Post-match: So what is next for the Democratic Party? (Post 2024)

First, do not nominate a woman, and even worse a colored woman.
Second, try to attract as many people as they can to purple states so they become blueish.

 

Third time I posted this, but it IS worth reading, even if it is by David Brooks.

https://archive.ph/wLsQo

The problem isn't with the Democratic party itself, it's with party politics as parties currently operate. He might be on to something. This strikes me as closer to accurate than any other bothsideristic argument I've seen

The result is that each party has its own metaphysics. Each party is no longer just a political organism; it is a political-cultural-religious-class entity that organizes the social, moral and psychological lives of its believers.

Each party’s metaphysic seems to grow more rigid and impermeable as time goes by. Sometimes it seems that Harris is running not to be president of the United States but to be president of a theme park called Democratic Magic Mountain, while Trump is running to be president of Republican Fantasy Island. Each party has become too narcissistic to get outside its own head and try to build a coalition with people outside the camp of true believers.
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First off, Democrats need to put their passion, policies, principles, and purity aside and be laser focused on creating a political appeal and building a political coalition that can actually win them political power. In other words, they need to focus on the crass and dirty thing that so many liberals and lefties disdain: pure hardball power politics.

This is not "resistance". "Resistance" lets you indulge in your purity. Power politics requires you to get dirty and make compromises and do cynical things because the point of power politics is to win. Winning is the point of an election.

Because your passion, policies, principles, and purity don't count for shit unless you win. Republicans understand this innately, which has long been their political advantage. Democrats never want to accept this truth, which has long been their political weakness.

I have zero confidence that the Democrats will be able to do this. It's just not part of their culture.

 

That's all true, but it is also true that voters are now part of a team, "Team Trump" or "Team Democrat." It almost doesn't matter what the candidates believe or what they are polling on, people just vote for their team.

I mean, "Team Trump" is no longer the party of fiscal responsibility and now openly roots for Russia to win wars. So all that "balance the budget" and "strong defense against communism and dictators" is gone. Nobody cares.

 

Let's look at the facts and not the feels. Yes the country does feel more polarized and the two parties like echo chambers but the facts say that more and more people are unaligned.



Minority voters (of which I am one) are also drifting increasingly to independent status so they are by no means a bulwark for the Democrats anymore.

We are seeing this reflected in other spaces as well. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Post have both refused to endorse a candidate. That only happens because there was no echo chamber and there was actual discussion happening.

The primary issue for both parties should be how to win the independent voter and this time around the Republicans did much better. I'm sure that Democrats will recalibrate soon enough.

 

That ship has sailed. That was the gerrymandering case that decided “this is a state issue”.

When history is told of this time the lefts inaction and respect for the court in the decades the proceeded this will likely be one of the root causes. Dems never understood that their “friends” on the other side of the aisle were at war with them the whole time. They kept championing Dems that could “reach across the aisle”. He’ll…Biden bragged about this in his primary debate.

 

I think this has been obvious since Gingrich made the "no reaching across the aisle" thing a part of his plan of action. It took Democrats far too long to figure out he was serious.

 

I'm guessing treating them as a monolith is part of the problem. I mean, I live in a place with a large population of spanish speaking people. I know for a fact that A LOT of Mexicans and Mexican Americans aren't huge fans of Puerto Ricans, and vice versa.

Solution: begin by treating them first and foremost as AMericans. That's what most of them seem to want, unless they've been trained by their liberal arts colleges to play the Oppression Olympics via theories of Intersectionality.

 

So, the big issue with Latino voters is that we are no longer a true minority. Our portion of the population has gone from 5% in 1970 to 23% today. We just feel secure in our power base and the strength of our community. We are also fundamentally multi-racial and since the US is now also fundamentally multi-racial we just don't feel the issue any more. The big thing that kept most Latinos in the Democrat camp was the insecurity of being a minority in a primarily northern-European population. From this point on Hispanics will be voting on values which - this should be no surprise - trend more conservative and blue-collar.

So what about immigration? Most Latino immigrants that nationalized are not going to want more immigrants. That's a reality and common among all immigrants of all races.

 

This may be a maverick answer, and I confess I have more to learn here, but what about re-evaluating/re-calibrating the number (and therefore allocation) of representatives? Not a 2028 or 2032 fix, surely, but any real existential fix won't be possible by then anyhow.

The 435 count is from 1929, and since it's fixed, a 1929 average of 210k constit'ents per rep is now (or was in 2018) 747k*.

Increasing the size of the House would more accurately index reps (ergo electoral votes) to population, which would somewhat level the playing field between red land and blue people.

*https://www.pewresearch.org/short-r...-representatives-is-same-size-as-in-taft-era/ has maths, graphs, history, and the practical effects of matching our average constit'ents to other countries'. But still...the wackadoodle apportionment of reps --> electors has been bugging me for a while and at least now I found something on the intarwebz to help educate myself.

e2a: this is probably more an American fix than a Democratic fix, but I still cling to being both.

 

It's a fantasy answer.

 

Dems need to embrace racism and misogyny, pronto

 

Apropos of this thread ...

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblo...aretoken/8e64fb0b-1639-431c-9fe7-5acde6243a99

 

I hope that the democratic party changes it's rhetoric to talk more about "everyone."

Not african-americans, or immigrants, or women, or former felons, or college students, or LGTBQ+, just everyone.

They pretty much hand the commercials to the Republicans saying that Democrats care only about "them" and not about "you."

If they just couched this as freedom for everyone it might work better.

 

The Democratic Party should consider adopting racism and misogyny if it wants to remain relevant as a party...

Van Jones on CNN, probably...

— The Devil's Architect || 10000% Kamala Harris Stan (@TheDevilsArch) November 6, 2024