Somebody needs to win with an AOC platform in a district where Democrats are considered weak. AOC clearly moved no needles, not in many years, dismissed as "only electable in New York".
Either the progressive platform can win seats or it can't. You really need to find out.
Putting every possible progressive dollar and energy into winning a primary in a non-safe seat, is your only way to find out, that I can imagine. After 2024, it's clear that only wins, not words, count.
We just need competitive center left Dems who aren’t 100 or committed to traditionalist messaging. They don’t need to have AOC’s platform, specifically
“However, Democrats aren’t actually in ‘disarray.’ The party’s operating pretty much as it always has, but the most well-run Arby’s is still an Arby’s.”
LOL! The perfect analogy… serving old and tough grey meat on a worthless, stale bun.
Also, I was just chastised in another post for blaming John Conyers (merely referencing him parenthetically in actually blaming the Democratic establishment) for throwing Elizabeth Warren under the bus by putting their thumbs on the scale for Joe Biden. I think this article (thank you, future fictional husband Stephen) makes the case that the party is fixated on olds at our peril. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the future of the party, whether the establishment likes it or not.
This is somewhat off-topic, but certainly in the news.
I'm very interested in the dynamic going on right now, and it's been reported how DJT was just a lump on a log until the single most important person on the planet (soto voce nelo ksum) decided how the government should be run.
If 'Murica (I will not call it America ever again until the fucking nation has found some sanity) wants ksum to run it, I look forward to it losing %80 percent of it's value. And yes, we all collectively will be punished. It ain't right, it ain't deserved. But fact is "right" and "deserved" are purely human concepts. They don't sell on the NYSE.
Well hey, no matter if Connolly is actually good at the job he is an Old and he is therefore forfeit.
Really I think that people should just be direct to Democrats and say if you are ”old” and potentially unwell you must not be in leadership or in office. Let's call it the Sotomayor Principle.
This would be a good opportunity for clout as well, as only Democrats will allow their offices to be picketed, so it may be useful to protest them and force them to retire. Democrats are weak anyway, everyone says. Sure, we lost to fanfiction but the real problem is Democrats are old.
I agree that if they’re too old and/or infirm to serve properly, they should go, gracefully. What I loathe is when, once they’re gone, the pioneers who gave us so much during their long careers are suddenly trashed for “having waited too long” and thus been responsible for everything that’s gone wrong since the Civil War. See: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Nancy Pelosi.
Yeah but Democrats love martyrs too for advancing the cause of whatever bugbears they carry. That's one reason they nowadays love invoking LBJ while in his time Democrats were busy shitting on him to where he also decided to not run for reelection, and then they allowed Nixon in.
Every time something goes wrong in the Senate, there's thousands of takes that say "Oh ____ is no LBJ," "LBJ wouldn't allow this." And it of course ignores the different context and political balance of Congress of the day. Back then there were Republicans that weren't nihilists in the thrall of a godking. Back then there were actually broadcast networks that had journalists instead of glorified access columnists. And the political makeup was different; there were lopsided margins in Congress for Democrats. LBJ wouldn't have been able to do his dick-whipping-out antics if he were in the minority, or even a majority the size of modern Democratic majorities. Same thing with Carter, who gets all the accolades now way too late to have affected anything.
And on top of that, Democrats love dead political figures because they won't be alive to defend themselves or give context.
I also hate using the number of followers someone has as a mark of their worth. Social media has a lot to answer for. Politics shouldn't be a popularity contest. I am in favor of training up the next generation of leaders, though there's a lot of institutional knowledge held by the olds that needs to be retained.
The “institutional knowledge” argument is often an excuse and one that doesn’t recognize how politics functions today. If there are some craft parliamentary measures that would let Connolly hold Trump accountable, I’m all for it, but that’s mostly fantasy.
Oversight is about political messaging. Comer was all over TV hammering the Bidens. Connolly sending polite letters to people and maintaining order (though he won’t even be the chair) will have zero impact on the people we have to reach.
It was obvious from this election that Democrats did not do a great job connecting Trump’s corruption and criminality directly to Americans’ bottom line.
Nah I gotta disagree because Harris and Walz directly hammered on that. One of the reasons I know that was the people nitpicking the whole issue with the tariffs (and now the people are shitting themselves because they just didn't want to listen.)
There is no coherence out of voter response in the election except just giving President Klan Robe grace and having a shared amnesia about 2020. You also had media arms that would magnify non-scandals and make them highlights of coverage, when they weren't taking direct leads from the darker anterior segments of the rightwing media human centipede. Here's one I remember that also exemplifies this. Remember when MSM flacks started—for some reason—complaining that Kamala Harris was using wired earbuds? It took a long time before people pointed out, *She's on the Senate Intelligence Committee.* Bluetooth "airpods" and the like are inherently insecure. Experts explained that yes actually Kamala Harris is correct. And then it gets dropped and the next made-up scandal happens.
How much did we hear about Hunter Biden's penis, getting that into the zeitgeist, and "Biden did something in Ukraine I'm sure," and then "is Kamala Harris really Black?"
And then Democrats themselves, the rank-and-file don't share their statements. They just hang the message all on the President and VP and say "You gotta do everything!" That's a thing Republicans don't have to do. They don't rely on Klan Robe to advance the party ideology; he's just the barker that gets butts in the seats. I also give the rightwingers credit, at least they share their party reps' social media posts. So at the same time they demand Democrats "fight fight" and do the silver-tongued speech thing, and then don't spread it.
Lastly I will go to my grave saying this, these people voted for fanfiction in the service of their privilege, so that they could have a chance to remove minorities they don't like. Americans have proven over and over in history that they'll screw themselves over if only to screw someone they don't like worse.
The racist edgelord shitposter who has leverage over the Republican Party told these people with his own mouth that "It's going to be hardship for a while." Harris and Walz pointed out that he said this and that it backed up their message.
EVERYTHING was on the table and we're not even talking yet about the Project 2025 stuff which again was hammered.
It doesn’t matter what you say if your intended audience doesn’t hear your message and worse, doesn’t trust you. If the WICKED movie had been promoted exclusively during NASCAR and MMA fights, it would have bombed. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t any good.
I always come back to the fact that Democrats have ceded the spaces where young people and minorities receive their news (podcasts, social media). They are speaking to middle-aged college educated suburbanites who watch MSNBC and Meet the Press. That’s a major problem.
They also don’t spend the time between elections building a genuine rapport with normal voters, not just the DC press corp. That’s what AOC does well with her Instagram lives and yes Ted Cruz does as well with his *thrice weekly* podcasts.
That’s true about them ceding the spaces. And that’s why I keep coming back to Brian Tyler Cohen (as he says this too). If they go on more podcasts it would help. In the end a very fundamental issue is that crafting legislation and doing social media are two very different skill sets. Unfortunately because Democratic initiatives require statutes we still need politicians who know what they are doing, and we need communicators. People who are good at both are the true unicorns.
To be a Republican you don’t need to have legislation; that’s delivered to you by dedicated NGOs which Democrats don’t have (because that requires billionaire and millionaire dosh). So that is I think part of the issue with why Democrats aren’t thriving in a media environment like this.
I think the Connolly/AOC issue is a bit of a much ado about nothing, though. How much does it matter who gets to be ranking member? Legislators' power these days is all in their ability to go on TV or communicate with the masses. In that sense, AOC is already one of the most powerful Dems in the House, even without a title. On the other side of the aisle, I can't name most committee chairs, but I do know who Marge Greene and Adriana Luna are.
What Dems need isn't so much "drive out the old" but rather to platform their best spokespeople, and coordinate on consistent messaging and imagebuilding. Right now they're seen as the party of out of touch elites, rather than regular working folks, and what will matter is what you have in mind when you think "Democrat".
Yes, I think AOC is clearly better at messaging and reaching people than Connolly. When someone has rejected a democratized form of constituent outreach, it reinforces the “out of touch” elitist narrative. There are many politicians whose social media feed is clearly run by their interns, for instance.
Yep--I know it seems unfair when Dems are the ones offering substantively better policies for low income folks, but image matters. If you look like someone who sits behind a desk, has multiple degrees, etc., they're just not going to think you're one of them. (And this is a class issue, it can transcend race in these cases). Meanwhile, the "local oaf" Homer Simpson type, the sort you imagine at the end of the bar spouting "honest nonsense" is going to have more appeal.
AOC I think does have more appeal, particularly to younger people, than most of the Dem leadership--and Crockett, despite being an attorney, has a very "are you shitting me with this?" vibe when she speaks on the floor that has a much more "honest" sound than say Schumer's carefully guarded words (granted, Senate rules are probably stricter than House rules).
Ranking member really doesn't matter because of how voters rewarded Republicans, but this is also part of how you can get clicks and clout from petty squabbles. Remember the heyday of the "Squad" was that they were cast as Nancy Pelosi's arch-enemies. That was why they were getting extra clout even if it wasn't actually the case. Indeed the main disagreements between Pelosi and the "Squad" are tactical, not ideological.
Note that this angle isn't played up with Hakeem Jeffries as there's even less daylight between him and them ideologically, so thus there's no coverage.
Democratic Disarray, even perceived Disarray, is how you get clicks.
Also Connolly is definitely not an elite; he doesn't have a high profile as pointed out.
And people's perceptions are of course also bullshit. That's why there were people voting believing that Democrats want teachers to transition children in the goddamn classroom without parent permission.
And I've talked about before why the consistent message and imagebuilding doesn't work; it's because of the ideological diversity of where Democrats come from. Now given the losses like Sherrod Brown this will be easier as now Democrats are even more concentrated in "blue states," but then they'll be brushed off as not-"Real America." A whole lot of our political dynamics come from the wide swathes of unreconstructed territory and the outsize power given to it.
Well said, Stephen. Dem leaders are chumps, they keep on taking the same bad advice from political consultants. and pay for the bad advice. Dems need to ditch those political consultants, and forget about bipartisanship, which they still value. Why? No one else does, certainly not repubs. It's nice if a good piece of legislation is bipartisan, but it's not the bipartisanship that makes it good, it's what is in it. Bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship is stupid.
Another thing that Dems need to realize - the MSM does not value the truth, the Constitution, or democracy. They are very much aligned with repubs, and love trump. No matter how bad the second trump maladministration is, the media will sanewash it. Dems should push back against the media's framing every single thing from the RW perspective.
Finally, Dems won't automatically gain seats in 2026 and 2028 because of their being chumps and because of the media embracing the repubs and trump. Another thing that will hurt them - demoralized rank and file Democrats. We see Dems in office surrendering to trump, so why should we campaign for them, donate to their campaigns, or even vote for them? What the hell happened to Harris' rallying cry of "When we fight, we win!"?
It makes me apopleptic to get calls from the d senate or congressional campaign committees. They can fuck straight off, and I'll support Ds who actually understand what it takes to stand up an opposition, thank you very much.
Fwiw, the border bill is absolute horseshit, as it eviscerates asylum law. The fact that Ds have learned they can just throw immigrants under the bus is one of the more depressing "bipartisan" lessons they've learned.
My entire career has been about immigrant rights, protecting the least of these, and advocating for justice to the extent it's available in this deeply, aggressively stupid country. Ds have conditioned us to accept so little that I actually donated to the Harris campaign while fully expecting her to throw immigrants under the bus on day 1. A billion dollar losing campaign that had nothing to say on universal health care, immigration, or Gaza - bc we just can't do difficult things anymore & apparently shouldn't aspire to solve them.
I think they're so flummoxed by the election results they have no idea what to do next. Harris did everything she was supposed to do, and lost. So what now?
They have to conclude that (1) the electorate is stupid/rotten and so they can never win them over, (2) the electorate is stupid/rotten so maybe we need to be more stupid and rotten in hopes of winning them over, or (3) the electorate is not a good/bad beast, but rather a collection of voters who, like it or not, were won over by the wrong side this time, and if Dems intend to win enough of them back they'd better figure out how to sell their product.
Something I’ve noticed in dysfunctional organizations that applies to the Democratic Party today: It’s often easier to claim that a strategy, project, etc was a terrible idea in *general* than to criticize its execution and those responsible.
Democrats did not effectively win the messaging battle, mostly because they didn’t even try to reach their own voters where they were. What I’ve seen after the election is the refusal to even concede that there were issues with the messaging and they have resorted to blaming the electorate -- voters are stupid and racist and we shouldn’t even try OR they are stupid and racist and we need to be the same. Neither is the right choice.
Blaming the electorate is just pointless. I mean, sure, if we had the electorate we wanted (mostly people who listen to our impassioned arguments and value what we value!), that'd be great, but by and large the electorate includes a lot of people who don't have time for that, or have concerns that more directly affect them. If our job is to sell to them, we'd better figure out our audience and figure out how to make it work.
If we were a soda company, and we got crushed by Coke last quarter, what would we say to the exec who says "well, the consumers are all obviously stupid for preferring Coke to our product"?
I'm sick watching establishment Democrats sideline the voices like AOC. They're STILL focused on the gd norms, and we see them working hard for the corporations and wealthy who elected them now that money is basically unlimited in elections. How's progress on the CEO crisis hotline coming, Democrat Gov of NY?
When the working class felt abandoned by Democrats, they were right. Voting for Trump won't help them either, but there is no party left that's fighting for the little guy. We need to get money out of politics like ta-now.
Many Republicans at one point thought their own party was a fossil, its establishment not up to the task of standing up to an evil Democratic regime, and the party as it was deserved to die. They formed their own political movement, with the help of sympathetic donors and celebs, at the grass roots local and national level, and began a campaign of getting their message out through media and their own communications channels, and pressuring Republicans to either toe the line or get primaried to oblivion. They wound up taking over their party. This was the Tea Party movement, that led to the MAGAs.
Right now, a lot of Democrats are furious with their party, believe it is not up to the task of standing up to an evil opposition, and think the party as it is deserves to die. Remains to be seen if they form their own answer to the Tea Party.
The Tea Party was a middle-class white movement. Dems would need something similar. The bottom line is that someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, as much as we loathe her, has more clout sociopolitically than someone like Cori Bush. The professional activist class is mostly ignored by Dems and major donors. I do hope that someone like Shannon Watts can perhaps drive the necessary change.
Yeah, the Dems can't write off the non-college voters. For a while it seemed they wanted the strategy of "we can count on POC voters, plus educated whites" but even that was dicey (and failed in 2016) and now that voters are sorting more by class than race, it's potentially fatal if it's not a Biden-era blip.
>>Democrats have a plan to take power in Washington back from Republicans in two years: work with them now.<<
“Take it back in two years” is the lamest-ass thing I’ve ever heard. That sums up the Democratic party’s game plan, almost always. That makes me feel like a loser. “Work with them now” makes me feel like they think I’m a sucker who will still be more than happy to throw money at them, on a continual basis, I guess. Yeah, no. Show me that you know how to use it to win elections, and I’ll consider donating to you again in the future, Dems. But as of now, you’re just another big-money political player in America’s two-party system, and I don’t like feeling like a loser and a sucker.
Yes, Democrats don’t beat themselves up thinking, “You know, if we’d kept the pressure up or done something different that actually forced out Trump during his first impeachment, maybe fewer people would’ve died under President Pence -- no matter how bad he otherwise would’ve been.” Instead, they secretly see the pandemic as “exposing” Trump to voters.
But it’s sociopathic cowardice to just sit back and hope that people get hurt so you can regain power.
Yep--plus, what if we don't have a disaster in 2026? Or if the media landscape is such that any disaster can be turned against Democrats? This sense that success is "due" eventually is just self-defeating.
They also always assume things will repeat themselves--we'll win the midterms because the out party always does! (Except in 2002, when the in party exploited a national security crisis...but what are the chances of THAT happening again?) Republicans will overreach! (Seems they overreached already, and the voters still rewarded them)
And now their messaging boils down to "eh, we were just kidding about the end of democracy thing".
It's incredible to think about how much the Republican party has transformed itself in the last 30 years. From Gingrich in the '90s to Bush in the 2000s, to McConnell during the Obama era and the tea party and now the Trump era, the GOP has adapted based on how to most effectively oppose the Dem's and gain power (that the actual policies and governance often feel secondary seems almost intentional). And when the party tried to moderate in 2012 with Romney and it didn't work, they swung hard to the right.
Comparatively, the Democratic party is essentially the same as it was in 1992, trying to be the party of the moderate center, of compromise. The personnel changes have been largely cosmetic, and the few people who have tried to genuinely shift the party's message (Dean, Sanders, AOC) have been sidelined and shouted down. Claiming the center has proven to be a losing strategy, and yet it's clear that the people in charge of the party are going to double down on it, either because they think it will work or because they care more about their own power than about winning elections.
“People want to see government work, and we’re going to hold Republicans accountable for whether they’re willing to help move things forward for the American people,” DelBene said somewhere from 1993.
More like 1996. “The politics of failure have failed. We need to make them work again.”
—Senator Ka-…Bob Dole
The populace as a whole doesn’t care about governance, they only care about their own selfish desires and that their beliefs, whether bigoted or righteous are confirmed as being correct.
Time for Frost, Moskowitz, Crockett, etc. to ascend and be given the leadership positions. At least the Washington Generals are in on the gag.
What’s going on with Moskowitz? He’s all in on the DOGE caucus? He praised Matt Gaetz as a candidate for AG? Where’s the guy who excelled at humiliating Jim Jordan and James Comer? Deeply disappointed in him.
I had no idea about that. I've only been reading SER's pieces on occasion so I'm not as informed as I used to be. I only chose his name because he seems like a fighter and is fearless. I just would like to have people who are committed to their beliefs and will call out liars and deceivers by name. Stephen wrote it better than I ever could.
It’s impossible to keep up with everything these days. Moskowitz’s name jumped out at me earlier on because I liked him so much. Now I’m not so sure. I fucking HATE this timeline.
He should have made it plain that this was the fault of President-elect Leon Musk and his VP Trump. CALL OUT THEIR NAMES. Quit with the semantics and soft-pedaling of what’s going on. This is a big part of the problem: The Dems (with the exceptions of Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez) still refuse to fight fire with fire.
We need to embrace the GOP's primary strategy that doesn't reward this "traditions and norms" nonsense. Get anyone over the age of 60 or with any right-leaning tendencies (hello Fetterman) out. Traditions and norms went out the window a long time ago. If anything, THAT is what voters are rejecting. You would think they'd realize this since they've already thrown out one Dem tradition: opposing Trump.
The people in charge are ruling class millionaires. They can afford to chill out while the rest of us run. I don't see a way out outside of a third party, that has to build from the ground up. It's at least a generation out of power. You can't drag these mofos left and they are just right wing lite on so many issues now, be it immigration, education, queer rights, regulation. I mean really, with friends like this....
Somebody needs to win with an AOC platform in a district where Democrats are considered weak. AOC clearly moved no needles, not in many years, dismissed as "only electable in New York".
Either the progressive platform can win seats or it can't. You really need to find out.
Putting every possible progressive dollar and energy into winning a primary in a non-safe seat, is your only way to find out, that I can imagine. After 2024, it's clear that only wins, not words, count.
We just need competitive center left Dems who aren’t 100 or committed to traditionalist messaging. They don’t need to have AOC’s platform, specifically
Bringing the 🔥, Mr. Robinson. May more heed your wisdom!
“However, Democrats aren’t actually in ‘disarray.’ The party’s operating pretty much as it always has, but the most well-run Arby’s is still an Arby’s.”
LOL! The perfect analogy… serving old and tough grey meat on a worthless, stale bun.
Also, I was just chastised in another post for blaming John Conyers (merely referencing him parenthetically in actually blaming the Democratic establishment) for throwing Elizabeth Warren under the bus by putting their thumbs on the scale for Joe Biden. I think this article (thank you, future fictional husband Stephen) makes the case that the party is fixated on olds at our peril. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the future of the party, whether the establishment likes it or not.
This is somewhat off-topic, but certainly in the news.
I'm very interested in the dynamic going on right now, and it's been reported how DJT was just a lump on a log until the single most important person on the planet (soto voce nelo ksum) decided how the government should be run.
Put nelo in charge of the government and he'll do to the USA what he did to X - a reduction in value by 80%. https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+reduction+in+value+of+X+since+musk+bought+it&oq=what+is+the+reduction+in+value+of+X+since+musk+bought+it&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRirAjIHCAUQIRiPAtIBCDk3NjhqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
If 'Murica (I will not call it America ever again until the fucking nation has found some sanity) wants ksum to run it, I look forward to it losing %80 percent of it's value. And yes, we all collectively will be punished. It ain't right, it ain't deserved. But fact is "right" and "deserved" are purely human concepts. They don't sell on the NYSE.
Well hey, no matter if Connolly is actually good at the job he is an Old and he is therefore forfeit.
Really I think that people should just be direct to Democrats and say if you are ”old” and potentially unwell you must not be in leadership or in office. Let's call it the Sotomayor Principle.
This would be a good opportunity for clout as well, as only Democrats will allow their offices to be picketed, so it may be useful to protest them and force them to retire. Democrats are weak anyway, everyone says. Sure, we lost to fanfiction but the real problem is Democrats are old.
I agree that if they’re too old and/or infirm to serve properly, they should go, gracefully. What I loathe is when, once they’re gone, the pioneers who gave us so much during their long careers are suddenly trashed for “having waited too long” and thus been responsible for everything that’s gone wrong since the Civil War. See: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Nancy Pelosi.
"Either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain,” as the saying goes. This is fairly consistent throughout history.
I’m surprised at Nancy Pelosi seemingly taking this route. I guess I shouldn’t be.
Yeah but Democrats love martyrs too for advancing the cause of whatever bugbears they carry. That's one reason they nowadays love invoking LBJ while in his time Democrats were busy shitting on him to where he also decided to not run for reelection, and then they allowed Nixon in.
Every time something goes wrong in the Senate, there's thousands of takes that say "Oh ____ is no LBJ," "LBJ wouldn't allow this." And it of course ignores the different context and political balance of Congress of the day. Back then there were Republicans that weren't nihilists in the thrall of a godking. Back then there were actually broadcast networks that had journalists instead of glorified access columnists. And the political makeup was different; there were lopsided margins in Congress for Democrats. LBJ wouldn't have been able to do his dick-whipping-out antics if he were in the minority, or even a majority the size of modern Democratic majorities. Same thing with Carter, who gets all the accolades now way too late to have affected anything.
And on top of that, Democrats love dead political figures because they won't be alive to defend themselves or give context.
Yes! All of this.
I also hate using the number of followers someone has as a mark of their worth. Social media has a lot to answer for. Politics shouldn't be a popularity contest. I am in favor of training up the next generation of leaders, though there's a lot of institutional knowledge held by the olds that needs to be retained.
The “institutional knowledge” argument is often an excuse and one that doesn’t recognize how politics functions today. If there are some craft parliamentary measures that would let Connolly hold Trump accountable, I’m all for it, but that’s mostly fantasy.
Oversight is about political messaging. Comer was all over TV hammering the Bidens. Connolly sending polite letters to people and maintaining order (though he won’t even be the chair) will have zero impact on the people we have to reach.
It was obvious from this election that Democrats did not do a great job connecting Trump’s corruption and criminality directly to Americans’ bottom line.
Nah I gotta disagree because Harris and Walz directly hammered on that. One of the reasons I know that was the people nitpicking the whole issue with the tariffs (and now the people are shitting themselves because they just didn't want to listen.)
There is no coherence out of voter response in the election except just giving President Klan Robe grace and having a shared amnesia about 2020. You also had media arms that would magnify non-scandals and make them highlights of coverage, when they weren't taking direct leads from the darker anterior segments of the rightwing media human centipede. Here's one I remember that also exemplifies this. Remember when MSM flacks started—for some reason—complaining that Kamala Harris was using wired earbuds? It took a long time before people pointed out, *She's on the Senate Intelligence Committee.* Bluetooth "airpods" and the like are inherently insecure. Experts explained that yes actually Kamala Harris is correct. And then it gets dropped and the next made-up scandal happens.
How much did we hear about Hunter Biden's penis, getting that into the zeitgeist, and "Biden did something in Ukraine I'm sure," and then "is Kamala Harris really Black?"
And then Democrats themselves, the rank-and-file don't share their statements. They just hang the message all on the President and VP and say "You gotta do everything!" That's a thing Republicans don't have to do. They don't rely on Klan Robe to advance the party ideology; he's just the barker that gets butts in the seats. I also give the rightwingers credit, at least they share their party reps' social media posts. So at the same time they demand Democrats "fight fight" and do the silver-tongued speech thing, and then don't spread it.
Lastly I will go to my grave saying this, these people voted for fanfiction in the service of their privilege, so that they could have a chance to remove minorities they don't like. Americans have proven over and over in history that they'll screw themselves over if only to screw someone they don't like worse.
The racist edgelord shitposter who has leverage over the Republican Party told these people with his own mouth that "It's going to be hardship for a while." Harris and Walz pointed out that he said this and that it backed up their message.
EVERYTHING was on the table and we're not even talking yet about the Project 2025 stuff which again was hammered.
It was the damn fanfiction.
It doesn’t matter what you say if your intended audience doesn’t hear your message and worse, doesn’t trust you. If the WICKED movie had been promoted exclusively during NASCAR and MMA fights, it would have bombed. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t any good.
I always come back to the fact that Democrats have ceded the spaces where young people and minorities receive their news (podcasts, social media). They are speaking to middle-aged college educated suburbanites who watch MSNBC and Meet the Press. That’s a major problem.
They also don’t spend the time between elections building a genuine rapport with normal voters, not just the DC press corp. That’s what AOC does well with her Instagram lives and yes Ted Cruz does as well with his *thrice weekly* podcasts.
That’s true about them ceding the spaces. And that’s why I keep coming back to Brian Tyler Cohen (as he says this too). If they go on more podcasts it would help. In the end a very fundamental issue is that crafting legislation and doing social media are two very different skill sets. Unfortunately because Democratic initiatives require statutes we still need politicians who know what they are doing, and we need communicators. People who are good at both are the true unicorns.
To be a Republican you don’t need to have legislation; that’s delivered to you by dedicated NGOs which Democrats don’t have (because that requires billionaire and millionaire dosh). So that is I think part of the issue with why Democrats aren’t thriving in a media environment like this.
All I can do is hope we don't become them.
I think the Connolly/AOC issue is a bit of a much ado about nothing, though. How much does it matter who gets to be ranking member? Legislators' power these days is all in their ability to go on TV or communicate with the masses. In that sense, AOC is already one of the most powerful Dems in the House, even without a title. On the other side of the aisle, I can't name most committee chairs, but I do know who Marge Greene and Adriana Luna are.
What Dems need isn't so much "drive out the old" but rather to platform their best spokespeople, and coordinate on consistent messaging and imagebuilding. Right now they're seen as the party of out of touch elites, rather than regular working folks, and what will matter is what you have in mind when you think "Democrat".
Yes, I think AOC is clearly better at messaging and reaching people than Connolly. When someone has rejected a democratized form of constituent outreach, it reinforces the “out of touch” elitist narrative. There are many politicians whose social media feed is clearly run by their interns, for instance.
Yep--I know it seems unfair when Dems are the ones offering substantively better policies for low income folks, but image matters. If you look like someone who sits behind a desk, has multiple degrees, etc., they're just not going to think you're one of them. (And this is a class issue, it can transcend race in these cases). Meanwhile, the "local oaf" Homer Simpson type, the sort you imagine at the end of the bar spouting "honest nonsense" is going to have more appeal.
AOC I think does have more appeal, particularly to younger people, than most of the Dem leadership--and Crockett, despite being an attorney, has a very "are you shitting me with this?" vibe when she speaks on the floor that has a much more "honest" sound than say Schumer's carefully guarded words (granted, Senate rules are probably stricter than House rules).
Ranking member really doesn't matter because of how voters rewarded Republicans, but this is also part of how you can get clicks and clout from petty squabbles. Remember the heyday of the "Squad" was that they were cast as Nancy Pelosi's arch-enemies. That was why they were getting extra clout even if it wasn't actually the case. Indeed the main disagreements between Pelosi and the "Squad" are tactical, not ideological.
Note that this angle isn't played up with Hakeem Jeffries as there's even less daylight between him and them ideologically, so thus there's no coverage.
Democratic Disarray, even perceived Disarray, is how you get clicks.
Also Connolly is definitely not an elite; he doesn't have a high profile as pointed out.
And people's perceptions are of course also bullshit. That's why there were people voting believing that Democrats want teachers to transition children in the goddamn classroom without parent permission.
And I've talked about before why the consistent message and imagebuilding doesn't work; it's because of the ideological diversity of where Democrats come from. Now given the losses like Sherrod Brown this will be easier as now Democrats are even more concentrated in "blue states," but then they'll be brushed off as not-"Real America." A whole lot of our political dynamics come from the wide swathes of unreconstructed territory and the outsize power given to it.
𝑫𝒆𝒎𝒐𝒄𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒔 𝒅𝒆𝒆𝒑𝒍𝒚 𝒗𝒂𝒍𝒖𝒆 𝒏𝒐𝒓𝒎𝒔, 𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒖𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒈𝒐𝒐𝒅 𝒈𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒏𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆. 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒏𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒖𝒔-𝒒𝒖𝒐, 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏 𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕’𝒔 𝒈𝒓𝒐𝒘𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒍𝒚 𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒆 𝒇𝒂𝒔𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒕, 𝒊𝒔 𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚 𝒅𝒊𝒇𝒇𝒊𝒄𝒖𝒍𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒑𝒆𝒐𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝒘𝒉𝒐 𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒆𝒊𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒃𝒐𝒓𝒏 𝒕𝒐 𝒄𝒉𝒖𝒎𝒑𝒏𝒆𝒔𝒔 𝒐𝒓 𝒉𝒂𝒅 𝒄𝒉𝒖𝒎𝒑𝒏𝒆𝒔𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒓𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒖𝒑𝒐𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎.
Well said, Stephen. Dem leaders are chumps, they keep on taking the same bad advice from political consultants. and pay for the bad advice. Dems need to ditch those political consultants, and forget about bipartisanship, which they still value. Why? No one else does, certainly not repubs. It's nice if a good piece of legislation is bipartisan, but it's not the bipartisanship that makes it good, it's what is in it. Bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship is stupid.
Another thing that Dems need to realize - the MSM does not value the truth, the Constitution, or democracy. They are very much aligned with repubs, and love trump. No matter how bad the second trump maladministration is, the media will sanewash it. Dems should push back against the media's framing every single thing from the RW perspective.
Finally, Dems won't automatically gain seats in 2026 and 2028 because of their being chumps and because of the media embracing the repubs and trump. Another thing that will hurt them - demoralized rank and file Democrats. We see Dems in office surrendering to trump, so why should we campaign for them, donate to their campaigns, or even vote for them? What the hell happened to Harris' rallying cry of "When we fight, we win!"?
It makes me apopleptic to get calls from the d senate or congressional campaign committees. They can fuck straight off, and I'll support Ds who actually understand what it takes to stand up an opposition, thank you very much.
Fwiw, the border bill is absolute horseshit, as it eviscerates asylum law. The fact that Ds have learned they can just throw immigrants under the bus is one of the more depressing "bipartisan" lessons they've learned.
My entire career has been about immigrant rights, protecting the least of these, and advocating for justice to the extent it's available in this deeply, aggressively stupid country. Ds have conditioned us to accept so little that I actually donated to the Harris campaign while fully expecting her to throw immigrants under the bus on day 1. A billion dollar losing campaign that had nothing to say on universal health care, immigration, or Gaza - bc we just can't do difficult things anymore & apparently shouldn't aspire to solve them.
I think they're so flummoxed by the election results they have no idea what to do next. Harris did everything she was supposed to do, and lost. So what now?
They have to conclude that (1) the electorate is stupid/rotten and so they can never win them over, (2) the electorate is stupid/rotten so maybe we need to be more stupid and rotten in hopes of winning them over, or (3) the electorate is not a good/bad beast, but rather a collection of voters who, like it or not, were won over by the wrong side this time, and if Dems intend to win enough of them back they'd better figure out how to sell their product.
Something I’ve noticed in dysfunctional organizations that applies to the Democratic Party today: It’s often easier to claim that a strategy, project, etc was a terrible idea in *general* than to criticize its execution and those responsible.
Democrats did not effectively win the messaging battle, mostly because they didn’t even try to reach their own voters where they were. What I’ve seen after the election is the refusal to even concede that there were issues with the messaging and they have resorted to blaming the electorate -- voters are stupid and racist and we shouldn’t even try OR they are stupid and racist and we need to be the same. Neither is the right choice.
Blaming the electorate is just pointless. I mean, sure, if we had the electorate we wanted (mostly people who listen to our impassioned arguments and value what we value!), that'd be great, but by and large the electorate includes a lot of people who don't have time for that, or have concerns that more directly affect them. If our job is to sell to them, we'd better figure out our audience and figure out how to make it work.
If we were a soda company, and we got crushed by Coke last quarter, what would we say to the exec who says "well, the consumers are all obviously stupid for preferring Coke to our product"?
THIS, exactly.
[the most well-run Arby’s is still an Arby’s.]
Please don't compare Arby's to the Democratic party.
Arby's at least provides tasty sandwiches when you give them money even if they aren't as tasty as your local sandwich shop.
I'm sick watching establishment Democrats sideline the voices like AOC. They're STILL focused on the gd norms, and we see them working hard for the corporations and wealthy who elected them now that money is basically unlimited in elections. How's progress on the CEO crisis hotline coming, Democrat Gov of NY?
When the working class felt abandoned by Democrats, they were right. Voting for Trump won't help them either, but there is no party left that's fighting for the little guy. We need to get money out of politics like ta-now.
It really got rolling under Clinton & his trifling triangulating bullshit.
Many Republicans at one point thought their own party was a fossil, its establishment not up to the task of standing up to an evil Democratic regime, and the party as it was deserved to die. They formed their own political movement, with the help of sympathetic donors and celebs, at the grass roots local and national level, and began a campaign of getting their message out through media and their own communications channels, and pressuring Republicans to either toe the line or get primaried to oblivion. They wound up taking over their party. This was the Tea Party movement, that led to the MAGAs.
Right now, a lot of Democrats are furious with their party, believe it is not up to the task of standing up to an evil opposition, and think the party as it is deserves to die. Remains to be seen if they form their own answer to the Tea Party.
The Tea Party was a middle-class white movement. Dems would need something similar. The bottom line is that someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, as much as we loathe her, has more clout sociopolitically than someone like Cori Bush. The professional activist class is mostly ignored by Dems and major donors. I do hope that someone like Shannon Watts can perhaps drive the necessary change.
Yeah, the Dems can't write off the non-college voters. For a while it seemed they wanted the strategy of "we can count on POC voters, plus educated whites" but even that was dicey (and failed in 2016) and now that voters are sorting more by class than race, it's potentially fatal if it's not a Biden-era blip.
>>Democrats have a plan to take power in Washington back from Republicans in two years: work with them now.<<
“Take it back in two years” is the lamest-ass thing I’ve ever heard. That sums up the Democratic party’s game plan, almost always. That makes me feel like a loser. “Work with them now” makes me feel like they think I’m a sucker who will still be more than happy to throw money at them, on a continual basis, I guess. Yeah, no. Show me that you know how to use it to win elections, and I’ll consider donating to you again in the future, Dems. But as of now, you’re just another big-money political player in America’s two-party system, and I don’t like feeling like a loser and a sucker.
"Wait and assume Republicans will be very unpopular, even though we were sure they were unpopular in 2024" seems a pretty weak strategy.
Hey, maybe we can hope for a pandemic, or an Iraq War, to make Republicans even less popular! Just sit back and wait for winning by default to work!
Yes, Democrats don’t beat themselves up thinking, “You know, if we’d kept the pressure up or done something different that actually forced out Trump during his first impeachment, maybe fewer people would’ve died under President Pence -- no matter how bad he otherwise would’ve been.” Instead, they secretly see the pandemic as “exposing” Trump to voters.
But it’s sociopathic cowardice to just sit back and hope that people get hurt so you can regain power.
Yep--plus, what if we don't have a disaster in 2026? Or if the media landscape is such that any disaster can be turned against Democrats? This sense that success is "due" eventually is just self-defeating.
Hasn’t worked so far, and it’s ghoulish to hope for some major disaster to come along and save their their sorry behinds again.
They also always assume things will repeat themselves--we'll win the midterms because the out party always does! (Except in 2002, when the in party exploited a national security crisis...but what are the chances of THAT happening again?) Republicans will overreach! (Seems they overreached already, and the voters still rewarded them)
And now their messaging boils down to "eh, we were just kidding about the end of democracy thing".
Yes, that’s my whole point.
It's incredible to think about how much the Republican party has transformed itself in the last 30 years. From Gingrich in the '90s to Bush in the 2000s, to McConnell during the Obama era and the tea party and now the Trump era, the GOP has adapted based on how to most effectively oppose the Dem's and gain power (that the actual policies and governance often feel secondary seems almost intentional). And when the party tried to moderate in 2012 with Romney and it didn't work, they swung hard to the right.
Comparatively, the Democratic party is essentially the same as it was in 1992, trying to be the party of the moderate center, of compromise. The personnel changes have been largely cosmetic, and the few people who have tried to genuinely shift the party's message (Dean, Sanders, AOC) have been sidelined and shouted down. Claiming the center has proven to be a losing strategy, and yet it's clear that the people in charge of the party are going to double down on it, either because they think it will work or because they care more about their own power than about winning elections.
" The personnel changes have been largely cosmetic”
Very important point.
“People want to see government work, and we’re going to hold Republicans accountable for whether they’re willing to help move things forward for the American people,” DelBene said somewhere from 1993.
More like 1996. “The politics of failure have failed. We need to make them work again.”
—Senator Ka-…Bob Dole
The populace as a whole doesn’t care about governance, they only care about their own selfish desires and that their beliefs, whether bigoted or righteous are confirmed as being correct.
Time for Frost, Moskowitz, Crockett, etc. to ascend and be given the leadership positions. At least the Washington Generals are in on the gag.
They should just have Crockett do all the media for them. And let her do all the talking on committees.
What’s going on with Moskowitz? He’s all in on the DOGE caucus? He praised Matt Gaetz as a candidate for AG? Where’s the guy who excelled at humiliating Jim Jordan and James Comer? Deeply disappointed in him.
I agree - and he hopped right on board the defund nonprofits w views we don't like (Gaza) bullshit.
I had no idea about that. I've only been reading SER's pieces on occasion so I'm not as informed as I used to be. I only chose his name because he seems like a fighter and is fearless. I just would like to have people who are committed to their beliefs and will call out liars and deceivers by name. Stephen wrote it better than I ever could.
It’s impossible to keep up with everything these days. Moskowitz’s name jumped out at me earlier on because I liked him so much. Now I’m not so sure. I fucking HATE this timeline.
Hakeem Jeffries showed some signs of oppositional life after Musk scuttled the budget deal.
https://youtu.be/fTHYxgPMy4k?feature=shared
He should have made it plain that this was the fault of President-elect Leon Musk and his VP Trump. CALL OUT THEIR NAMES. Quit with the semantics and soft-pedaling of what’s going on. This is a big part of the problem: The Dems (with the exceptions of Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez) still refuse to fight fire with fire.
I keep banging my head on this wall, can’t understand why it hurts. I’ll keep banging my head on this wall. Maybe it will eventually stop hurting.
The embarrassing shortsightedness of not removing head from ass
We need to embrace the GOP's primary strategy that doesn't reward this "traditions and norms" nonsense. Get anyone over the age of 60 or with any right-leaning tendencies (hello Fetterman) out. Traditions and norms went out the window a long time ago. If anything, THAT is what voters are rejecting. You would think they'd realize this since they've already thrown out one Dem tradition: opposing Trump.
The people in charge are ruling class millionaires. They can afford to chill out while the rest of us run. I don't see a way out outside of a third party, that has to build from the ground up. It's at least a generation out of power. You can't drag these mofos left and they are just right wing lite on so many issues now, be it immigration, education, queer rights, regulation. I mean really, with friends like this....
They're really not doing much to dispel their image as out of touch elitists.