politics

Predicting what is going to happen in the future is harder than finding out what happened in the past. Especially when you're asking people what they are going to do vs what they did. Honest people can change their minds.

Just make voting mandatory and give people time off to vote. Read about Australia's voting system. It's really awesome and I wish we could have something like that here.

I think it was a no show problem because we had practically the same decreased turnout in 2012 compared to 2008 without pandemic voting weirdness to explain it, but either way 100% vote by mail is an excellent idea (both the underlying policy and campaigning on "let's make interacting with your government less of a pain in the ass" type ideas)

Wanting Obamacare repealed isn’t “Democrat” unless you want it replaced with Medicare for all. Go vote Republican if you want to strip everyone of their healthcare.

Yeah, this was an odd write-up. I found this section particularly baffling.

It’s true that Democrats need to energize their base voters, but our analysis suggests that they’re unlikely to do so successfully through a strategy of blanket progressive appeals to an ideologically diverse base. Instead, Democrats need to persuade nonvoters with a clear and credible message about how the party plans to improve the economic lives of working people.

Now, credible eliminates the means-tested-to-death programs the Dems love so much, right out of the gate. This, much as the author seems loath to say it, leaves you with progressive ideas, or Republican/conservative ideas. Presumably, folks who cared enough to register as Democrats don't like the conservative ideas, so we can fairly safely discard them as a winning move to get those voters out. Raising the minimum wage, universal healthcare, building more housing and/or implementing schemes to help people afford current housing, expanding benefits like WIC and EBT, free and universal university education, or taxing the rich and corporations to fund these sorts of programs are all clear, credible and progressive stances that would help working people.

It doesn't get much more simple than, "I make minimum wage. They say they will make minimum wage a bigger number, so I will get more money." or "My check would be bigger if I didn't have to pay insurance premiums, and I could spend it on other stuff if my insurance actually reliably covered most medical expenses without me having to cough up $2500-$6000 a year out of pocket first."

I'd also like to send out a special "Fuck you" to everyone who signed off on changing the position representing nonvoting Democrats and those who voted, depending on whether the nonvoters were more or less likely to respond in a certain way compared to those who voted in this section.

The second thing to notice about the demographics of Democratic nonvoters: They were overwhelmingly working class and relatively economically precarious. Democratic nonvoters were nearly twice as likely (60 percent vs. 32 percent) to have a household income of less than $50,000 per year, they were nearly three times less likely to hold a four-year college degree (47 percent vs. 17 percent), twice as likely to be gig workers (31 percent vs. 15 percent), and only half as likely to be union members (27 percent vs. 14 percent). Further, nonvoting Democrats were more than twice as likely as voting Democrats to report feeling the economy is worse now than a year ago (46 percent vs. 22 percent) or that their incomes had recently decreased. And, perhaps not surprisingly given their economic precarity, Democratic nonvoters were substantially more likely than voters to support increased state welfare spending (61 percent vs. 52 percent).

Perhaps it's just the $150M spent on The Abundance agenda working their magic, producing articles that support centrist neoliberalism.

It’s true, not just for the U.S. either. And the biggest topics are always economy and immigration. At the end of the day, people will vote for what’s perceived as safety and security, a return to “the old times when things were better.” They will sacrifice freedoms for it. That trade is of course, a lie. And that’s how fascists get voted in, by preying on that fear.

They surveyed people who self-identify as democrats, and I feel like an increasing number of people who identify as leftist or progressive do not, or have stopped, thinking of themselves as democrats. So, to me, the question is whether these conservative, non-voting democrats outnumber the thoroughly disillusioned, non-voting progressive independents.

Note that they're less progressive, not not progressive. The data tells a different story than the headline.

You can find the data here. Took a quick glance at the data and didn’t find anything particularly loaded and didn’t see any direct mentions of Gaza but I could have missed something.

"Because people are, by and large, spectacularly awful" is a terrible message for getting people to vote for you, and you can tell a lot of actually awful people in the Democratic party believe it based on the stupid shit they campaign on (for example - nobody is going to buy it when you say you want a lethal military, your party likes treaties and peace and UN hearings, you're just pretending to be a Republican because you think we're all stupid).

Maybe if we run on what we actually believe and stopped trying to bullshit people they'd stop being so spectacularly cynical about their country.

I don't think it used to be that way, but it has always struggled with class disparity to different degrees. When the financial security and physical health of people are compromised, they're less likely to be progressive.

It's like how you wouldn't stamp out a fire in your own house because you're upset of how your neighbour treats his kids. Then complain that you have no home now and blame it on the fire. Jfc.

Idiocy caused the "no show" problem. If you couldn't see that the Biden and Harris campaign were creating the exact conditions to make this happen by fighting with their own supporters over Israel (who turned out to vote against Trump anyway but made the Democratic party look like the chaotic shitshow it is with their protests) and telling everyone else that the economy was great actually and they were just too stupid to see that, you're a fool (who was probably being paid six figures for campaign consulting).