#Democratic strategy
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Analyzing Kamala Harris's Election Loss: Factors and Implications
The Political Landscape: Kamala Harris’s Election Loss This week, Kamala Harris faced a significant setback with her election loss, but the blame doesn’t solely rest on her shoulders. While her recent actions merit scrutiny, the real origins of her defeat can be traced back to a challenging political environment and decisions made long before she became the unofficial nominee in July. Throughout…
#2024 election#campaign challenges#Democratic strategy#election loss#electoral dynamics#Kamala Harris#political environment#political landscape#President Biden
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Democrats Bet on Monkeypox for 2024
Democrats Bet on Monkeypox for 2024: Mail-In Ballots and Drop Boxes to the Rescue! (Again) Democrats Bet on Monkeypox for 2024: Why Debate When You Can Mail It In? Washington, D.C. – As the 2024 election approaches, the Democratic Party appears to be taking a familiar route, one that worked quite well during the COVID-19 pandemic. This time, however, it’s not COVID but Monkeypox that’s serving as…
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#free people#free gaza#leftism#anti capitalism#communism#socialism#anarchy#strategy#free palestine#palestine genocide#endisraelsgenocide#ceasefire#gaza#palestinian genocide#democratic republic of the congo#congo genocide#dr congo#congo#free congo#drc#save congo#free rohingya#rohingya#myanmar
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Just wanted to let you guys know this is a direct quote from last night’s Trump/Musk collab.
Please check your voter registration. Please vote against Trump and the GOP.
And do not tell me there is some CONTEXT to this.
#vote against trump#vote against Republicans#vote harris/walz#vote true blue democrat down ballot#gop#gqp#trump#maga#republicans#southern strategy#us history
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In defense of Deliverism
There are many ways to slice up the coalition that is the Democratic Party, but one important axis are the self-styled adults-in-the-room, who declare themselves to be realists, and the party's left wing, who are dismissed as idealists who don't understand politics: neither how to win elections nor how to wield power.
The "realists" are the ones telling us that we can't have nice things. They say that if the Dems promise bold action - protecting abortion, controlling assault weapons, funding infrastructure, raising the minimum wage, providing health care - they will lose elections. When Dems do win elections, they insist that none of these things are possible: the Supreme Court will strike them down, or the GOP will filibuster them, or the business lobby will subvert them.
For these realists, every negotiation is a grand bargain in which all the grownups meet in smoke-filled rooms where they niggle and cajole and flatter their way into tiny, incremental policy changes, "signature achievements" that are so modest that the enemy can't possibly weaponize them as the deeds of radical socialists who will bring the country to ruin.
To do otherwise, the realists say, is to court catastrophe. Wielding power will destroy the "comity" that makes the legislature effective. It will "delegitimize" the institutions whose trustworthiness is key to enacting sound policy. When they go low, we must go high - not out of a sense of decorum, but to preserve the republic itself.
This kind of politics - the "triangulation" politics beloved of the consultant class - took over the Democratic Party in the Bill Clinton years (see also: UK Labour under Tony Blair). But its foremost practitioner - the Triangulation GOAT - was Barack Obama.
Obama's inside/outside game was indeed remarkable. He assembled and steered a massive, grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign that leveraged his skills as a once-in-a-generation orator to inspire huge numbers of historical nonvoters to show up and cast their ballot (recall that nearly every US election is won by "none of the above," so GOTV is a winning strategy, if you can pull it off).
Then, after the election, he switched off that grassroots.
Literally.
At the time, Obama's grassroots was the most successful netroots in history. Talented coders and digital strategists figured out how to leverage the internet to identify, mobilize and coordinate volunteers across the country. And while netroots activists did their work across the whole internet, their home base was a server the Obama campaign controlled. Once Obama won, they switched that server off.
You see, the rabble is useful when you're out there, trying to turn voters out to the polls. But if you plan to spend your term in office playing eleven dimensional chess, you don't want the mob jostling your elbow and shouting in your ear.
If FDR's (possibly apocryphal) motto was "I want to do it, now make me do it"; Obama's was "I want to do it, now go away." Rather than surrounding himself with the great unwashed, Obama created a cabinet of technocrats, grownups from the upper ranks of industry and the consultant class.
Think of Tim Geithner, Obama's Treasury Secretary, who counseled that the banks should be bailed out with no strings attached, not even a requirement that they halt the seizure and liquidation of swathes of Americans' family homes. When Geithner told Obama he had to "foam the runway" for the crashing banks with the roofs over everyday Americans' heads, there were no grassroots organizers foaming at the mouth in outrage. Thus did Obama end the Great Financial Crisis - by creating the Great Foreclosure Crisis:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly
But Obama's signature achievement wasn't his economic policy - it was his healthcare policy. The Affordable Care Act was a carefully triangulated compromise, one that guaranteed a massive flow of public cash to America's wildly profitable health insurance monopoly and steered clear of any socialist whiff that Americans would get their care from the government.
The ACA was an technocrat's iron-clad dream policy. It would work! After all, it "aligned the incentives" of healthcare investors and "harnessed markets" to drive efficiency. No one could accuse this policy - which was copypasted from former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's RomneyCare - of being "socialist." It was invented by a Bain Capital consultant!
Sure, the left would carp about Medicare For All and whine about the unjust enrichment of insurance barons. And sure, the right would try to convince "low information voter" lumpenproles that the individual mandate was an imposition on their Freedumb (TM), but in the end, more of us would get covered, prices would come down, and America would flourish.
That's not how it worked out. Prior to ACA's passage, 85% of Americans had health insurance. Today, it's 90%. That's not nothing! 5% of the US is more than 16m people. But what about the 85% - 282m people - who were insured before the ACA? Their insurance costs have doubled - from an average of $15,609 for a family of four in 2009 to $30,260 today. Obama promised that ACA would lower the average family's insurance bill by $2,500/year - but instead, insurance costs increased by some $15,000.
ACA wasn't just about cost, though: it was supposed to end discrimination, by forcing insurers to take on customers without regard to their "pre-existing conditions." On this score, too, Obamacare has failed: thanks to the ACA's tolerance for high-deductible plans, the number of Americans enrolled in plans that force them to pay for their chronic care out of pocket has skyrocketed from 7% to 32%. Yes, your insurer can't discriminate against you for having diabetes, but they can make you pay an extra $2,000 in deductibles every year before covering any of your diabetes care.
Now, maybe business-as-usual would have been even worse. Perhaps not passing the ACA would have left Americans poorer and sicker. But we're not comparing ACA with doing nothing - we're comparing ACA with more muscular, direct programs, like M4A. What if Obama had enlisted his grassroots, summoning up a left-wing answer to the Tea Party that turned the GOP into the party of no (including no compromises)? What if he'd jettisoned comity, appointed new judges, sent every executive order the Supreme Court rejected back to the court to be struck down again?
What if he'd governed like Lincoln, or FDR:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court
There's a name for this kind of politics: it's called deliverism:
https://prospect.org/politics/case-for-deliverism/
Deliverism is the idea that if you promise things to the voters, they will vote for you. It's the idea that if you deliver things to the electorate, that they will re-elect you.
Deliverism is a subject of hot debate in the Democratic Party, because Biden is an empty vessel that gets filled by different party factions, which means that his policy is incoherent, but includes some of the muscular, get-stuff-done politics of the Dems' Warren-Sanders wing, but that agenda is often undermined by the "responsible grownup" do-nothing Schumer wing.
The responsible grownups say that deliverism is dead, because voters mostly respond to hot-button cultural issues, while material improvements in their lives barely move the needle:
https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/
In support of this proposition, deliverism's critics point to Obamacare, lauding it as a policy that made Americans better off, but still failed to win enough support for the Dems to defeat Trump at the end of Obama's second term.
In their rebuttal in The American Prospect, David Dayen and Matt Stoller point out that for most Americans, Obamacare didn't produce any improvement to their health care. The ACA made their care far more expensive, and the ensuing concentration across the sector (mergers between insurers, and between insurers and pharmacy benefit managers and pharmacies) made their care worse, too:
https://prospect.org/politics/2023-06-27-moving-past-neoliberalism-policy-project/
The rise in health care costs is no mystery: monopolies have taken over healthcare. In particular, healthcare is now the domain of private equity rollups, where a fund buys and merges dozens or hundreds of small businesses:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/18/wages-for-housework/#low-wage-workers-vs-poor-consumers
Every layer of the healthcare stack is has grown steadily more concentrated since the Obama years: "Hospitals, doctor’s practices, health insurance, pharmaceuticals, ambulances, nursing homes, rehab facilities." As Stoller and Dayen put it:
> Every part of our health care world is increasingly controlled by greedy bankers who kill people for money.
The same corporate concentration has eroded wages, meaning that workers are paying for higher healthcare cost out of smaller paychecks.
Stoller and Dayen argue that the polls show that politicians who make material improvement to voters' lives do win popularity. Take the Child Tax Credit, which lifted more American children out of poverty than any initiative in history. The majority of voters who received the credit favored the Democrats. After Joe Manchin killed the credit, that support flipped, and that cohort now supports the GOP by a 15% margin.
Sure, Biden couldn't order Manchin to support the Child Tax Credit. But he could have gone to WV and campaigned for it with Manchin's base. He could have loaded the bill with pork for WV that was linked to the credit, and dared Manchin to vote against it. He could have "fought dirty" (which is what the grownups call "fighting to win").
The grownups say that if Biden had done that, he might have alienated Manchin and lost future votes, or caused Manchin to run as a Republican in his next election - but that presumes that Manchin won't switch sides anyway, and it presumes that failing to deliver the Child Tax Credit wouldn't also jeopardize the Dems' legislative majority.
The grownups in the Democratic party say we can't win by campaigning on economic issues like monopoly, nor on pocketbook issues like M4A. But when Biden slashed the cost of insulin, his approval numbers shot up.
The grownups' claim that they should steer Democratic electoral strategy is grounded in the idea that they can win elections, and without electoral victories, the Dems can't do anything. The grownups' claim that they should steer Democratic governing strategy is that they can win policy victories, and that these will get the Dems re-elected.
But neither of these claims hold water. Far from being pie-in-the-sky idealists with no theory of change, the party's left is incredibly good at getting stuff done. Take the antitrust enforcers Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, as well as the recently departed Tim Wu. They aren't mere idealists - they're brilliant tacticians and proceduralists who have figured out how to use their existing authority to do more than decades of their predecessors combined:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff
By contrast, the grownups in the party - people like Pete Buttigieg - have notably, repeatedly failed to master the procedural technicalities needed to exercise comparable authority. You can't be a technocrat unless you understand the techniques:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge
As for electoral strategy, the consultant class puts all its focus into eking out these incredibly marginal wins - the name of the game is to guarantee a 50.1% win and then move on to the next fight, which ensures that governing will be impossible. Meanwhile, union organizers like Jane McAlevey seek out 97% majorities for strike votes, in the teeth of voter suppression, gerrymandering, dark money and disinformation campaigns that are far worse than anything we see in a general election. And yet it's the party's labor wing that is smeared as unserious about electoral victories:
https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe
It's true that the right has been scoring electoral wins with appeals to ideology and identity rather than by promising concrete, material improvements for their supporters' lives. You can win elections that way - but only by demonizing half the country as the enemy and then promising to make their lives miserable.
That doesn't invalidate deliverism as a strategy for winning elections. People may not have the time or interest to follow politics in detail. They may not understand how the ACA's internal technical workings are structured. The ACA has a lot of deficits - for example, it doesn't allow people to discover which insurance companies deny the most claims:
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-often-do-health-insurers-deny-patients-claims
But even if that data were out there, there's only so much attention people can or want to pay to their insurance policies. People want health care that works: that takes care of their illnesses and injuries, without bankrupting them. Something like the VA (at its best). Or Medicare (at its best).
Improving peoples' lives isn't merely good governance - it's also good politics. Playing hardball is hard and can be unpleasant, sure, but most of the risk from taking big swings while in office is that the voters won't stand with you and give you the political capital to score big wins.
"I want to do it, now go away" guarantees that there will be no polity at your side, giving you political capital. The politics of grand bargains only produces unimpressive, incremental change.
For all the failings of the GOP's radical wing (and there are many such failings), there is this one virtue: they get stuff done. The GOP has taken massive swings - seizing the courts, dismantling the administrative states, stacking elections, and siphoning off trillions for its donors:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos
The Democrats don't need to copy the GOP's abandonment of material policy for ideological hardlines. Indeed, it shouldn't: when they go low (culture war bullshit), we go high (delivering real benefit to voters). But the Democrats' left wing could sure stand to learn a trick or two from the GOP's right - namely, how to turn "I want to do it, now go away" into "I want to do it, now make me do it."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation
The Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop (I’m a grad, instructor and board member) is having its fundraiser auction to help defray tuition. I’ve donated a “Tuckerization” — the right to name a character in a future novel:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/clarion-sf-fantasy-writers-workshop-23-campaign/#/
[Image ID: An old fashioned tickertape parade. In an open-top convertible, surrounded by security, is a kicking Democratic Party donkey colored red, white and blue.]
#pluralistic#thanks obama#grand bargains#deliverism#elections#strategy#obamacare#democrats in disarray#consultant class#monopolies#medicare for all#electoral strategy#us politics#m4a#triangulation#aca
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Calling it now, next election cycle the dems are gonna dig up Henry Kissinger's rotting corpse and go on a multistate press tour with it. Watch them lose California for the first time since Ronald Reagan.
#this is clearly a valid election strategy that works yall just dont understand politics#we need to go more rightward actually. this will definitely work.#us elections#2024 elections#election 2024#kamala harris#democratic party#democrats
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sorry im not voting for any candidate that will happily continue supplying weapons for a genocide. it would go against everything i stand for
#when i do go vote this week i might vote third-party or abstain from picking a president entirely. id have to do research#also kamalas such a bad pick. saying nothing on queer protections while promising “the most lethal military in the world”#and is a known cop happy to put transgender ppl in jail#i dont trust like that. idk wtf her strategy is but even if she wasnt actively participating in genocide i probably wouldnt pick her#any party needs to earn my vote and if they cant do that idk what to tell you thats their problem#and if they lose so be it. do better next 4 years#idk. ultimately i know no president or government entity will do anything to protect trans ppl bc it goes against their interests#but the least they can do is not participate in genocide and not allow things to get worse#and given the last 4 years the democrats fail on those fronts completely. they have done nothing for us
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Leaving it on the table.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/us/missouri-uncontested-races-elections.html
A frustrating article about how both parties, but far more often Democrats, leave republicans running unopposed across the country.
The Democratic Party should funnel long-term resources in supporting candidates in all races in all states, even if the candidate wants to declare themselves as an Independent who caucus with Democrats. Make the republicans defend themselves and their terrible electoral decisions everywhere. Make sure more people hear a well-framed vision for what the left wants for the country.
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The ACLU on Tuesday vowed to launch a legal challenge to U.S. President Joe Biden's executive order barring migrants who cross the southern border without authorization from receiving asylum.
Biden's executive action invokes Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act—previously used by the administration of former Republican President Donald Trump to deny migrants asylum—"when the southern border is overwhelmed."
Under the policy, asylum requests will be shut down when the average number of daily migrant encounters between ports of entry hits 2,500. Border entry points would reopen to asylum-seekers when that number dips below 1,500.
The president said he was acting, in part, because "Republicans in Congress chose to put partisan politics ahead of our national security, twice voting against the toughest and fairest set of reforms in decades."
On Tuesday, the ACLU said Biden's policy will "rush vulnerable people through already fast-tracked deportation proceedings, sending people in need of protection to their deaths."
"We intend to challenge this order in court," Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, said in a statement. "It was illegal when Trump did it, and it is no less illegal now."
In July 2020 a federal judge in Washington, D.C. struck down the Trump administration's ban on most Central Americans and migrants from other countries.
ACLU chief political and advocacy officer Deirdre Schifeling said that "we need solutions to address the challenges at the border, but the administration's planned executive actions will put thousands of lives at risk."
"They will not meet the needs at the border, nor will they fix our broken immigration system," Schifeling added. "We urge the administration to uphold its campaign promise to restore asylum and mobilize the necessary resources to address the challenges at the border. It's not just the morally sound thing to do—it's good politics."
The ACLU pointed to polling showing that "voters nationwide and in battleground states largely reject enforcement-only policies that put vulnerable people in danger."
The group is advocating "balanced and humane solutions" including "improving processing at ports of entry and addressing the immigration case backlog by investing in immigration court judges and legal representation."
#us politics#biden administration#joe biden#vote uncommitted#democrats#immigrant rights#immigrants#immigration#asylum seekers#Trying the same strategy as always that has never worked once and has only cost countless lives
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two common talking points about non-voting from the left:
1. depriving the Democrats of your vote will show that you will not empower genocide and punish them for doing so
2. the Democrats will not be affected if the Republicans win power because they are the same class
does anyone else see a contradiction in terms here?
#as for the “it is easier to organize under a more extreme government” folks#fair point but whose lives are you gambljng by adopting that strategy?#and if you are saying “well the democrats are coercing consent by running against the Republicans”#see post. they don't give a shit about ethics. they just want to be better than the other guys.#all power manufactures and coerced consent#from the commander in chief to your boss#that doesn't mean that choosing not to interact with it is a good idea#we CANNOT avoid interacting with power systems under this political paradigm#so you might as well not shut down the avenues of power you got#vote for whoever makes your life better#in short#eat their pizza and form a union anyway
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Predictability of the 2024 Presidential Election Outcome
Reflections on the 2024 Presidential Election Outcome For the first time since the night of November 4, 2008, the results of a presidential election unfolded in a manner that I had anticipated. Having experienced numerous surprises in the past, I don’t wish to overly boast about my foresight. However, I believe the outcome of the 2024 election was particularly predictable. Despite the myriad of…
#2024 election#Biden administration#Democratic strategy#electoral dynamics#legal challenges#midterm elections#political predictions#rule of law#Trump#voter sentiment
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what if trump started campaigning on an anti genocide stance. would that finally convince the dems to fucking say something or would they continue to double down and sink themselves further
#I am speculating. the current political landscape is so fucking weird that I don’t know what to anticipate#but I think if trump started leaning into a stronger antiwar message he could pull voters away#bc Harris has said JACK FUCKING SHIT abt her foreign policy stances#and it’s literally only going to get worse#she has some important political choices to make her and there is no fucking time for her to lose#*here#I am talking abt all of this as someone invested only in the race itself. not the party#I’m v curious abt the internal strategy going on here#it’s perplexing me#democrats have not yet earned my vote and genocide is a hard fucking red line#as of right now. 0 plan to vote for them#star’s thoughts#usapol
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what do YOU think happened in 2016 ?
#like i Said. obviously voting strategy is dependent on what state you're in#my state's electors are going to vote for the democrat they just are. lol#the us presidential election is silly it just is. as if it's my fault#sorry for arguing about voting on tumblr dot com#i didn't vote for hillary clinton either hope this helps <3
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The GOP are working hard to bring this to every state.
If you do not vote, you are helping them. CHECK YOUR VOTER REGISTRATION!!! Educate yourself about local candidates and legislation coming in the November 2024 election. Tell Trump and all Republicans how you feel by voting.
#pregnancy#abortion#abortion rights#gop#gqp#republicans#maga#qult#southern strategy#trump#us history#us elections#vote true blue democrat down ballot#vote harris/walz#vote against trump#vote against republicans
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"We've just got to go after him. And...put him right where he belongs: with [Barry] Goldwater] around his neck...He's got a better television personality and he's more effective. But he's more dangerous."
-- President Lyndon B. Johnson, telling California Governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, that the Democrats needed to portray Brown's opponent during the 1966 California Gubernatorial election, actor Ronald Reagan, as an extremist and link him with LBJ's unsuccessful opponent in the 1964 Presidential election, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, during a phone call recorded by LBJ's White House taping system on June 13, 1966.
#History#Presidents#Lyndon B. Johnson#President Johnson#LBJ#Ronald Reagan#President Reagan#Edmund G. “Pat” Brown#Pat Brown#1966 California Gubernatorial Election#1964 Election#Barry Goldwater#Politics#Political History#Presidents on Presidents#Political Strategy#Democratic Party#Republican Party#California Governors#California Politics#LBJ Library#White House Tapes#White House Recordings#White House Phone Calls#LBJ Tapes#Presidential History#Presidential Recordings#Presidential Phone Calls
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my dad was like ahhh I'm so mad at the ppl who abstained bc of Palestine rahhhh this is their fault until I was finally like well ok but I also don't think she should've thrown her lot in with Liz Cheney..... did not go over well
#whenever you even slightly criticize the democratic party terrified liberals are like oh so you LOVE DONALD TRUMP??? well no.#i just dont think tacking right is a good strategy 😞
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