Comment by cogman10
10 hours ago
Dems have lost to Trump twice and it looks like they want to run the same campaign strategies in future elections. They are relying too heavily on "trump bad" to win and I worry about what that will ultimately result in down the line.
This is a statement you can make.
It's also a statement entirely divorced from reality when you look at the fact that those winning candidates are not in fact doing that, and neither are the candidates that are getting the most national attention like Talarico.
Newsom has a vested interest in making it sound like he's the maverick here that knows the special formula, but it's been obvious to damn near everyone that they couldn't run out the same losing playbook.
> neither are the candidates that are getting the most national attention like Talarico
It's a pretty close race with some recent polling indicating that Crockett will win the primary. Impossible to tell though. I clock her as being a more traditional democrat ultimately policy wise.
I'd expect she or Talarico has a good shot at winning in TX. They both have the potential to pivot to a more traditional position in the general election.
My main concern is the current elected leaders of the democrats and how the incoming dems view them. Frankly, if a candidate isn't saying "we need to oust Schumer/Jeffries" then I take that as a pretty decent signal that they align close enough with the moderate position to worry me about the future party.
I worry about the actions of the dems after election. I think they'll win the midterms, maybe even take the senate. I even think there's a good shot that they win 2028 presidental elections. The problem is that I think they'll run a biden style presidency and future campaigns once they get in power. That will setup republicans for an easy win in 2030 and 2032.
I'm a Texan so I'm following this pretty closely. I slightly prefer Crockett to Talarico, but I voted for him in the primary because I think he's got a significantly better shot to win.
Texas is going to need moderate and centrist votes to swing blue - we're not making the state more liberal at a rate that is gonna hand either of them a victory. Both are actually fairly progressive. But Talarico is a lot better at selling those progressive values to everyday people. The hispanic vote is one of the biggest factors in Texas, and while they're obviously not a monolith, culturally a lot of them have much more mixed social values than other voting demographics. Statistically, way more likely to be heavily religious, and that's at odds with a lot of the social values from more progressive candidates. Talarico effortlessly refrains these issues in a way that aligns with stuff he can directly quote scripture on.
I'm an atheist so I don't care what scripture says on the matter, but it's the sort of thing that plays well with a lot of a key voting demographic that Crockett just can't do.
Trump also lost everytime he was in a vote against Sleepy Joe Biden. Newsom went in a different tact with the redistricting effort instead of “they go low, we go high”, but yea I am also concerned to see if anyone else in the party actually updates their strategies for our current era instead of pre 2008 politics.
If Democrats actually knew how to message on what they accomplished instead of letting the other side control the narrative and refocus everything on to fringe issues that only the fringe of the party cares about, as well as matching every Biden brain fart/stutter/"senior moment" with the equivalents from Trump, I suspect a Biden vs. Trump rematch would have been a Biden victory.
But they suck at that. And when they failed to convince Biden to drop out early, they should have stuck with him and just ran hard on actual accomplishments during the admin. But Harris was a last minute pivot and it showed. I think she would have been perfectly fine as a president, and I voted for her, but not surprised in the slightest that she lost - and I expected her to lose bigger than she did.
The fact that Trump couldn't even get half the popular vote when running against a last minute ticket change that was never selected to be the presidential candidate by the party she was representing is a pretty big indictment of how unpopular he really is.
I think there's been learning that you can't just be "not Trump", but yeah - I don't know that the party in general has any idea how to handle messaging and narratives.
Agree with you on their failure of messaging, Biden was the most progressive President since Carter and I only limit myself to that because I am not as well versed in history at that point.
Yet somehow the progressives found him more unpalatable than the MAGAs if you look at people like Brianna Gray and Jill Stein.
It’s too far out for me to say I will definitively vote for Newsome but so far he’s the only Democrat whose started throwing hands both legislatively and on social media.
I hope the dems figure out how to do more of that and better, instead of returning to shit like the October shutdown and the exchanging leverage for pinky promises from Mr. John “I am an obligate pinky promise liar” Republican.