The Democrats built a great coalition for winning the White House, and it may prove to be quite durable. What this last round of midterms taught us, however, is that our presidential coalition will simply not work on the local level, and that the party is going to have to change.
I’m already finding myself outside of the progressive consensus on how the party should change, but I’m definitely more in their camp than any other.
I have a feeling that talking about this is going to be my project for the next year or so.
I’ve barely begun the linked article, and this caught my eye: “”The debate will ultimately play out in a battle for the soul of the Clinton campaign,” said Matt Bennett, a senior official at Third Way, the centrist political group.”
Shouldn’t Third Way be referred to as the center-right arm of the Republican party? Didn’t they endorse Cory Gardner for fck sake?
Oops. Comment attached to the wrong post. Sitll, Third Way is centrist?
No, right post. Sheesh. I guess I need more coffee.
I came to post the EXACT moment. I was reading the article, got there, stopped, and came back lol.
“The debate will ultimately play out in a battle for the soul of the Clinton campaign,” said Matt Bennett, a senior official at Third Way, the centrist political group.”
Heh, my take is that 2014 election was a referendum on the “soul” of the Clinton campaign.” Democratic candidates aligned with the Clinton “third way” — letting the media define Obama as a leftist when his policies and actions are barely distinguishable from Bill Clinton’s and in many ways not so different from GWB’s — then ran on “I will find the sweet spot between Obama and McConnell/Boehner.” When they couldn’t find anything other than blank space between those two positions, the Clintons helicoptered in to rescue their campaigns.
That’s what I not too explicitly pointed out in Running from Obama into the Arms of … The underlying assumption was that the Clintons are really as popular as public opinion polls indicate. That by locking arms with Bill and/or Hill in campaign appearances and photos, voters would be inspired and eager to show up and vote for their friends. What happened to Warner in VA who is already known to be a close Clinton ally and therefore, didn’t need their services for his election? (Will put their “scorecards” in a comment to that diary.)
Burke in WI followed the “third way” script and Bill Clinton rewarded her with his presence on the stump:
And enough with all the Democratic “legacy” candidates.
As facts are rarely complete, it’s important to combine those that confirm or deny beliefs/assumptions/etc.
Democratic CW is that in 2000 Al Gore was either stupid or a liar. The lament (because Gore must be stupid) was “why didn’t he use Clinton in his campaign?” because Clinton is so awesome. (Recall the Hillary was busy competing with Gore for campaign funds and running her own campaign in NY.) Gore explained why a long time ago — when Clinton appeared with him at campaign rallies, Gore’s poll numbers dropped in that location/region. The combination of 1) the MSM trashing him from day one, 2) a high percentage of voters thinking GWB was GHWB, and 3) being associated with Clinton caused his poll numbers to lag those of GWB from early in the campaign until the Democratic convention. He couldn’t do much about #1 and #2 became clearer as the election got closer (although due to accepting federal matching fund for the primary, his campaign had to go dark when he secured the nomination and before the convention while team GWB was able to stay in campaign mode hobbled his campaign). It was only #3 that he could try to mitigate. And recall that GWB was running on “restoring dignity to the WH” which was a direct attack on Clinton.
He couldn’t even do much about Clinton hogging time at the convention as if he was his coronation. All he could do at that point was give the speech of his lifetime and he delivered. (He did screw up with one of the suckiest VP nominees, but in real time, it wasn’t at all clear that Lieberman was horrible. Although, it may have cost him WV.)
Democrats also refuse to acknowledge that Clinton did stump for Gore in AR. The one place where he might have been helpful and wasn’t likely to hurt Gore too much.
“letting the media define Obama as a leftist when his policies and actions are barely distinguishable from Bill Clinton’s and in many ways not so different from GWB’s”
Wow, you are something else again.
Why don’t you detail the differences (on a left-right economic and MIC basis) instead of hurling an ad hominem?
Clinton: NAFTA; Obama: TPP (aka NAFTA on steriods)
Clinton: Rubinomics; capital gains tax reduction; Obama: Simpson-Bowles, Grand Bargain
GWB: tax cuts; Obama: partial extension of Bush tax cuts
GWB: NSA increased empowerment and spying on USians; Obama: more NSA empowerment and spying
GWB: some drone strikes; Obama: many more drone strikes.
GWB: bomb Afghanistan; Obama: more troops and more bombing of Afghanistan.
That’s just a few things off the top of my head; the full list is much longer.
Defend Obama as a much more decent man than Clinton and GWB if you want (and wouldn’t disagree with that), but on a policy level, he’s not much different if you bother to look at those pesky facts.
Yup, you are something else again. This is why I usually just read Booman and skip through the comments because this list is just completely devoid of any context that gives it any kind of usefulness.
Even when I agree with your analysis of particular policies, I don’t get the sense you even care about how you would actually achieve them.
Still can’t make come up with facts and arguments to justify your ad hominem — just double down on it?
I don’t get the sense you even care about how you would actually achieve them.
Sure, skip comments and diaries and just go with your “sense” that I don’t “even care” about achievements. Rightly or wrongly, I give everyone here the benefit of doubt that we all care about achievements. Differ on what what matters need to come first, second, etc. And differ on what strategies and tactics to use to accomplish goals given the huge range of political realities and impediments.
I even highlighted one House race that made effective use of twitter to re-elect the Democrat in a not so favorable district. Not that you or many here noticed it.
If I said to you that that there is not much difference in the policies of Bernie Sanders and GWB and used the example that Sanders voted to keep GTMO open (denying funding for transport, etc) wouldn’t you find that simplistic?
The means by which you want to make the comparisons is not useful, accurate, or fair.
Now you’re being ridiculous. Find some legislation that GWB supported that Bernie, as a member of the House or Senate, went along when the Progressive caucus didn’t. I don’t know what Sanders’ reasoning was to deny funds for closing GITMO and probably wouldn’t agree with it. But I’ve never claimed that Sanders is perfect and have disagreed with him on occasion, in particular I-P. There, I gave you a second issue on which Sanders isn’t that far from GWB. Still doesn’t make those two much alike.
I presented a list of large issues/policies — not single votes on specific legislation which not infrequently contain deal-breakers for more independent minded politicians. Should we compare the similarity between GWB and Obama on the banks and GM bailouts? I’ll let one slide, but the the fact that he kept Bernanke, appointed Geithner, and didn’t direct the Justice Dept and SEC to go after the crooks. Just like GWB.
your list is so reductive as to be meaningless. simpson-bowles grand bargain? Obama enacted that? how about Bush got us into an expensive war of choice/ Obama got us into an expensive war of choice [?]
So, you’re saying if that stuff had landed on Obama’s desk, he wouldn’t have signed it?
How much additional treasure, blood, destruction was squandered in Obama’s “smart war” in Afghanistan? What was accomplished? The Libyan and Syrian policies weren’t free and the people in those countries have paid a huge price for worse than what they had before. Oh, and now US troops and more covert training activities are being done in Iraq and Syria.
Ordinary people that have continued to see their real incomes decline (and decent paying jobs still hard to find) while the richer keep getting richer aren’t cheering for this situation. As their choices are limited to D or R, they go with the one not in power when they are dissatisfied.
Yes, I agree with your last paragraph, though some of the candidates the DSCC did not support really appealed to voters on that issue (Rick Weiland, for example) and would have made a difference had they been elected- the problem with DSCC and dem party that we discuss on this site.
Re: your other points:
There is a tremendous difference between starting wars of choice that enrich looter cronies, and trying to end said wars after inheriting both the starting and years of mismanagement of them. The difference outweighs the fact that both Bush and Obama admins have been managing/ or mismanaging the wars.
The MIC has done also done well under Obama.
I really like Rick Weiland and thought his campaign videos/ads were first rate. All positive and a regular guy that would work for ordinary folks. Alas, apparently all those white rural folks in SD prefer a city slicker that will work for the 1%.
Raul Ruiz found was able to win re-election in a traditionally Republican district in an ad that highlighted his humbleness as a “public servant.” Tough to do if it’s not legitimate and one is wealthy and/or a legacy office holder or seeker.
Rick is impressive, hope he runs again. Rick’s campaign had no money, it was a problem with visibility. don’t write off rural voters. my guess is it’s probably not the rural voters had they had more info about Rick – keep in mind SD didn’t have much of a recession because it’s an ag based state. the dirt is just continuing to come out on his opponent’s scams. maybe dataguy will weigh in on this.
Weiland had enough money. He ran plenty of ads. He is a D, and the D brand does not sell in red turf at this time.
did you see that the Sioux are objecting to Congress making agreements w foreign nations (Canada’s XL) that cross rez land? also, didn’t they succeed in renaming Shannon County?
there are Obama looter cronies, for example?
oh and Simpson Bowles – that has been discussed ad infinitum on this site. forming a commission to study something – isn’t that sop for not actually acting on something? and Obama has reduced the deficit nevertheless.
If throwing seven billion dollars into the economy, mostly to the banksters, MIC/NSA/HSA, medical industrial complex didn’t reduce the deficit, then we would be in really big trouble. OTOH, I think that a focus on the deficit is a poor measure of how to evaluate the government funding/spending. It masks the fact that for over thirty years we’ve been collecting huge amounts of surplus Social Security dollars and spent that surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy and a bloated military.
If we’d run up $7 billion in additional national debt in the past six years to upgrade the US electrical grid and significantly reduced the lost electrical production, significantly increased renewal energy production, upgraded/built major public transportation and water systems, assisted broke/dying towns/cities in clearing blight, etc., a lot of jobs would have been created and we would have made major steps in reducing CO2 emissions.
yes, I agree.
If the power structure moves to the right, we simply become an even weaker alternative to the GOP than we were in the Midterms. If Dems don’t stand for a fair deal for workers, protecting (what is left of the) environment, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, and keeping a reign on Wall Street, in my view it would be time to disband the party and start over. Right now in mid November 2014, I like Elizabeth Warren a lot, Hilary….not so much.
Yesterday I ran into a local restaurant owner who told me she begged the twenty-somethings who work for her to go vote. Despite having early voting available for a month before the election just a few minutes away from both restaurants, none of her workers bothered. Well, what did the Dems lay out there for them to be excited about? Lucy yanked the hope and change football away again, so why make the effort?
Our GOTV effort was also hampered by the great number of voters who have switched to cell phones and dropped their old land lines. Got lots of “no longer in service” recordings.
I found the same thing phone banking here for the Nunn campaign. One of the reasons that I defaulted to in person canvassing. The rewards were greater. What are campaigns going to do about updating phone records for their constituents?
Plus, how does one motivate voters who aren’t clued in so much about the issues and don’t realize that voting every two years is mandatory for things to move forward and not backwards. I had a couple tell me that don’t vote except in Presidential elections.
Today’s NY Times newsletter email doesn’t help us with our brand (nor the comments, as the ACA is excoriated from the left and the right with almost equal venom!
IMO, phone banking is only effective for people who have already been contacted by in-person canvassing and who have already committed to vote and then only for reminding them of their commitment to vote, the date, the place, and the time, and thanking again for support.
I think that trying to cold call voters into the voting booth is likely self-defeating. Even if they are previous voters for Democratic candidates.
Absolutely, those voters have been inundated with (supposed) pollers and robocalls that they are not going to take kindly to being called during dinner, in the shower, diapering the baby, etc.
Walk the neighborhood. There is no substitute. “I’m your neighbor from four blocks over” is a great introduction. While stumping for our candidate with my 12 year old grandson, when one lady answered her door, he responded with, “Hi! You’re Jimmy’s Mom aren’t you? I’ve seen you at the bus stop.” Her face lit up and he followed through with, “I’d like to give you this brochure that explains our candidates position on women’s issues.” Priceless.
yes, in person door to door. and very rewarding – I met some great people, and many people who wanted to talk about, or even just vent about, the issues. I guess that’s one reason although I’m very upset about the outcome, I feel good about the candidates I worked for, about their appeal to voters and about the voters. I think good candidates that appeal to voters is key, at the same time voter suppression must be reversed/ stopped.
There is no Democratic road to the White House anymore, and anyone who continues to believe this bullshit is an idiot. WI is a very red purple. Feingold’s loss was just the foretaste of what has happened. MI, PA, and even IL are now highly dubious as “blue” states. IL in particular is going to be interesting. The pension crisis in IL is terrible. If the costs of funding the pensions are returned to local districts, which I expect, you will see such an outcry that you will be shocked. Real estate taxes in IL are already outrageous. If the pension crisis is foisted upon the local school districts, they may double. That would bring the whole “destroy the unions” thing to IL. OR voted to eliminate drivers licensing for illegals, and I expect to see that in other states. I will contribute to such campaigns. The promotion of illegals by the Democratic Party are making the Party into a RICO-level conspiracy to violate the law, in which many politicians top to bottom conspire to condone law-breaking, and support illegal behavior. This is not acceptable.
So, this bullshit “coalition” has not validity at this time. Better rethink, because while you are rethinking, PA and OH are moving the EV to the congressional district level, and when that happens, the R ability to capture the presidency going forward is very strong.
At present, I consider only NY, VT, CA, MA, MN, and WA reliable and dependable states. The rest are up in the air.
Of course, if you start to think about what the Dems could possibly do to lose California, one possibility would be that they start pandering to nativists. Especially in a presidential race. If, hypothetically, there was a Democratic nominee trying to make inroads with white voters by bashing on “illegals,” and a Republican nominee who went around saying nice things about Latinos, that could flip the state’s electoral votes to the Republican. You never know.
Yeah, bullshit on that. OR had a referendum on drivers licenses by illegals, and the “no license” side won 2:1.
2:1.
In OR.
This bullshit about the support for illegals is getting old. AR – Cotton ran against illegals, won. CO – Gardner ditto. We lost AZ-1, we lost district after district where illegals were an important issue.
The American people are waking up to the bullshit about Democratic Party support for illegals. I call it a RICO-level conspiracy to condone, assist, and excuse illegal activity. It’s wrong.
NY and MA are slipping.
Obama won WI by 8 points. I guess I’m an idiot, then. MI, IL, PA, and WI are not in play. Every year PA is “in play and a battleground” only to see it not be in play whatsoever.
Maybe you should start a new branch of the “Know Nothing” party?
You are simply not paying attention. WI went to Walker now twice. Doesn’t that trouble you? MI re-elected Snyder easily. Doesn’t that trouble you? IL elected an R gov, and my comments about the pension crisis had better be considered. Walker used pensions in WI to sway moderates to his side. This is going to happen in IL. A strong campaign about pensions and greedy teachers (all false, I know) will sway moderates to the R side.
Mindlessly chanting “We own the future” and “We are inevitable. Just wait until we actually vote” is not a campaign, it’s bullshit.
MI also elected a Democratic Senator in a Republican wave year. As did IL with Dick Durbin, while admittedly he had the benefit of being an incumbent, won by 10%. Walker squeaks by in a wave election, and that’s showing us that WI is in play? Feingold barely lost — again, in a wave year — by only 5 points.
Obama won IL…by 17.
The only states in the region that are up for grabs in presidential years is Ohio and Iowa. Meanwhile, VA is marching towards “lean Dem” in presidential elections, and NC is swing.
Presidential elections are going to mean little if you consistently lose one or both houses of Congress.
He was implying that there was no presidential firewall. I begged to differ. What you’re arguing is not the same thing.
How many GOP governors has Massachusetts had? By your logic, Democrats better count that one as unreliable too.
And the other point: What about the “EV to congressional district” movement in OH and PA? This is already in place in ME and NE. There is nothing to stop it from happening in OH and PA, although the D gov of PA will slow it down. OH, however – any thoughts about that?
It’s not going to happen. There was brief flirting with it in 2012, didn’t happen. Maine is Maine…the weirdest state in the country.
I admire your confidence, but do not agree. OH is a different state than PA. PA now has a D gov. OH does not, and the S of S is a lunatic wack-job. You’re gonna hear a lot of stuff out of OH.
I admit they might get desperate later — when they realize they cannot win the WH and the court begins to be reshaped the way FDR was able to shape it. It might start happening in 2018 and 2020. They’ve not reached that point yet.
Here’s my prediction: You will see this early in 2015. This is gonna be floated in OH at that point, and there will be a huge push. Will it pass? Dunno
Let’s rediscuss in April. That’s when we will know.
Who the heck was in charge of vetting Fitzgerald? That was a loss that was completely avoidable. The guy was handsome, smart, well spoken, something out of central casting even but c’mon. That was political malpractice not to fully examine every facet of his life.
OH D party did a shit shit job.
I don’t think we need to extrapolate doom and gloom for Democrats in Ohio based on really obvious political malpractice.
Didn’t the lieutenant gov. candidate have tax evasion problems, too?
This is just basic, basic stuff.
you are correct about the vetting. nobody was doing anything remotely close to actual vetting.
Quinn lost because of the Blago association.
When Chicago turns out, Illinois remains Blue.
If, if, if… blah, blah, blah. Seriously, why did Rauner win? He won because of the income tax increase. And just wait until the pension crisis comes home to roost. Whoo-boy, you ain’t seen nothin’.
Rauner won because Chicago didn’t turn out.
Quinn forgot who pulled him over last time- Chicago.
Picking Paul Vallas was a loser move. SHould have chosen a Black female running mate and let her loose in Chicago and the Southern Suburbs.
The Dems still have a veto-proof majorities in the House and Senate. Michael Madigan is still the most powerful politician in Illinois.
I agree for the moment. I continue to be concerned about the pension crisis. IL is #1 in all state of unfunded obligation. If those obligations are returned to the local school boards, what will happen then? I will tell you – Republicans will begin a fierce and unrelenting drumbeat about greedy teachers. That’s the road to WI.
If they have veto-proof majorities, they could tax the corporations and the rich to fund the pensions payouts and rebuild the fund, like they should have all along.
They could also investigate whether they had been sold fraudulent investment vehicles that delivered poor performance while enriching Wall Street.
Aggressive action on both of those puts Rauner on the defensive structurally. They could also begin to solve the pension issue. And they could claw back some of the money that Rahm is shoveling to corporations.
Another tack would be to end the economic development bribes and slush fund that most governors have.
One reason that Rauner won was due to a temporary tax increase designed to solve some of the problems with the pension situation. There have been special sessions.
It is a threat to D status in IL. Mark my words.
Likely the tax increase went on the middle class and the government employees hate the Dems for wanting to split the difference. Amirite?
maybe you should stick to SD politics
In the same election Durbin smoked his opponent, the main reason that Quinn lost was because he’s an awful politician not because of anything he did
Since I grew up in Arlington Heights, went to UI-UC, lived in Belleville from 1997-2009, sent two kids to UI-UC and one to Bradley, I have well-formed opinions about IL politics. I have deep roots in the state.
A glance at the 2000 map at the county level shows that there can be no coalition.
It is the cities versus everybody else and the cities are being hollowed out.
Urban and rural civilizations have NOTHING in common and cannot be ruled under a common structure of law.
The framers of the Constitution dealt with this by implicitly subordinating the cities. We, today, deal with it by weakening the structure of law.
PVI is not destiny. That was 14 years ago. What someone needs to do is an atlas of the 192,480 precincts.
Urban and rural are the same civilization. They are mutually dependent no matter how much they are blind to that fact. They require the same structure of law. All of the jockeying has to do with one trying to take advantage of the other.
The framers of the Constitution subordinated large states, which is not the same as subordinating cities. It also subordinated free states until 1866.
The same trends that make the Progressive coalition dominant at the Presidential level will make it dominant at the Local, the Senate, and then the Congressional level…in that order… it will just take a little longer because of how the votes are distributed. 2020-24 should do it.
Change takes time and this is a big change, because it is the death of one of the organizing principles of American politics: white supremacy.
Did you attend to the last election?
Death throes. Most white folks are not conscious of their attitudes of privilege and the fact there are billions of dollars of money propping up institutions to keep those attitudes in being. When they figure out that they are being manipulated, they generally are not happy and begin to be more open to change.
And South Dakota is notorious for some of its institutional racism against Native Americans. It might not be true now but in the 1970s, the classic symbol of this institutionalization was in Mission SD. The city was white controlled, owned a liquor store, and the liquor store was next door to the jail. Both were across the street from the store operated by Congressman James Abourezkh’s parents.
Also, beginning in the 1970s, the US government under settlements of treaty lawsuits began providing funds for tribes to purchase back property lost from reservations as a result of the Dawes Act. That use of “their” tax money did not go down with a lot of the white residents nearby who inherited land essentially purchased through fraud from Indians who had received it under the Dawes Act.
The unspoken white guilt about treatment of Indians is strong in South Dakota, just like the unspoken white guilt over slavery is strong in the South. With token actions like the election of Tim Scott, white Southerners are moving toward being able to confront the unspoken.
The healing power for Dr. Martin Luther King was his strong call to face the truth and then move beyond it. That is why he received support from young white ministers. It is also why white men in power conspired to kill him. It is why a growing number of white Southerners are progressives, especially younger ones.
But white privilege is a mindset that has become very expensive for the actually privileged to keep in being. Especially for white people who do not materially benefit from their supposed cultural superiority. And even the propaganda machine has become monstrously expensive. When people notice how much politicians spent on getting re-elected compared to the response to the ebola outbreak in West Africa, many are appalled.
WHY is Third Way commenting on the Clinton Campaign. Muthaphuckas didn’t endorce any Democrats. They are NOT Independents;..They are REPUBLICANS running a scam.
Geesh.
As for the local level.
Democratic Party Ideas WON in red states.
Need to find the candidates that will stand up for them.
If they keep on recruiting squishy muthaphuckas that won’t stand up for what’s right…
then, we will continue to get the results that we got.
And, no, that does NOT mean that they have to continue to coddle working White folks.
Nope.
Well said.
Why do I get so impatient when I read about “Democratic ideas”. Voters do NOT VOTE ON IDEAS. They only bring in policy when both parties are considered equally legit. And right now, they are not both considered legit in rural turfs.
When I ran for state senate (and I am far from an ideal candidate, not being from SD, etc), I ran when there was a strong issue – an unpopular education issue was on the ballot. I thought “People will oppose this. Thus, they will support me.” Wrong. They opposed the issue. They did not do the logical thing and support me. People can easily separate issues and candidates.
You won’t get pushback from me on this point. I make the same point over and over, and lot of commenters don’t want to hear it (or they lie, like saying single payer has majority support by cherry picking polls).
My mom supports higher minimum wage, paid maternal leave and vacation, no cuts to SS and Medicare. She also then complains that Obamacare is going to kill jobs by…increasing the cost to hire (hello? you support higher min wage), and loves Paul Ryan.
Single issues only matter when they’re on the ballot. Until then, brand is everything.
She also supports no cuts to the military, and then complains she gets nothing for her tax dollars. Hmmm…try adding two and two together? No? Ok then.
how come after the GOP loses, we don’t see shyt articles like this?
Guess who owns the media?
who you telling?
The link goes to the New York Times.
BooMan’s context is pretty non-committal.
BooMan’s point is that the Obama coalition did not become the Quinn coalition and is likely not to become the Rahm coalition. And that the Democratic (mostly white) leadership needs to examine why that might be.
RAHM coalition?
he’s down to single digits with Black people
and in the teens with Latinos
what coalition?
BooMan’s point about Presidential coalition translating to local coalition. Says more about Rahm than about Obama, doesn’t it.
Guess who the Democratic Party establishment is most like? They can’t even run a credible massive GOTV campaign and win.
The GOP owns booman tribune?
C’mon now.
Let’s start from this observation. The Democratic Party Presidential coalition does not work on the local level because the DC consultants have allowed the presence of local Democrats to wither. Over a decade of blogging, this is the issue I have railed at more than any other: when you write off political geography, the people who live there (and might agree with you ideologically) write you off. The excuse for over a decade has been the allocation of resources argument–from big spending consultants. What Howard Dean’s 50 state initiative was about was putting a Democratic presence in each of the 50 states. President Obama’s 2008 results benefited from that approach. The Democratic Party does not organizationally involve the ideological allies that it has.
The Democratic Party allowed the Republicans to totally capture the media without an effective answer. That train has left the station. Democrats and progressives must develop a strategy that does not require subsidizing the Republican-owned media with a half-billion dollars. The free media coverage hyping ISIS and ebola and ignoring substantial campaign issues was not accidental and was not the result of poor Democratic message management. Democrats have allowed their progressive elected officials to be excluded from the media conversation because it is convenient to the neoliberal wing of the caucus. That also forces the neoliberal wing rightward enough to make them vulnerable to Republicans. Plus, there is no political debate at all; it is all phony issues, never politics. In that, Democrats ceded but the medium and the frame of the message being discussed. And it opened up the Republican right-wing to media legitimation as the other side of the argument. You don’t need to accept progressive ideas to understand that silencing them does not improve policies.
The Democrats allowed Republicans to frame movements for economic and political justice for everyone as “identity movements”. And then those movements reduced themselves over a couple of decades to identity movement. The 1960s civil rights movement framed itself as for freedom, justice, equality, peace, and an end to poverty. For everyone. Pragmatically. And pragmatically, the movement ran into all sorts of traditional privilege and into class conflict, if not class war. And the internal divisions provided the weakness for the establishment to win its view in 1968 and 1972 and begin the counter-movement thereafter. Those privileges persist in the Democratic Party today and divided the Democratic caucus against itself in a catastrophic way. The white men’s club still holds sway in the Democratic establishment in DC and most states. And among rank-and-file Democrats. And most tragic of all among rank-and-file union members.
Between 1964 and 1968, the Republican Party decided that the US political system should be a de facto ideological quasi-parliamentary one instead of a pragmatic battle of coalitions of interests. And using the conservative deconstruction of how the Communist Party created tight ideological discipline, a key success factor in the Communist Party in their opinion out of fear, they created the same structure of front groups, propaganda operations, and political accountability organizations to ensure that no conservative Republican strayed too far from real conservatism and real Americanism. And to ensure that their message dominated society. Democrats continued in their big tent pragmatism. You can see their parliamentary expectations in the discipline of obstruction and the assumption that of course Obama should resign after their Congressional victories. The US system doesn’t work that way.
Had in 1969 or 1972, the Democratic Party taken the ideological challenge seriously and forcefully argued the logic of infrastructure (not big government, for chrissakes) and equality for all, we might have that strong ideologically contentious system that both progressives and conservative claim to have wanted. But that assumed that both parties were popular mass parties deriving their power and ideas from the grassroots. As it turns out, neither party was. And the grassroots shrank and shrank in their interest in politics.
Maybe it is time to rebuild from the grassroots and not strive so much for ideological clarity and purity but a vision of a world and an America that actually functions on behalf of people. That delivers socially on its guarantees of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness and the principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights without arguing about these principles themselves. Because those principles are not an end in themselves, like Second Amendment fundamentalism as become, but a means to humane existence.
That means that the agenda and platform essentially is freedom, justice, peace, and infrastructure. For everyone. And the Democratic Party needs to have a serious conversation about how what it advocates as policy as a practical matter moves to support these. And across the blogosphere.
And if that is not the direction the Democratic Party is heading but becoming more pro-business, pro-military, and retreating from accountability for increasing freedom, equality, peace, and infrastructure, there are a lot of people who will be either looking for alternatives or will sit out coming elections. The horse race might draw them in 2016, but in 2018, the turnout might be even lower.
Employees cannot yet muster the courage to say that their employer is exploiting them unmercifully although that is true from retail to academia and from IT contracting to health care. If no politician starts saying it, people will continue to suffer in job-scared silence and continue to vote Republican (and say so at work) or be silent and not vote at all.
By far the biggest challenge facing those who are not conservatives and not Republicans is breaking the totalitarian grip of conversations in red states. People who are not conservative Republicans are afraid to speak up because of economic retaliation, family conflict, or physical danger. The toleration and encouragement of political intimidation has made Republican politicians powerful and conservative media figures wealthy with tropes of killing libruls, but there are too many hotheads now willing to act this drama out and they are far away from all being in the South.
You haven’t paid a lot of attention to local races. In red states like SD, you can run a lot of D candidates locally. They run and they don’t win. My friends ran for State S and R, and lost badly. Candidates with lots of experience, good ideas, appeal across the board. In my district, D candidate was the former mayor of a town, and he got his butt kicked by a receptionist at a chiropractor who is honestly the stupidest woman I have ever met.
The problem is partly local candidates. But more fundamentally the D brand is badly damaged at this time. We cannot win in rural turfs. And rural turfs are everywhere. Gerrymandering works BECAUSE the R brand OWNS the rural areas. Until we figure out how to appeal again to the rural areas, we are in a world of hurt.
And you haven’t paid any attention to anything THD is saying. You’re describing effects, after the fact. THD has described very well and in great detail the causes that have led to those effects.
I believed Clinton was making the infrastructure argument in 1992 (not spending but investment) and got excited over it, and I’m sure Obama was doing it in 2008, but it always gets diluted as it trickles down. The big media would rather talk gossip than policy, of course.
Maybe we should all be more involved in storytelling as well, like Oprah but more politically pointed. About health insurance and employer abuse, immigrants who “play by the rules”, veterans abandoned by the cheapskate system, heedless rich dicks, etc.
And make the point somehow that state and federal legislatures do things that affect everybody. Every year divisible by four the voters come out, because they know something important is happening, and then two years later they stay home because nothing they hear strikes them as important enough.
Carter made the infrastructure argument late in the 1980 campaign such as his campaign was. Clinton also made it in 1992 — $3 trillion in new national debt since 1980 and we didn’t build a damn thing. Then promptly forgot about it as Rubin et.al. took over his economic policy agenda. In The Roaring Nineties, Josef Stiglitz details why this was a major lost opportunity for the nation.
“By far the biggest challenge facing those who are not conservatives and not Republicans is breaking the totalitarian grip of conversations in red states. People who are not conservative Republicans are afraid to speak up because of economic retaliation, family conflict, or physical danger.”
I can relate to that living in a red and conservative area. In the locker room at the local YMCA, where all the loud mouths come to speak their minds, I heard this fella say something ‘nice’ about Obama. Big mistake. I doubt he will ever make that mistake again. There is simply no tolerance for that. I worked in an office environment for much of my career, and needless to say, management was very conservative and republican. Best to keep your mouth shut. And I was in management.
In the 1950s and 1960s in the South, Republicans used to have the same problem. Everyone assummed everyone was Republican.
I think it’s time for that 35% or 45% of Democrats in red states to come out of the liberal closet and let people know that there are liberals among them and that they just can utter BS and get away with it. But it will take numbers to turn a individual disaster into a social transformation. It briefly worked in the 1970s until Ronald Reagan said it was alright to be bigots again.
My question is, who builds from the grassroots? If the grassroots had power, DC consultants couldn’t allow local Dems to wither. If the Beltway Boys have power… then how does anyone make ‘it’s time to rebuild from the grassroots’ happen?
I’m also not really sure what striving not for ideological purity but for a vision of America that functions on behalf of the people really means. Functions how? For which people?
On the first question, that is the conundrum we are currently in. The Beltway establishment sucks off the money sent to the campaign committees and doesn’t help deliver victory. But they are there over and over again pitching their nostrums. And the candidates who do succeed with their advice are automatically distancing themselves from the grassroots and placed in the lobbyist bubble.
The grassroots must empower themselves, mobilize themselves and create the conditions in which they can vet candidates and then deliver the votes to the selected candidate. More importantly, it must keep the political relationships open so that local issues and solutions can be communicated both across the network and to local, state, and federal Democratic officials.
The 2012 election had about 135 million total voters over 192,480 precincts or about 700 voters per precinct on average. That’s both parties. The Democratic split for that varies, but that is an average of 245 (at 35% D) to 525 (at 75% D) people per precinct to organize on a continuing basis. If you know a source of data on the size of precincts, you can estimate the largest and smallest numbers involved here.
The sad truth is that the grassroots have to rebuild the political culture and system themselves.
Here is a vision that functions for the people at large. Return to Eisenhower taxation levels stripped of special interest deductions. Infrastructure that includes free public transportation, energy, broadband communication, water and sewer, education, health care, pension benefits, and social safety net for crises. End to business subsidies of all kinds. Reduction of military budget to $300 billion for everything. We used to take so much of this infrastructure for granted, and now we ask how it’s done. Of course, “free” means that the infrastructure is paid for collectively independent of use. And that its use depends on its quality being better than what most private providers would offer. We’ve made libraries continue to work on this basis although the austerians have forced libraries to hold book sales to supplement their purchasing budget.
Most services do tend to be better provided locally and financed nationally. Some connective services like broadband internet, high-speed rail, and electric grid (but not production) might be better provided by the federal government. And then there are ecosystem services that require federal and even global protection in order to work as infrastructure. The details of that are the ones that are going to be the most contentious.
There used to be a concept of the general public good, which was the object of public policy and expenditures. Might be good to resurrect that concept.
To what extent is it that our coalition doesn’t work on a local level and to what extent is it that we just don’t fund campaigns adequately at the local level? I read a claim recently that Grimes’ campaign alone got more money that all the Democratic states legislature campaigns put together. I haven’t checked up on it, but would our coalition desert us for state legislature elections if they knew about them and what they meant?
I call bullshit on the premise. The 2008 and 2012 Presidential coalition led by Barack Obama had huge coattails for state and local elections.
There are several issues.
Snap out of it. We know how to win elections. We have to do it — every time.
We do need white voters to win some of the time. Not necessarily the ones you’re writing off, but we do need approx 40-45% of them to have any chance at a House majority.
Isn’t the big problem with winning House seats that Republican state legislatures redistricted them to be even more challenging for Democratic candidates to win?
Partially. But if you look at the numbers, we can swing the vote enough in 2016 to take many of those gerrymandered seats. The backbone of the Republican party is the old racist whites who fought civil rights and desegregation in the 50’s and 60’s. They’re dying now, to the point that even seniors swung significantly our way from 2010 -> 2014. If we can just give the non-seniors a reason to show up and vote we’ll have a huge swing in our favor in 2016.
It’s not just old racist whites. It’s 60% of white voters. A majority of white women voted for Cuccinelli in 2013. McAuliffe didn’t win because of women. He won because of black women. Big difference. Warner wasn’t paying attention to even the last statewide election when he ran this last Senate campaign.
Yes, we have to show up and give people a reason to vote for us but we do not have to do the Clinton 2008 dog whistling lite or Republican lite crap. We will not win the people who like the dog whistling anyway and we will lose our reliable voters-as we should. And if you think your potential voters like Republican policies and will vote for them then there is no point in running. Look at the Grimes campaign to see how futile this is. No state has benefited from the ACA more than Kentucky. At least plant the seeds for future gains by talking about it.
Gerrymandering has put a strongbox on the House, yes, but with a big enough wave it can be overcome. The point is keeping your floor high, but your ceiling low.
Either way, let’s assume we do well in 2020 and control redistricting and fix stuff. We will still need around 40% white vote by then (it’s probably about 45% now).
Importantly, thought, the big issues is not race, but age cohorts. Right now we have two heavily partisan cohorts – the old people who fought against civil rights and are heavily Republican, and the young people who protested the Iraq war, who are heavily Democratic. Demographics are swinging very hard in our direction right now as that first group is dying off.
Our big issue is getting the Iraq war opponents out to vote. I actually suspect one of the main causes of our lousy turnout is Obama restarting the war in Iraq, and especially promising an open-ended war. He should have said the countries that created Daesh are responsible for cleaning up their mess, and that we aren’t in danger because he won’t ignore a warning of an attack like Bush did.
It’s 39% now–so let’s call that 40%.
And we got crushed.
36% voter participation crushed us. Running a depressing, defensive campaign does not help with turnout.
Do you think we did everything possible to encourage voter participation?
Obama won 43% of it in 2008. We need better to overcome the redistricitng in 2020. Figure…45%. Then when it’s fixed, 40% by then should be enough as the districts will be fixed and more POC will be eligible to vote with the older whites dying off.
One of the reasons I switched emails was the never-ending downpour of Democratic solicitations. I use the word “downpour” deliberately: it was nothing but gloom and doom. “Give us money, we’re losing.” So I’m supposed to back a loser?
Exactly.
We even have the capability for micro-targeting our message and we didn’t even try.
Who is “we”? That’s the weak link that BooMan is looking at.
Granted, most of the ridiculously over-messaged emails in my inbox are “blog action” campaigns or MoveOn or DFA, but I got emails from candidates who bought a mailing list from a 2006 or 2008 candidate and didn’t bother to clean it against their state.
The email overkill is why I’m arguing that impersonal mass marketing techniques within the short context of a campaign are counter-productive if there has been not personal networking relationships established. This is also true for phone-banking except as a reminder. But not as true for face-to-face canvassing in which the canvasser can build a short-term personal relationship of collegiality.
The people who did micro targeting and digital for the Obama campaign are not phantoms. They have names and contact information. I would encourage you to find out why they were not consulted. It isn’t because they were not available.
Exactly my point. But why does that information have to be recreated from scratch every campaign if the party has infrastructure? As best I can tell the party functionaries at the state and local level deliver little of value to candidates or voters, are jealous of their power, and seek to monetize their contacts and position at the earliest opportunity. This leads to conservatism (of the stick-in-the-mud kind), corruption, and lost campaigns. North Carolina counties have shed Democratic Party organizations through that deterioration and finally lost the state as well. Don Fowler in South Carolina ran the state party into the ground there and his wife followed as state executive drove it to the embarrassing Al Greene for Senate debacle. Without minority-majority districts mandated by court order there would be little national Democratic presence in any Southern state. As the white Democrats drift to the center, they get picked off.
The state parties and the Obama campaigns were different entities. Obama campaign made significant upgrades to voting software and other capabilities that states did not.
You need to hire people to do the work. State parties need to invest or die.
You can do effective voter persuasion via phone but you have to know how to generate a productive list and you have to reach them all the other ways as well. And there are a ton of rural districts that are not easily canvassed. It takes multiple voting cycles to get to most of the doors.
Maine is a perfect example of this. Mike Michaud has been to most of the doors in Maine’s CD2 because he has been going to doors for decades. It takes decades to get to all the doors because they are sooooo few and soooooo far between.
It was unbelievably stupid to squander his mega advantage in a midterm election. He probably could have held onto that seat (just barely).
The last time a Democratic presidential candidate lost in Maine was in 1988 — twenty-four years ago. Something must be seriously wrong with the Maine Democratic Party that has elected a DEM governor only twice in those twenty-four years, and only once elected a DEM Senator (Mitchell in 1988).
“You can do effective voter persuasion via phone but you have to know how to generate a productive list and you have to reach them all the other ways as well”
By now I am on the unproductive list. I hung up via cell phone and home phone. Who wants to listen to nonsense? Like what have you done for me lately?
The downpour is crazy. I don’t even check my email much anymore because of the flood of fundraising. And it’s basically a waste – I contribute when motivated by blogs. They’d get a lot more from me if they focused on creating sites I’d like to look at with things like voting records and position analyses.
And when those coattails were not there, what happened? That’s the point. The Democratic establishment has been pretty much coasting on Presidential elections and not maintaining local and state party infrastructure to win on a consistent basis.
I would argue that they do too much maintaining of the state party infrastructure and not enough organizing or incorporating best practices in digital and outreach.
Maintaining personnel who are ineffective is not the same as maintaining infrastructure that facilitates rapid start-up, effective cross-candidate coordination, and thorough geographical coverage during campaigns.
No one in politics incorporates best practices in digital media and outreach. No one. The Obama campaigns did well; the Obama White House sucks on this score. Too much marketing; too little generation of mandate to govern.
The state parties are mostly volunteers so it is pretty tough to fire people. They can be really dysfunctional organizations where new ways of doing things, even successful new ways, are resented and shoved aside in favor of established networks and friendships.
I would argue that the Obama WH puts out really good messaging. They don’t have a media megaphone. FOX, CNN, etc are not going to even cover it. Chuckles Todd even told us that it is not their job to report on lies that are spread about policy. The media are solidly in the tank for Republican and business interests.
Liberal blogs are good at discussing policy but terrible at promoting voting or getting out the vote.
How many posts were there even here at booman about the ground games in various places? Booman is one of the best sites. Look at the four months of posts before this election at the liberal/progressive sites. It was not what we were talking about.
When I’m clearing email messages from my in-box and not reading them because they are not timely, are cloying, or telling me what I should be thinking, I maintain that is a failure of social media. The White House does too much of that type of push from the top type of social media, pushing an internally generated agenda that shows that the solicitation of opinions was just a ploy to get email addresses. That is hamhanded politics. Using social media in governing is different from using social media in a campaign.
Developing a social process in which people understand what to expect from social media is still a massively underexplored area of politics. Even some of the folks who early got some aspects right, like Occupy Wall Street, have still run into problems implementing their vision of how social media can operate.
Social media is really not email. Young people barely even use email except when absolutely necessary.
“2. State, county, town/precinct Democratic organizations really should pay attention to Obama campaign messaging and the mechanics of elections. “
I know you and THD are very interested in organization, and I have no doubt that is super important, but the message has been lost. What exactly does the democratic party stand for if the President thinks it is OK to cut SS and medicare or ignores the rampant economic problems facing us? And allows the crooks on Wall Street to go free while the middle class is driven into the ground? Or seeks corporate trade agreements? Or makes it his goal to reduce the deficit while ignoring the poor? The Occupy movement had at least this at its core. The “me too” message on economics won’t play anymore. Organizational politics can’t help a dead message. Maybe that’s why the organization is or has fallen apart.
I’m seeing more rumbling observations that Obama isn’t just waving a red flag in front of the R’s on immigration. Instead, it’s a signal that he’s chosen to go big on his legacy by choosing big topics and taking the fight right through the R’s front door.
The observation continues that by going for the biggest, raising all the stakes, he will super charge his own Presidential relevancy again. It’s a kind of quadruple down borrowed in part from the Clinton logistics.
If Obama does go for broke, his leadership into the fray will change the dynamics and the voice of the Progressives. We WILL get louder and we WILL be heard.
It’s a kind of quadruple down borrowed in part from the Clinton logistics.
No, Clinton doubled down on bipartisanship with the GOP. The repeal of Glass-Steagall (Gramm-Leach-Bliley) and Commodity Futures “Modernization” were after the 1998 election. His only win in his last two years was saving his own neck after being impeached.
Obama appears to be moving ever so slightly to the left of his neoliberalcon (aka “third way”) positions and creating a bit of space between himself and the GOP. As if he’s saying, “Please proceed, Mrs. Clinton,” because your “third way” Democratic politician friends were so successful in the midterms that voters are eager for more of that.
The first “third way” FOBH at bat was McAuliffe in VA. He did beat a loonie (possibly helped by the sitting GOP VA governor being under investigation), but in 2014 the “third way” folks lost to the loonies. And the FOBH Warner came extremely close to losing.
Terry Mac did not campaign as a Third Wayer, though. He campaigned on gun control and expanding Medicaid.
How’s that gun control and Medicaid expansion working out?
VA may be one of the friendlier places for the “third way” — it’s the basic position of Warner and Kaine. And only those that live under a rock, didn’t know that McAuliffe is a Clinton guy. At a superficial level (and most elections operate at that level) the 2013 gubernatorial election in VA was between a loonie and a Warner-Kaine-Clinton guy.
If one word had to be used to describe Terry’s campaign for governor, I think it would have to be “liberal”.
http://terrymcauliffe.com/on-the-issues/policy/
His campaign was nothing like Warner’s.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
More so than most of the 2014 DEM Senate/Gov candidates, I’ll agree. But when stripped down to basics, ignoring the rhetoric, were his public policy positions really different from Warner’s and Kaine’s? He had the gift of running against the transvaginal probe guy just like the not liberal Donnelly had in IN in 2012. His race was but a year after Obama won in VA for the second time and not expanding Medicaid wasn’t a popular position in states that Obama won. He did spend $38 million to Cooch’s $21 million and some of the “middle” space was being occupied by the “libertarian guy. But he got 4,000 fewer votes than Warner did in his mid-term re-election contest.
I’m absolutely not a fan of the guy, but it’s not his fault the Medicaid expansion couldn’t be pushed through. My old state senator (Edd Houck) lost in 2011 by 226 votes. If we had him, the Medicaid expansion would be a done deal.
But doesn’t that mean that while he was able to defeat Cooch, he had no “liberal” coattails?
Herring’s race was very close – without a strong showing by McAuliffe, Herring likely would have lost.
AG Herring isn’t a “radical centrist” like Warner, and hasn’t triangulated the way WJC did – not at all. He’s not been afraid of fights on the liberal side and has won a great deal of them.
Terry is doing the best he can with a legislature that is as obstructionist as the House and Senate – and maybe moreso. E.g. the Speaker of the Virginia House declared that one of McAuliffee’s vetos was unconstitutional and that was that. Not even an override vote was required. http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/state-regional/house-again-blocks-mcauliffe-on-medicaid/article_b3
78346c-fb25-11e3-8e68-0017a43b2370.html
Of course Terry isn’t the 2nd coming of FDR or Andy Jackson or someone like that; this is Virginia after all. But give the man a little credit, eh?
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
After what he did at the DNC 2001-2004, including trashing Gore, not inclined to be generous to McAuliffe. Also not keen on newbies that expect to begin their career in elective office at or near the top. OTOH don’t think VA is well-served with a single four year term for governor.
I don’t like voting for people for important positions who have never held elective office, either. And the musical chairs system that Virginia has (Usually: AG to Governor to Senator) doesn’t serve us well. Especially when the Governor spends 4 years (or more) preparing to run for Senator (or President). There’s no incentive to actually modernize the state government or put into place solutions that won’t pay off in less than 4 years (but would make sense for the future of the state).
But we (generally) vote for people that win primaries. He worked hard to win the primary and the election, and has done a (mostly) good job so far. Especially compared to the alternative!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Still, my point being that rather than take a timid approach, or even search for bipartisanship, Obama seems to be signaling a bold go for broke run at his legacy. The boldness on key Dem issues would be what would energize his Party and regain the loss in legitimacy that ’14 is trying to claim.
In New Mexico the number of people involved in internal Democratic politics pales when compared to the number of Democratic voters. This year is a good example. The Democratic Party candidate for governor got almost no support at the state convention yet went on to win the nomination by a combination of name recognition and money in the primary.
Dem activists knew he would be a crummy candidate, he was a crummy candidate, but we were over-ridden by our Know Nothing base and we went on to get slaughtered in the Governor’s race, barely lost the SoS election, and won the Auditor and Treasurer races — the last had good, solid, candidates. The votes were there, Udall won re-election to the Senate handily, Lujan and Grisham won in their districts, but King couldn’t grab the necessary votes.
So, in New Mexico, there is a disconnect between party activists and the party electorate. Until that is addressed — how? don’t know. beat my head against that wall for years — we’ll continue to lose winnable positions.
Here’s one way you could do it. It’s more or less identical to the argument that Keystone XL will create lots of jobs, only high speed rail isn’t a massive new investment in fossil fuels.
And of course high speed rail was a major issue in the gubernatorial election, which is why it’s somewhat odd that KCAL 9 asked Jerry Brown if the election results mean that high speed rail is in trouble. Neel Kashkari ran against high speed rail, and he lost by 19 points!
I find myself on the left in economic matters. And Clinton/Obama are not there. That said, I am grateful Obama won in 2008 or we might have had a depression instead of the Great Recession. But his actions were half measures. The stimulus was good but far from excellent. And he never called the thieves on Wall Street to account. I held my nose over the ACA believing it was better than nothing.
One day, when many were hyperventilating over the deficit, I heard Obama say that, just like a household, we had to tighten our belts and bring the deficit down. And he went on to form a Commission to do just that. And he wanted to cut SS and medicare. That later morphed into the Grand Bargain. Lower those costs to free up money for infrastructure. That was straight out of the Third Way/DLC/Clinton playbook. Hell, the Republicans would love it, if they didn’t hate Obama so much.
But it is wrong, dead wrong on the economics, every bit of it. And along the way Obama let people in debt from Wall Street games and education suffer and inequality increased. He never supported increased minimum wage increases for long, other than for a sound bite here and there. And unemployment continued, and still does, from a too small and too poorly directed stimulus. Poverty abounds.
I always supported the party with donations. This last time I hung up. I only had local candidates to vote for here and a fool for congress. I guess I am the bigger fool since I voted for them. They all lost anyway. I expect to hang up in 2016 as well if this New Democrat/Third Way crap is still around. The only glimmer of hope I have, and it is small, is Warren.
Enough for now.
I heard Obama say that, just like a household, we had to tighten our belts and bring the deficit down.
Cringeworthy if he’s that ill informed on government funding/spending and cringeworthy if he knows better but encourages people in such ignorant thinking.
Here’s the likely issue, in a nutshell.
My own district AZ-02 had one of the closest congressional races in the country. The republican ‘won’ by 161 votes out of over 219,000. (net this is out of 382,000 registered voters, so at 57% turnout we beat the national average by quite a bit.)
Ron Barber is a Blue Dog conservadem. His VERY FIRST vote in Congress was to censure Attorney General Holder over the Fast and Furious fauxtrage.
The Democratic Establishment will say “See! This proves that trying to be Republicans works, we almost won!”
The Democratic wing of the party will say “Well, if he hand’t campaigned as the second Republican in the race, maybe the 1/3rd of registered voters in the district who are ‘independents’ wouldn’t have voted for the real Republican instead.”
The national Party’s focus on the Presidency is what costs us the 2010 midterms, which was the single most disastrous election in modern times for the party. 2014 was nothing compared to giving the rabid GOP base control of redistricting.
It gave the Republican a likely lock on the House until 2022, lead directly to the constant red state sabotage of Obamacare, and the continued disastrous “recovery” from the Lesser Depression.
I’ll also note: in Arizona, the only reason we even have competitive districts like CD2 is because the citizens wrested control of redistricting away from the Legislature in favor of a redistricting Commission; 2010 was the first real test of this and the AZ Lege (GOP controlled since 1967) has fought it tooth and nail ever since.
Wall Street Journal, Washington Wire: Obama’s Email List Costs Group More the 1.6 Million a Year
The group is Organizing for America.
That’s less than half of who actually voted for Obama in 2012.
That might answer why targeted GOTV was so lousy this year. Reinventing the wheel because an individual campaign had to pay off its campaign debts or control some money. And if Jim Messina is controlling the money, you can imagine what sort of candidates would be receiving support.
Dems need the white working class back, and they can get it by policy shifts against free trade, against Wall Street, etc combined with propaganda shifts to undo the harm done over the years by constant and violent propaganda attacks against men and against whites.
But I don’t know how they can do that given who they are and how they have sold their anticlericalism, their feminism, and the immigration outlook solely as attacks on men, white men, and the white race.
Not to mention in the teeth of O’s impending immigration move and his horrific deals with China on trade and on the environment (also really on trade).
Both parties are increasingly behind the politics of race and issues to which class is not relevant, as well as goals openly and unambiguously harmful to the working class.
That will leave the white working class a loser, and with them will go the whole working class and those below.
Politics is always about what different factions of rich people want.
They get their way by controlling campaign money for their tools in office to use trolling for votes.
Progressivism and support for interests of the 99%, over the decades, were always about that.
Lately, that is not how the people who control the parties, their agendas, and their messages want to do business.