I think they have a different plan. They’re going to intentionally screw up Obamacare so it doesn’t work. And when they’ve made sure it doesn’t work, there won’t be public support for it. As a bonus, they can then blame the Democrats for starting the program and attribute the mess the Republicans turned it into back to them.
A lot of people forget that back in the sixties, it was the Democrats who were pushing for tax cuts and conservative Republicans (like Goldwater) who were calling it financially irresponsible.
Yeah, this is the basic problem. At this point, the party platform IS racism, cruelty, misogyny, crime, and a willingness to lie unconditionally. Everybody who isn’t for those things has either left the GOP or is so ill-informed about what the party is doing that their vote isn’t available to be changed, anyway.
Out of curiosity, what income level people are you talking to. ISTM that someone making, say 50-100k would be the right demographic of people that would love to start their own business but know that insurance may be an issue, while the people that are making $1m+ aren’t going to be all that worried about spending an extra couple hundred a month on premiums (per employee that takes it).
As much as I’d love UHC, it’s one of the issues where I can understand why people are against it. At least why upper class people are against it. If they can comfortably afford health insurance and medical bills, they’re going to get very little from subsidizing the cost for people that can’t afford it. But look at someone that earns (pre-tax) $1000/mo, has a $400/mo apartment and has to pony up $200 per month for an insurance plan with a $5000 deductible, it makes more sense.
Of course, someone I know in nearly that exact position blew me off when ACA first showed up and I told him that I ran the numbers and it looks like he’d be eligible for a rebate to help make this more affordable. He wasn’t going to take any money from Obama…of course that never stopped him from borrowing gas money from me (his employer). Hell, another employee even offered to set him up with the person that she works with for state-subsidized insurance. It’s free (or very cheap) and last I checked was actually really good coverage. He’d rather struggle than take money from the government.
So I definitely don’t think more than 5% of Republican politicians are going to get on the ACA bandwagon. I think it’s something they could do to try to grab the moderates, despite the fact that for most of them it would hurt them in primaries and the general with everyone else who considers voting Republican. The GOP realized a while ago that you don’t win most US elections by appealing to moderates - you appeal to your own base as well as disenfranchised voters and people who vote for personalities.
The Trump admin’s tactic is definitely deliberate sabotage, but it is interesting that there’s been some very slight pushback against that from congressional Republicans. It may be wishful thinking but I actually do think that enough Republicans have said they want to let Obamacare fail and try to blame democrats that they will have a tough time appealing to anyone outside their base on healthcare.
Agreed. During his campaign, look at how many people said things like ‘Trump says what we’re all thinking’. Well, maybe he said what you were thinking, but most people have learned that when you think that kind of stuff, it’s wise to keep it to yourself and not act on it.
It is. We can look at a number of factors to see if certain tax rates are associated with certain things. It isn’t perfect, but, hey, political science is a lot harder than physics. We can still do it, so suck it up and look at the graphs.
And that’s one of the things the GOP will have to do in order to become worthwhile: Admit that evidence has a role to play in politics. Dogma doesn’t make it. Dogma leads you off a cliff, and “lower taxes” is a dogma. That goes for a lot of their other policies, from abstinence-only sexual education to supporting for-profit prisons to ramping up the war on drugs: They don’t work and they only make things harder for people.
Which leads me into my next point: The GOP needs to start trying to help people. Policies which are harmful for no reason beyond short-term gain and/or sucking up to ideologues have got to go. Which policies hurt more than help? Well, evidence would show you that, if you’re willing to look at it. Shouting everyone else down and lying about what they say won’t.
Which leads me to yet another point: The GOP needs to stop lying. It needs to stop paying people to lie for it. It needs to distance itself from liars. It needs to realize that bad argumentation technique is, in fact, a form of lying. You can’t come up with good ideas if all your mental effort is going into dreaming up lies about your opponents and coming up with ways to deflect honest criticism.
And again: The GOP needs to dump the hate groups. That kinda ties into the above point, in that you don’t need to dance around accusations of being a Nazi if you’re capable of denouncing Nazis at your rallies without half the room booing you, but it’s just a really good point regardless.
My ideal GOP is a wonky policy party with good ideas for some reforms but a bias towards staying the course, except when staying the course would lead to disaster or harm people to no good end. Retake the Center Right Clinton was able to peel off and debate with the Democrats over who controls the Center. The Republicans used to be right here, in fact, before Nixon, before they absorbed the Dixiecrats, and before school integration scared the Evangelicals into voting GOP.
For me, it wouldn’t be enough for them to stop being racists and to start basing their policies on provable facts, they would also have to account for their past sins. The GOP would have to stage truth and reconciliation hearings where they described their attempts to suppress minority votes and disenfranchise Americans. They would have to open their archives up to the public, including internal emails and they would have to admit fault and ask for forgiveness.
The Republican Party is a criminal organization that is actively undermining the Republic. It’s irredeemable at this point and doesn’t deserve a vote from anyone, let alone a Democrat.
They don’t need to soften their positions, they need to be forcibly disbanded and their leaders imprisoned in Gitmo.
There’s nothing the GOP can do to attract voters like the SDMB, because -
If the GOP turned into progressive Democrats, the SDMB and voters like them would just vote for the progressive Democrats anyway.
The GOP could continue to support ideas with widespread support - voter ID, a ban on third-trimester abortions except if the fetus is dead or dying or will kill the mother, nuclear energy, GMOs, things like that. The difficulty is that the mainstream media will not cover it if they support those issues - they will put Democrats on air and assist them in changing the subject.
Same with the deficit, which should be a mainstream issue. That needs to be dealt with a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. The MSM will help the Dems call for tax increases, and then determinedly change the subject when the spending cuts turn into spending increases. See the Medicare Sustainability Act, and AOC’s notion of cutting $720B from the military, M4A and its increase of the deficit. Etc.
Regards,
Shodan
So if I’m a single issue “fiscal responsibility” voter, and between the two parties I have one group who wants to cut taxes and seemingly do nothing to cut spending, and another group who’s willing to raise taxes and cut military spending in order to balance the budget, which one should I vote for?
This goes back to what was said above about Republicans needing to start living in the same reality. I’ve never seen Republicans actually practice what they preach, except Brownback’s Kansas and we all saw how well that turned out.
Three words: Purge the loonies. Yeah, it’ll cost you in the short run but, after a few cycles, folks will believe it and start voting for you.
As **Shodan **points out, the problem with a lot of these suggestions thus far is that if presented with a liberal Republican Party, and a liberal Democratic Party, most Democrats would still vote for the Democratic Party anyway. How do these suggestions change that?
You are the one who asked the question-what kind of answers were you looking for?
Why don’t you tell us what reasonable measures you think the Republican Party could take that might attract Democratic voters?
To solve the debt problem, we need a combination of tax increases and cuts to defense spending. Most Democrats won’t even consider the latter, let alone any Republicans.
Right. The only reason Democrats don’t vote Republican is because the mainstream media suppresses all the really good ideas the Republicans have.
So why is it the only paid advertising I see or hear from Republicans (actually, from the Trump re-election campaign) and the only direct mail that Republican campaign committees send to my late father, has to do with immigration or the socialist agenda of Nancy Pelosi? Who’s hijacking the Republican party’s efforts to put out their own positive story?
As an example, is it a liberal position that it’s a bad thing if people die because they’re too poor to afford health insurance? If your answer is “yes,” and a Republican party who adopted that mentality would hence be a “liberal” Republican party, then that means that the Republican party is probably too far gone to ever attract Democrats.
There’s no reason for that to be a liberal position, though. I believe the Republicans of my childhood would have no problem saying something like, “Of course it’s bad that people die from lack of access to health care, and we truly want to help those people. We feel that the free market, and not the government, is in the best position to do that.” And if this position was backed up by evidence, Democrats would have no problem voting for it.
The problem is that the Republican party has all but abandoned this position in anything more than faint lip service, as shown by the fact that when Republicans had 100% control of the government and were therefore in a position to pave the way for some great free market solution to people dying from being poor, they did absolutely nothing. As long as Republicans continue to live in a made up reality where doing nothing in the face of a serious problem is an example of “compassionate conservative” or a sign of their great ideas, then they’ll have a hard time attracting Democrats.
If your current view is that the Republican Party is unreasonable, then you should already have a clue as to what changes should be made to make it reasonable.
If on the other hand your current view is that the Republican Party is reasonable as it now stands, then any changes suggested will seem unreasonable to you.
Even if it weren’t backed up by evidence, some Democratic leaning voters would vote for it. But, right now, I don’t hear the Republican Party’s solution to the two (IMHO related) problems -
- How do you keep people from dying from lack of access to health care?
- How do you keep people from going broke over the cost of accessing health care?
People who lean left do not think that the status quo is just fine. So the GOP needs to convince them that things really are just fine or give a conservative solution to those problems (I have no idea what that could be. I’m not a conservative - but those of you who are surely can come up with a solution.) I don’t think that saying “this is a problem; here’s how it can be fixed” is liberal.
The most conservative solution that I would not dismiss out of hand is a single-payer Medicare for all option - but with the patient being the single payer. It would allow people to use the buying leverage of the government, and would allow a lot more transparency when deciding the course of a health treatment as the prices are more public. You can’t have a functional free market without price transparency, so red lip service to the “free market” is ridiculous in the current obscure environment.
A plan similar to this was proposed in Nevada but didn’t go anywhere. Note that I would not endorse such a program, but it is a plan I can take seriously, unlike the current non-plans.