Democratic political strategy
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/genuine question, asides from the obvious of republicans adopting left policy, what would have to happen for another party switch to occur?
like, i know it happened once. wondering what circumstances and context brought that about and if that’s even a realistic framing to think about today’s world?
not saying i disagree, but people always link this article as though it even has a section on partisan politics. it doesn’t, or really even pose any evidence that suggests the effect applies to the overton window. would be curious if there are any sources that pose evidence.
Frankly the people are the ones moving further to the right because the state does not educate them and regulate corporate power, transforming the public into a myopic panicked herd.
That’s actually false. When it comes to policy preferences, the actual electorate swings pretty far left compared to the right wing and far right parties they can choose between. Universal health care, parental leave, paid sick leave, higher minimum wage all enjoy broad and firm popular support, and neither party is even talking about this.
!! yea
always important to remember that the electorate’s preference in policy has only a loose relationship to who they vote for. this air gap is where most elections are fought, where strong messaging tightens the gap and messaging failures loosen it. the 2024 presidential election had a hella loose connection between party and people.
The Overton Window is set in an abandoned lot. The house burned down a long time ago.
Always reach across the isle and punch nazis.
The rightward shift of the GOP and the tendency of the seemingly infinite number of spineless Dem careerist politicians to seek compromise is very real, but please remember the 90s and 2000s, everyone. They were not as rosy and left-wing as you remember; while not nearly enough, the Dems are notably more left than they were then.
In the larger picture the rightward trend is kind of true on economic fronts.
But yeah, since the 90s we’ve slowly moved left.
Since the 90s we’ve moved left economically as well. The 90s were where the Dems had their massive neoliberal shift, after all. Not hard to be more left than THAT.
Right, that’s why I said in the larger picture. Before Reagan, taxing the rich and a living minimum wage were standard. Now it’s considered radical. But we’ve definitely moved back to the left since then.
Can you please explain what you mean exactly by “economic fronts?” Do you mean there are specific things they’re further right on than before, or that they’re further right on the economy as a whole? If the latter: what issues are you accounting for, and how are you turning their stances into a clean metric?
I mean taxing the rich and a livable minimum wage used to be acceptable. But due to the rightward slide, the tax rate from most of the 20th century and livable single income minimum wages would be considered radical now.
If I were to guess, I’d say, the left is winning on social fronts. IE Say topics like gay marriage, Partial legalization of pot etc… would never have even been on the table 40 years ago.
Now admitted, The current position of the pieces of the country is poised in a way that we are very likely to take huge backslides on those issues.
Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man. You take a step towards him, he takes a step back. Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.
“Why isn’t anybody voting for us”
I think the question they ask is more like “why are people voting for the other side?” …leading to “we need to be more like them”
Harris was down 10 million votes compared to last election. The issue really is “why aren’t people voting for us”
I’m not arguing what the actual issue is, just how they consider the issue.
The problem is theres nothing on our side. Our choices are right of center and so far right they fell off the graph.
There’s also the choice of doing what Bernie did, and build up an alternative from the local level, but that would require people to realise that politics aren’t restricted to TV-level races nor snooze for 4 years.
If Americans did that in large scale they could to the democratic party the reverse of what the tea party did to the republican party.
The Democratic party hates Bernie though. Theyran so hard against him back in '16 and '20. I swear the Democrats would rather lose to a Republican than run an actual left candidate.
That’s because there are only a handful of “Bernies”. A party is not a monolithical block, it’s the sum of it’s members, and the centrists end up being in charge because they are the ones that end up representing the party at most levels. If you want to shift the balance you need leftists to run for school boards, and city halls, and build from there by starting taking over the state committees and DNC members elected by each state (which in turn control the DNC).
If even the most extreme of the extreme right managed to do it in the republican party, there’s no reason why a moderate left movement couldn’t do it in the democratic party - if anything I would expect it to be easier.
Well that would require people to actually go vote every time instead of just bitching online. Or discouraging everyone from voting by saying someone is “Republican light”
They only look at the votes that were cast not voters who stayed home
How cute, you guys are trying to rewrite it in your favor. Too bad the science says otherwise.
These stats are about the policy preferences of the electorate, while OP is about the politicians. But your picture is a fantastic illustration as to why the democrats lost the election. It’s because they keep moving further right (look for example at their recent pro-fracking, pro-border wall, pro-genocide presidential candidate).
When they don’t have all 3 (house of reps Senate and presidency) they are forced to reach across the aisle. And they’ve had all 3 for, drumroll please, 4 of the last 24 years. Or 6 of the last 32 years. Or 6 of the last 44 fucking years. Don’t want them to reach across the aisle? Then give them consistent and overwhelming victories.
I know posts like those feel good, but the objective fact is that the political conversation and (much more importantly) public policy has moved drastically leftward in both shorter terms (the last decade) as well as more medium-term measurements (the last fifty years).
Universal health care used to be something that was at least mentioned during campaigns, now not so anymore. Fracking, inhumane border policies to keep those crazed illegal immigrants out, explicit support for genocide; these are far right policies, and the dems are falling over themselves to support it. Every cycle they move further right.
The Affordable Care Act passed, and addressed some of the most glaring, campaigning worthy issues. It’s only been 14 years, and already support for the ACA is rising, and opposition is falling off.
Support for more fracking has risen slightly in the last 4 years, but it lags behind the growth in support for solar, wind, and even nuclear. I suspect (caveat emptor) that as renewables bring energy costs back into check, support for fracking will follow the drop in support of coal production. It should not be a surprise that any shelter is popular in a storm.
Both parties used to be strongly against illegal immigration, now one campaigns against it, but did most of the things they were allowed to do to encourage and allow it, including publicly declaring their support for illegal immigrants, and passing sanctuary city laws.
I don’t have a strong grounding in how much open support there is for genocide, but I think the American population is more aware of it happening than they were in the past. Hopefully that means we care more now.
just playin’ the long game. won’t be long now and it will loop around to the far left.
Yup, we just need to accelerate and we totally won’t end up in a fascist dystopia
So, everyone’s hoping for the bit overflow
The reverse Ghandi.
Ah, so they are doing horseshoe theory in real life?
ultimately its the voters. we have primaries as well as general and remember congress is what can really change things. The last election shows voters felt we were not right enough at all levels.
I think thats an over simplification.
Disinformation is part of it. Also leftist voters feel disempowered (they shouldn’t, but they are). And voters often don’t understand the politics behind good policy.
Its been shown that if dem policy were presented, then voters would overwhelmingly support it.
Maybe voters are more left than dems, but don’t like dems fundamentally, because they have no backbone.
Sure there is disinformation but it does not nullify information. The voters can’t say they did not know what trump was like or what the republicans have become. There was the four years previous and everything they actually say. If folks voted for it, its what they want. If folks did not its still what they wanted. What else would someone expect the results to be. What have the results been in elections before. We all know we have first past the post. We all know its a two party system. We can get that changed but its going to have to be a the primaries and working at every level. I hope the majority make better decisions in two years if they have that chance.
If there’s so much appetite for a progressive/socialist party in the USA, how come there isn’t one that gets a significant amount of financing and votes?
Because that wouldn’t be in the interest of the billionaire class so it’s actively suppressed. I mean, the government killed Malcolm X and MLK Jr. There’s no telling how many more. Look at the response to BLM or the pro-Palestinian protest in comparison to the Jan 6 traitors. The left are painted as radicals for wanting equality and healthcare, while the right gets a free pass on being pedophiles, con men, and foreign assets.
I’m talking about a party with a platform, doing an actual campaign to get people elected, not a protest movement.
Look at how much money Harris managed to get from regular people, you would believe the left would be able to organize more than just protests, that there would be the Republicans, the Democrats AND the Progressives (or whatever the name it would have)…
I volunteered for Bernie Sanders. His two runs for President (along with a long career) are probably as close as you can find to what a modern progressive party would look like.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=n00000528
He raised a lot of money, had very large rallies, and a lot of very passionate volunteers. But lost, and there’s two reasons why.
- First past the post spoiler effect - Bernie had to run as a Democrat within the Democratic Party primary system. If he had run as progressive or democratic socialist he would have split the democratic vote. In a first past the post system Duverger’s Law mathematically guarantees 2 party rule.
Any progressive alternative would split the democratic vote, and ensure that, at least for a while, the republicans would win every election. You can see on Lemmy and Reddit and all other kinds of social media the amount of anger and infighting this causes on the left. This is a strong disincentive for anyone to start an alternative party.
- The donor class - the Democratic Party is largely funded by big money donors. Big money donors have a lot of money because of how things are currently arranged. If the way the country works today has made you fabulously wealthy, even if that means a lot of people suffer, you tell yourself “they suffer because they don’t work hard like me” and want things to stay the way they are. So you donate to both parties to control them and make sure that whatever particular apple cart you’ve cornered doesn’t get overturned.
Every problem the American people face is a profit generator for some fuck face. Rent too high, some landlord is enjoying record profits. Can’t afford medicine, some pharmacy CEO is buying their third yacht. Those people have enough money to buy politicians, ads, political parties, media networks, social media companies, etc. They aren’t just going to sit back and let you fuck up their money making machine, they will deploy those assets against anyone that threatens the status quo.
Here’s a particularly egregious example coming from MSNBC during Bernie’s last run when his reforms threatened their wealth https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/chris-matthews-bernie-sanders-public-executions-949802/
So that’s what any progressive party is up against. The mathematical certainty that they would lose until they could unseat the current Democratic Party, something that would take some number of election cycles. The donor class wanting to thwart any change. And let’s say they do overcome both of those things. That party then becomes the thing the donors try to buy next. Your party starts with high minded ideals but one by one the members of your party get big paydays from the billionaires and suddenly they want to soften this reform and maybe hold off on that reform and… oh look they are holding the exact same positions as the current Democratic Party. Because those positions are the positions of the people that own the party, and they will happily buy another.
I’ve seen some interesting speculation that the Republican party’s embrace of Trump will be the death of the party once Trump passes on, and I’ve wondered what will happen. The US has always had 2 parties since the country’s conception, so I genuinely wonder if the Democratic Party will flip conservative again and either the Republicans will attack from the left as “New Republicans” or a new party will fill in the left-leaning gap they’ve left.
This makes sense at a macro scale but I simply can’t imagine a scenario at the micro scale that makes that happen. Most realistic scenario I can think of is that the Republicans fail to elect anyone (might get a seat or two still but not enough to be a viable party) for a cycle of two, the Democratic party stops trying as more career politicians move over from the Republican party and some popular Democrats splinter off to form a new party. But the things that have to happen for each of those steps to occur are pretty insurmountable.
Idk it’s an interesting thought experiment especially when trying to stay realistic and not just be a wet dream
“The progressive alternative would split the Democratic vote”
But people keep talking about electors voting for the Democrats not by choice, but because it’s the only option left of the Republicans. If there are so many people who do it (or don’t vote due to a lack of option) like people keep repeating, then removing the Democrats from the equation shouldn’t be an issue, right? Budget or not, people choose where they put a checkmark.
What I’m getting at is that I don’t think there’s as much appetite for a progressive party in the USA as some people like to believe. There’s a far right party and a conservative party and, even though nature doesn’t like a void, no one bothers actually trying to fill up the empty space on the left. Hell, Sanders and AOC keep getting elected yet even they aren’t trying to get a Progressive party started, AOC is a Democrat and Sanders is an “independent” that keeps showing up at Democrat’s events.
We have data so that we don’t have to go with our guts
You can check out the vote totals
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
I would argue the 2016 is a better reflection, in 2020 there was a sort of coordinated drop out of centrist candidates on Super Tuesday as the establishment wing of the party threw their weight behind Biden.
But in either case the answer is that the Democratic Party is basically a coalition party of centrist Dems that seem to be fine with shifting further and further to the right and more progressive voters. In 2016 it was pretty evenly split so there is appetite just not enough for a viable party.
Ok, where’s the Progressive party then? If the existing parties are leaving such a huge part of the population without a party (based on what people are saying) then it should be a guaranteed win, right? Why don’t the progressives Democrats (and left wing independents) get together and tell the rest of the Democrats to fuck off? Sanders has a ton of support, you just proved it!
I think the space doesn’t get gobbled because people prevent it from being gobbled, like OP says
If the game weren’t rigged, the space wouldn’t exist
This is the exact, desired outcome by the billionaires. Us arguing over how this is our fault for not voting correctly.
Campaigning in the US relies heavily on money from wealthy investors to get off the ground. Meaning, any new party that wants to get going needs approval from the wealthy to do so.
Additionally, a huge percentage of the population pays no attention to politics at all, just closing their eyes to the whole election and either not voting, or voting for the party they’ve always voted for every time, so even if your party managed to get some attention, it’d just be another 3rd party further fracturing what small portion of the population risks voting outside the 2 party system as it is.
In other to have a shot at winning, you’d need to somehow make enough money to afford competing with the 2 established parties for screen time, which would mean major corporate backing that would only happen if they liked your policies.
