2017: Whither Democrats?

You get a like because that’s the most cynical thing I’ve heard since … well I don’t even know.

Jesus…

I really have no longer response to that. It’s so, I mean God help us if we have two parties who just make shit up to get votes.

I mean, is there any credible argument whatsoever that anything but massive, unfuckingbelievable ignorance is what led to Trump’s election?

Ignorance of reality, I mean, not the lies that the right-wing noise machine so aptly spreads. Sorting the truth from the lies is not difficult, if you get your news from better sources than Facebook, Fox News, and talk radio.

How do you combat that sort of willful ignorance? Hell if I know.

Going to take a shot in the dark that the answer isn’t “more ignorance.”

A bunch of Obama-then-Trump voters are what pollsters demurely call “low information voters.” Which is a nice way of saying voters who don’t actually vote on issues or facts, but rather flit to whatever the shiny object is that election.

Obama was the shiny object in 2008 and (relative to Romney, anyway) 2012. Trump was the shiny object this time.

To get those voters, you need to commit to being shinier - which in the case of Trump meant having massive name recognition completely unconnected to political experience or ability.

But low-information voters are by definition flaky, changeable, and unreliable, and chances are they’ll flit over to the other party next cycle anyway. Trying to build a party around them is like trying to build a house on foundations of sand. What you want in your party are dedicated voters that stick (and if you can get enough of those, the low information voters will flit over eventually anyway.)

What I am seeing in many of the responses here is the same thing I am seeing in the Democrats response/strategy since election day: denial, misplaced blame and inaction. Hell even Clinton herself engaged in this in her first sit down interview since losing the election. She blames misogyny, the Comey letter and Russia for her loss, saying “If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president”.

Really? Can you 100% honestly say you believe that? I sure as hell can’t. While there is no question that the Comey letter had an effect, and it certainly appears that Russian tampering via fake news, control over Wikileaks and ties to the Trump campaign played a part as well, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton was made into a very polarizing candidate long before any of that stuff came into play, that many people who stayed home instead of voting Democrat this year did so because she was a candidate they did not support, and that her campaign message failed to reach influential voters in swing states or tie together voters from her own party who had supported Sanders during the primary.

The Democrats have been blaming Clinton’s loss on every facet they can write a hot take about for 6 months now, when they should be focusing inward, on their own party and WHY they failed to resonate with enough of their own voters and swing voters to win. This is especially critical since Clinton WON the overall popular vote. That makes core party voters and fence sitters in swing states who failed to turn out at the polls vitally important for the effort in 2018 and 2020.

There are two things the Democratic Party needs to do to gain ground in 2018 and win in 2020:

  1. Find fresh young faces to take on Republicans in races for the House, Senate and Governorships. They’ve already got a decent start on this and are taking advantage of the anti-Trump groundswell.

  2. But the party message can’t simply be “Trump sucks, vote for us!”. While true, it’s not going to be enough. The party needs to focus on crafting a message that is reiterated in every single race that is run in 2018 and builds through to 2020, and that message MUST reach the disenfranchised former party voters and the swing state fence sitters. That message MUST counter Trump’s own rambling populist bullshit with a voter-centric populist message of their own. Bernie Sanders was successful because he was listening to voters, delivering a message that spoke to what they were concerned about. Healthcare, Education, Jobs, Success. Granted, we can’t go promising pie-in-the-sky shit like free college for everyone, but in the wake of Trump promising and NOT delivering on so many things that are of primary concern to so many voters, the door is wide open to bring these folks back into the fold by highlighting what they’re concerned about, how Trump hasn’t done anything about it, and how Democrats will.

“Low-information voters” may be flaky and unreliable, but the sad fact of American politics today is that they are a large and strong voting block, and they need to be appealed to in order to win elections. Ignore them or piss them off (“basket of deplorables”) and you will likely lose.

I think way up in the thread, someone said that the democrats need to focus their message to an 8 word slogan. What would you come up with?

I am going to change mine.

Cheaper healthcare, better jobs for the working class.

print the t-shirts.

Single-payer healthcare, 21st century clean energy jobs.

That’s the slogan. I’ll vote for that.

I’d change it to “Guaranteed Healthcare, 21st Century Clean Energy Jobs”, but otherwise I really like it.

I’ve been very active in the local Democrats for a little less than a year now and the excitement and desire on the ground are very real. In 2014 my congressional district did not have a Democrat challenger despite being fairly purple. My state delegate district hasn’t had a serious Democrat challenger in quite some time.

For 2018 there are (at last count) SIXTEEN people clamoring to run against the GOP incumbent, and five have spent the time/money to get the signatures and file with the FEC. As for the state legislature spot, three would-be challengers pitched us at the monthly meeting last night; the primary will be next month (Virginia’s state elections are in odd-years, so we have an election in November).

Assuming that the excitement holds for one more year, 2018 is going to be a bloodbath for the GOP.

The message most certainly needs to be about Healthcare (single payer), Education (public school reform and college costs) and Infrastructure/Jobs Creation.

On message T-shirt slogans (white or blue shirts with relevant graphic):
Healthcare - “We The People : 2020”
Infrastructure/Jobs - “United We Stand : 2020”
Education - “Life, Liberty, Happiness : 2020”

It’s 100% true. It’s for their own good.

Depends- if it’s just folks who voted last time getting more active- it won’t be a huge effect. If non-voters wake their asses up , then you will be right.

So far I think it’s more of the former.

Another thing that has to be done- Trump voters have to be discouraged as much as possible from ever voting again. There needs to be a constant drumbeat of Trump supporters getting screwed by Republicans- and the Republican party has to be called all Trumpists.

Well, I think part of the groundswell will be new faces. Clearly people are tired of voting for “washington insiders” whatever that means. We need to get some local politicians or community leaders or businesspeople who are democrats and young, to sell a fresh vision of the american dream, that only voting democrat can provide.

Healthy Americans, Healthy Planet, Healthy Economy, Vote Democrat

Print the t-shirts.

Actually, let me re-order that.

Healthy Economy, Healthy Americans, Healthy Planet, Vote Democrat

She is, of course, quite correct:

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/807984392480161793

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/807987340941684736

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/807986531243819008

I’m struggling with the dissonance in this thread … the people didn’t elect republican, they elected Trump the person. They didn’t reject democrats because of some snappy saying. They rejected Hillary the person.

Democrats do better when there are honest to god candidates. Note the plural. This last election they were doing a round of King/Queen maker. Do not delude yourself. Bernie was just thrown in there to give Hillary someone to debate AND HE ALMOST WON. This should have highlighted how bad of a candidate Hillary was.

The democrats should run 6-8 viable candidates and let the country decide. Unlike in 2016, they didn’t really participate in the process as Hillary was the anointed one (and I’ll repeat she almost lost!).

You need to give people investment in their candidate & give them a choice. The person with the best message will win and then you will have a candidate who can win in the fall.

He did not. The delegate counts were 2,800 to 1,800. 538 also had this to say about it:

In my opinion, I think it’s fair to say he surprised members of the DNC when it was pretty much just a coronation. But I think it’s really overstating his successes to say that he almost won.

I do agree with your point, though. They should have run multiple viable candidates, not clear the deck for Hillary.

Oh yeah, the old “people are sheep” argument.

There is no way to accurately assert that. Nate Silver can bloviate on poll data all he wants but it means little, as he, like Clinton, is still looking for someone/something to blame because they were so very, very wrong in November. First of all, those polls rely on people a month after the fact telling the truth about how they voted and when they made up their minds. Secondly, it doesn’t take into account the possibility that a lot of those folks may have already been leaning Trump, and events of the final 10 days of the election simply solidified it for them. There is no way to accurately determine the number of voters who were going to vote for Hillary but decided against it due to the Comey letter or anything else in the final days of the election.

Even if you could, it’s all still missing the point. Democrats lost in 2016 in large part because they undermined their own chances in ways they’d rarely done in previous elections. The point that others have mentioned, that Hillary was the clear choice from Day One and everyone else was there to provide window dressing is one good example. Bernie Sanders may have never had a chance at knocking Hillary from her perch, but neither did the Democrats expect such a wide division within their own party when Sanders began drawing larger than expected crowds and surged in popularity. That directly impacted Clinton on election day. Would Sanders instead of Kaine as VP turned the tide? We’ll never know.

Or how about the image problem the campaign had, one that started long before the “deplorables” remark that defined it. It wasn’t just Republicans that were turned off by the perception of arrogance and assumed victory that Clinton gave off. It’s still amazing to me that Hillary Clinton had more in common with most “common people” than Donald Trump, and yet somehow the exact opposite was perceived by a good portion of the American public, even some who didn’t vote Trump. That’s an image issue, and it was one the campaign was aware of all along and chose to ignore.

Which is where we are today. Clinton’s image problem cannot become the image problem of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton was a very well qualified, intelligent and committed candidate who SHOULD have become the 45th President of the United States. It didn’t happen. It’s time to stop trying to pin blame on Comey, Russia, idiot voters and Conservative Media (and believe me, I spent my fair share of time blaming all of them) and move on to craft a new message delivered by new faces that can take advantage of the disaster that is the Trump Presidency and bring sanity back to Washington in 2018 and 2020.

i must say I underestimated the damage Sanders did to Hillary by validating the Trump message that Hillary represented a corrupt elite to which he was anathema. The Bernie/Trump voter was a real thing.

yeah but

i

okay and

…okay

The inability for extremists like Sanders to recognize how liberal Clinton’s voting record is and what she’s advocated for her entire life is one of the reasons I will never, ever be able to respect Sanders or take his contributions seriously.

Just, fucking fuck Bernie Sanders for perpetuating the false equivalence between Clinton and the GOP and fuck Bernie Sanders for failing to acknowledge and genuinely back Clinton for her capabilities immediately after he lost the primary, instead dragging his feet until the convention and even then making a pithy display of support.

If he were a major candidate against Trump or any other ordinary GOP candidate, I’d vote for him, but I’d genuinely be voting for him as the lesser of two evils, compared to when I voted for Clinton as someone I was absolutely proud of and thought was by far the most capable presidential candidate in my lifetime.