A take on progressives and nationalization of politics
The problem is we have a political generation raised by Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders. Bunch of late-Millennials and Zoomers who think doing a "moneybomb" online for their candidate means winning. Half of Bernie culture was just repeating and celebrating statistics about how many email nag donations he gathered. The fact that Paul and Sanders did nothing but lose on election day didn't seem to sink in.
If you want to study how progressive change actually happens look at Obamacare.
It passed because we had 13 Democratic Senators voting yes in states Obama had lost to McCain:
2 in Montana
2 in North Dakota
1 in South Dakota
1 in Nebraska
1 in Missouri
2 in Arkansas
1 in Louisiana
2 in West Virginia
1 in Alaska
As well as 6 more Yes votes from Democratic Senators in states Kerry had lost to Bush just a few years before, albeit Obama won them:
2 in Virginia
1 in Ohio
1 in Indiana
1 in North Carolina
1 in Iowa
In our Obamacare-passing Senate coalition of 60 Yes votes, fully one third (19) were from states where Democrats LOST to Bush in 2004, just one Senate term before the passage of Obamacare in 2010.
The lesson is really clear. If you want progressive change in the country, you get it by electing Democratic Senators in Trump states who are decoupled from national politics and represent genuinely moderate politics (and who then "betray" their voters by loyally staking their careers on structurally progressive legislation like Obamacare, often times losing their seats in the process).
You can't just parachute coastal-liberal money into red states to back coastal-liberal candidates and hope that Ted Cruz's or Lindsey Graham's horriblel ratings will do the work for you. You don't get progressive change by electing Beto O'Rourkes or Jon Ossoffs, you get it by electing Max Baucuses and Claire McCaskillses. Candidates who the average Reddit zoomer will hate and think is "owned by corporations" or whatever. Candidates whose only exposure on Reddit will be 40k upvotes of screenshots of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Twitter-dunking them for not being Socialist enough. Those are the candidates who will actually accomplish change.
Once this lesson sinks in you also see how the nationalization of our politics down to the dogcatcher level has seriously advantaged the Republicans. Sure, they can't win a national election as long as they are the FOX News party. But as long as every Senate race goes the same direction as the Presidential ticket, they can also indefinitely stop a Democratic majority (or at best give up a 52-54 seat majority from time to time that can't accomplish structural change). And their permanent minority status at the Presidential level is buffered by the electoral college, giving them pretty decent odds at elections where they lose the popular vote by millions.
Posted Dec 26, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC
Dude the senate has become way more partisan than in the early 2000s. People in trump states are not going to elect democrats. We ran moderate candidates in montana and iowa and they still got crushed. Even conservative dems like joe manchin are being steadily pushed out of their own state. I don't want to sound like a doomer but the senate is completely out of reach for democrats.
Yeah, the only reason Donnelly, Mccaskill, Bullock, Heitkamp, and Jones lost is because they were Democrats; some states just can't be won right now.
I wouldn't say winning the senate is impossible though, the Georgia races are winnable as are the races in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin. That would result in enough seats to get rid of the filibuster even without Manchin and Tester's support.
They lost because politics has been nationalized and they’re unable to actively push back on unpopular stances that the national Dem party advocates for.
I don't think there is much that can be done about that. The nationalization of politics has more to do with technology than any political agenda, and it would be absurd to expect the party to realign to match the positions of deep red states.
It's not like the Democratic agenda is filled with unpopular positions. The ACA is popular as are the $15 minimum wage and generic gun control. The things widely regarded as radical, unpopular ideas like M4A, reparations, and border decriminalization never made it to the party platform and candidates supporting them lost the presidential primary.
The Democratic Party proved itself perfectly capable of losing Senate elections in Alabama long before Twitter ever existed. (Doug Jones only won because his opponent was a child molester and Claire McCaskill would’ve lost in 2012 had her opponent not started going on about “legitimate rape”.)
Democrats were winning senate elections in red states up until right before Twitter and political nationalization was what it is today. Look at some of the Ws from the 06/08 maps
-Tim Johnson (South Dakota)
-Max Baucus (Montana)
-Mary Landrieu (Louisiana)
-Mark Pryor (Arkansas)
-Tom Harkin (Iowa)
-Jay Rockefeller (West Virginia)
-Mark Begich (Alaska)
-Ben Nelson (Nebraska)
-Kent Conrad (North Dakota)
-Bill Nelson (Florida)
-Claire McCaskill (Missouri)
-Byrd/Manchin (West Virginia)
-Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas)
Only dems that will those are red state blue dog dems. Who will follow Joe Manchin lead in not letting the senate go to far left
Exactly Dems ran Steve Bullock who won governor twice and he still got pummeled
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Bullock is literally one of the most conservative democrats there is. Also Do you think democrats are dumb? They've literally been doing this. 'moderate and 'conservative' democrats still lose in red states.
r/agedlikemilk
They weren’t really that “moderate”. If Theresa Greenfield is the most right wing conservative candidate that Dems are allowed to run anywhere in the country, then this party is fucked for the foreseeable future.