3698

Some things which may enrage folks on the left, but is perhaps worth hearing anyway.

Then, some data to support the underlying message, that independents and moderate Republicans actually matter, and played key roles in 2018:

3699

If you are a never-Trumper, aren’t you already by definition going to vote Democrat? Because if you don’t, then you’re helping Trump to not be never.

3700

In most cases, I think that yes, this is correct. However, it can also potentially just mean that you don’t vote for anyone, or vote for some third party.

In 2016, I think you saw folks just not vote or vote for the libertarian, but then in 2018 a bunch of them actually voted for the democrats to stop the GOP. I think a big part of this is just because so many people assumed Clinton was gonna win in 2016, and thus didn’t need their help.

3701

Interesting that Republican candidates are never enjoined to court moderate Democrats. Never Trumpers are a group of folks who deliberately turned their own party over to morons, lunatics, and grifters and now are giving us advice? Sure. Yeah, I mean I’m not enraged, but they can go roll around in their own shitty bed for awhile before they get any seat at our table. And when they do, they should expect one in the far far back of the room.

  1. Universal health care is a moderate position. Most people want the government to ensure people have health care. There’s nothing radical about it except that America is already the gross outlier and any shift to normalcy looks like radicalism.

  2. The Green New Deal is, in any sane world, utterly necessary. And any person with any intelligence should recognize the urgency of some action to mitigate the effects of climate change. If #NeverTrumpers aren’t on that bandwagon, they’re idiots and worthy of being ignored. And hey, guess what? It’s really fucking popular.

  3. Packing the court and executive actions are direct responses to the completely radical method of governance that the GOP has used for the last 2 decades. I too would rather we returned to norms of democratic governance. But we also need to unfuck what the GOP has done. I’m still not sure what the proper action is there, but you can’t fight a raging fire with legal tape. And if someone beat up your Xerox machine with a baseball bat, you can’t expect to fix it by pushing the power button; you’re gonna have to muck around with the insides.

  4. She’s compares most of the Democratic field to Stalin? That’s a GOP version of Godwin’s law, and makes it really hard to take anything she says seriously.

3702

3703

So you would rather antagonize those people than try to gain their vote. Primarily out of spite.

3704

Nope, I just think that NeverTrumpers’ advice is shit, as evidenced by what they did to their own party. And that we can win over independents and moderate Republicans without them. They also never consider the risk of alienating the Democrats’ core constituencies. Is it worth depressing core turnout to win over moderates on the edge? Maybe? But they never talk about numbers–they just talk about their policy preferences as if we need their advice. There’s a strong case for exciting the base rather then courting moderates. In fact, that’s exactly what Republicans have done in every election since I could vote! And it has worked! A major difference is that the Democratic base isn’t a bunch of crazy, frothing at the mouth reactionaries, bigots, and morons. We have good folks.

3705

Interesting how they control almost every state legislature, the Senate and Presidency without doing it.

They are better at this. The people that helped them win are trying to help the Democrats win now.
But they aren’t saying what makes people have the good feels, so obviously they’re secretly trying to kill the Democratic party or something.

Here is the thing: you can win from the middle and still go left. Because that’s what the GOP has been doing for going on 30 years in the opposite direction. Also controlling state houses and governorships matters, which means maybe running people in races and doing footwork for them.

3706

This statement seems to be mistaken on two fronts.

First, you very clearly stated that you are in fact allowing simple mindless spite control your decision making here. You stated that you prefer them to simply suffer on their own, and not be included in “your table” at all. And then maybe at some point in the future, you’d allow them to occupy some lesser, subservient role to you. That’s mighty white of you, Matt.

But then beyond that, you repeatedly say, “They did this to their own party!” But what we’re talking about here are specifically people who reject what the current GOP has become. They are people who agree with you on this assessment, but you are committed to just punishing them out of some misguided sense of partisanship and spite, rather than forming a coalition.

But you WANT your party to be a bunch of foaming at the mouth reactionaries.

Instead of forming a coalition with the majority of voters, you want to go down the GOP path of appealing to only your own most extreme members.

The result of this could POSSIBLY result in an electoral victory, with the center being simply disillusioned, and you ultimately duking it out with the extreme fringe of the right. But even if you achieved victory in that situation, you’d be left with what happened to the GOP, where you’d have a party made up of fringe elements who can’t really govern, because they don’t represent the actual will of the people.

3707

Deleted.

3708

They control state legislatures and the Senate due to the built-in rural bias of the U.S. Constitution. I’m not sure why rural people are more Republican than the vast majority of us who live in cities, but there it is. But explain to me how abandoning universal health care and climate legislation and fronting comfortable old white dudes is gonna overcome that. You have to use numbers, not just handwave about how country folks like their comfortable old white dudes and that’s the right way to make them feel good about voting for sanity rather than obvious insanity.

I don’t think they’re trying to kill the Democratic party. They’re not a secret fifth column. But the advice they gave Republicans was “court the base”, i.e. “go right.” And the advice they give Democrats is “court the middle”, i.e. “go right.” Since they prefer right-leaning policy, I’m not very surprised that their advice is consistently to “go right.” And, since it’s self-serving advice, I’m not convinced by it. Show me polling.

They’re really not. Their policies are grossly unpopular. Their party holds power due to electoral chicanery and coalitions of convenience that entail significant blowback–like having to vote for Hillary Clinton even though they hate her guts because they threw red meat to the zombies long enough that the zombies took over. Their advice to the GOP to gain state legislatures involved gerrymandering, something they’re now advising Democats against. I just don’t see any value in what they’re saying. It’s a lot of words, with no data.

No duh, we need independents and probably some moderate GOPers. But adopting the policy preferences of the NeverTrumpers and propping up an old white guy aren’t necessarily or even obviously the way to go about it.

3709

Progressives aren’t reactionaries by definition. And yeah, our left flank does support crrraaazzzyyy ideas like universal health care and mitigating the coming climate apocalypse. But I guess I’ll take that over nazis, torturing children, dark ages science, and fealty to any perceived bellicose authority.

3710

You don’t have to. You can simply moderate your message.
Bernie’s message, for instance, is a very bad one. Saying that you are going to abolish the entire existing healthcare system and replace it, is inherently an extreme position.

But you can take a position that most (all?) of the other candidates support, which simply allows for a public option, and ultimately you’ll achieve your goal anyway. But you’ll find it much easier to garner moderate support with that message.

But we’ve covered this before… the Democratic party is, currently, much more diverse than the GOP.

Only a bit over 50% of Democrats describe themselves as liberal, with the rest describing themselves as moderate or conservative. Comparatively, something like 90% of GOP members describe themselves as conservative.

And ultimately, you don’t want to be like the GOP anyway. That message of only appealing to your base, while it did work in the recent past, doesn’t result in anything good. It’s a big reason why the GOP is the monstrosity that it is now. Further, it’s a reason why it was so grossly incapable of actual governance. The idiots who were elected by only appealing to the GOP base, were ultimately incapable of the most basic compromise with Democrats (and often weren’t even compatible with the moderate wing of their own party), and thus couldn’t get anything done.

The GOP is not a blueprint for what the Democrats should do. If anything, it’s a blueprint for what not to do.

You’re specifically saying that you don’t want to let them even sit at your table… Why? If you form a broad coalition that represents a compromise between the liberal wing of your party, and independents, and the moderate GOP members… you’d have a huge majority. And that majority would actually be able to get stuff done. That majority might not want to do everything that you want to do, but it’d be able to do SOME of what you want to do. It’d be able to make progress.

3711

Except that, as pointed out above, they control a majority of state legislatures, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court and are currently taking steps to mitigate democracy and enshrine their minority rule in perpetuity. They’ve successfully hamstrung Obamacare’s implementation, rolled back environmental protections, put children in cages, turned all of our security forces into racist cesspools, started trade wars, lowered taxes on rich people. Seems to me they’ve been pretty effective. I’d like some of that for our side please. How 'bout we get to enact some policy that’s not even radical, that has majority support, that is sane and rational?

3712

As a never-Trumper who never officially registered as Republican and was never active in the party but more often than not voted R, I have several requirements for a Presidential candidates such as not Trump, not lost to Tea Party-style nonsense, and most importantly pro-life.

I would’ve voted for HRC if she was pro-life but being pro-choice is the greatest deal breaker. Abortion on demand is the greatest evil of our time. So I wrote in.

McCain in '08 is the last Republican I voted for President. I thought Romney was too out of touch with economic realities of common people, Obama and HRC were pro-choice, and Trump is Trump.

For the last two US Senate races I didn’t vote for either candidate due to the Democrat being pro-choice and the Republican being what the modern Republican party has, unfortunately, become.

FWIW North Dakota is so far to the R side that my vote won’t be make-or-break for anything. But the side effect is I can vote my conscience in every race.

3713

You’d like some of that? Some of what the GOP did?

What major policy initiatives did they enact? They couldn’t repeal the ACA, which they basically ran on for the better part of a decade. Despite controlling both houses of congress, and the Presidency. They managed to pass a tax bill. That’s essentially all they achieved since winning the Presidency. And they controlled both houses of Congress for long before that, and yet never really achieved anything with that control.

Because they were entirely consumed with partisan combat, and fighting against Obama, than trying to create a broad coalition of support for their policies.

On some level, this kind of fundamental dysfunction works for the current incarnation of the GOP, but that’s because their core purpose has become “break government.” If your only goal is to effectively stop government from working, then those tactics work.

But that’s not what you want. You want government to actually do something useful. That means you need to actually be able to pass laws, not just stop anything from happening. And in order to pass laws, you need broader support.

3714

Is it? Are you against abortion or just against legal abortion? Because there are plenty of countries, e.g. Denmark, where abortion is freely available, but have very low abortion rates. The Clinton policy was “safe, legal, rare,” which seems to me if you think abortion is wrong, is preferable to “unsafe, illegal, common” as is the case in many Latin American countries. If I were designing policies to mitigate abortion, I’d want things like an economic safety net (poverty has the strongest demographic correlation with abortion rate), subsidized childcare, free healthcare, strong early education, better access to family planning resources. Only one party supports those things, and it’s not the GOP.

3715

If pro-life is the litmus test, then it seems to me you will probably never vote for a Democrat, since abortion rights are a key part of their platform. So you may be a never-Trumper in the sense that you won’t personally vote for him, but I read “never-Trumper” in a stronger sense, as in, “would prefer practically anybody else to be president and will actively oppose him”. Perhaps that is a misread on my part.

3716

This doesn’t even make sense in any fashion. They win on the state level because they try. They played the long game. The entire nation was Democratic for a long time and now it isn’t.

How are you going to deal with those issues if you don’t control any levers of power?
Do what the GOP did: talk moderate and push left once elected.

And they control nearly every branch of the government at every level.

But they’re not good at winning elections?

“Everyone hates their policies, and the fact they win almost every election anyways proves they don’t know how to win elections.”

But you’re willing to let all those things happen in the name of a purity test on the campaign trail.
So… do you really care about them at the end of the day?

You can’t change anything unless you start winning.

3717

Yes it is.

I’m against both.

I also support those things.

But I absolutely will not vote for pro-choice candidates under any circumstances. Asking me to vote for a pro-choice candidate now is like asking an abolitionist to vote for Jefferson Davis in the 1850’s.