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Jaicee 3 days ago
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haxxiy said:
Jaicee said:

Honestly, I think it'd be in the Democratic Party's best interest to revive the so-called "blue dog" faction of their party in the future. Those people are the dying remnants of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal worker-farmer coalition and the modern Democratic brand simply sucks at reaching either end of that spectrum increasingly. There's too many goddamn Venture Capitalists for Kamala and Business Leaders for Harris, too many events with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and other assorted neocon militarists who've never heard of a war they didn't want us to fight and couldn't give a rat's ass if you starve or wind up homeless or die of a fentanyl overdose. I'm seeing way too much Mark Cuban on my screen and it's communicating the wrong message. It's time to get back to kitchen table issues. Where are those in this last stretch of the campaign? Wtf happened to that whole message?

This is also just simply a change election year worldwide. The world, and the working class in particular, is unhappy with the post-pandemic cost of living, housing shortages, and the mass migration that's opened up to add more strain to our resources in a context of what's often been real scarcity and already-strained government budgets. In America's case, that means people are also just simply looking for excuses to vote for Trump this year. Harris is stuck fighting against that tide and what it all means is that she has to basically be perfect to win and Trump can get away with pretty much anything at the moment. Is that fair? Hell no! Is it reality though? Yes.

You have a point there. What happened to the party that used to dominate small towns and urban centers alike by its connections to the working class? Trading non-college-educated Whites and now even PoCs for (some of) the Republican college-educated vote is a surefire manner of losing the EC for a long, long time. There could be no worse combo in that regard.

It'll be even worse after 2030, the blue wall will be destroyed (-16 or so ECs) by the next apportionment.

That being said, I think Trump can and will still lose because he's a deranged lunatic who is bleeding in the suburbs worse than Goldwater. But just.

Yeah...to your last statement, I haven't seen any downward movement in Trump's poll numbers this whole election cycle (in fact just the opposite of late), but I hope you're right.

Anyway, on the larger point, exactly. I view the Democratic Party's ideological coalition as a spectrum whose poles are the student movements on one end of the spectrum and the labor movement on the other. You need a healthy balance of both to win, but the balance of influence in the party's policy formation has been skewing more toward the student movement than it should in recent years, I believe, and it's starting to really drive away working class support.

The types of people I'm specifically thinking of as hopefully future presidential candidates include the same people I originally championed to be the party's nominee this year when it first started looking like Biden might drop out: people like Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear or Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (who definitely should've at least been the running mate, seriously). I've also taken notice of independent candidate Dan Osborne's impressive success so far in his bid for a Senate seat in deep-red Nebraska that some voices are rightly casting as a kind of model for challenging Republicans in heavily rural states and areas. In the Congress, I've quickly become huge fan of of Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in particular and yearn for a world in which she might have a bright political career ahead of her. I think that's possible. These are the sorts of Democrats (and other non-Republicans) I have the most favorable opinion of.

If you're looking for academic case for a more moderate brand of Democratic politics in the future, my go-to for that is The Liberal Patriot. It's a creation of the authors of the well-known 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, which famously argued that the Democrats were demographically destined to become the majority party based on the changing demographic composition of the country. In more recent years, they've been warning about the Democratic Party's loss of support from the working class and prescribing solutions. They've provided some of the most compelling analysis of this political moment, IMO. (Recent example.)