I was unhappy about voting for him (though I did) and then pleasantly surprised at what he accomplished. Throughout, though, I felt he was communicating these accomplishments poorly. That’s one thing Democrats really need to learn: Americans, collectively, are pretty damn stupid. We need a series of propagrandistic PSA advertisements showing what government is actually doing for real people, because we’ve forgotten what beneficial work the government actually does, and the Republican narrative which sells so well with MAGA is “you’re on your own, you mighty free and independent future billionaire, so we’ll stop taking your money for useless shit and leave you alone.” We need “we’re all in this together, pooling our resources to lift all Americans to a better place, in thousands of little ways all the time, like this one.”
This is where I almost 100% agree. I think we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to calibrate a message, when MAGA has intuited long ago it doesn’t need a message. Even “we’ll leave you alone” is probably too nuanced. They’re just low trust distilled.
They promise to be awful and spiteful and vindictive against all those people you hate, and most of all they’re male coded. They aren’t like your mom/teacher. They’re trade school, and testosterone therapy, and gambling apps, and AI generated pornography.
Dems don’t just have to have a cohesive message. They are at war with nihilism. That is very very tough to message against, especially when Bezos/Musk/Zuckerberg/Ellison own all the media you message through.
The good news is for all the problems with an electorate with deeply instilled oppositional defiance disorder, they despise MAGA at this moment. In 3 months the most anti-MAGA voting bloc since Goldwater became the nominee is headed to the polls. I just hope that if dems win a strong majority by 2029 their supporters can keep their head in the game, instead of immediately trying to attack their own coalition.
I see this complaint a lot. But I think the problem lies less with Democrats, and more with how the deck is now structurally stacked against them. Dems can make PSAs, tout their accomplishments from the rooftops, and if no one covers them, it’s as if it never happened.
Who controls where money will go for “news” coverage? Who controls licensing and airing rights?
In each of his two terms, Trump moved quickly to take over as many news outlets as he could, assisted by billionaires who have few or no altruistic goals. He gave Sinclair Broadcast Group the ability to take over local stations – news that many, especially older folks – trust without question. Bezos took of WaPo. Zuckerberg let Facebook/Meta run wild with the propaganda, and Trump encouraged it all. Here came One America Network and NewsMax. All singing from the same hymnal, a tune their audience has been fine-tuned to receive.
With very few exceptions, “news” in the US is now controlled by interests that support Republicans and MAGA. It’s hard to get a message from the Left to break through.
The time to have addressed this in any meaningful way is long gone, I’m afraid. We’re to the point where we have to rely on the hard work of educating individual voters one by one.
The only American news sites I (semi) trust now are The New Yorker, The New York Times and MS Now. But I trust The Guardian more. There may be others, but these days, it’s hard to keep a bead on the truth of things. That’s by design on the Right. I’ve no clue how to overcome it, but we must continue to try. Speaking up seems to be the best way I’ve found so far.
I believe there is some sort of maxim in customer marketing that you have only 10 seconds to persuade someone to buy your product, and if you haven’t already sunk in the hook in 10 seconds, you likely won’t persuade them at all.
Trump and MAGA have managed to master the 10-second hook method, even if it’s all lies (“Make America Great Again” was a perfect slogan to convey everything to voters in one short line.) Democrats and liberals still struggle to this day to distill a long message down into 5-10 seconds and make it memorable.
You can go undercover in MAGA without needing to reveal your identity or let your family/friends know. You can wear masks at MAGA rallies to hide your face, or go anonymous in Reddit or right-wing social media without them knowing your real identity.
That’s because solving problems at the governmental level is complex and not readily distilled down into simple messages. Simple answers are usually wrong.
Going undercover with MAGA feels like reading the King In Yellow’s second act. You think you can keep your sanity but you can’t. Cults know how to control the people inside them. You can’t live in that atmosphere and keep your critical thinking intact. Either you cut and run or you welcome the growing brain worms.
There’s a substantial chunk of voters that you didn’t mention. The center left, AKA the base (or at least what used to be the base back in the Obama days) is a huge chunk. Then there’s the non-MAGA conservatives. Of course getting them to join together with progressives and the various marginalized groups is an even bigger challenge.
Educating is exactly what you do. You educate and you vilify, and you try and find candidates that pass the eye test. Obama’s 2012 campaign where he (correctly) summarized Republicans as woman hating venture capitalists is the gold standard.
But also you have to get used to the fact that this is a generational fight and we’ll lose some elections. I think Dems need to learn not to overreact to inevitable losses. Sometimes you lose because voters feel petulant and nihilistic. When that happens you need to work more to get the population dreaming of a better world instead of finding the perfect elevator pitch.