Yeah, there are 19 blue states, 7 swing states, and 24 red states so that's the math. Dropping identity politics and emphasizing popular economic policies (which they already do pretty well) would help, but I don't think there's anything the party could realistically do to put any of the red states in play in the near future. The most likely possibilities are probably Ohio and Texas, and they aren't really in reach.
Absolutely that. I hear far, far more people complain about democrats running on identity issues than I see evidence of democrats actually doing so. Anyone that thinks that republicans spoke less than democrats about trans folks & gender identity especially but also LGBT in general, race, or religion, is someone that has not been paying attention. Democrats did talk more about women, though. But I don't buy that we were hurt by that one.
Ultimately, I return to my comment from the other day: everyone and their dog is going to have a "solution" for winning the election that boils down to more of the party adopting that person's ideological stances and focuses. Inevitably some of them will be right, but the ideological sniping and finger pointing is a waste of time. It causes party disunity and won't get anyone to actually change their mind.
You would never know. When Bush sr was elected in 1988 and the end of the Cold War, who would think the realignment into the current party-system was just about to kick in? Maybe to the exception of some close circle of Bill.
Obviously the current party-system is crumbling, and a new realignment is in full blown. How does the picture end up, is anyone’s guess.
If the Democratic Party carries on its current path of identity segmentation of American electorate, I won’t be surprised that NY and NJ becomes swing states in 2028.
Industrial policy isn't going to be an issue. After all, DNC Chair Jaime Harrison fiercely defended Biden's record on the economy as it relates to manufacturing.
The real problem is that Democrats are not talking enough about going after Citizens United and the corporate influence on society. It's a good reason why we cannot get enough done, especially with getting a public healthcare option. Dan Osborn may have not won but he got the closest margin of loss out of any challenger to a GOP incumbent by running an anti-corporate campaign in Nebraska.
There are plenty of other issues such as cost of living, income inequality, etc. but attacking the corporate influence does win over voters.
A good short term fix is to bring to heel the lecturing snobs who turned intersectionality from a delicate house of cards into a demolition derby. Activists simping for Assad, Sinwar, and Nasrallah poisoned the well and triggered a backlash against the so-called "educated" elites.
And activists blurred that difference. Many of them howled when Haniyeh, Sinwar, and Nasrallah were eliminated. Those ones should have been iced out of the movement.
It's the same pattern we saw, in a different form, in the 2018 and 2022 midterms. There's a not-insignificant part of the republican base that only cares about voting for Trump. They won't show up for midterms, for special elections, or anything of the sort. But they will will show up if he's on the ballot. That a decent chunk of them aren't even voting down the ballot is kind of incredible.
If this is something that holds — not guaranteed, but not unreasonable either — we could expect a modest boon in future elections.
Precisely! I believe there’s a state supreme court race on the agenda very early in 2025. Democrats need to heavily prioritize winning these and similar races.
Also, there will be local and state races that would normally be below the radar. We need to focus on them and win them, build up a winning streak while strengthening the Democratic Party organization in each state – expanded by a strengthened alliance with the groups and organizations that arose organically during the 2024 election.
I struggle who in the MAGA movement can pick up trumps baton and run with it like he does. DeSantis nor Cruz have broad appeal and come across as slimy politicians, JD Vance is not charismatic and also comes across inauthentic, so maybe tucker Carlson type? But he doesn’t have the “business man guy from the apprentice” that seemed to help trump with those squishy folks in the middle. Also, none of these figures have the teflon trump seems to have. It seems the conservative coalition is built on a foundation of sand
The question is whether they need to win elections, or primarily do the job of implementing Project 2025. For the latter, I fear JD Vance is an excellent choice – never mind that he has all the charm of excrement-coated Anthracite.
But, yes, other than that, the MAGA coalition is built on a foundation of quivering lard. (They’re radical extremists, NOT "conservatives".)
That generally happens when a political bloc is tied together by the charisma of one person. The Obama coalition only showed up for Obama. The Teddy Roosevelt coalition fractured quickly once he left and Taft came in.
I'm gonna assume the provisional ballots are among those that NBC are reporting as the remaining outstanding votes, since they have Philadelphia alone as have 60k remaining. I also wonder if all the mail in ballots have been received by now, not counting UOCAVA ballots, since the total did fluctuate a bit a few days ago.
Well maybe, maybe not. I do agree he seemed to be on a leash after the first week he joined and it was very frustrating. He should've been let lose on all the "dude" podcasts/Joe Rogan etc and just bro-ed out.
I think Newsom would be weaker than Harris, he's also from SF, has more baggage and a weaker profile, and comes off as less trustworthy. I don't think Buttigieg helps with any groups that don't always vote Dem. Moore could be interesting. I would add both the AZ senators to the list, I think they'd run well almost everywhere.
I am a Dem from L.A. and I don't despise Gavin, although he uses too much hair product, which is a metaphor for his slickness. I wouldn't support him in a primary even if I liked him because he would be a weak candidate in the USA. Even in CA he has worn out his welcome. Next...!
Aren't we supposed to avoid Dem POTUS primary talk?
Newsom is going to run and will get a lot of attention because he's mastered the art of getting media attention.
I agree with you though. I think he would be weaker. Also, fairly or not, I think he will be received more poorly because he's also a California based democrat. That isn't why Harris lost, but reductionist conclusions are part and parcel for how primary voters behave in these contests and that comparison is a poor one for him.
He passes the basic smell test as a candidate, but so do all the other serious contenders. I think 2028 primary voters will be leery of anyone who hasn't demonstrated appeal to swing voters in a swing state.
I certainly hope they are to at least some extent.
Incidentally I dislike Newsom. I've gotten a handful of texts from his team in the past week (despite endlessly replying "stop" to every political text I get) and it just rubs me the wrong way to know that he's immediately trying to position himself for the primary. Comes across as him being gleeful that the country suffers because it's good for his personal ambition.
Let's be clear-eyed about the implications of the DNC's new primary schedule, frontloaded with South Carolina and Georgia, for 2028 and every cycle thereafter. Our 2028 Presidential nominee will be whoever Jim Clyburn decides to endorse.
Spell out to me an alternative scenario. With the nature of the primary schedule and the sharp rate of candidate attrition for those who fail to perform, conservative blacks in the Deep South have been bequeathed kingmaker status for our party's Presidential nomination. Make no mistake about it....what they say goes. Maybe they will make the right choice as they likely did in 2020, but either way, you're gonna have to live with their choice.
Ah yes. The same scenario spun four years ago as to why Trump wouldn't be the GOP nominee in 2024. Surely Trump's fried chicken diet would give us a deus ex machina ending!!!! I suppose J.D. Vance could die in a car accident too and prevent him from being the frontrunner for the 2028 nomination. But in the absence of Grim Reaper intervention, I'd like to hear another scenario where Jim Clyburn doesn't single-handedly decide who the 2028 Democratic nominee is.
wow, drama queen much? you asked, I answered; and now that that's out of the way; my scenario is highly likely (but, I'll play along anyway cause it's fun); first of all(as usual), you throw out highly debatable broadsides and assume that we here should simply take those things to be facts; I disagree with almost your entire premise here and dispute just about every single one of your conclusions; but imo that doesn't matter mainly because right now I don't frankly care who is nominated or how and why; I think this for 2 main reasons (#1 being by far the most important);1\imo Trump will have a disastrous 2nd term that is much worse than his first and whoever is unfortunately the Republican nominee is going to get destroyed in the 2028 elections; and my second point is even more simple so; 2\ until this year, from 1992 through 2020; every single election had a Democratic party candidate that won the popular vote, so imo 2028 will be no different; the Democratic party will nominate a perfectly electable candidate once again(I am confident you will completely miss the main point I'm making and respond with some innocuous drivel that doesn't matter one iota about the overall board); but I am willing to read any rebuttal you have(oops I got ahead of myself; yes Kerry barely lost the popular vote; my point stands)
Pointing out the SC/GA impact is absolutely wise to do, but that doesn't mean Clyburn will be kingmaker. Especially seeing as how he is 84 today — more so than with most people, we cannot even be certain he will be alive in four years time. Even with an outsized influence, which is a reasonable assumption, he alone would not be enough to dictate the outcome.
Clyburn's input will matter if there's an undifferentiated pack, as there was in 2020. If there are even two or three clear frontrunners, it won't matter as much.
Exactly; and we simply have no way of knowing what happens in midterm or even the 2021 Governors races on the schedule; or the special election for congressional open seat race or races that always pop up or a million other things before an election in 4 years. !!
The continued blueing of the GA suburbs means it's primary electorate is not going to be as dominated by the old school AA vote machine like it is in SC.
The last four democrats to lose the popular vote covers a span of time longer than I've been alive, and I'm no spring chicken nowadays. IMO their homestates is the least interesting factor, especially considering how much our politics has changed over those intervening 40 years.
That said, I'm going to have my eyes on Whitmer and Pritzker going into 2028. I'm not going to bother thinking further than that. Certainly not committed to them, but they're the ones that stand out the most to me at this stage.
I've been a "Whitmer stan" ever since she was first elected Governor and I remain so. The folks saying we can't go with a woman again are mistaken. I think vs Vance after 4 years of Trump mismanagement it could be the great beating we've all envisioned/hoped for but haven't experienced since 2012.
Anyone who has lived in San Francisco as a liberal knows very well that Newsom as Mayor of San Francisco was too caught up in trying to be a celebrity than actually being a Mayor. Former Supervisor David Campos had said he was more comfortable making speeches in big crowds but aloof when it came to actually doing the job of being Mayor when working with supervisors.
Former Mayor Art Agnos said it best, "He gives great speeches but, in the end, what's it all about?"
Besides, Newsom himself is too comfortable making his name in deep blue turf. He was great in pushing the gay marriage issue when it was unpopular and established Healthy San Francisco, one of the first local universal healthcare programs but my god, he otherwise gives the GOP too much ammunition (the ad he did trolling Florida did nothing to help Democrats). There's no evidence Newsom has the ability to appeal to swing voters, let alone independents in Midwestern states or the South.
Also, Newsom as Governor flat out won't even push to get the Costa Hawkins Act or Ellis Act repealed even if recently, he signed a rent control legislation into law. He and many Democrats in the State Legislature are too beholden to the California Association of Realtors and developer interests.
I am confused by the last part of your comment. Who was the other CADEM who lost the popular vote? I have 2024 Harris (CA), 2004 Kerry (MA), 1988 Dukakis (MA) and 1984 Mondale (MN). Farther back you have 1980 Carter (GA) , 1972 McGovern (SD) and 1968 Humphrey (MN).
Kamala Harris was the first California Democrat to be nominated for POTUS or VPOTUS, as far as I can tell. Who am I forgetting?
Looking ahead to the 2026 Senate, I would love for us to secure some major candidates, even in some red states. At this point we have to try. Assuming we can hold CO, GA, NH, PA and VA, I would like the following candidates for swing to medium red states:
Alaska: Mary Peltola (whether or not she holds her House seat)
Iowa: Rob Sand or Cindy Axne
Kansas: Laura Kelly
Maine: Jared Golden or Troy Jackson
Montana: Zeno Baucus or Whitney Williams
North Carolina: Roy Cooper, Don Davis, Wiley Nickel, or Jeff Jackson.
Ohio: Tim Ryan or Greg Landsman
Texas: Lizzie Fletcher, Joaquin or Julian Castro, or a state legislator from the Rio Grande area who can help try to curb the trend there.
Blood-red state unlikely to happen wishlist:
Kentucky: Jacqueline Coleman (Andy Beshear said he won't run)
Louisiana: John Bel Edwards
Mississippi: Jim Hood or Brandon Presley
Nebraska: Dan Osborn (he held Fischer to a close race than any D ever could, and is probably our only option here)
South Carolina: Thomas McElveen
South Dakota: Stephanie Herseth Sandlin
West Virginia: Richard Ojeda
We might as well run Osborn-type independents in AL, AR, ID, OK, TN, and WY since no one obvious come to mind for those.
5-10% chance that he runs, he'd have to be convinced that (i) he almost certainly WOULD win; and (ii) almost certainly anyone else would lose.
Hard to square that circle. He's an excellent retail politician, but very, very cautious. I suspect his strong preference is to retire and go back home. My impression is that even living in Raleigh represented a tough ask for him, he'd hate DC.
Nickel is the one left without anything to run for in 2024, he likely got "soft" assurances that the establishment would let him have its 2026 Senate lane. I'm not sure anyone else (outside the usual grifter and rando lanes) really would want it. Jackson and Hunt just got elected, and will bide their time. The rest of the state bench is anonymous at best.
NC has always had lots of transplants, I don't expect that will be an issue. Nickel just strikes me as "generic, urban NC Democrat" (not meant pejoratively, that's pretty much what I am). There's nothing sketchy about him, but nothing really charismatic or memorable either.
It's a decent, safe choice for losing a federal race without burning your bench. You can go back to "Helms v. Hunt" to see how state-level popularity usually doesn't translate federally.
Edwards won as a charismatic outsider, and of course he turned out to be a shyster and a...piece of excrement. Kay Hagan kind of came out of nowhere, and won by a perfect storm of circumstance (political tailwinds), excellent campaigning, and a bad/cocky opponent.
Nickel could win like Hagan did, it's just not particularly likely.
I completely disagree; the 2026 election for all competitive Senate and House seats will depend on how bad Trump performs in the first 2 years of the second term
Any notable state legislators in Montana we can recruit for a statewide election? I know the state level Montana Democratic Party has been significantly weakened over the past decades, but the recent redistricting laws led them to gain more seats this year. So hopefully they should have some credible candidates soon if not already for statewide races.
I'd rather not run Landsman for a longshot Senate race as it could put his House seat at risk. If Peltola wins I might be reluctant to run her too. Davis and Golden are different because their potential Senate races would start out as much more winnable, but I'd prefer someone with less to lose than Davis if they would be about equally strong. I think Golden would clearly be the strongest possible candidate for Maine, so that's a tough one.
It is quite unfortunate the fair redistricting ballot measure failed in OH, if they redrew OH-01 to become a Cincinnati-only seat it would be borderline safe-D and free up Landsman to run statewide.
Peltola should still run, the replacement value of a US Senate seat is too high (we could easily take another Biden20/Harris24 house seat in CA or the northeast to make up for losing AK)
We just won a bunch of statewide races in NC, plenty of options there.
Golden used to work for Collins, so just convincing him to run would be difficult, unless she retires of course.
I always thought Peltola's plan was to stay in the House for a few terms until Alaska looked pinkish enough to go for a Senate run. Which is why I really hope she prevails; I fear that 26 may be too early for the jump.
Please, no, not Jared Golden! That proposal is misreading Maine’s political map. While Golden is an excellent fit for ME-02 and probably the best Democrats can achieve in this Red district, he is far too conservative for Maine as a whole. Besides, already in the House, Jared Golden has proved himself to be a Manchin-like figure, voting against certain key Democratic policy positions.
Maine has an excellent Democratic-caucusing senator in Angus King – and he is much more moderate. That is the sort of candidate we should be looking for to challenge Susan Collins.
Rob Sand would be an excellent get. Iowa may be too far gone, but the state could be one of the most adversely affected by Trump's tariffs if other countries aggressively retaliate.
We did well here during the 2018 midterm, so the right candidate could make it close.
CO isn’t even going to be a contest. Kamala Harris won the state by 16% points and Senator George Hickenlooper unseated Cory Gardner by nearly 10% points. This indicates the state is moving further to the left.
Which ultimately is a win for Democrats despite the major losses. They get more representation and visibility, plus a larger pool of potential candidates for Congressional and statewide offices in the future. It's easy to forget that Jon Tester himself started off as a state senator and later became the President of the Senate. Perhaps in future Montana Democrats can recruit an equally, if not superior candidate from the state legislature for statewide office and perhaps win again.
With the CA amendments sharpening penalties for non-violent crime and continuing the use of prison labor as allowed under the 13th Amendment, I think we have QED on what the people want w/r/t law enforcement. Just stop fighting it and roll with it. Chesa's expulsion is not some glitch you can rationalize away. Alameda County and LA County declared they want DAs that actually prosecute.
While there are some compromises I'm willing to make mentally (I'm not a politician so I'm not "making compromises" on policy per se), I worry about the road this "hard on crime" stance will take. Have we all forgotten the Kids for Cash scandal?
I think we should first separate the goal of electing DAs vs. the actual legislative process of getting new laws instituted when it comes to criminal justice reform. Frankly, I think progressives in this election spent way too much energy on trying to fight the recalls and didn't look at themselves in the mirror by realizing they don't have control over their narrative.
What Pamela Price was doing as DA was irrational and not progressive. She showed a bias when it came to reducing sentences for the accused who were black by lowering their sentences regardless of what they were arrested for. This goes against the values I learned as liberal in high school in Berkeley when I was taking ethnic studies back in the mid 90s. One of my family members also has an attorney who worked for a long time in the Alameda County DA's office, is pro-criminal justice reform, but was not a fan of Price in how she handled her cases.
On the other hand, legislatively criminal justice reform has legs. The notion that progressives think there's a blow to criminal justice reform by recalling DAs like Chesa Boudin and Pamela Price is just absolute BS, especially considering Trump as POTUS signed The First Step Act back in 2018 which the majority of Democrats & Republicans in the House and Senate voted for. Criminal justice reform legislatively isn't strictly partisan and is an ongoing process.
We have a messaging problem not a policy problem. The public is not made up of policy wonks. They just want things to feel fair to their monkey brains. They know/think mostly what they see on TV and their phones. We are losing in the propaganda space to cop unions and billionaires. I live with a blue collar black guy who is a state employee and a two strike felon, who just spent about $70k and several years on legal defense of a malicious prosecution of a self-defense incident that would have counted as a 3rd strike as charged, and he’d have voted against Gascon if we lived in L.A. County because of the propaganda.
Sometimes you gotta let the baby have his bottle (i.e. stricter law enforcement). When law enforcement vastly oversteps the boundaries again, please suppress any wacko who promotes "defund the police." Also, don't let anyone shriek at normies just living their life. Maybe we'll end up in a better place then.
As a constituent in his state Senate district and CD 47, I was livid at the DUI, but did vote for him in the primary. Fortunate for us, the Republican candidate was highly flawed including a criminal past himself.
A pretty red day in Arizona as the R counties finish counting. The big news though was a 100,000 vote drop from Maricopa. About 50,000 came from R districts, 30,000 from D districts, and 20,000 from AZ-01 (Schweikert’s toss-up district).
Out of that mix, somehow Lake only netted *2,000 votes.* Yikes. The batch was Trump +11 but only Lake+2.
Hopefully she will grow up. She can say that type of stuff and win her own district, but when said 2 weeks before an election when crime is on the ballot, it sure can hurt candidates in swing districts.
LA news was harping on it for at least a 3 day news cycle.
It's a stupid thing to say anytime but agree with you about especially at that time in a political race which can be broadcast non-stop to hurt the entire slate
Part of "growing up" is being on the council and having to deal with real issues and try to accomplish her goals. She is more than just her worst soundbite. Ysabel Jurado is a tenants rights attorney who built a multiethnic winning coalition against a powerful politician while being a member of a small minority in the district (Filipina). KDL is part of the majority ethnic group of the Eastside and was pitching an appeal to keep the district Latino. The best of L.A. politics is when people are able to build coalitions among different groups to work for a better future for all Angelenos.
I am willing to give Ysabel Jurado a chance, and I thank her for taking out the trash by retiring Kevin DeLeon.
Looks like NBC has called the Nevada senate race tonight for Jacky Rosen. A bit odd how AP has yet to call the race, despite the very clear remainder of the outstanding votes being in Washoe and Clark that strongly favor Rosen. Yet they seemed all too willing to call the Pennsylvania senate race for McCormick despite the fact that the secretary himself stated that there were over 100k outstanding ballots yet to be counted and the margin continues to narrow.
Why did the Latino vote shift so far to the right in almost every state? I think we can rule out a number of explanations at least as primary factors.
I don't think it was racism, because most of the same voters overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama.
I don't think it was sexism, because most of the same voters overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton.
I don't buy that more than a handful of voters of any race are willing to vote for a black man or a white woman, but not a black woman.
I don't think it was Harris' perceived ideology or personal qualities, in part because she consistently polled better than Biden did. The trans bashing may have hurt her, but I wouldn't think that it would have hurt her more among Latinos than among other voters.
So what's left? I suspect there were two main things. The first is inflation, which especially hurt Dems among less engaged voters, and Latinos tend to be less engaged than other groups. The second is that there seems to be an informal permission structure to vote GOP that wasn't there as recently as 2016. The border issue probably hurt Dems somewhat in border counties, although the shifts there weren't that much bigger than in other heavily Latino counties. What does this mean for the future? Any dissatisfaction with the economy or other current conditions will hurt the GOP at least in 2026 and 2028. But the permission structure won't go away. Unless something else changes, I think the Dem ceiling among Latinos is lower now than it was in 2016 and we aren't likely to approach 2016-type margins for the foreseeable future. The analogue on the other side is that the GOP ceiling among college-educated suburbanites is lower than in 2012, and they won't again approach their pre-Trump margins.
Yep. At the very minimum people want to have the illusion that we are a classless and color blind society where the only things that matter are ability and the willingness to work. The fact that the number of people who can “bootstrap” their way out of poverty is the exception not the rule is irrelevant. They want that illusion. Microtargeting and DEI rob them of that illusion.
I think microtargeting makes sense in terms of running ads calculated to appeal to the audience of whatever show/channel/etc the ad is running on, but I agree that any sort of identity politics needs to go. Everything I've seen suggests that swing voters just don't want to hear it.
My own thought is that the best rhetorical appeal on this is to emphasize the multi-ethnic, class-based appeal of the Democratic coalition, and work on rebuilding that. It's hard to exactly spell out the nuances that I'm picturing in mind, but... we need to keep being anti-racist, while (to borrow your words) avoiding micro-targeting in the political appeals.
That and the fact that in Spanish, Latinos is THE correct way to refer to a plural of Latin American people (unless they are all female). For many, “Latinx” is a violation of their native tongue.
I get the impression a good chunk of the Latino community, "Latinx" is viewed as something rich white hipsters came up with, so why should they embrace it? It comes across as white "elitists" trying to speak for them.
Ruben Gallego is strongly against the term Latinx and is one of those Latinos you're referring to who gets offended by the name.
Also, let's be frank: It doesn't sound great to have a term sound like Kleenex. We've used Latino for decades and there's no reason why we need to be "more inclusive" by saying Latinx.
Better to focus on bread-and-butter issues affecting the Hispanic and Latino community instead of trying to sound hip and cool.
If you do use the term, pronounce it Lah-TEEN-ay, and not LA-tin-ecks. The second one is like nails on chalkboard and not at all what is actually said by Spanish speakers who use the term.
(I agree that Latino is sufficiently inclusive in most situations. I would only use Latinx I was specifically highlighting gender neutrality. eg. "The Trans Latinx community")
I know that’s what everyone is saying, but why then vote for the candidate whose two most important policies are highly inflationary? You don’t have to be an economist to realize that tarrffs and deporting the people who harvest and process food and who build houses will result in large price increase.
Voters tend to be backward looking. Most casual voters have no idea what tariffs are, and probably just didn't believe Dems' warnings that they're inflationary. Likewise they don't have experience with severe immigration restrictions outside the context of the pandemic, when there wasn't much demand so the labor supply contraction didn't really show up in prices. I suspect that if Trump goes through with this the results will be highly unpopular, but it's hard to warn people about things that don't confirm their priors and that they haven't experienced before.
My first guess would be a shift in social structures.
Historically there were many specific white ethnicities that were looked down upon in generations past: Italians, Irish, Poles, and many others, were othered for their or their ancestors' country of origin. As cultural perceptions of race and ethnicity changed and those groups were brought under the larger umbrella of "white", their voting behaviors shifted.
I'd hazard a guess that Latinos, especially those with lighter skin, are seeing cultural perceptions of race and ethnicity change again, in their favor, and they are given less of an other treatment as a result. That cultural change is a good thing, of course, but it would come with the consequence of them no longer perceiving conservatives' xenophobia as targeting them. That in turn would result in changed voting behavior, which is bad for us, even if the root cause is from society improving.
If this is what is happening it would require more or less a complete rewrite of the foundations of how our party appeals to them for their vote.
I suspect most Hispanics are pocketbook voters instead of culture war voters. A campaign centered around reproductive rights and January 6 had no salience to them.
If ever there was a time (and I'm not sure there ever was) that Hispanics were partial to the open border position that Democrats have been incrementally moving toward since 2013, that time passed its expiration date but the Biden administration got the memo a few years too late.
Every survey I've seen indicates that they're mostly interested in kitchen-table issues. I don't agree that Dems are moving left on immigration as the party's current position is to pass the enforcement-only bill that Trump blocked, which puts them to the right of where they've been at any previous point this century.
Well they're no longer moving left on immigration in 2024 but did for a decade preceding it before finally getting the hint that there wasn't a constituency for it outside of university faculty lounges. By the time Democrats finally got the message, the cake was baked and the opposition was able to completely and unequivocally roll them.
When Biden first came into office and basically undid what Trump had done instead of implementing a tenable border policy, he created chaos in Arizona and Texas.
Every Arizona Democratic politician was screaming about what he was doing to them including the D governor and D mayors of Phoenix and Tucson, both US senators and Senate candidate to be Gallego.
This was the major reason for the lurch to the right in Arizona, and the only reason we are even in the running in the Senate race is that Kari Lake is such a horrible candidate. Even people who can stomach Trump can't stomach her, and it's so close we could lose that lead.
This shift caused us to lose sheriff and recorder in Maricopa to right wing candidates that can now cause harm to our side in future elections.
We had a slate of candidates in Arizona that were as crazy or worse than Lake, Lake being the R candidate for governor, and we narrowly won the seats we did. The effect is also cumulative.
Not only do people hear RW media screaming this stuff, but liberal help organizations are on news and public affairs programs begging for money and volunteers because they are overwhelmed
Then the problem gets hyped beyond how bad it is by RW media, blogs and social media.
Most people then start blaming Phoenix's massive homeless problems and drug problems on immigrants where there is little known tie. You see very few Latinos in the homeless encampments in Phoenix.
Dobbs + very popular governor candidates in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Other than that, the two elections are turning out to be remarkably similar downballot.
Well, a stage full of Democratic Presidential candidates raised their hands in 2019 when asked if they supported decriminalized border crossings. When the top emissaries for the highest office in the land convey their support for it, I'd say that's a good representation of the party's position.
And for all intents and purposes, Biden's asylum policy amounted to de facto open borders. All comers get to put in an asylum request and then stay in-country for multiple years until their asylum hearings, are granted work permits, and face effectively zero chance of deportation even if they don't qualify for asylum, provided they don't commit felonies. We can split hairs on whether that qualifies as "open borders" or not, but the public sure perceived it to be and that's what matters.
As far as I know, "decriminalizing" something is not synonymous with making it legal. I can think of many things that are illegal but won’t land me in jail or prison. That said, I appreciate your key points.
It's a distinction without a difference. The old adage is that if you're explaining, you're losing. If the Democrats want to spend their time breaking down the distinction between their past calls to decriminalize border crossings and how it's different from voter demands to close the borders, then they're gonna do a lot more losing.
Many of my Hispanic friends are the least offended people in the world. They're straight forward and can take jokes, even if they make fun of them (in a good way, not a Tony Hinchcliffe kind of joke). Certainly, there are exceptions of them who are liberal and reliable votes for Democrats but overall, many of them care less about politics and are more about making a living and providing for their families.
Good analysis. For those who shifted, I think it came down to their personal economic circumstances.
Gamarra said the U.S. has the best economy in the world based on figures, “but what we don’t realize is that people don’t consume those figures. People go to the supermarket. They go to the gas pump. They’re trying to buy a home. And if any group has been affected by the economy, it has been Hispanics.”
Also, with inflation, it’s made voters less likely to have the ability to save given they are having to spend more on purchases than they’ve typically done in the past.
Hispanic families are very much middle class, the ideal type of voters Democrats should win over. However, if being in the middle class is made harder with inflation, then it’s a problem for the Democratic Party.
I feel like the challenge is threading the needle of not coming off as uber-liberal on, say, trans issues, while also not throwing that community under the bus.
Yes, but part of the problem we had this cycle was keeping our coalition together. If you throw trans people, or other groups, under the bus, you risk losing other segments that you absolutely need to win.
It's a tightrope, and I think there's a way to do it, but she didn't.
has anyone said anything about throwing anyone under any bus? I know for a fact I haven't, and I am confident that it won't happen; it's the other guys that do the demonizing
This would be very bad for the country, but also very bad for the GOP in the next election. Thune would be better for both.
Is Cornyn effectively out as a contender then, and it’s a two-man race?
I'm going with most likely and I still think Thune wins(posted it Friday, still believe it)
We’ll see if sentiment that Scott’s budget proposals in 2022 screwed the GOP continues to carry
Yeah, there are 19 blue states, 7 swing states, and 24 red states so that's the math. Dropping identity politics and emphasizing popular economic policies (which they already do pretty well) would help, but I don't think there's anything the party could realistically do to put any of the red states in play in the near future. The most likely possibilities are probably Ohio and Texas, and they aren't really in reach.
Harris ran less on identity issues than Biden, who ran on it less than Clinton. This seems to be fighting the last war a bit
Absolutely that. I hear far, far more people complain about democrats running on identity issues than I see evidence of democrats actually doing so. Anyone that thinks that republicans spoke less than democrats about trans folks & gender identity especially but also LGBT in general, race, or religion, is someone that has not been paying attention. Democrats did talk more about women, though. But I don't buy that we were hurt by that one.
Ultimately, I return to my comment from the other day: everyone and their dog is going to have a "solution" for winning the election that boils down to more of the party adopting that person's ideological stances and focuses. Inevitably some of them will be right, but the ideological sniping and finger pointing is a waste of time. It causes party disunity and won't get anyone to actually change their mind.
Trump could make a lot of states in play (just gotta wait it out)
You would never know. When Bush sr was elected in 1988 and the end of the Cold War, who would think the realignment into the current party-system was just about to kick in? Maybe to the exception of some close circle of Bill.
Obviously the current party-system is crumbling, and a new realignment is in full blown. How does the picture end up, is anyone’s guess.
If the Democratic Party carries on its current path of identity segmentation of American electorate, I won’t be surprised that NY and NJ becomes swing states in 2028.
A cataclysm would have been also losing Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and Michigan.
But I agree with him on neo-liberalism. And having been saying that since 1994.
I’m just really hoping the party doesn’t ditch the movements toward industrial policy that Biden made
Industrial policy isn't going to be an issue. After all, DNC Chair Jaime Harrison fiercely defended Biden's record on the economy as it relates to manufacturing.
The real problem is that Democrats are not talking enough about going after Citizens United and the corporate influence on society. It's a good reason why we cannot get enough done, especially with getting a public healthcare option. Dan Osborn may have not won but he got the closest margin of loss out of any challenger to a GOP incumbent by running an anti-corporate campaign in Nebraska.
There are plenty of other issues such as cost of living, income inequality, etc. but attacking the corporate influence does win over voters.
A good short term fix is to bring to heel the lecturing snobs who turned intersectionality from a delicate house of cards into a demolition derby. Activists simping for Assad, Sinwar, and Nasrallah poisoned the well and triggered a backlash against the so-called "educated" elites.
There is a huge difference between being pro-Palestinian and being pro-Hamas or pro-Hezbollah.
And activists blurred that difference. Many of them howled when Haniyeh, Sinwar, and Nasrallah were eliminated. Those ones should have been iced out of the movement.
$20m of debt to save four Senate seats is a bargain.
Exactly; it's 1 fundraiser
Not if your goal was purchasing personal access to the White House…
Think about this logic. She’s whining that her rich friends wrote checks because a win was already being guaranteed?
She's an idiot; literally her quote is contradictory; folks like her are better just milked, then ignored
Trust fund baby whines about writing checks.
Same thing happened in Michigan, Slotkin got 16k fewer votes than Harris but Rogers got 117k fewer than Trump.
It's the same pattern we saw, in a different form, in the 2018 and 2022 midterms. There's a not-insignificant part of the republican base that only cares about voting for Trump. They won't show up for midterms, for special elections, or anything of the sort. But they will will show up if he's on the ballot. That a decent chunk of them aren't even voting down the ballot is kind of incredible.
If this is something that holds — not guaranteed, but not unreasonable either — we could expect a modest boon in future elections.
Precisely! I believe there’s a state supreme court race on the agenda very early in 2025. Democrats need to heavily prioritize winning these and similar races.
Also, there will be local and state races that would normally be below the radar. We need to focus on them and win them, build up a winning streak while strengthening the Democratic Party organization in each state – expanded by a strengthened alliance with the groups and organizations that arose organically during the 2024 election.
And winning builds morale!
I struggle who in the MAGA movement can pick up trumps baton and run with it like he does. DeSantis nor Cruz have broad appeal and come across as slimy politicians, JD Vance is not charismatic and also comes across inauthentic, so maybe tucker Carlson type? But he doesn’t have the “business man guy from the apprentice” that seemed to help trump with those squishy folks in the middle. Also, none of these figures have the teflon trump seems to have. It seems the conservative coalition is built on a foundation of sand
The question is whether they need to win elections, or primarily do the job of implementing Project 2025. For the latter, I fear JD Vance is an excellent choice – never mind that he has all the charm of excrement-coated Anthracite.
But, yes, other than that, the MAGA coalition is built on a foundation of quivering lard. (They’re radical extremists, NOT "conservatives".)
I don't agree; I think Trump will treat Vance worse than Mike pence
I was hypothesizing in the event of Trump’s (un)timely demise.
Lmao 😂 ok
Imo maga is Trump and only Trump
That generally happens when a political bloc is tied together by the charisma of one person. The Obama coalition only showed up for Obama. The Teddy Roosevelt coalition fractured quickly once he left and Taft came in.
which is exactly why imo we have an excellent cycle in 2026
That said, Jacky Rosen also performed better than Catherine Cortez-Masto did back in 2022.
Suffice to say, Sam Brown was a worse GOP Senate Candidate than Adam Laxalt was back in 2022.
Doesn’t surprise me, Laxalt had a solid surname in the state, had run for office before (once successfully) and could present well
By contrast, I think Laxalt has had more politically savvy skills than Brown. I mean, he's the son of the late Pete Domenici.
Under voting downballlot isn’t new.
So in summary: we don't know yet.
Nice to see there's a lot of Allegheny in there too. Probably won't be as lopsided as Philadelphia though.
I'm gonna assume the provisional ballots are among those that NBC are reporting as the remaining outstanding votes, since they have Philadelphia alone as have 60k remaining. I also wonder if all the mail in ballots have been received by now, not counting UOCAVA ballots, since the total did fluctuate a bit a few days ago.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/pennsylvania-senate-results
Needs to do better than that. And with any other uncounted votes out of Philadelphia.
Needs to do better indeed. Hopefully that's out of northeast Philly, the least Democratic region of the city.
Let's just count and wait and hope
Moore I think could be formidable in a field of boring white guys
Moore is OK but I don't see star power there. His DNC speech was 'meh'.
Walz-Gallego.
I like Walz for sure(could care less about the veep; veep doesn't matter)
I like Walz a lot but the debate showed why he's not an A side national candidate.
It did not. The Harris campaign had him tone down the style that had gotten him on the ticket in the first place.
Well maybe, maybe not. I do agree he seemed to be on a leash after the first week he joined and it was very frustrating. He should've been let lose on all the "dude" podcasts/Joe Rogan etc and just bro-ed out.
I think Newsom would be weaker than Harris, he's also from SF, has more baggage and a weaker profile, and comes off as less trustworthy. I don't think Buttigieg helps with any groups that don't always vote Dem. Moore could be interesting. I would add both the AZ senators to the list, I think they'd run well almost everywhere.
both won't run
I'm a devoted dem from LA and I absolutely despise Newsom.
I am a Dem from L.A. and I don't despise Gavin, although he uses too much hair product, which is a metaphor for his slickness. I wouldn't support him in a primary even if I liked him because he would be a weak candidate in the USA. Even in CA he has worn out his welcome. Next...!
Aren't we supposed to avoid Dem POTUS primary talk?
Newsom is going to run and will get a lot of attention because he's mastered the art of getting media attention.
I agree with you though. I think he would be weaker. Also, fairly or not, I think he will be received more poorly because he's also a California based democrat. That isn't why Harris lost, but reductionist conclusions are part and parcel for how primary voters behave in these contests and that comparison is a poor one for him.
He passes the basic smell test as a candidate, but so do all the other serious contenders. I think 2028 primary voters will be leery of anyone who hasn't demonstrated appeal to swing voters in a swing state.
I certainly hope they are to at least some extent.
Incidentally I dislike Newsom. I've gotten a handful of texts from his team in the past week (despite endlessly replying "stop" to every political text I get) and it just rubs me the wrong way to know that he's immediately trying to position himself for the primary. Comes across as him being gleeful that the country suffers because it's good for his personal ambition.
Due respect that's just getting the jump on the competition (imo newson never gets nominated; and yes a part of it is his home state)
Pritzker is also a possibility.
Let's be clear-eyed about the implications of the DNC's new primary schedule, frontloaded with South Carolina and Georgia, for 2028 and every cycle thereafter. Our 2028 Presidential nominee will be whoever Jim Clyburn decides to endorse.
8 years later is going to be much different
nonsense
Spell out to me an alternative scenario. With the nature of the primary schedule and the sharp rate of candidate attrition for those who fail to perform, conservative blacks in the Deep South have been bequeathed kingmaker status for our party's Presidential nomination. Make no mistake about it....what they say goes. Maybe they will make the right choice as they likely did in 2020, but either way, you're gonna have to live with their choice.
simple, Clyburn is dead; next
Ah yes. The same scenario spun four years ago as to why Trump wouldn't be the GOP nominee in 2024. Surely Trump's fried chicken diet would give us a deus ex machina ending!!!! I suppose J.D. Vance could die in a car accident too and prevent him from being the frontrunner for the 2028 nomination. But in the absence of Grim Reaper intervention, I'd like to hear another scenario where Jim Clyburn doesn't single-handedly decide who the 2028 Democratic nominee is.
wow, drama queen much? you asked, I answered; and now that that's out of the way; my scenario is highly likely (but, I'll play along anyway cause it's fun); first of all(as usual), you throw out highly debatable broadsides and assume that we here should simply take those things to be facts; I disagree with almost your entire premise here and dispute just about every single one of your conclusions; but imo that doesn't matter mainly because right now I don't frankly care who is nominated or how and why; I think this for 2 main reasons (#1 being by far the most important);1\imo Trump will have a disastrous 2nd term that is much worse than his first and whoever is unfortunately the Republican nominee is going to get destroyed in the 2028 elections; and my second point is even more simple so; 2\ until this year, from 1992 through 2020; every single election had a Democratic party candidate that won the popular vote, so imo 2028 will be no different; the Democratic party will nominate a perfectly electable candidate once again(I am confident you will completely miss the main point I'm making and respond with some innocuous drivel that doesn't matter one iota about the overall board); but I am willing to read any rebuttal you have(oops I got ahead of myself; yes Kerry barely lost the popular vote; my point stands)
That’s ridiculous. Following that logic, I guess Jim Clyburn will be the next nominee if he chooses to run. Or maybe Jamie Harrison.
Thank you; you posted what I wanted to say with a LOT fewer words
Pointing out the SC/GA impact is absolutely wise to do, but that doesn't mean Clyburn will be kingmaker. Especially seeing as how he is 84 today — more so than with most people, we cannot even be certain he will be alive in four years time. Even with an outsized influence, which is a reasonable assumption, he alone would not be enough to dictate the outcome.
Clyburn's input will matter if there's an undifferentiated pack, as there was in 2020. If there are even two or three clear frontrunners, it won't matter as much.
I'm not sure Clyburn will matter at all; regardless of the situation (4 years is a long time from now and a midterm cycle to boot)
Exactly; and we simply have no way of knowing what happens in midterm or even the 2021 Governors races on the schedule; or the special election for congressional open seat race or races that always pop up or a million other things before an election in 4 years. !!
The continued blueing of the GA suburbs means it's primary electorate is not going to be as dominated by the old school AA vote machine like it is in SC.
Does anyone else think Mark Cuban is gearing up for a 2028 run?
no
Oh why not, anything goes
where they were from doesn't matter
I'm drawing a blank here. Who was the other Dem from San Francisco?
the post is wrong
Mondale from Minnesota (definitely not San Francisco)
The last four democrats to lose the popular vote covers a span of time longer than I've been alive, and I'm no spring chicken nowadays. IMO their homestates is the least interesting factor, especially considering how much our politics has changed over those intervening 40 years.
That said, I'm going to have my eyes on Whitmer and Pritzker going into 2028. I'm not going to bother thinking further than that. Certainly not committed to them, but they're the ones that stand out the most to me at this stage.
It's going to be a long four years.
I've been a "Whitmer stan" ever since she was first elected Governor and I remain so. The folks saying we can't go with a woman again are mistaken. I think vs Vance after 4 years of Trump mismanagement it could be the great beating we've all envisioned/hoped for but haven't experienced since 2012.
Absolutely we can go with a woman(if she wins the primary elections)
Mondale(not sure when you were born)
I like Walz first; Whitmer second(no disrespect to Pritzker but the billionaire thing is a bad idea imo)
Absolutely NO to Newsom.
Anyone who has lived in San Francisco as a liberal knows very well that Newsom as Mayor of San Francisco was too caught up in trying to be a celebrity than actually being a Mayor. Former Supervisor David Campos had said he was more comfortable making speeches in big crowds but aloof when it came to actually doing the job of being Mayor when working with supervisors.
Former Mayor Art Agnos said it best, "He gives great speeches but, in the end, what's it all about?"
Besides, Newsom himself is too comfortable making his name in deep blue turf. He was great in pushing the gay marriage issue when it was unpopular and established Healthy San Francisco, one of the first local universal healthcare programs but my god, he otherwise gives the GOP too much ammunition (the ad he did trolling Florida did nothing to help Democrats). There's no evidence Newsom has the ability to appeal to swing voters, let alone independents in Midwestern states or the South.
Also, Newsom as Governor flat out won't even push to get the Costa Hawkins Act or Ellis Act repealed even if recently, he signed a rent control legislation into law. He and many Democrats in the State Legislature are too beholden to the California Association of Realtors and developer interests.
I am confused by the last part of your comment. Who was the other CADEM who lost the popular vote? I have 2024 Harris (CA), 2004 Kerry (MA), 1988 Dukakis (MA) and 1984 Mondale (MN). Farther back you have 1980 Carter (GA) , 1972 McGovern (SD) and 1968 Humphrey (MN).
Kamala Harris was the first California Democrat to be nominated for POTUS or VPOTUS, as far as I can tell. Who am I forgetting?
Looking ahead to the 2026 Senate, I would love for us to secure some major candidates, even in some red states. At this point we have to try. Assuming we can hold CO, GA, NH, PA and VA, I would like the following candidates for swing to medium red states:
Alaska: Mary Peltola (whether or not she holds her House seat)
Iowa: Rob Sand or Cindy Axne
Kansas: Laura Kelly
Maine: Jared Golden or Troy Jackson
Montana: Zeno Baucus or Whitney Williams
North Carolina: Roy Cooper, Don Davis, Wiley Nickel, or Jeff Jackson.
Ohio: Tim Ryan or Greg Landsman
Texas: Lizzie Fletcher, Joaquin or Julian Castro, or a state legislator from the Rio Grande area who can help try to curb the trend there.
Blood-red state unlikely to happen wishlist:
Kentucky: Jacqueline Coleman (Andy Beshear said he won't run)
Louisiana: John Bel Edwards
Mississippi: Jim Hood or Brandon Presley
Nebraska: Dan Osborn (he held Fischer to a close race than any D ever could, and is probably our only option here)
South Carolina: Thomas McElveen
South Dakota: Stephanie Herseth Sandlin
West Virginia: Richard Ojeda
We might as well run Osborn-type independents in AL, AR, ID, OK, TN, and WY since no one obvious come to mind for those.
He's an Assistant US Attorney in the state.
I believe Nickel is already semi-confirmed lining himself up (don’t quote me on that)
Landsman would be solid. I’d also propose James Talarico in Texas
Nickel will run, lose (respectably in best case scenario). Which is fine, Tillis isn't going to lose here outside a tsunami of epic proportions.
What’s your take if Cooper jumps in? And his chance?
5-10% chance that he runs, he'd have to be convinced that (i) he almost certainly WOULD win; and (ii) almost certainly anyone else would lose.
Hard to square that circle. He's an excellent retail politician, but very, very cautious. I suspect his strong preference is to retire and go back home. My impression is that even living in Raleigh represented a tough ask for him, he'd hate DC.
Nickel is the one left without anything to run for in 2024, he likely got "soft" assurances that the establishment would let him have its 2026 Senate lane. I'm not sure anyone else (outside the usual grifter and rando lanes) really would want it. Jackson and Hunt just got elected, and will bide their time. The rest of the state bench is anonymous at best.
Nickel is a transplant, right? Tillis is one as well, but from Tennessee, if I remember correctly. So that doesn’t matter.
I agree Nickel stands little chance statewide, unless there is another huge anti Trump backlash.
NC has always had lots of transplants, I don't expect that will be an issue. Nickel just strikes me as "generic, urban NC Democrat" (not meant pejoratively, that's pretty much what I am). There's nothing sketchy about him, but nothing really charismatic or memorable either.
It's a decent, safe choice for losing a federal race without burning your bench. You can go back to "Helms v. Hunt" to see how state-level popularity usually doesn't translate federally.
Edwards won as a charismatic outsider, and of course he turned out to be a shyster and a...piece of excrement. Kay Hagan kind of came out of nowhere, and won by a perfect storm of circumstance (political tailwinds), excellent campaigning, and a bad/cocky opponent.
Nickel could win like Hagan did, it's just not particularly likely.
Cooper should be our pick(if he decides to run)
I completely disagree; the 2026 election for all competitive Senate and House seats will depend on how bad Trump performs in the first 2 years of the second term
I’d like to see Sherrod Brown give it another try.
2018 midterms he won 53% - 47% (300,000 votes thereabouts). Only reason he lost was sharing a ballot with Trump!! 💙🇺🇲
He may run sooner than 2026. I'm in favor of it.
Sooner than 2026?
There will be a vacancy in the other OH-Sen seat soon. The couch guy is getting an undeserved promotion...
That's 2026
2026 is the first race
He's the obvious first choice(if he wants to run)
Brown or Tim Ryan. Tim Ryan is 20 years younger and hopefully can hold down the seat for a while.
Any notable state legislators in Montana we can recruit for a statewide election? I know the state level Montana Democratic Party has been significantly weakened over the past decades, but the recent redistricting laws led them to gain more seats this year. So hopefully they should have some credible candidates soon if not already for statewide races.
Tester and Tranell actually did pretty damn good(not sure if they are through with electoral politics)
I'd rather not run Landsman for a longshot Senate race as it could put his House seat at risk. If Peltola wins I might be reluctant to run her too. Davis and Golden are different because their potential Senate races would start out as much more winnable, but I'd prefer someone with less to lose than Davis if they would be about equally strong. I think Golden would clearly be the strongest possible candidate for Maine, so that's a tough one.
It is quite unfortunate the fair redistricting ballot measure failed in OH, if they redrew OH-01 to become a Cincinnati-only seat it would be borderline safe-D and free up Landsman to run statewide.
Peltola should still run, the replacement value of a US Senate seat is too high (we could easily take another Biden20/Harris24 house seat in CA or the northeast to make up for losing AK)
We just won a bunch of statewide races in NC, plenty of options there.
Golden used to work for Collins, so just convincing him to run would be difficult, unless she retires of course.
I’d rather take a shot with Jackson anyway. We don’t need a slightly less conservative version of Joe Manchin to win in Maine.
A pretense of progressivism isn’t what progressives are looking for, tyvm.
yeah, Jackson seems the play here.
I think Landsman would be l less likely to win than Ryan or Brown anyway.
I always thought Peltola's plan was to stay in the House for a few terms until Alaska looked pinkish enough to go for a Senate run. Which is why I really hope she prevails; I fear that 26 may be too early for the jump.
Please, no, not Jared Golden! That proposal is misreading Maine’s political map. While Golden is an excellent fit for ME-02 and probably the best Democrats can achieve in this Red district, he is far too conservative for Maine as a whole. Besides, already in the House, Jared Golden has proved himself to be a Manchin-like figure, voting against certain key Democratic policy positions.
Maine has an excellent Democratic-caucusing senator in Angus King – and he is much more moderate. That is the sort of candidate we should be looking for to challenge Susan Collins.
Gillibrand was more moderate but I don't think she would have gone around saying that it didn't matter if Trump or Biden won.
Do not know if it's a long shot though; that depends on Trump 2.0
Rob Sand would be an excellent get. Iowa may be too far gone, but the state could be one of the most adversely affected by Trump's tariffs if other countries aggressively retaliate.
We did well here during the 2018 midterm, so the right candidate could make it close.
too be fair, A lot of these races mainly come into play due to only one thing; Trump screwing up, which is highly likely
If Rubio is in Trump cabinet, Florida also will have a race
I thought Hagerty had inside track for SOS? (Wouldn’t be much difference between him or Rubio tbh)
Agreed👍
CO isn’t even going to be a contest. Kamala Harris won the state by 16% points and Senator George Hickenlooper unseated Cory Gardner by nearly 10% points. This indicates the state is moving further to the left.
George?
Anybody have a good read on how Democrats were able to do so wel in the Montana legislature considering how poorly we did otherwise in that state?
Which ultimately is a win for Democrats despite the major losses. They get more representation and visibility, plus a larger pool of potential candidates for Congressional and statewide offices in the future. It's easy to forget that Jon Tester himself started off as a state senator and later became the President of the Senate. Perhaps in future Montana Democrats can recruit an equally, if not superior candidate from the state legislature for statewide office and perhaps win again.
I doubt currently if anyone there is a Jon Tester(we can only hope)
What happened? Do you have a quick rundown
With the CA amendments sharpening penalties for non-violent crime and continuing the use of prison labor as allowed under the 13th Amendment, I think we have QED on what the people want w/r/t law enforcement. Just stop fighting it and roll with it. Chesa's expulsion is not some glitch you can rationalize away. Alameda County and LA County declared they want DAs that actually prosecute.
While there are some compromises I'm willing to make mentally (I'm not a politician so I'm not "making compromises" on policy per se), I worry about the road this "hard on crime" stance will take. Have we all forgotten the Kids for Cash scandal?
That was corruption.
It was corruption that couldn't have happened without a public that valued being hard on crime and celebrated judges who ruled as such.
Activists should have thought of that before they contaminated their cause with terrible PR.
I think we should first separate the goal of electing DAs vs. the actual legislative process of getting new laws instituted when it comes to criminal justice reform. Frankly, I think progressives in this election spent way too much energy on trying to fight the recalls and didn't look at themselves in the mirror by realizing they don't have control over their narrative.
What Pamela Price was doing as DA was irrational and not progressive. She showed a bias when it came to reducing sentences for the accused who were black by lowering their sentences regardless of what they were arrested for. This goes against the values I learned as liberal in high school in Berkeley when I was taking ethnic studies back in the mid 90s. One of my family members also has an attorney who worked for a long time in the Alameda County DA's office, is pro-criminal justice reform, but was not a fan of Price in how she handled her cases.
On the other hand, legislatively criminal justice reform has legs. The notion that progressives think there's a blow to criminal justice reform by recalling DAs like Chesa Boudin and Pamela Price is just absolute BS, especially considering Trump as POTUS signed The First Step Act back in 2018 which the majority of Democrats & Republicans in the House and Senate voted for. Criminal justice reform legislatively isn't strictly partisan and is an ongoing process.
We have a messaging problem not a policy problem. The public is not made up of policy wonks. They just want things to feel fair to their monkey brains. They know/think mostly what they see on TV and their phones. We are losing in the propaganda space to cop unions and billionaires. I live with a blue collar black guy who is a state employee and a two strike felon, who just spent about $70k and several years on legal defense of a malicious prosecution of a self-defense incident that would have counted as a 3rd strike as charged, and he’d have voted against Gascon if we lived in L.A. County because of the propaganda.
Sometimes you gotta let the baby have his bottle (i.e. stricter law enforcement). When law enforcement vastly oversteps the boundaries again, please suppress any wacko who promotes "defund the police." Also, don't let anyone shriek at normies just living their life. Maybe we'll end up in a better place then.
Not when the bottle is a poisoned chalice.
Let them suffer it.
Leopards eating our faces?
Nope, just theirs. Thank heavens for federalism.
LA County and Orange County had updates within the last 30 minutes, Min took the lead and Whitesides and Tran narrowed their deficits.
I’m guessing there’s not much chance of Rollins closing on Calvert?
No updates from Riverside yet
CA-47 Dave Min pulled ahead with 50.2%.
Late votes are coming in very blue, so he'll more than likely hold this (Porter's old OC district).
That would be interesting. He was declared instantly dead on DKE when he got his DUI.
As a constituent in his state Senate district and CD 47, I was livid at the DUI, but did vote for him in the primary. Fortunate for us, the Republican candidate was highly flawed including a criminal past himself.
I guess voters this year were quite forgiving of electing politicians with criminal histories, even elevating a convicted felon to commander in chief.
Or maybe it is just a Southern California thing, Calvert and Issa also have histories.
Not by me
Maricopa incoming!!
A pretty red day in Arizona as the R counties finish counting. The big news though was a 100,000 vote drop from Maricopa. About 50,000 came from R districts, 30,000 from D districts, and 20,000 from AZ-01 (Schweikert’s toss-up district).
Out of that mix, somehow Lake only netted *2,000 votes.* Yikes. The batch was Trump +11 but only Lake+2.
Gallego currently up around 33,000. Remaining votes (not including provisionals):
Maricopa - 330,000
D counties - 120,000
R counties - 90,000
Please can the Republicans keep nominating Lake for statewide office !!
Forget statewide office! The GOP should have her run for POTUS in 2028.
CA SoS's Unprocessed Ballots report Friday evening:
4,953,569 estimated, Plus 142,335 ballots left to cure.
Any ideas about the CDPs ballot cure operations ?
Los Angeles City 14th district Councilmember Kevin de León (racist) concedes to Ysabel Jurado (F--- the Police).
Hopefully Jurado can grow
Hopefully she will grow up. She can say that type of stuff and win her own district, but when said 2 weeks before an election when crime is on the ballot, it sure can hurt candidates in swing districts.
LA news was harping on it for at least a 3 day news cycle.
It's a stupid thing to say anytime but agree with you about especially at that time in a political race which can be broadcast non-stop to hurt the entire slate
Part of "growing up" is being on the council and having to deal with real issues and try to accomplish her goals. She is more than just her worst soundbite. Ysabel Jurado is a tenants rights attorney who built a multiethnic winning coalition against a powerful politician while being a member of a small minority in the district (Filipina). KDL is part of the majority ethnic group of the Eastside and was pitching an appeal to keep the district Latino. The best of L.A. politics is when people are able to build coalitions among different groups to work for a better future for all Angelenos.
I am willing to give Ysabel Jurado a chance, and I thank her for taking out the trash by retiring Kevin DeLeon.
Looks like NBC has called the Nevada senate race tonight for Jacky Rosen. A bit odd how AP has yet to call the race, despite the very clear remainder of the outstanding votes being in Washoe and Clark that strongly favor Rosen. Yet they seemed all too willing to call the Pennsylvania senate race for McCormick despite the fact that the secretary himself stated that there were over 100k outstanding ballots yet to be counted and the margin continues to narrow.
CNN has called NV for Rosen, too.
Could AP now be a bit gun-shy after their possibly premature PA call?
Is not the first time the AP messed up a call too early.
In 2018, they called CA-21 for Valadao, but 3 weeks later he ended up losing.
AP has called it.
Why did the Latino vote shift so far to the right in almost every state? I think we can rule out a number of explanations at least as primary factors.
I don't think it was racism, because most of the same voters overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama.
I don't think it was sexism, because most of the same voters overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton.
I don't buy that more than a handful of voters of any race are willing to vote for a black man or a white woman, but not a black woman.
I don't think it was Harris' perceived ideology or personal qualities, in part because she consistently polled better than Biden did. The trans bashing may have hurt her, but I wouldn't think that it would have hurt her more among Latinos than among other voters.
So what's left? I suspect there were two main things. The first is inflation, which especially hurt Dems among less engaged voters, and Latinos tend to be less engaged than other groups. The second is that there seems to be an informal permission structure to vote GOP that wasn't there as recently as 2016. The border issue probably hurt Dems somewhat in border counties, although the shifts there weren't that much bigger than in other heavily Latino counties. What does this mean for the future? Any dissatisfaction with the economy or other current conditions will hurt the GOP at least in 2026 and 2028. But the permission structure won't go away. Unless something else changes, I think the Dem ceiling among Latinos is lower now than it was in 2016 and we aren't likely to approach 2016-type margins for the foreseeable future. The analogue on the other side is that the GOP ceiling among college-educated suburbanites is lower than in 2012, and they won't again approach their pre-Trump margins.
Yep. At the very minimum people want to have the illusion that we are a classless and color blind society where the only things that matter are ability and the willingness to work. The fact that the number of people who can “bootstrap” their way out of poverty is the exception not the rule is irrelevant. They want that illusion. Microtargeting and DEI rob them of that illusion.
I think microtargeting makes sense in terms of running ads calculated to appeal to the audience of whatever show/channel/etc the ad is running on, but I agree that any sort of identity politics needs to go. Everything I've seen suggests that swing voters just don't want to hear it.
My own thought is that the best rhetorical appeal on this is to emphasize the multi-ethnic, class-based appeal of the Democratic coalition, and work on rebuilding that. It's hard to exactly spell out the nuances that I'm picturing in mind, but... we need to keep being anti-racist, while (to borrow your words) avoiding micro-targeting in the political appeals.
Not to mention words like “patriarchy” “Latinx” and “pronouns” which scare just about everyone.
That and the fact that in Spanish, Latinos is THE correct way to refer to a plural of Latin American people (unless they are all female). For many, “Latinx” is a violation of their native tongue.
I get the impression a good chunk of the Latino community, "Latinx" is viewed as something rich white hipsters came up with, so why should they embrace it? It comes across as white "elitists" trying to speak for them.
Ruben Gallego is strongly against the term Latinx and is one of those Latinos you're referring to who gets offended by the name.
Also, let's be frank: It doesn't sound great to have a term sound like Kleenex. We've used Latino for decades and there's no reason why we need to be "more inclusive" by saying Latinx.
Better to focus on bread-and-butter issues affecting the Hispanic and Latino community instead of trying to sound hip and cool.
If you do use the term, pronounce it Lah-TEEN-ay, and not LA-tin-ecks. The second one is like nails on chalkboard and not at all what is actually said by Spanish speakers who use the term.
(I agree that Latino is sufficiently inclusive in most situations. I would only use Latinx I was specifically highlighting gender neutrality. eg. "The Trans Latinx community")
My guess is it’s almost certainly cost of living.
I know that’s what everyone is saying, but why then vote for the candidate whose two most important policies are highly inflationary? You don’t have to be an economist to realize that tarrffs and deporting the people who harvest and process food and who build houses will result in large price increase.
Voters tend to be backward looking. Most casual voters have no idea what tariffs are, and probably just didn't believe Dems' warnings that they're inflationary. Likewise they don't have experience with severe immigration restrictions outside the context of the pandemic, when there wasn't much demand so the labor supply contraction didn't really show up in prices. I suspect that if Trump goes through with this the results will be highly unpopular, but it's hard to warn people about things that don't confirm their priors and that they haven't experienced before.
My first guess would be a shift in social structures.
Historically there were many specific white ethnicities that were looked down upon in generations past: Italians, Irish, Poles, and many others, were othered for their or their ancestors' country of origin. As cultural perceptions of race and ethnicity changed and those groups were brought under the larger umbrella of "white", their voting behaviors shifted.
I'd hazard a guess that Latinos, especially those with lighter skin, are seeing cultural perceptions of race and ethnicity change again, in their favor, and they are given less of an other treatment as a result. That cultural change is a good thing, of course, but it would come with the consequence of them no longer perceiving conservatives' xenophobia as targeting them. That in turn would result in changed voting behavior, which is bad for us, even if the root cause is from society improving.
If this is what is happening it would require more or less a complete rewrite of the foundations of how our party appeals to them for their vote.
I suspect most Hispanics are pocketbook voters instead of culture war voters. A campaign centered around reproductive rights and January 6 had no salience to them.
If ever there was a time (and I'm not sure there ever was) that Hispanics were partial to the open border position that Democrats have been incrementally moving toward since 2013, that time passed its expiration date but the Biden administration got the memo a few years too late.
Every survey I've seen indicates that they're mostly interested in kitchen-table issues. I don't agree that Dems are moving left on immigration as the party's current position is to pass the enforcement-only bill that Trump blocked, which puts them to the right of where they've been at any previous point this century.
Well they're no longer moving left on immigration in 2024 but did for a decade preceding it before finally getting the hint that there wasn't a constituency for it outside of university faculty lounges. By the time Democrats finally got the message, the cake was baked and the opposition was able to completely and unequivocally roll them.
When Biden first came into office and basically undid what Trump had done instead of implementing a tenable border policy, he created chaos in Arizona and Texas.
Every Arizona Democratic politician was screaming about what he was doing to them including the D governor and D mayors of Phoenix and Tucson, both US senators and Senate candidate to be Gallego.
This was the major reason for the lurch to the right in Arizona, and the only reason we are even in the running in the Senate race is that Kari Lake is such a horrible candidate. Even people who can stomach Trump can't stomach her, and it's so close we could lose that lead.
This shift caused us to lose sheriff and recorder in Maricopa to right wing candidates that can now cause harm to our side in future elections.
If he created chaos in 2021, how did we win nearly every statewide race in 2022?
We had a slate of candidates in Arizona that were as crazy or worse than Lake, Lake being the R candidate for governor, and we narrowly won the seats we did. The effect is also cumulative.
Not only do people hear RW media screaming this stuff, but liberal help organizations are on news and public affairs programs begging for money and volunteers because they are overwhelmed
Then the problem gets hyped beyond how bad it is by RW media, blogs and social media.
Most people then start blaming Phoenix's massive homeless problems and drug problems on immigrants where there is little known tie. You see very few Latinos in the homeless encampments in Phoenix.
Even going beyond border control issues, how 2022 managed to be less disastrous than 2024 is something hard for me to wrap my head around.
Lower white non-college turnout.
Dobbs + very popular governor candidates in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Other than that, the two elections are turning out to be remarkably similar downballot.
When have Democrats advocated for open borders?
Well, a stage full of Democratic Presidential candidates raised their hands in 2019 when asked if they supported decriminalized border crossings. When the top emissaries for the highest office in the land convey their support for it, I'd say that's a good representation of the party's position.
And for all intents and purposes, Biden's asylum policy amounted to de facto open borders. All comers get to put in an asylum request and then stay in-country for multiple years until their asylum hearings, are granted work permits, and face effectively zero chance of deportation even if they don't qualify for asylum, provided they don't commit felonies. We can split hairs on whether that qualifies as "open borders" or not, but the public sure perceived it to be and that's what matters.
As far as I know, "decriminalizing" something is not synonymous with making it legal. I can think of many things that are illegal but won’t land me in jail or prison. That said, I appreciate your key points.
It's a distinction without a difference. The old adage is that if you're explaining, you're losing. If the Democrats want to spend their time breaking down the distinction between their past calls to decriminalize border crossings and how it's different from voter demands to close the borders, then they're gonna do a lot more losing.
It's not their problem now; fortunately for the Democratic party
never
Indeed, you are correct.
Many of my Hispanic friends are the least offended people in the world. They're straight forward and can take jokes, even if they make fun of them (in a good way, not a Tony Hinchcliffe kind of joke). Certainly, there are exceptions of them who are liberal and reliable votes for Democrats but overall, many of them care less about politics and are more about making a living and providing for their families.
Agree with the prediction that Hispanic voting patterns will converge with whites' eventually.
The corollary being, that similar to whites, there will be a divergence between college-educated and non-college voters.
Depends what you mean by eventually.
Good analysis. For those who shifted, I think it came down to their personal economic circumstances.
Gamarra said the U.S. has the best economy in the world based on figures, “but what we don’t realize is that people don’t consume those figures. People go to the supermarket. They go to the gas pump. They’re trying to buy a home. And if any group has been affected by the economy, it has been Hispanics.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-economy-latino-vote-2024-election-rcna178951
Also, with inflation, it’s made voters less likely to have the ability to save given they are having to spend more on purchases than they’ve typically done in the past.
Hispanic families are very much middle class, the ideal type of voters Democrats should win over. However, if being in the middle class is made harder with inflation, then it’s a problem for the Democratic Party.
It's a variety of things but people are fooling themselves if they think being perceived as uber-liberal on cultural issues wasn't a major factor.
Definitely a factor but this race was about economic policy(perceived inflation)
They intersect; it all leads to a permission structure to vote GOP.
Most definitely but pocketbook issues always dominate real voter choices
I feel like the challenge is threading the needle of not coming off as uber-liberal on, say, trans issues, while also not throwing that community under the bus.
pocketbook issues always have been the dominant ones(and always will be); the Harris campaign lost on inflation(actually, the perception of inflation)
Yes, but part of the problem we had this cycle was keeping our coalition together. If you throw trans people, or other groups, under the bus, you risk losing other segments that you absolutely need to win.
It's a tightrope, and I think there's a way to do it, but she didn't.
has anyone said anything about throwing anyone under any bus? I know for a fact I haven't, and I am confident that it won't happen; it's the other guys that do the demonizing
Looks like Caraveo has fallen behind in CO-8 by about 2,500 votes, she'll need Adams county to come in big for her to retain her seat.