Can Democrats Get Their Voters Off the Couch?
Can Democrats Get Their Voters Off the Couch?
Dorian Warren argues that cynicism and disillusionment among the party's base helped Trump win.
Focus on actually helping out the working class and you'll get all the votes you need. Until then, throwing out a few progressive scraps has stopped working because people are sick of the bullshit rainbow capitalism.
This podcast is very relevant:
Gosh, if only they had landed that George W Bush endorsement things would have been different, I'm sure. The party relies on essentially blackmailing their base while pursuing 1% of Republican voters who don't vote for them anyways, over and over.
He also attributed Trump’s win to broader failures in Democratic Party messaging
Again and again the Dems only think about their messaging. The American people are fucking sick of messaging. We want action.
It is about action, but also messaging. Democrat are shit at bragging about their accomplishments for working Americans because they don't want to offend corporate interests and wealthy donors.
Politics are all about the interdependence of action and messaging. If you don't run on powerful messaging then, even if elected, you aren't going to have the ability to take significant action. If you don't take significant action, then it's a whole lot harder to create effective messaging. You can't have one without the other.
Any progressive that somehow managed to run the gauntlet and become president would find themselves in conflict with both Republicans and Democrats in congress. The only way to break that log jam would be a massive populist uprising. The only way to get that is with powerful messaging.
Maybe if they just lean a little farther right. I'm sure it'll work this time!
'We should've done more podcasts'
I think it's important to highlight the importance of primary elections here. Unlike most other countries, the process of choosing who a party nominates to stand for election is entirely controlled by voters in the USA through primary elections.
The Democratic Party loses because the Republican Party nominates populists that people are excited to vote for. If the Democrats want to win, they need to do the same—nominate people that voters are actually enthusiastic about.
Primary elections have historically rubbish turnout. If progressives, social democrats, and socialists want their candidates to be nominated, they should be starting information campaigns to get their fellow left-wing Democrats to vote in primary elections.
True enough but the DNC is absolutely not innocent here with how they like to fuck around in their primaries.
Of course that's true, but the rules surrounding superdelegates and other tomfoolery wasn't enough to make a difference in any recent presidential primary. 2024 was an anomaly but it seemed pretty likely Kamala would have won the nomination regardless (this is not an excuse to not hold a primary).
The rules for primaries to legislative or local offices are actually completely clean and fair, at least as far as I can tell.
The important part of a primary isn't the actual person, it's that they force the democrats to acknowledge what their base wants and pretend to want it too.
It's also the best opportunity candidates get to frame issues and demonstrate vision. Conventional wisdom is that a contested primary is bad for the general, but that hasn't been true for decades. Election after election, a contested primary wins the general.
"The Democrats" are a lot less cohesive than you're giving them credit for. Yes, there's a national committee and several important figures within the party, but there is no single "leader of the Democratic Party" who dictates policy down to their underlings. Plenty of times we've seen prominent Democrats in power defy the party leaders and suffer no immediate consequences.
The traditional American political system is very decentralised. Parties are more like labels that politicians adopt rather than actual vehicles for political control. Anyone is free to join any party and nobody needs the party's permission to stand for election.
Meanwhile, if you take a look at how political parties work in other countries, there's usually a person holding the title of "party leader", that usually being the president, leader of the opposition, prime minister, or holder of some other important state office. The party leader is in control of the entire party and all of the party's elected officials are expected to follow the party's official ideology as dictated by the leader. If they refuse, then they will be kicked out of the party. The party leadership has complete control over who is allowed in the party and who it nominates to stand for election.
The Democratic Party has several important leaders. Biden, of course, is the president and thus the most influential. But he's not the dictator of the party. He still has to negotiate and work with the likes of Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakim Jefferies in the House for his agenda. And, of course, Biden doesn't have the power to dictate policy to the various state chapters of the party, which have their own local leaders setting agendas independent of what Biden wants.
Contrast this with the Republican Party, which in recent years has become a lot more hierarchical, with Trump as the undisputed party leader. Trump's power over the party is all informal, but informal power is still power and the reality is that Trump, as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, can almost unilaterally dictate who the party nominates and what the party's policy platforms will be on a national scale. That sort of centralisation just isn't present in the Democratic Party.
I hear a lot about the corruption of the democrats that blocked Bernie and I can see the toll it's taken on America. How can we fight back? I am willing to donate or protest the dnc picking another neolib but I'm not sure what to do.
If they're staying on the couch and not voting, they're not voters.
Calling them "their voters" also misrepresents things and highlights part of the problem