It has to be a stimulus they feel as negative.
Losing office is about the only unarguable one. Barring a coup, that isn't happening any time soon.
Practically any other stimulus will be perceived as positive.
Losing office is about the only unarguable one. Barring a coup, that isn't happening any time soon.
Practically any other stimulus will be perceived as positive.
Fundamentally Trump is a symptom. When he goes, all the voters that voted for him will still be there, and they’ll still have all the reasons they voted for him.
Many of the people you see in films and photos furiously protesting the civil rights act, picketing with signs against MLK Jr, lynching people during that time, putting glass in the seats of children because the schools were forced to end segregation, etc are still alive. Trump was grown and had started college when the Civil Rights act passed.
Its time to start just forgiving them because they never seem to forget.
IMO this is a problem with the Democratic party not connecting with voters. Voters voting for Trump don't feel represented by Democrats, and that is something Democrats should be solving for.
But a crazy percentage of voters thought the economy was literally in a recession. Not even that it was doing poorly, but that there was a recession. Some people just live in an alternate reality.
The Democratic Party is not blameless. They are seen as being soft on immigration now. Obama deported more people than Trump.
They forgot the lesson that allowed Bill Clinton to win - “It’s the Economy Stupid”.
And no matter how you feel about it. There is a large part of the United States, even among the LGB crowd who don’t want biological men in women’s sports.
DEI the way it is framed is toxic to millions and I as a Black guy rolled my eyes at much of the indoctrination and “ally” nonsense I had to endure during my stint at BigTech.
No matter how you feel about this either, it takes a remarkable amount of lack of self awareness by the DNC not to know how toxic this attitude is to a large swath of American voters.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/dnc-mee...
> The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced
I'm not the only trans person like this, so it seems odd to exclude a whole group from even the possibility of agreement.
I have heard my gay friends say that the issue is causing support for issues that do affect them lose support because of narratives around trans issues.
If you even look what Trump is doing, he isn’t erasing LGB teens from government websites, just everything else related to it.
No, I’m not in favor of that anymore than I’m in favor of him removing everyone from government websites that is Black.
I’m all about RealPoliticks. Obama distanced himself from radical Blacks (repeat I a black) and Bill Clinton through Sister Soulja under the bus to appeal to moderates.
If Fox News tomorrow changed their tone and message all those sheep would change
It’s that simple
It was like an even more hamfisted change management process than the neocons upsetting their apple carts, before they understood how things were balanced on them.
Not to say anything shouldn't be changed, but jesus... folks need to have a little humility and curiosity -- try to understand what the folks before them were attempting to do and how.
It's a tactic. Like everyone else, they have interests and goals and needs, and they can be deterred in the same way. The problem is, nobody really tries. The Democrats keep doing the same ineffective things - a demonstration of being cowed and intimidated.
For example, the Dems have almost no ability to communicate with the public. Whatever Trump and the GOP say are effectively true because there is no counter voice (beyond some third parties). The Dems don't do anything about it; they just keep communicating in the same way.
The Dems have no talking points. A few of them are organizing now around 'economic populism' - in other words, they are completely cowed and will avoid all the major threats to freedom, democracy, the rule of law, safety; the corruption, cruelty, and hate. They are going to their safe space - economic policy!
This +100. Even B Clinton as a 25+yr citizen communicates better with the public than 99% of active Dem politicians.
However, I was referring to the lack of a mechanism. Whatever the Dems say, almost nobody hears it. Name a major statement by a Democrat in the last week? In the last month?
They simply need to solve their problem. That they have it is absurd and makes them look pathetic, cowed, and ineffectual victims - not something people vote for. What is more important to a political party than a means of public communication?
Name a major Democrat. There is none. After 3 electoral cycles when party bureaucracy each time crowned the candidate instead of a candidate rising through the primaries the party has no leaders anymore - note the difference between a leader and a top bureaucrat, the Dems have no deficit of the latter.
Democrats are making many statements. If they are not "major", it is perhaps because nobody cares about statements. They care about the exercise of power, and Democrats have none. Any statement they make is easily dismissed as bluster.
The first sentence is true, the second absolutely false. Public, political communication is all about that second issue - look how effective the GOP is. They can make absolute nonsense into a norm; they can shut down any speech they don't want.
It seems like the current way of doing things leaves the opposition rudderless through most of a presidential term, followed by a bitter fight where their own side rip each other apart followed by only a few months to try and establish oneself as leader in waiting.
Could the democrats do their primaries now? It feels like that would 1. Distract from Trump so he doesn't get run of the news 2. Mean that all the "candidate X is a bad democrat" stories could be long forgotten by the next election. 3. Give a pedestal to the actual presidential candidate as the go to person for the media to get reactions from 4. If they turn out to be genuinely terrible there's a lot of time to find out and potentially replace them.
... but when the primaries are is encoded into state law, so it would be a challenge to change it for every state if one wanted to shift when "the primaries" as a whole concept are.
That's a very interesting point. On the other hand, the GOP did have a leader through the Biden administration - Trump.
Even when they don't, such as under Obama, they do have effective means (Fox, social media, etc.) and content (effective, disciplined talking points) of communication. The Dems have neither.
Primaries are actually a relatively recent innovation. Before that, the candidates just appeared from the party machines. All of the ugliness went on out of public view.
For the last several elections people complained that there wasn't much difference between Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. And there isn't. They are a center leftish (by American standards) bunch.
The party has a small wing further to the left, but it just isn't enough to put forth a strong candidate. That is the biggest ugliness we get now: they don't feel represented and often, they don't vote.
Because sadly, thats what the people respond to. When given the choice between food on the table / roof over their head / cash in the bank account and abstract values like "republican government", "rule of law" and "protecting human rights" etc. they will choose the former. Especially as long as its OTHER people's rights, and OTHER parties getting surpressed, they don't care quite so much. We've seen this play out in Russia. Granted they did not have the long history of Republican government that the US has had.
The irony with Trump is they may get neither. At least some of them. Authoritarians have way of mollifying that minimum % that actually matters. Mostly people with guns and willingness to use them. In the US we're talking as low as 25% (so 75% of us are effectively screwed). And when you have billionaires controlling the information space, it would be very difficult to organize opposition.
I'm now looking out to 2028. Trump and his cronies may be plotting to crash the system and "declare an emergency" so elections get suspended. Or the alternative, he just runs again and dares anyone to stop him. The blue/purple states should at the very least, bar him from appearing on the ballot there's a question of whether there will have enough backbone and could not be sufficiently threatened/bullied into backing down, or if he tries to pull a 2020 again with an "alternate electors", at the very least cause confusion so the election can be thrown to the House where GOP almost assuredly would have control over the state delegations. Lastly, the various Federal agencies, possibly even the military would be sufficiently "Trumpified" such that they will threaten, maybe even resort to force.
That's the opposite of the truth. Republican regions have long voted against their economic interests in favor of their values. Look at all the white working class people in the South that have long voted Republican over values, even as the GOP took away or blocked their benefits, education, health care, minimum wage, labor rights, etc.
If the response is "yeah, we're good with those things, what else have you got?" I don't know what to say. You want bread? Maybe some circuses?
The Democrats did have plenty of policies. Realistic ones. Not the most exciting. If the public wants to be excited, and aren't picky about it, then indeed they should have that. But I'm not going to be able to provide it.
> The Democrats did have plenty of policies. Realistic ones. Not the most exciting. If the public wants to be excited, and aren't picky about it, then indeed they should have that. But I'm not going to be able to provide it.
I think it's obvious that such an approach doesn't work; does that matter to you? You seem defiant to me (though interpreting tone from text is very uncertain); who are you defying? There's nobody to defy - you either get the results or not.
It's also obvious, IMHO, that the issue isn't policies but politics and ideals - freedom or oppression, humanitarianism or cruelty, power or democratic equality, democracy or authoritarianism, etc. How many bridges to build next year doesn't measure up, and if that's what a politician talks about, they are clearly hiding from a difficult reality.
“It’s the economy, stupid” is over
It is now the era of “It’s the vibes, stupid”
Many Dem leaders don't seem to care now, complaining that people are pressuring them to be effective.
There are countless interviews with voters quoting the laughable and provably impossible promises/lies Trump spouted during the last campaign as their reason for voting for him.
If what you’re advocating is that the democrats need to embrace denying reality and lying to the public if they want to win, I can’t disagree with you. But I also think historians won’t have a tough time pointing to the end of the American experiment.
Just telling people the 'truth' isn't effective communication at all (in fact, it can be dangerous) - that should be obvious to anyone with some experience in life. To tell the 'truth' and then throw up your hands because it didn't work is just being at victim.
A major political party knows all that - it's shameful and corrupt that they don't care to be effective.
I don't expect the voters to love boring truths. But if they actively want to be lied to, and revel in getting away with lies, then democracy is not the tool for me.
There has to also be a competing vision.
The Democrats have been stuck in a "That's a lie!" + {crickets} rut for too long.
What is the competing vision? (And no, general platitudes about freedom, democracy, and apple pie aren't enough)