Democratic strategists and organizers are hoping that if 2024 presidential nominee Kamala Harris performs well in the November election, there will be a down-ballot effect in gubernatorial, U.S. Senate and U.S. House races. Democrats have a small majority in the Senate, while Republicans have a sing...
We had multiple Democrats Peel off and stymied loads of progress (Manchin, Sinema etc).
We need enough room for the wolves in sheep's clothing to not make a (D)ifference in the progress we need to shut down authoritarianism.
The supreme court being public enemy #1 means we need everything else to be operating seamlessly to be able to prevent every single goal for project 2025 line by line immediately and permanently.
Undoing regulatory capture will also be a monumental feat, as will reforming media's ability to platform lies and disinformation that are objectively false.
Huge fucking task list and we haven't even talked about running the actual country yet. We're gonna need one hell of a blue wave to drown the fascists and drain the swamp.
We had multiple Democrats Peel off and stymied loads of progress (Manchin, Sinema etc).
This is a consistent problem with Dem "majority" coalitions dating back to the '77 Carter coalition that cracked up while trying to pass a universal health care plan and fossil fuel exit strategy. Clinton's '93 coalition also splintered due to conservative Democrat infighting. Lieberman famously killed a host of legislation in '09/'10 (although he was mostly a cat's paw for other conservatives in the House and Senate). And then Manchin/Sinema upended Biden's reforms in '17, before squandering the House majority the following year.
These failures aren't accidental. They are the direct result of Democrats saying "We need to vote candidates who are electable" and then getting a bunch of shitty corporate flaks who bought their way through the primaries.
We just watched Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman lose their House seats to AIPAC lobbyists, while Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlahib had to muscle through enormously expensive primaries funded by the same far-right donor groups that favor the Republican Party.
The supreme court being public enemy #1 means we need everything else to be operating seamlessly
The SCOTUS is a distraction, as they've got no real power to enforce their decisions. The real fight is between a liberal federal government and the assorted red state and municipal governments. We've seen this proven out with AGs like Ken Paxton and governors like DeSantis who routinely break laws in their quest to pump up the base with high profile acts of cruelty to their minority populations. They've discovered its easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and the Biden admin's response has been to just kinda shrug its way through rather than risk open confrontation.
This is the same shit guys like Pierce and Buchanan did shortly before the federal system collapsed under their feet. But if you're always trying to triangulate and get the opposition on board, its where your party and your country eventually end up when fascists at the lower levels of government realize they've got carte blanche and a partisan mandate to do evil.
Reps are probably taking it unless Texas, Florida, or Montana comes through to glad Dems a 50/50 split.
Now if they can abolish the filibuster at least for adding states and also take the house, they could add DC and Puerto Rico and the next cycle would be friendlier.
I am not sure they want to win. The convention as a whole anyways. Having all 3 seats of power will now set the precedent to do something and they don't want to do something, at least their donors don't.
Good point. If they win all, and then do nothing, it shows us all again that when they have the power they don't use it. Not for anything good to actually benefit the public at least.
"Meanwhile, Will Reinert, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the most contentious House races are likely to require "trench warfare" in order for the GOP to keep the speaker's gavel.
Reinert told The Hill, "Because we are well-prepared, we are well-positioned to grow our majority. But it's going to be a knife fight until the very end.""
It's still absurd to me that this is something one would even need to say.
The sentence "don't vote for Ted Cruz" has the same vibe to it as "don't shit your pants in the supermarket". It feels like something that shouldn't need to be said.
Watch NY Dems fuck it up (again). More seriously I think it’s very likely that the presidency and the house will move in the same direction. Gerrymandering and the electoral college both favor the GOP in the same way. Even in 2016 when Dems won the popular vote by a mile, the GOP still took both the house and the presidency.
Its still crazy to me so many people wanted to keep Biden. He wasn't only hurting our chance at the presidency, a poor presidential candidate hurts chances for gains in House/Senate too.
Biden had too many valid issues that was hurting Dem turnout.
Lots of people couldn't hold their nose for Biden, and likely weren't going to show up to just vote down ballot.
Kamala is far from perfect, but has practically zero baggage in comparison to Biden. So running her is going to help pick up more seats elsewhere.
If she does the "now that I'm in office I'm going to start trying to find out if I can do anything" that Biden did tho. We'll get nothing accomplished with those 2 years and lose one or both in midterms.
There's no excuse to be unprepared in January, it shows voters that the candidate wasn't really serious about fixing shit, and it's almost impossible for a candidate to recover.
Considering a primary in 2028 is incredibly unlikely, we can't afford Kamala to fuck this up.
She needs to start doing shit to help Americans day 1.
Traditionally, the incumbent has a huge advantage. I don't believe that the party of any sitting president that was primaried ever won the election. There are only a few cases of a sitting president that was eligible for another term stepping aside, and those were a very long time ago.
There was very little precedent for what Biden did, and I think very few could have predicted the enthusiasm for Harris - I remember her last campaign. It wasn't inspiring.
I think Biden felt like the safest choice to many, though obviously that's been proven incorrect. Hopefully the Democratic party will take a lesson from this and be more willing to replace an incumbent in the future if there's a better option.
I don't believe that the party of any sitting president that was primaried ever won the election.
Probably because the party was already in a really weak position in the first place, which led to both the nominee getting primaried and the party still losing the general anyway. Like, if someone has a massive coronary and ends up dying during emergency heart surgery you're probably not going to blame the surgery for killing them.
. I don’t believe that the party of any sitting president that was primaried ever won the election.
And I've never heard of a single person dying during open heart surgery who didn't have a condition that required open heart surgery...
Looking at just that and refusing open heart surgery wouldn't make much logical sense if you had a condition surgery could help...
Right?
Because lots of people have died because they didn't have surgery they needed. Similarly incumbents have lost elections because they were too weak of a candidate and shouldn't have been on the ticket in the first place...
Its still crazy to me so many people wanted to keep Biden
I get it. Changing the engine out mid-flight comes with a lot of uncertainty. Would selecting a new candidate go smoothly, would a new candidate be able to get momentum, what happens if a new candidate is worse, etc.
Biden wasn’t great, but people were worried about all the unknowns.
If she does the "now that I'm in office I'm going to start trying to find out if I can do anything"
Not sure what you’re trying to say with this. Are you saying she shouldn’t try to do anything? If so what is the point of electing her? As I see it, it’s the exact opposite and she should immediately try to accomplish some goals. Why wait?
It wasn’t good phrasing, but I think their point is she needs to take action on day 1, not start researching/planning on day 1. “Trying to find out” being the operative words, versus, “now that I’m in office, I’m going to do X, Y, and Z.”
That she shouldn't just put her feet up after the election like Biden did
If she wins in November, then she needs to have a plan ready in January for at least some things to get moving.
Like, Biden said he'd de-criminalize cannabis federally to get votes. Then in January declared he'd "look into it'" and stalled till we lost the House in midterms and said he couldnt. Which still wasn't true.
Shit like that depresses Dem turnout.
I thought the last line was as simple as I could make it...
She needs to start doing shit to help Americans day 1.
Its still crazy to me so many people wanted to keep Biden.
This question has been asked and answered; to death. Trends strongly indicate it's a disaster to primary the incumbent for very obvious and often-repeated reasons.
If she does the "now that I'm in office I'm going to start trying to find out if I can do anything" that Biden did tho. We'll get nothing accomplished with those 2 years and lose one or both in midterms.
It really felt like Biden slow-walked or bailed on a TON of his campaign promises. And then he proceeded to nominate a limpdick/arguable quisling AG who took two fucking years to do literally anything in terms of prosecuting Trump for his unprecedented open insurrection - by which time, most of the public’s attention span had lapsed, so the poLiTicAL PerSecUTiOn angle pushed by the GOP gained a lot of traction.
Biden did a bunch of good stuff, but he also did a bunch of really dumb stuff, and had an absolute SHITLOAD of missed opportunities - both in terms of making and executing policy, as well as effectively leveraging the bully pulpit. Not to mention, it became abundantly clear that he’s generationally out of touch with the majority of the country at this point.
Its still crazy to me so many people wanted to keep Biden.
There's tons of people in the Democratic party who loved how "ineffective" Biden was at getting anything progressive done while he kept the taxpayer money to cops and for profit businesses flowing. They were making incredibly stupid arguments, but the hardcore Biden supporters were very much not stupid people.
Being president is hard AF apparently, you can see how it aged each of the past one rapidly. Just imagine the state that raggedy ass trump would be in after another term, hardly fit to change his own shirt probably
Dems were always expected to flip the House this year. The fight is much tighter for the Senate, which the Republicans are still expected to flip given a map that is very favorable to them this year.