People like Harrison are stuck on foolish strategies like blowing hundreds of millions of dollars on TV campaigns and quixotic runs in safe GOP seats. This strategy has narrowed their field of play and incinerated money that could have been spent wisely.
The problem that’s been growing for decades is that Democrats went from being dominant with the noncollege vote to losing it decisively, and that’s fatal in so many states and districts that their best hope is barely winning Congress and that requires a great year for them. Meanwhile they seem to have no plan for winning back that demographic, which would require long term local party building in areas they currently are deep underwater in, and communication channels that reach both supporters and potential supporters (they’re great at dunning you for money via endless emails if you’ve ever been foolish enough to donate to them—meanwhile nothing getting useful talking points, or tying people to local organizing events, that could do some good).
This is a party that deserves to die, alas them dying would mean the death cult leading the other party would finish us off much faster.
“ No, Schumer thought the centrist Sinema was a safer bet to flip the Arizona Senate seat. As usual, Schumer picked the wrong political Holy Grail.”
It’s if anything the larger failure of making “centrism” your defining electoral brand, when the right has descended into an authoritarian cult of personality. Part of the reason Democrats controlled the electoral fortunes of West Virginia for so long is the residual effects of the New Dela manifest by its biggest industry. If you were in West Virginia you were directly connected to the coal industry and understood the benefits of a strong union blue collar workforce. This wasn’t just about a better pay check- this was a direct political organizing machine. With the slow death of coal, this died out along with it, and slowly demographic resentments took over. Manchin absolutely did nothing to earn back their vote- even though he could have demanded financial aid packages to West Virginia that would have dwarfed anything Byrd achieved in 2021 and 2022 in exchange for his BBB vote.
It’s why now Schumer’s track record this cycle is having such poor results. There is no mass movement towards just “the status quo”. People are interested in candidates willing to define what they believe and actually work to achieve them. The message needs to be “I will do everything different” not just “I will continue the current right wing bullshit just more humanely
It's a good, and sad history lesson. But it does show again that in this country, injustice is baked into its DNA and that means you have to ground out every little bit of progress over long odds.
I'll say this about Jaime Harrison; at least he tried running...$100 million thrown away or not. People yell at Democrats all the time about not contesting seats and he did it in a hostile place.
Contest every race, but spend the money wisely! Endless TV ads in SC got him…to lose by ten points. Meanwhile, putting that money into building local organizations across the state might have helped flip downballot seats and started the long term process of making that state competitive. Which sounds like a long shot now, but if Dems had even a modest gain among noncollege or rural voters, is not unheard of.
Imagine that you and I are hardcore steak lovers. Would a constant barrage of ads about a vegan restaurant make us abandon steak? And the supposed negative steak ads would just inspire us to eat more steak.
Liberals currently believe their positions are so great, they just need to turn up the volume even if the audience doesn’t like the music.
Reminds me of “we tried nothing and are all out of ideas!” They just don’t know of any other way than high priced consultants and expensive TV ads. But Republican dominance of these areas isn’t because they had more ads, it’s because these people are hearing conservative opinions through constant repetition of local pastors, trust figures, even just friends in the community and they adopt that mindset. Democrats will have to put in long work in those communities to start reversing that.
It’s a good point but now I don’t even know what “spend wisely” even means in the era of sadopopulism and rightwing-captive media (inclusive of social media algorithms), AND the fact that polls are not to be trusted at all if showing positive results for Democrats. That’s part of why I’m all about “people need to vote and we’ll let the chips fall where they may.” After all, it’s a common trope for Dems online to complain about incessant fundraising e-mails too. So clearly everyone knows what they need to do, and money ought not matter.
That’s a part of it—the money itself matters less than how they’d use it (and the best efforts aren’t even about spending, but local sweat and toil). And if they have money, one expensive TV ads that convinces nobody could fund local party organizations running food drives, tax prep help, all sorts of services that could be provided by the party and build goodwill. But you’d never think of that seeing those dumb fundraising emails that just give the impression it’s all a scam.
Ultimately, Harrison spent a lot of money to remind voters that he was a traditional Democrat in a state where a traditional Democrat can't win. Arby's can run a billion ads but it will just convince me not to go to Arby's.
Yup—his example doesn’t tell us “Democrats can’t win in half the country and shouldn’t bother trying” but rather “Democrats can’t win in red areas by just airing ads”. Why they thought that would work for Harrison (or McGrath in Kentucky) if they just had ENOUGH money for more TV ads is beyond me.
I defend Joe Manchin on the regular because he *never* pretended to be anything other than what he was, a conservative Democrat-admittedly a dying breed. He himself, towards the end, admitted he and the party were no longer a good fit. His were never going to be the shoulders upon which a new progressive era proudly stood-Joe Biden knew that. And people forget the Senate majority is powerful, even if some members are not going to support your every progressive pipe dream (big tent means big divergence on a lot of hot button issues). Do I wish Manchin had been more supportive of progressive priorities? Of course. But drumming him out means we now have loony Jim Justice in that seat.
Sinema I feel differently about. She was recruited for her "moderate" credentials, but that went to a whole different level when she got to the Senate and decided she was personally going to take an ax to priorities one would have expected her to support, given her earlier stances. She's a poser and a liar IMO, not to mention a failure. Arizona was duped, like PA has been. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I maintain that manchin in particular has skeletons in his closet and it couldn't be that hard to find them if you were someone with Schumer or Biden's level of influence, and that there should have been a meeting in the white house where Biden sat both manchin and sinema down with a carrot in one hand, a gun in the other and made it clear that they would not be fucking around anymore.
Would his centrist ass ever have done that? No. Should he have? Yes. I don't care if it took dangling manchin balls first over a pit of rattlesnakes to get him to quit sabotaging everything.
I was one of the Arizonans who canvassed for and supported Sinema in 2018 and believe you me, no one in Arizona cared what Chuck Schumer (who?) wanted. Triple threat "red" Arizona (GOP majorities in Congress, GOP governor and GOP state legislature majorities) was showing signs of a possible opportunity to emerge as a "purple" state.
We dearly wanted to flip that Senate seat from red to blue and build a statewide Democratic movement - which we did - that would go on to elect Senator Mark Kelly in the 2020 Special Election and again in 2022, as well as flipping the Governorship, Secretary of State and a whole bunch of other critical statewide and local political races in that 2022 election. Sinema was replaced by Senator Ruben Gallego, whom I also supported, in the 2024 election, as well as supporting Adelita Grijalva in the 2025 special election to replace her father in his Congressional seat.
In 2018, however, Sinema had very strong state grassroots support and a well-connected friends-driven fundraising network, both of which she subsequently shat all over.
So, regardless of how supposedly "well" kooky Princess Sparklepants may have "occasionally" voted in DC - and "voting the "right way" is bullshit when you know it won't make a difference in the bucket of spit that is the "60 vote threshold" in the Senate (See also: Murkowski and Collins) - her fucking rude and snottily entitled behavior in Washington and back home made us all absolutely delighted to finally see the back of her spangled self-serving ass when her Congressional pension vested in Year Five and she "stepped down" at the end of Year Six.
Nobody may have cared what Schumer thought directly, but his endorsement meant she got a lot of exposure and access to resources she would not have otherwise had. So, even if no one "cared" per se, they were definitely influenced
Sinema's history does also track with what happens with people out of the modern "Green" Party, And you have a great point about Manchin. Unfortunately, with the U.S. by design set up to allow a rural planter class to effectively control government, it means in order to get any meaningful progress or civil rights, we have to flip very hostile areas. And that's a huge ask.
"Unfortunately, with the U.S. by design set up to allow a rural planter class to effectively control government." Yeah. This is why I couldn't give a rancid shit about the Constitution (the only thing Republicans and I agree on, ironically enough). It's a relic of its time. Not worth the paper it's printed on. We need to throw it out entirely and start from scratch. Not that I think that will ever happen. It's the the second most worshipped text in the country right behind the Bible.
As for needing to convince or flip hostile areas, I don't think that's necessarily true. Gerrymandering does the job just fine. And I'm totally fine with conservatives not having any voice in the government. A group of people that doesn't want to have a government at all shouldn't get a voice in the government they want to destroy. And that's not even touching on the fact that they're genocidal Omnibigots.
That’s the core tension of coalition politics in the U.S. system: progress requires persuading voters who don’t already share the same priorities. That is nothing new or unique. It's also *up to the politicians* to do that work, which, since the advent of the 24 hour news broadcast and then the rise of the internet, is harder to do. But not impossible! In fact, there really is no other choice if Dems want to be viable outside big cities and richer states. Sitting around bitching about how bad or stupid the voters in those areas are is not the way to do it, either. It's not up to the voters to just magically change their priorities because you want them to. You need to persuade people that your way is better! We must remember that what seems self evident to us is not for the voting majority. Tribal politics works best when pretty much everyone is miserable and hates each other.
I will say this though, it's apparently just fine for people in these areas to use California as a shibboleth (not to mention the eliminationist rhetoric about various and sundry minorities). So Murc's Law as well as just...repellent nature of American politics plays into this too.
Persuasion on an operating environment where "{minority} should not exist in the USA" is a horrific proposition, because if you're debating essential humanity and belonging we're already lost.
With the advance of sadopopulism (the tactical nuclear weapon of politics) I am not sure what the answer is. I'm sure a lot of people are trying different campaigns. Mamdani, the new hotness online, worked in the narrow circumstances of New York City. I want to see what happens in areas with a less favorable resource environment.
Well, there are clearly some areas of noncompromise, the rights of humans to exist as they are being one of them. But it doesn’t matter what your morally solid position is on that-or climate change, immigration, etc-if you can’t persuade others of it, and that is a hard pill for lefties to swallow-shoving the furthest left candidate down people's throats who then calls all their prospective voters bigots is just not a winning strategy. I’m surely not defending bigoted beliefs (and I am defining the term “bigot” broadly here), but bigots were not born that way-as Lt Cable so eloquently put it, “You’ve got to be carefully taught”. And if we want progress on rights and public services, we have to engage at least some of those people because some are reachable (thinking right now about my dad, whose opinions on LGBTQ rights-they just called it “gay rights” back then-evolved a lot over the years). If we don't *want* to reach them, then fine, but it's a strategy for permanent marginalization. We'd rather be right than hold power, which is the ONLY way to affect change.
Full on Mamdanis are only going to be electable in narrow areas, but that doesn't mean more lefty politicians can't borrow some popular ideas from him and modify them for their own campaigns.
People like Harrison are stuck on foolish strategies like blowing hundreds of millions of dollars on TV campaigns and quixotic runs in safe GOP seats. This strategy has narrowed their field of play and incinerated money that could have been spent wisely.
The problem that’s been growing for decades is that Democrats went from being dominant with the noncollege vote to losing it decisively, and that’s fatal in so many states and districts that their best hope is barely winning Congress and that requires a great year for them. Meanwhile they seem to have no plan for winning back that demographic, which would require long term local party building in areas they currently are deep underwater in, and communication channels that reach both supporters and potential supporters (they’re great at dunning you for money via endless emails if you’ve ever been foolish enough to donate to them—meanwhile nothing getting useful talking points, or tying people to local organizing events, that could do some good).
This is a party that deserves to die, alas them dying would mean the death cult leading the other party would finish us off much faster.
“ No, Schumer thought the centrist Sinema was a safer bet to flip the Arizona Senate seat. As usual, Schumer picked the wrong political Holy Grail.”
It’s if anything the larger failure of making “centrism” your defining electoral brand, when the right has descended into an authoritarian cult of personality. Part of the reason Democrats controlled the electoral fortunes of West Virginia for so long is the residual effects of the New Dela manifest by its biggest industry. If you were in West Virginia you were directly connected to the coal industry and understood the benefits of a strong union blue collar workforce. This wasn’t just about a better pay check- this was a direct political organizing machine. With the slow death of coal, this died out along with it, and slowly demographic resentments took over. Manchin absolutely did nothing to earn back their vote- even though he could have demanded financial aid packages to West Virginia that would have dwarfed anything Byrd achieved in 2021 and 2022 in exchange for his BBB vote.
It’s why now Schumer’s track record this cycle is having such poor results. There is no mass movement towards just “the status quo”. People are interested in candidates willing to define what they believe and actually work to achieve them. The message needs to be “I will do everything different” not just “I will continue the current right wing bullshit just more humanely
Strong comment. Thanks.
Ultimately, the fault lies with American voters. And the apathy, hate, cynicism, and ignorance that infest so much of the body politick.
We don't have a good government because not enough voters want a good government.
It's a good, and sad history lesson. But it does show again that in this country, injustice is baked into its DNA and that means you have to ground out every little bit of progress over long odds.
I'll say this about Jaime Harrison; at least he tried running...$100 million thrown away or not. People yell at Democrats all the time about not contesting seats and he did it in a hostile place.
Contest every race, but spend the money wisely! Endless TV ads in SC got him…to lose by ten points. Meanwhile, putting that money into building local organizations across the state might have helped flip downballot seats and started the long term process of making that state competitive. Which sounds like a long shot now, but if Dems had even a modest gain among noncollege or rural voters, is not unheard of.
Imagine that you and I are hardcore steak lovers. Would a constant barrage of ads about a vegan restaurant make us abandon steak? And the supposed negative steak ads would just inspire us to eat more steak.
Liberals currently believe their positions are so great, they just need to turn up the volume even if the audience doesn’t like the music.
Reminds me of “we tried nothing and are all out of ideas!” They just don’t know of any other way than high priced consultants and expensive TV ads. But Republican dominance of these areas isn’t because they had more ads, it’s because these people are hearing conservative opinions through constant repetition of local pastors, trust figures, even just friends in the community and they adopt that mindset. Democrats will have to put in long work in those communities to start reversing that.
It’s a good point but now I don’t even know what “spend wisely” even means in the era of sadopopulism and rightwing-captive media (inclusive of social media algorithms), AND the fact that polls are not to be trusted at all if showing positive results for Democrats. That’s part of why I’m all about “people need to vote and we’ll let the chips fall where they may.” After all, it’s a common trope for Dems online to complain about incessant fundraising e-mails too. So clearly everyone knows what they need to do, and money ought not matter.
That’s a part of it—the money itself matters less than how they’d use it (and the best efforts aren’t even about spending, but local sweat and toil). And if they have money, one expensive TV ads that convinces nobody could fund local party organizations running food drives, tax prep help, all sorts of services that could be provided by the party and build goodwill. But you’d never think of that seeing those dumb fundraising emails that just give the impression it’s all a scam.
Ultimately, Harrison spent a lot of money to remind voters that he was a traditional Democrat in a state where a traditional Democrat can't win. Arby's can run a billion ads but it will just convince me not to go to Arby's.
Yup—his example doesn’t tell us “Democrats can’t win in half the country and shouldn’t bother trying” but rather “Democrats can’t win in red areas by just airing ads”. Why they thought that would work for Harrison (or McGrath in Kentucky) if they just had ENOUGH money for more TV ads is beyond me.
Yes, it's not his fault that's what it cost. Sara Gideon did the same thing in Maine only to end up losing by double digits as well
Most of the normies bitching about them are conflict theorists, which is usually wrong.
This take is why I’m glad you’re mostly a mistake theorist, which is mostly correct.
Interesting history, thank you.
I defend Joe Manchin on the regular because he *never* pretended to be anything other than what he was, a conservative Democrat-admittedly a dying breed. He himself, towards the end, admitted he and the party were no longer a good fit. His were never going to be the shoulders upon which a new progressive era proudly stood-Joe Biden knew that. And people forget the Senate majority is powerful, even if some members are not going to support your every progressive pipe dream (big tent means big divergence on a lot of hot button issues). Do I wish Manchin had been more supportive of progressive priorities? Of course. But drumming him out means we now have loony Jim Justice in that seat.
Sinema I feel differently about. She was recruited for her "moderate" credentials, but that went to a whole different level when she got to the Senate and decided she was personally going to take an ax to priorities one would have expected her to support, given her earlier stances. She's a poser and a liar IMO, not to mention a failure. Arizona was duped, like PA has been. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I maintain that manchin in particular has skeletons in his closet and it couldn't be that hard to find them if you were someone with Schumer or Biden's level of influence, and that there should have been a meeting in the white house where Biden sat both manchin and sinema down with a carrot in one hand, a gun in the other and made it clear that they would not be fucking around anymore.
Would his centrist ass ever have done that? No. Should he have? Yes. I don't care if it took dangling manchin balls first over a pit of rattlesnakes to get him to quit sabotaging everything.
I just see things a little differently.
I was one of the Arizonans who canvassed for and supported Sinema in 2018 and believe you me, no one in Arizona cared what Chuck Schumer (who?) wanted. Triple threat "red" Arizona (GOP majorities in Congress, GOP governor and GOP state legislature majorities) was showing signs of a possible opportunity to emerge as a "purple" state.
We dearly wanted to flip that Senate seat from red to blue and build a statewide Democratic movement - which we did - that would go on to elect Senator Mark Kelly in the 2020 Special Election and again in 2022, as well as flipping the Governorship, Secretary of State and a whole bunch of other critical statewide and local political races in that 2022 election. Sinema was replaced by Senator Ruben Gallego, whom I also supported, in the 2024 election, as well as supporting Adelita Grijalva in the 2025 special election to replace her father in his Congressional seat.
In 2018, however, Sinema had very strong state grassroots support and a well-connected friends-driven fundraising network, both of which she subsequently shat all over.
So, regardless of how supposedly "well" kooky Princess Sparklepants may have "occasionally" voted in DC - and "voting the "right way" is bullshit when you know it won't make a difference in the bucket of spit that is the "60 vote threshold" in the Senate (See also: Murkowski and Collins) - her fucking rude and snottily entitled behavior in Washington and back home made us all absolutely delighted to finally see the back of her spangled self-serving ass when her Congressional pension vested in Year Five and she "stepped down" at the end of Year Six.
Nobody may have cared what Schumer thought directly, but his endorsement meant she got a lot of exposure and access to resources she would not have otherwise had. So, even if no one "cared" per se, they were definitely influenced
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/02/krysten-sinema-democrats-senate-chuck-schumer-687120
Ok?
Sinema's history does also track with what happens with people out of the modern "Green" Party, And you have a great point about Manchin. Unfortunately, with the U.S. by design set up to allow a rural planter class to effectively control government, it means in order to get any meaningful progress or civil rights, we have to flip very hostile areas. And that's a huge ask.
"Unfortunately, with the U.S. by design set up to allow a rural planter class to effectively control government." Yeah. This is why I couldn't give a rancid shit about the Constitution (the only thing Republicans and I agree on, ironically enough). It's a relic of its time. Not worth the paper it's printed on. We need to throw it out entirely and start from scratch. Not that I think that will ever happen. It's the the second most worshipped text in the country right behind the Bible.
As for needing to convince or flip hostile areas, I don't think that's necessarily true. Gerrymandering does the job just fine. And I'm totally fine with conservatives not having any voice in the government. A group of people that doesn't want to have a government at all shouldn't get a voice in the government they want to destroy. And that's not even touching on the fact that they're genocidal Omnibigots.
That’s the core tension of coalition politics in the U.S. system: progress requires persuading voters who don’t already share the same priorities. That is nothing new or unique. It's also *up to the politicians* to do that work, which, since the advent of the 24 hour news broadcast and then the rise of the internet, is harder to do. But not impossible! In fact, there really is no other choice if Dems want to be viable outside big cities and richer states. Sitting around bitching about how bad or stupid the voters in those areas are is not the way to do it, either. It's not up to the voters to just magically change their priorities because you want them to. You need to persuade people that your way is better! We must remember that what seems self evident to us is not for the voting majority. Tribal politics works best when pretty much everyone is miserable and hates each other.
I will say this though, it's apparently just fine for people in these areas to use California as a shibboleth (not to mention the eliminationist rhetoric about various and sundry minorities). So Murc's Law as well as just...repellent nature of American politics plays into this too.
Persuasion on an operating environment where "{minority} should not exist in the USA" is a horrific proposition, because if you're debating essential humanity and belonging we're already lost.
With the advance of sadopopulism (the tactical nuclear weapon of politics) I am not sure what the answer is. I'm sure a lot of people are trying different campaigns. Mamdani, the new hotness online, worked in the narrow circumstances of New York City. I want to see what happens in areas with a less favorable resource environment.
Well, there are clearly some areas of noncompromise, the rights of humans to exist as they are being one of them. But it doesn’t matter what your morally solid position is on that-or climate change, immigration, etc-if you can’t persuade others of it, and that is a hard pill for lefties to swallow-shoving the furthest left candidate down people's throats who then calls all their prospective voters bigots is just not a winning strategy. I’m surely not defending bigoted beliefs (and I am defining the term “bigot” broadly here), but bigots were not born that way-as Lt Cable so eloquently put it, “You’ve got to be carefully taught”. And if we want progress on rights and public services, we have to engage at least some of those people because some are reachable (thinking right now about my dad, whose opinions on LGBTQ rights-they just called it “gay rights” back then-evolved a lot over the years). If we don't *want* to reach them, then fine, but it's a strategy for permanent marginalization. We'd rather be right than hold power, which is the ONLY way to affect change.
Full on Mamdanis are only going to be electable in narrow areas, but that doesn't mean more lefty politicians can't borrow some popular ideas from him and modify them for their own campaigns.
Agree 100% on Manchin and Sinema, and on Fetterman as well.