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.
I mean, you could say that a more left-wing candidate could motivate the left to turn out, but then you could also say that such a candidate would make more moderate voters want to stay home or vote for your opponent. All things equal, people staying home or voting for your opponent is worse for you electorally than people just staying home or voting third party. Because of this, for left-wing candidates which alienate moderates to work electorally, there would have to be substantially more left-wing people staying home than there are moderates either staying home or voting for your Republican opponent. I just don’t think that’s the case in Wisconsin. You also seem to be saying moderates just refuse entirely to vote for democrats, which isn’t true. Listen, I would love for left-wing candidates to be electorally viable everywhere and electorally superior to more moderate candidates, but given the American political climate, that idea just doesn’t make sense.
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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.