The thing that is personally demoralizing to me is that I really think the party decently had it's shit together last November, especially when all of the factors were taken into account. And we still got beaten. So, I'm not sure that getting our shit together again (and plenty can argue on exactly what that will look like) is going to s…
The thing that is personally demoralizing to me is that I really think the party decently had it's shit together last November, especially when all of the factors were taken into account. And we still got beaten. So, I'm not sure that getting our shit together again (and plenty can argue on exactly what that will look like) is going to save us. I do think the party needs change, but I don't know in which direction, and I'm not sure how much it will help.
We did not in fact have our shit together, I’m sorry, but we didn’t. Why Democrats decided to rerun the failed 2016 Clinton strategy “Trump is a danger to democracy” in 2024 is one of the key reasons we lost everything. Most people (even many supporters) don’t like Trump as a person, but they don’t care until he’s in office and only then do they get mad about it.
To be fair I don’t think any Democrat could’ve won as the majority of voters had made up their mind they wanted 2019 back again come hell, high water or Trump. But Harris and her team ran an old school race talking about what she wanted to do with policy (no one cares about that). Biden didn’t talk much about policy in his successful 2020 campaign.
The way to win modern elections is to make your opponent look unacceptable to the average/swing/doesn’t pay attention voter. People vote based on what they don’t want, not what they do want. We saw that in every election from 2017-2023 (except a mild blip in 2021 elections) as Democrats hammered Republicans and gained a ton of ground everywhere only for 2024 to come up and then for the party to completely toss the playbook that wins elections and go back to attacking Trump.
I do think this point gets brought up a lot but still not enough - nostalgia for pre-COVID still hasn’t subsided (indeed it may never) and a lot of people got basically cooked mentally 2020-22 and have never recovered. The equation “Trump = 2019” is inane logically but emotionally very, very powerful.
That’s also why I think his approvals have nosedived so fast - he’s very publicly and loudly *not* bringing the pre-COVID rosy warm nostalgia memory people (wrongly, as we were headed into recession by the end of that year, but nevertheless) want back and that they believe they elected him to bring back as a single-issue vote
The indicators around manufacturing output and similar were blinking as early as 2018 - a big reason why Powell started cutting rates, along with rising WH pressure heading into an election year, to get ahead of it
That said, a mid-to-late 2020 recession in a no-COVID scenario is probably more of a 2001 (pre-9/11) type contraction, maybe a smidge worse if short of 1990-91, than another 1982 or 2008
The biggest contributors to a Democratic Party getting its shit together....
1) Don't run a cognitively compromised octogenarian incumbent with an approval rating south of 40% and convince yourself that everything is gonna work out.
2) Don't let 10 million people cross your borders illegally and only begin making gestures to fix it a few months before the election.
The thing that is personally demoralizing to me is that I really think the party decently had it's shit together last November, especially when all of the factors were taken into account. And we still got beaten. So, I'm not sure that getting our shit together again (and plenty can argue on exactly what that will look like) is going to save us. I do think the party needs change, but I don't know in which direction, and I'm not sure how much it will help.
We did not in fact have our shit together, I’m sorry, but we didn’t. Why Democrats decided to rerun the failed 2016 Clinton strategy “Trump is a danger to democracy” in 2024 is one of the key reasons we lost everything. Most people (even many supporters) don’t like Trump as a person, but they don’t care until he’s in office and only then do they get mad about it.
To be fair I don’t think any Democrat could’ve won as the majority of voters had made up their mind they wanted 2019 back again come hell, high water or Trump. But Harris and her team ran an old school race talking about what she wanted to do with policy (no one cares about that). Biden didn’t talk much about policy in his successful 2020 campaign.
The way to win modern elections is to make your opponent look unacceptable to the average/swing/doesn’t pay attention voter. People vote based on what they don’t want, not what they do want. We saw that in every election from 2017-2023 (except a mild blip in 2021 elections) as Democrats hammered Republicans and gained a ton of ground everywhere only for 2024 to come up and then for the party to completely toss the playbook that wins elections and go back to attacking Trump.
I do think this point gets brought up a lot but still not enough - nostalgia for pre-COVID still hasn’t subsided (indeed it may never) and a lot of people got basically cooked mentally 2020-22 and have never recovered. The equation “Trump = 2019” is inane logically but emotionally very, very powerful.
That’s also why I think his approvals have nosedived so fast - he’s very publicly and loudly *not* bringing the pre-COVID rosy warm nostalgia memory people (wrongly, as we were headed into recession by the end of that year, but nevertheless) want back and that they believe they elected him to bring back as a single-issue vote
We were heading into recession at the end of 2019? Or just because COVID happened?
The indicators around manufacturing output and similar were blinking as early as 2018 - a big reason why Powell started cutting rates, along with rising WH pressure heading into an election year, to get ahead of it
That said, a mid-to-late 2020 recession in a no-COVID scenario is probably more of a 2001 (pre-9/11) type contraction, maybe a smidge worse if short of 1990-91, than another 1982 or 2008
The biggest contributors to a Democratic Party getting its shit together....
1) Don't run a cognitively compromised octogenarian incumbent with an approval rating south of 40% and convince yourself that everything is gonna work out.
2) Don't let 10 million people cross your borders illegally and only begin making gestures to fix it a few months before the election.
Can't really argue with that.