“close off-year election in April with relatively low turnout is”
Low turn out is all I needed to read.
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How do you run an election for a Supreme Court Judge on pocket book issues?
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There’s a long article up on the DCCC rule change on the Washington Post. It turns out that the demand for the provision came from the Congressional Black Caucus, which saw its members challenged by populist progressives at an alarming rate in 2018. The CBC wouldn’t back any candidate to run the DCCC who didn’t address challengers to incumbents. In a perfect world, this provision might be wrong but we don’t live in a perfect world, and the idea that we would waste pressure resources defending seats held by incumbents like Hakeem Jeffries in 2020 when the Republic is facing existential threats seems ludicrous to me.
P.S. Not one Justice Dem, Our Revolution, or Brand New Congress candidate won a swing district in 2018. Not one. As populists they claimed to speak for the people, but the people spoke otherwise with their midterm votes.
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Once again, Dems figure out how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s getting harder and harder to justify supporting clueless, incompetent Dems who couldn’t run a campaign if it was on auto pilot. It’s sickeningly reminiscent of John Kerry losing to the idiot GW Bush, or Hillary losing to the worst president in history, or the fact that under Pelosi’s leadership Democrats lost 63 House seats. Here’s a quote from VOX:
“Of the 16 years that Pelosi has served as the top leader of House Democrats, the party has been in the majority for just four years. Worse, she was speaker of the House when Democrats lost their majority in 2010 — a 63-seat loss that was the largest suffered by the party in more than seven decades.”
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Yes, a win turned into a loss. Where the heck were the rest of WI’s Democrats? You blew it!
P.S. Not one Justice Dem, Our Revolution, or Brand New Congress candidate won a swing district in 2018. Not one. As populists they claimed to speak for the people, but the people spoke otherwise with their midterm votes.
So what.
Seriously, must the Democratic caucus always be subservient to the most conservative of its members?
The centrist model for the past four decades has been to constantly move rightward, in a futile attempt to seize the middle in some permanent sense. But of course politics doesn’t work that way. There is no absolute middle to voter sentiment. If the Republicans are moving to the right and Democrats are moving to the right, then the sentiment as a whole will move to the right. This validates Republican thinking - at least among politics-only pundits who never pay attention to whether the popular policies actually work as advertised.
Voters who want the party to move leftward understand that the best place to do this is in party strongholds. Then, later, as the movement gets more momentum, it will translate later into being powerful enough to win swing districts, or at least push them leftward.
Professional centrists are eternally short-sighted, pursuing the mythical “swing voter” at the cost of the party’s long-term prospects. This leads to comical missteps such as Charles Schumer laughing off the loss of voters from the left with a smug assertion that any one vote lost on the left will be replaced by two votes from the center.
And yet this hasn’t happened. Why not? Because the bell curve model of voting preference is nothing more than a fiction. The country has a bimodal voting distribution, with large clumps both on the left and the right, and anybody who tries to run a campaign based on a faulty basic understanding of this fact is probably going to fritter away his own support without making significant inroads into the other side.
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Here:
Perhaps you’d be so good as to shut your goddamned mouth and go out and work for a candidate you like. This negative shit about the entire party doesn’t help. It really, really doesn’t.
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It is all about Pelosi protecting her personal power through her money flow. That’s it. She does not care about anything else, but she does occasionally throws her starving rubes a few crumbs, which they interpret as a meal.
Awww… hit a nerve? I can work against candidates I don’t like, too. That is still legal.
Pelosi is horrible. Go ahead and defend the crumbs she throws you.
And be happy when we lose races we should win.
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Yeah. It hits a nerve when people who claim to be on your side do counterproductive shit. And once in a while I just have to let loose and say it. You might keep in mind I’m about the best fucking friend you have on this board.
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“unless there were some major screw-ups in election-night vote counting“
Wasn’t this the state that would not let anyone recount the ballot after 2016? Wasn’t this one of the states that had Russians crawling all over it? Wasn’t this the state that has been aggressively purging the voter rolls for years now?
Almost accepted a position in Racine, glad I didn’t…
There is a recent piece that proclaims WI as the drunkest state in the Union,that, and voter suppression may be providing a double whammy …any place the can keep electing a dope like Walker as Governor clearly has problems with communications and messaging. .
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At a certain point, one is forced to conclude that the citizens deserve the boofing they’re going to get.
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Yes it does. Like Pelosi working to undermine primary challengers to Democratic House incumbents.
That is truly counter-productive “shit” by someone who claims to be on our side.
Think about it.
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The “our leaders are shite” schtick gets old, george. It gets old. I’ve stopped bitching about a certain saintly one’s cluelessness about making snide remarks in public regarding the great unwashed. Mostly, anyway.
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Yes, it does. So does losing under the same old leadership.
Now you ought to be a consultant.
This crap of ignoring the Overton Window as it moves ever rightward is one of the keys to GOP strategy and to our ongoing woes. You’d think some of the consulting class would have realized they should be pursuing grand strategy, not a tactical rightward two-step toward the edge of the stage.
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And, in how many states is there an election to fill a Supreme Court seat?
Talk about politicization of the judiciary!
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