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PoliGAF 2017 |OT1| From Russia with Love

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Dukakis was basically a much less charismatic Bill Clinton who didn't brag about murdering black inmates, not sure that means the centrism was the key winning ingredient. There's actually a decent argument that Slick Willie and Bush 41 were actually the closest ideologically of any two party nominees, ha. I'd also say LBJ is probably the farthest left a president has been, both on his fight against poverty and on Civil Rights relative to the median position at the time.

This is also a misunderstanding of how we got where we were, I highly recommend everyone read How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul. I made a thread about it but no one responded, sad! It also assumes that people vote on a one dimension left-center-right scale and ignores a lot of factors. Tom Perriello's recent podcast with New Republic also highlights much of the current issues in the Democratic Party and how the populists feel. Jason Kander, if you can find his Keepin' It 1600 interview, largely talks about the same thing.

I think the populist bone in the Democratic Party is dead with some supporters of that side is still trying to regain power again. However, I do not think that is possible in the long term or at the very least they won't have complete control.

The issue lies in several different factors, on the top of my head racial demographics, urbanization, geography, current ideology of the working class and farmers, and the right-wing swift of those two groups of people.

The article stated that one reason of the swifts that is still currently felt by Democrats, is when the Watergate Babies swift the focus of economic populist issues to more social issues that help shaped the Obama coalition. I think I read something similar somewhere else, but I don't remember were basically the planning of the Obama coalition has started sometime in the 70s or something like that.

Anyway, PoC and other minority groups like LGBT and Muslims are basically the backbone of the party. The concern of those individuals has less due to economic injustice and more with social injustice. The party while is concerned with economic injustice has to be more aligned with their voters. The issue with populism that it fails to connect the issue that is currently facing these groups. How do the big banks negatively effect prospects of young AAs dealing with racial and social discrimination? Were do the millionaires fit in? How would breaking up the big banks protect the rights of the LGBT community? How would breaking up monopolies deal with the effects of job discrimination, or discrimination of Muslims in the county? Are billionaires the ones that are deporting the immigrants? The populism doesn't have solid detailed answers, besides vague promises that it would somehow work.

The left wing populists( I do not think these people are far leftist like some describe, but are left wing populists) have not been able to message that effectively at all for years and have failed to have done so in 2016.

Geography and urbanization has played a part as well. The country is far, far more urbanized than it was in the past, additionally, the political power of rural white voters, has been declining with the minorities gaining more influence. With that in some cases the Democrats have been awarded for focusing on that. Instead, Democrats lost influence with the WWC and rural voters, however, the Republicans picked them up and managed to change the views of the working class and rural voters in my belief.

I think rural voters and the working - class are much more closely aligned to the Republican Party than they were before. I do not think they are hostile to big business, millionaires, regulation as they were before. In fact, they might be far more supportive deregulation, corporations, and the wealthy . That doesn't mean that they think the upper class shouldn't pay their fair share, but it isn't a priority. Also they seem to be more inclined to help those groups as they think it benefits them. The WWC has seemed to embraced fiscal conservationism and are more social conservative in return. What could be the case is that left-wing populists are the ones that lost in touch of the rural and working - class voters.

The demographics are changing and the country is going to become more diverse, and the Democrat Party is the only party that is in a real position to take advantage of that, but that may be the biggest issue as they don't really have a central message. In my opinion, Hillary lost some support among minorities, and lost the group of blue-collars whites that voted for Obama by a lot in that specific regard, however, the election was still close .

I think Democrats can still recapture some of the populist message again as it fits with the newer generation, but in large part I think that ship has sailed. The ones that use to make up the Democrat Party are happily wearing that Trump hat and swinging a deplorable flag.
 

Doc Holliday

SPOILER: Columbus finds America
The threat of a filibuster, like any threat, is meaningless without actual power behind it. If the Democrats don't use it now, it is a completely empty threat.

This is a hill worth dying on. It's not about Gorsuch, it's about the fact that this seat is completely illegitimate and tying Republicans to Trump. If Trump is going down, then everyone else has to go down with the ship.

Agreed, the only pick Dems shouldn't filibuster is Merrick Garland.
 
T

thepotatoman

Unconfirmed Member
Any who says the the "far left" needs to take over the Democratic party has literally no concept of politics in this country or overall sentiment of the nation's populace. Obama spent 8 years getting called a radical leftist when he was at best a centrist. Roughly 20% of the country wanted someone more liberal than him. When the Democratic party tried to become more liberal during the late 60s/70s, they went on to lose 5/6 Presidential elections, 4 of them in epic landslides. It wasn't until the Clintons showed up that they started winning elections again and turning the country more leftward. You can criticize their politics all you want, but their brand of liberalism actually won elections, while the "far left" has never won shit.

Carter/Reagan was 40 years after FDR's last election, and 40 years before Clinton/Trump. You have to be at least 47 years old to have voted in the Dukakis/Bush election, with most Dukakis/Bush voters being much older than that.

Maybe it's time to admit we're living in a different era. You can't learn lessons about the current electorate from that far back.
 

Gruco

Banned
Carter/Reagan was 40 years after FDR's last election, and 40 years before Clinton/Trump. You have to be at least 46 years old to have voted in the Dukakis/Bush election, with most Dukakis/Bush voters being much older than that.

Maybe it's time to admit we're living in a different era. You can't learn lessons about the current electorate from that far back.
Tbh, these coalitions have a way of finding themselves. No one was going to talk a Bernie, or Trump, or Obama enthusiast out of supporting their guy. Movements emerge out of the desires of the population.

Someone somewhere will pick up the mantle and find a new way to appeal to Obama, Hillary and Bernie voters. Not my job to decide who that is or how it happens.
 

kirblar

Member
This RT string on @jbouie's feed is important for context:
Mike Duncan ‏@mikeduncan

LRTs I thinking framing that contempt as a "reaction" to elite disdain rather than an independent positive emotion is where we go wrong

For millennia rural inhabitants have viewed cities as dens of corruption and vice. Leeches on the hardy virtue of the rural population

This was evident all over the Roman era I just wrote a book about. It's not just "you don't like me so in response I don't like you"

So all I want is for that to be recognized more. We act like all could be defused by elites not being so douchey. Not so!

We should press rural/interior whatever America to acknowledge that living in a city does not strip you of dignity or make you less virtuous
It's Hamilton v Jefferson all over again, same as it always has been.

Don't play their game. It's not about "being condescended too", it's not about "elites", it's not about "small town values." It's about them wanting to be able to be openly shitty to people and not wanting to get popped in their mouth when bile spews out of it.
 

Blader

Member
Csn they stonewall the nomination for 4 years if thats the case?

No, because they're not in the majority and McConnell will nuke the filibuster if he can't get eight Democrats to vote yes on Gorsuch.

If the roles were reversed, and it was the Dems who had a 52-seat majority, then they could absolutely stonewall for as long as it took for Trump to put up a nominee they like. Alas.
 

Cybit

FGC Waterboy
This RT string on @jbouie's feed is important for context:

It's Hamilton v Jefferson all over again, same as it always has been.

Don't play their game. It's not about "being condescended too", it's not about "elites", it's not about "small town values." It's about them wanting to be able to be openly shitty to people and not wanting to get popped in their mouth when bile spews out of it.

Um....aren't you basically doing the same thing in reverse that your tweetstorm is getting angry about?

"You aren't less virtuous for living in a city"

"Those small towners just want to be racist assholes"

That said, yes, this is basically Jefferson vs Hamilton redux 10230880923409.
 
No, because they're not in the majority and McConnell will nuke the filibuster if he can't get eight Democrats to vote yes on Gorsuch.

If the roles were reversed, and it was the Dems who had a 52-seat majority, then they could absolutely stonewall for as long as it took for Trump to put up a nominee they like. Alas.

Damn.

Woukd they be willing to nuke the filibuster though?
 

Gruco

Banned
Don't play their game. It's not about "being condescended too", it's not about "elites", it's not about "small town values." It's about them wanting to be able to be openly shitty to people and not wanting to get popped in their mouth when bile spews out of it.
Yup. The popularity of "God's not dead" pretty effectively killed my ability to take the "liberal condescension" theory seriously.

That, and credulity on Trump's "chaos in the inner cities" line.

A big part of this is just people being looked down on for living in a city, or for having gone to college.

I mean, I don't say that to try to dismiss Dem problems or whatever. But, let's not pretend this isn't a thing.
 

Blader

Member
This made me laugh way too hard:

This means that Republicans, while waiting for their alternative to “congeal,” have already set in motion the disintegration of the current health-insurance market. “It’s worse than the dog who caught the car,” said Jesse Ferguson, a strategist advising Democrats on health care. “It’s the dog who somehow is now driving the car.”

Damn.

Woukd they be willing to nuke the filibuster though?

McConnell does not want to do that, and will probably work his ass off to make sure he gets eight Dem votes. If the party holds the line, though, and Schumer gets all 47 other Dems to refuse to vote yes on Gorsuch, then McConnell will have to nuke it. He's not going to go back to Trump and tell him to nominate a less conservative judge.
 

kirblar

Member
Um....aren't you basically doing the same thing in reverse that your tweetstorm is getting angry about?

"You aren't less virtuous for living in a city"

"Those small towners just want to be racist assholes"

That said, yes, this is basically Jefferson vs Hamilton redux 10230880923409.
If the two things were equivalent, sure.

But they're not. I'm not saying living in a small town is bad, I'm saying being a racist asshole is bad.
 
I think the populist bone in the Democratic Party dead with some supporters of that side is trying to regain power again. However, I do not think that is possible in the long term or at the very least they won't have complete control.

The issue lies in several different factors, on the top of my head racial demographics, urbanization, geography, current ideology of the working class and farmers, and the right-wing swift of those two groups of people.

The article stated that one reason of the swifts that is still currently felt by Democrats, is when the Watergate Babies swift the focus of economic populist issues to more social issues that help shaped the Obama coalition. I think I read something similar somewhere else, but I don't remember were basically the planning of the Obama coalition has started sometime in the 70s or something like that.
The Obama coalition has been called "McGovern's Revenge" if that's what you're referring to, but it's not as simple as "gave up economic issues for social issues". The Watergate Babies still cared about economic issues, but they preferred elitism and privatization (a new sort of liberalism) and worked hand in hand with Reagan to help disassemble the New Deal. Clinton crushed the antitrust laws, deregulated large industries, and pushed to emphasize the economy more on high-wage tech and financial work while shifting formed high wage manufacturing jobs and other backbones of uneducated labor abroad. He wasn't the same as Reagan, obviously, he shifted our taxation to be more progressive, he attempted healthcare reform, etc, but fundamentally he was different from the New Dealers before him. Business was an ally to work with, not something that had to be restrained.

Anyway, PoC and other minority groups like LGBT and Muslims are basically the backbone of the party. The certain of those individuals has less due to economic injustice and more with social injustice. The party while is concerned with economic injustice has to be more aligned with their voters. The issue with populism that it fails to connect the issue that is currently facing these groups. How do the big banks negatively effect prospics of young AAs dealing with racial and social discrimination? Were do the millionaires fit in? How would breaking up the big banks protect the rights of the LGBT community? How would breaking up monopolies deal with discrimination the effects of job discrimination, or discrimination of Muslims in the county? Are billionaires the ones that are deporting the ones immigrants? The populism doesn't have solid detailed answers, besides vague promises that it would somehow work.

The left wing populists( I do not think these people are far leftist like some describe, but are left wing populists) have not been able to message that effectively at all for years and have failed to have done so in 2016.
While you're certainly right that class-only populism is bad and won't work unless you're running as an ethnonationalist, the big banks *do* hurt these communities. When Illinois imposes harsh austerity measures, who do you think the benefits and consequences most heavily weigh on? Rich people love austerity, it means they have to pay less taxes. It's poor black kids in the South Side of Chicago whose schools are further underfunded that suffer. When unions get broken up, it disproportionately affects the low-wage workers who are people of color. Zephyr Teachout talks in this interview about how our obscenely expensive and privately funded elections keep out women and people of color from running for office.

The two main sources of corruption within our party and within our politics are the way that we fund campaigns and outside money. And both of those privilege wealthy men. The money that funds campaigns is overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white. And that’s even more true for super PACs. What it does to our candidates is they become beggars to this handful of really non-representative Americans.

It affects who runs for office. The New York City public financing system has only been fully funded since about 2010, but the effect has been far more women and people of color running for office, and far more incumbents getting challenged. The way we fund campaigns is a feminist issue and a race issue. If you want more representation, you can’t say it’s going to be really expensive to run for office and you need a rolodex of billionaires. That’s just going to re-create the same system and exaggerate it.
While this isn't to say that breaking up the banks would "end racism", concentrating power in the hands of an increasingly small number of hands hasn't been beneficial to people of color. And luckily, Bernie and other left-wing populists have remained steadfast in their commitments to protecting immigrants and PoC. It's Warren who was reading the letter from Coretta Scott King to protest Sessions. Bernie was saying that we need more women, more people of color, and more LGBT representation in the government. Their messaging might not be perfect but their goal isn't to abandon all non-class issues for a class only focus.

Let's not pretend Hillary's messaging wasn't tone deaf either, considering she began her campaign off visiting a black church in Missouri and said All Lives Matter.

Geography and urbanization has played a part as well. The country is far, far more urbanized than it was in the past, additionally, the political power of rural white voters, has been declining with the more minorities gaining more influence. With that in some cases the Democrats have been awarded for focusing on that. Instead, Democrats lost influence with the WWC and rural voters, however, the Republicans picked them up and managed to change the views of the working class and rural voters in my belief.

I think rural voters and working - class are much more closely aligned to the Republican Party than they were before. I do not think they are hostile to big business, millionaires, regulation as they were before. In fact they might far more supportive of those groups. That doesn't mean that they think the upper class shouldn't pay their fair share, but it isn't a priority. Also they seem to be more inclined to help those groups as they think it benefits them. The WWC has seemed to embraced fiscal conservationism and are more social conservative in return. What could be the case is that left-wing populists are the ones that lost in touch of the rural and working - class voters.
The WWC aren't a homogenous blob and didn't all immediately exit the Democratic coalition. They were an important part of it just four years ago! An Obama that loses the Rust Belt entirely but wins NC and FL is still a loser. These were (along with black voters, obviously) one of the Democrats groups to stay loyal after the New Deal fell apart. They stuck it out with Dukakis, Clinton, Kerry, and Gore before. They didn't leave when Obama said gay people should be able to get married. But when their communities are dying of opioid addiction as wealthy people fire them, the messages they get from the people they've loyally supported are "America is already great" and "we'll just replace you with wealthy suburbanites".

Who is to say that working class also only represents the WWC? This a problem that gets brought up when (wrong) people say that we need to focus only on the WWC, but the response from the black working class this election was largely to stay home. Hillary's share of the black vote was worse than Gore's. Before anyone comes out to say this, I'm not trying to blame them because obviously the election was decided by flipped WWC voters. But the idea that their problems can be largely ignored in a campaign that spends its first GE month with wealthy donors and then a large amount of targeted messaging trying to peel off Romney voters who want someone who won't crash their stocks but otherwise just want tax cuts and the status quo, their answer is to stay home. Some of that was due to voter suppression.

The demographics are changing and the country is going to become more diverse, and the Democrat Party is the only party that is in a real position to take advantage of that, but that may be the biggest issue as they don't really have a central message. In my opinion, Hillary lost some support among minorities, and lost the group of blue-collars whites that voted for Obama by a lot in that specific regard, however, the election was still close .

I think Democrats can still recapture some of the populist message again as it fits with the newer generation, but in large part I think that ship has sailed. The ones that use to make up the Democrat Party are happily wearing that Trump hat and swinging a deplorable flag.
My first point is that the election being close to begin with should be a big warning flag and that even winning the extra necessary 40k votes in WI/PA/MI only puts off the pain.

But as to the idea that as the country becomes less white the Democrats will be unstoppable, we should look at the case of the ethnic Catholic immigrant. When they came to this country, they were like Hispanics! They didn't speak English, they had the wrong religion, they formed their own communities, and anti-immigrant sentiment swelled. No Irish Need Apply was a thing. Eventually, the northern Democratic party (a very different creature than the south at the time, unsurprisingly) pulled them into their wings, gave them jobs and were rewarded for it politically. These workers became a large part of the labor backbone of the New Deal and were key to the unstoppable coalition, along with black voters and white southerners. When one of their own (kind of) Kennedy ran, he had to make a big speech declaring that he firmly believed in the separation of church and state and that he wasn't an actor of the Pope, such was the distrust of Catholics. It was not unlike the A More Perfect Union speech.

But as they became more integrated into the white population and became to be considered 'white' unlike before, their political opinions diversified. They were less defined as a bloc by their outsider religion status and more by other factors. It's not that they just "became conservative" it's that they became white and their political interests were defined by other factors, like income and geography. A unionized Great Lakes Catholic in Wisconsin was probably still a Democrat, but the white Catholic was suddenly much less politically married to the Democratic party than it had been before.

My point here is that hispanics becoming a larger portion of our population doesn't guarantee that they'll remain politically defined by being hispanic. They might even become white! That was the Republican strategy before Trump won, to get hispanics to vote less homogenously and peel off those who vote Democratic because of anti-immigrant sentiments but otherwise don't necessarily correspond to Democratic ideologies.
 

sc0la

Unconfirmed Member
Donold Tromp: "We'll be doing something very rapidly having to do with additional security for our country. You'll be seeing that sometime next week."

Because doing things very rapidly worked out so well last time.
 

NeoXChaos

Member
The Obama coalition has been called "McGovern's Revenge" if that's what you're referring to, but it's not as simple as "gave up economic issues for social issues". The Watergate Babies still cared about economic issues, but they preferred elitism and privatization (a new sort of liberalism) and worked hand in hand with Reagan to help disassemble the New Deal. Clinton crushed the antitrust laws, deregulated large industries, and pushed to emphasize the economy more on high-wage tech and financial work while shifting formed high wage manufacturing jobs and other backbones of uneducated labor abroad. He wasn't the same as Reagan, obviously, he shifted our taxation to be more progressive, he attempted healthcare reform, etc, but fundamentally he was different from the New Dealers before him. Business was an ally to work with, not something that had to be restrained.

While you're certainly right that class-only populism is bad and won't work unless you're running as an ethnonationalist, the big banks *do* hurt these communities. When Illinois imposes harsh austerity measures, who do you think the benefits and consequences most heavily weigh on? Rich people love austerity, it means they have to pay less taxes. It's poor black kids in the South Side of Chicago whose schools are further underfunded that suffer. When unions get broken up, it disproportionately affects the low-wage workers who are people of color. Zephyr Teachout talks in this interview about how our obscenely expensive and privately funded elections keep out women and people of color from running for office.

While this isn't to say that breaking up the banks would "end racism", concentrating power in the hands of an increasingly small number of hands hasn't been beneficial to people of color. And luckily, Bernie and other left-wing populists have remained steadfast in their commitments to protecting immigrants and PoC. It's Warren who was reading the letter from Coretta Scott King to protest Sessions. Bernie was saying that we need more women, more people of color, and more LGBT representation in the government. Their messaging might not be perfect but their goal isn't to abandon all non-class issues for a class only focus.

Let's not pretend Hillary's messaging wasn't tone deaf either, considering she began her campaign off visiting a black church in Missouri and said All Lives Matter.

The WWC aren't a homogenous blob and didn't all immediately exit the Democratic coalition. They were an important part of it just four years ago! An Obama that loses the Rust Belt entirely but wins NC and FL is still a loser. These were (along with black voters, obviously) one of the Democrats groups to stay loyal after the New Deal fell apart. They stuck it out with Dukakis, Clinton, Kerry, and Gore before. They didn't leave when Obama said gay people should be able to get married. But when their communities are dying of opioid addiction as wealthy people fire them, the messages they get from the people they've loyally supported are "America is already great" and "we'll just replace you with wealthy suburbanites".

Who is to say that working class also only represents the WWC? This a problem that gets brought up when (wrong) people say that we need to focus only on the WWC, but the response from the black working class this election was largely to stay home. Hillary's share of the black vote was worse than Gore's. Before anyone comes out to say this, I'm not trying to blame them because obviously the election was decided by flipped WWC voters. But the idea that their problems can be largely ignored in a campaign that spends its first GE month with wealthy donors and then a large amount of targeted messaging trying to peel off Romney voters who want someone who won't crash their stocks but otherwise just want tax cuts and the status quo, their answer is to stay home. Some of that was due to voter suppression.

My first point is that the election being close to begin with should be a big warning flag and that even winning the extra necessary 40k votes in WI/PA/MI only puts off the pain.

But as to the idea that as the country becomes less white the Democrats will be unstoppable, we should look at the case of the ethnic Catholic immigrant. When they came to this country, they were like Hispanics! They didn't speak English, they had the wrong religion, they formed their own communities, and anti-immigrant sentiment swelled. No Irish Need Apply was a thing. Eventually, the northern Democratic party (a very different creature than the south at the time, unsurprisingly) pulled them into their wings, gave them jobs and were rewarded for it politically. These workers became a large part of the labor backbone of the New Deal and were key to the unstoppable coalition, along with black voters and white southerners. When one of their own (kind of) Kennedy ran, he had to make a big speech declaring that he firmly believed in the separation of church and state and that he wasn't an actor of the Pope, such was the distrust of Catholics. It was not unlike the A More Perfect Union speech.

But as they became more integrated into the white population and became to be considered 'white' unlike before, their political opinions diversified. They were less defined as a bloc by their outsider religion status and more by other factors. It's not that they just "became conservative" it's that they became white and their political interests were defined by other factors, like income and geography. A unionized Great Lakes Catholic in Wisconsin was probably still a Democrat, but the white Catholic was suddenly much less politically married to the Democratic party than it had been before.

My point here is that hispanics becoming a larger portion of our population doesn't guarantee that they'll remain politically defined by being hispanic. They might even become white! That was the Republican strategy before Trump won, to get hispanics to vote less homogenously and peel off those who vote Democratic because of anti-immigrant sentiments but otherwise don't necessarily correspond to Democratic ideologies
.

wow you read a lot and know your stuff. Political science major or junky?
 

Emerson

May contain jokes =>
Donold Tromp: "We'll be doing something very rapidly having to do with additional security for our country. You'll be seeing that sometime next week."

Because doing things very rapidly worked out so well last time.

Trump holds a live press conference on all major news networks and suffocates himself with a plastic grocery bag.

The country is very rapidly much more secure.
 
Trump's staff other than Bannon and Miller trying to trick him into picking Abrams seems like it should be a huge story? If Trump stops trusting his staff other than the two Nazis, that's going to lead to bad consequences.
 

I think it's supposed to be some sort of alpha male thing. He does it all the time.

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both lol, got really addicted to learning polisci during the primary and then switched my major because I also grew to hate computer science. A lot of this is just stuff I read for fun though.

Heh, I got my degree in computer science and became a politics junky after I graduated. My current job is the best of both worlds so I'm pretty happy.
 

Emerson

May contain jokes =>
The hand jerk is for pussies who want to attempt to dominate.

A true man's handshake is casually firm, confident and solid without effort, and not overbearing.
 

kirblar

Member
"WWC" isn't a homogenous blob. But the people voting for Trump are one. From one of the congressional postmortems: https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/should-house-democrats-write-off-rural-congressional-districts/2017/02/09/9ea98502-eee0-11e6-b4ff-ac2cf509efe5_story.html?postshare=4931486666933174&tid=ss_tw

He means that there are House districts that Democrats have competed in, or even represented for a long time, that have moved so sharply away from Democrats that they need to reassess whether to compete there ever again. Yet there is also an emerging set of districts that have long been held by Republicans that are now bending toward Democrats faster than even the most optimistic strategists envisioned.

The ones now on the table? Longtime Republican districts that are becoming more demographically diverse. Off the table may be rural districts with little diversity, the very places where President Trump did well in 2016.
Some findings are surprising. ”Did the unemployment rate matter or not?" he said. ”Turns out it doesn't matter much at all."
This means that Democrats made mistakes in places such as Iowa's 1st Congressional District and Minnesota's 2nd Congressional District, seats that in the summer of 2016 Democrats expected to win. But both are very rural and are not diverse. Rep. Rod Blum (R-Iowa) won reelection by nearly eight percentage points in a district that swung from twice voting for Barack Obama for president to supporting Donald Trump, and Rep. Jason Lewis (R-Minn.) won his first election despite a long career of controversial statements as a radio talk-show host.

Two highlights for Democrats came in highly educated suburban districts: in northern New Jersey, where Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D) ousted a seven-term Republican; and outside Orlando, where Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D) knocked off a 23-year incumbent.

Some of this won't be news to Luján and senior DCCC staff, because they have already launched a ”Majority Project" in these emerging districts. In private they admit they realized too late that Trump was speeding up the shift of well-educated suburbanites toward the Democrats, leaving too many Republicans facing inferior opponents last year in potentially competitive races.

Still, Luján told reporters he has put pollsters and consultants on notice they might be losing their contracts because they were too far off the mark in some of their assessments, particularly in rural districts.

What's most disturbing for Democrats is just how badly their candidates did in some places. In Denver's eastern suburbs, Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) won a fourth term by more than eight percentage points despite a relentless DCCC investment there; Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) won the suburban district north of Philadelphia previously held by his brother by nine percentage points; and in the Twin Cities suburbs, Rep. Erik Paulsen (R) won a fifth term by an astounding 13 percentage points.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won Coffman's and Paulsen's districts by nine percentage points over Trump, and Fitzpatrick's district was essentially a tie in the presidential race.

Maloney summed up those suburban follies in the most basic terms: ”Candidates still matter."

The question neither Maloney nor Luján will answer is whether they should recruit moderate to conservative candidates in rural districts or just abandon them altogether.
Again, you are making this fundamental mistake of viewing this as a class based lens. It's not about class. Trump's average voter is better off. It's about identity. It's about geography. It's about a bunch of scared ignorant white people lashing out at the modern world.

Your read of white integration for Irish Catholics also completely misses the point- once they were allowed "white privilege", they then had the privilege to diversify their political opinions. When you are part of the racial underclass, no such privilege is afforded to you. Your options are limited. And anyone pushing a "class-first" narrative is going to be given a massive side-eye. (One of the roots of today's inequality is that black people were left out of major parts of the New Deal.) When Warren talks about these social and economic issues, she is able to effortlessly integrate them (like in her recent letter/speech) in a way Bernie has never been able to.
 

NeoXChaos

Member
both lol, got really addicted to learning polisci during the primary and then switched my major because I also grew to hate computer science. A lot of this is just stuff I read for fun though.

yeah. I also found this and read it on your state:http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post/how-idaho-became-one-party-state#stream/0

Seems like Idaho has and is traditionally Republican but D's were at least competitive. They did well in the Depression era then things slid back into R control by the 60's. Major reasons for hard right turn is conservative transplants from CA more conservative than the R's in Idaho plus an erosion of Unions in the 70's over Timber and Lumber industries. The national Democratic shift on socials issues in the 70's did not help either. Cecil gave a them a short rebound in the late 80's early 90's due to R infighting but by 94 they were back with force and ever since in the control.
 
Your read of white integration for Irish Catholics also completely misses the point- once they were allowed "white privilege", they then had the privilege to diversify their political opinions. When you are part of the racial underclass, no such privilege is afforded to you. Your options are limited. And anyone pushing a "class-first" narrative is going to be given a massive side-eye. (One of the roots of today's inequality is that black people were left out of major parts of the New Deal.) When Warren talks about these social and economic issues, she is able to effortlessly integrate them (like in her recent letter/speech) in a way Bernie has never been able to.
Not replying to the rest because we'll argue in circles forever but my exact point is that assuming hispanics will remain part of the racial underclass and as such always vote Democratic is misguided at best. They vote for us in big numbers now because they aren't given white privilege, that doesn't mean that as they become more integrated and more demographically represented they will remain like that. This is what both Bushes and Rubio understood, and a big part of why Bush beat Kerry.

yeah. I also found this and read it on your state:http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post/how-idaho-became-one-party-state#stream/0

Seems like Idaho has and is traditionally Republican but D's were at least competitive. They did well in the Depression era then things slid back into R control by the 60's. Major reasons for hard right turn is conservative transplants from CA more conservative than the R's in Idaho plus an erosion of Unions in the 70's over Timber and Lumber industries. The national Democratic shift on socials issues in the 70's did not help either. Cecil gave a them a short rebound in the late 80's early 90's due to R infighting but by 94 they were back with force and ever since in the control.





lol
This was actually pretty interesting, thanks for sharing. I know my parents both love Cecil Andrus even though most of their lives they've been Republicans. Northern Idaho also used to be much more Democratic even in presidential elections, you can see Dukakis and Clinton winning most of the northern counties. The lumber industry is still in Lewiston but it's a pretty small part of the state and we lost our House Minority leader and the other Democrat that represented it last November. We'd probably actually benefit if it was part of the same district as mine, but instead we're linked with Benewah.
 
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