Josh Marshall at TPM:
Miscellaneous Thoughts on a Democratic Path Forward
"I’ve been arguing pretty strenuously against getting taken in by these [..] claims of some overwhelming victory or mandate. Trump is now under 50% of the popular vote. "
""you don’t want to go into full baby-and-the-bath-water mode if you lose by a little over a single percentage point. And your coalition is hardly hopeless if you get between 48% and 49% of the vote in a bad year."
/nosanitize
@TheAbbotTrithemius when you win both the senate and congress...and you win the president, i think you have a mandate by the american voters. it doesn't matter by how many votes.
i don't know why all this squabbling over by how much he won. american voters voted red across both houses & the president.
he has all the power given he also owns scotus.
who cares if it was by a million votes or 7 million votes? they won. & can do whatever the fuck they want.
Right, so does the Democratic party need to make a huge change in terms of its strategy to get more votes or make some not so huge changes?
@TheAbbotTrithemius @singlemaltgirl
IMO Dems did the best they could. Dems ALWAYS change, sometimes less sometimes more...cuz Dems.
Repukes have changed, too...but in the opposite direction. Maybe (in teleological terms) they were gonna end up fashy anyway.
Fox News and greedy dipshits won this one, it's THAT SIMPLE. And a flood of falsity that engulfed/engulfs STILL those of us who don't read the papers.
Every so often a GOP disaster is too big to cover up, see '08 and '20 for exs.
Yes, I think this definitely isn’t throw the baby out w the water and begin completely anew territory, although the question needs to be given a hard look.
The thing I don’t agree with Marshall about is that the Dems need to choose either non-college educated working class voters or college educated, but not both.
That WC non-college people have been convinced “elite” Dems are the source of their troubles and not the GOP who has eviscerated, exploited them for 4 decades is a..
A communication failure by the Dems that’s literally tragically, epically, one of the greatest examples of incompetence in the history of the country.
Just unbelievable and horrifying.
Dems should easily and rightfully have a commanding lead with BOTH of those groups.
The only bright spot I see possibly is that the WC is now bound by ethnic, racial, gender boundaries as voters.
This was the block that powered FDR’s New Deal and the creation of a prosperous middle-class after.
@TheAbbotTrithemius @InUnfunky
the 'communication failure' is not a current thing that just happened and also goes back those 4 decades since Atwater boosted Reagan and began the formation of the overwhelming barrage of bullshit to which the Dems have no equal counterpart
Yep and even the MAGA TV ads that falsely claimed Harris supported sex-change procedures for prisoners (paid by the state) reeked of the “Willy Horton” and “welfare-queen” campaigns that Atwater used in that Reagan time-period.
@InUnfunky oh agreed. i think harris/walz put together a joyful, hopeful, positive policy campaign. they stayed above the fray, stayed high when the other side went so so low. i don't know what more they could have done.
@TheAbbotTrithemius