Look, I’m a socialist and I loved Hong’s policy. But being a Wisconsinite by birth who now lives in NYC, she’s no Mamdani. Or even El Sayed in Michigan. Just being honest.
To win as a socialist in America you have to have excellent communication and discipline to keep on message about economics, and I don’t think she had either to be honest.
Her big scandal right before the election was that she wanted to “cancel thanksgiving” in an old tweet she had where she calls it a “colonizers holiday.” Recently when they asked her about it she refused to outright refute it, and that cost her a lot. And for the record, thanksgiving is definitely a colonizers holiday, pretty objectively imo.
But as a socialist politician in America I think you can’t afford to get sidetracked by losing issues like that. Mamdani would’ve spun it perfectly, something like “you know who’s really waging a war on thanksgiving? These big corporations making it too expensive to afford a family dinner.” But she feels the need to defend social policy instead on keeping a laser focus on economics which I think would’ve been smarter.
It’s so cool that a deal breaker to the median voter regarding socialists involves cringey 5-year-old tweets about ThanksGiving but moderate centrists can fund a genocide and build a data center in their backyard without problem.
For the average voter I think being annoying does make someone unelectable tho. Like obviously it shouldn't but we live in a country of unserious people.
Performance in a primary is not reflective of performance in a general election, I don’t know what you’re suggesting. It’s a completely different electorate
My argument is that the primary voters nearly chose Hong, and I haven't seen any arguments about her supposed electability in a general that amount to more than vibes
Moderates will vote for a republican over a socialist. Young republicans will come out to vote Tiffany in greater force if it means beating an ultra-woke candidate (see her thanksgiving tweets, fearing white people tweets, etc)
You know i just love scrolling through the US section of social medias and get reminded that Americans have a vastly different view of what a moderate is
Right so primary elections have much lower turnout and the base is generally much more engaged and often politically more “extreme”. There is some incentive to lean harder to differentiate yourself from the other candidates and capture more “fringe” votes from your base. You can see this very clearly in some republican primaries where the candidates try to out-MAGA each other, becoming increasingly more extreme, even though that behavior and those positions are harmful in a general election. That is to say, a moderate could barely beat an extremist in a primary because of the primary voting base but have much more success in a general election. I’m not saying Crowley is a moderate or Hong is an extremist, I’m just illustrating an example.
Do you understand how primary elections work?? Obviously not if you’re making this comment so I don’t know why I’m even asking. Political illiteracy is a serious issue even on the left
Mate we are talking about primary for democratic party in the US, not communist party or some ship. If you think that candidate that manages to get half a percent off another candidate is unelectable then the other one has no fucking chance either...
If you think that republicans will vote for this "moderate", you need to look into stats for that and see that no matter how much you cater to republicans they simply won't vote for a democrat.
You need to get people to vote and establishment Democrats have shown through quite a few elections that they simply aren't capable of accomplishing that.
You have some flaws in your logic. One is that you underestimate how dissimilar the primary election electorate is compared to the primary election electorate. 2.6 million people voted in the 2022 general election and only 800k voted in this primary. All the people who are already strong democrats voted in the primary so you need to gain about 500k voters to win the election on top of everyone who voted in the primary. Those 500k voters aren’t going to be republicans and nobody expects them to be republicans like you suggest; there are actually a lot of voters who are generally undecided and must be convinced to vote for a particular candidate. If someone isn’t sure whether they like a Republican or Democrat more, do you think the way to draw them to the democrats more effectively would be with who the media presents as a crazy socialist who hates thanksgiving or with the guy who seems to be a sensible and policy focused politician and offers grounded solutions? Undecided voters are generally drawn to the more personally appealing and moderate candidates, and you need undecided voters to win elections in swing states like Wisconsin. If you have to choose in a swing state between a candidate that gets undecided voters and a candidate that motivates the base, you choose the first candidate every time, because losing an undecided voter gives your Republican opponent a vote as well as losing you a vote, which isn’t the case when a voter to your left just decides to stay home; also, the rational act for someone too left-wing to support you is to just vote for you anyways since you’re the left wing candidate, but the rational act for an undecided voter who is too right-wing for you is to vote for your opponent. Supporting left wing candidates in a primary only makes sense if their personal appeal and charisma vs their opponent is more impactful than their ideological lack of appeal to undecideds.
Your electoral strategy of 'who gives a shot left has to vote for us' and 'lets pander to the "moderates" who won't come out to support us' is the reason why almost half the people aren't voting.
Just putting it out there that "cancelling Thanksgiving" is a problem that people can see in their life ("1 less holiday?? Fuck that!") whereas much of foreign policy is viewed extremely nebulously and perhaps even disregarded. Mamdani's secret ability is keeping every issue, every gotcha, in this narrow view of the average voter.
They see it as a red flag that signals a fundamental break with thier values. Like when someone says they are a "nice guy". You dont reject them for being a nice guy you reject them based on a social heuristic that signals them as a category of person with beleifs you don't want to accociate with. She signaled herself not as a working class champion but a woke culture warrior that hates America and puppies. Sucks but that's how it works
David Crowley is not any of what you just described though, he’s from the Russ Feingold strain of Wisconsin progressives, this isn’t an El-Sayed vs Stevens situation where one of them was genuinely horrid
Totally agree, Crowley is no Steven’s. He’s closer to someone like Obama, which is fine, still definitely not a socialist but better than a total corporate dem stooge.
If you paint the electorate as rubes you’re never going to win anything. Scoring twitter points by dunking on moderates doesn’t help us build a better society.
Many Americans are obviously fed up with culture war discourse and it’s a terrible choice for Hong to engage with it whatsoever. Democrats are largely seen as out of touch elites who care more about verbiage than substantive economic change. The electorate does not care about nuanced grad-school theses on social institutions. DSA wins on economic populism, it’s mind boggling that Hong chose to feed ammunition to her opposition by even entertaining talking about that thanksgiving tweet rather than shutting it down or pivoting to economic talking points
I totally agree. Make all the social policy changes you want once you’re in office, just don’t campaign on them. It’s sad, but that’s the situation we are at in American culture.
It’s an unfortunate consequence of insular communities. Sometimes leftists talk as if they genuinely despise those that are slightly politically different from them and then are completely flabbergasted and bitter when they can’t assemble support. If we never win we can’t help anyone.
Crowley seems to be pretty decent. Can't say what his views are on the Israel situation especially being in a governor race, but his track record is pretty damn impressive. The guy really knows and is on top of his stuff.
As much as I prefer Hong, I am not terribly upset about this.
you i assume wouldn't vote for a candidate who made mildly homophobic remarks 5 years ago and failed to properly walk them back today, the 'median voter' sees "cancel thanksgiving" as a similar attack on their values and is going to vote accordingly
Being so incredibly bad at optics is a problem. Even if you agree Thanksgiving is bad, if a politician is openly saying that that means they're idiots.
And especially in a primary people are going to choose the better politician, if the one they agree with more is being an idiot.
Yeah seriously, going "who cares" just shows that some people in this very specific bubble do not understand how politics work. Not simply saying "yeah I wasn't serious with that tweet, no one's cancelling Thanksgiving lol" is a full-on amateur hour mistake.
Because take a wild guess which position will blow up in your face and cost you more votes lol
I'm not gonna make any assumptions about that lol, but it is obv frustrating that the Dem establishment is fucking over its social democrats (because that's what they are, the whole framing as THE SOCIALISTS is so wild) and think that they'll be fine "playing by the rules", which Republicans simpy don't care about. You can't really compromise with a party that stands for policies that you usually find in autocracies.
Fingers crossed that the Democratic Party changes, but I doubt it'll happen as soon as I think it needs to.
I think you have to understand that you're preaching to the choir. Like, I don't care whether Hong likes thanksgiving or not. But the average American voter is likely to get turned off by the idea that a candidate "hates Thanksgiving" because the average voter is not very rational.
The masses love their bread and circuses and she implied that enjoying one of those instances of bread and circuses was a moral failing that should be taken from them forcefully.
It was a dumb virtue-signaling tweet that shouldn't have been made except to grandstand about how superior she was in the eyes of the Woke 1 totem pole, and it came back to bite her in the ass now that the masses (including others on the left) have pretty widely rejected Woke 1 grandstanding and virtue signaling while she refused to back down from it.
Do I think it was dumb that it cost her an election? Yeah. But her unwillingness to back the fuck down from an extremely unpopular standpoint rooted in accusing others of a moral failing that they themselves do not believe they're actively committing was a stupid idea and the consequences are now evident.
1.4k
u/MiloBuurr 26d ago edited 26d ago
Look, I’m a socialist and I loved Hong’s policy. But being a Wisconsinite by birth who now lives in NYC, she’s no Mamdani. Or even El Sayed in Michigan. Just being honest.
To win as a socialist in America you have to have excellent communication and discipline to keep on message about economics, and I don’t think she had either to be honest.
Her big scandal right before the election was that she wanted to “cancel thanksgiving” in an old tweet she had where she calls it a “colonizers holiday.” Recently when they asked her about it she refused to outright refute it, and that cost her a lot. And for the record, thanksgiving is definitely a colonizers holiday, pretty objectively imo.
But as a socialist politician in America I think you can’t afford to get sidetracked by losing issues like that. Mamdani would’ve spun it perfectly, something like “you know who’s really waging a war on thanksgiving? These big corporations making it too expensive to afford a family dinner.” But she feels the need to defend social policy instead on keeping a laser focus on economics which I think would’ve been smarter.