Political Discussion

Teeeee said:
Well I very very very much do. As do A LOT of women.
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I know you do. And I’d prefer it to be a woman too. Which is why it was framed that way in my original post.

But I know just as many females who could care less if it’s a woman if that women winds up being somebody like Amy. Point being, gender and race cannot simply be a tool to convince people to vote for a moderate. The ideology of the VP matters.

See Palin, Sarah.
 
wokeupnew said:
And going really far left will alienate A LOT of voters.
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Not going left at all will alienate A LOT of voters. Biden is center right and a VP even slightly left of center would be a massive step up. The progressive swath of voters needs to be tossed a bone in this election or it's over before it even starts.

wokeupnew said:
I think Waren would be a great pick personally.
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I like Warren, but I couldn't disagree more.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
Trump has already indicated that he's coming hard for MN. Without Klobuchar on the state ticket again until 2024, I think there's a real concern that Minnesota goes red this year. If she's on the ballot, albeit for a different office, maybe that changes? I don't know.

Of all of them, I think maybe Whitmer has possibly the most cache right now. She gave the Dem SOTU response, she's obviously up Trump's bunghole in a way a lot of the other possibilities aren't right now, and securing Michigan is very important to Biden's path to victory. She's young, has legislative experience, has a history of supporting abortion rights with a very personal story tied to it, supports abolishing ICE, supports infrastructure improvements, she beat her Republican opponent in 2018 by ten points...

Seems like a lot in her favor, despite only being halfway through her first time and opposing single payer healthcare.
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Picking VPs on the potential of securing their individual state seems short-sighted to me.
 
ayayrawn said:
Not going left at all will alienate A LOT of voters. Biden is center right and a VP even slightly left of center would be a massive step up. The progressive swath of voters needs to be tossed a bone in this election or it's over before it even starts.
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Exactly. Bernie’s base matters. Young people matter. Clinton’s condescending tone towards us and her pick of Kaine mattered. People always point to the deplorable comment, but she basically sat there calling people under 35 and progressives deplorable every step of her campaign.


And frankly, Biden is at risk of doing the same thing. He already said he “has no empathy” for my generation and told a room full of bankers that “nothing will change”.

And this morning Yahoo sent me an article with the headline Biden says he “doesn’t regret a single decision” he has made in his career.

Uh— this is how we lose to Trump. You can’t just keep doubling down on suburbanites over the age of 50.
 
Y'all are making really good points here, and I agree in theory with all of them.

The thing is, the DNC is just looking at the current voting population some 120 million people. The strategy that they'll likely go with is how to we get more votes from those 120 million people than the RNC. Trump won in 2016 because he energized a lot of rural voters who didn't give a rats ass about politics before. A lot of people voted for the first time and from areas that normally have lower turnouts. They were not a part of that 120 million people. That's what the DNC should be trying to do, get higher turnout for non-voting progressives.

Promise me the fucking moon, give me Medicare for all, universal income, the green new deal, I'll vote for you. Even if you backtrack after the election (Like Trump did) on all those promises. Changing their platform would get a lot of new voters. But everything that I've seen since 2015 has been the establishment dems not caring at all about the progressive wing of the democratic party. I don't see Biden promising Universal Healthcare or any other essential things that every other major country on earth has. I don't see them picking a logical much more progressive VP pick or approach for progressive issues. They won't do it.

So, it's getting the most out of what's available. They're banking on Biden to be enough and with enough voters being anti-Trump. It worked for the Democratic primaries that already happened. A lot of those voters said in exit polls they thought Biden was stronger against Trump and removing him from office was their main issue.

Do I think that this strategy is going to work? I don't know. But that's what's likely going to happen.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
I think Biden and the party could justifiably say though, that this is exactly what Bernie did, and the votes just didn't materialize like he promised they would. How do you convince people to turn out to vote for the watered-down version of the thing they couldn't be bothered to vote for in the first place? And how do you do it without losing the support of the moderates that did come out, but for Biden?
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you're right, I don't know. it's all very tricky.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
To further that thought, part of the calculus here has to be determining whether swaying the progressive vote (much of which exists in locations that are already likely to vote D) generates a net gain that is big enough to offset the potential continued loss of states with critical EC counts. I don't know the answer to that, just trying to place all this in the context of the mechanics of how the race is actually contested.
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I understand where you are coming from, and it would be true if we were talking about progressives over the age of 50. But this posit overlooks people under 40 who are overwhelmingly progressive. Yes- we don't turn out in the numbers that Boomers do. But turning out those of us that are politically active has never been more vital (because of the enthusiasm of Trump's base). For reference- we won Obama 3 or 4 vital swing states in 2012 (Ohio and Florida included). We also arguably lost Clinton the election-- though that's on her. Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Texas, Colorado and, to a lesser degree, Pennsylvania (because it's an older state) all come to mind as places where turning out the youth will matter a LOT.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
I'm just trying to play the hand I'm going to be dealt, and moderate-vs.-progressive isn't going to be a relevant question for me at a certain point. It's going to come down to whether Trump is reelected or not, and that essentially will make me, and really all of us in my view, into single issue voters in November.
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Bingo. Progressivism is, unfortunately, going to take a backseat for a lot of voters in November.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
That might be on her, but do you think that a VP pick further to the left of Kaine would have done it? I mean, from a more cynical perspective, let's say Biden does pick, I don't know, Warren or, let's imagine he hadn't committed to a female VP, Bernie himself. We all know Biden's positions and how they stand in contrast to some of the core progressive goals. How would that not just be pandering for the vote? Unless it's accompanied by some Grand Bargain-style realignment of the party, which is not why Biden was chosen by the people who voted for him, then what's the point? If young progressives are really as savvy as we make them out to be, then why would this fool any of them into voting for the things they supposedly despise?

For my own part, I'm coming at this from a state that wasn't going to get to vote until May in the best circumstances, possibly even later now. I'm just trying to play the hand I'm going to be dealt, and moderate-vs.-progressive isn't going to be a relevant question for me at a certain point. It's going to come down to whether Trump is reelected or not, and that essentially will make me, and really all of us in my view, into single issue voters in November.
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For many I know- it would be an indication that a re-verse BIl Clinton was being pulled and that he was pivoting to the left. That progressives would at least be welcome within the conversation during his presidency. That matter a LOT to the activists and younger portion of Bernie's base because it provides HOPE that we might be able to pressure Biden on certain issues.

Kaine signified a doubling down by Clinton that we did not matter. Yes, it made a huge difference among the groups I've already mentioned from everything I could gather at the time and have since. The strategy shifted from "maybe we can pressure Clinton" to "it's already on fire, burn it to the ground".

Where that completely backfired is that the media pushed all of the blame onto Bernie and Russia instead of conducting a thoughtful conversation around why Clinton had lost.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
I don't mean to diminish those people's feelings about this, because those are valid. But this is also frustrating to hear. I mean...VP was the only place this leverage could be exerted? What about HHS? Education? Energy? Defense? State? Labor? Treasury? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? What about the risk to the Supreme Court? There were obviously other paths for progressive voices to be heard, and in fact the VP choice is probably among the least effective of all of them aside from its symbolic value (which isn't insignificant, granted -- just without much practical application). Frankly it's tough for me to hear that and not feel like blaming the selection of Tim Kaine for not voting for Clinton (or at all) is reverse engineering a scapegoat.

"Let it burn" feels like a reasonable consequence until 40M sick people lose their jobs and their insurance and the federal government can't find its own ass due to corruption and incompetence. Then what? Sure, we exposed a lot of the rot in the system, but did we successfully teach the moderate/neoliberal arm a lesson with this exercise? Or just double down on ensuring that we're a lost generation?
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I'm not saying it was the right stance. But there are many people who feel like their concerns and problems have been ignored for so long by Democrats and white, upper middle class Boomers that the approach became-- our house is already on fire and has been for decades, maybe the whole neighborhood has to burn before the fire department shows up.

I think I've used that analogy before but it's an appropriate one. Of course- what actually happened was that Trump sent the fire department over to throw kerosine onto the fire while the media pivoted to "Trump is starting a fire".

And yet, when I talk to a lot of my Latino and black friends- their stance has not changed and they are the millennials I'm seeing the strongest anti-Biden push among. Basically- their view is that their parents waited decades for the promises that incremental change will pay off and that it's never happened. I literally had people on my Facebook feed referring to their parents vote for Biden as beaten dog syndrome.

As to my white never-Clinton friends-- their view was similar. That systemic change throughout history has only happened once things got back enough that misery was widespread and not confined to bubbles related to class, generation and race.

www.audible.com

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I have not read it-- but that book is commonly cited among that later group.
 
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Hi y’all. I’m just popping my head in here and breaking my embargo to share something I saw that made me think of a lot of y’all right now.
84F53A8D-5134-478F-BEAC-A51AC7B47667.jpeg

*Edited to add* Please don’t take this as me laughing at y’all. It isn’t meant in a derogatory manner, just a humorous recognition of the position y’all find yourselves in.
 
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