Comment on This is what Democratic voters are saying. Will the party listen?
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Here’s my breakdown after listening to a lot of analyses.
Establishment (centrist) Democrats really would rather be rich than serve the public. Seriously. If they just pass the clauses written for them by corporate lobbyists, they not only get campaign contributions and dark money, but a cushy high-paying job after their political career ends, and they get to join the ownership class. (Thank Reagan for allowing all this to become legal.)
The superdelegates in the Democratic Party are all old guard establishment Democrats.
Also Blue Dog Democrats argue that the Republicans will assert some of the more extreme ideas that the SDA are considering (e.g. abolish police, abolish prisons) which will scare their voters away. The thing is, if their voters are engaged with the far-right propaganda machine (e.g. FOX News) and are dim enough to take Republican talking points seriously, then they’re not going to vote blue anyway. They need to vote red to prove their manhood, own the libs, lock immigrants in torture cages and deny gender affirming care to trans folk.
Harris made this mistake (among many) during her 2024 campaign, trying to get never-Trumpers and Liz Cheney Republicans. All those are still too racist and detest working class folk to dare vote Democrat.
Regular Democratic voters want a platform, things like universal healthcare, a jobs guarantee, higher education for all, support for Palestine (and no support for IDF), immediate action on the climate crisis. A platform draws more apathetic Democratic voters to the polls.
Independents want a better economy, and if they’re not racist (in which they’re actually Republican) then they vote against the incumbent when inflation is high and jobs are down. Right now, inflation is high and jobs are down.
Blue-no-matter-who Democrats see the Republican party and the MAGA movement as an existential threat to the United States, specifically to democracy as an institution (lower case) and the preservation of civil rights. They fight their platform battles during the primaries, and then vote against Republicans (that is, for the non-Republican everyone else is voting for – usually the Democratic candidate, but not always).
To BNMH Democrats, the immediate issues are overhaul of SCOTUS (more than merely adding new bench seats and term limits) and federal restoration of free and fair elections (eliminating gerrymandering, voter suppression and top-down election fraud). Until these things happen, the Republican party, and the captured SCOTUS will continue to be an existential threat. As Larry Lessig points out, we’ve been kicking this can down the road for a long, long time, and now we’re paying the price.
~ We know independents and non-voters outnumber both Democrats and Republicans
~ We know MAGAs are getting dissatisfied, between inflation, the war and the Epstein files. But MAGAs are easy to manipulate
~ We don’t know how big factions are, nor how determined they are to vote. There are local trends
~ We know that whites in the south are (generally) staunchly Republican
~ We know blacks nationwide (generally) vote Democrat. Especially black women
~ We know municipal areas vote Democrat, and because they’re dense, they win popular elections (they dominate Governor and US Senate races)
~ We know rural areas vote Republican, and they get a boost from the EC. They’re also useful for gerrymandering
~ We know the VRA is gutted and the southern states acted quickly to gerrymander and otherwise suppress the black vote. That will affect House seats and state assembly seats, also the race for President in 2028
~ We know that billionaires are investing hundreds of millions (that’s huge) in key elections to push them red. In 2024 Musk’s $250M contribution made a critical difference for Trump. In elections since, campaign money has helped less.
We expect the Democrats will take the House in November, but they will only get fifty Senate seats, leaving the majority to the Republicans. This will inhibit saving Social Security, and allow Trump to confirm bench appointments (including SCOTUS seats if Thomas or Alito retire). If Mitch McConnell remains undead (and still not voting) that will make things interesting… but hopefully the public is pissed off enough to give the Democrats that key one-more Senator.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 4 days ago
I’m an Unaffiliated Independent, but for your purposes, I mostly fit into your BNMW category, including the SCOTUS expansion, and splitting with Israel, which are serious requirements for a future democratic America.
While you are 100% correct that the Dems finally need to give voice to an actual platform, and not just “At least we’re better than those guys!”
But IF the Dems give us a platform we can support, the next wave of Dems politicians will first have to fight a political WAR before we can ever even consider any of those Democratic initiatives that we’ve taken years to convince them to accept. As long as MAGA continues to exist, they will thwart 90% of Democratic initiatives, and later they’ll roll back the 10%, the first chance they get.
MAGA has to be stopped, crushed, and purged from our government and society. It would be great to finally get the DNC to support a real Democratic platform, but it’s useless if we have a literal Domestic Terrorist Organization running around fucking up EVERYTHING. The Biden administration tried to pretend they were just Republican business as usual, and they got savaged for four straight years, and then stole the 2024 election. MAGA will not be ignored.
I want all those wonderful things on the Lefty Wishlist, and I believe they are absolutely possible, with proper economic and tax policies, but we will NEVER get the opportunity to address them until MAGA Treason has been decisively dealt with.
And I believe that the Midterm election is going to be a bloodbath like we’ve never seen before, and seats are going to flip that nobody thinks are in contention, including the Senate. I think the Dems may win the Senate by a seat or two, but there will be several surprise flips in the House. All the gerrymandering won’t save them, it will only mean that it would have been even worse for MAGA without it.
The Dems will come out of the Midterms able to do almost anything they want, and we have to make sure they follow US, not the other way around. They’ve demonstrated they can’t be trusted to lead properly, or at all, so we’ll have to take the responsibility from them, and make them work for US.
IN 2028, the ONLY winning combInation will be a candidate who enthusiastically commits to crushing MAGA, with a TRANSFORMATIVE platform to pursue after they’ve handled the MAGA business.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 3 days ago
If the house goes how you suspect gerrymandering will backfire. Pack and Crack gerrymandering like republicans have been doing is the art of building as many pretty safe seats for your party as you can then attempting to shove the rest into as few as possible extremely safe seats for your opponents (if you can ensure none of your voters are in those districts you do it). It’s finangling safety of seats vs number of seats, and republicans seem to be leveraging themselves a bit heavily at the moment.
If it’s a bloodshed election, the gerrymandering will be most analogous to a dam that’s bursting. What it had been holding back it’s now providing an excess in its failure.