Prime content is available to paid members, please join us
Texas Has a Lesson for the Presidential Contenders
Discussion
Join our users to read our prime articles
Then Pelosi’s House should be working to pass bills on immigration reform and ACA fine-tuning/improvement so that it is crystal clear what a Dem prez of any stripe is gonna have to accept should Dems be given control of the government. You basically are pleading for an overall strategy now to calm the nervous newbie suburbanites, so someone with some actual power needs to start imposing some order on the proceedings, given that we have decided to start the cattle-call prez campaign a year or so early. Obviously the worthless corporate media is looking to play up the “Dems Wildly… Read more »
I hesitate even to bring it up, because the gist of Martin’s piece is still very much valid, but much of the shift in Texas suburbs has really just been a matter of urban populations getting pushed out into the inner ring suburbs. The wall of Republican voters that once lived in North Dallas has simply kept moving north, through Richardson and Plano to Frisco and McKinney. So essentially the “cities” are just geographically bigger, and will continue to get that way. This is the unintended consequence of governing such that only a few share in our economic growth. People… Read more »
Even in my little slice of suburbia in western NY, the local Democrats have made inroads. They have taken pains to distinguish themselves from the local R’s and the urban Democratic machine by being squeaky clean, and immediately stomping out any whiff of corruption. They also come across as reasonable, and responsive to public opinion. When compared with the typical local R candidate who says crazy stuff caught on tape, it’s an easy choice for a lot of sane people. Right now, in this political moment, being a good person and letting voters know that (which is often hard since… Read more »
Thanks for this. I just want to echo the importance of your (Armando’s?) final insight: negative campaigning is the most effective persuasion work ever invented. In the vast majority of cases, Democrats don’t get Republicans and Republican-leaning voters to vote for them because Republicans feel good about voting for a Democrat; they get Republicans and Republican-leaning voters to vote for them because a certain number (5%? 10%? rarely more) of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters are so disgusted (by the collapsing economy & W’s botched wars in 2008, by (we hope) Trump’s racism & buffoonery in 2020) that they can’t bring… Read more »