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.