For Democrats To Win In Georgia, Messaging Should Link Race And Class | Talking Points Memo

I am sorry, but as an Atlanta resident I am calling bullshit. Rev Warnock spent months with TV ads that talked about his background and what he wanted to do for Georgians. That was before the attack ads started from Loeffler. Ossoff has done the same. If these women cant name a reason to vote for either of these candidates, perhaps they need to tune in a bit more. That sounds like a cop out to me.

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I reread the “story.”

It’s a classic case of begging the question, and Josh should never have published it.

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Base turnout is going to decide both of these races. I cant imagine many people would vote for one democrat and one republican.
Also, early mail in voting is way down in the Trumpiest of counties compared to blue counties. Some of them might just sit it out. Also, the weather on Jan 5th is going to play a very important role in turnout.

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An early voting line in Atlanta goes down the block and wraps around the corner. Some lined up more than two hours before polls opened at that location. In total so far, more than 480,000 Georgians have either voted early in person or returned absentee ballots.

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I wrote this four years ago - seems still pertinent:
I’m bothered by the “we need to get over identity politics and focus on economics” arguments I’m seeing. Partly because I am just a bit of a sucker for both-and, but also because I worry that it surrenders one set of hard-won and genuine political achievements in the name of another set of genuine achievements that will be hard to win and for which we all need all the help we can give one another.

For starters, it’s not as though the liberal left alone has pursued so-called identity politics. The right bashes liberals for it–but their dismissive and derogatory usage of the term is also a dog-whistle for alt-right identity politics–the identity politics of implicit white nationalism. Maybe ( maybe ) Steve Bannon really doesn’t see his nationalist project as the pursuit of a white supremacist utopia. But his constant rhetorical appeals to “Judeo-Christian culture,” directed to and amplified via the Breitbart constituencies, makes that hard to believe. He seems to be the kind of true believer–above all in his own apocalyptic revolution–who considers the use of all means, including the inflammation and discharge of racist, sexist, and other baser impulses, to be justified by his envisioned end. He calls out to people whose cultural capital investment in actual “Judeo-Christian culture” is so low that about all it means to them (I surmise) is whiteness.

But that cultural poverty is not their fault alone. And middle- and upper-class liberals would do well in the next four years to engage in full-throttled self-education about “those people,” through direct engagement with them, through education and other forms of social action. (Freire and concienticization and all that.)

We also need to be stone cold sober in face of Bannon’s success in predicting the election outcome. More importantly, his prediction that people of color and women would go for Trump in surprising numbers, must be faced with steely self-analysis. We cannot afford to let the (for us) unimaginability of people Trump has delighted in demeaning nevertheless voting for him leave us prey to confirmation bias regarding analysis of what happened in 2016.

I think this is crucial looking to 2020. If an ambitious infrastructure project goes ahead, and if it produces tangible benefits for poor working people of all races, sexes and genders before its incompatibility with Trump’s other public and personal goals becomes manifest, then 2020 might go his way too.

This does NOT, I think, mean Democrats should be looking to cooperate with Trump on those matters if it means overlooking (i.e. normalizing) his reprehensible overall political strategy.

It means building upon what coalitional identity politics has made possible, not abandoning it, let alone throwing those vulnerable as marked “others” to the baying hounds of postmodern Jim Crow. It means seeing that the interests of different groups don’t only overlap. Overlap is good, and so is diversity. But identity politics in its best sense is predicated on the assertion of common humanity shared among people just as they are: “Although–perhaps even because –we are different from one another, we are like one another.”

As Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized, there is deep common interest that can be inspiringly articulated in economic terms, and in cultural terms. We have a common interest in people being free to be and go their various ways. For that to be possible requires looking out for one another, however different we may be; looking out for one another in basic terms of economic justice as well as personal and cultural respect. Government is not the only and not even always the best instrument to secure these ends. But we can’t achieve them without good government, either. We don’t need to make America great again. We just have to keep trying to make it better.

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Who the hell are Ethel and Julius?

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GA Republican: “They were Lucy’s neighbors, moran!”

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There’s just one hitch: Trump’s new political machine is pocketing most of the dough — and the campaigns of the Georgia senators competing in the Jan. 5 races aren’t getting a cent.

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The Rosenbergs, executed for spying in the 50s.

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Rosenberg.
Russian spies who gave Russia our atomic secrets and were subsequently hanged.

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“Deep common interest”

538 has a great article up today about how Warnock is tapping that “deep common interest” doing an ad with his dog.
I bet Warnock knows a few things about MLK.

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It’s not complicated. Get 29%-30% of the white vote and Dems win GA, plain and simple. You don’t need a focus group.

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I hope Stacey Abrams is on to that.

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Campaign messaging, for Republicans, is the cherry on the sundae. They maintain a perpetual, year-round, off-season branding campaign to the effect that Democrats are wrecking the country and Republicans are the party of jobs and freedom. This structural partisan branding means that any idiot, however corrupt, can become a strong Republican candidate. He or she enters the race with a strong following wind.

Democrats meanwhile spend 3.75 years out of 4 trying bending over backwards not to attack the GOP as such. Trump is bad, certain issues are urgent and need to be fixed–but they don’t have a basic posture that the Republican Party is terrible at governing and that the Democrats–and only Democrats–can be trusted with your prosperity and dignity. This absence of party branding means that even outstanding D candidates, like Ossoff and Warnock, are under enormous pressure to run exceptionally effective campaigns that will compensate for years of under-educating and under-communicating to low-info voters. Even if they win elections, their standing in the eyes of the low-info public is much more precarious than the standing of their GOP counterparts.

Candidate quality and good campaigns are important, of course–but if you have to run a great campaign in order to win, you’re in trouble. Precisely because a blitz of ads over a few weeks cannot reach and persuade voters to trust you, or distrust the other guy, with anything like the same efficacy as a permanent campaign.

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For Democrats to win anywhere, you pretty much have to connect race and class because a) otherwise it leaves the door wide open for those who would divide the electorate on those things and b) core Democrats won’t bother to vote because they won’t see the material payoff when either a) diversity among a group of upper-middle-class people is used as a smokescreen for avoiding talking about class and the lot of working people or b) class is used as a smokescreen for leaving minorities out of the picture. This is something the Democratic Party ever since about 1970 has insistently denied or avoided. It’s time it changed.

Electrocuted.

The hell they were. Texas born and bred.

They message superbly for the mostly homogeneous group they wish to entice.
They make up for any shortfall with cheating, suppression, FOX (etc), Gerrymandering

We–on the other hand–appeal to a vastly more varied electorate, which contains many low-participation younger folks

Hindsight is 20/20…Early in Reagan’s Presidency, a Democratic think-tank should have come up with a messaging which serves to animate those the Democrats wish to attract.

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These days, Texas is the Midwest.

Texas is its own region.