Hello? Yes? This is Claire McCaskill. I'd like to report a vicious slandering of my district by one Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Yes, officer. She was doing a socialism on television. Yes, officer. Yes. It cost me the election. People wouldn't vote for me because someone in New York did a socialism. Yes, sir. Absolutely, sir. You can put me on hold.
The funny thing about that woman is that she ran in 2 of the single strongest years for democrats on record. There's nothing special about her ideology that helped her win. Before that she held a job that democrats always hold in Missouri (state auditor).
I think it's 50/50 pure ideology, with the other half being convinced by the first half you need to be centrist to raise enough money to win in competitive districts.
That stuff just isn't true for an incumbent, a progressive has insane fundraising capacity compared to these unknown moderates.
I totally agree, being a progressive helps with fundraising. But it's harder for an unknown to win that way in their first election, among these total random downballot progressives only josh4congress raised a competitive amount of money.
I also think some of their progressives can't win stuff is that they think progressives like AOC have an outsized influence on the public perception of the democratic party, and that hurts candidates down ballot.
I don't really agree with this stuff, but it's not a totally braindead thing to think. Social conservatives don't really have a place in the modern dem party even if they support social democratic reform.
Too bad this won't convince anyone. They'll just say the progressives are in districts that were guaranteed to go blue, while the brave centrists in swing districts lost because they were guilty by association.
If you want to dunk on any of these morons use CA-45 and CA-49 as examples of "progressives" winning on sizeable margins in historically very deep red areas. Richard Nixon retired in Levin's district for fucks sake. (Katie Porter and Mike Levin are admittedly still very lib, but they endorsed M4A, and Levin endorsed GND so gotta work with what we got) Moderates on the other hand may lose in CA-48 and CA-39.
Or how DSA endorsed Bradshaw in Tennessee did just as well as shit lib rock star Mcgrath in Kentucky.
Or how DSA endorsed Bradshaw in Tennessee did just as well as shit lib rock star Mcgrath in Kentucky.
Not a glowing endorsement, given the outcome of both races. Bradshaw did add 20k votes to Bredesen's haul in 2018, breaking 1M Tennessee Democrats. But Hagerty brought in 600k extra Republicans.
McGrath slipped 1k votes from 813k in 2016 to 812k in 2020, which is fucking pathetic. Meanwhile, McConnell added 200k to Rand's 1M vote election.
In both cases, the problem isn't so much that they lost. It's that they failed to significantly broaden the base of the Democratic Party. This, while Republicans are out there running up the scoreboard.
I'm willing to cut Texas Dems some slack, simply because they moved the needle from 4M votes in 2018 to 5.2M in 2020. The GOP just kept pace, adding 1.2M of their own in turn.
Dems have been banking for years on the theory that they'll demographically eclipse Republicans through inertia. 2020 suggests that just isn't true. It may well be Democrats who are staring down extinction, under these trends.
Nah someone did some research and there were like 6 or 7 swing districts where Trump won and so did the progressive downballot. Like the north maine district had both Susan Collins and Trump win big there, but this dude kept his seat (where he supports M4A and GND, but is still a moderate on basically every other issue).
Dems would rather lose as moderates than win as progressives. I don't think trying to use this obvious info to convince them to run more progressives will work.
They're beholden to their donors, Biden had more billionaire support than Trump, it wasn't even close. This country is so upside down right now, people need to stop drawing historical parallels, because they're just aren't any. We keep saying Republicans are winning the game because they're consolidating power, but that's just not true. Capital is consolidating power. Im glad we're here and not on r*ddit, because I can say it; we really need to be guillotining billionaires soon or we are fucked. We are on a bullet train to a corporate controlled techno‐dystopia that would make a Gibson novel look like a paradise.
Add to that climate change and the future looks pretty horrible. I don't think there is hope for the US.
Oh trust me I know they won’t listen lol but it is fun to shit on them
Honestly downballot results were bad as a whole, progressives kept their seats sure, but none of the election day candidates Bernie endorsed won either (although some of this can still just be explained by gerrymandering and not having a real rural strategy for dems in Texas).
That’s not true. Link of Bernie 2020 endorsements.
It’s not like an onslaught but he did back some significant winners who weren’t incumbents like Cori Bush in Missouri, Nikema Williams in Georgia, Marie Newman in Illinois, and Jamaal Bowman in NY.
None of those people had competitive races today. I'm talking about the ones with competitive races.
I don’t know what your standard of competitive is, but Marie Newman won with 54% of the vote which seems competitive to me.
That's a blue district that had been held by democrats for decades is still how I view it though.
This is a bad take. That district is where all the Chicago cops live, it is definitely not progressive. Lipinski was anti-abortion and anti-lgbt.
On the flip side of this, exit polls showed that Trump and the GOP in general are getting lower income and working class voters in wide margins. Trump got the most POC votes of a Republican candidate since the 1950s. He doubled his support with black voters and everyone is acting SHOCKED that he picked up Latino voters by a wide margin too.
The progressives won mostly in comfy blue states and city councils. They aren't radically taking over the Democratic Party and it's clearly not going to happen. They'll be painted out as white middle class college kids wanting "free stuff" (which let's be real, a lot of leftists that come from privileged income backgrounds literally think that socialism is just when the government does stuff). In this same time span, within 4 years, the Tea Party movement had outright taken over the GOP and had many members in Congress. The old neo-cons like McCain and Romney were just barely hanging on by a thread as the Tea Party swooped up win. The same can't be said for the neolib centrists still in charge of the Democratic party.
Dem party leadership will use this as an excuse to move further right. They have basically re-invented themselves now as the college educated, smug rich people's party. That's what they wanted to become under Biden and they made it very clear with all their ads about him being the "middle class president", a heavy focus on the suburbs and even made snide comments about the "uneducated" being subhuman. They are never going to move left. They'll spent the next 4 years wanting to oust those few progressives in congress, and probably use one of them (AOC maybe?) to run for president and whip up a bunch of support, only to sabotage their movement at the last minute and tell everyone to vote for another milquetoast neoliberal like Biden.
This isn't a fair comparison between progressive and the tea party. The right had been laying the groundworks for a media ecosystem that would allow such a taken over for just over 2 decades before they won this flip. We had hardly any significant left media system before 2016 compared to right now.
People need to toss out this year's exit polls. There is no amount of modeling or regression that can make up for a fundamentally non-random sample. That data is useless.
Who cares what happens to the fucking Democrat twits.
Why are you wasting time arguing/obsessing with them that liberals you like more are better than their liberals? They're both still liberals and doomed to prevent real reform.
With the exception of a handful (literally) of candidates like the red haired lad from Virginia, socialism (in even the most watered down, revisionist forms) is not on the ballot.
What you're celebrating is liberals who want to somewhat more equitably distribute the stolen loot of empire to the people. There is no structural change with these people. None. The structure is capitalism and they are not proposing fundamentally changing it so much as rebuilding the shoddy social democrat framework atop it again after it was quite resoundingly knocked down and bulldozed over. But they fail to understand the context in which that was allowed. That there is no Soviet Union, no new scary socialist threat that has them panicked, they won and are confident they are still in control. These are not people who want to abolish the exploitative system of capitalism. To change the relationship of the classes to the means of production. Not people who want to put an end to imperialism. And not people who matter because guess what? The excess hyper-profits from imperialism have dried up. There isn't any more that the bourgeoisie can spare like they did in the 50s, they are now in cannibalism mode and will not permit these kinds of concessions short of a wormhole opening up to a mineral rich alien world with an easily subjugated population.
Truthfully the American people are happy with the status quo. They do want imperialism. They are labor aristocracy, a bourgeois proletariat if you will. They do want to subjugate the world populace to subsidize their lifestyle. They just want to change the terms and percentages a bit in their favor but they have no leverage. To get leverage would require giving up their lifestyles off the backs of others and they are unwilling to do that so will continue fighting amongst themselves until hopefully their evil empire collapses.
I’m not celebrating liberals who are ok with western social safety nets. What I am saying is that progressivism is direct improvement of the material condition for millions of people. Capitalism is a fuck and electoralism can not fix the root of its problems. Empowering more people and exposing them to both the problem they currently don’t even understand exists while also showing them the obvious solution is how you turn your stagnant leftist status quo and completely reactionary population into a mobilized leftist movement which seeks to end exploitation of the global south and instead liberate the global working class from oppression.
I know incremental change isn’t real and you can’t vote away the power of the bourgeoisie, but you can utilize what wiggle room electoralism grants you to the advantage of the disadvantaged in the long term. I would love to end electoralism and capitalist exploitation tomorrow, but what few tools are granted to me today would be stupid to not utilize for our own benefit in pursuit of one day dismantling the systems of exploitation that be.
Its the ideas like those described in the OP's tweet that pushed me to finding farther and farther left spaces to try to figure out what is going on in the world. So, yeah, no revolutionary change but at least giving people who had no other word to describe themselves besides "liberal" the idea that there is a whole sea of lefty ideas that can better describe their world view. Helps to peel off the disaffected. Hope they find somewhere left to land.
