Hacker News Reader

Comment by colpabar | Hacker News Reader

Look man, dems have tried the whole "democracy is on the ballot" thing and lost two elections to trump. They have lost to him twice! Maybe instead of campaigning on how bad the other guy is (disclaimer: i fully agree that he is bad), they could actually do things that make people want to vote for them? I say this as someone who would really like to republicans lose forever after this, but who fears that the dems won't ever win again because they won't change.

View on HN

Democrats lose because they keep telling the truth that people don't want to hear.

Democracy was on the ballot, at least the second time. People voted against democracy, and now there isn't democracy. The regime is invading its own cities to purge them of dissidents.

But everyone thought this was alarmist and voted against the guys who said it would happen. They have no charisma.

It's August in a non-election year, nobody's campaigning right now.

I agree with your fear, but one of the key problems Dems have faced in their messaging is a false perception that the modern Republican party believes in truth, democracy, or the rule of law. A lot of effort went into negotiating bipartisan immigration reform in 2024, because the negotiators falsely believed that Republicans wanted immigration to be reformed. It would have been a great reason to vote for them if it had worked! But once the negotiators announced a breakthrough, Trump issued new instructions that Republicans who want to stay in good standing must not support it and his appointed Speaker of the House must never let the bill come up for a vote, ensuring that it could never pass.

So it's not enough to come up with a reason to make people want to vote for you. You have to come up with a reason that Trump can't tell plausible lies about, and that Trump's anti-democratic conduct can't defeat. That's a much harder problem.

But that's why they're losing. Republicans are in permanent campaign mode. Did Trump shut up after he left office in disgrace in 2021? No, he just kept acting like he was president and kept his coalition together.

I agree with all your criticisms of Republicans. But Dems have major faults. they're bad communicators. They won't push symbolic votes (where they don't have the numbers but do it anyway to appease their base). They don't put out aggressive policy agendas because they don't want the Republicans to criticize them, instead they run like middle managers trying to ace the interview. Half of them can't articulate what they stand for besides being seen as decent and competent.

Their biggest problem is that they are fundamentally conflict averse. Great in normal times when negotiation and compromise and mutuality are in vogue, utterly useless in this political moment. Only 10-15% of them in Congress have the will and skill to fight, most of them are just like panic-stricken bystanders shouting 'keep calm, keep calm!' and 'we're having a problem, we need to do something!'

I agree with everything you're saying, but the biggest problem you point out is exactly what the democracy talk is meant to solve. The Democratic coalition includes more than a few people - not just politicians, voters too - who specifically value negotiation and compromise and mutuality over most if not all policy objectives. The only way to convince them to support a knock-down fight is to convince them that they have to fight, that we have to pause negotiation and compromise for now or risk losing it forever.

I've been trying to convince them of that for 15 years and it's only recently that the party base is tilting in the direction of possibly-maybe being more confrontational. Most Congressional democrats have yet to get the message, or mouth the rhetoric but make no effort to match it with legislative actions (even superficially futile ones).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com