Wolfgang622 wrote:JFLNYC wrote:As long as Dems keep fighting with one another, as long as we are petulant enough to imply that it’s gotta be my candidate otherwise my friends and I won’t work hard and might not even vote, as long as we continue to disparage our own candidates, the election of any one of which would reverse the existential threat now threatening our country, we will, as they say, get the government we deserve.
For the record, I didn't say any of this, nor did I imply it, nor did I even think it. I was simply making my analysis of the situation, which was meant to get at who would be most electable in the current environment, which is what we all want.
Also for the record, I didn't say you said, implied or thought any of this, but we both know there are Dems who do.
Wolfgang622 wrote:JFLNYC wrote:The key to winning will be mobilizing as many Dems to vote as possible and that’s the issue here. Younger progressives point out that they’re the ones likely to do the most legwork while older moderates point out that they’re the ones with the money and, even more importantly, they’re the ones who actually vote more.
To this point, and keeping electability, and only electability, in the forefront of my mind, the ideal candidate, proceeding from your own observation here, is one who is a Democrat, who has proven s/he can raise money from a variety of sources from across the age demographics of the Party, and who excites young people, since old people, as you point out, will vote anyway. The candidates who tick all of these boxes are, then, Warren (again, my preference) or Sanders.
It's a clever attempt to turn the argument on its head but not quite right. I didn't say older voters "always" vote, I said they're the ones who "actually" vote, meaning that, if properly motivated, we more reliably actually go and vote whereas younger voters sometimes do not vote no matter what the apparent motivations. So the point is it's generally more productive and efficient to encourage people who will actually do something rather than those who often do not.
But so much of this electability issue is speculation. In 2018 we Dems did really well, so I'm going to quote again from this article: How Democrats Defeat Donald Trump, which deals in facts rather than speculation. I encourage reading the full article, but here are a few highlights (emphasis mine):
Stop hypothesizing about Democratic voters’ political priorities and policy appetites and look at the actual evidence of where Americans really are. That’s the 2018 midterms.
It may have minted young progressive superstars like the congresswomen in the squad, but they aren’t especially popular beyond their progressive fan clubs. More important, their victories had zilch to do with why or how Democrats regained control of Congress and have dubious relevance to how Democrats can do the same with the White House in 2020. The House members they replaced were Democrats, not Republicans, so their campaigns weren’t lessons in how to move voters from one party’s column to the other.
Other first-term House candidates’ bids did offer such lessons, so look harder at that crew. Lauren Underwood in the exurbs of Chicago, Xochitl Torres Small in southern New Mexico, Abigail Spanberger in the suburbs of Richmond, Va., and Antonio Delgado in upstate New York — these four defeated Republicans in districts where Trump had prevailed by four to 10 percentage points just two years earlier. None of them ran on the Green New Deal, single-payer health insurance, reparations or the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
They touted more restrained agendas. And they didn’t talk that much about Trump. They knew they didn’t need to. For voters offended by him, he’s his own negative ad, playing 24/7 on cable news.
Of the roughly 90 candidates on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of 2018 challengers with some hope of turning a red House district blue, just two made a big pitch for single-payer health care. Both lost. While first-time candidates endorsed by the progressive groups Justice Democrats or Our Revolution certainly won House elections last year, not one flipped a seat. The party did pick up 40 seats overall — just not with the most progressive candidates.
According to a May analysis by Catalist, a data-analysis firm, 89 percent of the Democratic vote gain in 2018 was from swing voters. That’s just one set of numbers, one way to slice the pie, but it does raise questions about the progressive insistence that partisan turnout and a surge in new voters, attracted by bold policy positions, is the path to victory in 2020.
There’s something else funky about that insistence — about the theory that a more progressive Democratic nominee would get all the votes that Hillary Clinton did in 2016 plus ones from people who stayed home in disaffection and much of the left-wing spoiler Jill Stein’s share. A more progressive nominee might lose some of the votes that Clinton did get. Who’s to say that the math, in the end, would be all that favorable?
