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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Hush Hush, Keep it Down Now, Voices Carry

Hush Hush, Keep it Down Now, Voices Carry

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This post is in: 

Part of the reason I’m so focused on the Democratic response to Trump is due to something Seth Moulton said in his interview with Jon Lovett on Pod Save America a few days ago:

This [slandering trans folk without rebuttal] was exactly what the Republicans were able to do with immigration.  I remember being on the House floor last year, and there were some people / colleagues running for the this position of Democratic Messaging like Committee Chair, so supposedly in charge of Democratic messaging for the House, and I asked one of the candidates how she thought we should deal with immigration.  She said we should not talk about immigration.  I said, well, I actually think a lot of people are concerned about it because it does seem there’s a real problem with the southern border.  She said, nope, it’s dangerous to talk about it because it’s used against immigrants.

The whole Moulton interview starts around 1:42 on this YouTube recording.  Now, is Moulton lying?  I doubt it.  He did a terrible job talking about trans people in his NYT interview the other day, and he takes some lumps from Lovett on that regard, but he does make the point that Democrats not responding on major issues where Republicans are making a lot of noise (like trans rights) is not good for the party.  His anecdote raises an important question about the Democratic leadership’s attitude towards messaging.

Now, when I write that the Democratic leadership has not responded to Trump’s interview, I mean almost the whole of the Democratic leadership has been silent.  I covered what was said on Sunday shows yesterday, and none of it was a response to Trump’s comments.  Jim Clyburn, who didn’t cover himself in glory yesterday with his talk of pardoning Trump, went on CNN today and compared Trump’s desire to jail the January 6 committee to the time when Jim Crow became the law of the land.  Adam Schiff stood up to Trump on X earlier today.  That’s two.  Are there others?  I’ve been looking pretty hard and can’t find any.

Of course, Liz Cheney was out with a tough statement.  That’s because she’s a Republican who understands what the fight is.

People got upset in the last comments about me posting Will Bunch’s crack  about sending the Democratic leadership to space, but if you’re not responding to at least one of the dozen bad things Trump said, and voicing the Democrat’s position opposing it, you might as well be orbiting the fucking planet for all the good that you’re doing.  If the person who was running for chair of messaging had the attitude that Moulton relayed, then we have a big problem to even have that person be considered for the position.  Messaging means relaying your message, not sitting in silence.

I’ll close with some good news.  Ken Martin, one of three candidates for DNC chair (the others are Ben Wickler and Martin O’Malley), understands the assignment:

Martin, the Minnesota state chair, says the party must invest “significant resources” in a comprehensive, granular mapping out of how different political demographics get electoral information, including via non-news sources. Martin also sees the information problem as directly linked to a Democratic brand problem, in which “the majority of Americans now believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor.” As Martin notes, Republicans have been allowed to keep up a “constant drumbeat hammering away at our brand.”

“Because we’re not in these information spaces, we’ve allowed the Republican Party to define us,” Martin said. “We’re not defining them. We have to be present in every channel.” Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has aptly termed this the “loudness gap.”

To counter it, Democrats must enlist an army of “trusted messengers and validators” in those spaces, Martin said, to “remind people who we are and what we’re fighting for.” Martin noted that during the campaign, Trump reached deep into various nonpolitical markets (as Ilyse Hogue details, Trump worked male-heavy audiences particularly hard). Democrats must find their own large niche audiences as a means to giving “people a sense that you’re one of them,” Martin said, adding: “It can’t be inauthentic.”

Importantly, Martin argues that the Democratic consultant class still remains too wedded to traditional paid advertising. During the campaign, some Democrats criticized the leading Super PAC, Future Forward, for spending too much on overly tested ads on network television. Martin declined to fault the group directly but said the party must reorient generally away from broadcast ads made by Democratic admakers.

This is the kind of attitude we need in our leadership, not the notion that we need to shut up about important issues where the Republicans are killing us in the media.

 

Reader Interactions

291Comments

  1. 1.

    The Audacity of Krope

    They’re both right. We should talk about immigration. And, when I do, I will denounce shit heels like Moulton.

    Adam Schiff stood up to Trump on X earlier today.

    Mighty generous interpretation of that Tweet.

  2. 2.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @The Audacity of Krope:

    Mighty generous interpretation of that Tweet.

    He stood up for Adam Schiff would be another way of saying it.  And I agree about Moulton, FWIW, but the anecdote is an interesting reveal.

  3. 3.

    Eric S.

    I’ve made a similar argument in my work. My company has a lot of state Gov’t regulation (and it’s a good thing! Most of the time.). We’ve had a lot of changes over past few years. When potential changes are discussed with regulators other companies like mine chime in a lot. We are always sitting quietly.

     

    It’s not a good strategy in our case to just filibuster these talks but we keep getting left behind when the decisions are made. And that, in a way, is where I agree with original post. The voters are marking descions on what they hear and when our side is silent they’ve got no need to even notice us.

  4. 4.

    JerseyBeard

    We win the fight by fighting it. Not fighting guarantees defeat. Democrats who aren’t willing to fight aren’t doing us any good. This is simple stuff.

  5. 5.

    lowtechcyclist

    This is the kind of attitude we need in our leadership, not the notion that we need to shut up about important issues where the Republicans are killing us in the media.

    Agreed

    ETA: Just heard “Voices Carry” for the first time in decades a couple days ago. Still sounds good.

  6. 6.

    Destroy Oh Boy

    The Democratic party has largely given in on several key issues. Immigration, guns, and hydraulic fracturing are a few. Immigration is a particularly thorny discussion because anything policy-wise that can be done will be effectively attacked in the space of public opinion. I do not think it was a winning argument that Trump had Congress kill the immigration reform bill. It just meant, to lower-information voters (the vast majority) that Trump has power to make things happen.

    I feel that this is the principle area of frustration and the arena for future Democratic messaging: power. MAGA messaging has effectively made institutional norms barriers to effective change. Dem messaging is focused on the fears and anxieties that arise from dismantling the norms. For example, when SCOTUS decided that the President has broad immunity, Biden responded by telling the public that he would not abuse his power. That was not received as a message of strength, but a out of touch fixation on a traditional executive branch that very few people understand or care about.

    In my opinion, Democratic messaging should be about providing powerful and engaging ideas. Propose popular vote changes to the Constitution, urban renewal, mass transit, and other ideas that propose sweeping reform and restoration. Most people are simply not interested in the very norms that also keep progress gridlocked. In short, Democrats have become far too conservative.

  7. 7.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @@mistermix.bsky.social: You’re definitely right. When you look at internal issues among Democrats, you would actually be presented with a raft of items where the media’s preferred “both sides” framing would actually be valid. Both sides have some good and some weak points. Of course, the media eschews such framing in these particular instances, choosing instead to work to mold the Democratic party in a way more to its own liking.

  8. 8.

    RepubAnon

    The codfish lays 10,000 eggs, the humble hen lays one. 

    The codfish never cackles, to show you what she’s done

    And so we scorn the codfish, while the humble hen we prize

    Which only goes to show you that it pays to advertise

    Something for Democrats to think about, remembering that the “liberal media “ was never very liberal

  9. 9.

    Gloria DryGarden

    I like that Martin is talking about branding, keeping our messaging out there. And

    what if all three of them have some position to help move this forward and toward rebuilding our policy platforms and branding, messaging and communication?

  10. 10.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Just heard “Voices Carry” for the first time in decades a couple days ago. Still sounds good.

    Aimee Mann is great, and it’s a good day when I can use one of her song lyrics for a post.

  11. 11.

    Belafon

    They would have to figure out a way to counter the ads that Republicans are putting out on broadcast tv, especially those on immigration and anti-trans ads. One of the Republican ads that played here in Texas had a woman stating that she would be mad if she found out that a school was giving her son hormone medications. As if schools are going to do that.

    Smarter people than me are going to have to figure out how to counter those ads without having them block back on the trans people, immigrants, or any other targeted group.

  13. 13.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Destroy Oh Boy:

    The Democratic party has largely given in on several key issues. Immigration, guns, and hydraulic fracturing are a few.

    I agree about immigration.  The party really needs to come up with an approach that will work here, but it ain’t easy.

    Fracking really isn’t even an issue anymore, so why would we want to bring it up? To tell voters that we want them to pay more for gasoline?  Fuhgeddaboutit.  It’s a bad thing to be doing wrt climate change, but we need a majority to be able to do anything at all.

    I don’t think the Democratic Party has given up on guns so much as there are so many issues in play these days that it’s gotten pretty much squeezed out of the discussion.  Good luck trying to bring it up unless a mass shooting has just happened.

  17. 17.

    Jeffro

    First Dem pol to come up with a catchy way to say “fuck trump” wins the 2028 nomination.  You heard it here first.

    (hint: it’s really just “fuck trump”)

  18. 18.

    Jeffro

    @Suzanne: Mrs Fro and I saw her in concert a few years ago – great show!

    I had no idea until a year or two ago that she’s the female vocalist on Rush’s “Time Stand Still”.  Which was already a cool song but is now that much cooler.  =)

  19. 19.

    Martin

    @JerseyBeard: What is ‘it’? Americans fairly broadly dislike partisanship so if ‘it’ is the GOP, that may not help apart from making partisan Dems happy.

    A lot of the feedback from the election was that voters don’t dislike Dem policies, but they disliked a lack of a plan to address the things they are unhappy about. Dems could oppose everything that doesn’t support their plan, but don’t they need a plan first?

  22. 22.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @lowtechcyclist: I agree about immigration. The party really needs to come up with an approach that will work here, but it ain’t easy.

    I don’t understand why. A better-resourced, rigorous, but flexible immigration system serves our security purposes, which is the Republicans’, and their voters’, theoretical concern. And though the border gets more attention than is warranted when compared to legal entries that overstay, I know, there still isn’t any reason that we can’t talk about actually useful physical security measures at the borders too.

    Wanting to know who enters and leaves your country is a valid concern. Simplifying the overall process so people are more willing to use it and finding a humane solution to the current undocumented population both help achieve this. But instead the debate is “they opened the border to everyone” vs. crickets.

  24. 24.

    Kathleen

    First, Will Bunch is a professional Democrat Hater.  Second, I don’t understand statement that Dems don’t have policy on immigration. There was a bipartisan immigration bill that was set to pass until Trump told Rethugs to vote no. Several Dems worked hard for many months on that bill. Doesn’t the existence of a “bill” indicate some kind of underlying “policy”? And is a “policy” without concrete actions useful? And in order to get policy with concrete actions don’t you need a bill that requires votes from Republicans which is what they had? I forgot to take my “How Democrats Disappointed Me Today” supplements so I’m sure I’m missing something

    OT – Also, I guess it’s OK for Bernie to be willing to work with Trump and Musk but not Democrats.

  25. 25.

    Martin

    @Jeffro: I would argue that ‘fuck billionaires’ is probably a VERY popular message. And you can then point out all the ways that Trump and his cabinet, Musk, Vivek etc are going to fuck them over, not because of Trumps personal characteristics (which is what Dems have been focusing on) but because he’s a greedy motherfucker that gets his wealth by fucking over the little guy.

    Dems never REALLY drilled in on how he would refuse to pay contractors and how Dems would protect small businesses and contractors from that. That would probably involve some kind of judicial reform because Trump’s strategy was to force them to sue him which would cost more than what they were owed, because paying legal fees isn’t a standard expectation in civil cases.

  27. 27.

    different-church-lady

    “We’re not defining them.

    Who has time for that when we need to spend it all helping MAGA define Biden?

  28. 28.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Baud: It was crickets.  Democrats sparred with Republicans over immigration in their official capacity. They weren’t making their case in the media. See the OP.

    Also, that connection I made between a functional system and the goal of security doesn’t look to be circulating among our politicians. I’ve only seen that posited in a handful of articles and online rando opinions. It seems obvious, though, and I think it could have legs, but Dems want to confirm to public opinion, not push it.

  29. 29.

    different-church-lady

    When it comes to immigration/border, once again it’s asymmetry: Democrats have to walk a tightrope between control and anti-xenophobia that Republicans/MAGA do not.

  31. 31.

    rikyrah

    Chris D. Jackson (@ChrisDJackson) posted at 0:43 PM on Mon, Dec 09, 2024:
     Ashley Biden shared a heartfelt Instagram post and photos from her journey with @POTUS @JoeBiden on his final international trip as president.

    She writes, “I will never forget those who have shown kindness and respect to my father  and to all those who haven’t.”   https://t.co/DdO9rYp4O2
    (https://x.com/ChrisDJackson/status/1866191922563305531?t=KFlOoqpuDQp7QxT4IuAfmA&s=03)

  32. 32.

    gene108

    I feel Joe Rogan’s become the boogeyman to people on our side as a MAGA goon, but he is not overtly political. I think his biggest problem is giving a platform to cranks and conspiracy theorists in some misguided effort to represent all sides of an issue. Otherwise his podcast is not nearly as bad as Howard Stern was in the 1980’s, though he attracts a similar demographic to the one Stern did back then.

    ****************

    The basic problem with Democratic message is an inability to clearly communicate “what’s in it for me”. How is giving amnesty to a bunch of illegal aliens, who broke the law coming here going to help me?

    A person could be from any walk of life – teacher, barber, small business owner, doctor, accountant, etc. – but that connection as to how protecting transgender rights is important to them or how immigration reform is important or how a better social safety net can help them in an emergency.

    Very very few people have met a transgender person, or actually interacted with someone here illegally, or whose life as fallen apart enough to actually need any government safety net programs from the ACA to Medicaid to SNAP, etc.

    Republicans paint a clear, though inaccurate picture, that immigrants are responsible for hundreds of thousands of crimes every year and the only way you can be secure is to deport them all. Transgender people are a threat because they want to turn your fine young son into a girl, or have someone else’s “boy” unfairly  compete against your daughter.

    I do not know how to fix this or what Democrats need to do.

    When Democrats have been in power, in recent years, they have been much more unified in their policies goals than Republicans have been. In communicating to voters, Republicans are much more unified than Democrats have ever been.

  35. 35.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @different-church-lady: When it comes to immigration/border, once again it’s asymmetry: Democrats have to walk a tightrope between control and anti-xenophobia that Republicans/MAGA do not.

    They don’t, though. It’s a false choice and it’s just allowed to continue to be presented this way because we don’t want to maybe upset someone or, worse, challenge them to think for half a second.

  36. 36.

    rikyrah

    2RawTooReal (@2RawTooReal) posted at 0:58 PM on Mon, Dec 09, 2024:
    Instead of being cowardly & shifting “WHITE” I mean right democrats need to learn from Vice President Kamala Harris. She’s not acting defeated. She’s not sacrificing her morals or belief’s in order to play along to get along with the incoming administration

    GROW A BACKBONE BITCH https://t.co/7SaqPrygY1
    (https://x.com/2RawTooReal/status/1866195836742287816?t=59vqJiCOotz0MsH4v_iVVA&s=03)

  38. 38.

    Gretchen

    The Washington Post is doing its part to misinform. 6 opinion pieces and 6 articles on the Hunter pardon the day after it happened. The day after Trump promises to jail his political opponents ( the same day Assad’s political opponents are being freed from prison), there’s one news article and no opinion pieces. That was just a little info from his interview, no more important than his tariff promises.

    Then they print what they describe as « smart ideas » from a Michigan roofer on how to solve the housing crisis. The guy has no idea that, even if Trump cared about people like him, he has no power over local zoning laws or mortgage rates. He also had no idea that Harris had a comprehensive plan to help him buy his first house, and Trump didn’t. WaPo didn’t feel it was their place to correct any of this. They just wrote down his misinformed ramblings and called it smart.  They also didn’t point out that the price of condos in this guy’s town start at less than the cost of his enormous truck and snowmobile. https://wapo.st/3D1W6mD

    Should be a gift link.

  39. 39.

    Martin

    @Kathleen: Second, I don’t understand statement that Dems don’t have policy on immigration.

    For one, Democrats didn’t argue it was their policy. They argued it was the GOPs policy and they agreed with it. That’s not a great campaign message, to say the least.

    Democrats don’t have anything to point to which says ‘here’s how we think the southern border should be handled’, ‘here’s how we would deport undocumented immigrants’ and handle the tricky space where the public is sympathetic to dreamers but not others. The public is probably looking for a ‘this feels fair’ answer for how certain classes of undocumented immigrants stay. And Dems have something of an answer there, but they’re also afraid to talk about any of this because they don’t have an ideological answer for immigration overall, and all of the secondary impacts from that. It’s hard.

    The GOP answer is easy, and easy to talk about. Dems need to find theirs, because it really is all over the place. The CBC has historically opposed immigration because immigrants competed for the kinds of jobs that black Americans can usually get. That’s softened, but the latino community has stepped into the same space. So even within the Democratic Party, it’s all over the place.

    I don’t see why a harder line on stopping undocumented immigration would hurt Dems. Sure, oppose a wall (because Dems have put themselves in a corner where they have to) but provide a solution. Hint: it can be a jobs program. Voters are amenable to jobs programs.

  40. 40.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: Hating on immigrants is pretty popular, the only good immigrants are their ancestors  who first came to the US.

    BTW Bernie Sanders was a hardline immigrant basher (but from the left) before he ran for President.

  41. 41.

    rikyrah

    Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) posted at 0:07 AM on Mon, Dec 09, 2024:
    Have you seen the new ad featuring a Black Mrs Claus being run in the UK by Boots? It’s being slammed by right-wing groups who say it’s racist against white folks. Sounds like the reaction we’d get if the ad were run here: ‘Too woke.’

    Anyway—unbothered, Merry Christmas, and https://t.co/qQT247OZnG
    (https://x.com/cwebbonline/status/1866001602894815480?t=f5iF1oBIh1BduLqLmhFPWQ&s=03)

  42. 42.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @Kathleen:

    OT – Also, I guess it’s OK for Bernie to be willing to work with Trump and Musk but not Democrats.

    Ro Khanna and Bernie’s Elon-curious tweets and statements are stupid.  It is not OK.

    That said, neither of those guys are part of the Democratic leadership.  What’s happening in the media is that Khanna (in particular) and probably Bernie are willing to say something when leadership is saying close to nothing.  So Khanna gets quoted and on the TV.  He’s a total pick-me, and he’s getting attention right now, and eating it up.

    Also, your bar for “Democrat Hater” is pretty low if you think Will Bunch is one.  Here are his latest columns: https://www.inquirer.com/author/bunch_will/ Not seeing a lot of Democrat hate there.  But I guess if any criticism of Democrats is out of bounds, he’s a hater.

  43. 43.

    WTFGhost

    Frankly, I think ‘Defund the Police” was a Republican messaging strategy that succeeded. It’s the sort of thing an empathic Democrat could *understand* intellectually, “reduce funding for cops, more funding for non-cop encounters that cops shouldn’t handle.” It also makes a great anti-dem soundbite.

    *THAT* is what Dem strategists should be afraid of: engagement that might be weaponized.

    I think what they have is the opposite fear, *THAT* engagement *WILL* be weaponized – if you stand up, that, by itself, will be weaponized.

    But as mentioned in the post, unanswered hate, like “kids identify as cats” is *believed*.

    That’s why “weird” was such an effective form of attack. “Kids? Identify as *CATS*? You fucking weirdo, kitty litter is so when a gunman charges the school, NORMAL SCARED KID HAVE A PLACE TO PEE WITHOUT A TOILET! What kind of SHITHEAD would think it’s about identifying as a fucking *cat*, jezum h criminy, mama mary ,and Joseph the carpenter, what kind of MORON… never mind. You’re probably ‘exceptional’ to your parents and special ed teacher.”

    THAT is how you wound MAGA.

    Also: don’t expect any politician to do that. That’s how activists speak. Politicians wait for hateful, nasty, despicable ACTIVISTS give politicians room to “compromise to shut them up for a bit.” Then, of course, they don’t shut up, and demand more.

    You don’t want to be rude and demanding and drawing hard and fast lines? Then, don’t be an activist, and make sure your sexual partners come pre-vetted, and I’m only half kidding. You don’t have to be rude and demanding and draw hard and fast lines if you and your partner are happy with plans and activity – but you need to be able to be all of those things if your partner might want to drag you down a lane you don’t want to go down – and yes, a partner can be trying to do that in thoughts it will make you both happy. Saying no to an eager, happy partner isn’t easy, especially if you need to be rude, demanding, and drawing a hard and fast line.

    Um. Do I need to explain that parable? Time and place for everything, etc.?

  46. 46.

    Gretchen

    The Pod Save guys lost me during the election. They supposedly wanted our side to win, but they kept taking shots at Biden during the whole election season, and now they’re smug about having been right all along.

    Our smartest strategists, AOC and Jasmine Crockett, never, ever take shots at their own side. They understand like most Democrats don’t that criticizing our own side weakens us. You never hear Republicans doing that.

    If you remember, AOCs first week in Congress, AOC participated in a climate sit-in at Pelosi’s office. I’m guessing Pelosi had a talk with her, and since then she’s she’s kept her criticisms private and her support public.

  49. 49.

    Suzanne

    @gene108:

    I feel Joe Rogan’s become the boogeyman to people on our side as a MAGA goon, but he is not overtly political. I think his biggest problem is giving a platform to cranks and conspiracy theorists in some misguided effort to represent all sides of an issue. Otherwise his podcast is not nearly as bad as Howard Stern was in the 1980’s, though he attracts a similar demographic to the one Stern did back then.

    Agree.
    Rogan is really a lifestyle influencer. His political leanings are a small part of that. People tune in to his podcast and only incidentally get political content.

    Not participating with people like this is an error. It would have been great to show young men how they can be into lifting and supplements and aliens and beer and vote for Democrats.

  50. 50.

    different-church-lady

    @gene108: This showed up three days ago on LGM, and it’s stuck in my mind (emphasis mine):

    Prospero’sGhost 

    +2 3 days ago

    No snark: but what MORE could Harris have offered the poors and the middle class?

    FFS, Trump LITERALLY ran on hate, vengeance, and downright evil. And won.

  51. 51.

    WTFGhost

    @@mistermix.bsky.social: But I guess if any criticism of Democrats is out of bounds, he’s a hater.

    Wow. Good, biting sarcasm. I don’t want to have a disagreement with *you* anytime soon… not if I cared about you and your opinion, at least.

  52. 52.

    The Truffle

    @WTFGhost: The best response is: “This a hoax, you housplant, just like the 910 other memes you’ve shared. Learn to use Google and maybe then you’ll be taken seriously.”

    But calling them weird works too. As in: “You should wear a tinfoil chapeau when saying that.

  53. 53.

    Motivated Seller

    Democrats have no answer for the “burn-it-down” vote. That is why Republican messaging has largely succeeded while Democratic messaging has not.  Per Ken Martin quote from above, “the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor.”

  54. 54.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Gretchen: If you remember, AOCs first week in Congress, AOC participated in a climate sit-in at Pelosi’s office. I’m guessing Pelosi had a talk with her, and since then she’s she’s kept her criticisms private and her support public.

    Pelosi from a few years ago should have had a talk with Pelosi in July.

  55. 55.

    sab

    @rikyrah: We really need to tie Congressional pension starting dates to Social Security starting dates.

    My mom lived to 85 and my dad to 99. And they left me an inheritance so I am okay.

    My husband’s dad died at 69 and his mom at 75. He is 73 and a third of his inner city parochial school high school clas has already died. His back is shot to hell from his blue collar job wear and tear and the last back surgery gave him a MRSA infection so he will be on strong antibiotics for the rest of his life, with the consequent stomach upsets and scheduling his daily life around the antibiotic regimen.

    So I am very sick and tired of hearing congressmen whine about Social Security and Medicare.

  56. 56.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @Gretchen:

    The Pod Save guys lost me during the election. They supposedly wanted our side to win, but they kept taking shots at Biden during the whole election season, and now they’re smug about having been right all along.

    I’m not a big fan, but I listened to this one because I wanted to hear what Moulton would say.  As messaging people (Favreau, Lovett and Pfeiffer for sure, don’t know about Vietor), they were super frustrated with Biden’s inability to message.  And that frustration definitely leaked out.

    @Martin:

    I don’t see why a harder line on stopping undocumented immigration would hurt Dems. Sure, oppose a wall (because Dems have put themselves in a corner where they have to) but provide a solution. Hint: it can be a jobs program. Voters are amenable to jobs programs.

    Having a jobs program would at least acknowledge the massive need for immigrant labor in the country, something that’s almost completely lost in the Republican messaging.

  57. 57.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @rikyrah: It’s not your money, Mark. You flaming asshole.

    Here’s a thought: For every year the retirement age gets moved back, multiple by three the number of terms it takes for Republican shits such as yourself in Congress to vest for your fucking pensions, but goddamned abomination.

    Now THAT is the language Democrats should bring to the SS fight. Hell, just REMINDING the American public about Congressional pay and pension would be worth it. How many of us, who pay for all of that, get pensions anymore

    ETA: Thanks rikyrah for bringing it to our attention.

  58. 58.

    WTFGhost

    @Gretchen: The Pod Save guys lost me during the election. They supposedly wanted our side to win, but they kept taking shots at Biden during the whole election season, and now they’re smug about having been right all along.

    Wise people are never smug about having been correct. If nothing else, wisdom teaches you that people don’t *like* smug jerkoffs. If my mental masturbation comes up with a lovely orgasm, wisdom tells me I don’t think average people want to see it.

    On the other hand, if I speak wisdom, I want people to wish they *had* listened to me – smugness does exactly the opposite.

  59. 59.

    Martin

    @different-church-lady: Democrats don’t need to walk that tightrope. We don’t need to fight anti-xenophobia around immigration. We choose to. We can fight that elsewhere.

    That was also part of the message – voter felt that when they wanted the border secure, we were calling them racist – even when the person wanting that was latino. This is Democrats projecting our biases too broadly onto the electorate. Yes, a lot of Republicans are racist. No, everyone asking for border security is racist. We often projected the former bias onto the latter population, rather than engage with border security on its own terms.

    Note, Californians are bad people to look for answers on this because we’ve built economies here in CA where immigration is viewed as broadly beneficial. Every home owner here has hired a gardener, tree trimmer, painter, etc that was undocumented. Every one. And if the payoff for undocumented immigration are cheap services, and it doesn’t undercut the larger job market, then sure, don’t worry about it. So we don’t. Ask Texas latinos what they think the border policy should be. They’ll tell you. It’ll probably be pretty reasonable.

    And we’ve always had ways to earn citizenship. So lay those out. Serving in the military has always been one. Champion that. Trump is talking about giving green cards to college grad, which is a VERY democratic themed policy, that I didn’t see Democrats advance. Democrats can also pile on that these need to be administratively efficient to do. No doing the military service and then having to wait 5 years for the court to process the green card.

    Dems lately tend to talk about the policy in meta terms, but not in concrete ones. We need this, without staying what it should be. They were better at talking in concrete terms a decade ago but I think they let Trump dictate the terms of the debate. He’s pretty good at that.

  60. 60.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Martin:

    I would argue that ‘fuck billionaires’ is probably a VERY popular message.

    I’ve always said Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure.  And that simple message does resonate with certain people.

    But this election has disabused me of my previous notion as stated by you.  We worship money in this country and in a broad sense define “success” in terms of “how much money does someone have?” and saw that play out in spades.

    Admittedly, about half this country does feel the way many of us do vis a vis billionaires but the other half sure as hell don’t.  Thus, I’m beginning to see that message as not resonating with the kinds of voters we’re looking to either a) peel off, or b) get off their asses and vote.

  62. 62.

    WTFGhost

    @The Truffle: Pointing out the sheer, gross, stupidity of the grossest stupidity helps with the person feeling they just pantsed themselves, and instead of their mooning getting applause, they just are standing there bare-assed.

    You *did* have it right, that I was holding it back for the 910th or so batch – no need to shame someone for their first urban legend. My humble opinion, anyway.

  63. 63.

    trollhattan

    @Suzanne:

    Good to know.

    She was very good the one time I saw her and my crush increased after that show, if that’s even possible. Good to know she’s still performing, doesn’t seem to come west often.

  64. 64.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @WTFGhost:

    Wow. Good, biting sarcasm. I don’t want to have a disagreement with *you* anytime soon… not if I cared about you and your opinion, at least.

    Hmm, the person I was responding to mentioned that she hadn’t taken her “How Democrats Disappointed Me Today” supplements,  and also labeled one of the few columnists who I think has reasonable pro-Democratic (or at least pro-liberal) takes as a Democrat hater.

    But, please continue about my injection of sarcasm into the conversation.  And be sure to ignore that I responded reasonably to her other point about Bernie/Ro Khanna.

  66. 66.

    Miss Bianca

    @Gretchen:

    Our smartest strategists, AOC and Jasmine Crockett, never, ever take shots at their own side. They understand like most Democrats don’t that criticizing our own side weakens us. You never hear Republicans doing that.

    Yes. Funny how it’s the “young gun” Democratic electeds who are women of color who get that when so many others don’t, isn’t it?

  67. 67.

    sab

    @WTFGhost: My Black Congresswoman ran in a purple mostly  urban district on more funding for police. Her opponent was a known Republican person. And she won. And we had had a horrible unjustified police shooting of a young man that led to weeks of protests and both the police chief and the mayor resigning.

    People want police and police funding. They just don’t want police escalating bad situations and killing innocent citizens.

    I am old. All the police I know worked most of their careers without Scalia’s stupid qualified immunity, and they would be happy to see it gone. They never did anything where it would have been needed.

    ETA As you said, defund the police hasn’t been a Democratic thing anywhere except in a handful of districts.

  68. 68.

    Gretchen

    @WTFGhost: Yes! I wish they hadn’t told Walz to stop saying weird – it was working! AOC gets this. The day Nancy Mace made 200+ tweets about her new transgender colleague, AOC went after her for wanting to do genital inspections on little girls and asked who would be in charge of the panty checks. Mace went completely silent for a couple of days, and then went on Fox News complaining that AOC mischaracterized her. She didn’t explain how she planned to gate-keep the bathrooms, though.

  70. 70.

    tam1MI

    @Gretchen: The Washington Post is doing its part to misinform. 6 opinion pieces and 6 articles on the Hunter pardon the day after it happened. The day after Trump promises to jail his political opponents ( the same day Assad’s political opponents are being freed from prison), there’s one news article and no opinion pieces. That was just a little info from his interview, no more important than his tariff promises.

    Which is why Job 1 of every Dem in this country should be to drive the Washington Post and other Legacy Media outlets of their ilk out of business.

  72. 72.

    Belafon

    @The Audacity of Krope: challenge them to think for half a second

    I have a cousin who I have challenged to think for a little bit, and it fails. She posted anti-trans memes (have you seen the one with a trans-woman holding two beach balls asking how many balls are in the picture?), anti-immigration memes, both of which I pushed back on, all the while liking my statements about how the health insurance system is not helping people.

  73. 73.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @WTFGhost:

    Hey, friend, I said I didn’t want even a minor disagreement. You’d hurt my feelings, and I don’t want that.

    LOL OK – I’ll stop while feelings are still intact.

  74. 74.

    lowtechcyclist

    @The Audacity of Krope:

    I don’t understand why. A better-resourced, rigorous, but flexible immigration system serves our security purposes, which is the Republicans’, and their voters’, theoretical concern. And though the border gets more attention than is warranted when compared to legal entries that overstay, I know, there still isn’t any reason that we can’t talk about actually useful physical security measures at the borders too.

    Wanting to know who enters and leaves your country is a valid concern. Simplifying the overall process so people are more willing to use it and finding a humane solution to the current undocumented population both help achieve this.

    You just demonstrated why.  If you were a Dem politician saying what’s in that quote box to a voter, he would be lost by the end of it, and would just assume you’d thrown a bunch of gobbledygook and bullshit at him. You might as well have said nothing, and this wouldn’t have a prayer against “Dems are for open borders.”

  76. 76.

    rikyrah

    Kenny BooYah!  (@KwikWarren) posted at 5:26 AM on Mon, Dec 09, 2024:
    I don’t think ppl voted4fascism—most Shitler voters don’t even know what that is. They voted4white patriarchal supremacy&Christian nationalism. But they’re gonna get fascism, mixed w/plutocracy. And all those poor&middle class suckers who voted4Shitler are gonna suffer too.
    (https://x.com/KwikWarren/status/1866081921756782673?s=02)

  77. 77.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Belafon: You can bring a person to knowledge, but you can’t make them think. You can, however, repeat the process until they figure it out. Once they start replicating it on their own, they’re free, independent, and you likely don’t have to worry about such nonsense going forward.

  78. 78.

    tam1MI

    @The Audacity of Krope: Pelosi from a few years ago should have had a talk with Pelosi in July.

    She’s old and her judgement is faltering. She should step down from her seat and let someone younger and more on the ball take over.

  79. 79.

    Gretchen

    @Chief Oshkosh: Good idea. Normal people have to work 20 or more years for the few pensions that still exist. Congresspeople qualify after age 62 and 5 years of service. That should be an issue if they want us to work all our lives until we’re past 70.

    And the pensions are pretty generous – they average $85,000 for the state pension program or $45,000 for the one that also lets you contribute to Social Security.

  80. 80.

    Martin

    @Baud: Failure to make progress on the issue. Voters like most dem positions on guns, but that story showing police selling machine guns they can legally acquire speaks to the broader problem I’m mentioning. What’s the point of ‘comprehensive background checks’ when the chief of police is selling a legally acquired machine gun out of the trunk of his car and the federal government is powerless to detect, let alone stop that?

    Incremental ideas only sell if the status-quo is working as advertised and is ready to implement the new idea. I sure doesn’t look that it is to voters, and that the correct idea is to make the status quo work as advertised. It’s hard to sell the public that we should give chances to asylum seekers if the government is failing to meet the basic needs it promised to citizens. I’m reminded of one of AOCs Trump voters who was upset about asylum seekers getting resources when he (also an immigrant, possibly originally an asylum seeker himself) was working 3 jobs and struggling to make rent. It’s easy to interpret that as an ‘I’m opposed to immigrants’ message, when it’s really a ‘why can’t we make housing affordable’ message. That’s particularly true when we have an easy answer for the former (you’re racist) and don’t for housing.

  81. 81.

    Suzanne

    @zhena gogolia: So what? Go talk to him anyway. He has a huge listenership.

    We should never walk away from an opportunity to vigorously and passionately talk about our values.

  82. 82.

    karen marie

    “Ken Martin … understands the assignment”

    Yeah, okay, sure.

    From 2021:

    “[Jaime] Harrison [elected as DNC chair in 2021], who cut his teeth working as political floor director for Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., when he was House majority whip, ….  “We were in a ditch,” [Tom] Perez told NBC recently of the state of the party when he took over [in February 2017]. “We had to earn trust back.”

    “After winning the election [to run the DNC], Perez’s immediate response was to make a motion to suspend the rules and recreate the (largely ceremonial) role of deputy chair, and to install [Keith] Ellison [who lost to Perez] into the office.”

    Democratic leaders have an affliction that makes them forget that their fucking job is to engage and recruit party members and support and promote party positions.  This goes doubly so for chairs of the DNC.  Where the fuck is the DNC?  They’re playing fucking games, creating “largely ceremonial” positions for their friends.

    None of the motherfuckers currently running for DNC chair are going to do jack, because ignoring – and denigrating – the Democratic base is the real qualification for that office, no matter what high-minded bullshit they spout in the runup.

  83. 83.

    Geminid

    @Gretchen: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez was very critical of the Infrastructure bill before and after it was passed without her vote in November, 2021.

    That was a good piece of legislation. For instance, it included $10 billion in funding for New York City’s Metropolitan tTransit Authority, which could be a reason she finally gave up trying to persuade Democrats that a win was actually a loss.

  84. 84.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @lowtechcyclist: That was the detailed view, but it can be distilled down a lot.

    The simple “a functioning immigration system makes us safe” gets all the basics of that across and if people want to understand why, that’s where you dive into the particular arguments.

  85. 85.

    lowtechcyclist

    @West of the Rockies:

    I found it a little weird that the song Voices Carry was by the group Voices Carry from the album… Voices Carry. 

    The name of the group was ‘Til Tuesday.

    ETA: Old School got there first.

  86. 86.

    Gretchen

    @zhena gogolia: Rogan’s feelings were hurt that Harris wouldn’t travel to his studio and give him 3 hours the last week of the campaign, while Trump went to him and gave him the whole 3 hours. Narcissists gotta narcissist.

  87. 87.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @karen marie:

    None of the motherfuckers currently running for DNC chair are going to do jack, because ignoring – and denigrating – the Democratic base is the real qualification for that office, no matter what high-minded bullshit they spout in the runup.

    Wickler, my pick FWIW, has a long history of engaging with the base in Wisconsin.  I don’t know about Ken Martin, just thought what he said made sense.  We’ll see.  I don’t know what the role of the modern DNC will be since a lot of the fundraising in the Democrats’ world is via Act Blue and doesn’t go through the party apparatus.

  88. 88.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: Voters believe that the rich should pay their fair share of taxes.  They also believe that taxes and regulations are the only thing preventing them from becoming Billionaires.  They see no contradiction in holding both views.  Most voters don’t have coherent stances.  Donald Trump is extremely pro-Billionaire and mainly became famous for the public perception that he is one.  His administration will be full of them, as he promised.  I’m extremely skeptical that Anti-Billionaire messaging is the One Weird Trick™ for capturing normie, unaffiliated, infrequent, non-voters etc.  Too many people in our electorate (even people with liberal social views) admire (or even worship) Business-Owners and see Billionaires as the best examples of that category.

  89. 89.

    Martin

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: 5 years ago I think you were right. Since Covid, that has changed a LOT. Republicans used to support corporations – like 65% favorable pre-Covid. It’s 25% now. Democrats have a slightly more favorable view of corporations now.

    Billionaires have similarly fallen off a cliff – with pretty even support/opposition 5 years ago, and their support is collapsing.

    I don’t fully understand what mechanic is driving that collapse in support – I don’t think anyone does – just that it’s there. 5 years ago taxing billionaires more was popular (45%) and now it’s almost 70%. Something has changed pretty recently – and it’s changed much more on the GOP side than on the Dem side.

    Our bias that the GOP is the party of big business is true with current elected officials, but not with voters. JD Vance is more supportive of Lina Khan breaking up companies than a lot of Dem lawmakers are – and that seems pretty representative of young Republicans. The old stereotypes don’t hold. We need to reevaluate them.

  90. 90.

    lowtechcyclist

    @The Audacity of Krope:

    The simple “a functioning immigration system makes us safe” gets all the basics of that across

    You’re expecting “a functioning immigration system” to mean something to people?

    and if people want to understand why, that’s where you dive into the particular arguments.

    Most people aren’t going to bother to ask “WTF do you mean by that?”

    And of course if it’s a TV or radio commercial or a bumper sticker, they can’t anyway.

  92. 92.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Gretchen: Rogan never really wanted to have Harris on.  If it happened they wouldn’t have talked politics but about other bullshit.  He certainly wouldn’t nod and agree and let her give her sales pitch the way he did for Trump.  He brought up the idea of her coming on the show as an exercise in performative impartiality.

  94. 94.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @karen marie:  None of the motherfuckers currently running for DNC chair are going to do jack, because ignoring – and denigrating – the Democratic base is the real qualification for that office, no matter what high-minded bullshit they spout in the runup.

    Is just cynicism run amok or do have specific information that you would be willing to share?

  95. 95.

    Gretchen

    @karen marie: Ben Wikler has done a great job in Wisconsin getting voter registration and turnout infrastructure effective in Wisconsin. Why do you think he’d forget how to do that if he had a national position?

  96. 96.

    Steve LaBonne

    Yet once again I will point out that a significant weakness of our political system is that the party that doesn’t control the White House has no natural leader / spokesperson. (Trump was the exception because he had a stranglehold on the Republican Party even when out of office- we have nobody like that, thank goodness.) This is always a guaranteed source of frustration.

  97. 97.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @lowtechcyclist: You’re expecting “a functioning immigration system” to mean something to people?

    We live in a world with how much gobbledegook from Republicans and you think that’s too difficult to understand? Most people who are interested enough to care have an idea of what a functioning immigration system would look like. To some degree, they’ll impute their own meaning and that’s OK.

    But it’s simple, serves our policy position, and explicitly rebuts the line of attack against us. I’m not particular about the exact wording, people can play. But it also happens to be the truth and a damn good reason to have responsible people making our policy decisions instead of of demagogues.

  98. 98.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @UncleEbeneezer:

    Voters believe that the rich should pay their fair share of taxes… I’m extremely skeptical that Anti-Billionaire messaging is the One Weird Trick™ for capturing normie, unaffiliated, infrequent, non-voters etc. Too many people in our electorate (even people with liberal social views) admire (or even worship) Business-Owners and see Billionaires as the best examples of that category.

    Oh, I’ve absolutely come to the same conclusion vis a vis anti-billionaire messaging as not resonating.

    As for taxing the rich, I know we’ve had plenty of Dem pols with national profiles (Warren and AOC to name just two) preach that but try to find that as some universal core messaging bullet point within the Dem Party and it effectively goes nowhere because of the baked in trickle-down, Laughernomics that underpins a ton of what many self-professed progressives pitch–and the sources of that crap come from the uber-rich. And it’s in soooo much of what Democrats and Democrat-adjacents push.

    I can go all Horseshoe Lefty on how big money controls both parties, yada, yada, yada, but when you see the lack of singular, powerful messaging on this (as opposed to the typical Dem nuanced messaging along the lines of “make them pay their fair share”), it does make me wonder.

  99. 99.

    rikyrah

    Charles Kuck (@ckuck) posted at 8:25 AM on Mon, Dec 09, 2024:
    Because Trump will be issuing an executive order on January 20, 2025, ordering the Department of State to stop issuing US Passports to children born in the US to undocumented parents, and possibly even to parents on nonimmigrant visas, it is essential that those children be applying for US Passports immediately, using the expedite option from Department of State.

    It is also highly likely that he will order USCIS to refuse to accept Form I-130 petitions from US citizen children for undocumented parents. So, file the Petitions now!

    I have no doubt that the courts will strike this down as unconstitutional, but it will not be a fast fight.

    travel.state.gov/content/travel…
    (https://x.com/ckuck/status/1866127152946520469?t=XwCsu-Wf3xHjYF7AJFHCyA&s=03)

  103. 103.

    Martin

    @rikyrah: Lack of an acknowledgment and plan for institutional reform creates the space for that to happen. DOGE is the only reform program being offered up, because Dems have been too reflexively defensive.

    Dems need a contrasting effort to DOGE. It doesn’t need to call for massive defunding of the government, but it does need to lay out a program of reform of means while establishing a defense of the ends that Democrats want to protect.

    Dems in vulnerable districts who want to respond to calls for reform kind of have no Democratic initiative to hang off of. They’re also terrified of the idea that shrinking some of these program might make them work better (note: HUD pretty much doesn’t build housing or do urban development any more) and validate the GOP ‘small government’ idea. So I think they get forced into defending bad programs.

  105. 105.

    karen marie

    @@mistermix.bsky.social: Fundraising goes through ActBlue and not the “party apparatus,” because there is no “party apparatus” other than – in isolated areas – people doing their best on a local, state/county level.

    As far as I’m concerned, the DNC may as well not exist.  Every paid position in the DNC appears to be a make-work reward for people loyal to the previous group of people who failed to do what is necessary to succeed.

  106. 106.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Martin: Dems need a contrasting effort to DOGE.

    They’ve long had that. Their own attorneys general have shown excellent results everywhere I looked finding billions of dollars of abuse of government programs. See, Kamala Harris.

    People don’t care about billions of dollars of recovered waste, they care that someone they see as undeserving gets a hospital bed for a night and Medicaid covered it.

  107. 107.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @karen marie:

    As far as I’m concerned, the DNC may as well not exist.  Every paid position in the DNC appears to be a make-work reward for people loyal to the previous group of people who failed to do what is necessary to succeed.

    If Wikler wins, I’ll be interested to see if this pattern continues.  I don’t know Martin, and I’m guessing O’Malley is more of the institutionalist who would continue current DNC practice.

  108. 108.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @Martin:

    Lack of an acknowledgment and plan for institutional reform creates the space for that to happen. DOGE is the only reform program being offered up, because Dems have been too reflexively defensive.

    Some folks are having a discussion about Herbert Hoover on Bluesky, and it reminded me that Truman actually liked Hoover and thought he had gotten some bad luck along with the obvious bad judgment Hoover showed.  Anyway, Truman appointed Hoover to a government waste and fraud commission of some kind.  Different times but I thought it was an interesting story.

  109. 109.

    Captain C

    @sab: The reply when Rethugs say “Democrats want to defund the police” is “No, Democrats want better policing.”  Every.  Fucking.  Time.  (Yeah, I know, message discipline.)

    Also, “You guys just keep making shit up.”  (Which should be a part of every reply to Rethug lies.)  If the FTFNYT or suchlike get the vapors, all the better.

  110. 110.

    Captain C

    @Gretchen:

    I wish they hadn’t told Walz to stop saying weird

    That was a really stupid own goal.  We need to ditch the milquetoast, cowering consultant class posthaste.

  111. 111.

    cmorenc

    @rikyrah: Actually, the public (including most of her base supporters) aren’t hearing squat out if Harris since the day after nov 5th, so her alleged attitude of fierce resistance to the incoming Trump Admin isn’t breaking through to anyone outside those in her inner circle.

  112. 112.

    Captain C

    @rikyrah:

    And all those poor&middle class suckers who voted4Shitler are gonna suffer too.

    If they were the only ones suffering, I’d be fine with that.  Unfortunately, a lot of good people who don’t deserve it will also suffer.

  114. 114.

    WTFGhost

    @Martin: I think we (liberal-supporters) might want to think of two types of shots.

    If AOC makes you feel like crap for a lack of full throated support for transgender rights, that’s *one* kind of shot to take.

    If she makes you feel like crap because you had to vote against ONE bill, because it contained a poison pill (for you), that’s another kind of shot to take.

    Fun Fact in the 1960s, the “good shot” to take, and the “bad shot” to take, would have resembled each other – but the side in favor of civil rights was factually and historically correct. Remember: during the inquisition, the sound moderate thought we oughtn’t burn *too many* heretics, and only radicals said “maybe we shouldn’t burn… any… heretics? Just a thought experiment!”

    I don’t *know* AOC, but, she sounds like the kind of person I *hope* is taking the right shots, even if they’re sometimes “you know you need to integrate schools, or Black students won’t ever get good educations” – a *nasty* shot in the 60s, for some.

  115. 115.

    cmorenc

    @UncleEbeneezer: Harris should have gone on Rogan for the full 3 hours.  Her handling of an adversarial interview with Brett Bair on Fox indicates she could handle the give and take of Rogan, even when he tried to challenge her talking points.  She could have held the upper hand while humanizing herself with his huge audience, and made it much more difficult to paint her as a cartoon figure to that audience.

  116. 116.

    WTFGhost

    @The Audacity of Krope: To be brutal, I think, if you want Republicans to understand, you need to be like, “Republicans don’t give a damn about immigration; they just hate Mexicans and Latin Americans.”

    Force *them* to create the image of a “functioning immigration system” to prove they aren’t hateful bigots. “Mass deportation, including of *US CITIZENS*, is all they want!”

    And don’t have any sympathy for your Repub friend who says “dude, you make me sound like a bigot!” to which you should say “politics ain’t beanbag” which is kinder than “fuck your feelings.”

  117. 117.

    Martin

    @Baud: See, I think that’s a mischaracterization.

    There’s a recurring dynamic in business where a company will neglect its core market to chase a new market, the new market fails to materialize, and they get overrun in their core market because of the neglect.

    I think that’s kind of the trap Dems fell into. The machine is falling into neglect, and Dems are advancing a message of moving forward. And voters are saying ‘no, no, you gotta fix the machine first’. They (narrowly) chose Trump hoping he’d fix the machine because he was pointing out the ways in which it was broken. He wasn’t calling for burning it down, not really. We saw that he’d burn it down if given the chance, but a lot of voters didn’t see that. Their views on protecting Social Security are pretty clear – and yet that’s what they’re going after – against the wishes of voters.

  118. 118.

    gvg

    I am not sure immigration is comparable to trans rights.

    The problem I see is that a lot of democrats, especially pro labor lower and middle class are not really pro-immigration and have not been for a long time. Nobody is really except really serious liberals and economists. Probably also historians. People have an instinctive tribal response every time money gets hard to earn, to not want more people to come in and lower the value of their labor. It is not exactly incorrect, but short sighted. It does have to be done a better way and not the way we have been doing it (under the table).

    The way we have been doing it is essentially setting up a black market of exploitable workers who are like scabs that undercut union labor. They need to be legal and paid the same so that they can call the cops for law breaking and the only point of hiring them is really that there aren’t enough Americans which now that we are really past the Baby booms working years should be the case.

    Employers will howl but they are going to anyway because the demographics say labors value is going up and they haven’t adjusted to that yet. In a lot of ways the sheer numbers of BB’s worked against them economically even though that wasn’t the usual narrative. The later ones more than the early ones of course.

    I have been listening to other democratic voters who aren’t as engaged for years and immigration is not really popular and never has been. Being nice is. Treating people politely is, but not increasing that much more immigration, not fighting to fund more staff for processing. They want to buy America. They do also care about energy efficiency and cars that work plus climate etc and are personal friends with immigrants, but they are easily scared by ….not too extreme immigration scenarios.

    When I was young, there seemed to be more movies on that celebrated America’s immigration heritage and what it had gave us. Also sort of pointing out how other countries that didn’t accept outsiders fell behind us (Nahnah!). I guess that counts as propaganda but I feel the money results support this point of view and wish we were making this effort. Not politicians speeches, but getting certain movie types and stories on the airwaves over and over for years to counteract…..what I think are some false tropes such as ticking time bombs justifying torture or anti women’s rights.

  120. 120.

    Baud

    @Martin:

    I’m not blaming us if voters chose not to believe us. I think he’s going to burn it all down, so we’ll see how voters respond.

    ETA: pretty weird to see the argument that Trump won based on modest reform rather than upending the system

  121. 121.

    gvg

    @cmorenc: He did not offer her an interview until the last few days of the campaign when she did not have time to do what he wanted which was hours of her time. Either he was really arrogant about a Presidential candidate’s time or he really did not want her and only made an offer he knew she had to turn down. That was not a real chance so forget it.

  123. 123.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @WTFGhost: I mean, that’s kind of the point. Republicans are bigots. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t non-bigoted reasons to want border security. I’ve been at “they’re lying and actively avoid fixing it” since Dubya. I just get whatabouts for Democrats.

    The simple truth is no Democrats are for open borders and the fact that they run away from serious debate on the issue just concedes the point anyway. Humane immigration reform would be a win for everyone except for the greedy and hateful. There’s no reason to run.

  124. 124.

    Suzanne

    The best tweet on this:

    We are finally on the verge of learning, once and for all, if Italians are white

    As a Spaghetti-American, I laughed incredibly hard at this.

  128. 128.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Suzanne: One of my favorite Simpsons jokes is when they are in an Italian restaurant and the waiter is this over-the-top, stereotypically Italian-American guy talking with the overblown accent etc., and a man stands up and says “As president of the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League…this really burns my cannoli!“

  129. 129.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @WTFGhost: Another way to look at it is whether her vote was a symbolic protest vote or a vote that tanked an important piece of legislation.

    In this case, the bill passed, despite her and her allies protest vote.

    AOC has made statements about her view of her role in the party – basically, if this were a parliamentary democracy, she’d be in a different party than the Democrats, similar to, say, the NDP in Canada.  But that’s not how our democracy works, so she’s a Democrat but opposes some of what more center-left Democrats want to do.  So, yeah, she’s going to be critical of other Democrats.

  132. 132.

    karen marie

    @Martin:   Except that this is nothing new.  They’ve done this every election cycle for the last 20 years and counting.  “Fell into a trap.”  Give me a fucking break.  There is no “trap.”  Dem “leadership” has made this choice again and again and again, and failed again and again and again, without learning a fucking thing.  You’d think they’d glance over at Republicans who feed their base at every opportunity and realize what they need to do, but you’d think wrong.

  133. 133.

    kindness

    There was a reason Trump told House & Senate Republicans to kill the immigration compromise they had worked up with Democrats.  We all saw it happen.  The MSM talked about the bill tanking for a week and then  went right back to parroting Trump/Republican rhetoric  never mentioning that Trump killed the most conservative immigration bill that was ever able to pass.  The MSM is a problem for Democrats.  The MSM will never admit they love their Republican Daddies but we can see it when they squeal like little children around them.

  134. 134.

    Martin

    @The Audacity of Krope: That’s weak. Harris’s signature accomplishment in CA was the $25B settlement with lenders after 2008. But CA homeowners lost WAY more than $25B and that didn’t remotely make people whole.

    In the aftermath it was clear that the government had no fucking idea what was happening in the housing/financial market – Bernacke was still saying the sector was healthy up until nearly the end.

    A plan can’t be ‘we’ll claw back 5 cents on the dollar and distribute 4 to the people who were harmed’. Reform needs to be preventing the abuse in the first place, providing for proper recovery for people harmed, etc.

    They also care that some billionaire got away with it. And they always get away with it. If we can’t control costs by reigning in the greed at the top, of course they’re going to turn to the perceived waste at the bottom. So when the GOP point out the latter, Dems reflexively defend it as not a problem. They never say ‘we’ll tackle the millions lost by giving beds to undeserving people when we’ve tackled the billions that the CEOs are stealing from the taxpayer’. That would be useful, but they never say that, and they never follow through on that. The AG work is useful but’s it’s small when it happens and it’s very irregular. Some stuff never gets done because the volume of fraud is so high. Wasn’t that the excuse around holding the Jan 6 people to account – DOJ was overwhelmed with the volume of cases?

  135. 135.

    cmorenc

    @gvg: Gee, all that time doing rallies in Pa, Mi & Wi sure proved to be a better use of her time than 3 hrs spent instead chatting with Rogan /snark …That’s 3 free hours of media reaching 20-30 million voters instead of folks who were going to turn out for her anyways.  Even if the overall time overhead would have been more like 6-8 hourd.

  136. 136.

    Baud

    I can’t believe we’ve replaced “she didn’t go to Wisconsin” with “she didn’t go on Rogan.”

    Online analysis is really not superior to pundit analysis. It’s just more interactive.

  137. 137.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Martin: I agree with you wholeheartedly that the Democrats aren’t doing enough on this front, but they’re also the only ones doing anything.

    Repeat ad infinitum for all aspects of American politics.

    ETA: Also I really don’t think even if the Democrats were able to prevent most of the abuse up front and recover every penny of the rest, it would even then overcome the image of the undeserving other on the dole.

  139. 139.

    Baud

    Uh oh. We’re headed to permanent minority status.

    BREAKING: Tim Walz’s daughter Hope says that her “red flag” for dating a man is if he listens to Joe Rogan because it means he “probably isn’t a great person” and his “values” won’t “align” with hers.
    This rule has “never failed” her and her friends.

    Like and share if you love this rule!

    [image or embed]

    — Occupy Democrats (@occupydemocrats.bsky.social) Dec 9, 2024 at 11:57 AM

  141. 141.

    Martin

    @@mistermix.bsky.social: I think it’s a much broader problem than just the DNC. A lot of this community demands the same thing. There was a reflexive opposition to AOC when she was challenging the Dem incumbent, not because her ideas were unpopular (I don’t think most people weighing in had any idea what the varying ideas were) but because barring some overt flaw, incumbency carries its own value and we defend that value.

    Republicans fear a primary from the right because their electorate seems to view establishment as an undesirable trait. Dems fear a primary from the right because we value establishment and fear a rightward policy shift by the electorate. Dems never fear a primary from the left because we are centrists to the end.

  142. 142.

    Jinchi

    Agreed, I’m ready for the Democrats to start showing that they’ll fight for people they consider their constituents, and stop looking for ways to heal the partisan divide that Republicans are invested in perpetuating. I still think the biggest “own goal” the Democrats made was forfeiting the vast majority of the Muslim vote by never figuring out how to speak about Gaza with compassion for the civilian population.

  145. 145.

    Baud

    @Martin:

    There was a reflexive opposition to AOC when she was challenging the Dem incumbent

     

    ???

    Speaking for myself, the first time I heard of AOC is when she actually won. And I recall people here being kind of excited about it.

  146. 146.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Jinchi: I still think the biggest “own goal” the Democrats made was forfeiting the vast majority of the Muslim vote by never figuring out how to speak about Gaza with compassion for the civilian population.

    Apparently agreeing with Republicans that everyone questioning our policy of arming Israel is anti-Semitic and that our nation’s students deserve to be harassed and assaulted by random MAGAts wasn’t the messaging coup they thought it was.

  147. 147.

    Captain C

    @Baud: Just waiting for the FTFNYT op-ed piece about how young liberal women really ought to be happy servicing retrograde young men who want to demean, abuse, and control them for…reasons.

    Probably co-written by Bobo, Chunky Reese, and Dowd.

  148. 148.

    Suzanne

    @Baud:

    Apparently, he’s a rich dude, so definitely white. 

    But the CEO was a Mashed-Potato-American! That’s even whiter!

    I could insert a joke about white-on-white crime here. I am genuinely feeling bad for the guy, though. Apparently he injured his back, and had surgery, and it didn’t help. He was apparently in terrible pain, fell into psychedelics as a way to cope, and apparently had a psychiatric break.

  150. 150.

    cmorenc

    @Baud: Because not going on Rogan is an obvious missed opportunity compared to the umpteenth rally in Michigan or Wisconsin with those same several hours.  She would have handled Rogan well and didn’t need to favorably impress but a very modest portion of his audience to pick up a lot of the difference she lost by in the upper midwest.

  153. 153.

    Baud

    @cmorenc:

    I don’t give campaign advice or analysis. I haven’t done that research.

    Maybe the problem is that conservative policies are,.on average, more popular than either centrist or leftist policies.

  154. 154.

    lowtechcyclist

    @The Audacity of Krope: ​
     

    We live in a world with how much gobbledegook from Republicans and you think that’s too difficult to understand?

    It’s IMPOSSIBLE to understand, because it can mean a whole shitload of very different things. We could have functioning immigration systems that will take almost anyone who can find work picking strawberries, or functioning immigration systems that only let MDs and computer scientists in, or whatever.

    But your normie isn’t going to get even that far. He’s just going to register it as meaningless to him, and not give it another thought.

  156. 156.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Baud: Maybe the problem is that conservative policies are,.on average, more popular than either centrist or leftist policies.

    Never seems that way when they poll the policies, only when candidates come into the picture.

  157. 157.

    WTFGhost

    @The Audacity of Krope: My thoughts are, right now, the burden is on the people who are constantly defending against it.

    We are defending against arguments regarding the border. Rationality won’t help, anything we do will be called “open borders” anyway.

    Reverse the pressure: “You don’t care about the f’ing *border*, you want you cars and trucks, and OH YES, your fentanyl, coming across, YOU JUST HATE MEXICANS!”

    Make them prove they don’t hate Mexicans, by proposing legal immigration. Just like they want us to collapse on the border, by saying anything we do is “open borders.”

    Technically, people who do this are supposed to be called “journalists”, but that word has clearly changed its meanings since the natives of this land first coined it.

  158. 158.

    tobie

    @Suzanne: The reason she didn’t go on Rogan’s show was that he demanded that she come to his studio in Austin, Texas for a 3-hour sit-down with him in the final week of the campaign. Harris offered to meet him elsewhere but he refused anywhere but his studio. It’s a typical macho male technique. Debase the woman. Make her kiss your ring. Show her who’s boss. This would have been the entire tenor of the interview with one of the vilest men on the planet. You seem to have some trust in Rogan. He’s not an honest broker. Seeing him go after Zelensky of late reminds me of what a loud-mouthed dick he is.

  160. 160.

    Martin

    @WTFGhost: Two shots she took against Pelosi/Dems:

    1. She described Pelosi’s freshman orientation as ‘how to be indoctrinated by lobbyists’.
    2. She said that when she defeated an incumbent Dem in that district, nobody asked her how she did it. She is still critical of Dems on this to this day – I heard her say it in the last week. Dems have a formula for how to run as a Dem and they are not open to new ideas.

    I don’t think she’s toned down her criticism – just shifted where she expresses it.

    I have mixed feelings about Pod Save America because it could easily have been called ‘Meet the Consultants’. But since the election they’ve opened up a bit to people on the left who during the campaign were critical of Dems – individually and collectively. It’s way too late and way too little, but it’s something.

  161. 161.

    sab

    @Harrison Wesley: So true, with Irish a close second.

    OT: I pied you the other night, in utter shock, and then reread your comment later and thought “Duh, that’s sarcasm or whatever, not what he actually thinks.”

    People late at night are literal minded. Please be more careful because your comments are mostly useful and informative

    ETA I.e I don’t want you banned.

  164. 164.

    Suzanne

    @cmorenc: I agree with you. It was a missed opportunity. It can be understood as a tradeoff in an abbreviated campaign.

    I think some of our other Dems should go on his show now. Anybody who’s good at talking like a normal person about things. We’re out of power, but we don’t need to be out of influence. This is the time to get out there.

  165. 165.

    cmorenc

    @Baud: Except at the time 7-10 days out from the election I thought then she was making a huge mistake refusing to take the time to go on Rogan, mine is not a retro/take from hindsight.  She would have handled him just fine.  Free platform to speak to 30 million voters.

  166. 166.

    Baud

    @cmorenc:

    I haven’t done the research.

    ETA: It’s still alternate history since we don’t know what would have happened if she went on

  167. 167.

    Suzanne

    @tobie:

    You seem to have some trust in Rogan. He’s not an honest broker. 

    No, not at all. Not even a little bit. I think it would have been excellent for her image to argue with him extemporaneously.

  168. 168.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Suzanne: ​
     

    As a Spaghetti-American, I laughed incredibly hard at this.

    When you lived in Arizona, did that mean you were a Spaghetti-Western? ;-)

  169. 169.

    Seeker

    @tobie:  Trump being able to handle going on Rogan while Kamala was not able to handle it is the kind of thing that makes people vote for Trump.

  171. 171.

    VFX Lurker

    @Baud:

    Maybe the problem is that conservative policies are,.on average, more popular than either centrist or leftist policies.

    The November 5th election bears this out.

    Maybe bluer states and bluer cities can implement kinder policies.

  172. 172.

    Baud

    Right after the election, everyone was talking about how tough they were going to be. Aside from migrating to Bluesky, that attitude didn’t last through the inauguration. People are already pointing fingers inwards.

    More Dems should work with Trump. Chasing the amateur online punditry is a hopeless endeavor.

  173. 173.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Martin:

    Agree with this, but I think because of your electoral system this is a problem with no solution. The Democratic Party has to be very ‘broad’ to win, with an often unwieldy coalition. The Republicans can just stick with old white people and have a very good chance, particularly in a voluntary voting situation where nearly 15% of your ‘natural base’ couldn’t be bothered to turn out.

    However the national and state Dem Party machines need a good tune up and overhaul, including getting more money for demonstrated organising from the central organisation.

    And who ever wins the fight for DNC Chair should be the one with demonstrated organising and communication chops. And by ‘communication’ chops, I mean communicating with the Party, not with the dead head legacy media.

    Christ almighty, I thought our legacy media was bad. It is, but not as bad as the US thank heavens.

  174. 174.

    Quinerly

    @Joseph Patrick Lurker:

    I heard this on my radio while in Bisbee. She was taking hits from Republicans that she wasn’t supporting Hegseth because her name had been floated for his replacement.

    Dems better get their act together and make the hearing as brutal as possible. I feel like that’s the only way he can be stopped. There is is a side of me that says put him in at DOD and let him fail. I think the place will eat him alive and he will be a drunk on the job from the pressure. And he won’t last 6 months.

    But what do ai know? I am kinda getting to the burn it all down phase in my thinking.

  175. 175.

    zhena gogolia

    @Baud: Yeah, that has to be nominated for stupidest comment EVAH on Balloon Juice, and I’m including “Brinks’ trucks!”

  176. 176.

    Geminid

    @Martin: My recollection is thst there was little reflexive opposition to now-Representative Ocasio-Cortez for challenging incumbent Joe Crowley. The race only got national attention after she beat him. That election was off most everybody’s radar including Crowley’s. He took her lightly and when he realized she might beat him it was too late.

    A lot of the credit there goes to the New York DSA chapter. While Justice Democrats did most of the fundraising and media outreach, it was the DSA that provided the volunteers doing the door-to-door canvassing.

    This was a low turnout primary. Crowley got less than 15,000 votes while Ocasio-Cortez did not  get much more. By contrast, the Virginia 7th CD primary held that same month saw Abigail Spanberger win with around 35,000 votes, and the runner-up got 20,000.

    Of course the dynamic in VA07 was different than in NY14. The Virginia 7th CD was a purple district and Democrats there were hungry.

    Primary numbers aside, I still thought Spanberger beating Dave Brat in the general election was a bigger story than Ocasio-Cortez’s win. But the media and Democrats nationally thought otherwise.

  177. 177.

    sab

    Some guy from the New York party wants to be national chair. I can’t stop laughing. I live in Ohio where we fight to even breathe or be on the ballot. His people routinely lose in an almost blue state.

  178. 178.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @lowtechcyclist: Like I said, play with the language. The principle is fine, though. And really everyone not having the exact same ideas about the details is fine, because a few hundred people in Congress will be voting on the details after the election.

    Christ, why do Democrats insist on needing both a detailed plan and needing it in a sentence? Stop campaigning on policies. Campaign on values. Values are simple to communicate and manifest in policy.

    Let’s try on a few more ways to communicate the same or supporting ideas:

    We need more resources to process immigration claims to ensure we know who enters the country.

    Legal immigrants shouldn’t be burdened with heavy bureaucracy and harsh penalties, it just incentivizes the non-legal path.

    Militarism, suspicion, and lack of cooperation at the border is empowering criminal gangs.

    All one sentence. All address both the concerns of being humane and secure.

    If you have a problem with the actual principle of what I’m saying, please argue with that. But to say it’s too complicated? No.

  181. 181.

    lowtechcyclist

    @zhena gogolia: ​
     

    Have we lost a huge chunk of front-pagers, or am I imagining it?

    I’ve been noticing that too. Between AL’s morning post and either JC’s or Adam’s evening post, whichever comes first, it seems like it’s all mistermix, all the time. Nothing wrong with him, but some variety might be nice.

    I think WG may be frustrated by the the failure of her attempts to have some threads where people are semi-pleasant to each other for a change – and I wouldn’t blame her.

    And I’m not going to ask whether Betty C is having a difficult time with the cancer or the treatments, or just doesn’t have anything to say right now, since she doesn’t want her health to be a subject of discussion here. But I miss her voice on the front page when it isn’t there.

  182. 182.

    sab

    Now all our people are figuring what they are going to do for a living because they don’t have billionaire welfare to fall back on, unlike the Republicans.

  185. 185.

    Harrison Wesley

    @sab: You probably should pie me forever. I’m not a very nice person, and I’m a very right-wing Democrat.

  186. 186.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Baud: I’ve seen polls where we lose on certain policies.

    I’ve seen you say this before. I wonder which policies, like legitimately. The only ones I can think of are trans-girls/women (only female presenting for some reason) in sports and mass deportation.

    I really don’t think the first rates too highly in importance for anyone who isn’t already fully an asshole. It’s one thing to be of the opinion they shouldn’t participate, entirely another for your vote to hinge on it.

    The mass deportation thing, that’s something I could see more voters putting more significance on. But they really don’t understand what the consequences will be there. May they fall more harshly on MAGAts than the immigrants, against all odds.

  187. 187.

    Martin

    @Baud:

    I’m not blaming us if voters chose not to believe us. I think he’s going to burn it all down, so we’ll see how voters respond.

    ETA: pretty weird to see the argument that Trump won based on modest reform rather than upending the system

    My argument is something of a ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ dynamic in politics. If you cede a space that the public cares about, you invite your opponent to occupy that space, even accidentally. And there are a lot of voters interested in upending the system. They occupy the margins, and the GOP has been co-opting those voters, and Dems have been rejecting them from their left.

    I think if the GOP were in the White House and Harris ran on the same policies she would have won, because she would have accidentally occupied that space (note, Trump is even more defensive of the status quo when he’s in charge because he can’t not be the greatest human alive and everything is perfect because of him).

    Like, if the machine isn’t working and you’re the one in charge and voters can’t see progress, they’re going to vote you out, even if you have a bunch of good ideas of how to fix it. Execution matters. You have to deliver.

    I think you’re too invested in trying to win the ‘we understood Trump more than his voters’ argument and not understand ‘what did Trump voters actually want’ question. Polling shows Trump voters strongly support protecting Social Security. His policy of ‘eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits’ was enormously popular. They didn’t want it burned down. If anything they wanted reform to protect it as we haven’t had any real progress on that front since the Reagan admin. Lots of ideas, no actual implementation. That’s where they wanted the reform to take place, not to privatize it.

    There’s also some evidence they expected Dems to protect them from Trump doing that which is why Dems didn’t fare that badly down ballot. That was certainly expressed a lot in focus groups – that many of Trumps voters didn’t really trust him that much and figured Dems would make sure the worst ideas didn’t go through. And isn’t that where a lot of us are now – maybe we should punish those voters for taking advantage of that by letting those worst ideas go through?

  189. 189.

    Baud

    @Martin:

    My belief is the race was unwinnable by anyone. Any move Harris made to try to attract one group of voters would have cost her another group of voters.

    Trump voters want everything burned down except themselves, it’s true. They’ll learn.

  191. 191.

    Seeker

     

    @zhena gogolia: it’s an honor to be nominated.

    You perceive Rogan as a partisan. Most people perceive him as an open minded normal guy. Whether or not that perception is correct doesn’t alter the fact that not going on Rogan was perceived by a lot of people as both arrogant and as proof that Kamala could not hold a substantive conversation with someone while Trump could. Again, that perception may be incorrect but this is the information that tons of voters get and use.

  192. 192.

    Martin

    @tobie: That’s the rule for everyone on his show. Russell Crowe was just complaining about that same rule.

    You’re ascribing malice to Rogan on this, when he’s just lazy. He wants to do the show the way he wants. He didn’t invite either Trump or Harris on – they asked, and so they do it on his terms. Trump did the full 3 hours.

  194. 194.

    sab

    @lowtechcyclist: Mistermix used to be not there much, but Betty Cracker has health issues so he has risen to the occassion.

    Watergirl was posting almost continuously but has fallen down a lot since the election. That might be a good thing just because we shouldn’t have most of the time with only one front pager.

    Mr. Cole has reappeared which I personally like a lot.

    We need more plant pictures and pet pictures and reader imput. Half a dozen people shouldn’t have to carry the whole thing, especially for free.

  195. 195.

    RaflW

    @lowtechcyclist: It’s curious how we haven’t seen CEOs suggesting that maybe tighter gun laws, or even just trying to say there’s no legitimate, 1787 originalist argument to be made for silencers.

    Just not a peep from them about how guns everywhere make their lives a tad riskier. Huh.

  197. 197.

    lowtechcyclist

    @The Audacity of Krope: ​
     

    We need more resources to process immigration claims to ensure we know who enters the country.

    Legal immigrants shouldn’t be burdened with heavy bureaucracy and harsh penalties, it just incentivizes the non-legal path.

    Militarism, suspicion, and lack of cooperation at the border is empowering criminal gangs.

    All one sentence. All address both the concerns of being humane and secure.

    The first two are about bureaucratic details. They don’t say what the policy IS, they just say we want whatever it is to be handled smoothly.

    The fucking Holocaust was handled smoothly.

    The third states a problem without saying jack shit about what your policy is.

    For some reason, I can pie someone on my laptop but they’re not necessarily pied on my desktop. Being back on my laptop reminds me that you’re one such person. Now that I’m here, I’m getting tired of toggling just to see your latest nonsense, so our conversation is at an end.

  199. 199.

    WTFGhost

    @Martin: See, I know specifics can always kill me, because my brain is broken.

    You can drop your stones in the bucket, one after the other, and I can’t say that’s not a heavy bucket weighing against a person.

    I look at it, and can’t see any way to lift it, because those are *your* stones. You know how heavy they are – you know what it takes to shift them.

    I love the cut about “how to be indoctrinated by lobbyists,” because that strikes me as a freshman who wants to tussle with the junior/senior class. That’s the kind of cut where Pelosi might have her feelings hurt, or, might think “Battle on, AOC,” and pretend to be too dignified to respond to the cut, while glad it was made.

    Because Pelosi might well know, yes, she is teaching the class on handling your lobbyists, and, yes, the advanced class is “fighting for your principles, *using* the handling of lobbyists you learned as a freshman.”

    And I imagine AOC thinks she will someday teach her own freshman class – if she succeeds, she will, and if she flames out, she won’t.

    I can’t say what *is* happening, ever – but that’s a model where AOC is a useful gadfly and maybe someday a brilliant, senior stateswoman. If it’s not her, I hope there are other standouts I haven’t heard of, yet.

  202. 202.

    Tazj

    Immigration is a complicated issue that is easily exploited by Republicans. I think they might have been losing on that issue before border governors like Abbott started bussing  people to northern states. There were very desperate people trying to come here because of deteriorating conditions in their own countries. Remember the pictures of the families struggling at the border? The young man and his small child who drowned trying to cross the river? And then Abbott putting up the razor wire to keep people from crossing.
    Democrats campaigned on having a more humane immigration system and I genuinely think many Democrats want a better system besides not taking a lot of heat from activists. They are criticized for detaining undocumented minors for too long or under poor conditions and also for releasing them too soon and having them subject to human traffickers or working under dangerous conditions at chicken farms. Republicans don’t care, they just want people kept out.

    Biden and Harris worked to decrease the number of people trying to cross the border and the combination of their work and the pandemic ending resulted in low border crossings. However, Republicans won on the issue because of the Republican refusal to sign an immigration bill and what happened with the bussing  of immigrants. When immigrants were bussed to my area it was on the local news every day with complaints about spending and crime. Then apparently some immigrants feel as if the newest immigrants were given things they weren’t by the government.

    It’s a lot easier to demonize people then to try to solve problems.

  203. 203.

    Baud

    @Tazj:

    It’s a lot easier to demonize people then to try to solve problems.

     
    I’m told Dems should try to emulate Republicans when it comes to messaging. Except the one thing that works best, apparently.

  204. 204.

    sab

    @Harrison Wesley: I am a left wing Democrat and I know y’all are out there. I grew up in Republican family so I can deal with differences. Policy differences I can deal with and argue about.. Overt racism I pie. You didn’t cross that line and I doubt you will.

    I know we are a big tent. That is why I like hearing from you. The Jim Crow guys went to the other party.

  205. 205.

    glory b

    @Seeker: I perceive him as the white guy who used the n-word on the air.

    Multiple times.

    Then again, white people memory holing this is what makes him an “open minded, normal” white guy.

  207. 207.

    different-church-lady

    @John S.:

    Ask me how much credit Biden and the Democrats got for giving Israel everything it wants from my Orthodox Jewish relatives.

    How much credit has Biden and the Democr… aww, screw it, let me just pound my head on my desk, it’s faster that way.

  210. 210.

    different-church-lady

    @Baud:

    I can’t believe we’ve replaced “she didn’t go to Wisconsin” with “she didn’t go on Rogan.”

    I can.

  211. 211.

    Seeker

    @glory b: I’m not arguing about whether or not he’s a good dude. I mean, his friendship with Alex Jones is an established fact. It feels like that’s all anyone would need to know. But apparently its not

    Rogan is a huge part of the American media and is immensely popular. Not engaging with him failed. So something else needs to happen

  212. 212.

    Martin

    @karen marie: I think we’re describing different things. The problem isn’t that Dems aren’t doing what the left wants. The problem is you need at some point to be willing to say ‘we’re going to stop all new programs and put our energy on making the current stuff work’.

    Dems do have this ambitious view of what government does – EV credits, CHIPS act, credits to new homeowners, etc. The GOP has this restrictive view of what government does – ban abortion, etc. I’m arguing for maybe a competence view of what government does – bring people to justice more often and faster, while reducing mistakes by the system. Make government more responsive to people. Dems were nearly as culpable as the GOP in blocking the IRS from letting you pay taxes from a free web service, something that should have been available 25 years ago. Someone yesterday brought up there is no part of government that is tasked with addressing online fraud and similar crimes. Ostensibly it’s the FBI but they aren’t equipped for that, at the current scale. It’s ambitious in that it’s a new thing, but ‘protect people from crime’ is not a new thing government does, but it is a thing government is a LOT worse at doing. Fix that.

    Part of the criticism of the DOJ cases against both Trump and Hunter aren’t that they did something wrong, it’s that other people who did the same wrong thing didn’t get held accountable, and so it looks targeted. Isn’t the real problem there that DOJ isn’t holding other criminals accountable? Doesn’t fixing that fix the problem of the appearance of targeting? The pardon and the immunity are just acknowledgements that nobody should be held accountable. That’s the wrong way to go, no?

    And why can’t government protect consumers from nonstop product recalls and all that? At some point people ask ‘if government can’t work, why should we pay for it’. The GOP are making the latter argument, but Dems aren’t really making the case to fix the former.

    And the solution to housing affordability isn’t taxpayer dollars for new buyers (I can’t express how much I hate that policy idea), it’s building affordable housing. Why can’t HHS just build housing and sell it at cost? No subsidy, just finance the construction and then have buyers replace the money. Willing to bet that would have knocked more off the cost of the housing than the subsidy would have been, and costs taxpayers nothing.

  213. 213.

    Quinerly

    @Seeker:

    You could have some valid points. I really knew nothing about Rogan until this election.

    My cabinet refinisher guy has been at my house on and off since 9/30. We have gotten to know each other rather well. Lots of chit chat. Nice guy. He thinks I am nuts.  He was not a Trump supporter. Really dislikes Trump but likes Rogan. Made a point of telling me Rogan was not political and that Harris made a big mistake not sitting down with him. We had a long talk about Rogan and his audience. Certainly not my thing, but I’m a good listener. And, I asked a lot of questions. I really have no Joe Rogan people in my life.

    Thankfully, I am not paying middle aged White cabinet guy originally from Kansas City by the hour because we have a done a lot of talking over coffee in the lead up to the election. I feel like I got a perspective that I would have never gotten….this whole male centered podcast stuff.

    Cabinet guy ended up not voting. He was Harris curious. Thought Biden shouldn’t have run. He’s an ex Marine. I’m gearing up to chat with him about Hegseth when I get back. I realize I live in my own bubble….mostly conversing with folks on the same page as me. I am curious to get cabinet guy’s take on Hegseth. Cabinet guy was a heavy drinker earlier in his life. Now doesn’t drink.

  214. 214.

    Geminid

    @sab: When I heard about New York state Senator Shoufis throwing his hat in the DNC ring, it seemed odd to me. I thought he must want to get his name out there for some reason, because he certainly wasn’t gonna won.

    Maybe Senator Shoufis is testing the water for a run at New York’s party chairman. People seem to stay mad at the current one, Jay Jacobs. But I don’t know very much about that state’s Democratic politics except that they seem to be very contentious.

  215. 215.

    Seeker

    @Quinerly: That’s an interesting story….thanks for taking the time to share it. Also interesting that Rogans endorsement of Trump wasn’t enough to bring this guy’s vote in for him.

  216. 216.

    sab

    @MattF: Apparently you took the weekend off? The rest of us with no lives but BJ had threads about that all weekend.

    Yikes, I sound bitchy. We had to walk our out of town daughter’s dog through ice and snow and howling winds all weekend.

    It was unpleasant (except we really like her dog) and cold and very icy, and we are so old a fall on the ice probably would be catastrophic.

    So I am grumpy that spouse signed us up for this and that we did it. Scary what with the ice.

  217. 217.

    Martin

    @The Audacity of Krope: There are a few. Border security is one, which is why Biden gave in to it. Trans kids in sports is another (I think Dems should keep fighting that one – integration wasn’t popular either). But Dems have good arguments for rights for the trans community. They’re not always expressed well, but they’re fundamentally good.

    I don’t think Democrats need to make big changes in their policy ends. I think they need some changes in their policy means (see my example above on housing).

  218. 218.

    HeleninEire

    Yay my niece got her Irish citizenship.  Almost 2 years in the making. My house in Dublin is gonna be packed! 😅

  219. 219.

    MattF

    @sab: I’ll admit that I don’t read most BJ threads any more. So, maybe the comment was aimed at irregular readers like myself.

  220. 220.

    Citizen Alan

    @Suzanne:  Possibly, but it’s impossible to know for sure. After all, Rogan’s target audience is men who become viscerally angry at intelligent and competent women who don’t take their shit.

  222. 222.

    sab

    @Baud: I did not know that. But I don’t go on BJ at work. We bill hourly so I don’t do anything but work at work, which I think is a miracle. No need to socialize. Mostly all Trumpers everywhere else I have worked. Assume it is the same at current job, except they are all so nice. Weird in an accounting firm. Normally there are rough edges. Not with these folks.

  223. 223.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    If anyone is still reading comments on this thread, if you want more dog / flower / cooking / etc threads, that’s not my jam, but if you would write and politely ask the front pagers who used to do those threads, they might consider doing more of them.

    I have no inside knowledge of why they stopped other than (I assume) people being worn out.  And I sure understand people being worn out.

  224. 224.

    Geminid

    @sab: And Rose Judson is doing some good posts. Her work is very complementary to this forum’s other talented front pagers’.

  225. 225.

    Martin

    @Baud: Dems didn’t dislike her opponent, so there was a lot of ‘who is this little shit coming in here fucking up a sure win’.

    I’m not saying people disliked her ideas, they disliked that she was adding uncertainty to a certain situation. She was shaking up the status-quo, which is why Pelosi was pretty pissed. I think if Dems didn’t like her opponent, that part of it would have been received better.

    So once she was the candidate, of course Dems supported her. What choice did we have at that point? And we turned her previous faults into benefits, in part because Democrats often seem determined to not embrace the things they like, but to push away the things they think other people won’t. It’s why I think Dems are more likely to internalize the idea that a woman can’t win the Presidency after this election than the GOP, and as a result, the GOP is more likely to nominate one going forward if we hold onto this idea that Harris only lost because of sexism.

    So AOCs youth was a feature we liked but one we didn’t want because ‘voters want experience’. I think we do that a lot.

  226. 226.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Martin: I think we should be less focused on the federal government as the means to our policy ends. Let’s get back to more state and local control. Red states can do their fucking around and leave us out of the finding out. And we can stop subsidizing them.

  227. 227.

    Quinerly

    @Seeker:

    Can’t say for sure but I have to wonder if Harris had sat down with Rogan and shot the breeze if middle aged White cabinet guy would have voted for her. I may get around to asking him. Right now I am curious about his take on Hegseth….and I want him to finish this job. It has gone on a long time.

    He’s a perfectionist and very conscientious. He really under bid this project but not cranky about it. Has a great attitude about kinda screwing himself on the time. Just a stand up guy who happens to listen to Joe Rogan.

  228. 228.

    Baud

    @Martin:

    Here’s what you said.

    A lot of this community demands the same thing. There was a reflexive opposition to AOC when she was challenging the Dem incumbent,

     

    This does not jive with my recollection at all. I can’t go back to look at the blog when she won her primary in 2018 right now, but maybe someone else has the time to see how people reacted.

  229. 229.

    frosty

    @zhena gogolia: ​I don’t think we’ve lost anyone. Could be fewer posts – maybe the FPers read the comments and say “Fuck it, they don’t read what I write anyway, just get on their hobbyhorses and ride.”

  232. 232.

    Martin

    @VFX Lurker: How does that bear it out? Every abortion protection initiative won a majority of voters, even in red states. Minimum wage initiatives won almost everywhere. Criminal justice reform won in a bunch of places. Lots of liberal ideas won.

    I’m trying to show that you can’t simplify this down to a single variable like left-right or male-female or white-black. I’ve rejected lots of people in hiring decisions because I thought they had the right judgment, the right ideas but were overly cautious in their thinking. I was looking for someone to overhaul a department – I wanted someone who wasn’t afraid to do big things and to stand up to ‘but this is how we’ve always done things’. I also wanted those big things to be good things. It would have been wrong of the people I rejected to conclude that I thought their judgement or ideas were wrong.

    I’ve also rejected applicants who wanted to do big things when hiring for a department that was running really well. I wanted a maintainer, not a reformer.

    I don’t see why the electorate wouldn’t have the same complexity in how they think. I can see why pundits and political journalists wouldn’t be able to see that – they favor simplistic answers to problems. They only have so many column inches to work with.

  233. 233.

    sab

    @@mistermix.bsky.social: You have been doing a lot on the front page lately. Some of us have noticed.

    I intend ( soon) to get a camera to click my lovely guys ( two cats) that satby brought me. I have been busy with redecorating their basement.

    Solomon has his own three condos in a basement cat HOA. Plus also he has free run of my big room where I sew. His sister sleeps under my bed upstairs. They both have the run of the house.

    I woke up for snacks at 2 am yesterday, and there was Solly sitting on top of the fridge upstairs.

    A couple of hours later husband met Solly’s sister Echo sauntering down the hall upstairs. Husband thought she was Solly until he noticed no white socks. She didn’t seem worried  by him at all. Stopped and got scritches then went on her way

    ETA First time husband has even seen her. He has been making jokes about my mythical cat.

  234. 234.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @frosty:

    I agree but part of the problem about what you’re describing was FPs often saying “this is also an open thread” which allowed certain people to start peddling their usual nonsense literally for years.  Thus, seemingly every diary comment thread was in effect hijacked.

  237. 237.

    Baud

    @Martin:

    I’ve got no moral qualms with that, but billionaires aren’t a “people”. I‘m also not confident it will go anywhere but it’s not my call to make.

  238. 238.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @RevRick:

    True but there was a lot of that messaging this time around, didn’t matter.

    It’s as if even that message is too complicated.  Or it’s yet another issue that doesn’t resonate with low-info/sit-on-your-ass voters, hell, I dunno.

  239. 239.

    sab

    @RevRick: If the Evangelical leadership in America were actually worried about our spiritual state they might be concerned. But they aren’t. I don’t want to cause sectarian strife but they did this, caused this fighting.

  241. 241.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: There is effectively no thread discipline here and there never has been.  I doubt that has any effect on the FPers who have been quiet of late.  Some are probably exhausted after the effects put in during the run up to the election.  others may be tired of the weird poetry and woo-woo self help advice comment threads that have been showing up lately.  Others may be baking to prepare for Christmas.  We should be glad that MM is picking up the slack.

  242. 242.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Baud: I’ve got no moral qualms with that, but billionaires aren’t a “people”. I‘m also not confident it will go anywhere but it’s not my call to make.

    For me, they’re a proxy for “the prioritization of money concerns over actual production” and “the very notion of capital ownership and investment more broadly.” But those are harder sells, gotta establish the who before the why, it seems.

  243. 243.

    Martin

    @The Audacity of Krope: I agree. Well, to be clear, I think Dems should be pragmatic on this. Be open to moving things up or down. If states seem to be more effective, then be open to the feds giving that up. There’s a big disagreement on transportation funding – so kick most of that back. It’s not 1950 any longer. Keep funds in place for maintenance, but give states more say over it. If Iowa wants to tear up their roads for gravel, I don’t see why that isn’t their business. Keep the interstates maintained, keep air travel working, fund Amtrak, cut off all of the state/local dollars and let states raise that themselves and have that debate. CA and TX have the most complex transportation infrastructure and are ideologically opposed. We can do it.

  244. 244.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Omnes Omnibus: To me, the answer to thread discipline is threaded replies. Create a discreet structure for each line of conversation.

    I know the idea goes over like a wet fart here. And I, too, find it less functional now that I rely more on my phone.

  245. 245.

    Harrison Wesley

    @sab: That is my line. Civil rights,human rights – there is no compromise, and that’s where the right wing falls down. I’m afraid I’m going to have to move back to the old country.

  247. 247.

    Martin

    @Baud: Sure they are. In fact, they’re a more deserving class to attack because with a few exceptions, ‘billionaire’ isn’t an intrinsic trait – it’s one they choose. So it maps onto all of the ways that Democrats think this should be done – don’t judge people on who they are, but on what they do.

    I can assure you it’s trivial to not be a billionaire.

  251. 251.

    Baud

    @Martin:

    My long reply got eated. Anyway, if people want to try it and prove that it works, be my guest. I’m not going to get mad at any Dem that doesn’t believe that it’ll work, because I don’t believe it either. But maybe Trump’s billionaire cabinet will change some minds.

  252. 252.

    Geminid

    @WTFGhost: There are plenty of capable and hardworking Democratic House members just among Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s Class of 2018. Reps. Lauren Underwood (IL), Sharice Davids (KS), Sean Casten (IL), Jason Crow (CO), Veronica Escobar (TX) and Chrissy Houlihan (PA) are just six of them.

    There’s also Reps. Andy Kim (NJ) and Elissa Slotkin (NJ) who are moving up to the the Senate in the next Congress. Reps. Mikie Sherrill (NJ) and Abigail Spanberger are very capable Democrats who intend to move up to Governor next year.

    Add in Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and you have very talented House Class of 2018. I think we’ll be hearing a lot from them all in the next decade.

  253. 253.

    WTFGhost

    @different-church-lady: You know, I realized one day that the only thing *good* about a breakup (yes, breaking up a romantic relationship) must be *hurting* people. You can’t do anything good or noble – or if you do, it doesn’t matter if the other person is sufficiently hurtful.

    The lesson I took was, I suck at the breakup model, since I want to minimize the hurt. “Of course I still think you’re beautiful, and I still love how witty and how overpoweringly *smart* you are! It’s just… you want something, I can’t give it to you any longer, and I’m sorry.”

    Ahem. The lesson for politics is, people will remember Weird Al’s “One More Minute” for a million years longer than the saddest, sweetest, mopiest, “if I’d known it was my last night with you…” song ever.

    The latter might be more *special*, it might be what got you through the night of a bad breakup. But Weird Al makes everyone laugh.

    It might have been better to say that Republicans were eager for the Israelis to build ovens. Only, you know, *funny*. Like Weird Al. And if anyone said we were being *sew sew meen*, we’d say, “oh, come on… ‘I’d rather rip my heart from my rib cage with my bare hands and then throw it on the floor and stomp on it ’til I die!!!’ – it’s a *joke*.”

    It doesn’t matter that Republicans weren’t hoping for genocide; Trump would be down with it, and soon he’d be saying he heard “lots of people” want them to build ovens. He wouldn’t even know the reference.

    Moral of this story: no one remembers the noble, lonely, person who Did The Right Thing so much as the person who SCORED A BURN. Not saying I like it – just saying it seems to be so.

  254. 254.

    Martin

    @The Audacity of Krope: They are also the physical manifestation of individualism over social responsibility. Biden started the ball rolling with his push against neoliberalism by having the government directly intervene in markets. But it’s a tepid push. It’s more shoveling taxpayer cash to corporations, with no protections from those benefits all going to investors.

    Attacking billionaires makes for an easy transition to ‘if you don’t want to be attacked as a billionaire, then maybe keep prices in check for consumers, or reinvest those profits by paying your workers better. Force the GOP to defend billionaires, because younger Republicans are looking to flank Dems from the left on corporate power in favor of more competition, more small businesses, etc. while casting Dems as protective of corporations and billionaires – which mostly stems from Dems refusal to crack down on big banks, hedge funds, etc.

  255. 255.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    There is effectively no thread discipline here and there never has been.

    As you might have noticed, everything I post is marked “Open Thread” because of this.  Frankly, I don’t care — as long as the first half dozen comments aren’t totally off topic.

  256. 256.

    Martin

    @The Audacity of Krope: Cole hates it, and he’s our benevolent dictator. (Personally, I think Watergirl has deposed him and maintains him in an imprisoned state with the periodic carefully controlled public appearances – she’s our deep state).

  260. 260.

    Geminid

    @Martin: I’m not sure why Rep. Ocasio-Cortez thinks other Democrats should have asked her how she beat a complacent incumbent in a deep blue district primary.

    It would be a different and more important story if she’d beaten an incumbent Republican in a purple district, like Sharice Davids, Andy Kim, Elissa Slotkin, Katie Porter, Jason Crow, Lauren Underwood, Sean Casten, Chrissy Houlihan and a couple dozen other Democrats did that year.

  261. 261.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Martin: It’s more shoveling taxpayer cash to corporations, with no protections from those benefits all going to investors.

    Half measures have been the death of us. No amount of halving gets you anywhere, especially when you constantly halfway to and lurch harder and harder fro.

    younger Republicans are looking to flank Dems from the left on corporate power in favor of more competition, more small businesses, etc. while casting Dems as protective of corporations and billionaires – which mostly stems from Dems refusal to crack down on big banks, hedge funds, etc.

    There are too many red lines in things much more important to me. But if this took hold in a meaningful way it would open a door into our coalition.

  263. 263.

    Martin

    @Geminid: She was outspent like 10:1. She won by organizing. That was her point. You don’t have to sell out to the billionaire donors to win. You can just appeal to voters and ask them to work for you, and you’ll work for them.

    Democrats aren’t broadly interested in that form of politics. One of the campaign critiques is that Harris pivoted off of economic populist messaging and campaigning with Shawn Fain when the campaign felt they needed the big donors, and pivoted to the anit-fascist messaging and campaigning with Liz Cheney. I have no idea whose idea that was but Harris was the candidate, so ultimately it’s on her.

    I think AOC would say she would have been better off with less cash but a better message being carried by organizers. Counterfactual we can’t prove, but we also can’t disprove. All we can do is try it.

  264. 264.

    different-church-lady

    This Prospero’sGhost person at LGM is striking me as insightful:

    Prospero’sGhost+2 4 minutes ago edited
    The question is not what did the dems did wrong.
    The question is why is America full of so many awful immoral, amoral deplorable assholes willing to vote for literally the worst human being EVER to run for president.*
    Riddle me THAT.​

  266. 266.

    Martin

    @The Audacity of Krope: Right. The GOP is very good at wedging Dem interests and forcing us to play defense to hold our own voters. Dems suck at doing that to the GOP with the messaging post-Dobbs being a very notable exception, apart from the GOP figuring out how to successfully defend on that.

    If Dems could do that on more fronts, force the GOP to stay more on defense, it should open them up to advance policy on some of those red line issues. My suggestions upthread to defend the ends of institutions and be willing to campaign on reforming the means, would do some of that as well, and you can of course tie those together – ‘we shouldn’t have to enrich billionaires for basic government services, government can do these things itself’ which is a traditional liberal position that we seem to have abandoned.

    See California giving up on trying to negotiate with drug manufacturers and just internalizing that as a government service (by way of a non-profit). CA makes its own Naloxone, and will do insulin next. But CAs execution has been uneven – and needs to get better at it, and if Dems want to embrace that approach need to internalize the stuff that went wrong, own those mistakes (and not cover for them) and lay out how to avoid them.

  267. 267.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @different-church-lady: indeed.
    That is the difficult question. Here people that think that way, exist. And have been persuaded. There’s a range of intelligence.

    my best brainstorm, is someone gets talking to the tv screenwriters, and some shows are written, that address cult deprogramming, what works in the social safety net, how different humans can know and like each other across all kinds of barriers.

    I don’t know anyone. There are just actors I admire, who know or become producers. there’s frank schaeffer, who converted away from that dominance religion life, and cares now. Somebody knows somebody.

    of course, any tv show or movie would need to be sexy, or funny or romantic

  268. 268.

    karen marie

    @Martin: Yes, we are talking about two different things.  I’m talking about the DNC and party messaging.  You apparently are talking about what Dems are doing/not doing that are not the DNC and party messaging.  Those are very different things.

  269. 269.

    Martin

    @Baud: ‘she didn’t go on Rogan’ could be interpreted that Democrats need to recruit traditional non-voters. Because that’s the space Rogan occupies. Dems don’t make any serious effort to recruit non-voters. Trump does and has added millions in each of the last 3 elections.

    Dems had a theory that Trump had a ceiling. And I think that theory was correct with reliable voters. Trump just got unreliable voters to make up for it. Rogan is part of how he did it.

  271. 271.

    Martin

    @karen marie: I’m not sure how to interpret ‘Republicans who feed their base at every opportunity’, because a lot of what I see Republicans doing is lying to their base and I don’t think that’s helpful for Dems. The GOP is also not amenable to jettisoning bad people – they’re at least as protective as Dems, and often more protective. Trump is the one who kind of breaks that on the former by backing primary challengers. Neither party does that.

  272. 272.

    Geminid

    @Martin: But you’re still talking about a primary in a deep blue district, with a complacent incumbent who did not campaign hard.

    And from local news stories I read that fall–and I read a lot because I was very interested in this race– the volunteer canvassing effort was in large part carried out by the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter. New York City’s DSA chapter had 5,000 members and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was one of them.

    Her knowledge gained in that election does not strike me as very transitive beyond blue districts with relatively large DSA chapters and complacent incumbents, and those are scarce. Reps. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman pulled it off in 2020, but they’re both on their way out of Congress already.

    Now, I did hear of a Democrat who won a really tough race this year in an R+ district, on the strengrh of a strong and well-organized volunteer effort. At least, Kay said that’s how Marcy Kaptur won in her Toledo, Ohio-based district. Kay is a very astute observer of such matters and also happened to canvas some with the local IBEW chapter. But Rep. Kaptur did not have to learn this trick from Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.

  273. 273.

    NaijaGal

    @Martin: The weird thing is that she was being praised for reaching out to and getting the attention of social media influencers on Instagram, etc., rather than sticking with the mainstream media for outreach.

    Everyone is stuck in their positions, but I think that this loss is basically a combination of jettisoning the incumbent, giving his successor only 3 months to campaign, relying too heavily on the donor class because Citizen’s United kind of demands it, a news media owned by corporations and oligarchs with no effective left-leaning (or plain neutral) counter, Russian disinformation, and good old fashioned American racism and misogyny.

    You keep pointing out how voters voted for liberal seeming measures in red states while voting against Democrats.

    When FDR passed the new deal, many of the programs discriminated against African Americans – this was the way he could maintain his coalition. I don’t think that works in 2024, but I’ve seen so many (mainly white, male, democrats) simply act as though they can’t see what’s in front of their noses, most likely because they don’t know what to do about it, so they fixate on the things that they do know something about, to the irritation of the minority groups whose civil rights are now in jeopardy.

    We’re all confused right now. In late January, we’ll find out whether Democrats still have a coalition or not.

  276. 276.

    Martin

    @different-church-lady: You’re framing that as a zero-sum thing, as if Rogan listeners were on board with Trump and needed to be convinced off of Trump.

    But the suggestion here is that Rogan had a large pool of non-voters, and in 3 hours Trump poked at various things that some of those listeners cared about and turned them into voters for him. Not that he swayed them off of Harris, he swayed them off of staying home.

    Rogan isn’t partisan. He’s dumb and incredibly gullible, but he’s not partisan. He’s not the best place for Dems to recruit voters but, he’s got a big audience and even a small reach is a lot of voters. And voters skeptical of politicians usually like it when you come to them. That’s how AOC got my kids to be reliable voters – through a video game fundraising stream.

  277. 277.

    Martin

    @Geminid: Her knowledge gained in that election does not strike me as very transitive beyond blue districts with relatively large DSA chapters and complacent incumbents, and those are scarce. Reps. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman pulled it off in 2020, but they’re both on their way out of Congress already.

    Isn’t that how we won two senate seats in Georgia? Substitute ‘black women’ for DSA members.

  278. 278.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @UncleEbeneezer: Too many people in our electorate (even people with liberal social views) admire (or even worship) Business-Owners and see Billionaires as the best examples of that category.

    Mmm, not sure it’s all or even mostly that. It may just be the calculus of a working class that is by no means stupid and by all means cynical: They’d love to see the ultrarich pay something approaching their fair share but they’re sure it’ll never happen – the billionaires own the gummint, the courts, the legislatures, the banks, the police, etc etc etc, and they can’t be touched because even if the law and the right are on their side the bigbux types will delay, delay, delay until they drop dead. If the average Joe (or José) wants something better for his family and friends, the only place he can get it is by taking it away from people with as little (or even less) power than he has. And it helps if he can justify the “redistribution” by classifying the victims as Others who don’t deserve to have good things so long as his kith & kin are wanting/deserve something better. He doesn’t even have to hate those Others – they just have something his folks want.

  279. 279.

    Steve

    I have long believed that Democrats need brand promotion, not just candidate promotion. Not every McDonald’s ad is promoting a deal on a Big Mac; many are just promoting the chain as a whole. There should be a steady stream of such ads promoting the Democratic Party across a variety of mediums running at all times. Then, when elections roll around, we can have candidate ads as well. This, it seems to me, is the true job of DNC: to promote the Democratic brand.​
    ​
    ​

  280. 280.

    Martin

    @NaijaGal: The weird thing is that she was being praised for reaching out to and getting the attention of social media influencers on Instagram, etc., rather than sticking with the mainstream media for outreach.

    What’s weird about it? She did a good job of that and there’s no reason to think that didn’t work. But instagram gets you mainly young women, and gets them by proxy. Joe Rogan gets you men, and you have to get them directly – you have to sit for the interview and defend your ideas and participate in that larger conversation. (there are social media spaces to reach men by proxy and spaces to reach women directly.)

    There are assertions that Harris avoided those kinds of direct interactions. She did some, but not many and was a bit uneven on them. Some were really good. But I noted that Trump did a number of shows that had previously hosted white nationalists and the like which are normally hostile to establishment republicans (we think its horrible he pulled in white nationalists, but votes are votes). Harris never went near a show that is hostile to establishment dems, so I think she left a lot of potential votes on the table as a result (think the pro-palestinian voters that Biden’s policies estranged, but not just on that issue). She also didn’t go where young men might be other than maybe the GSW podcast, and even that is pretty friendly territory.

  281. 281.

    Glory b

    @Martin: Hes a racist who used the n word on the air, many times.

    There are online mash ups of him using it repeatedly.

    This feels like too many on here are saying “black people will vote for Dems anyway, let’s go after the guys comfortable with using racial slurs to that degree.”

    He used them primarily towards black women. I hope you aren’t surprised that so many of us are deciding to check out.

    Go ahead then.

  282. 282.

    Martin

    @Glory b: Hes a racist who used the n word on the air, many times.

    Yeah, I know. I’m not here to endorse that or him. I’m not in the ‘she needs to do Rogan’ camp. I’m not in the ‘we need a Joe Rogan of the left’ camp.

    The point is that most voters live in non political spaces. Invade those spaces. Skip Rogan – but make up for not reaching that population. The voters Trump got by going on the podcast of a guy who uses the n word on air still count, though.

    My argument was that Harris should have gone after voters on the left, but that didn’t happen. Lots of people hated that idea.

  283. 283.

    Geminid

    @Martin: No. This is not how we won two Georgia Senate seats.

    You are equating a low turnout Democratic primary in a reliably Democratic Congressional district with a pair of high turnout Senate elections in a 50-50 state.

    You are also comparing a group of DSA canvassers just large enough to swing a low turnout primary with the largest single component of Georgia Democratic voters by gender and race,

  284. 284.

    NaijaGal

    @Martin: It’s weird because some people have memory-holed that, acting like she didn’t do anything new or creative and that her also going on Fox News was no big deal.

    The Joe Rogan one-weird-trick to win the election pre-supposes that misogynists would vote for her. I have my doubts but people will pile on. If she’d gone on and still lost, they would have piled on for her missing a campaign trip to Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania to appear on Joe Rogan’s show in the final week of the election.

    There’s never any deeper analysis about why no woman has won the presidency in the US, but  women have won the top office in deeply patriarchal societies like Pakistan, India, Mexico, South Korea, Brazil, Angola, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.  I’m deliberately not making the comparison to women winning the top office in the UK or Germany or Israel which Americans think of as more progressive societies.

    No need for any reflection when an adjudicated rapist wins office after a hatefest and complete mess of a campaign. No one will ever tell me that man ran a good campaign (insert thirty minutes of swaying to music here). He didn’t but he didn’t have to. She ran a better campaign and lost. This says something but it’s not what most people want to hear.

  286. 286.

    Another Scott

    @NaijaGal: +1

    It’s the “Why Won’t Kamala Go To The Border??!!” stuff.  When she does go, it’s not even 15 minutes of news.  Going on Rogan would have had no measurable benefit.

    Misogyny, and yes racism, were heavy weights that she almost overcame in challenging unique circumstances.  Doug being Jewish was probably an additional weight for some voters that didn’t get talked about much, AFAICS, but was yet another way for the monsters to “other” the ticket.  Unfortunately, she didn’t overcome those things, but she did move them forward.

    Thanks.

    Hang in there, everyone.  It’s going to be a slog and we have to pace ourselves.

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  287. 287.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: I don’t know what Martin’s track record is, but I do know Wickers and he would get my vote in a heartbeat.

    There’s a difference between great ideas and talking and having a track record that shows that you did exactly what needs to be done in a hostile environment and you were successful.

  290. 290.

    WaterGirl

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    There is effectively no thread discipline here and there never has been.  I doubt that has any effect on the FPers who have been quiet of late.  Some are probably exhausted after the effects put in during the run up to the election.  others may be tired of the weird poetry and woo-woo self help advice comment threads that have been showing up lately.  Others may be baking to prepare for Christmas.  We should be glad that MM is picking up the slack.

    Excellent points!

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