Political observers were shocked over the weekend after a new poll revealed what one reporter called "the largest lead for either party on the congressional ballot in the NBC News poll since the 2018 midterms."Jake Sherman, the founder of Punchbowl News, flagged the NBC poll on Sunday morning."NBC P...
And they will still manage to fuck it up somehow
I’m reminded of a recent debate about fixing ICE, where someone said “What do you mean, fix them? They’re working as intended.”
To me, the Democratic party evokes a similar problem: I believe their goal is to maintain between 40-60% popularity. So, the champagne is uncorked at 40, not 50; because they don’t care about winning. They just care about people being scared of a loss, and viewing them as a strong-enough alternative to send them massive numbers of donations. If they were below 40, then people might lose hope in them or form an alternative. If they were above 60, then they could stand to cozy up to some corrupt billionaires, get away with some horrible legislative corruption for profit, and stand to drop a few points.
But the key here is, all of this only works because of fear of a far, far worse alternative. I’ve voted in elections where I had reasonable faith that every candidate on the ballet wanted the best for their constituents, and voted based on policy improvement and experience. As long as one party is so far below the basic standards that a corrupt career politician seems better if he can promise “No secret police”, then the Democrats’ way of maintaining 40-60 is easy.
So, next time they run a candidate that gets a “failure” of 45% of the vote, remember, they’re not your friends and they don’t care; they hit their goal. It’s still a failure of people that voted for a wolf in wolf’s clothing.
While I believe that this is accurate, as a broad stroke and specifically of the DNC itself, any individual democratic politician is not necessarily corrupt and playing a foil. Especially as you get more and more local.
Don’t let cynicism prevent you from voting for a local candidate for mayor or city council, for example. It’ll take time to see if Mamdani is what he claims to be, but it’s not unreasonable for someone who is mad at the current situation to run for office with a real intent to improve things.
The way we fix things is by getting the local orgs to throw their weight around. Those precinct orgs get votes in the district and district vote in state and state vote nationally. If you’re mad right now or were mad in 2020, then get involved. Find your local democratic organization and become the change. Under our Representative Democracy, we don’t always directly elect our leadership, but we do get to elect the people that elect the people that elect the people… Gotta start at the bottom and ensure that first step has our values in mind. Right now, too many people only get involved every 2-4 years and are mad at the results.
“President” and “Senator” are important titles, but so is “County Chair”. Doing this and pushing the Democratic party further left will be more effective than sending a protest vote for a third party every 4 years, but you can do both.
I’ll agree with that. A nice way of summarizing, in my eye, is: If you pictured your civilly responsible, experienced neighbor deciding to run for office to fix the state or the country, which political party do you think they’d join?
Even if you believe an entity like the Democratic Party to be profit-driven and corporate, you can still pull what useful value you can from them where they’re behaving correctly.
Schumer and Jeffries are doing a very, very lame and cringe dance around their office right now, as dreams of status-quo and elderly, out-of-touch representatives preserving wealth inequality dance in their heads.
“This means we can run Harris again, right?”
“Of course, and we will make Liz Cheney her running mate this time around, it’s assured to succeed, it checks all the boxes, diversity! bipartisanship! Women in power! The people will love it!”
They’ll use it as a sign from Israel that we don’t need a primary and they’ll throw Kamala at us again. I swear to god I will vote for JD if they don’t have a primary again.
Sounds smart and reasonable. Worked out great last time.
Yeah, such a great plan. Hope that works out for ya next time round.