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US Politics: Out in the Cold


DMC

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9 minutes ago, S John said:

If the minority vote isn’t mobilized and fired up to get Trump the fuck outta here no matter who is running against him I really don’t know what to think.

Do you know what to think if the white working class vote isn't mobilised to get him the fuck out? 

If they get a pass and the minority vote don't, someone needs to explain to me why.

 

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3 hours ago, Darzin said:

I agree I think Harris is not terribly appealing. I really like Julian Castro but I'm not sure if he'll get traction. I also like Beto O'rourke I think he would cruise  to victory as a second Obama, which is both good and bad, good because I think he'd capture the Obama coalition and be almost impossible to paint as a radical, and bad because he's not a radical, though he has endorsed healthcare for all which is my litmus test. I also somewhat like Tulsi Gabbard, for some of her foreign policy stances, she's problematic in other areas but she'd be my number one for secretary of state.

She’s be a terrible Secretary of State, not that it matters how she’s do because I imagine that the shortlist for all twenty democrat candidates for Secretary of State has one name on it, Barack Obama

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Fair or not, I think every female Democratic presidential candidate is going to face significantly greater questions about their "electability" than any male candidates (except maybe Bernie) and I think there's a good chance that will cause them to underperform in the actual primaries. 

As far as replicating coalitions goes, there's really three paths forward, because everything we're talking about is pretty marginal; there's 60 million+ regular voters who are going to vote Democratic no matter what. The nominee could energize minority voters, win back Obama-Trump white voters, or retain 2018 white suburban gains. Ideally, they would do some of all three (just like how Obama had a lot more white working class voters than people realized), but doing well enough at any one of them would probably be enough to win if Trump stays at his current unpopularity (and if Schultz doesn't fuck things up).

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2 minutes ago, Fez said:

 

Fair or not, I think every female Democratic presidential candidate is going to face significantly greater questions about their "electability" than any male candidates (except maybe Bernie) and I think there's a good chance that will cause them to underperform in the actual primaries. 

 

I find the prospect unlikely. I do find the prospect of people complaining that a female wasn’t nominated because she was female, or if having gotten the nomination lost, because they were female. I found it infuriating that some people(even my own family), started positing how they couldn’t believe how sexist America was by virtue of Clinton(war-mongering, corrupt, elitist), losing. 

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9 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

I find the prospect unlikely. I do find the prospect of people complaining that a female wasn’t nominated because she was female, or if having gotten the nomination lost, because they were female. I found it infuriating that some people(even my own family), started positing how they couldn’t believe how sexist America was by virtue of Clinton(war-mongering, corrupt, elitist), losing. 

If you squint hard enough, with blinders on for good measure, then I can understand how you could ignore a preponderance of inconvenient evidence so that you come up with up that asinine conclusion.

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23 minutes ago, Fez said:

Fair or not, I think every female Democratic presidential candidate is going to face significantly greater questions about their "electability" than any male candidates (except maybe Bernie) and I think there's a good chance that will cause them to underperform in the actual primaries. 

Oh yeah. Wait for the blizzard of articles wondering aloud whether the candidate is 'likeable' and why the answer is 'no'. 

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7 minutes ago, Week said:

If you squint hard enough, with blinders on for good measure, then I can understand how you could ignore a preponderance of inconvenient evidence so that you come up with up that asinine conclusion.

Hillary Clinton’s sex not being a big reason to her defeat is an asinine conclusion? Please, cite polls that show  sexism did indeed play a significant part in her defeat.

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1 hour ago, Mexal said:

Maybe. There are rumblings already that this might be harder than it'll appear. 

 

IIRC, one of the most skeptical sub-groups of the Democratic base about Obama in 08 were its black constituents. Once it appeared that he was a viable candidate, they turned around. I suspect the same will happen for Harris. She has everything you want in a candidate, and it appears that she’s an early fundraising juggernaut. I expect her to be top three in the polls sooner than later.

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2 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I’ve been meaning to look up some articles about Harris to see why people are attacking her career as a prosecutor and AG.

I’ll read the whole article, but my immediate reaction is that the knives came out pretty damn fast for her.

Here's a fair, if brief, summary of Harris' prosecutorial record.  The article you quoted was a regurgitation of Lara Bazelon's NYT op-ed - the one whose methodology merely entailed lexisnexis'ing every problematic case Harris' office was involved in, then putting all the blame on her with no context.  That piece was a hit job - and an oppo dump - plain and simple.  Anyway, more important than the substantive pros and cons of Harris' record, the link above emphasizes:

Quote

But it’s also the case, less often discussed, that Harris was balancing demands and expectations that are not put quite so squarely on the shoulders of white men. As "a woman who is a minority who is anti-death penalty” (her words), she faced significant hostility in her job and during her campaigns from police unions and the law-and-order types in her state, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Harris is now criticized for being too deferential to existing authority in her work. That may be true — but it may also be true that she simply had less space to be unrestrained.

Because there have been so few women generally, and women of color specifically, in positions of high-level political power in the United States, it becomes easier to caricature them or flatten their records into simplistic positions rather than taking into account the nuances of policy. White men, on the other hand, get to be complicated, have imperfect records, and be treated like individuals.

This is echoed in some of the substantive complaints often highlighted.  She often worked to uphold cases where the prosecution fucked up the evidence?  She defended the state's death penalty law even though she opposed it?  These would be expected of any DA - and if she hadn't done these things she's be filleted by the right.

Actually, I like how it appears Harris leaning in to her prosecution background as she starts her campaign.  Intuitively, it is an advantage for a Democrat to have that protection against the "tough on crime" idiots once the general election hits.  Especially when facing a president that should, could, and would be prosecuted if he wasn't president.

There might be something in her record that is particularly concerning, or even disqualifying (although it clearly hasn't been found yet).  And she certainly may fail on the merits regardless.  But if the left rejects out of hand the candidate that plainly enjoys the broadest potential across all the constituencies needed to defeat Trump by caricaturing and dismissing her as "a cop," then - seriously - fuck the left.

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2 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Hillary Clinton’s sex not being a big reason to her defeat is an asinine conclusion? Please, cite polls that show  sexism did indeed play a significant part in her defeat.

If you need polls to convince you that sexism had a noticeable impact, then you are pretty far behind the eight-ball amigo. Look at the "justifications" that you've provided (elite, corrupt, war-mongering) juxtaposed against Trump. 

Please cite polls that gender and sexism played no part in the previous election. The burden of proof to buck conventional wisdom is on you.

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4 minutes ago, Week said:

If you need polls to convince you that sexism had a noticeable impact, then you are pretty far behind the eight-ball amigo. Look at the "justifications" that you've provided (elite, corrupt, war-mongering) juxtaposed against Trump. 

Yeah, but, but...her emails!

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3 hours ago, Mexal said:

No. I'm not disregarding them. I'm just not catering to them. I'm catering to the entire US and the policies that the Dems push forward and have been pushing forward do benefit white, high school educated, workers, which is very much the group you're talking about. Catering to them though with the bullshit immigration issues, the bullshit nationalism that doesn't work, with the bullshit healthcare appeals, is the wrong path forward. Stick with the economic and healthcare issues with them and hope they realize that everything Trump has done has actually made shit worse for them. A Bernie candidacy, which fails with women, suburban white men and minorities is a terrible idea.

Lord deliver me from a(nother) Bernie candidacy.  

Personally I find the narrative that "the forgotten white working class man" brought us Trump is too simplistic.  It plays like a Chevy commercial during the sportsball and validates the (incorrect and offensive) narrative that this is the class of people who are "real" Americans and deserve special consideration (blergh). There are lots of factors which all contributed to our current sorry state of affairs.  For 2020 success, the Democratic party needs to do lots of things different (e.g., better candidate, better messaging, better ground game, better turn out, better internal polling, better outreach to its base).  Focusing on working class white men alone or even primarily will not lead to victory but 4 more years of status quo.

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9 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

They(white workers) are the demographic Democrats need to flip if they’re going to win the presidency. 

Nope! They simply need to get more people voting on their side, and it's far more likely to get a chunk of the 40% who didn't vote for anyone last campaign than it is to get the 1% that voted for Trump. 

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Winning the presidency in 2020 is going to be damned hard and an enormous fucking lift, the only person who has knocked off a one term president was Ronald Reagan, who got a huge amount of help from ted Kennedy and a fractured democrat electorate. Clinton doesn’t count since Ross Perot gifted him that win by weakening bush more in several states bush ultimately lost (and never saw coming), while the places Perot weakened Clinton more luckily were in places where he could absorb the loss and thus didn’t lose those states.

But I don’t expect a win because I don’t really think democrats are willing to put in the gargantuan amount of distributed effort to make this happen. Democrats will spend 1 billion on campaign consultants (residing in offices far away from actual voters) but will never be willing to spend that much money on actual investment in winning. Until the consultant culture is broken, democrats are going to lose because they’re flushing all their money down the consultant toilet instead of investing in shoring up and expanding their base.

I expect democrats will run a consultant approved campaign like a fairly normal campaign, and I expect they’ll win the popular vote and get pantsed in the electoral college.

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I like Kamala Harris and expect she’ll do very well in the primaries but I am skeptical of her ability to win primaries, most of her career has entailed being Coronated by democrat machine bosses in Northern California because she is a great candidate on paper, but she struggled in her first state wide race and I think she’s likewise going to struggle badly in the different “small” politics of the first three states and I’d expect Cory booker to handle the shift to small states much better.

 

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To win a great deal must be done to rid the system of voter repression and gerrymandering and all the rest of the methods the rethugs have been mining for many a cycle to ensure the Dems don't win.  Is the party and the politicians willing to do that?  It seems all they are interested in is getting the nomination to run for themselves.  The hell with reformative legislation.  They're raising money and making speeches around the country and tv programs instead. In fact, one doubts that clowns like Schultz even know about voter repression and supression and gerrymandering.  Their ilk don't vote -- they donate to candidates.

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13 minutes ago, Zorral said:

To win a great deal must be done to rid the system of voter repression and gerrymandering and all the rest of the methods the rethugs have been mining for many a cycle to ensure the Dems don't win.  Is the party and the politicians willing to do that?  It seems all they are interested in is getting the nomination to run for themselves.  The hell with reformative legislation.  They're raising money and making speeches around the country and tv programs instead. In fact, one doubts that clowns like Schultz even know about voter repression and supression and gerrymandering.  Their ilk don't vote -- they donate to candidates.

Some are I've heard Beto talk about gerrymandering in Texas. 

I agree with those saying that trying to convert Trump voters is a lost cause, much better to boost turnout half the country doesn't vote it's much easier to run up your margins with them than try to bring Trump voters into the fold.

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I voted for Sanders the last time around, because the choice was between him and Clinton. If he runs this time around no one can or should prevent him, but there are many other candidates to choose from. Whoever it is, climate change has to be in their top 3 priorities I think (we only have a 12-ish year window and the last 4 years have been a nightmare). Healthcare and inequality (economic or racial/class based) should also be in there someplace. 

All this talk of middle class tax cuts and immigration reform leaves me a little cold. No perfect candidate exists, but at least some of them need to acknowledge some of the new and urgent challenges we are facing. So far its been a bit blah.

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Booker and Harris seem like the strongest possibilities at present. Beto as an outside, with the upside of being the sort of person who can bring out a lot of enthusiasm, but I'm honestly not sure he's going to be able to manage. All three have their negatives, though. 

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