As best as I can tell, the problem is that being a “big tent” party, the Democratic party doesn’t have a single coherent strategy, and what they do have is fraught with contention and controversy, with Democrats of all stripes going their own ways as convenient to them.
The Republican party, odious as it is lately, is the opposite. They’ve got a coherent strategy and message and they parrot it all the way down.
So to that benighted and baffling chunk of the voters who has apparently not decided by now, I’m sure this comes across as a certain level of order and competence on the part of the Republicans and a similar amount of disorganization and ineffectiveness on the part of the Democrats.
What it does to those voters is to drive them to turn out to vote against Trump / MAGA when Republicans are in charge, but to stay home when Democrats are the incumbents. The fact that the reason Democrats can’t fully enact their agenda when they hold power (due to the filibuster and the Republican leaning SCOTUS), seems to not enter into their decision making process. Why that is the case is unclear to me.
I look at it the other way. As per my last post, the Republicans can no longer appeal to Democrats, as shown by their being down to just three House seats in districts that voted for Harris.
A big tent does not prevent winning elections. When Democrats last had a 2/3 majority in the House (1965-67), some were liberals and others were segregationists.
What would tell me that the Democratic tent was overly large to win elections would be if the Green Party was siphoning off too many progressive votes for Democrats to win.
Their formula seems to be hoping that Americans are decent enough to not elect a fascist, treasonous, sex offender. And they keep getting disappointed.
The republicans are basically the default party in the US and sadly have been since the 90s. The only time the democrats win is when the GOP fucks everything up, and the democrats get elected to fix things. Once things are slightly stable, the public elects republicans again to fuck everything up. The pattern keeps repeating.
Clinton balanced the budget and kept the peace, so Bush had 9/11 happen because he didn’t care about terrorism, he caused endless wars and exploded the deficit. Obama ended the war in Iraq, got the economy stabilized and passed health reform. The public responded by putting Trump in charge who botched covid.
“My fellow Americans,” Bush said, “at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us.”
Bush swore to do “everything in [his] power” to undo the damage wrought by Clinton’s two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.
During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.
“You better believe we’re going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration,” said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. “Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?”
On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further.
What will probably happen is the dems will win congress in 2026 and win a trifecta in 2028. The dems will pass some reforms, but then in 2030 congress will go GOP and in 2032 the GOP will win the presidency and congress.
A ‘winning formula’ is a consistent 80+ million votes for democrats in presidential years and 60+ million votes in midterm years. I don’t think democrats have any way to achieve this except hoping the GOP fucks up bad enough that some people are temporarily wiling to vote democrat for an election cycle before going back to the default GOP.
America is like a stupid teenage girl who dates bad boys who treat her like shit. Then she gets upset and dates a nice guy, quickly gets bored, and goes back to the abusive bad boy. America sucks.
Republicans are seen as the party of winners (financially successful in-groups), and a lot of POC want to be liked and accepted by white supremacists. So its not going to be easy.
Also at least the dems are starting to play hardball with gerrymandering. But the democratic party should be doing more to drive wedges between GOP groups, the same way that right wing groups both domestically and overseas support the pro-palestine movement and Green movement to demoralize the democratic progressive base into apathy.
There need to be more false flag social movements to divide catholic republicans and protestant republicans, or divide white republicans and POC republicans.
The DNC? The Democratic party is the party of diversity, yes. If, like the Republicans, the Democratic party was the party of homogeneous fear, messaging would be much simpler.
Sure. I meant with respect to House races, and to a lesser extent state and local races. Running up the margins also matters when authoritarians are trying to throw out fair elections!
I take the DNC’s strategy to essentially be “let a thousand flowers bloom so long as your pollen doesn’t land over here.” The handwringing about Mamdani was concern that he would become the face of the party for elections all over. I happen to think that would be a mostly fine outcome on net! But I think you’re basically right that Dems don’t have a messaging problem right now. They had a pretty big anti-incumbency and candidate problem in 2024. If they had been out of power and/or not pulling an emergency switcheroo because they nominated someone too old for the job, they would have won.
This is not true. Yes, the current MAGA branch is loud and in charge, but they have no coherent strategy, besides applauding whatever crazy idea trump has come up with. By saying they have a coherent strategy is saying trump has a coherent strategy, and that is demonstrably not true.
There are also other branches of the GOP, including the Old money group, the billionaires group, etc. Right now you dont hear much from them. trump throws them a tax benefit bone once in a while, and they are quiet- for now.
To state what should be sort of obvious, the Democrats’ main formula is trying to figure out whatever is desired by a majority of voters in any given race, forming a policy position around it, and persuading voters that their policy and their candidate will serve that need.
That’s ok as far as it goes. Democracy ought to work like that, in general. But alone, it’s not enough. If you passively wait for whatever a focus group tells you is important, then you’re going to be pulled overwhelmingly toward micro economic concerns, because everybody thinks they ought to be earning more, spending less, and taxed at a lower rate. The public needs to be led and inspired to want more than that. It’s risky but necessary.
That’s why Democrats consistently fail to meet the moment. Their formula is basically to follow the electorate, thinking that’s their job, when they need to be leading and selling a bigger vision. Not just wanting more for the country but being honest about the threats facing it.
I just have to laugh at the poster upthread who thinks the Dem position is hating Trump, because mainstream Dems have mostly gone out of their way to avoid the seeming negativity. Leadership and vision here would look like plainly stating that this man is a fucking menace to domestic tranquility, world peace, and everyone’s individual long-term interests except for the richest among us. The best we get is these milquetoast admonitions that Trump’s policies fall short on kitchen-table issues and neglect the little guy.
At least that’s how it’s been for too long, a few are breaking ranks, but Dems mostly don’t want to stick their necks out like that. The Dem formula is following the electorate and avoiding controversy, and it needs to change.
That is not true. We just had a good, decent Dem president. 117th Congress (2021–2023) had a dem majority (very slim in the Senate). Also in the 110th-111th Congress (2007–2011). In 2019–2023 The Dems controlled the House.
Nothing wrong with the first, and the Dems have had some pretty controversial platform
, including of course support for Roe and Abortion rights. Not to mention Civil Rights, Womens, rights, etc.
Sure for the last two years the GOP has been in control- that will change.
They did. What I don’t understand is why the voters who let that be their deciding factor think that way.
I’ll use a local analogy from my home town of Corpus Christi, where we’re having a major problem with potentially running out of fresh water. To avoid getting bogged down in the details, and since our local offices are non-partisan*, I’ll call the two major positions X and Y. We have a mayor and 2 at large city council members that are X, and 4 other council members (a fifth recently quit midterm) that are Y. Things are not getting done due to that impasse. For whatever reason, however, a lot of voters are in a “throw them all out” mindset. They seem, IMHO, completely oblivious to the fact that if this were to happen, we would be in a position where the mayor and two at large council members would be Y, and the other 5 council members (including the Y that has retired midterm) would be X, and we would be right back to where we started.
I suspect that the swing part of the electorate are people that think like that when voting in national elections.
*. This adds another wrinkle. There are hardcore local X Republicans who think the X officials must be Republicans and that the Y officials must be Democrats. There are equally hardcore Republicans who happen to be Y that believe the exact opposite about the same officials. The same goes for hardcore local Democrats, just reversed.
I think the issue is that voters have this unshakable, partly subconscious belief that there is someone planning everything the democrats do. So when the party does things that aren’t consistent it appears to be the one guy at the top being an out of touch moron, not that the wide variety of different people with different opinions do and say different things.
“Meeting the moment” is not winning some elections and trying to move on while hoping Trump blows over.
Biden let the inflation narrative get away from him. He seemed to assume things were naturally going to sort themselves out. He let Merrick Garland sit on his hands while Trump collected steam and ultimately ate Biden’s lunch. Biden didn’t meet the moment, the moment crushed him flat, and we’re all paying the price.
There is no argument you can propose that isn’t immediately flattened by the fact that Trump is now President, and most of his lackeys dodged jail, got pardoned, and/or now occupy Cabinet positions. The Dems missed in the worst possible way and they have nothing but excuses to offer for it.
Exactly my point. The Dems didn’t lead on those. The public happened to be leading in a strong direction, and the Democrats chose to follow them, and apparently they’ve been trying to replicate that strategy ever since.
In fact they seem to have learned the wrong lesson there, that if you follow the public too far out on a limb, you get burned by the backlash. Best to watch where they’re going and follow from a safe distance.
As best as I can tell, there are really four separate populations in the country.
Die-hard Republicans. These are the people who will vote R/red no matter what. They may not like Trump, but they’ll hold their noses and vote for him because they feel that he’s still better than a Democrat. Or maybe they love him. It doesn’t really matter; they’re going to reliably vote R.
Die hard Democrats. Same thing on the other side of the aisle.
People who still make a game-time decision. This encompasses a lot of different groups- between those who haven’t been sufficiently repulsed by Trump and the GOP that they feel there’s a legitimate decision, those whose economic positions are precarious enough that they’re desperate to vote for whoever’s positions sound like they’ll relieve a lot of that economic pressure, those who decide to vote Democrat or not to vote at all because the Democratic party isn’t representing them directly (the most execrable of them all, IMO), and anyone else who is making their choice based on factors near the election.
Realistically speaking, category 3 is who ultimately counts. I’d assume that categories 1 and 2 are probably similar in size, so neither has a baked-in advantage there. But the problem then becomes how do you appeal to this disparate group of people? What’s going to appeal to a person who’s struggling economically and is willing to overlook all the graft and BS from Trump if it helps them stay afloat, AND that’s also going to appeal to some progressive person who has their head up their butt and thinks that not voting is some sort of protest, instead of a vote for the other guy? And how do you come up with something that satisfies those two and also is appealing for the person of questionable judgment who is willing to vote for Trump, yet isn’t a GOP diehard?
It’s a hard place to be, and I feel like the Republicans do well here because they seem like they’re organized, singing from the same hymnal, and getting stuff done, even if it’s bad stuff. Meanwhile, the Democrats look way more scattered and ineffectual because for whatever reason, they appear much less unified in an ideological or messaging sense.
My suspicion is that if the Democrats were consistently singing from the same hymnal and had a coherent and cogent platform that was less anti-Trump and more centered around benefitting the common people/nation/world (in that order), they’d do much better with the third category of people. Except the progressives who choose not to vote; they’re petulant assholes who are cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
Based on what I’ve seen in the past and heard recently from a saber rattling Kamala Harris, the philosophy is: doing the same thing over again but, for some illogical reason, expecting a different result.
IMHO the reason it’s this way is because of the shift in the groups that took place when Trump won. Some of the reliable R voters (the Liz Cheneys of the voting public), either stopped voting R or became D voters. If I’m not mistaken, some of the regular posters on this board fall into that category. In exchange, some of the crazies on the Democratic side (the RFK Juniors and Tulsi Gabbards of the voting public) became R voters. The swing group is seemingly a group of voters who either vote D (if it means voting against an incumbent Republican) or stay home (if it means coming out to support an incumbent Democrat that disappointed them). Convincing this third group to vote D even when the Democrats are already in power is the key to Democratic victory. Of course not only do I not know how to accomplish this feat, neither do the Democratic politicians running for office.
Pew does a typology quiz that breaks people down into 9 groups. Basically 3 right leaning groups, 3 left leaning groups, and 3 ambivalent groups.
I think the 3 ambivalent middle groups that can go back and forth are the ones that decide elections like you said. Like it or not, Harris got 75 million votes and Trump got 77 million, but if the democrats had run a white man, then 1 or 2 million people who aren’t threatened by women or POC may have voted democrat. Thats not a guarantee, but Biden got 81 million votes in 2020 and Harris got 75 million votes in 2024. Would a white man have gotten 77 million votes? Its impossible to know.
But the point is that, for the people who actually decide elections, they can be moved by things that seem trivial to others. It just sucks that at the end of the day, these are the people who decide elections. Maybe they liked one candidates haircut more than the other.
At the end of the day, elections are determined by the laziest, least informed people who barely bother to show up. They are the ones who switch back and forth or the ones who sit out elections.
Also turnout is a huge issue. In presidential year elections, about 150 million people show up to vote. In midterm elections, about 120 million people show up to vote.
So of the 260 million or so eligible voters, about 60-65% show up to vote in presidential general elections. In the presidential primary, its about 25% of voters show up to vote.
In federal midterms, about 45% of eligible voters show up to vote. In the primary its about 15% of voters.
In state/local elections, about 20% of people show up to vote. In these primaries it is about 5-10% of voters.
So just getting people to show up to vote is a huge issue. While there are lines for the presidential election, I’ve never seen a line for any primary or for any midterm or state/local election. It takes me less than 5 minutes to vote in these elections, but even with the tiny time effort the vast majority of people don’t vote in them.
The reason we are in this mess is because 14 million people voted for Trump in the republican primary of 2016. Basically 14 million people fucked over the entire nation.