I find myself thinking about the Dems in Congress similarly to the Repub Senate under Obama. I know they oppose (pretty much) everything Trump and the Repub majorities propose, but I’m not clear what exactly they stand for. I know the minority is limited in its ability to effect legislation, but I’m not aware of clear alternative proposals being offered. For example, in response to the Repub efforts to replace ACA, did the Dems propose any specific measures to improve the ACA?
Instead, much of what I perceive impresses me as vague generalities, which I fear will not translate well into election wins. There was a lot of media attention to various protests, but is there any underlying evidence suggesting that will result in electoral gains at any level?
Can anyone point me to where I can feel the Dems stand FOR something specific, rather than simply against all things Trump?
Last month, there were a series of op-eds on economic policy by Schumer and other Democratic legislators. It had some fairly straightforward populist economic proposals (increase the minimum wage, boltser consumer protections, and control drug prices).
However, since you haven’t heard of this, and since there’s been negligible new information since, I can’t say that the Dems have been a good job putting these policy proposals out there. I guess we’ll see if there is any meat to these ideas once midterm campaigns start in earnest…
Yeah, I guess I was wondering if it would be possible to air proposals OUTSIDE of the campaigns, to show that they had offered concrete alternatives, and been thwarted. Though unlikely, they might even be able to find some small areas of commonality with moderate Repubs.
But I know that for 8 years, I consistently thought of the Repubs as standing for nothing other than opposing Obama. Does not sit well with me to currently feel similarly about the Dems.
I don’t know what the answer is. I think it has become PC to pretend Trump won the white working class due to economics, but studies have found that cultural identity plays a bigger role.
Democrats don’t need to win working class whites. THey just need to lose them by a smaller margin and/or increase their turnout among other groups. Working class whites are 1/3 of the electorate. Democrats can try to appeal to college educated whites, women voters and minorities instead to increase their margins and turnout.
My concern is that there is no way for the democrats to appeal to the WWC without abandoning their own party values. The democrats are the party of inclusiveness, tolerance, etc. and if WWC voters are leaving the dems because of identity politics regarding wanting to keep America white and Christian, then the democrats really can’t offer them much.
On another note, Obama created the ACA, bailed out the auto industry (which saved over a million jobs, most of them white working class jobs) and supported labor unions. The WWC responded by voting republican more strongly than they ever have before. I seriously doubt any of those policies, which helped millions of working class whites, won Obama or the democrats much political support from the WWC.
However if Schumer’s ideas can ensure the democrats only lose the WWC by 25-30 points, instead of the 37 points they lost them by in 2016, then great. That is probably a small enough margin for the dems to win the presidency and a variety of seats on the federal, state and local level.
Agreed that the Dems’ messaging seems to be pretty crappy once you go beyond “Trump and the Republicans suck.”
Single-payer is one of the major Dem proposals to the health care problem (HR 676, 118 Democratic House sponsors), but being a rather controversial proposal, it doesn’t have broad backing of the party as a whole. “A Better Deal” doesn’t seem to have gotten very far after the initial messaging blitz.
Agree that they need to introduce proposed legislation and at least start making some noise about their proposals. “At least we’re not as bad as the other guys” doesn’t seem to be a strategy Dems have the ability to execute well.
We’re just a bunch of schmucks on a message board. Don’t the pros making big bucks know better?!
Re: single payer, wouldn’t there be incremental changes they could propose which might nudge policy that way? As I understood it, ACA was a sop to pharma/insurance, to get Repub support. Couldn’t they propose specific tweaks such as allowing medicare negotiation of drug costs, or some other limited steps which might appear all the more reasonable in today’s poisonous climate?
Yup, the drug cost issue is in “A Better Deal” and it’s also the focus of Senate S 771. There was also some effort to relax restrictions on drug imports back in March/April-ish to try to lower costs that way; that measure failed.
Dinsdale wrote: “But I know that for 8 years, I consistently thought of the Repubs as standing for nothing other than opposing Obama. Does not sit well with me to currently feel similarly about the Dems.”
The difference is that the Republicans were obstructing Obama and the Democrats are, to the best of their ability at any rate, obstructing trump. All obstructionism is not created equal.
I’m slightly baffled by OP. During the campaign many Democrats proposed
raising the minimum wage
amnesty for illegal aliens
making college affordable.
… and much more. These are NOT small things. To the contrary, I’d condemn Democrats for proposing too much, not too little. Do you expect them to propose building a wall somewhere?
Yes, the recent messaging has focused on “Trump is horrible” — but that is the most important message and 40% of the electorate doesn’t even get it.
In contrast to the top three points mentioned above, what has the GOP message been?
I’ve always maintained that Democrats’ problems are less about policy and more about authenticity. The Democrats can win as a centrist, socially liberal, Wall Street friendly party. They can also win as a progressive populist party. What they can’t do is tell voters one thing in Kentucky and then do another in DC. They also can’t be an elitist party but claim to be fighting for the common man. If the Democrats want to be elitist they need to own it, as Republicans once did when they were the party of the elites. And if they want to be for the common man, they have to adopt the common man’s concerns and priorites as their own, as opposed to the concerns and priorities of the intelligentsia. That means Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, trumps everything, including climate change.
As for the policies Democrats are actually getting behind, they are pulling from the GOP playbook of supporting unworkable ideas that haven’t been fleshed out. Ideas which they will be forced to mostly abandon once elected, thus demoralizing their base even more. That’s the problem with politicians, they are so short-sighted. They think that making promises they can’t keep to get the base excited for one or two elections is worth the destruction of their base in the elections after that.
Quit ignoring the third parties and point how useless and irrelevant they are. Point out how there are no Green and Libertarian candidates running in the midterms. Make sure everyone knows that Jill Stein and her ilk are complete idiots.
AF
It’s time to do a hatchet job on Bernie Sanders. Apparently this shitbag is doing New Hampshire appearances over Labor Day. Make sure Sanders isn’t around to spread his poison all over again in 2020.
One of the handicaps for liberals (in terms of winning elections) is that liberalism, by its very nature, is meddlesome. At a certain fundamental level, liberalism *requires *intervening in other people’s lives or dictating behavior.
If you want to reverse climate change, for instance, you can’t just buy a Prius while letting other people continue to generate high carbon emissions, because your own self-control won’t stop the global warming - that requires the united effort of billions of people worldwide in order to work.
If you are a PETA animal-rights activist, you can’t say, “I won’t kill animals for fur, but I will shrug and look the other way when others do so” - you have to do something much more interventionist, otherwise the minks are still being killed.
If you want to reduce gun violence and want fewer guns in America, you can’t just say, “Well, I won’t own a gun then.” You have to try to confiscate *other *people’s guns, or constrain/limit them in some way.
If you want single-payer healthcare, you have to compel people to pay taxes into such a healthcare system in order to make it work. You can’t just say, “I’ll pay for such a system but the rest of the country doesn’t have to” - it only works if everyone pays into it.
Great point, and that’s why such things should only be implemented with broad public support. Doing those types of things in a 50-50 country, or worse, when the polls are against you on such an issue, puts Democrats right back into the minority.
So that would be another piece of advice: pay attention to public opinion. Democrats tend to get focused on how cowardly the party is, but it’s not cowardly to listen to the public when the public is aroused. That’s how democracy is supposed to work. Sometimes it’s good to get spooked and abandon a legislative program.
Republicans do a lot of bad stuff, but when the public is aroused against a piece of legislation, they almost always drop it like a hot potato.
Um, your party is divided pretty closely down the middle on Sanders. The Republicans have a problem too, it’s called Donald Trump. Doing a hatchet job won’t work there either, it will just cause a civil war within the party. Let the Republicans have a civil war while the Democrats have a spirited competition that ends in party unity regardless of the end result.
Yes, conservatives aren’t libertarians, so that kind of thing will always be an issue. But the rule that you need broad support to outlaw stuff or force people to do things still stands. The people who don’t like being told what to do will always be more motivated.
For sure, which is why abortion has been a vote-loser for the GOP for a while now.
As the ‘hamburger’ article stated, whichever party is perceived as being more morally-lecturing or judgmental tends to lose. Up until a while ago, that would have been the GOP and its religious right. But nowadays that is the Democrats, perceived as the party of SJWs and 56 different gender prefixes.
I think the Democrats need a theme, like “War on Income Inequality” and “Fight for Fairness”. I would include a number of proposals and keep them all on the table at once, similar to the way that Obama did with the Recovery Act and Obamacare. It brings moderates to the table to do some deal-making. The proposals could include some things that a handful of Repubs might like, such as middle class tax cuts, but it could also include things that progressives get a boner about like minimum wage increments. And a range of things in between, including proposals for public options in universal health insurance (Medicare for All) and universal income supplements. Some of these might get shot down but bringing a theme and multiple proposals is like running the ice with a power play or a 3-on-1 fast break: the Dems increase their chance of scoring.
I would start with the theme first and then start hammering away at the districts that Trump and incumbents carried by less than 10%. But…it will be just as important to get out the minority vote as flipping moderate white voters. The Dems need a message for everyone and they need outreach for everyone, in every key constituent community, not just selected ones.