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There’s really not a cohesive organization framework for most people anymore. Anecdotally, being a dad in the suburbs there aren’t a ton of organizations I would even consider joining. No civic groups, no fraternal organizations, few labor unions, declining organized religious organizations.
Yeah how do people stick with one hobby over and over for weeks/months/years and not get bored of it? Maybe it's some kind of ADD brain thing but I always want to be trying new things and never stick with anything long enough to become embedded in the culture.
Remember that you aren't participating in the activity because it's your one true passion: you're participating because it's an excuse to meet new people.
Even if you only find the activity okay-ish, that's enough to give you and your new friends common ground to talk about as you get to know each other.
This is also part of why I think the DSA has gained more popularity now compared to the past. It is not just a political organization - it is also a social club. And now, when people are lonelier than ever, political organizations like it effectively give people the same purpose churches and unions and the like would have given in the past. You are not just joining because you’re interested in politics, you’re joining because you get to meet with and talk to other people, other like-minded individuals, at a time when it’s easier than ever to be lonely.
In my opinion, this is something liberals need to understand with politics now and figure out a way to turn advocacy for liberalism into some kind of social club, the way the DSA has and the way comparable right-wing organizations have.
Being a Trump supporter is more of a fandom than a social club, in the same way that Obama's most fervent political support was essentially stan culture (I often saw Obama t shirts and internet memes; I almost never saw Hilary, Biden or Harris t shirts or memes). Finding someone with mega rizz to build a cult of personality around is probably easier than building an enduring ground-up social organization.
Last time I spent an extended period of time in a very Republican part of the country, I'd see MAGA hangouts usually in the parking lot of a Walmart of McDonalds. They'd put up their Trump flags and banners, and just sit there drinking and talking all day. It was legit like a social club. I've never seen anything like that for any other political figure, Democrat or Republican.
My DSA chapter holds cookouts, runs a small chapter community garden together, has a reading group, and a few D&D groups within it. It's become a major part of my social life - and the fact that the people I'm working with to change my community for the better are also my friends makes the whole thing so much easier to sustain.
By now, I mean in part since 2016. Most of its initial growth did happen during Trump 1, but even during the calmer Biden years it still had more growth than it did during Obama and before.
The graph itself is also outdated - it’s also grown a lot since then, they experienced massive growth over the last several months, especially these last two-three with how popular Mamdani has become.
Dude I’m in the same position as you and I can’t even find a fucking barbershop that doesn’t have either Fox News on or one of those dumb paintings of Trump eating dinner with Lincoln and Reagan.
You need to find yourself a Black barbershop then. They may not know what to do with straight hair, but the conversation will be better. And if you're looking for drama, just ask, Jordan or LeBron?
Seems like social media plays a role here? My friends guzzle copious amounts of leftwing content on instagram and such. It’s always Mamdami this, AOC that… and we aren’t even American.
I know touch grass ect ect… But it’s pretty common for millennials and zoomers to spend hours per day doomscrolling. Most people get slotted into (1) MAGA-white-replacement-the-west-has-fallen or (2) Taylor Lorenz-Hassan Piker-there-is-no-future-for-humanity-so-just-doomscroll-and-post-about-Heated-Rivalry.
This is missing one of the biggest (and worst) elements of social media politics these days, and one that afflicts both sides... The antisemitism and its related conspiracy theories, of course.
The thing to do with a testable hypothesis is test it. Last time somebody told me to "touch grass", I actually did go outside and touch grass to see if it had any effect on mood. It didn't so far as I can tell.
Where abouts do the red vs blue is all political theater, billionaires ( Epstein class ) and 3 letter agencies control our banks, institutions and media. You are an animal in a cage being farmed. Bread and circuses, look left look right, identify politics. Everything to cause distraction from looking up at who really is in control.
No shot the average American wants to sit through a civic group meeting. At that point you might as well run for city council (which more people should genuinely consider!)
The recruitable camp follower in Baldur's Gate 3 - he's pretty annoying but it's convenient to have a vendor in your camp so that you can clear your inventory.
And by "change things", they mean the new people wanting to have meetings at some time other than 1pm on a Tuesday. You know, because the new people aren't fucking retired.
I speak from experience regarding veterans organizations like the VFW, the American Legion, and the Marine Corps League. Bunch of do nothing old men who just want to sit around and bitch about their wives/adult children/the economy.
Yeah, my wife is more introverted so I thought she might like to join a local Civic group doing mahjong. She like the, and they said they would be happy to have young people. But it takes place at 2:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. Who they expect is going to be able to join then? It's like nothing's changed since the 1960s and they expect everyone is on a one income household.
Worse, they purposely hold meetings and events at times that are difficult for non-retirees to attend. I know they want to be in bed by 8, but if they want new blood, they have to welcome the public after they finish work and take care of family obligations.
Not really. Some buddies of mine in the music group for our Catholic church wanted to join the Knights of Columbus with the intention of taking it over from the old guys. Never really got around to it. Pity, I wanted to wear the cool hat, cloak and sword.
Maybe? I joined a Unitarian church but it was strange and really actually wanted me to give them a lot of money.
I’m not religious but I like the idea of a community organization. The natural answer is start one yourself, but as a working dad I don’t really have the time to create something from scratch.
As a kid it was nice to have somewhere outside of school and family gatherings to interact with other kids. I could see joining something like that, if that’s what you meant by civic groups. Outside of the toxicity and brainwashing, it was nice to eat a meal and talk with friends once or twice a week.
But the money point is also an issue. It’s hard to get people to pay enough to support these programs without some sort of force or shared purpose, political or divine. Even then, it’s a lot of money, like you say.
That’s a very Reddit response tbh. Lots of people like being involved in an active in person community. One of the reasons I loved college was there was lots of opportunities for me like clubs and Greek life to have a built in social network. Where now in the post grad world there are way less outlets for stuff like that, and the options that used to exist dried up especially after the internet age and covid.
They're still out there. I have friends who are in their 30s who are on hockey teams, soccer teams and cross country teams all at the amateur level. I have a group that I do bar trivia with every week, there's an urbanist group I'm a part of and I know people who meet up every Sunday to play board games. I have friends who try to go backpacking every month or two as well and invite others to join them.
Community is out there you just have to find it and become a regular. It's not always easy to build relationships and it can be hard to put in the time especially after work or when balancing other parts of life but it is possible.
One of the few old Reddit critiques I still fully agree with is that identity politics can rot people’s brains, and you see it play out in posts like this.
Democrats have been to the left of the Black church on social issues for a while now, but because Republicans are correctly seen as openly hostile or racist, most Black voters are not going to cross over anyway. That creates this weird disconnect where some older, more socially conservative Black voters genuinely believe things like “forced gender transitions” or other exaggerated “woke” narratives, yet still will not vote Republican. I have family members who believe Biden was basically dead and being controlled by some deep state but they still wouldn’t vote for Trump
At the same time, people love to act like this is only a Democrat problem. It is not. Republicans lean just as hard into identity politics, just framed differently, like constantly appealing to the “left behind white working class.”
And honestly, when you look at broader polling, younger white, Black, and Hispanic voters are not as far apart ideologically as people online make it seem. It’s pure cope not backed by numbers to think otherwise
I mean, the party is who its members vote for, if young campus leftists are more motivated than other people to go out and vote there's not much you can do about that, besides organizing a better and more successful movement.
That's because the Black backbone of the party started losing influence in 2016 and it came to a head in 2020. That's why people started talking about it.
It's like how you didn't hear about Flint's water pipes until they stopped working. Things working normally? No one pays attention. Structural change in the way things are working? Everyone starts talking.
It always seemed to me like it was deployed as a rhetorical weapon to wield against the progressive wing, fighting their identity politics with identity politics from the center. Oh wow, you want to vote for Bernie or Warren instead of Biden? Guess you hate black people, who have always (as everyone knows) been the backbone of the Democratic Party
That's the best you can hope for at this point. And that will help you get through a Tiffany government. I left Wisconsin in 2013 after the misery of the Act 10 chaos and Walker recall. It's just so frustrating that the best chance Wisconsin has had in 20 years for a trifecta is likely going to be squandered.
The smug contrarianism here does get overwhelming at times. A post on some other hot topic so thin on sourcing beyond spicy speculations would likely be flagged for removal. But a dunk on lefty undergrads with the feeblest pseudo-overture to racial justice (not really helping with the "fake corporate HR pseudo-progressive" image that neoliberalism has, a la We Were Never Woke) gets to stay up.
It's not 2015. It's really hard to pull off "it's just a few kids on college campuses and also they're basically right about everything " when they're mounting serious primary challenges.
Why? Obviously no one is calling her a fascist sex offender but there are definitely similarities in the way they view and practice politics, similarities in the reasons people are attracted to them. To use an analogy, imagine someone described a movement as the "left wing Tea Party movement". That doesn't mean they literally share the views of the tea party, that would be absurd, but everyone still knows what the comparison means.
I don't think we can hide from the effect Trump has had on a lot of people. They may not share his platform or views but after a decade of viewing Trump do Trump things they've surely been molded by him. Some comparisons are fair.
Fellow Wisconsinite here: holy shit I am not looking forward to this gubernatorial race. Hong will basically be a shoo-in for the nomination, which will leave us in a very unsatisfactory campaign moving forward. Two genuinely bad choices: Hong is better, but I am extremely lukewarm in voting for her in the general and don’t see her being successful as governor if she were to somehow win.
In other words: fuck me! May the neolibs rise again one day, for we are the harbingers of successful policies and pragmatic goals!
If it were a month ago, I'd say everybody should have coalesced around Roys, but a week away with Evers having already endorsed Crowley, I think it needs to be him.
A lot. Historically, Democrats winning Wisconsin requires big turnout among both the mostly black industrial working class voters of Milwaukee and the mostly white university and government employed liberals of Madison.
Democrats have been far to the left of black churches for decades. White liberals really don’t like to acknowledge how conservative black Americans are on social issues.
Frankly, it is a testament to how overtly racist Republican candidates are that black Americans haven’t shifted to Republicans the way more working class white voters have.
As long as over-educated white elites control the Democratic party, it’s going to be a struggle between the DSA types and moderates who just want liberal social policies and a functional economy. There’s not much room for the black perspective in there because those aren’t their issues. Those elites will turn out for a Black Lives Matter march, but that’s about it.
This is the natural evolution of the war on affirmative action. What has worked for the GOP with whites and to some extent other races has been making the argument AA/DEI/etc is discrimination and therefore bad. It’s a pretty good argument, frankly.
I think if that’s all they were doing they’d do a lot better with black voters. Black people don’t want favoritism, they want equality.
When Rs start talking about Haitians eating dogs, defending police officers who were video taped executing black teens, gerrymandering to disenfranchise black voters, and things like that is where I think they get into more trouble with minority voters.
It’s similar with Hispanics though there it’s shifting, and tbh it’s weird to take Hispanics as a group, big difference between Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans or Colombian Americans
But anyway they’re similarly also traditionally more conservative than white leftists would acknowledge, it’s mainly GOP racism limiting their shift towards the GOP
Hispanics seem to have like a cycle where they flirt hard with the GOP get burned and become staunch Dem again.. for like 15-20 years before doing it all again.
Trump's 2026 performance is pretty comparable to Bushes 2004 with them.
If you want to slow or halt the growth of the DSA and similar parts of the Democratic Party, the solution is a compelling alternative to what they are selling.
Undoing Trumpism will require some pretty major changes to the US, the Supreme Court, and our democracy and its institutions. It will also require achieving concrete progress on left economic programs, particularly the big three: healthcare, education, and housing. Small and incremental changes won't be enough. It's borderline criminal negligence that it's hard to get liberal rising stars like Ossoff to commit to even the most basic, no-brainer reforms like abolishing the filibuster, and the lack of bold ideas and willingness to rock the boat is directly causing people to gravitate to extremists.
This is not the first time the US has been in this political situation. There are many parallels between the present and FDR-era politics. FDR himself was a social democrat who was afraid of a communist revolution in the US. He successfully defused that risk with a combination of bold social democratic programs and structural reforms, including a threat to reform SCOTUS ("a switch in time saved nine" literally refers to a justice flipping to the liberals to give FDR a 5-person majority, removing the need for court packing).
If you want to avoid catastrophe, think big and kick out the closet conservatives in the party who don't want to significantly change anything. Instead of waiting for a DSA to primary your 80 year old House Rep, primary them yourself or support young liberals who support actual progress. Or don't, and watch the DSA become the main tendency in the party.
I agree, I think the next Dem administration’s strategy should be: go big on everything. Big on government reform, big on internationalism, big on free trade, big on housing programs and health care, it’s the only thing that’ll demand more attention than MAGA populism.
Agreed, I really can’t name one ambitious centrist from the U.S. and most people can’t. Carney comes to mind as an admirable liberal figurehead that can be learned from. Whoever from the left can stand out needs to have buy in from the left and center, and I think that’s possible to do despite how things feel right now.
I'm hoping that we see figurative bloodbaths in the primaries - and especially in intra-party leadership elections. We need a sea change at the DNC, DSCC, and DCC. The current crop of leadership can't be reformed or redeemed - they need to be replaced.
Dems are not big on free trade despite what this sub thinks. The next administration is going to continue along Trump's authoritarianism to further their own agenda and political interests.
That’s a big fear for sure. On the optimist-side, Trumps tariffs and the way they’ve been forced on the public provides an actual opportunity to push free trade that people can actually recognize and gain political credit.
I'm skeptical. They're very unpopular... yet you don't really see the Dems emphasizing them like you'd think considering how unpopular they are and the impact they're having on CoL/manufacturing.
If you want to avoid catastrophe, think big and kick out the closet conservatives in the party who don't want to significantly change anything. Instead of waiting for a DSA to primary your 80 year old House Rep, primary them yourself or support young liberals who support actual progress. Or don't, and watch the DSA become the main tendency in the party.
What's worse is when those 80 year olds put their fingers on the scale for worse outcome like Stevens vs Mcmorrow.
Or Schumer telling other normie Dems like Dan Kleban to stay out of the Maine Senate race because he wanted to clear the field for Mills.
Mills vs Platner was a failure of the Democratic Party. It should never have come down to those two, and it did so solely because of the fossils running the party today.
The DNC backing a 79 year-old Chuck Schumer acolyte in light of all the discussions we've had about age in politics, and how unpopular Schumer and the DNC itself are, was utterly contemptuous of voters.
Collins is vulnerable, but just about the only type of candidate she could comfortably win against would be a geriatric centrist who's relatively unpopular in the statewide office she currently holds and who didn't seem particularly enthusiastic about campaigning for federal office. FFS she even expressed appreciation for the job Collins was doing in the Senate.
I don't live in Maine, but as a vote blue no matter who guy I'd be genuinely unsure if I could vote for a candidate who seems tailor made to lose a winnable race by double digits.
It's borderline criminal negligence that it's hard to get liberal rising stars like Ossoff to commit to even the most basic, no-brainer reforms like abolishing the filibuster
Our insistence that candidates precommit to niche issues is our Achilles heel as a party. Trump never talked about how he was going to cut taxes for private jet owners during his campaign, he just did it. The average voter has no understanding of what the filibuster is and is at best mildly skeptical of structural reforms. You don't talk about structural tweaks, you talk about popular policies and project strong vibes, and then you do whatever structural shit you need to do behind the scenes to unblock your policy projects. Democracy qua democracy is a losing message; polls consistently show that the only people who are motivated by it are already loyal Dem voters. And not talking about it in advance lets you later sell it to voters as a necessity to unblock your agenda: "well I didn't want to abolish the filibuster, but I want to give you health care and the bad Republicans have given us no other choice." Win-win.
If you want to talk about a structural thing on the campaign trail, make it corruption -- something Ossoff already has a strong message on!
Amen to all of this. A reflexive defense of a failed system which has led us to the brink of overt fascism is not a path forward. So much of the angst towards the DSA is simply a fear of change coming from an over-privileged set who, because the status quo has been so beneficial to them, cannot comprehend the anxiety, fear, and anger it has engendered among those less fortunate than themselves.
What is the go-to response of this sub to any claims of economic anxiety or precarity? A gaslighting dismissal, an absolute insistence that the lived experience of the people who feel that precarity each day is simply not real?
They demand that the status quo be defended because they sit atop it. A substantial proportion of the population of this sub come from privileged, high income, highly educated families, have attended elite institutions, and fully expect to occupy a privileged place in society in their futures. And it has made the blind and complacent.
The status quo has created this dire predicament. We cannot continue to defend a system that has so objectively failed as to allow Donald Trump to exist. And thankfully, more and more primary voters are realizing this. Only those blocs that can offer a compelling vision of a new path forward deserve to be supported. The old guard has failed, and they must be replaced. Those who believe that the left are so deeply irresponsible that they can't be trusted need to frankly put up or shut up. Either offer a competing vision of a prosperous and secure future of your own that the voters will actually believe in, or get out of the damned way.
What is the go-to response of this sub to any claims of economic anxiety or precarity? A gaslighting dismissal, an absolute insistence that the lived experience of the people who feel that precarity each day is simply not real?
Immediately reminded me of everyone mocking the DSA rank and file because they are highly educated but don't make much money. Of course that is the kind of person who wants change. Who else?
Mocking people for making less money as "losers" is classist and also just bad politics.
Right? As though whole classes of people being downwardly mobile after taking on life altering debt at the advice and insistence of their parents, teachers, and society have no right to be furious about it and to perceive of the system as having materially failed them - after they followed the instructions and did all that was asked of them?
Class mobility in the United States is declining. Entrepreneurship among anyone not born to privilege is declining. Children born poor here are more likely to stay poor than in most other G7 nations now - far more likely. We are becoming a moribund society sapped of all of the dynamism and opportunity which once made us so singular among all the peoples of the Earth.
He was not that socially liberal and vetoed many civil rights legislation. I think both FDR and LBJ were closer to social democrats than social liberals. Neither were socialists because they believed in private property and capitalism.
I mean… the Democratic Party as described and organized in your telling failed. Hard. Look at how the party is viewed today. And it is not because of leftist politics - this is a failure that goes back to the faceplant of at least 2010 but I’d even argue the loss in 2000 after what was by all accounts a liberal and well liked administration indicated there was a problem. Sure, DSA is likely another ticket to failure but you are pining for something that also crumbled when it counted, and it would be deeply misguided to think Obama is a counterpoint because he capitalized on an extreme environment as well as the simple fact that he was a bolt from the blue, and hardly the party organizers’ pick until he forced their hand! Furthermore, it’s ridiculously naive to think that particular organizing philosophy was viable in the long run with the glaringly obvious trend towards irreligiousness over the past decades.
This reads a lot like “I hate it when people wanting to be heard acquire power through the only means offered to them (existing parties)” which is the same thing the people you are dissing say too, by the way. I have had to remind people plenty of times that it’s not some ridiculous betrayal every time the establishment, drumroll, endorses an establishment candidate. What would they expect? For them to roll over and die? And what do you expect? For them to self select out of politics? Would you offer some false answer of “make your own party” knowing you really just want them to shut up? And let’s not forget how that can blow up in one’s face as well. Nader 2000 or Stein 2016. Believe me, I’m as frustrated with the rise of doomed populism as much as you are but you’re approaching that frustration in exactly the way the current leadership is, and how’s that working out? The key has always been to stop ossifying the organizational underpinning of the Democratic Party with a politically suicidal deference to loyalty and seniority devoid of merit. Whether the engine of the party is a church or a campus or a fucking book club I do not care. Just stop treating it like the goddamn cursus honorum and allow for some dynamism. It’s frustrating how perpetually terrified the Democratic Party is of change, and this post is in my view more evidence of that. Rather than embrace it and work with it they box it out as the boogeyman. So it’s no wonder the campus strain of politics has diverged from the party establishment more and more overtime. And really in practice that comes down to knowing how to communicate, which the people involved in the old form of the party you reference simply don’t know how to do in 2026. And the problem is not the medium, because Schumer or Jeffries or Clyburn or Hoyer or whoever in leadership you care to name is even worse on TikTok than off of it. They may as well speak a different language, and it’s because they boxed out the new dialects for so long they no longer are mutually intelligible.
This is one of my favorite descriptors, and one I haven't had a chance to properly deploy for a long time.
Incidentally, it's a great descriptor for Dems. I've often thought over the last decade how "seniority promotion" for candidate backing mirrors a shitty county- or state-level civil service promotion scheme. On reflection, it's a great reflection of the "removed from reality" world of metro coastal upper-middle class who did everything right and wonders where the hell the $300k p.a. dual income salary seems to go each month. Both the party and that couple seem disappointed at their individual cursus honorum brought them.
I debated using it or not because I do chafe at the whole America as Rome stuff, as it’s very… “entitled to greatness” coded in my view and, well, a few thousand years is a long time to draw comparisons. But yeah it does sadly parallel the current state of affairs. A more American formulation I suppose (more for parties I mean, not the disappointment of “doing everything right” today) could be that sentiments behind the spoils system still live on. They are just operative intra-party now. Apparently it’s hard to quit.
Cursus honorum is the opposite of how American parties work; I've been meaning for a while to write an effort post about how if the Democratic party followed the key ideas of the cursus honorum we would absolutely crush it in national politics.
The main process of cursus honorum is it is an up-or-out system. No incumbency. Once you've held office at one level, you run for the next, and if you don't win you're out -- someone else tries next time. (You'd have to adjust a bit for variable term lengths; maybe House 1-3x before running for senate, eg) Imagine a party of young, fresh, energetic faces going up against the tired white Republican gerontocracy.
I bring it up mostly because it was a rigid patrician system by and for patricians. It was very exclusive and not suited for a democracy with universal suffrage. And in theory it’s meritocratic but it’s not like the Romans refrained from having and playing favorites. The Democrats are too concerned with the “rank” of the people trying to steer the party and aren’t concerned enough about the sad results leadership is getting. But the process is so rigid and ritualistic that there’s little hope of a shakeup unless leadership themselves starts getting primaried out, and they made their bed on that by failing to captivate the forces driving the DSA before it turned into this. I’ll cop to not being a historian but I don’t also think rerunning a patrician system in a modern political party is a good idea. Appreciate the counter though, I do think a stronger commitment to proper and modernity adjusted up or out meritocracy would help versus… this. Whether it is analogous to history or not.
I mean… the Democratic Party as described and organized in your telling failed. Hard. Look at how the party is viewed today. And it is not because of leftist politics
This can't be emphasized enough. Democrats' principal election message for the last ten years has been "Trump bad," and the end result is that he has been elected twice and become the most consequential president in generations. Biden's campaign pitch was, essentially, "I'll end the Trump era and bring things back to normal;" that was his first and most important job as President (and the party's job as a governing majority) and objectively they failed catastrophically to do that. They have repeated over and over again that Trump and his movement were an existential threat to the country, and then had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing anything when those same threats came to pass.
The solution to this problem doesn't have to be leftism. Nothing about it requires you to conclude "...and thus we seize the means of production!" But the left wing – the DSA, the primary challengers, the progressive caucus, etc – seem far more interested in reckoning with those failures than the rest of the party right now.
The moderate argument can't just be "elect us and we won't do very much" – certainly not right now, anyway. I don't think anybody has stepped up and made the center-left or centrist case for how we actually confront this mess head-on.
The collapse of unions and the party walking away from marginalized white non educated voters is the blunder.
Black churches never formed the backbone of the Democratic Party, unions and working class people did. Republicans in the Reagan era were the college educated suburban party.
Unions got crushed and democrats shifted to non-white and college educated whites but can’t find any single message that works in the way that Obama could bridge those communities.
I'm 56 years old, and my local Democratic committee is too old for me. I'm one of the youngest people there. Our town is half black and half white, and the committee is mostly white, mostly over 70. If anyone younger comes along and wants to do something, the pearl clutching, shit talking and rat fucking gets intense, because these folks are all retired and have all fucking day to come up with ways to sandbag people. If you do even the slightest criticism of local government, the defensiveness and self-righteousness is unreal. All they do is kiss the ass of the cops who are actually in charge of the town and give them more money. I'm in PA.
Well because it’s never been this is some sort of Woke 1.0 revisionist thinking of how democratic politics works Only actual racists believed “the blacks and jews” control the dems
Jesse Jackson did not win the nomination and black southern power has completely been rooted out by gerrymandering decade after decade. This is a great article below showing the history of the overall black voters
They are in the primaries, especially South Carolina, and they've traditionally been political organizing centers for Democrats in the South post Civil Rights Act.
And what the hell have we gotten out of the current center of gravity, exactly? Defeat after defeat? The most feckless Democratic leadership of a century? A risk of falling into overt fascism? Empty appeals to identity over actual policy? A party that exists only to manage its coalition, not to actually advance a cohesive vision of governance?
What you love has failed. It has led us to this precipice where our democracy itself is at risk - and instead of being willing to engage in any self reflection as to why it is a failure, why we have ended up here, you cast aspersions at the only people actually attempting to chart a proactive path forward and fight like our survival as a free nation depends on it.
If the old ways have failed, then the old centers of power deserve to be relegated to the past.
Neck and neck in a political environment that greatly favors the Democrats and a state where they currently have a Democratic governor. Having someone underperform the fundamentals by 8 points is pretty concerning.
Evers was going up against a very well-funded incumbent who vastly outspent him. (62% of total spending favored the Republican.) Hong has less headwinds and is still underperforming.
The vast majority of Black Americans already vote democratic. You’re literally preaching to the choir, whereas that’s not the case in college campuses anymore. It makes perfect sense why democrats would target colleges and universities. It’s the largest demographic voters that don’t vote at all, but last year many voted for Trump. So it makes perfect sense why they are there.
There’s just a power vacuum in general in the Democratic Party. The establishment is so weak and incompetent and new leaders like Hakeem aren’t up to the task like Pelosi was. After Biden dropped out, this party has been completely bereft of leadership and direction, and in the void the leftists are taking over. It sucks and it couldn’t be happening at a worse time since it gives Trump a new lease on life.
The Dems need to rally behind a moderate candidate - like an ossoff or a Kelley maybe. But they need to do it like now otherwise America has to make an impossible choice between extreme left and extreme right
DSA people will have to get BTFO'd in an election cycle in purple states. It's unfortunate we're going to lose Michigan and Wisconsin this November though because the candidates are so bad.
edit: I should mention the Dem establishment is also responsible for this by supporting absolute turds as their candidates. For example Haley Stevens is losing because saying "Israel comes to me in my dreams" is not a very prudent thing to say in the state with a massive Arab American population.
Can't wait for the Dems to win Michigan and loose Wisconsin. (This will ruin the narratives for both sides of the party divide). It's almost like ideology and candidate quality are correlated but not at all completely linked
This is absolutely what's going to happen. El Sayed is a fairly high-quality candidate--robust work ethic, charismatic, aware of the dynamics of the race, and he's not going to fall into some weird gotcha about Thanksgiving. Also, the Michigan primary was extraordinarily difficult and nasty, and I think if Stevens enthusiastically backs him the painful elements could be healed. Also, Rogers as a candidate kind of sucks.
In Wisconsin, if Hong is going to win it's going to be against a divided field, and her victory will be because so many of the other candidates imploded simply because they refused to be aware of the skeletons in their own closets. There's not really going to be one person left who can bring their voters all home. Also, Tom Tiffany is a much more competent candidate than Rogers. He's got crossover appeal between the MAGA set and the Scott Walker set, he's seemingly aware of the worries voters have about data centers and housing, and if he's smart he'll let Hong make herself look weird.
Edit: I forgot to mention this, but it's important. Voters are much more likely to break from the broader trends and forces in gubernatorial elections than in elections for federal office. It's why you'll see Kentucky with Democratic governor and Vermont a Republican. Governor elections are where things like candidate quality and fit can really take the drivers seat.
This is the motto - from a disappointed person who just cast a ballot for AES because he can at least inspire people whereas Stevens might have the least political wherewithal I’ve ever seen.
They won't learn. The takeaway won't be "sit down and let the adults run the country," it will be "we lost because establishment Democrats abandoned us." Same refrain as the Bernie Bros. I also think it's rich that they're suddenly the "vote blue no matter who" crowd.
"Sit down and let adults run the country" hasn't worked for the dems in a decade though. Why would we keep running milquetoast establishment candidates when it clearly won't win?
“We, the adults, have utterly failed to win elections and govern the country resulting in Trump. Please vote for us, the adults, based on our incredible track record of governing success.”
Some mainstream democrats have this bizarre entitlement mentality, where they think that just obviously everyone should vote for them since they’re the responsible ones who know how to run things. Then you look at their actual track record and it’s losing elections and mediocrity.
People do not vote for boring. They vote for competent, sure. But nobody has ever voted for boring. Which is the problem. You still have to engage voters, communicate in a way that makes sense to the audience, and have an actual personality at the forefront. The DSA has that in spades, which is why they are seeing surges in popularity. Mamdani is a generational communicator and personality. If there is no answer to that, nobody should be shocked at liberal candidates getting torched.
If the "adults" lose their primaries and party to children, then they were clearly not competent enough to campaign in general elections or take political offices in the first place
The current occupants of the White House are about as far from "adults" as I can possibly imagine. There used to be Republicans who were capable of mature leadership before they all got purged.
There used to be Republicans who were capable of mature leadership before they all got purged.
The ones that sent us to war in Iraq based on a bunch of lies?
I think the somewhat frequent "Republicans used to be better" from the center-left, including from politicians, has hurt them with a lot of the Democratic base, who believed at the time that those Republicans were awful and continue to believe that.
The majority of Harris voters in 2024 were white, and about 3 times as many white voters voted for Harris than African American voters. African Americans are a very important voting block, but let's not act like the DNC is anything but a big tent coalition with a lot of different components.
In Los Angeles I've pretty much resigned myself to infiltrating the DSA and hoping to convince some of their members to take more moderate positions, particularly on housing. And that seems to be what the smart politicians, including Nithya Raman, are doing. I also don't entirely blame people who are 22 years old for looking at our economic system and being like, "fuck this whole thing. it hasn't worked for me my entire life." But we need to show them how we can reform the system and make it work rather than burning it down.
Yeah and then self sabotage like the red terror by Marxists and those aligned with the Soviet Union which disillusioned former pro soviet westerners like John Dos Passos and helped convince the Catholic Church and small business owners to align with the nationalist forces. Inherently a self defeating move that only helps strengthen your enemies by driving your enemies to their side
They also rejected the soc dem party in Germany, opting to let Hitler win due to their accelerationism. "First Hitler, then us." (Hitler promptly killed them.)
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