they understand it enough imo - they just don't care.

why would they when they can easily just go with their usual angle: 'vote for our selected candidate or we will call you a racist deplorable'

the candidate must draw voters to them. qualification and experience (hell being the most qualified and experienced candidate of all the times) is a large component of a politician's resume, but the "do i want that guy or gal or xheshe to be president" has components that extend beyond politics.



yeah i think a dynamic young(er) moderate (D) can easily do this. but you need to gain minority voters so being a minority helps (in general, some don't bother with it) on top of keeping large swathes of middle america interested in your policies. you also have to have an edge to you to draw in first-time or very inconsistent (in terms of actually showing up) voters. Trump ironically had a handful of these traits - more than anyone in 2016 and it's shaping up that way again in 2020 - which is why he pulled a number of Obama voters towards him in 2016.

to your point Obama had a unique opportunity in 2008 with an abysmal economy coupled with a very unpopular President Bush in the other party exiting the White House. circumstances may not allow that coalition to ever play out. But he was definitely an unstoppable force in 2008 and 2012 was never really in doubt..heck even if it was his opponent was too busy arguing with the debate moderator and talking about binders to even think about how to be a winner.

So, I think the TPP was a really good thing. Free trade, in aggregate, is better than protectionist policies. However, you can't go into trade deals blindly because there are some people who WILL be left behind and you need plans to address that.

I'm skeptical of increased college access being a vote grabber because that really only affects privileged people. What good is cheaper college if the vast majority of your community fails to graduate high school? I think that universal pre-K and increased after school programs are something that almost EVERYONE can get behind. I'm not opposed to doing BOTH, but the pre-K stuff needs to be the topic under the spotlight.
You're absolutely right about healthcare. Universal healthcare is INCREDIBLY popular in this country and that should be a top 2 priority for the next administration. The GOP is full of shit when it comes to this issue.



It's interesting that you mentioned that an inspirational candidate is necessary to cover up terrible party infrastructure but you want to double down on covering up those flaws. The young vote has and always will be unreliable. You CAN'T have long term success by relying on the youth.

You need to look at WHY people SWITCHED because a switched vote is worth TWICE as much as a turnout vote.
http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-many-obama-2012-trump-2016-voters-were-there/
8.4 million Obama voters went to Trump and 2.5 million Romney voters went to Clinton. That's a net of 5.9 million (estimated). Now, this isn't the most reliable estimate according to the article but even if we cut that number in HALF, that's means you need 6 MILLION more turnout votes. Yes, this is rudimentary because it's nation wide, but this effect is amplified in the Rust belt. Note that Clinton had only 100k less votes than Obama did nationwide whereas Trump beat Romney by 2 million. In what kind of world do we live in where we're going to turnout an additional 6 million people at a MINIMUM? You're probably looking closer to 10 MILLION.

Look, you're not wrong that increased turnout for a particular candidate would have helped. But, like you said, all that does is cover up fundamental flaws in your election strategy AND it's unreliable. It also seems incredibly unrealistic looking at the numbers. The better strategy is to understand why people went from one candidate to another and adjust your policies/outreach accordingly.

I think you're making a mistake by assuming low high school graduation rates are a separate issue from college access. People don't fail high school because they are too dumb or can't work, they fail because either them or their parents or both don't see an economic incentive to education, and that can be alleviated by giving them access to high education and job training after. Plenty of people don't do well in high school because they don't see college as a realistic goal even if they do well enough to gain admission. There was a great story a while back about a millionaire who offered to pay college tuition for any graduates from the high school he graduated from and the graduation rate went from like 70% to 100%. When there's opportunity people try.

I think this is a lot closer to the truth. The Sun Belt strategy isn't ready now and it won't be until 2028 most likely. I do think that it's difficult to pull off the entire Obama coalition in those numbers but you don't need to have the margins of victory that Obama had in those key areas. Someone like Biden could probably get half those votes back which would result in a decisive Democrat victory. People pushing Klobuchar for instance aren't taking a nationwide view of what's required to win. I think she's great from a policy perspective, but she's more suited for a VP slot IMO.

At the end of the day, you need to make a sizeable dent in the largest voting block (whites). There are certain segments of that demographic that you simply can't ignore and take for granted.

But that's exactly what the Democrats have refused to do post-2016. Instead, they ostentatiously doubled down on the agenda which was rejected at the ballot box in 2016. Trump's incredible divisiveness and erraticness are quite literally the only things keeping them competitive. Put a similar politician who's slightly more competent and less erratic in Trump's position from 2016 onward, say a Boris Johnson, and he'd be cruising to reelection while De Blasio and Vermin Supreme are the only ones interested in the Democrats' token candidacy.

Also, Democrats are in a strategical dilemma here because adjusting their policies to the obama-trump voters (mostly white working-class) would alienate progressives and minorities, and depress the turnout they're getting from these groups. Their best bet would probably be a slightly tamer version of the Sanders 2016 platform: very far to the left on economic issues while putting little emphasis on culture war topics.

I didn't mean to imply that they are mutually exclusive issues. What I meant to say is that low high school graduation rates are a result of a systematic failure of our primary and secondary education systems. Helping families through after school programs and universal pre-K isn't a panacea but it would definitely help a lot. Our education failures are more cultural than anything and that will take decades to fix.

Not all Democrats have doubled down but enough have. They live in a bubble and that's a huge problem. It's not even a small, loud, minority. It's probably 25% of the party which is HUGE.

I don't think you need to go "very far to the left" on economic issues because I don't think people have that much granularity when it comes to policies. I do agree that a "left" economic platform is something both wings of the party can agree on. But going back to the issue of switched voters vs. turnout voters, if you lose one person for every vote gained back, that's a winning proposition because you remain static while Trump loses a vote.

damn didn't think that number was that high. as you said even at a halfed estimate, that's a net 6M deficit. pretty cool analysis.

I didn't either. It really shows how badly Democrats have fucked up (and Republicans too tbh). Why did it take them so long to figure this out?

Here's another cool map: https://www.cnbc.com/heres-a-map-of-the-us-counties-that-flipped-to-trump-from-democrats/

This post was edited by thundercock on Jan 20 2020 03:28pm

Rejected at the ballot box?

Don't act like less than 50% of an electorate is a mandate dude, it's silly AF. Getting 3 million less votes than the other guy Isn't a sound victory.

Obama won by an electoral landslide but that didn't stop the neo cons from coming back strong AF.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jan 20 2020 03:50pm