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Reporting from Politico describes the polling conducted for the Democrats, by the Democrats (source poll now released here). It's interesting stuff. When asked (all voters) about the Democratic response to Trump so far:
Pretty damning. If you lump in the "not sure" with those that actually explicitly say the Dems have no strategy at all, that's a good 2/3rds of voters, and even less than a third of those who think the Dems do have a strategy think it's a good one! And that's before the State of the Union, which seems to only have reinforced this impression. They tested a handful of opinionated claims about what direction the Democrats should go, presented in pairs and asked about which were, relatively speaking, more persuasive if they were to go that direction. Specific matchup data or party affiliation breakdowns wasn't published but overall, some notes about what did particularly well or poorly:
I found the contrast pretty interesting. Voters seem to think that a moderate, mainstream Democratic party would be most effective, but at the same time didn't think that talking down to people was necessarily an issue. Of course, all these reasons were relative to others, not framed in absolute terms, but still. The fact that "Democrats have no message" was found to be MORE persuasive than many of these other reasons, yet a statement calling them to double down on explicitly leftist policies seems to suggest that the Democrats are in a bit of a hole beyond just identity. A lot of people here seem to think that woke language is the millstone, but many voters don't seem to agree. If there's a big takeaway here, it's that voters are probably increasingly favoring short-term, domestic results in their motivations to vote. They don't think the messengers are that flawed, only the message itself, which is super interesting. As such, if I were the Democrats, I'd lean hard back into restoring CFPB-like programs and putting in to place better health care reform as midterm messages. After all, I think a lot of voters still look favorably on the Obamacare reforms. A final note is that this Democratic-aligned polling outfit didn't even bother to include an immigration-specific message! Perhaps because on their version of a Trump approval poll, Border Security and Immigration both received top marks at +10 and +8 favorable. Inflation and healthcare got -10 and -10, emphasizing my point about good points of focus.
Clarification for those reading the post and not the linked paper:
The point there is that "if Democrats ever want to win elections again, people need a clear message from them about what they stand for and what they’ll do" but it comes at the end of the sentence. No specifics as to which message, it's just that they need some message. The opposite of rolling on with the no-message approach which is presumably what the party has been doing recently.
This doesn't affect anything else in the parent post, it's just that this quote out of context is rather confusing.
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Tangential anecdata: I've been getting a whole lot of political-ad texts over the past several weeks alerting me to Democratic campaigns (didn't bother to read them in detail, though, I just sent an unsubscribe response and deleted ASAP). It seems that some Dems are finding the willpower for #Resistance, despite this being the kind of time where few might blame them for keeping their heads down and muddling through.
I think this is Democratic over-correction that will come back to bite them. They raised historic amounts this last cycle and a lot of it was via these exact text campaigns. Rather than go "nice, let's keep that in the back pocket for the next major election" it's really easy to hit the button to mass-text for short-term attractive fund-raising, and they don't have the self-control to stop themselves. In short, it has nothing to do with willpower and is not indicative of grassroots #resistance. If anything, this is yet another thing that will fatigue voters. They'd be better off keeping their powder dry for the actual midterms.
Arent there active campaigns coming up in the next few months? Like to replace congress people and governors? I'd presume they want cash for that stuff.
Yeah, this is the sort of thing I'm referencing, there's going to be a few political seats up for grabs in the near future.
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What sort of campaigns? Fundraising, sign-waving, social media stuff?
There's like a few Senate(?) seats potentially available for grabs due to some runoff elections or something, I think. Again, I didn't memorize the details that well and I've already wiped the texts, and I don't even live in the East Coast where this would be more relevant.
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I think the biggest problem the Democrats have is that they don't understand their enemies. If you go on reddit, they think that the average conservative is a fan of Andrew Tate. I've actually basically been banned because my karma got so low from pointing out how ridiculous it is that the average conservative would support a black Muslim pimp who pimps out white women. Reddit can be excused a but because they skew young and are extremely online, but I've seen older Democrats in the MSM think the same thing. So they basically have no understanding of why and to whom they actually lost.
Their other big problem is that they don't want to represent what America is but instead what they want it to be. They obviously aren't stupid enough to not see what policy positions they need to take to win, but they still refuse to do it. So clearly, representing the will of the people and giving them the government they want is not their number one goal.
Last thing is DEI sucks. I've seen DEI hires get trusted to do things they clearly aren't capable of doing and mess things up. Then, real hires have to come in and fix the job. Of course, once the DEI hire has ben exposed as incompetent, they never actually get rid of them. So you end up with a bunch of useless people collecting paychecks. Everyone except those whose paycheck depends on the DEI grift continuing can see this, so this is a huge loss for them as well.
There are other issues too like how female-coded the Democrats are, and when you add it all together, the Democrats are incapable of changing. I'm not saying they are purposely losing or are too stupid to change. What I'm saying is as constructed, they are literally incapable of changing enough to do what they need to win. How could they ditch DEI and stop turning off men when they absolutely need blacks and feminists to maintain their coalition? They keep saying they need a left wing Joe Rogan and stuff like that, but how could they possibly have one? This hypothetical person would be too cucked and people would see right through it because he would have to support things men generally hate.
I say all this to say that the people who run the Democrat Party are smart enough know this, and they'd rather keep their power, money, and influence than actually change. They'll pretend they are looking into changing the party, but deep down they know that it's impossible, so they will just keep going back and playing the hits: racism, sexism, etc. And since there are only two parties in America, they will win enough to keep the grift going.
The Man Enough ad (YouTube link) really drove home how unbelievably out of touch the Kamala campaign was with working class men. Somehow managed to directly insult and talk down to the demographic they were doing the worst with and actively trying to target.
They polled terribly with white men. They really needed not to do this! They couldn't help it.
I was a full on "lesser evil for Kamala" voter but this, this ad nearly made me just leave the ballot blank.
Between "Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee" at the end and "Trump should forget about running his own ads and use his campaign money to run this ad instead." in the comments, I'm wondering about false-flag advertisements.
Is there a solid reason to avoid them? Has anyone ever been caught? By what enforcement mechanisms? It feels like they would be much more effective than traditional attack ads, so someone must have tried it.
I'm not sure if this counts, but I did read about something like that happening in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race: https://apnews.com/article/musk-progress-2028-wisconsin-supreme-court-acb3b82275e466909c45fe284aa52dbf
Yes, that definitely counts. Those are superficially-positive positive ads that were run to damage the campaigns, which is exactly what I was thinking of.
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The whole "we need a left wing Joe Rogan" is especially rich when you recall that Rogan was a big Sanders supporter back in 2016 and the term "Bernie bro" was originally coined as a term of derision aimed at him and his listeners.
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A message via polling & committee is not a viable path to victory. Democrats need an actual leader with charisma and conviction, truly alien since Obama. In the ongoing Year of the Trump, the salient messages have been “resist”, “not Trump”, “woke” to a lesser extent, and “mumbling” at the moment. Somehow, I came out of the SotU shit show with a more favorable view of Trump even though I vehemently dislike every one of his policy positions or how he is implementing them. Democrats somehow came away looking even more effete. Resist: for a Congressperson to hold a placard or coordinate attire for an opposition speech.
I would go for accountability, the general acceptance of reality, and a clear, positive message for the future of the country. This bold proposal would require the Democratic Party to both run a primary and respect the outcome so it’s unlikely.
That may well be your opinion and you may well be right (voters don't always know what they want), but still I think it's worth pointing out that voters surveyed disagree. Specifically, one of the tested messages was:
which sounds very similar to your claim... but it tested smack dab in the middle of the pack, a perfect 50% score. The only "committee" aspect of the polling was that the surveyor is strongly Democrat-aligned, and the specific set of 10 messages were crafted by the pollsters themselves.
I think the element that you highlight that was very strongly supported however was that voters want a clear and pro-action "we want to do X" message, not a "we're against Y" message.
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Looking at the poll PDF, all it says is "registered voters". I couldn't find anything about the population demographics.
Is that published anywhere? I'd like to be proven wrong, but it's been my experience that when a polling agency doesn't publish that data, it's because the polled population is non-representative
Suspiciously high proportion of people who claim they voted, although the population was explicitly registered voters, but actual partisan breakdown is fairly split.
I can't believe I missed that. Thanks!
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It seems like democrats have angered multiple sets of people in multiple ways. People are mad about housing costs(even homeowners aren't onboard with price rises at this point), some people think democrats are too far to the right- fascinating specimens, but they'll eventually vote straight party D. Democrats have mishandled race issues, and they're married to ultra-unpopular incompetent-by-design local governments and to trans, which is a deadweight around their necks.
Democrats genuinely are much, much further to the right in some areas compared to where they were in the mid-2000s:
-Reflexivly carrying water for corporations and big pharmaceutical companies
-Strong support for foreign interventions and war
-Much more pro-Israel in the mainstream media and legislative parts of the party (I remember them having a week long panic attack during the Intafada when an Israeli helicopter strike killed six people)
Have the Democrats ever seriously opposed war and foriegn intervention? Sure there was that short stint between October 2001 and January 2009 but that seems to have been driven more by personal opposition to George W Bush than sincere principle.
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Since I haven't seen Grendel-Khan around in a while, would you care to go into detail? I'm curious.
Everyone except real estate agents wants single family homes to decline in value and price. Homeowners are worried their children won’t be able to get established, they don’t like the growth of apartments or their property tax bills. Seniors would often like to cash out and move to a smaller house with less to keep up with, but the prices put them off. Younger people would like to move to a bigger house, but even with equity they can’t afford it.
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I just want technocrats who will build a thousand nuclear reactors, regulate industrial contaminants and unhealthy food, craft policy for cheaper industrial inputs, rationalize local (city, county, state) regulations and bureaucracy (e.g. a unified online tax or building permit system) and encourage our people and culture to prosper, like Lew Kuan Yew. I've seen nothing like this in the West. Should I build it?
So what the GOP claims to be doing? The way to get that is to convince competent and sane people to join the republicans en masse.
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Your request is impossible. Just as we do not have angels in the form of kings, we do not have angels in the form of technocrats. There was one Lee Kuan Yew... but only one.
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The problem is lack of trust. Is that vaccine real or is it just a way to sell a product at taxpayer expense? Are those people regulating industrial waste actually engaging in a good-faith effort to keep the commons clean, or are they just regulating competitors of their lobbyists’ sponsors off the board?
You cannot have nice things without trust, and "trust" isn’t some value that mystically vanished: the disappearance of trust has been warranted. The governing strata of society are infested with liars and grifters.
I don't think this is consistent with the patterns we observe in contemporary politics. General institutional distrust is wildly asymmetric and the populist moment certainly hasn't cut down on the number of liars and grifters involved in government. People overwhelmingly think the other team is untrustworthy, but are, if anything, even more blindly loyal to their own political elites than they have been in the past.
It's perfectly consistent. If Republicans blindly trusted their own elites, Trump would never get the nomination, let alone the presediency. The fact that this did not result in a decrease of grifters might be a flaw of the tactic they picked to address the issue, but it's not a result of blind trust.
When the elites will not lead the people in the direction they want to go, they will find other leaders, who will be mostly grifters, because that's who is left.
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"Social trust" isn't just between a population and its rulers, but also between the members of the polity themselves. Perception of crime, "thickness" of social bonds, community engagement, etc. That also has been going down thanks partially to increasing diversity but also thanks to the internet which has everyone staring at a screen instead of each other and staying in instead of going out.
I don’t deny that the things you mention may be factors, but I think by far the most prominent driver of trust decline is people giving compelling evidence that they are, in fact, untrustworthy.
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Thanks to most people, especially those with authority, being utterly untrustworthy and the shared agreement to pretend they aren't failing.
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The current system can actually accommodate this kind of thing, and I mean it completely sincerely when I say it is possible, but it requires some form of organization, ideally in the form of a movement. So, unironically yes, you should build it. Think Tea Party or something - it took a few years, but we see now the fruits of what they planted on a wide range of issues, and it all started from a strong local groundswell of sorts. But first you'd have to find some way to package at least some of it together in a sensible way. Right now these things don't neatly fit into the packages offered by the status quo. I could theoretically see it sliding in either on the left (housing, green energy, people-centric) or the right (healthy living, lower regulations, cultural prosperity) just as well, though starting on a particular 'side' isn't mandatory.
I'd call it something along the lines of Human Basics, just have a heavy emphasis on health and housing, I could see that blending into a "package", with a reasonable vibe. I think something is brewing at least on the housing front, so your best bet other than starting from scratch would be to try and push the packaged mini-ideology onto an existing and on-the-ups housing advocacy group. Or, if you want to be institutional, if you could find a powerful state government to run a housing-regulation overhaul, that could be a good trial balloon if you can convince some powerful people directly. That's probably the only way to actually sidestep the movement requirement.
I'm not so sure about that branding: seems already taken. At least, "basic" and "human" make up two-thirds of the endonym for "woke" ("basic human decency.")
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Unfortunately our technocrats can't deliver that, but as a compromise, how about a trans-inclusive code of conduct for your favorite FOSS project?
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