There are two big problems with this reasoning:
It’s arrogant to imagine that your party obviously is better for the average American. Voting patterns seem to confirm that the poor do vote Democrat, but once people start paying income taxes, they vote Republican by a large margin.
There is more to a person’s civic responsibility than base self-interest.
What? Practically everyone who has a party of choice thinks that.
Or at least, says it.
Not really. Republicans don’t argue that it’s in voters’ self interest to vote for them, they appeal to values.
Democrats make motions in this direction, such as when Warren gave her much beloved speech that Obama tried to riff off of and failed, but I think they also realize that they aren’t going to turn out voters on the reality of how the government spends their money. That shtick only worked before the realities of big government became known to all.
Not to mention Democrats simply don’t respect taxpayers. They allow waste and abuse and frivolous spending without a concern in the world about it. It’s hard to get taxpayers to vote for you when you have that attitude.
I sure wish you’d provide cites or examples for claims like this.
“Tax cuts!” belongs to the first category, not the second.
First of all, everybody pays taxes. The right’s straw man is that poor don’t pay taxes, which is complete BS. The poor actually pay plenty of taxes. Sales tax, use taxes, and so on and so on …
Please, as a republican, explain why rich minorities, who pay income taxes vote for democrats. Socially conservative black and Hispanics, Upwardly mobile Asains, etc. And how about the suburban soccer moms who are more and more voting for democrats as well?
As for your second point, as a rich (relatively speaking) white, suburban, Evangelical Christian male I vote against my best interests all the time. I grew up a republican but left the GOP during the Reagan administration. I have this funny notion that when others around me do well it’s better for the society as a whole.
Until all Americans have healthcare as a right and women, gays and minorities get equal treatment under the law the Democratic Party, with all it’s faults, is better for the average American. Not necessarily the rich, white and priviledged Americans, but clearly the average Americans.
Republicans are like those around this part of Florida who live in gated communities. “If they let everybody in, how will everyone know I’m successful?”
The $500 billion in Medicare waste that was just allowed to sit out there until Democrats needed it to pay for Obamacare.
Another example is out of the Woodward book Price of Politics. Biden and Cantor had a working group that identified almost a trillion in unnecessary spending over ten years, real low hanging fruit. Pelosi and Reid insisted on revenue increases as the price for eliminating that waste. They eventually lost that argument, but wow.
Which is why I said income tax. Those other taxes pay for the services people use every day. Income taxes go to things that people tend to support less enthusiastically, mostly income transfers to other people. When half of your income tax dollar is simply being transferred to someone else, you’ll tend to not like paying income taxes all that much.
Actually, rich minorities don’t vote Democrat very reliably. They vote Democrat more than rich white people, but once those income tax dollars start getting hoovered up to provide nothing of value, people start to vote Republican regardless of race.
**At the end of the day, Hispanics tend to vote more Democratic than whites because they tend to be poorer than whites.
**
the GOP actually won wealthy Hispanics in 2002 and almost won middle class Hispanics in 2004. The key to the Hispanic vote is to make more middle class and rich Latinos and stop the importation of poor ones.
As for your second point, as a rich (relatively speaking) white, suburban, Evangelical Christian male I vote against my best interests all the time. I grew up a republican but left the GOP during the Reagan administration. I have this funny notion that when others around me do well it’s better for the society as a whole.
Until all Americans have healthcare as a right and women, gays and minorities get equal treatment under the law the Democratic Party, with all it’s faults, is better for the average American. Not necessarily the rich, white and priviledged Americans, but clearly the average Americans.
Republicans are like those around this part of Florida who live in gated communities. “If they let everybody in, how will everyone know I’m successful?”
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This post has made me see you in a new light.
So Democrats made the proposal to eliminate the waste and Republicans voted against the proposal.
And you offer this as evidence that the Republicans are the party fighting government waste?
The problem is too many Republicans define their self-interest as a value.
When a man defends a woman’s right to have an abortion, where’s the self-interest in that? When a straight person defends the rights of a gay couple to get married, where’s the self-interest? When a person born in this country defends immigrants, where’s the self-interest? When a white person attacks racism against blacks and hispanics, where’s the self-interest?
And to reduce the deficit. Can’t do that without revenue increases, you know. Can’t do it by eliminating waste. The waste is there and can be reduced. But, proposing to eliminate the deficit by eliminating waste is like proposing to solve the energy crisis by eliminating friction.
The waste has been eliminated. The sequester forced every agency to make cuts, although some may have kept waste and cut meat in order to make the cuts hurt more. All the more reason for Congress to be aggressive in taming the beast. The Congressional democratic leadership wanted to hold onto that waste to get tax hikes out of it. Democrats find waste useful. Pays for new programs like Obamacare or can be used as political chips. Get something real in exchange for something that should have been done without conditions.
So? That’s how politics is supposed to work. Let’s say that Republicans want to cut government spending and Democrats want to increase government revenue. The two sides are supposed to get together and make a deal - we’ll give you this much spending cuts if you give us this much increased revenue.
The Democrats are willing to make these deals. The Republicans proudly brag that they aren’t - they want to get what they want without giving anything in exchange. And the result is they get nothing - and they complain it’s all the Democrats’ fault.
The Republicans need to stop acting like spoiled children whining because Mommy won’t give them some candy at the checkout line. Hey, you want your candy? There’s the price tag. Now decide if you want to pay for it. Stop expecting people to give you things just because you want them.
The Democratic Party as we know it is done. It is hollow.
The GOP have lost all their statecraft, but that is because they are all politics now. They *cannot *lose overall. The Democrats barely have any statecraft, and their politics is just desperately trying to delay the inevitable; they cannot win overall, and they don’t even see it, even as they concede one state after another to the GOP for the foreseeable future.
The demographic tide that will save the party of Bill and Hillary is a fantasy. And really, the party of Bill and Hillary is not the party we need.
[del]The only hope I have is that when 80%+ of the nation are in or quite near poverty (which will–according to a cite I just read in the last hour and then lost–happen c. 2030, shortly after I’m dead, I suppose), that this will precipitate a realignment of the gringo soul in some way, and socialism will be viable.* More likely, *the USA will revert to its traditional stance of naked white supremacism, and my sweet young white cousins will encourage their children to eat darkies for meat.
Yes, I am saying that the Democratic Party sucks so hard and is so purblind that they will fail to win Congress back in the next generation, and that I find it more likely that the right-wing will turn to mass murder and gangs of roving cannibals as a means of social control, successfully, than that I will ever live to see them defeated. The Democrats lost their chance for future relevance in 2010. They are over.[/del]
Grr, this is not the cite I am looking for: http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/07/29/80-percent-of-americans-near-poverty-as-obama-laments-less-mobile-society/
[del]Democracy is joke. A failure. A bad surprise. Racist fanaticism and ruthlessness can trump it and trample it.[/del]
Sorry, got off the rails there.
Seriously, though, the Democratic Party is mostly incompetent politically and only moderately competent in office, and which means they lose even when the GOP are completely incompetent politically. In electoral politics, being mediocre at your job does not enable you to beat someone who can’t do your job at all.
This is why someone like Anthony Weiner is so important to the Democrats. He has very little statecraft, and is a compulsion-driven screw-up in significant ways, but he’s got political chops as a populist, which most Democrats, wanting to pretend* (pretend)* they are simple, dry, technocrats, don’t have at all.
The reason Republicans don’t make those deals anymore is because the spending cuts are future cuts and the tax increases are right now. And the future spending cuts are dependent on Republicans having enough power to ensure they remain. Democrats are already trying to simply spend more than the sequester allows, they can’t be trusted.
So says the one that told us that “starve the beast” was not a good idea for the Republicans to rely on.
So, you’re saying the Democratic Party needs to be more populist? Of course, that would have to mean left-populist specifically – hating Wall Street like Pat Buchanan does, but for somewhat different reasons and offering entirely different alternatives. It has been a long time since left-populism has gotten any on-the-ground traction in America. Which does not mean it’s impossible, it might just mean it’s about time. The most prominent recent expression of left-populism was OWS, which was characterized by being fed up with the status quo without having any clear alternatives to offer. I think the Dems need to fix that last part before they can make any use of left-populism; and I wonder if they have enough imagination to do that, any more. Unless they start listening to the Socialists.
I don’t think that the Democrats can pull this off as well as the Republicans. It is the nature of the left to take a more nuanced and tolerant view of the world. Less us vs them and more why can’t we all get along. As a result extreme rhetoric saying Romney is the anti-christ, a fascist who has concrete plans to make concentration camps for the poor, and enforce laws requiring polygamy for his Mormon masters, would likely just turn off the democratic base, rather than energizing it the way calling Obama a socialist Kenyan anti-christ Muslim who is creating Fema camps does the Republican base. That’s why Maddow will never be quite a vicious as Limbaugh or Beck.
The left may have its best chance in forming a populist movement by using greedy plutocrats as a boogeyman in the same way that conservatives have used government. The OWS movement started in that direction, but then fizzled when they didn’t have the organization to take it further. Obama has to some extent put his rhetoric in this direction but it hasn’t become a major platform the way anti-government has on the left. The problem is that attacking the rich is going to hurt your fundraising.
I do agree with others that state the the Dem’s need to focus more money on local races. That was one of the key steps in Rove’s quest for a Permanent Republican majority. It might also be interesting to have a Democratic version of ALEC