I’ll vote against Trump period. Kamala Harris doesn’t seem too bad to me, but there will be a ton of folks running in 2020. Whoever it is will be better than Hillary in terms of winning- even if it ended up being someone bad like Tulsi, she’d do better than Hillary.
Hillary was just uniquely unpopular and hated. The best candidate the Dems can go for is a blank slate that the Republicans can’t tar with 30+ years of baggage.
I mean compared to Trump she’s basically Jesus.
It’s not even a question of who to vote for, but then again neither was Clinton and we have President Trump.
Harris wont have Clinton’s baggage, but she will have the baggage of being a black woman who abused power in the past.
I doubt that abuse will resonate with people though, because… well look at Trump. Her skin color and gender will be a bigger deal to those people.
BTW, I love Kamala too. A lot.
I’m just pointing out–in agreement with Shiva’s comments–that she also, apparently, has some folks on the left who dislike her. That was news to me until this past week.
I hope Jason Kander can find an office to run for by 2020, too, btw. He might be The Guy.
To be honest it would probably be pretty trivial to find reason to dislike, even despise, most people who acted as state prosecutors. And, even more honest, is I’d probably agree with most such criticisms. Given the state of our justice system and the incentives involved you could probably find a case that makes most of us blanche at their actions.
So it is plausible to me that, for many, being a prosecutor is almost inherently disqualifying.
The crux of it all
Interesting, high level view from Nate Silver on the dynamics of the 2018 House race.
The thing that has me worried is that Republicans are not governing like a party that has to worry about re-election. I don’t know if that’s because they know the far right will have a lock on the judicial branch, or they are that confident in their gerrymandering/voter suppression tactics. The MSM will do their best “both sides do it but Democrats are worse” dance, and already I’m seeing commentary about the “Comey tapes” bullshit with “Is that just Trump being Trump,” i.e. any and all Trump behavior from the unethical to the illegal will just be hand waved away.
The key is to find the candidate who will cost the dems the least amount of votes. Fear of Trump and the end of democracy will drive Dems out to the polls.
You will have to win the Congressional elections, but Trump will probably lose the presidency on his own.
Why do you think Trump will lose the presidency on his own? The people who voted for him still support him. Nothing has changed, and it’s not going to change due to messaging from the Democrats or because the Democrats put up a better candidate. It’s only going to change when bad things start happening to the Trump supporters and they finally realize it’s due to who they voted for. The Democrats can’t be the messengers of that. They’ve been demonized and dehumanized to the point where nothing they say is believed.
You mean, like is already happening?
The realizing part is not happening already, no unless you’re seeing something I’m not.
I know several people who voted for Trump primarily because they felt like DC needed a change. That theme doesn’t hold when he’s an incumbent. I’m sure many will still vote for him, but someone answering if they’d still vote for Trump via poll is quite different than them actually casting a ballot.
Economy (employment) is improving. Maybe he will get credited for that. And who knows, maybe employers feel more confident with him as President. (The fuckers.)
Every R president for the last 30 years has crashed the economy to one degree or another (or been President during the crash). There is a near 100% chance that Trump does it, too. We’re already seen signs of the economy shrinking, with international travel down and immigrants spending less. Also, we’re due for a recession, a problem I used to worry about for Clinton.
Also, Republicans aren’t going to stop voting for Republicans just because their personal situation gets worse. I don’t know how many people who lost their houses in the 2008 crash (primarily caused by the repeal of Glass-Steagall act, brought to you by a Republic controlled congress) voted for Trump, but I bet it was about the same as the general population, or higher. And then Trump put Mnuchin in as Treasury secretary – who foreclosed on 36,000 houses through IndyMac.
So, yeah. Trump, McConnell and Ryan will take away everyone’s health care, and they’ll all get re-elected. Or maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll all get thrown out, but six or eight years later they’ll all be back.
Agreed, i think it would be a major mistake to assume that Trump will automatically lose. We (democrats) did that last time and i feel like it was one of the major mistakes we made that led to Trump winning.
While Trump does have an ultra loyal base that will vote for him no matter, they arent big enough to decide the election on their own, not nearly. He needs to go after sane republicans, independents and maybe even centrist democrats. I think a good candidate could do this, especially if independents are going through buyer’s remorse with trump.
Democrats are going to need to bring their A game though. Republicans will blame Obamacrare/Democrats for the problems they create with their wealthcare bill (assuming it passes, which i fear it will).
I wonder honestly if the problem with the Democrats is their very diversity.
The strength of the Republican is their relatively uniformity. If i tell you there is a rural Republican in Penn. and an urban Republican in Texas, it’s likely they’ve got a huge amount of cultural, economic, and even racial overlap. But a rural Democrat in Texas is likely to have little to no overlap with an urban Democrat in California - i would hazard to guess there is even a significantly higher chance (by some large factor, 5x or so) than the Republican example that they don’t even speak the same language, much less be of a different ethnicity. It’s much scarier for Democrats to start proposing nationwide programs when their base has such a large diversity of views, values, ethnicity and expectations than the Republicans, whose base are all various degrees of separation from Larry the Cable Guy.
Democrats need to adapt to where they’re running.
Instead that tend to flop out California Democrats in places like Iowa and get stomped.
For those of you in Washington State, there’s a pretty important special election coming up this fall for the state senate. Currently, Republicans control the senate (thanks to a turncoat Democrat who caucuses with them), and they’ve taken up the typical obstruct everything mantra.
There’s an open seat, and if (D)'s take it, they also take the majority in all three branches. Super important since the states will need to do everything they can to hold Trump and our Russian overlords at bay.
And, we appear to have a great candidate, for a district that voted pretty heavily (D) in the last presidential election.
She’s wouldn’t represent my district, but I threw some buckaroos her way.
Or even Oregon even. Remember, until the war backlash, Oregon had one R senator, and we had him for a while. You go too blue here, you can lose seats. Every time I see a money hungry bill from our legislator I cringe a little because… .they’re not making it easy to keep that seat D.