Sorry man, not necessarily you. It’s an oft repeated topic around here, like a P&R approved grumble. We won the popular vote. Yes. We lost the election, also yes. Repeated references to the popular vote are beating a dead horse.
It is brought up quite often in P&R, but usually around the context of reminding people that the latest action X taken by the President, or congress or the executive branch is done despite the will of the majority of the people, not only in polls, but also at the ballot box. It’s a constant reminder that you need +7 to +9 to overcome gerrymander and other systems put in place to elect someone new. And again, I think that’s important. Quite often people throw around “well, yes, they’re the majority, but they don’t come out to vote”. So it’s important to remind people that the majority of those that did come out to vote also voted against Trump.
For that use, approved, and rightly so. I’m still very worried about the mid-terms. Grumbling, hell even demonstrations, don’t always equate to voting turnout.
If Democrats don’t turn out, my fury will know no bounds. For all the angst and rage expressed online, if they can’t be arsed to get a polling station…
So, I just want to make sure I understand the currently accepted ‘truth’.
The Democrats were so mean to Kavanaugh that the GOP was going to let them win the midterms, but now the GOP is going to decide to vote to give the Dems a slap on the wrist and tell them to behave more nicely next time?
This whole narrative is ridiculous to me.
Yeah, but we’re not dealing with rational people. This is cult, and reason doesn’t reach them.
Just have to have 9% more people on 11/6 who have a clue to break the cycle. At least for now. Shame it can’t just be a majority, like in a democracy, but that’s the reality of things.
Even if we take this mysterious strategist’s insights about unreleased polling data as an accurate assessment of what’s happening, the GOP was already likely to keep the Senate. Steering into that to solidify Senate control might be sensible from their perspective, but it’s not delivering some dire doom for Democrats. Heaping on House wins helps hold it in 2020, though the Senate map isn’t much more vulnerable then unless the wave continues.
… yes, I changed “adding” to “heaping on” to beef up the oddly alliterative paragraph there.
That so-called cult is still not the majority. Everyone else needs to go out and vote.
This is really key. Right now we are in a situation where the GOP political cult has used the intensity of its voters, particularly in primaries and midterms, combined with the natural gerrymandering of the Senate and of urban/rural population distribution (more Dems clumped in cities making “packing and cracking” type gerrymandering very easy, and even causing Dem “overvoting” in some districts without gerrymandering), to take political power and has then used that political power to further entrench itself with gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc.
The cult intensity is not going to change any time soon although it may shed some members. But if we break the stranglehold on political power, we take away several of their key tools and create opportunities for ourselves to push things back to sanity, if we use those tools vigorously.
We need to establish a political beachhead by taking at least the House this November. If we do, we have partially broken the GOP stranglehold on power and established a base with subpoena power etc. to towards revealing more GOP wrong doing and facilitating more Dem electoral wins.
If we don’t establish that beachhead, well, the US is going to continue under political occupation by a right wing minority of voters.
The cult part we can’t do much about. The cult’s symbiote, the GOP national and state level political power base, that we can weaken. Weaken the cult’s overt political power and you have a chance.
I don’t disagree with this. That said, history shows that a good portion of the left electorate has very limited patience when it comes to their elected representatives using power to effect change. Given that the House can accomplish nothing of substance — by which I mean nothing that actually materially improves people’s lives or even gives them hope for such improvement — the question is, how do we keep power for long enough to do something?
I recall that in 2009 we had the House and we had the Senate with a filibuster-proof margin, and we had the White House. Then by 2010 we had lost the filibuster-proof Senate, and by 2011 we had lost the House, and by 2015 we had lost the Senate, and of course in 2017 we lost the White House.
So, what does the House do from 2019-2021? What are the prospects for taking the Senate in 2020? How do we keep people engaged when we can’t change anything? The rap on Obama — who ushered in the largest expansion of the social safety net in decades, and saved the economy to boot — has been that he was just more of the same, that he didn’t do enough, that he didn’t use his super powers to break Republican obstructionism, and Democrats stayed home in subsequent elections.
The house simply reveals Trump’s criminality and uses leverage to shut down the government to get concessions.
Yup, if they can put down their effing phones long enough. I heard this enraging story on NPR a couple of days ago about some Hispanic voter populations (I wish I could remember where, but I think it was in Texas). They interviewed a bunch of people who are US citizens and don’t like Trump and think Republican policies suck, but when asked if they think this election is important and they’re planning to vote, they’re all, “naah.” I wanted to reach through the radio and throttle them.
Recent history had shown that the electorate, left and right, does not need demonstration of change. It needs stoking of outrage.
That can be accomplished by a House dedicated to publicizing wrongdoing. As a corollary, don’t expect any attempt to actually remove Trump from office.
I agree with a lot of what you wrote there, but people need to be reminded constantly that the “filibuster proof majority” of 2009 was vanishingly brief between it taking forever to seat Al Franken and Ted Kennedy’s and Robert Byrd’s health problems.
I think this means the local democratic party needs to do better in reaching out to these young hispanic voters.
Sure. I’m not saying Obama did nothing. I’m saying that apathetic voters decided Obama did nothing and we lost power. And I’m wondering if they’ll be any more patient now.
In this instance, though, Neal brought her up. The right is so accustomed to opposition, and so poorly equipped for governance, that they need to keep bringing up Hillary Clinton. From “lock her up” at the rallies to Neal’s whatabbouttism justification when asked how he can support Trump. For many Trump supporters, the demonization they’ve been fed of the Clintons is all they have to go on.
@Neal_Stevens, if you have any reason to support Trump other than your hatred of Hillary Clinton and your assertion that Dr. Ford is a liar, I’d love to hear it.
-Tom