Yes.
Why?
Daniel
Perot got 8.4% of the vote in '96, but he’s pretty much washed up now. I’d be surprised if he could get more than 3% these days.
:smack: Not quite what I meant. If a third-party candidate came forward with a similar, libertarian-leaning platform and an immense personal fortune with which to buy as many votes as Perot did, I have no reason to believe he’d take votes exclusively from Kerry.
Daniel
There is one reason, Daniel. The same reason the Nader did not do so well this time around. Many conservatives / libertarians felt “burned” by their vote for Perot. I know that’s how I felt about it. The likelyhood that any third party candidate could make the sort of showing Perot did is extremely unlikely. Just MHO.
My own $.02: We need some tough candidates. I know Kerry had his tough-guy credentials and all from Viet Nam, but the way he responded to his detractors was so ineffectual. Hes been sucessfully portrayed as some weak candy-ass Massachusetts elitist from day one.
We need some candidates who will seriously stand up and say things in no uncertain terms, and stand by them, and when they’re attacked will come back even stronger. Someone who can talk tough and be taken seriously. Who that is, I don’t know, but we better find someone soon or its gonna get a lot worse.
Last night I was at Kerry’s rally in Boston, and Max Cleland came out for a minute. It reminded me of how he lost the race after his opponent questioned his patriotism despite his having lost limbs in Viet Nam. Why couldn’t (or maybe he did and I’m just not aware) Cleland just run an ad saying “How dare they question my patriotism. Here’s my patriotism <points to missing legs>. You should be ashamed of yourselves.” I really think that would have been a great response to that issue.
According to the link in mypreviouspost, it was closer to 18%.
A more relevant question would be: if Perot had not run in 1992, how would Clinton have fared? I think it’s entirely plausible he would have carried a majority of the popular vote – a lot of the Perot vote was for change amidst a weak economy, which would otherwise have gone to Clinton.
Okay. But surely you see that has nothing to do with Clinton’s prowess as a candidate, right? So the fact that Bush got a majority whereas Clinton didn’t doesn’t speak to a special mandate for Bush: it just points to the different circumstances under which he was running.
Daniel
I want Terry McAullif’s head on a platter. He should have been out after the 2002 losses. He should resign by the end of the day. He doesn’t know how to win. In fact, toss out all of the Democratic leadership and start over.
We are not getting our message across. We are allowing the other side to define all of the issues. I don’t know how to do it, with the media so far in the other side’s pocket and more corporate consolidation sure to come, but we’ve got to do it or we’re sunk. For starters, we’ve got to define the economic issues in no uncertain terms. We’ve got to get the message across that the little guy is getting fucked in this economy, and it’s not going to get any better until we do something about it. Frame it as a moral issue.
We had one: Howard Dean. But we bought into the lie that he was too “angry”, and anger is unbecoming of a president. We must stop letting the other party define the terms of our candidates.
I didn’t mean angry candidates. Bush, Schwarzenneger (sp) Giuliani and any number of other politicians are percieved as “tough” without being noted for their tendency to rant and scream. I would love a Dean presidency, but I just don’t see that in the near future.
vibrotronica makes a good point that I’d like to expand on. The Democrats will have it much harder in the next set of elections. They will be seriously behind in money, because which corporation or person wants to contribute money to a losing cause? It would be like throwing money away. In other words, there is a feedback loop here, where the more entrenched the one-party system gets, the harder it is to overcome.
Depends on the election you’re talking about. Don’t forget, something like 98% of all U.S. House members are in perfectly safe districts. For governorships, most states are pretty well safe for one party of the other. It may well be harder for Democrats to raise money for the Senate, but those races are high-profile and high-stakes enough that they get money from all across the country. As for the presidential election in 2008, Kerry proved pretty effectively that it’s entirely possible to raise gigantic sums from motivated Dems. After four more years of Bush and a wide-open White House, the Dems will be motivated again.
But here’s the thing. This “we are worse off” keeps getting repeated but it is only true for certain pockets of the country. It’s certainly not true for me, my family, and the people I know.
I’ve got a great job, my income has gone up threefold in the past 4 years. My taxes have gone down. The area where I live has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the U.S.
I only point this out because it seems that too often on these boards, people forget that individuals vote. “Economic indicators” don’t vote, at least not as a bloc.
I think we’ve made some progress since 2002, but far from enough. I still say we need something along the lines of a “Contract With America”, a group of six or eight issues with clear legislative proposals to go with them.
Each 2-year election cycle, we need 6-8 for-instances, embodying the core values of the party, where we say, “if you elect us, we will do our damnedest to do X about issue Y.” Stuff like raise the minimum wage; expand access to health care; reduce the deficit; make sure Social Security is on a sound footing; make it easier for workers to organize unions without reprisals; secure our ports, air cargo, and chemical plants against terrorists; hunt down Osama bin Laden; that sort of thing.
What this would do is remove the fuzziness in people’s perceptions of what Democrats stand for. And that fuzziness is our great enemy in appealing to what center remains in American politics: if Joe Sixpack is going to choose a leader, he’s going to choose the one he feels has a clear idea of where he’s taking us, even if Joe doesn’t always agree with him, over one that agrees with Joe on almost everything, but it isn’t clear how strong the leader’s allegiance to those positions runs.
What the Dems need is to define themselves clearly enough for long enough that they can win converts for their message over time. The object isn’t just to take the center; it’s to move the center. Even twenty years ago, in the middle of the Reagan era, Bush’s agenda would have been far too right-wing to sell to the American people. But since only one party’s had a consistent message to sell, they’ve been selling it, and moving the whole field their way in doing so.
divemaster: people vote as blocs. Individual votes don’t matter; it’s the larger conditions/circumstances that sway electorates.
Here’s what we need to do: First, sit back and watch the impending train wreck that is second-term Dubya. Deficits are ballooning, the situation in Iraq (I hate to say this) is declining–even Colin Powell thinks so, check out this week’s Newsweek–and Al Qaeda is still out there. With control of both houses of Congress, everything is unquestionably Dubya’s and the GOP’s responsibility. Granted, he seems to have a gift for wriggling out of accepting the blame, but even Reagan couldn’t do that forever, and he was the Teflon president.
Second, we do need to redefine ourselves. I suggest the following planks in our platform:
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Social libertarianism, i.e. we don’t care what you do in your bedroom. You have all the rights and responsibilities of adults. (And point out that bans on gay marriage go against this concept; let people establish their own contracts between themselves.)
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Fiscal moderation, in that we reinstitute Paygo rules and avoid deficit addiction; I think this is the one thing that will truly bite the GOP in the ass in the near future.
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Corporate responsibility; corporations file four times as many lawsuits as individuals do, and yet the GOP wants tort reform against individuals?
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Public ownership of the common good: if we support it with our tax dollars, it is ours. National parks, health care, Social Security–these are run for the common good and private exploitation of our national resources should be forbidden.
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Nationwide health care for all. If a Pubbie shrieks, “They want government involved in health care!”, point out that it already is, or have they not heard of Medicare? Taxpayers already pay 61% of health care spending, but much of that goes through private insurers; eliminate the middleman and we could have universal coverage without raising taxes. Also, with health care costs going through the roof, corporations would leap at the chance to eliminate this expense from their bottom line. I think this could be a signature plank of the party, defining it for years. Hell, just taking a stand would be a major advance.
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Foreign policy: First, let Iraq define the debate here. By midterm elections, we’ll have a pretty good idea of how badly fucked up that arena is. Also, we’ll see how well the concept of turning our backs on international alliances is working. I have a feeling that both circumstances will play into our hands, but this isn’t the same as articulating a coherent policy. Gotta work on this.
Hello SDMB world,
After looking at the other returns… Senate, House, Governors… it seems that the Republican ideals appeal to more of the country. (If it were just the president, I can concede an argument that his personality is what won.)
I myself believe in the separation of economic and social liberalism/conservatism. I know I would vote Democrat if they kept their socal liberalism, but did a 180 degree shift on economics… away from tax-and-spend and towards smaller government and accountability.
A lot of Republicans don’t mind George Bush’s God-talk, as long as he doesn’t do anything about it. The perception is that he really hasn’t done anything about it. 
However, we’re a bit peeved that he has been spending and increasing government like a liberal… perscription drugs, Ted Kennedy education bill, measly $300 tax refund, etc. We also noticed that he did NOT emphasize these things in his campaign, and the liberals couldn’t attack them anyways.
If Democrats could honestly put forward a candidate who is more Libertarian than liberal or socialist, they would win.
It means they hate gay people, they came out to vote against the rights and dignity and humanity of gay people, and … oh,look, they can vote for the president, who hates gay people, too. Bush’s victory is built from the ruins of the rights and dignity of gay Americans.
[QUOTE=Avumede]
I think not. Your theory is compelling, but it fails to account for Congressional races, which have further increased the Republican lead. Surely every campaign can’t have these same issues, can it?
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Those wins were either coattail wins (Bunning in Kentucky) or due to gerrymandering (the Texas redistricting was supposed to produce 6-7 new Republican seats… remove that and you have a Democratic gain).
The problem is that economics has totally vanished from the political discourse, leaving the Democrats wide open to “wedge” issues like getting people to cast ballots that say “I hate gays” on a presidential election date. The Democrats need to reintroduce economics as a key issue before the electorate, and that means stop sounding and acting so much like Republicans on economic issues.
One thing that I don’t think has been addressed is the issue of leveling the playing field. The Republicans still have a big advantage over the Democrats in several key areas, such as media spin, regional districting, and e-voting machines(*). If these meta-factors aren’t addressed, the Dems will be facing an uphill battle for decades to come.
(* = I’m still wondering what the Diebold factor was in this election. I’m interested in seeing what correlation there is between projected and actual results in states with paperless e-voting machines vs. results in states without…)