I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?

  • @very_well_lost
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    241 month ago

    To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: You don’t run for office with the electorate you want, you run for office with the electorate you have.

    • @[email protected]
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      81 month ago

      Well that’s a lie, with voter suppression and gerrymandering you can have your dream electorate!

    • @[email protected]
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      21 month ago

      Well then, our troubles are deeper than we know.

      On the right as long as you talk a good game on lowering taxes they’ll put aside any and all espoused convictions. See how quiet the Libertarians got when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Turns out any time I spent debating the preeminence of personal liberty and the NAP was a big fat waste of my time. Alas.

      On the left we have an electorate that “…would rather be right than president,” and it turns out they get to be neither.

      • @SoftestSapphic
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        1 month ago

        Most Americans align closer with progressives than any other group when it comes to policy. But messaging has been coopted by the Republicans to make people instinctively hate “socialism” because of the Red Scare Propaganda.

        But Democrats block progressive policy because it makes their donors angry.

        So really there’s nobody willing to represent the majority

        • @[email protected]
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          11 month ago

          I’ve become pretty skeptical we know where the majority is. The question determines the outcome of the survey. The measuring stick is flawed and error bars are many times larger than the difference being measured. Frankly, the thing being measured has more dimensions than are being measured.

          And it’s worth remembering how the party got here. The left and labor coalition failed to beat Nixon twice, Ford’s losing had little to do with the left, and it utterly fell apart against Reagan. The Democrats only started to get traction at the national level by going to the center, using the DLC playbook. I’m as angry about the abandonment of labor by the Democratic party as anyone, but the reason for it is not a mystery. By the same token if the left doesn’t build the structure for a more left leaning Democratic party to operate no one should expect the party to move.

          The hard thing is, I don’t know what that structure looks like, but it’s not enough to be “correct”.