Yes, it stops people who don’t care as much – but those people are equally distributed between parties.
Say you have 10,000 people in a district that’s split 65 Dem/35 GOP. Of those 10,000 people, 5,000 are highly motivated to vote and 5,000 have low motivation. You make it harder to vote, and the low motivation folks don’t bother. Congratulations! You’ve just suppressed 3,500 Democrats and only 1,500 Republicans, gaining your wider voting area a net of 2,000 votes.
It has nothing to do with the motivation of different parties’ voters.
At this point, who’s surprised by long lines at the polls? I suppose a first-time voter might, but I would expect that anyone who’s voted has a pretty good idea of the lines at the poll. If the lines prevent them from voting on Tuesday, then that’s just one election, oh well. The next election they can look into early voting if they want to avoid the lines.
OK but any timely and prompt dem will find it unfair that the “hard to vote” laws are targeting their side, regardless, and legitimately find it to be voter suppression.
Why don’t we have everyone vote only in DC for potus? Let’s try having polling places only in large population cities. Let’s try apportioning polling places by population and need. Let’s try automatic voter reg. If we’re trying that is. What was it we were trying to do again? There is no real good expressible reason for voter suppression.
Let’s just accept your premise that Democrats aren’t lining up to vote in enough numbers because it’s inconvenient and they don’t care enough, and it apparently isn’t worth Democratic leadership trying to make it easier for them to vote.
What strategy do you think leadership should take to get them to care? My strategy would be to make sure things like the Child Tax Credit don’t lapse at all, try to make patches to our healthcare system that for the most part are still in Build Back Better, and maybe try to figure out if we can get a program like free preK to be better patched up from what it is in the current bill.
Something I’ve thought about for a while is how the Democratic Party is stuck in a position where its loudest activist base is a lot more to the left than where the median Democratic voter is. And typically the median Democratic voter is more to the left of the average swing voter. Due to the idea that swing voters make their judgement based on the economic situation here and now hence why they can vote one way one election and the other way the next. Both parties loyal base of voters are in it for a broader social policy vision.
Well in the past Democratic Party candidates in local races were able to get elected by detaching themselves from the national party. Joe Biden was elected for the very first time to represent Delaware in the Senate in 1972. The same election in which Richard Nixon won Delaware by twenty points. In 1984 Biden was re-elected to a third term in the Senate with 60% of the vote. The same election in which Ronald Reagan won Delaware by twenty points. Delaware rejected the Democratic candidates for president George McGovern and Walter Mondale massively but supported a Democratic candidate for Senate. There was a large Nixon-Biden and Reagan-Biden crossover vote. And this wasn’t too uncommon across the country in the past.
Now people are a lot more entrenched on both sides. But I think the Democratic national brand is harder to shake off because a guy like Charlie Baker, a Republican in the deep blue state of Massachusetts, can simply project himself as a sensible moderate who thinks the state needs to keep spending under control and will work with the state legislature in a bipartisan manner to do it. He is not running on cultural issues that repulse a liberal state. He is not running in line with the national Republican brand. And as a result there will be crossover votes because he is “a good republican”. To many in deep red states the only good democrat is a dead democrat because they do care deeply about cultural issues and the national party is vehemently on the other side of it.
On the other side you’ve got John Bel Edwards in Louisiana, Laura Kelly in Kansas and Andy Beshear in Kentucky as examples of Democratic governors in deep red states. Obviously the “Democratic brand” didn’t keep them out of office.
I disagree. This is the old way of Democratic thinking, which led to big losses in 1994 and 2010, and has us on track for making 2022 a threepeat. I still think the calling a spade a spade strategy is the way to go. Stop calling out specific statements as being “disinformation” and start calling particular candidates liars. Forget about debating the details of a particular piece of legislation. Tell the voters that Republicans want to take away your rights and turn back the clock to the bad old days. Tell people that Democrats are the defenders of civilization and Republicans are a bunch of barbarians who want to bring back the dark ages. It has the advantage of being true.
I can easily see that seriously turning off underinformed (rather than misinformed) voters in the middle. I think Republicans are able to get away with it because of the status quo nature of conservatism; I’m not sure Democrats are able to repeat that kind of thing.
I think Obamacare was a unique example of something that was both going to scare a lot of people in the early years and also had all of that early instability with existing health insurance getting disrupted that it was going to be a political loser. I also think not passing Obamacare would have been a disaster for the Democrats long-term. Nowadays they get people to vote for them to protect the existing system which is considerably better than it would be without Obamacare and especially without any Medicaid expansion.
The early Clinton years would be an example of what happens if you don’t actually deliver on your legislative agenda.
In any case, the most effective social programs the Dems are working on basically consist of giving people money. Obviously inflation is a concern, but generally there is a lot less that can go wrong with that than with something like Obamacare.
Ah ha! There’s your problem. You don’t seem to understand that some people in this world have different experiences than yours. Even as these experiences are explained to you in excruciating detail, you “just don’t see”. I respectfully suggest that you take a step outside of your own world and see these election issues from another’s point of view. You may find it enlightening. Many people in this thread have given you some excellent starting points.
That’s all great, but as @k9briender said earlier, those all have to do with governing. One of the problems Democrats have is that they conflate governing with running for office. The less motivated voters who sometimes stay home don’t get up off the couch to stand in line for several based on the details of a huge bill like Obamacare or BBB, even when they’ve personally benefitted. They get up and vote because. one candidate or the other has a campaign that speaks to them more. Maybe that’s a bumper sticker that say God, Guns, and Freedom, or a red hat with MAGA on it, or a well delivered speech about how these are our values, those are their values, and I’m going up there to fight for our values. Republicans do well on that sort of thing. Democrats don’t. It’s a problem, and it won’t be won by getting bogged down in intra-Democratic debates about the minutiae of the latest bill struggling through Congress.
Someone who lives in a predominantly conservative, middle class, white neighborhood. I’ve never waited in line for more than about 5 minutes to vote at my polling location. Usually less.
When I have early voted (because I would not be available on voting day), I waited in line at least an hour. Sometimes far longer. I also had to travel to the middle of my county, rather than the polling place at the end of my street.
Considering that the alternative that you seem to be against is simply mail in voting, I’m not sure exactly what it is that you are fighting here.
Also considering that the faction that you are defending is also doing its best to limit and even eliminate early voting altogether, your arguments that someone can just early vote is even more useless.
And even if it’s only “inconvenient”, that’s wrong. Voting should be encouraged and made easy. I’ve seen the absurd news footage of people waiting 8 hours in line to vote.
When I vote, in Canada, it’s probably about a five minute walk to the polling station, and about a 10 minute wait, max.
I disagree. I think that there is a problem with the electorate conflating governing with running for office. They think that the person that gives the prettiest speeches, the ones that touch them deep in the cockles of their heart, is going to be the one who is better at actual policy matters.
Yes, for every complex question, there is a simple answer that is dead wrong. Republicans offer that, Democrats offer the more complex answer that is less wrong.
If someone is looking for a simple answer, and doesn’t mind it being wrong, then they vote for Republicans. If someone is capable of the basic critical thinking that gets them beyond bumper sticker quotes, they tend to vote for Democrats.
I’m not sure I follow. Yes, there are those who enjoy discussing the minutiae of the latest bill, there are plenty of threads here that break down and analyze legislation, but that’s still not what is actually presented to the public. If the fact that there are those who enjoy discussing bills in detail somehow turns off those who do not, then there is something very wrong with them. Not to say that it doesn’t happen. You’ll see soundbites where someone is discussing the minutiae of a bill, and the right wing outrage machine takes a few words out of an hours long discussion, and uses that out of context quote as a scare tactic. But that’s not the Democrats who are doing that, that’s the right wing outrage machine, I’m not sure you can blame the Democrats for that.
The only solution is for Democrats to no longer discuss bills at all.
I. was referring more to the actual members of congress rather than us here on the board . Someone upthread, or maybe in another thread, mentioned the old fashioned style of legislating where the POTUS would summon all the relevant congress members to the White House and they would have an all night session until everyone came to an agreement. I suppose that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, but maybe that kind of thing might help some, rather than week after week of Democratic congress members disagreeing with each other in public.
Big session, hundreds of representatives and 50 senators. I don’t think it would be all night, rather than it being more like a couple weeks. And that’s before they give up because everyone will never be in agreement.
Well, kinda by definition, the Democrats who are disagreeing in public are the ones who are not going to toe the party line in the first place. I also think that the media blows any disagreement out of proportion. Congressperson A says 1.5 trillion, Congressperson B says 1.6 trillion, and the media, especially right wing media, makes that the story, rather than the 95% that they are in agreement on.
Basically, everything you have said is style over substance, and the style that you are complaining about is a narrative set by the media, not by the actual politicians, much less the constituents.
Your asking for a level of discipline on messaging that I don’t think is reasonable to expect, and certainly not reasonable to implement.
Agreed. I would love it if whoever the Democrat candidate running against our Attorney General, Mark Brnovich, is would flat out say in a debate, “You signed on to the Texas challenge to Arizona’s vote procedure. Either you have no clue what ‘standing’ means in the courtroom or you’re a fucking liar interested in grabbing power for your party at any cost – even denying millions of Arizonans their vote – which is it?”
Ditto for the opponents of Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, with the addition of throwing the word “insurrection” in their faces. The Republicans have been running their rage machine for decades now. It’s time the Democrats had their own.
. Someone upthread, or maybe in another thread, mentioned the old fashioned style of legislating where the POTUS would summon all the relevant congress members to the White House and they would have an all night session until everyone came to an agreement. I suppose that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, but maybe that kind of thing might help some, rather than week after week of Democratic congress members disagreeing with each other in public.