Kozmos
Jew Detective
Just let republicans run things for two terms. Thing should sort themselves out nicely.
What can the Democrats do to actually win elections again?
- Thread starter Bootstoots
- Start date
MRM
Prince
Well, with this argument, every dictator you get 99 % of all votes in "elections" is legitimized
It does not only matter that someone got the most votes, also the how matters.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...lary-clinton-over_us_57930be0e4b0e002a3134b05
And here is the point. It is already enough, that there is only a suspicion that the candidate only won by cheating to let supporters of other candidates say "screw you" and then stay at home on election day. That is why transparency is important
FriendlyFire
Codex WMDicanious
More efficent death panels ?
I'd imagine the post election defeat will be analysised for a long time to come. Essentially we relied on voters being informed instead of relying on their feelings. Along with blowback from what was competent but unrealised Obama administration.
EnglishEdward
Deity
If you will pardon me for commenting on your internal affairs from the East side of the Atlantic.
I agree.
I rather think that the Democrats and the Republicans are perceived as having the same economic policies:
(a) suck up to the rich, (b) suck up to the corporates, (c) suck up to the bankers (d) run large deficits
This might be because in reality they (excepting Bernie Sanders etc) do have the same policies.
No comment.
The assumption you are making is that the policies are correct and the problem is in communicating.
It seems to me that Democratic policies are perceived as a mixture of:
(i) sucking up to the rich, to the corporate elites and speculative bankers
AND
(ii) sucking up to the politically correct social justice warrors concerned about minorities;
excluding most others.
Yes, the USA needs its SJWs but there are others with issues and stories to tell.
As most Americans are neither of (i) or (ii); it is rather surprising Hilary Clinton won the popular vote.
Frankly I think that it is only because of the obnoxiousness of Donald Trump that she achieved that.
If the republicans had choseb a better candidate, they'd have likely won the popular vote too.
Abandon the speculative bankers and move away from nominal political correctness.
I agree.
.
I rather think that the Democrats and the Republicans are perceived as having the same economic policies:
(a) suck up to the rich, (b) suck up to the corporates, (c) suck up to the bankers (d) run large deficits
This might be because in reality they (excepting Bernie Sanders etc) do have the same policies.
No comment.
The assumption you are making is that the policies are correct and the problem is in communicating.
It seems to me that Democratic policies are perceived as a mixture of:
(i) sucking up to the rich, to the corporate elites and speculative bankers
AND
(ii) sucking up to the politically correct social justice warrors concerned about minorities;
excluding most others.
Yes, the USA needs its SJWs but there are others with issues and stories to tell.
As most Americans are neither of (i) or (ii); it is rather surprising Hilary Clinton won the popular vote.
Frankly I think that it is only because of the obnoxiousness of Donald Trump that she achieved that.
If the republicans had choseb a better candidate, they'd have likely won the popular vote too.
Abandon the speculative bankers and move away from nominal political correctness.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
Pick a candidate completely focused on charisma. Make that candidate as marketable as possible. Forget silly trivial things like policies, we're talking about winning an election. Policies have nothing to do with anything.
This might work pretty well actually... start teaching the test instead of the subject...
GoodEnoughForMe
n.m.s.s.
I'm more concerned about the logistical side posed in the OP than the actual raw numbers. Democrats, in terms of the size of the electorate, are fine. There are just a ton of structural disadvantages. When someone says "look at all the states that are Red!" well yeah, because they are, and they vote that way. Dems are concentrated in a way that their raw numbers are going to look lesser than they are because they win fewer but more high population states (with some exceptions). Dems continue to perform well in aggregate Congressional votes.
Now, that still begs the question as to why Dems do so much worse in non-presidential years and are doing worse at the state level. I still think it's an issue of processes rather than numbers. Making voting easier, making it more accessible, working to end gerrymandering all will help. It also must be said that Obama himself probably didn't do enough to help down ballot Dems during his presidency. He was very detached from campaigning and endorsing Democratic candidates at all levels, likely out of either fear of re-election harms or frustration with the party itself. But he was popular enough that he probably could have helped.
I also think Dems need a shot of fresh blood and diversity to inspire the base. The reality is that the party still skews heavily old, white, and male. Really working to cultivate a super diverse party would do well to endear themselves to the changing demographics in America more than "well, at least we aren't the republicans." There is just one black Democrat senior senate staffer in DC. One.
Now, that still begs the question as to why Dems do so much worse in non-presidential years and are doing worse at the state level. I still think it's an issue of processes rather than numbers. Making voting easier, making it more accessible, working to end gerrymandering all will help. It also must be said that Obama himself probably didn't do enough to help down ballot Dems during his presidency. He was very detached from campaigning and endorsing Democratic candidates at all levels, likely out of either fear of re-election harms or frustration with the party itself. But he was popular enough that he probably could have helped.
I also think Dems need a shot of fresh blood and diversity to inspire the base. The reality is that the party still skews heavily old, white, and male. Really working to cultivate a super diverse party would do well to endear themselves to the changing demographics in America more than "well, at least we aren't the republicans." There is just one black Democrat senior senate staffer in DC. One.
I've kind of wondered about this. They could just run some polls to see which A-list celebrities have the best approval ratings, and run down the list until someone agrees to run.
President George Clooney?
Gucumatz
JS, secretly Rod Serling
- Joined
- Dec 11, 2011
- Messages
- 6,181
Honestly this is the key above. Sanders was a terrible candidate, even though he did appear marketable to a certain segment of the population, precisely because he could also be equally marketed against in a far worse manner than Clinton. The Democratic party lives and dies by the "waves of enthusiasm" during Presidential years, picking someone to market effectively that doesn't have years of attacks or attempts to brainwash the public against is key.
Dems need to retake the Senate [with 60 seats] and House as a whole in 2020 [2018 is a lost cause] - The party also needs to make it a priority to create some national redistricting tool to ensure gerrymandering can't kill Democratic possibilities wholesale once they eventually fall out of power again.
Oprah
Lexicus
Deity
Kanye 2020
Well the public perception of Hillary/the Clintons is already too much like the Underwoods.
All those politicians know is the test already.
Just pick a person actually deemed honest and intelligent by the public, not more of the same mud.
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FriendlyFire
Codex WMDicanious
Thats because the writers say that the Underwoods are based on the Clintons.
Which has probably didnt help with Republicans whom are prepared to think the worse of Hillary
I think you're getting it reversed... The scumminess of the Underwoods didn't cause the public to have a negative perception of the Clintons...The popular perception of the Clintons is what caused the writers to make the Underwoods so conniving and scummy.
Light Cleric
ElCee/LC/El Cid
- Joined
- Feb 5, 2011
- Messages
- 3,225
You know what they can do? Realize they're not as smart as they think they are.
Months of people prematurely and smugly touting Hillary's inevitable victory are now followed by those same people, who had no clue what they were talking about, are now smugly and condescendingly explaining why Hillary lost(spoilers: it has nothing to do with them). Like, hey, you just lost to probably the worst candidate since at least George Wallace and you have no idea it was coming, and you won't admit you effed up, why the hell should we listen to you? I had a post (rightly) deleted on election night going off on these numbnuts helping get Trump elected but it had too many swears.
Those same people could get out of their safe internet spaces and try to convert people elsewhere and actually learn how to do it. I hate to be "that guy" but this place is about as echo chambery as it gets. You make a post, you leave for a while, come back and there's like 10 pages of 2-3 people making posts of agreement and burying everything else, like goddamn. I can't decide if I lost faith in this place when Hillary supporters defended the al-Shifa bombing or when people berated Carly Fiorina (with an image macro from Facebook, nonetheless) for daring to call her dead daughter "her child" because of her age. Aren't you guys supposed to be the compassionate ones???
On the conversion note, Vox had an article about this. Yeah, it's hard. It takes time and effort, more than tweeting a label about someone. But it can be done. I was able to get several people in different states off the Trump bandwagon. Unfortunately, my mother couldn't be converted because she hated Trump but "can't stand that <b-word> HIllary". Yeaaaaaah, not every single person can be reached. But there's a hell of a lot more people out there to be flipped than other people seem to think.
You're probably thinking "We shouldn't have to do this".
Well no <expletive> Sherlock, there shouldn't be bigotry at all. But there is. You can shame it, make yourself feel good, and go back to Twitter and Kinja with your "DAE john oliver le drumpf xD" circlejerk when in reality you accomplished absolutely nothing, or you can actually try to make a difference. There's endless excuses like "I live in a blue state" to pretend you can't do anything, like the Internet doesn't exist for you to talk to people in other places.
Also, stop bringing in retreads like Clinton crony and poorly disguised velociraptor John Podesta. Get some fresh blood in.
I feel like I've been spewing the same crap since I got here. 900 state lost legislative seats, a boatload of lost House seats, like a dozen lost governorships and I don't know how many lost Senate seats later, I probably should have realized by now it's not going to sink into anyone's heads but maybe it'll hit someone eventually. Or maybe it really is garbage and deserves to get ignored, I dunno.
Months of people prematurely and smugly touting Hillary's inevitable victory are now followed by those same people, who had no clue what they were talking about, are now smugly and condescendingly explaining why Hillary lost(spoilers: it has nothing to do with them). Like, hey, you just lost to probably the worst candidate since at least George Wallace and you have no idea it was coming, and you won't admit you effed up, why the hell should we listen to you? I had a post (rightly) deleted on election night going off on these numbnuts helping get Trump elected but it had too many swears.
Those same people could get out of their safe internet spaces and try to convert people elsewhere and actually learn how to do it. I hate to be "that guy" but this place is about as echo chambery as it gets. You make a post, you leave for a while, come back and there's like 10 pages of 2-3 people making posts of agreement and burying everything else, like goddamn. I can't decide if I lost faith in this place when Hillary supporters defended the al-Shifa bombing or when people berated Carly Fiorina (with an image macro from Facebook, nonetheless) for daring to call her dead daughter "her child" because of her age. Aren't you guys supposed to be the compassionate ones???
On the conversion note, Vox had an article about this. Yeah, it's hard. It takes time and effort, more than tweeting a label about someone. But it can be done. I was able to get several people in different states off the Trump bandwagon. Unfortunately, my mother couldn't be converted because she hated Trump but "can't stand that <b-word> HIllary". Yeaaaaaah, not every single person can be reached. But there's a hell of a lot more people out there to be flipped than other people seem to think.
You're probably thinking "We shouldn't have to do this".
Well no <expletive> Sherlock, there shouldn't be bigotry at all. But there is. You can shame it, make yourself feel good, and go back to Twitter and Kinja with your "DAE john oliver le drumpf xD" circlejerk when in reality you accomplished absolutely nothing, or you can actually try to make a difference. There's endless excuses like "I live in a blue state" to pretend you can't do anything, like the Internet doesn't exist for you to talk to people in other places.
Also, stop bringing in retreads like Clinton crony and poorly disguised velociraptor John Podesta. Get some fresh blood in.
I feel like I've been spewing the same crap since I got here. 900 state lost legislative seats, a boatload of lost House seats, like a dozen lost governorships and I don't know how many lost Senate seats later, I probably should have realized by now it's not going to sink into anyone's heads but maybe it'll hit someone eventually. Or maybe it really is garbage and deserves to get ignored, I dunno.
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civvver
Deity
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2007
- Messages
- 5,855
Turn out their base. I don't have any empirical data to back this but I believe I heard that democrat voting was down this year, less showed up, the groups that show up most favor republicans. I think obama got a lot of people to show up and vote that normally wouldn't have by virtue of his charisma and being the first minority candidate. People identified with that. So continue to turn out the base and pick nominees who people actually like. No one liked hillary. Your average dem who doesn't regularly vote is not getting excited about going to the polls over hillary. They did for obama. Vice versa on republican side, I think people weren't excited about romney, but were about trump cus he's fiery.
Other thing is I think media and Hollywood don't really help them despite always endorsing them. A lot of middle of the road people find stuff like Meryl Streeps globe's speech infuriating and completely out of touch with reality. When those kind of elites complain about persecution or how america isn't fair it falls on deaf ears. A lot of people are just anti establishment/elite, and even though in reality the republicans have just as many establishment types in government, they aren't as visible as like all of Hollywood.
Other thing is I think media and Hollywood don't really help them despite always endorsing them. A lot of middle of the road people find stuff like Meryl Streeps globe's speech infuriating and completely out of touch with reality. When those kind of elites complain about persecution or how america isn't fair it falls on deaf ears. A lot of people are just anti establishment/elite, and even though in reality the republicans have just as many establishment types in government, they aren't as visible as like all of Hollywood.
GoodEnoughForMe
n.m.s.s.
I remain unconvinced being more progressive is the answer. Corbyn is getting absolutely mauled in support and polls by May. This is one thing I think a lot of leftists in America (and the UK) are guilty of; assuming the country is a lot more left/progressive than it is. There are a ton of people who are conservative, vote conservative, and are fine with it, and not a lot of demand for a bonafide social democratic welfare state, particularly in the states. The country is conservative. That's the reality.
I am a big fan of @Light Cleric's post. Some related thoughts of mine:
The internet outrage culture and the formation of bubbles has been really corrosive to the body politic. It's never been great, but it seems that internet discourse has gotten a lot worse lately. SJW behavior, in particular, pisses off practically everyone without doing anything to actually help reduce bigotry. It nearly certainly increases it instead, and places like Breitbart capitalize off this.
In the other corner we have the mainstream Democrats who are entirely unwilling to think outside their little technocratic box, neglecting to do anything to make themselves marketable. In this election, they managed to convince themselves that they could flip so many suburban Republicans to their side that it would drown out their losses among working-class voters, rather than just trying to appeal to the latter group so that they might at least not lose much ground vs. Obama in 2012. They didn't even have much of a ground game (better than Trump, much worse than Obama), and everything was very poorly targeted with little attempt even to appeal to minority voters and convince them to turn out. Grassroots-level campaigning was basically ignored. They also relied on deeply flawed computer models that basically just told them what they wanted to hear. This Jacobin article covers their failure in detail.
Both of these groups of people conspired to make the Dems as unlikable as possible on all levels in 2014 and 2016, and they show signs of getting worse rather than better. They even failed to get rid of either Pelosi or Schumer in place of younger Dems, and they don't even have much of a backbench of people with any influence who are younger than 65.
I agree that the share of convincible voters is higher than most people seem to think. Obama easily won Iowa twice, to say nothing of WI, MI, PA, etc. without being anything other than a mainstream Democrat who was good at selling himself. There's no reason they can't start running candidates who appeal to those voters again without having to compromise any of their values. It would also be really helpful if they would run people who are good at communicating that they are sincere and not corrupt. Sanders showed that a large proportion of voters - in particular, suburban and rural Democrat-leaning independents in the Midwest and West, along with young voters - could be won over by a self-proclaimed socialist. He has notable weaknesses as a candidate too, but someone employing his populist methods while being just a little more centrist (no "socialist" self-identification), and who is better at appealing to minority voters, could crush Trump in 2020. Ditto for candidates at every lower level.
Winning again will require accepting that voters are humans that make choices in a human way, with all the irrationality, subconscious bigotry, and so on. Republicans have also made it easier for themselves with gerrymandering, vote suppression, and so on, but elections are still winnable despite that.
The internet outrage culture and the formation of bubbles has been really corrosive to the body politic. It's never been great, but it seems that internet discourse has gotten a lot worse lately. SJW behavior, in particular, pisses off practically everyone without doing anything to actually help reduce bigotry. It nearly certainly increases it instead, and places like Breitbart capitalize off this.
In the other corner we have the mainstream Democrats who are entirely unwilling to think outside their little technocratic box, neglecting to do anything to make themselves marketable. In this election, they managed to convince themselves that they could flip so many suburban Republicans to their side that it would drown out their losses among working-class voters, rather than just trying to appeal to the latter group so that they might at least not lose much ground vs. Obama in 2012. They didn't even have much of a ground game (better than Trump, much worse than Obama), and everything was very poorly targeted with little attempt even to appeal to minority voters and convince them to turn out. Grassroots-level campaigning was basically ignored. They also relied on deeply flawed computer models that basically just told them what they wanted to hear. This Jacobin article covers their failure in detail.
Both of these groups of people conspired to make the Dems as unlikable as possible on all levels in 2014 and 2016, and they show signs of getting worse rather than better. They even failed to get rid of either Pelosi or Schumer in place of younger Dems, and they don't even have much of a backbench of people with any influence who are younger than 65.
I agree that the share of convincible voters is higher than most people seem to think. Obama easily won Iowa twice, to say nothing of WI, MI, PA, etc. without being anything other than a mainstream Democrat who was good at selling himself. There's no reason they can't start running candidates who appeal to those voters again without having to compromise any of their values. It would also be really helpful if they would run people who are good at communicating that they are sincere and not corrupt. Sanders showed that a large proportion of voters - in particular, suburban and rural Democrat-leaning independents in the Midwest and West, along with young voters - could be won over by a self-proclaimed socialist. He has notable weaknesses as a candidate too, but someone employing his populist methods while being just a little more centrist (no "socialist" self-identification), and who is better at appealing to minority voters, could crush Trump in 2020. Ditto for candidates at every lower level.
Winning again will require accepting that voters are humans that make choices in a human way, with all the irrationality, subconscious bigotry, and so on. Republicans have also made it easier for themselves with gerrymandering, vote suppression, and so on, but elections are still winnable despite that.
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