a thing that gets me a lot is that it's just plain a bad strategy to get votes and generate the necessary enthusiasm for a candidate. it's trying to win with an inside straight, where everyone, for no reason, in trade for nothing, just agrees to get treated like shit and fakes enthusiasm for it
it's a poison pill strat. pre-emptive caving consistently helps fascism. Caving adds credibility to the fascists and removes it from the dems. overall credibility hits undecideds, more than single issues, (otherwise they wouldn't be undecideds)
people will say "but they SHOULD vote anyway" and should isn't will. they can bitch and moan and whine about it but there's no enforcement method to make people vote and gutting of vote protections - and groups like OFA that register people and get them to polls - makes voting more difficult.
They also ignore the fact that for members of the group thrown under the bus, it's not a binary choice between vote dem or not vote at all. If both sides screw you then why not vote for the republicans to get revenge on the people who just betrayed you? Spite is a powerful thing.
They’re saying “sure they’ve spread broken glass in front of the voting booth but our forebears would have crawled across it to vote!” while standing next to a broom they refuse to use.
something i've been on for years, because i'm always told to be Pragmatic and Realistic, is that i believe the dems could win without giving lefties like me much of anything policy wise if they just invested in basic fundamentals and infrastructure vis a vis getting people to vote.
my understanding of why they won't ever do this is that they have consultants telling them, truthfully, that the people those efforts would empower to vote don't pay their bills. that's not their favored electorate and they're not interested in expanding it beyond the same crowd the republicans have
Well they’re going to keep on losing then.
yeah that seems to be their plan
things like the 50 state strategy, OFA, and ACORN did. real basic stuff. more in registering voters. more in making sure people have TRANSPORTATION to the polls, which is incredibly important in a country like ours with atrocious public transportation. helping with early voting, etc.
this is the kind of stuff Georgia volunteers for dems did years back that resulted in those surprise victories. they really put the fucking work in, and they did it early, too. they were registering people at police protests. the national dem response was 'thanks for the free work' and bouncing.
hell, it was worse than that, it was also repaying all that work with 'oh by the way we fucking love Cop City and we'll arrest your ass if you're against it'. they expect unpaid volunteers to do everything for them, with no investment, no infrastructure, no anything, and even arrest them sometimes.
'sure we cracked the skulls of all the people who just a couple years before were helping us win and registering people and driving them to the polls but surely they'll just get replaced by some other chumps who'll do the same work for us for free' while the war chest goes to more loser consultants.
Weird that these same people aren't turned off by someone like Gavin who's cool with some people being disposable. Strange. Odd.
just tearing my hair out for years. the dems wouldn't have to give me healthcare. they wouldn't have to even budge on popular shit like weed. if they would just fucking stop spending the money on fake jobs for family and friends to kiss their ass and gave it to no-name organizers in states.
and they won't do it, they can't do it. they absolutely refuse to meaningfully fund the infrastructure and groups who would handle the nitty gritty boring fundamental stuff of winning elections and keeping people engaged with the party. they want it for free, and they want it with no policy demands.
They just want to keep on being able to go to Washington parties and be driven around in limousines while make empty promises well guess what motherfuckers.
like they're not just gambling on "everybody we throw under the bus supports us anyway and shuts their mouth about their criticisms", they're also gambling "throwing all these groups under the bus won't depress enthusiasm of organizers, or of voters who are not these groups but support them"
i don't think they're gambling; i think they're playing to lose if the GOP wins, the Dems get all the institutional cruelty they could ever want, AND they get to blame "the leftists and their goddamn purity testing" for it, while witless "blue no matter who" rubes continue to blindly fellate them
aiming to win over a well to do suburban massachusetts guy who votes republican locally but democratic for president and has big opinions on public schools and 'just doesn't know about all this trans stuff', and trading a freshly 18 trans voter, their supporting parents, and friends, for it
just incredibly bad fucking electoral math. the actual people that would vote on 'i'd vote dem if they just got a liiiiiiittle bit more transphobic' are not great in number and they are also not generally in states dems need to worry about losing in the first place.
Yeah, but here’s the thing, that well to do suburban guy isn’t just offering Dems his vote, he also has *money*. At this point, I think the DNC is basically just taking bribes to lose elections. That’s a huge problem.
"every minority will agree to not just vote for us but continue to give us unpaid volunteer labor to help us win even as we treat them like shit to win over a fraction of the leftover squishy republicans we haven't already gotten in the 30+ years we've run this strategy" is not a pragmatic strategy!
just always on my hobby horse of "obama '08, even when being cowardly about gay marriage and doing Purple America stuff, did not run a campaign primarily fueled by telling his own supporters 'fuck you and eat shit' and palling around with the most extreme right wing people in the GOP"
I also think the 2016 and 2024 elections showed just how important the catastrophically bad economic situation in 2008 was for Obama's win.
2016 is a difficult election to use as an example for anything because, much as ppl hate to admit it (and as lousy a candidate/shitty human being as she was), clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million. 2016 shows one thing: america has a weird-ass electoral system.