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Republicans: $200
Democrats: $600
Republicans: (looks at watch)
Democrats: ok, $400
Republicans: (checks his phone)
Democrats: how about $300?
Republicans: (takes a nap)
Democrats: A single coupon to Denny's divided among 350 million people
They aren't trying to win and going along with the illusion that they are plays into their hands by legitimizing them
They're trying to win, they're just not trying as hard as they would if they considered it a life-or-death matter (which politics absolutely is for many vulnerable people).
Democrats view politics as a friendly game of beer-league softball; Republicans view politics as a knife fight.
Democrats are absolutely not trying to win. To continue the sports analogies, they're the Washington generals. Literally paid to lose. Thinking any higher of them is extremely naive
Literally paid to lose.
I don't see much evidence of this. Everyone in the Democratic Party machine -- at least from the idealistic interns all the way up to the actual candidates -- easily prefers winning to losing, because winning creates more job opportunities.
- If a candidate eats shit in a House race or whatever, that can (but doesn't always) end their political career.
- If you're a campaign manager and the campaign you manage eats shit, that makes it harder to get hired for the same job in the future.
- If you're middle management in a campaign, a win means a full-time staff or administration position and a loss means you have to scrape together some make-work at a think tank or, worst-case scenario, you have to find a real job.
- If you're a low-level staffer or intern, think tank make-work is even harder to get with your resume, so it's probably back to a real job if you lose.
- Obviously volunteers care about winning (at least to the degree I described above) -- they wouldn't work for free otherwise.
The only people who might just be indifferent in this process are big donors who give to both sides, and even some of those are probably hedging more than they are indifferent, much less paying one side to lose.
Democrats want to win. They just view their opposition as a good buddy you might have a spirited disagreement with, not an ideological enemy.
They don't want to win badly enough, their respect for imagined norms around civility kills them, which is easy to read as paid to lose.
But defending it in its original form
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The argument is around the media atmosphere which these campaigns rely on for feedback. They benefit from Trump mongering and do make more money when democrats lose.
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Way too many examples of failed consultants from the Hilary campaign being offered key roles (in the Kamala & Warren campaign). This can also be read as failure to attribute blame to the campaigns when they lose to Republicans (it was the racist gerrymandering!!!)
They don’t want to win badly enough, their respect for imagined norms around civility kills them
Agree 100% with all of this.
the media atmosphere which these campaigns rely on for feedback. They benefit from Trump mongering and do make more money when democrats lose.
This is spot-on, too. I can buy that the media functions as if it's paid to lose. I just don't see that extending to actual Democratic campaigns (despite the personnel overlap), because the same incentive structure doesn't apply. The Washington Post might sell more subscriptions if Trump is president, but how's Hillary's career doing right now? If your campaign loses you're either done or you have to find some safety net job for a couple of years; if you win you're in a much better position.
failed consultants from the Hilary campaign being offered key roles (in the Kamala & Warren campaign)
I see this as analogous to pro sports teams constantly recycling failed head coaches, and I think it's a lot harder to make the case that pro sports teams are paid to lose (although at least at the ownership level there's a good argument that winning is a secondary concern to profitability, but that's still pretty different from intending to lose from the outset). I think two things explain this:
- Blame deflection. If a candidate hires a 30-something with a limited track record to run their campaign and they lose, it's easy to blame the candidate for gambling on someone unproven. If you hire an experienced campaign manager, even if they flamed out four years ago, who takes the blame if you lose? They take a lot of it, as they've now tanked multiple campaigns. As for the candidate, who else were they going to hire? A no-name 30-something with limited experience? Even if you blame the candidate for a bad hire, that blame is tempered by the lack of obviously better options.
- Zero-sum outcomes. Just like in a football or basketball game, you can only have one winner in an election. So you can argue -- plausibly -- that a coach or campaign manager who loses is still highly competent and the best person for the next job, because when you have a zero-sum outcome you can lose even when you do a great job. Is a coach who loses the Super Bowl fired? No, because in context losing =/= incompetence, or even average competence.
Of course, recycling personnel from the Hillary campaign is a shitty idea for dozens of other reasons. My point is only that there are reasons for those hires that don't suggest campaigns are trying to lose, or that they're operating as if they are.
I think if we stay with the pro sports team analogies, think of it as commitment to failed tactical strategies. Like football (⚽) managers who want to play possession heavy football with players who just do not have the technical/physical skill to play such a game against skilled opponents. So they're paid to lose because they're paid to play out failed politics.
So they’re paid to lose because they’re paid to play out failed politics.
I get what you're saying -- that paying someone to execute a bad strategy will produce losses, so you're paying them to lose -- I just think that really strains the plain meaning of "paid to lose." When I hear "paid to lose" I think of a boxer (fuck it, let's keep going with sports analogies) getting a stack of cash to take a dive, or your earlier example of the Washington Generals. "Paid to lose" sounds like the outcome is explicitly determined right from the start, and you're paying the loser to go along in producing that outcome.
I don't think that reading of "paid to lose" fits Democrats. I think the "paid to execute a bad strategy" definition fits, but that's more "paid to try and win within narrow ideological constraints" rather than "paid to lose." It's like hiring a basketball coach to run an offense based almost entirely on mid-range jump shots because you think that's a fun style of basketball. You're hamstringing yourself from the start, but you still want to win -- you just want to win on your terms. You don't want to win at any cost.
Yeah, like I agree with you in the end. I've met way too many liberals and democrat organisers who are genuinely well meaning.
I think that leftists feel that way when these parties sabotage popular, succesful leftists inside them, like Pelosi's attacks on AOC, or the all of Labour on Corbyn and feels very much like they're trying to lose. It's more of a sentiment that is experienced subjectively than is applicable to their intentions.
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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-pelosi-idUSKCN24P2BL
"“I would be very much averse to separating this (unemployment benefits) out and lose all leverage (on Republicans) for ... meeting all of the other needs,” as lawmakers negotiate another coronavirus aid bill, Pelosi, a Democrat, told reporters. "
Oh, big fucking shocker, Pelosi's a giant weeping vagina about everything. "We have to work together!" only works when both sides want it to work.