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2020 Election Post-Mortem
Elki
get busyModerator, ClubPA Mod Emeritus
get busyModerator, ClubPA Mod Emeritus
Thread for the 2020 post-mortem of the election, related discussion, and your feelings about it.
Ground rules:
You don't have to be here. If you're in a celebratory mood and don't want to participate, you're welcome to not participate.
Everyone has their opinions, if someone doesn't share yours and you decide to get obnoxious you'll find yourself out of here.
No memes.
Still not a 2016 post-mortem.
Ground rules:
You don't have to be here. If you're in a celebratory mood and don't want to participate, you're welcome to not participate.
Everyone has their opinions, if someone doesn't share yours and you decide to get obnoxious you'll find yourself out of here.
No memes.
Still not a 2016 post-mortem.
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Posts
They're not doomed, they're shouldn't go home and start crying, after all they beat Trump - but if all they think about is that they beat Trump, they're enslaving themselves to short-tem thinking. If what the most important thing they take from this election is it's an amazing victory, that leftists are annoying, and that Democratic politicians aren't getting enough praised, only then are they truly fucked. And not fucked because of anybody else, but their own reactionary response, defensiveness. They need to worry a whole lot less about the fact that some people complaining, and more about what the failure to get the senate means, and what life will be like not that they have constructed an anti-Trump coalition and no longer have Trump to fight.
Right now I don't even want to make a leftist argument for where the Democrats should go, because the problem I see is that moderate Dems are gonna come out of this whole thing so primed for everyone to go into their usual camps that they won't even want to see that there's a problem, and that's going fuck them as bad it's going to fuck everyone else.
Entering your 10th year of not being able to pass a single piece of meaningful legislation it might be time to start to questioning what your leadership is doing.
With ~70 million people voting for Trump, and with a large re-election for both McConnell and Graham, it feels like this win is just passing through the eye of the hurricane. Next year will be the same mixed bag of emotions, COVID-19 is still hammering us hard, so any return to a functioning executive will be muted.
With the local elections not flipping as much Blue as desired, the election tampering from the GOP will continue; and this drives my anxiety about being able to sustain the momentum.
I do think Democrats need to stop giving up on "unwinnable" races - in some of my local elections there wasn't a (DEM) name on the ballot but they were available for write-in. Out-of-sight, Out-of-Mind is real, and if young folks think there is no alternative, they'll believe it, and be that much harder to sway away.
Which ain't gonna work, the gloves are off now and bi-partisenship is dead.
Dems not spending enough on online (when both Brexit and the-election-that-shall-not-be-spoken-of had heavy online components to their victory) is a little silly, even before you get to the pandemic component.
Let's hold off on the pre-mortem until he actually starts doing shit.
Where do you stand on someone like Amy McGrath? It seems delusional now to see how much money was pumped into her race. How much of that actually went down ballot? Should we support her un-winnability if it properly funnels money to active, local campaigns in the greater Kentucky effort?
I mean there's a good argument exactly that happened in 2018 with Beto. Probably too early to tell with her, but I don't think she ran her campaign in a way that would do that as well.
Touche.
From a post-mortem point of view I'd really like to know in detail what went wrong in Texas & Florida.
Was it just polling error, did the dems drop the ball, etc.
Also we need to acknowledge that any post-mortem is going to be weird, because this was a weird as fuck election. Too many variables for easy and clean takeaways in most places.
I’m going to repeat something that I said in the other thread that might be pretty controversial:
Basically, I’m not sure that any of the other Democrat primary candidates would have been able to get enough support from enough groups to win this election.
But yea, like Styrofoam mentions, how you can continually get progressive policies passed by wide margins and yet still have politicians fail to win is a massive political failure. These are winning policies!
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We could do a lot more to talk about wages. Not subsidies, tax brackets, whatever. Just start yelling about how people dont get paid per hour what they should.
I suspect, and we'll see as numbers come in, that a lot of people took Biden's thing about "Im a centrist kinda guy its ok if youre a republican you can vote for me" as a reason to ditch Trump and still vote GOP down ticket and thats not sustainable.
Where the fuck did the fabled Obama digital wonderkids and GOTV efforts go?!
It's absurd to say, but the Right is very easily winning the online meme war, and that's a cultural front that is growing, normalizing, and probably moving things in a way we need to look at.
Like, half the fucking Right wing memes on Facebook are just cannibalized shit from 08-13. It's always catching up to the big hot shit on 4chan or reddit, but I feel like whatever presumption of digital superiority Democrats probably self-inferred has failed them.
That's the kind of self-critical soul searching large political bodies are so bad at doing.
That's been a thing for a while. Like you tell people about the ACA's effects and they love it. Ask their opinion on the ACA not so much, let alone the people that passed it. Punching through that gap is the problem
The pie in the sky senate result is now 50, from pre-election predictions of 51-53. That's not changing, and it's the most significant failing here.
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At the end of the say McGrath felt like that same trap the center-left falls into too often where they think that they can somehow peel conservatives away from their guy by offering a milquetoast version of it under a different banner.
Again with the "we" here. Does the DNC extend to Canada? I'm not questioning your ability to analyse or affect these threads. You have great insights frequently. But if you aren't a US citizen it seems presumptuous, like me saying "How do we fix the Quebec situation?" Its a bit wonky.
McGrath was worth fighting for in the way that every lower ticket vote is worth fighting for. This election proved that small, microdonations can field as much funds to candidates as massive PACs. My hope is that the lesson here is to back every race in every state and focus on digital outreach and fundraising. As AOC points out, that's the future and the more the DNC embraces it now the more impact they will have at leveraging change.
But we really, really got to do better in state races. Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and Texas could all be much more achievable with the state legistlatures overcome and more left-leaning policies implemented to get people used to the benefits that come with modern democracy.
51, with an outside but tiny chance at 53.
Both AL races are going to runoffs and counting isn't over in two other states.
I think the McGrath campaign was required. My opinion is that it didn't fail due to lack of spending; it was because over the past decades years the Dems haven't cared enough to court the vote in a sustained manner.
In the AOC thread from above, she describes a smaller part of the problem; framed around the discussion around racism/race - Dems can't just sit around and engage when they feel like it. Discussions, local engagement is a year round, every year, deal. It's what the Republicans have been doing since the 80s.
These huge donation senate races are a consequence of the overall abandonment of the 50 state strategy. They’re instead hand-picking a few high profile races and dumping unbelievable resources into them unsuccessfully, when it feels like it would make more sense to spread those resources around to smaller races and expand the overall reach of the party.
They’re going to actually have to do something besides be the “not the nazi” party
Which is going to be pretty fucking tough without the senate
Look at the progress in Virginia (and Colorado?) for inspiration and messaging?
But if they can’t get much in the way of new programs and actions that help people, they absolutely do not have the charismatic, inspiring, non-loathed leaders to see them through the next elections
The Dems have literally nothing left to lose from moving on from Pelvis and Schumer
I dont know how we look at down ballot results and conclude anything other than that we have to clean house.
They still have fucking Robbie god damn Mook hanging around.
Fuck that's a fun theoretical. I remember literally a year ago when one of Biden's main accolades was he could get attract black voters in a way Obama could and Hilary could not.
And here we are with quite a few swing states held in the balance of their major metropolises, all of which had a large (and likely unprecedented?) black voter turnout.
Where would you see Sanders gain where Biden isn't strong, specifically?
Package it as providing new services to the community, where people have a phone number they can call to get a crisis worker to help in situations where they are needed. If you have to mention it at all, say you’re doing them a favor because they need to be able to do their jobs catching criminals and can’t do that if they are being overwhelmed with non-criminal calls.
Then quietly pay for it all by taking the money out of the police budget.
Pre-election I was served a ton of YouTube ads for Republicans (both presidential and local races) and racist/misogynistic shit like FAIR and Prager that I had to skip or close out/restart videos to avoid. The anti-Trump stuff was mostly RVAT and Lincoln Project.
There wasn’t a whole lot of leftist stuff, some Biden ads and the rare Dem aligned PAC, but there was a definite lack of presence and messaging.
That's not clear to me at all. I can't look at unprecedented democratic turnout and say that voter energy was left on that table. The idea that more progressive policies would have done better in specifically Florida is plausible, but considering Cuban votes against Biden I think it's by no means obvious or clear.
I mean the Cuban vote was reportedly motivated to turn out against "socialism", so..?
Ok, let's say you did a good job. You're saying you did a great job, and I don't object to that and we move on. When voters come and ask in the future what did you do to help them, what's that going to be? Because if the answer is going to be "actually, we lost the senate, and Republicans are an obstructionist party who wouldn't help us" then that's at odds with your current attitude, is it not?
And the first step to actually dealing with that problem is acknowledging the problem right now, because in even 12 months it's gonna be too late to start thinking about it.
Wait are the dems as a party still anti-mj???
Why??
I legit get excited at the prospects of elections where color of skin isn’t the highest correlation with candidate preference, but we’re in the middle of a neoconfederacy uprising and not being able to lock down your margins from the confederates’ targets is shameful
The Dems as a party are inconsistent on it, which amounts to basically getting nowhere.
Its a mix of being a party run by geriatrics and chasing that mystical swing vote dragon that they thibk theyd lose.
They're certainly not unapologetically for it. I can't answer your second question!
I’m not so naive as to think that Democrats couldn’t lose these votes honestly, but I do wonder about the extent of misinformation and soft suppression minority voters faced this years versus prior years. The Trump team was dedicated to it, in addition to Biden carrying baggage.
On the other hand, Georgia, man. Reducing the spread of white votes allows more unified minority votes to have additional power.
Also, I think it’s probably worth noting that the problem is largely among men.