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Democratic Electoral Prospects and the Role of Red State/Blue Dog Democrats in the Party
ChaosHat
Hop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered User regular
Hop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered User regular
This thread should be for:
1) Discussing Democratic electoral strategy, especially as it pertains to tossup/red states (we don't need help in the blue ones!)
2) Discussing the role of those Democrats in the context of the greater coalition of the party and their goals.
If it is for election updates it should go in the specific state or congressional elections thread.
1) Discussing Democratic electoral strategy, especially as it pertains to tossup/red states (we don't need help in the blue ones!)
2) Discussing the role of those Democrats in the context of the greater coalition of the party and their goals.
The dimensions of this question seem to be:
1) Is it possible to attract right-leaning voters to support you by supporting right-ish policies?
2) Is there a line between acceptable right-ish positions that a Democratic candidate can have and ones that are unacceptable?
3) Do conservative Democrats depress Democratic turnout in other states?
4) Is it possible to build a winning coalition that doesn't need any right-wing states or right-wing voters?
If it is for election updates it should go in the specific state or congressional elections thread.
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@kaid again, this is a liberal coalition that was unable to defeat Scott Walker, Donald Trump, or Ron Johnson. It's just a purple state and there's no evidence that being very liberal is a surefire way to win Wisconsin.
Rick Scott, on the other hand, is a known person who politiced himself very well on the gun control issue, has solid connections with both the tourism AND agricultural industries (especially Sugar in south florida with his water management policies), which gives him a large funding war chest to rely on. This is not to say Rick Scott has any right to win here, or that he actually is an anti-gun candidate. But he did manage to do what he needed to do in the last year to keep his optics more good than bad.
Nelson has run incredibly few online or youth-targeted advertisements and is hoping that the fact he has a D next to his name will carry him to victory. If he loses, and I expect him to (sadly), it will be because his campaigning was extremely weak.
Calling for Manchin or Donnelly to be kicked out of the party is counterproductive, but we can still give them a pretty good roasting.
I would argue that we don't have enough evidence that liberal Democrats would actually have trouble in these states as Democrats haven't even tried being liberal. They run to the right as fast as they possibly can.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
I'm honestly sick of the 4D Chess people have been pretending this all is. The bottom line of American politics is "are you going to help people who are in dire need of it or not?" You don't get to bargain with how much people are allowed to be abused, or exchange one group's suffering for another, etc.
When that chucklefuck Joe Donnelly says he's "open to legislation" that supports Trump's attacks on immigrants and their descendants, that's not some brilliant tactic coming into play. It's a complete betrayal of all the people affected by that kind of bullshit. There are racists among Democrats, and they go by many names; Red Dog Democrat, Blue Dog Democrat, and Centrist Democrat. Just because you state your racism politely doesn't mean you aren't racist.
/mic-drop
Edit - This thread was created when Donnelly's comments were brought up in the immigration policy thread btw, for context.
Bredeson polled slightly ahead of Blackburn before October.
In October Bredeson puts out a completely unnecessary statement in support of Kavanaugh.
News stories pop up of volunteers in multiple offices quitting his campaign in disgust. People who were phone banking aren't, people who were going to be going door to door for him won't.
Bredeson is now no longer ahead.
Nelson, for example, appealed to Florida voters once upon a time because he was a national aerospace hero. That image has decayed over time due to poor messaging on his part and the decline of the space coast. Rubio appealed to most of the industries and a large amount of of immigrant base initially. Both aren't winning or losing based upon how left or right their platforms are in relation to the national party, they are winning or losing based upon how they appeal to their voting base. The fact that they may be more or less conservative/liberal than the national mean doesn't play significantly in local politics.
What I don't understand and somewhat undermines my own position is who are these split ticket Gillum/Scott voters and what the hell do they even believe? Their policy positions are pretty incongruous and you'd expect a Gillum coattail effect to aid Nelson a LOT.
These red states still have liberals with ambition who can primary the incumbent blue dog Democrat. Still, among the most liberal electorate their states can offer, McCaskill and Manchin destroy their opponents. Yes it is hard to unseat incumbents but in a D+8 environment you'd think there is some major metropolitan current or former mayor, or gerrymandered liberal representative who has the ambition to take them on. If you're going to try to test the theory that people want a liberal person to vote for it seems like you're not going to get a better shot than right now.
I agree that stopping the garbage immigration concerns with Trump and police brutality against most of our minority populations, much less the desperate plight of our LGBT communities under Trump, are lager and more important issues. But assuming that the guy who lives in that mill town that might literally lose everything also thinks that is both unfair and unreasonable.
I mean there is this interpretation, or that Bredesen was on shaky ground throughout September and in a very red state voters closed in around Blackburn the way they did around Trump as it got closer to election day. We'll never know for sure but from a top level perspective "Republican wins in Tennessee" does not surprise me no matter what their opponent does.
While folks will have a lot of different reasons for voting, among folks I know in Central Florida voting that split the argument generally is that DeSantis is a horrific racist and Gillum is fine (ie embarrassed economic republicans not willing to support DeSantis and Gillum not having sufficient business objections to prevent them from supporting him despite being a Democrat), and that Scott was personally good for their industry or field and they want to see that grow. While I personally voted Gillum/Nelson, I can't fault folks who flourished under Scott. He was very good for our agri-businesses and tourism industries and earned a lot of loyalty in his policies there.
The guy who lives in that mill town who might lose everything would be better off voting for a Democrat who would want to help him, rather than a Republican who will take advantage of him. So he's most likely just willfully ignorant but chances are is also a racist and a bigot who would drag himself down further as long as it meant the people he hated were also punished.
Bredesen was already falling behind before the endorsement. It's almost certainly why he made it.
It's not clear there's a universal rule where you lose too much base support when tacking to the centre or right so it ends up being counterproductive. This may well not be true in all states or districts.
Perennial target of left-wing ire Joe Manchin literally shot liberal legislation. With a literal gun. He won that race.
Yeah, this is a pretty shitty thing to group wide swaths of the country on.
While voting for a democratic-led government would 100% help most of the poorer states in the long run, it won't in the short run. Economic diversification and infrastructure investment takes time, and most of these states do not have the economic capital to fund the amount of changes that would be required to make them competitive with the rest of the country without a decade of investment. During that time, those mill towns will die. The niche industries that employ most of the folk in the Appalacians would be closed down, especially if green industries also get their way with a democratic government as coal, forestry, and quarrying are all industries that can and will be curtailed signifigantly (likely making it cheaper to do elsewhere).
While all of those changes would be good for the country, good for the state, and good for the individual in the long term, for the miner who has little education or marketable skills beyond that none of that sounds good for him or his family. Most of these states also have atrocious state education systems, making retraining very unlikely in the short term.
So while, yes. Things would be better over time and would get really good for everything from the individual to the environment, this is still against the immediate self interest of most of the folks actually downtrodden in those states. Without a reconstruction-level economic goal from the federal government, that perspective probably won't change.
This is a ridiculous thing to assume for no reason. Democrats if elected would help these states, but not immediately, they'd just sit on policy plans for why?
excommunicating Lieberman was a pretty serious miscalculation.
It is pretty well documented that people vote against even their immediate economic or otherwise interests because they prioritize other things, like cultural issues, higher. eg - Soy bean farmers
You can think it's shitty I guess, but that doesn't mean it's not accurate.
How so?
I literally addressed that in the rest of the post. Changing industries takes time. You can't retrain 70% of your workforce suddenly to do tech work, nor just invite Google to come in an open a plant same year. New industries require roads, power, education, and a whole lot more to get off the ground. And while democratic policymakers would start immediately, the process from policy to actual employment takes years.
Central Florida, for example, is now a major medical hub. This took 10+ years of development to create the Lake Nona area to what it is today, and that's with a massive amount of funding from existent industries. Do to the same in, say, West Virginia would likely take even longer as there isn't the already established university system and major hospital nexuses driving it. A closer example might be back in the 1950s with the development of Disney here, which took decades to truly become an alternative to the Orange Groves and Celary farms, and nearly 30 years before it was a major employer.
Democratic policymakers will absolutely do what they can, but change is significant. The mill town problems of a lot of the central states are centuries in the making and will take a long time to fix. And during that fix you will have a ton of unemployment and transitional poverty.
How would voting for a Republican help them more in the short term, than a Democrat? A Democrat is far more likely to help with immediate aid while also planning for the long term. A Republican will just lie to them. Like they all have to people in the coal industry.
But maybe you should be thinking a bit about why folks vote against their self interests, and what those local circumstances are, rather than calling folks in the red states racists and bigots. There are plenty of those, sure. But unless our policy stances at the national level are addressing their concerns as well as those of the coastal states we won't have a major revolution of support there.
Mostly because the republicans own the niche industries exploiting them and are perceived to be the ones that are paying them. Look at the history of West Virginia and Kentucky politics over the last 100 years and you'll see a disproportionate amount of land barons, industry owners, and other similar shitheels that have used their positions to get federal money and grants to prop their industries up for personal gain.
That is a problem. But when your town is dependent upon the problem, the solution becomes murky.
Think it's pretty much already happened for Republicans, which is why they went so far right so fast and in many cases went farther than ever before in appealing to fearmongering and racism. Dems aren't there yet, but I don't think states will be buying the "moderate" for much longer, and I don't think the base will keep being ok with it either.
I think almost everyone in this forum would agree that the theoretical person is better off but what's the best way to actually reach this theoretical racist voter? Should we have candidates in redder places tack right and hold the line on liberal policy where possible?
Part of what frightens me is that I do think that the current liberal Democratic coalition is held together by opposition to Republican racism. There are a significant number of minorities that are actually pretty conservative socially but are basically kept out of the conservative wing of politics because Republicans hate them. 27% of African Americans consider themselves to be conservative and about 50% moderate. IF the Republicans weren't racist we'd probably see a more even split of their vote instead of being 90%+ democratic which would have pretty detrimental effects to the Democratic coalition.
This is part of why I'm not convinced going more liberal everywhere will result in better results.
How the hell was he even excommuncated? Dude lost the primary, ran as an independent and won the general, and then was given seniority and the Governmental Affairs Committee in return for caucusing with the Democrats.
Are you pitching the idea that Democrats should never primary incumbents, even in liberal states/districts, because the risk that the incumbent might win office somehow and then base all their votes on the principle of spiting the libs?
I go back and forth with this concept a lot, 'cause Donnelly's my Senator.
I don't think that a very liberal person can win here in IN. I could be wrong, but we couldn't even get Dan Canon out of the primary and into the general here in IN-09. So I expect, and accept, a degree of triangulating from Donnelly. I expect him to make some "I crossed the aisle" votes. There are things that feel ham-fisted and completely backwards though.
A little history: Donnelly won his seat in 2012, during Obama's reelection. The guy he was running against was IN's then State Treasurer, Richard Mourdock. Mourdock was pretty much a lock to win. He had the Teaper momentum behind him, along with the benefit of the inertia that comes with being on a ballot with an R next to your name in a state that has given super majorities in the state capitol to Republicans. However, Donnelly won! He managed to keep IN's Senate coalition purple! Yaaaay! Did he do it by being a good legislator? Ehhh, not really. He was an OK Rep, but as far as I know he didn't really have a "signature" piece of legislation. Maybe by being a guy willing to cross aisles? Ehhh, I don't think that appeals to Republican voters; I think that appeals to conservative Dem voters, but I'm not sure they, as a group, have the numbers that you HAVE to have to win as a Dem in IN. What really and truly delivered him that win was Mourdock's quote a little before the election that: "Life is that gift from God that I think even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen." Donnelly went on to win 50-44. A sound win, but not quite the drubbing one would expect from one candidate going "God planned for you to get pregnant by way of rape, so put on a smile".
So now we've got to figure out how to get him reelected. Last time around we got the benefit of 1- some R voters holding their noses and voting for Donnelly (it did happen, just not in record numbers) and 2- Republican voters sitting home because they were so turned off by Mourdock's statement. This year, we don't have those luxuries. We're running against a mostly bog-standard Republican. He owns his own business, and has been in the IN statehouse before as a Rep. The best Dems have to pin on Braun are 1- he supports Trump's agenda (which, yeah, you'd hope is enough, but Trump won here 57-38), 2- his company ships a lot of parts from Mexico (this is a big thing because of the GOP's xenophobia/racism, plants in IN shutting down and moving to Mexico, and Donnelly having some financial ties to his brother's company that has a plant in Mexico), and 3- as a business owner he's a fucking shithead to his employees including/especially in health insurance. So Donnelly's plan is to run as a very conservative Dem, and he says things like he supports Trump's wall and ICE. He won't let "radical leftists socialize our healthcare". He's got those stupid financial disclosures where he made some money from his brother's business that he keeps getting hit over the head with. So he's basically trying to run as "Braun-lite". All of those things (add on voting yea on Gorsuch) are going to turn OFF the Dem base though, and the R base already has those things (support ICE, support a wall, support keeping healthcare privately run) in their candidate. So whose votes is he pulling in? I'm not sure at all.
Anecdote != data, etc: I was talking to a co-worker Monday, and he said he'd considered voting for the "3rd party person" (Brenton) because he disliked Braun. Said Braun's stayed too quiet, and seemed lazy and didn't really want to campaign. Then he looked up Brenton's stances though, and went "oh holy shit, nevermind." So he voted for Braun. Even though he didn't like that candidate, and even though Donnelly's done all these things to appeal to a voter like him, he still did not get this guy's vote. Why? Because it wasn't even an option in his head; he was never going to vote for a Dem, so he only had 2 other choices. I do not see how taking a harder tack rightward helps anything here.
Again, I understand Donnelly making some more-conservative-than-I'd-like noises and votes, but my personal problem is that he's going overboard. What part of kidnapping kids at the border does he support? You can say you support keeping our borders safe without giving ICE a handy-J. He says he'll vote for Trump's wall. Why? Why not take an "irresponsible spending" tack on it, so you make it sound like if the wall were to somehow be fiscally responsible you'd be OK, but you still get to say to your own base that you're not for it. Why shit on "radical leftists" that wanna socialize healthcare? Donnelly likes saying he voted to save the ACA, and he likes saying he'll protect your Medicare/Medicaid. If you're up for protecting Medicare/aid then why rail on at all about socialized medicine being so scary bad? It feels contradictory to say those two things, and I'm still confused who they appeal to! Last night was the fucking kicker; in the debate the candidates were asked about Trump's fucking EO where he wants to end birthright citizenship. Now, I think that should have elicited a strong "oh hell fucking no", but instead he said:
It's infuriating because not only is he not just being like "fuck no", he's making himself sound profoundly ignorant regarding the Constitution. In one sentence he recognizes it as an amendment, 2 later he wants to see "legislation" to "make sure it's constitutional". You absolutely numbskull, you just said it's an amendment, you have to go through the process of RE-AMENDING to get rid of it! I honestly do not get what he was going for there, other than not sounding like he thinks a liberal/progressive/leftist sounds.
The only thing I can think of to do is get "leftier" candidates winning around the state, both at state and federal levels, to demonstrate to him that the voters he needs are not the ones being happy to hear about support for ICE, a border wall, and health insurance/care that fucks us over at every turn.
Am I voting for Donnelly? Yep. My other options are Mike "I'd Love it if You'd Believe That I'm Damn Near Trump Myself" Braun, or Lucy "Vaccinations Cause Folks to Become Transgender" Brenton. Am I happy? Fuck no, but my happiness isn't the paramount thing here. It's managing to do whatever I can to stop the GOP and Trump from implementing what they want, and Donnelly is a much better shot at that than either of the other two, despite his idiotic rhetoric.
</rambling>
Lamont was never going to win in CT, Lieberman nearly flipped to R with the backing of the CT GOP donors, and won while swimming against a tide of invective directed at him by the national Democratic party. If Reid hadn't let him keep his Homeland Security chairmanship he might've started caucusing with the Republicans. There's at least a robust argument to be had about whether a public option would exist now in the ACA if Lieberman had been less critical to passage or more amenable to Democratic overtures rather than still smarting from the intense dislike. It turned out OK, sort of, but it was a near thing. Hell, a McCain / Lieberman ticket might've beaten Obama and that would never have been on the table, and certainly the endorsement and convention speech wouldn't have occurred, if he hadn't needed to run outside the party structure. Things worked out in spite of the national party because Lieberman is still a Democrat (if a centrist one). It could have and should have been smoother sailing, and it also could have been much more of a mess for the Dems if not for Lieberman's desire to vote that way regardless of how the party handled it.
There is no way to reach them. If someone watches Fox News and disregards CNN or MSNBC they are too far gone. You're not getting through to them because they will deny reality. Katy Tur gave an example of this when she was on the campaign trail covering Trump and talking to people in areas just like the ones we are discussing. They were complaining about either the deficit or unemployment and how it had gone up under Obama and Tur tried to tell them the truth and even pulled up the actual .gov figures on her phone to show them and when faced with the literal facts she said the response was "I don't believe you."
That money doesn't go to that worker though. That money goes to the owner of those industries. So again, they are getting nothing, but the alternative where they would personally get something wouldn't actually happen because.....? Why? Why do you assume a Democrat would do nothing in the short term?
The former's kinda cannibalizing the latter with what the Red Tide's done this year though.
@ChaosHat
I do believe that there is a ... phenomena/whatever where when Dems hear fellow Dems speaking critically of a candidate, they're far more likely than their Republican cohorts to just go "well fine I won't vote for that guy then, fuck him", and that's they perogative, but I think that the critical messages would be more helpful if they were along the lines of "Gah, I hate that Donnelly <blank'd>, I wish we had someone better who would <blank>, like <candidate/popular politician>, so I'm going to go suggest that" instead of just "this guy is fucking horrible" because I feel that the former has a better possibility of getting a voter to begrudgingly vote for the not-great candidate while working on finding a better one, while the latter ends up with "well fine, I'll just disengage from the system then". 'Cause that doesn't help at all. You feel disenfranchised? Fuck, that sucks. Lots of other folks do too. I do, to a degree, but I fully admit that I'm insulated by virtue of the demographic I fall in, so there are some things I do not feel as intensely as people living them.
Lets say coal grants stop, that's 2% of the state workforce suddenly needing support as those supply orders move to cheaper overseas sources. Or chemical production, which is a much larger percentage of West Virginian economy and has absorbed most of the coal production workforce. A lot of towns still operate based on mill-economies tied to specific chemical plants.
So the republican abusing his power to keep his company flush gets outsed, the company leaves for a better location now that the economic incentive isn't there. That's good for the long term because the arrangement was predatory to the employees. But what happens to the 2-5k employees in that factory? Do they move? The state will offer what benefits they can under a Democratic government, but where will the funding come for employment assistance? Higher taxes presumably (on the wealthy, another good plan), but how long till such taxes have been raised? Will they raise bonds to cover the funds in the short term? Maybe, but with a shitty economic rating left by republican governance it would be a hard sell. And, again, take time.
Meanwhile those 2-5k employees no longer are injecting the funding into the town and have no employment opportunities. The local community colleges are designed largely to move about 50/50 to that local chemical company or out-of-state college (which is true of most of Appalachia). Without additional funding it won't be able to retrain folks and likely wont have the staff to retrain folks to a different industry right away since whatever replacement industry will have to be decided, worked out at the local and state level, and then private investment will have to be brought in to start it up, which will take a few years.
Those employees, and likely a goodly amount of the town which was propped up by the influx of money from the mill, starts losing people and cant maintain its necessary tax base to fund these things locally. Especially when the chemicle company paid a considerable amount of the local infrastructure costs to ensure their supply lines remained well maintained. This makes the town less likely to appear to new investors until enough state and county money is poured back into it.
Which will happen! But that is a long timeframe for someone employed in those industries for a lot of economic uncertainty. In 5 years, maybe, they would likely have a better job, with better benefits, under an optimistic perspective, but it might take much longer.
I love Katy Tur.
But yeah, the real problem in politics is Fox News and (to a lesser extent) MSNBC and all of the other biased sources being able to spout info with absolutely no accountability.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Uh...so where do you go for unbiased news?
Right, so they replaced him, he won anyway, he kept his chair and nothing bad came of the whole affair that wasn't going to happen if they hadn't challenged him.
The right so desperately wants MSNBC to be the left version of Fox because then they don't look like crazy people.