The Case For Biden

...and, I think I let you slide on this important phrase, as well. Picking nits, but it’s only more strategic because he — a Democrat?— plays better with Republicans.

I want a candidate who plays better with Republicans.

The idea that we need to be constantly at each other's throats doesn't appeal to me.

Yup. I'd like to see the Democratic Party welcome that small percentage of Republicans who don't feel comfortable with Trump's New Republican Party. It might be ten or fifteen per cent. I'd like to see the Democratic Party welcome a larger percentage of those "independents" who usually lean Republican. I'd like to see the Democratic Party win back Obama voters who voted for Trump, Stein, or didn't vote at all. I'd like to see everyone recognize that, at the present time, the Democratic Party is not a monolithic organization with a single ideology, but a collection of viewpoints with room for growth and change. Should the party ever regain control of Congress and the White House, that would be the time to redefine the party's political philosophy, based on praxis, not identity politics. In the meantime, the party should be a big tent with an open door — or flap. Under our election laws a proliferation of minor parties is a death sentence to the consensus and comity which will be required to repair the damage caused by the current administration.

I want a progressive who gives a damn about the environment, healthcare, an affordable college education, and who will kick ass on the corrupt entities who are making a killing on everyday Americans.

#onlyBernie

I notice that the ability to beat Trump is not on your list of desired qualities.

Anybody can win if enough people vote for him/her.

Look at his crowds. The biggest.

So it would be a huge state party that stood for nothing but winning.
Hey, look up.
That’s the current Dem party. Meaningless.

The Democratic Party Is Waging a War Against Its Very Own Base

In chasing a narrow swath of white swing voters, the leadership is demobilizing a broader coalition of voters who have delivered blue victories time and time again.
BY TORY GAVITO AND SEAN MCELWEE
May 30, 2019

At a critical juncture before the 2020 elections, the leadership of the Democratic Party is, perplexingly, abandoning key constituencies of its base, including young people, women, and people of color, as well as the policies that fire them up. In chasing a narrow swath of white swing voters, the leadership has ignored a broader coalition of voters who have delivered blue victories time and time again. Not only that—at times, it’s actively antagonizing them.

Even though the multiracial coalition that re-elected Obama in 2012 and stayed home in 2016 was large enough to change the outcome of the election, the Democratic leadership has focused on voters who swung from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. Party leaders have also taken to kneecapping up-and-coming progressives. Earlier this year, the DCCC—the party’s House campaigns arm—announced that it will blacklist firms that work with primary challengers, despite their delivering exciting new talent, reflective of its base, like congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.

This has led them to positions at odds with the values of the Democratic electorate. In the very same week that Alabama passed a full-fledged abortion ban, in what appears to be a coordinated, Republican-led attack on women’s reproductive rights in several states, DCCC chairwoman Cheri Bustos planned a fundraiser for Illinois congressman Dan Lipinski, an anti-choice, anti-LGBT Democrat who opposed the Affordable Care Act and refused to endorse President Barack Obama in 2012. In his safe blue district, he faces a primary challenge from mainstream, pro-choice progressive Marie Newman, who lost many of her consultants after the DCCC announced its blacklist

The backlash against the fundraiser for Lipinski—who supports abortion bans—was, predictably, swift and furious. Facing pressure, Bustos dropped out of it, but she had already signaled to the base that she valued incumbency over protecting a woman’s right to choose from the onslaught of right-wing attacks.

Bustos also made it clear that she sees the path to victory for Democrats in white swing voters, rather than in mobilizing the base of young voters and voters of color. She, along with other members in leadership like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer routinely undermine their colleagues' bold initiatives, such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal (though this may also be related to their acceptance of fossil-fuel industry donations), despite the popularity of these policies among Democratic voters. Leadership routinely says that they have to hold the “center” and “mainstream.”

Data for Progress, a think tank that studies public opinion and voter file data, analyzed the path forward for the Democratic Party, and the party could make big gains by a strategy that mobilizes progressives, rather than continuously undermining their base.

This orientation toward the middle instead of values and vision is demobilizing. Voters who are defined as “moderate” often hold a mix of extreme left and right positions. When the party machine prioritizes incumbents and moderates over its principles, voters become reluctant to identify as Democrats, and reluctant to vote.

Take, for example, the party’s treatment of black women. Black women are a powerful voting segment for the party, and yet they receive pennies to the dollar in resources spent by campaigns. They are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, and the current health-care system is failing this community, and yet this is seldom mentioned by Democratic candidates.

Resting on its civil rights–era support for black communities, the party is taking this community for granted. Now, the slip in black support for Democrats is beginning to show—voter file data from 2018 shows that black men, in particular, are increasingly identifying as independents. It’s not just black votes they have to worry about: The right has been working for a long time to make inroads among Latinx voters and hold power in the face of demographic change.

The results of demobilization are devastating. As the chart below shows, in four key states in 2016, there were more progressives who voted in 2012 and then stayed home in 2016 than the margin of victory in each state. Many of these voters are young people of color.

The Democratic Party Is Waging a War Against its Very Own Base
The valuation of white moderate voters—and so-called "electability"—over growing and reliable constituencies seems to have led the party to abandon areas where it could have won. The establishment's hostility toward the Democratic base is not new. This tension was starkly represented by Bill Clinton’s third-way centrism, with legislation like the 1994 crime bill and financial deregulation. And despite that model’s defeat in key 2016 states, its adherents, like Joe Biden, continue to push it as the sole way forward. Biden’s campaign is based around the thesis that good old boys can sit down over beers and pass comprehensive climate legislation. It’s more absurd than anything the left has proposed.

The party’s neglect of the Democratic base is reflected in the rhetoric and strategy that it employs in determining its geographic investments, too. Democrats continue to ignore the south and southwestern states, underinvesting in places where demographics are actually the most advantageous. Take Texas. Ignoring Texas’s 38 electoral votes, especially after Democrat senate candidate Beto O'Rourke lost by a mere 2 points, in 2018, is an old-world view. Democrats lost Texas in 2018 by 200,000 votes in a state with more than 6 million eligible voters—people of color and young people—not voting concentrated in major cities. Texas is changing and Democrats can take it, if they have the imagination and the will to follow the data.

Instead, they look at past battles lost in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. They argue that these are the important states on the path to 270 electoral college votes, insinuating that these populations are moderate and white. But even in the northern states, Democrats don’t get the base math right.

In Michigan, Democrats lost by 10,704 votes while over 4 million voters, counting both eligible registered Democratic and unregistered voters, were up for grabs. In 2016, Democrats failed to recognize that the turf in Michigan no longer looked like it did when Bill Clinton ran his 1996 reelection campaign, setting up field operations in neighborhoods that no longer existed. Consider the following data demonstrating that a multiracial coalition continues to be ignored by campaigns in traditional presidential battleground states, based on Data for Progress analysis of the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies 2016 survey.

The Democratic Party Is Waging a War Against its Very Own Base
In contrast, when Democrats mobilize their base, they win. There is GA-06, which middle-of-the-road Jon Ossoff lost; congresswoman Lucy McBath won there by running a campaign on the issue of gun safety and embracing the new electorate. Or in TX-32, where congressman Colin Allred focused on mobilizing young people and people of color in addition to making the case for his values in the Dallas area, flipping his district for the first time in 15 years.

Stacey Abrams’s gubernatorial campaign in Georgia was an explicit attempt to expand the electorate. That strategy succeeded in bringing a Democrat the closest to victory in a Georgia gubernatorial race since 1998. But the campaign wasn’t starting from scratch. Abrams founded the New Georgia Project in 2014 with the explicit intention of mobilizing the black electorate in Georgia. That long-term work focused on the base will pay off.

Mobilizing the Democratic party base means standing up for progressive values, principles, and policies—and reaching out to the people it claims to represent. In the Data for Progress and YouGov Blue “What The Hell Happened” survey, we found overwhelming support among 2018 voters for policies like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and free college. And, in a recent report, Pew found that Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z, turning 18 this cycle, are now a bigger voting block than Clinton’s cohort of boomers and older generations—together they outvoted older generations in the 2018 midterm elections.

The idea that the party needs to focus on the so-called center simply isn’t supported by data. The path forward for the Democratic Party is investing in the electorate of the future, not trying to win a smaller proportion of white voters that voted for Trump. This strategy will pay dividends for decades. Without a sharp pivot, Democrats risk again losing an entire generation of future Democrats who are disengaged and increasingly skeptical of the American political system.

Perhaps the Democrat leadership sees the agenda put forward by the author, and shared by the large collection of progressive candidates, none of whom can get past Sanders in the Polls, as a losing strategy for both the election and the governance of the country in the very unlikely event that any of them wins.

George.

The Rs backed a multiple married, pussy-grabbing man whose wife can still be seen posing nude in provocative poses with other naked women...not that there’s anything wrong with that.😇

A complete DC outsider, he beat the most powerful establishment machine in this country. It wasn’t because he was great; it was a rebuke of insiders.

Only Bernie Sanders can beat him.

And that’s what’s going to happen—if Ds line up behind him.

If they don’t, congratulations. Trump wins again.

No. It would stand for repealing the worst laws and reversing the worst acts of the Trump administration.

Meaningless? No. Because winning will provide the foundation for change; otherwise it's just a permanent "opposition party".

Once the Dems win, the demographics will put a lot of the younger, more "progressive" party members into the leadership spotlight. A Democratic victory, even by the one of those candidates you're so willing to dismiss as a "Republican", is the only way elements of a "progressive" program will come to pass, the only way "progressive" voices will stop being mere gadflies, the only path to defining our true meaning.

#NoMoreHalfMeasures
#NoMiddleGround

The Centrists ran it into the ground. I think it’s time to see what the Progressives can do with it.

The idea that he'd be the most progressive Dem primary candidate running was pretty deluded (or dishonest), for sure.

I will not be voting for Bernie in the primary. If I choose to go with a "progressive", Elizabeth Warren is a better choice. Warren is very intelligent, represents the middle class well, and has the advantage of actually being able to do the job well should she win it.

I might decide to vote for Joe Biden, just because I think that reaching out to the middle is the best for both the party and the country... and is the best chance of beating Trump.

Bernie supporters are getting awfully annoying.

Eh. It seems obvious why Biden would think he'd do well with moderate-to-conservative working class Democrats in red states, or midwestern states that have been turning red.

If we're nitpicking, that's not the same as "Republicans" though (culturally conservative or centrist Democrats are still a thing).

Moreover, it's not really a million miles away from the reasons why Bernie racked up the votes in many of the same states. Lot of white working class Dems there who liked his anti-elites populism, but aren't necessarily socialists or anything and culturally lean conservative. And frankly, a lot of voters in those states who just loathed Hillary and would have voted for anyone running against her (maybe especially if it was a white old guy). He didn't crush the West-Virginia primary because they generally go for the more left-wing candidate there.

I think the moniker Democrat has lost meaning. Do you feel confident about what a Democrat is? Now that anti-abortion is a so-called Democrat plank, I don’t think there’s a line between Republicans and Democrats.

Everybody who likes Medicaid, libraries, and fire stations is a socialist. Wouldn’t you agree?

Ignorant fear of the word socialism is a McCarthyist boogeyman hold-over, driven by our establishment’s desperation to scare us into maintaining the two-party system — that keeps them rich and us poor. I find it hard to believe you don’t agree.

Socialism shouldn't scare anyone into anything. People should understand what it means and contemplate the ramifications.

Certain forms of socialism might be necessary and good; while other forms might be economic and social-cultural abuses that coerce people and waste resources for no good reason.

Medicare could be ok, if it wasn't done in a wasteful way; but are you open to listening to critiques of why some people don't want it to be universal and working with them respectfully?

Libraries and other public goods are not necessarily socialist. Assembling a collection of books, media, etc. that anyone can respectfully use is not socialist. Using the library system to redistribute wealth and income from tax payers to writers, book distributors, etc., on the other hand, would be.

Corporations may be private businesses, but that doesn't mean they can't operate in a fascist way or that they can't be tools for pursuing socialism. Defining socialism in terms of the government owning/controlling the economy can be misleading because the economy can be controlled socially without using the government as a formal part of the process.

Nimh,

I’ve read this a couple of times and it doesn’t make sense to me. The ‘he’ here is Bernie?



Who’s more left than Bernie? And WV elects pretty extreme conservatives—their one D senator is really a R in D clothing.

Biden's efforts to violate the Second Amendment are not likely to be too appealing to rural voters. The suburbs might not care though.

... is something you might wish to try and do. You use the word to mean anything you don't happen to like.