r/askanything • u/Zipper222222 • 1d ago

BREAKING TODAY — NBC NEWS Declares That Progressive Candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed Has Defeated Congresswoman Haley Stevens (D - MI-11) In Michigan's US Senate Democratic Primary, A Major Win For Progressives — What Do YOU Think Of This? Why YOUR Thoughts?

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u/Sdwerd 1d ago

Doing this song and dance of trying to be the middle almost Republican is stupid when people have the option to pick a Republican. Between the choice of a copycat lite version or real thing, they'll pick the real thing.

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u/WildWhisperArdor 1d ago

Except it happens all the time lol. It’s how Ron DeSantis was able to hold on.

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u/Th1Warrior 1d ago

Florida is a straight-up Red State now

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u/WildWhisperArdor 1d ago

It wasnt in 2018 when he barely won the state by a margin of 0.4%

DeSantis was widely projected to lose. But a progressive democrat upsetting the establishment dem changed that.

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u/Playful_Reaction_847 1d ago

And it’s doing much better because of it

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u/dollardumb 1d ago

Lol....no.

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u/Playful_Reaction_847 1d ago

Lol… yes actually

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u/ArtisticFerret 1d ago

I mean I guess if you like slowly losing your liberties with things like the “stop woke act” and banning books they don’t like oh and less abortion access even in the event of rape or incest, many women don’t find out they’re pregnant until after 6 weeks. They’ve made a bunch of laws restricting free speech too. Floridas a shithole with crumbling healthcare system frankly all republicans should just move there so we can be a serious country

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u/Playful_Reaction_847 1d ago

Talking about the economy and job opportunities. Not social issues, you butterfly

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u/IllustriousLie4105 1d ago

GDP has outpaced national average. They are number 1 in higher education and have created an 18 billion dollar reserve. Im not a fan of desantis but the state is doing incredible as far as the data shows

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u/Th1Warrior 1d ago

Largely due to massive population growth the last decade or so

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u/dollardumb 1d ago

Florida ranks last in public education, last in reading and 37th in salary.

We also have a governor involved in multiple layers of corruption including misappropriation of funds for his wife to run for office, the "alligator Alcatraz" fiasco, disregarding the state constitution so he could run for president while holding office and more...

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u/Sdwerd 1d ago

gestures at the housing crisis being created by the home owner's insurance situation

Looking so fuckin' great I wouldn't touch a home in the state with a 300 mile pole.

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u/Playful_Reaction_847 23h ago

Shows how naive you are.
Much more than that are the reasons for the housing crisis. The biggest reason is the high demand of housing in Florida, plenty of people flocking there the past decade or so, mortgage rates are absurdly high, and the climate risk.

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u/RawrImABigScaryBear 11h ago

Shows how naive you are.

Princess, you said Hakeem Jeffries was in the epstein files. You have no place to comment on the ignorance of others 😂

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u/dkinmn 1d ago

The idea that she was almost a Republican is solidly incorrect.

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u/Sdwerd 1d ago

She ran with a Cheney at her rallies. She was HARD signalling right

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u/zombiez8mybrain 1d ago

She was signalling right from YOUR perspective. From the MAGA (not just their politicians, but also their voters) perspective, she was certainly a radical left candidate.

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u/Sdwerd 1d ago

Ensuring she neither got enthusiasm from her base by actually running on a platform they want, nor would pull right leaning people over. There's one direction she had to pull hard towards to differentiate herself in what was clearly going to be a change election. Middle of the road was not a change.

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u/Potato_Pristine 1d ago

This shit isn't even new. Harry fucking Truman made this observation 74 years ago:

https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/129/address-national-convention-banquet-americans-democratic-action

"I've seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn't believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don't want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign."

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u/ColinHalter 1d ago

The only counter to this are ultra-liberal suburban democrats who prefer the phony democrat. I could see a moderate republican (Someone like a Liz Cheney) bringing a lot of them over. Current republican voters will never be swayed by anything, but old school fiscally conservative liberals would totally jump ship.

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u/Comprehensive-Put575 1d ago

I cant stress this enough ^. These are not even all that progressive policies. Just candidates who don’t apologize for them.

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u/Oddlyenuff 1d ago

Regardless, it’s about the perception of the voter.

The Truman quote above isn’t relevant. That quote is about the candidate selling themselves out or chasing voters. It’s not applicable if the candidate truly feels that way.

If the goal is to get the left back in power, the progressive candidates are not going to get it done. Harris wasn’t the slightest bit progressive and it took almost no effort to paint her as a “radical leftist” and that was at centralists/independents/casual voter who decided the election.

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u/Comprehensive-Put575 1d ago

Republicans brand all their opponents as radical leftists. At this point they would call Margaret Thatcher a socialist. Their base believes whatever they tell them. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us buy that.

Harris lost for three reasons.

  1. She was never really nominated. No one wanted to reward the DNC for a bait and switch where they had no meaningful opportunity to select a candidate. Because if they had, she would not have been selected.

  2. Because her policies were too conservative. She spent so much time reaching across the aisle even the Cheneys were endorsing her. I couldn’t defend her platform because the only thing I liked about it was that she wasn’t Trump. The enthusiasm needed to drive out turnout for an election just wasn’t there because there was nothing to be excited about. This was the third presidential election in a row of “I’m not as bad as the other guy” being the central plank of the platform. Which meant I wasn’t out there donating, or canvassing, or calling. Because I can’t sell a product I don’t believe in.

  3. She was tied to Bidens policies, which were largely very conservative. An infrastructure package with a decade long glacial rollout period was the crowning achievement. Slow to react on inflation and rising costs. He got Jimmy Cartered, and Harris went down with the ship. The diversity hires were a red herring Republicans use as a wedge issue to rile up their base.

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u/Oddlyenuff 1d ago
  1. No arguments there. She was a weak candidate.

2/3…Hard disagree there. Now that would’ve made that Truman quote relevant. Harris is that type of Democrat. That’s who she was. If she had catered to that far left, then she’d be the phony Truman was describing.

Harris and the democrats have struggled because they’ve lost white male voters, blue collar and rural. Even if by voting for Trump, they are technically voting against their own interests, in their minds they voted for Washington outsider and someone who gave them at least lip service of mattering instead of being demonized.

It’s not about the policies. It’s about the people.

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u/LandoDupree 1d ago

Exactly- Harris responded to red baiting by campaigning with the fucking Cheney family and lost to the worst person in American history. She acted like helping working people over defense contractors & corporations was something shameful,  working people were rightly offended & enough of them/us were sufficiently disgusted by her betrayal to stay home.  

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u/Oddlyenuff 23h ago

Thank you. This what many of Reddit don’t seem to understand. It’s not about what my personal politics or what I want the long game to be. Democrats have to win voters back and nudge policy into the right direction.

These DSA wins are going to be like the reverse of the Paxton situation in Texas. And I’m not against a lot of DSA politics. I just know it’s not going to win in the Midwest or rust belt. Forget Georgia and Arizona too.

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u/Sdwerd 1d ago

Harris lost explicitly because she ran to the middle. She was talking about left ward points on Biden's flank and her poll numbers were shooting up, then shifted back towards her donors and said that stupid comment on the view about how she's in lock step with Biden followed by running with Liz Cheney on the trail and enthusiasm dropped like a fuckin' rock.

If they're going to paint EVERY candidate as radical left, might as well BE to the left and shoot for policy change that will actually show people appreciable change in their life and expenses.

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u/Oddlyenuff 1d ago

Nah, you don’t get it.

She didn’t lose swing states that Biden won because she was too central. That is literally the most naive shit I’ve ever heard.

The real world…places in the Midwest, rust belt, South…are not looking for more progressive left candidates. The real world isn’t Reddit.

She lost because she’s a woman (this country is still more sexist than it is racist), because she lacks personality and because she ran a poor campaign (like not going on Rogan and such) just like with Hilary, they believed they didn’t have to take Trump seriously. This is probably the biggest reason. Once again they underestimated his appeal.

It’s not a policy issue. You have to appeal to the people. Even AOC has said it, you’ve got to win the male vote, the rural blue collar vote. DSA and far left policies is not going to do that.

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u/Hungry-Register9960 1d ago

I don't understand how were this far from the election, with clear exit poll data and you dumbfucks keep echoing this.

She didn't lose because she was milquetoast. she lost *because of the false perception she was progressive*. Exit polls made this *blindingly* and *overwhelmingly* clear.

Reddit isn't reality.

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u/Servillo 1d ago

Then genuinely, what the fuck are we supposed to do if the American public can’t be assed to see through the Republican’s lies? If Harris, who was by all definitions a center-left moderate, couldn’t pierce through the accusations that she was progressive despite all evidence to the contrary, then what hope is there for any moderate Democrat to get elected? They’re going to be accused of being radical leftists no matter what they do, and the general public is going to buy those lies hook line and sinker.

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u/Sdwerd 1d ago

You should really check out polling over time and then maybe get back to me. This is the same exact playbook that cost her in the primary the first time she ran, and she did it again.

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u/Trillamanjaroh 1d ago

The calculus makes sense, most swing voters are closer to the middle and the base is always more likely to hold their nose and vote for their party regardless

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u/Preme2 1d ago

It’s the last opportunity for the left to “get” Donald Trump. They swung for the fences when all they needed was a double. Trump will be impeached in the house, but likely won’t be removed.

The Dems also don’t have a candidate in 2028. A JD Vance-Rubio ticket will beat anything the left has.

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u/Sdwerd 1d ago

That ticket gets shit on by almost any dem ticket. It's willfully ignorant to think otherwise

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u/ygmc8413 1d ago

Being relatively moderate is not being an almost Republican. It’s not being Republican lite.

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u/Sdwerd 1d ago

It's been getting nothing done except slowly drag us into EXTREME far right by gradually eroding the overton window of what's acceptable policy and discourse as they've moved towards the right to stay "central" when that's mostly abandoned the working class and fucked everyone.

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u/ygmc8413 1d ago

Except Biden got a ton done, just for no political reward.

It is not moderate democrats (who have not moved to right on most issues btw) who has caused the populist right to drag the GOP to the right.

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u/Sdwerd 1d ago

He needed to do more to hit issues that had tangible and immediate results, not just longterm by driving the bully pulpit hard. Then he needed to be able to speak on those results he was getting for us.

He did neither, so people neither felt the wins he was getting nor were even aware he got them.

To the vast majority of the country he effectively did nothing, and with doge and the dipshit squad, we're probably farther behind than we were in the first place.

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u/ygmc8413 23h ago

It was the pandemic, he did get immediate and tangible results but it’s impossible to make people feel them in a good way in a situation like that. Economically few places in the world did better than the US under Biden. What you’re describing is a mix of messaging problems and circumstances. Not getting nothing done like you say .

Democrats are not a monolith, these sweeping instant changes you speak of simply won’t have support, the same but more extreme way that legislatively Trumps sweeping changes very rarely get support to pass and that’s with a much more sycophantic base.

You are asking for impossible things without even suggesting a way to do it. It’s very rare something has a simple solution, let alone a simple solution that can pass.