I feel like because of the left-ed ness of this board, people really don’t “get it” when it comes to why Democrats lose.
Republicans run on a platform of “Make America Great!”. Get government out of people’s way so they can be successful! Make Big Business successful so they can make products Americans want and need and create jobs for them to work at! Take on those “shithole” countries using underhanded trade practices and “stealing” our jobs! Whether it’s “true” or not, it’s a message that excites people.
The Democrats run on a platform of “victimhood”. It’s all about how the wealthy, big business, White People, the police, whoever is “screwing” this group or that group. It’s not enough to tell us how crappy Trump is. Or come up with unworkable pie in the sky ideas about saving the environment.
The Democrats need to put someone out there who can get people excited about their ideas (whatever those are). I mean we are at less than 4% unemployment and haven’t had a major war or terrorist attack since Trump took office. So what do the Democrats want to change to make America “better”?
The Republican platform is all about victimhood. I mean, the first point of theirs that you pointed out is 'the government is screwing people who would otherwise be successful. Same with the ‘religious freedom’ and ‘war on Christmas’ rhetoric, the idea is that Christianity is under attack by secular humanists and queers. ‘Support our troops’ is about how ‘our troops’ are constantly being insulted by eh longhairs. ‘Blue Lives Matter’ is about how those terrible dark-skinned people don’t respect the police enough. ‘Build that wall’ is about stopping an invasion of brown people. ‘Protect traditional marriage’ is about how traditional marriage is under assault by the gays.
The Republicans campaign on ‘victimhood’ at least as much (and really far more) than Democrats do, it’s just got a very different focus on who the victims are. “Make America Great” is all about how good, honest Americans are the victims of evil liberals or dastardly homosexuals or rapin’ immigrants or big government or the like, and that once we’re in charge we’ll make them stop keeping ‘us’ down.
I think the simple answer to this is that Democrats are so divided on what they want, especially in the party. You have the establishment liberals. You have the progressives. You have the blue dogs. You have the moderates. You have the various minority groups. There is some level of overlap in what they want on some things, but not across the board. And each group thinks THEY are the voice of the party, and what the party REALLY wants/needs. And the most vocal elements are, invariably, the most radical and probably out of touch with the majority of their own party, at least in the aggregate. They are, however, convinced…and convince themselves…that this isn’t the case, and what the majority of the party REALLY wants is whatever they think it should want.
The Democrats are like cat herders…with particularly independent and stubborn cats. It’s hard to be effective when you have such a wide disparity between the various factions, and when some of those factions would rather fight to the death with each other for dominance (or take their marbles and stay home) than to compromise and get stuff done within the party. The Republicans, but contrast, have mainly eliminated or subdued at least the various factions, pretty much forcing them to walk in lock step.
That said, I’m not really convinced by the core premise of the OP, as I don’t see the Republicans as being all that effective in actually getting their plans implemented or enacted. They are just good at thwarting the Democrats, which, honestly, isn’t all that tough considering the lack of unifying message or leadership in the various warring parties of the Dems. Hell, look around this message board sometime when the various factions of Dem are fighting…they are almost more vicious against each other or even with anyone who only agrees with them partially but not in lockstep than against the actual ‘conservatives’ or few Republicans still about. You can see this very dynamic in play all the time, in thread after thread…and that’s HERE. The actual infighting in the party is SO much worse, and the Dem voters are torn between those groups and what the message is.
Another reason Republicans may tend to display more cohesive unity and lockstep is **because **they know they’re in the electoral minority. When you’ve got 12 million fewer voters than Team Blue, any disunity within your own ranks can be fatal. You either vote together in lockstep and go to the polls at a high turnout %, or else you’re screwed. This means showing more tolerance towards fellow Republicans, even if you disagree with them.
Democrats, on the other hand, know they have bigger numbers - and also that future demographics favor them - and so they may be more prone to infighting or complacency.
As per usual. Arguing is how a consensus is formed, rather than imposed. Whenever there is total unity in America, its usually that some catastrophe has befallen us. Or is just about to.
And we mustn’t forget that if the Dems ever achieve a solid lock on power, the ruthless and ambitious will start pretending to agree with us.
MY assumption (which isn’t based on anything) is that the current crop of democrats came of age during the southern realignment, Carter and Reagan, so they have a deep seated terror that any mistake will result in large numbers of people leaving the democratic party and becoming republican. What they dont’ grasp is that pretty much everyone who would realign pretty much has already. And there are enough educated women, liberals, minorities, etc to build winning coalitions without catering to resentful whites from small towns.
Plus democratic leadership tends to come from an older generation where economic inequality wasn’t that bad. They don’t really understand how bad their kids and grandkids generation has it in many ways and they are too intimidated by the rich to pass any effective laws to make the country better.
What still puzzles me is that republican politicians are terrified of their voters. Thats why GOP politicians are so loyal to Trump. They’re terrified of their voters turning on them.
But democratic politicians don’t fear their voters at all. If anything they disdain them. Democratic politicians fear so called ‘moderate republicans’ far more than their own voters. They’re far more scared of alienating moderate republicans than they are of alienating their own voters (liberals, blacks, labor, etc). Maybe this is just structural, because the democratic base are groups that society doesn’t value or respect as much. I really don’t know. But democratic politicians have far more respect and fear for GOP voters than their own voters.
It’s easier to sabotage things than it is to fix them. This is especially true in our system of government, which is designed with multiple features to prevent things from happening, but no features to make it easier to make things happen. Thus, the party whose goal is to break the government and prevent it from functioning has success, while the party whose goal is to make the government functional and accomplish good things has much less success.
You mean “lose” as in elections, not in actually running the country and making it better. Yes, Republicans are much better at getting elected than Democrats, for many of the reasons outlined above (fear-mongering, gerrymandering, stupidity of their base, trite catchphrases over complex reality). So they “lose” in some elections. The goal of the Republican party is to win elections. The goal of the Democratic Party is to run the country well and fairly.
Bullshit. That’s what the Republicans scream at their base about what Democrats run on, but it’s not reality.
Your inability to grasp what the ideas of the Democrats is shows just how out of touch with the reality of that party and its ideas.
Republicans are certainly much better at winning elections. Democrats are much better at making the world a better place for everyone. You get to decide which is better.
It’s not just the fact that Republicans received 12 million fewer votes in past elections, it’s that they know that their agenda is always going to get them 12 million fewer votes in future elections unless they can do something to shrink the opposition’s political power – hence the gerrymandering, misinformation (lying), working with a hostile foreign power, purging voter roles, and weaponizing the courts to sanction what they do by confirming ideologues. The Republican party does not want real democracy – they know that real democracy is their enemy. They want oligarchy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy. Republicans like being rich and they like being powerful, and their worldview is that those who have gold get to make the rules and everyone else can just suck it up.
This is why it’s critical to understand that political polarization is not just a consequence of the Trump administration; it’s a causal agent, a viable political strategy. By cranking up the polarization and by being as outrageous as he can possibly be toward Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, and women, it creates an extreme backlash and an extreme sense of urgency. And when moderates within the party don’t share that same sense of urgency and tell those who do that they need to calm down in public and be more strategic, it creates an environment in which friction and mistrust can occur, and that ultimately can lead to the Balkanization of the Democratic party. Polarization works. Russia has meddled in Eastern Europe before with precisely this purpose in mind. Polarization is what Hugo Chavez governed on.
The problem Democrats have is that their strength is also their diversity. If you can get the right guy, like Obama, you can get people to put away their relatively minor grievances. The Dems are united in their disgust with Trump, but ultimately, presidential politics is a lot more personal and individual than we assume, and the diversity within the Democratic party is a weakness in the sense that not everyone is suffering from the same kinds of problems. If you’re white and gay like Mayor Pete, you have different concerns than if you’re Black. And both have different concerns than many people in the Hispanic communities, who have come to fear ICE. And women, of course, have their own understandable fears and concerns in the Trump era.
Democrats do win elections. They had supermajorities in congress and the white house in 2009 and 2010. They passed a tepid version of health reform that disappointed their base.
Democrats also control the state government in a variety of blue states, and control government in most large cities.
They generally don’t do anything useful with the power the voters give them. The democrats need their own version of ALEC that can push for model legislation on the city and state level.
Labor reform, health reform, voter reform, protecting abortion rights, public financing of elections, tax reform, etc.
For the most part, democrats don’t use the power the voters give them to do much of anything. That may be slightly changing now, which is good. States like IL are starting to pass large amounts of legislation with a blue congress.
I would say that maybe 25-30% don’t want a true democracy, but instead want a democracy that is largely white christian nationalist. I mean, hey, Iran has a “democracy,” right?
A bigger problem is that maybe another 25% of the country just doesn’t care one way or the other – politics is too distant, too remote for them to be concerned with.
It’s the people who don’t care who enable the ones with authoritarian leanings.
Wish we had likes because this post deserves one. The constitution and an archaic and unrepresentative electoral system enable a dug in minority to obstruct progress for decades. We have to fix our elections as soon as Dems gain control of everything.
There’s almost nothing a democratic candidate can say/do without undergoing intense scrutiny from the party. Should Yang have implied Asians are good at math? Did Beto give his wife due credit publicly for raising their kids? Did Biden use the wrong word?
WHO. EFFING. CARES.
Meanwhile President Pussygrabber is attacking war veterans, their widows, bullying austistic 16 year-old girls, intimidating witnesses, trashing every democratic institution and virtually his entire party stands with him. That sort of commitment and unity gets them over the finish line…
Of course it’s reality. If you are black, you are a victim. If you are gay, you are a victim. If you are transgender, you are a victim. If you borrow money you can’t pay back, you are a victim. Etc.
If Democrats were better at making the world better for everyone, everyone would vote for them and they would win elections.
Democrats would be better at winning elections if they actually understood people who don’t vote for them automatically.
Dems seem to oscillate between moral outrage and condescension towards anyone that disagrees with them. “We lost the election? It must be because the electorate is stupid and racist!”
Wow. Shodan, offering no actual proof, but instead simply repeating the Republican party line. What a shocker? I may need a lie down.
Pointing out that some people are victims WHEN THEY CLEARLY ARE is certainly a part of the Democrat’s platform. Weirdly enough, people of color were victims of racism in the 60’s. Discriminatory and homophobic marriage and discrimination laws also created victims. But you know what Democrats did? Change it. Despite the best efforts of backward ass, racist conservatives and social conservatives. Meanwhile Republicans were and still are telling poor, rural, white people that THEY’RE the actual victims because “those people” want “special rights”.
While I would love to share your bright-eyed, optimistic view of the world and voters, I think history has proven for decades that people certainly don’t vote rationally.
And strawman.
Not having dealt with you in while, I’m glad for the refresher course in how inane your posts can be. Thanks for that reminder.
Now, that was pretty slick! Nice segue at the end, slipping deftly to the defense of the payday lending industry, who devoutly worship the miracle of compound interest.