Imagine complaining about the plumber who tried to fix your leaky pipe with a paper napkin, and have someone saying you are scapegoating them. It's their fucking job to prevent this.
Why didn't they win with a landslide? Was it because they stopped talking about relevant issues, capitulated on issues like transgender rights and immigration, ignored outcry about literally paying for a genocide, and preferred to associate themselves with centrists and "upset Republicans" instead of progressives?
It's mostly because of millions of democrats and POC being purged from the voting registers weeks before the election in every single swing state, and therefore being ineligible to vote.
I would have preferred the CR got struck down, but I also realize there are more avenues of resistance with continued government, so I'm very ambivalous to both options. If the general public always decided right and wrong to minimize suffering and casualty, Donald Trump wouldn't be president, Biden wouldn't have won the 2020 primaries.
Right but again, we don't have to wonder what the public would think because this has happened multiple times in the last decade and they blame Republicans. This isn't an unknown, pretending like it is doesn't help anyone.
Let's be honest, if ten years ago taught us anything it's that the public would probably blame the Republicans for the shutdown. They keep shutting the government down, getting blamed, losing elections as a result, then forgetting and once again shutting the government down. Why the hell should the Democrats save Republicans from the consequences of their own actions?? You know Democrats aren't going to get any credit for keeping the lights on when they swoop in and vote with the GOP on their asenine budget. Why would you rather take the high road in order to help the Republicans than take the low road for once and let the GOP's obvious lack of ability to govern bite them in the ass? What kind of a Democrat goes out of their way to save the GOP from itself?
But Democrats won't take the blame, we've been through this before and that concern almost never plays out. We're gonna pull our punches because they're already pretty unpopular and, what, that's good enough? Are you kidding?
You don't have to agree with me because I'm referring to extensive polling conducted after recent shutdowns instead of just pulling hypothetical reactions of out of my ass in order to give cover to Schumer.
Believe it or not, getting votes is also part of their job. It's an integral part of the system and usually works if they actually try to represent us.
This guy with his history of comments on Lemmy of all people defending Democrats really tells you everything you need to know about the current batch of Democrats doesn't it?
As an outside observer, I think a certain Mr. Sanders could have provided a decent alternative candidate but the democrats decided against him (in a not very democratic way IIRC). Instead, they opted for the flawed political triangulation tactic and took a right politics drift, to their own peril.
Different base population, different set of candidates, different election. Apples and oranges. In comparison, French elections have a sort of "primary" (the actual election) with a follow-up between the two strongest candidates across parties about who becomes the president. The odds there sometimes look quite different from the first round. I mentioned Sanders here because I remembered something fishy was going on during the primaries in 2016 which took Sanders off the board, despite a decent support. But Wikipedia suggests that might have been a Russian spin against Clinton? Hard to tell.
Anyway, my broader point is that you can't run triangulation politics against fascists. This doesn't work and political scientists have been pretty clear about that for a long time. Hence both Clinton and Biden were pretty short-sighted and weak strategic choices. The democratic party didn't stand for anything in the past decade, apart from "not the orange guy". There needs to be a visionary, authentic alternative people can identify with. I'm not sure such a thing can meaningfully develop top-down from inside the political establishment. I have no solution.
I’m sick of people who think the solution to today’s problem is inventing a time machine and going back nine years to run a guy who couldn’t win a primary as the presidential candidate.
I'm sick of people who think the DNC primary is a fair contest despite multiple courts saying it's a private party who can make up rules however it wants.
One might note that nobody suggested running Bernie today. If you expect people to forget that the conservative wing of the Dems is responsible for the rise of Trump in several important ways, that isn't going to happen.
Progressive candidates either tote the Democratic Party line or the party drops all support for them instead pushing all that money to a centrist candidate.
Then the democratic leaning media runs articles against those progressives saying stuff like "will progressives sink democratic electoral chances".
Not initially. Fox News was against Trump initially. The whole GOP establishment was against him. He took over by the GOP base consistently voting for him. There was an actual takeover that happened.