General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Keith Ellison: [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)It goes without saying Keith would have placed the exact same emphasis on the issue, and I don't need to remind you of why.
And those who preferred Keith(not all of whom were Sanders supporters...Chuck Schumer endorsed the guy early and backed him 'til the end) were not opposed to Tom because of his voter disenfranchisement position. It was other issues.
Voter disenfranchisement was going to be top of the list no matter who won the chairmanship. There's no disagreement and no debate on that.
But just re-enfranchising voters is not enough.
We can't ever run the exact same campaign we ran in 2016 again.
We can't win by saying "vote to go back to the years between 2008 and 2016"/
We need to make sure to offer a program that speaks to people's needs enough to get them to go to the polls.
And when the party campaigns, it needs to focus the campaign ON that program. Ads aren't the only part of a campaign, but they are a major part of it. And our ads this fall were a disaster and a disservice to the Clinton-Kaine ticket.
Why did the ads and the speeches keep focusing on calling out Trump on sexism and general jerkitude(which he did deserve to be called out on, obvlously) when the polling the campaign had showed that that emphasis wasn't gaining us votes and when voters kept saying that they didn't CARE about Trump's personal sleaziness? The party's proposals were all popular, and all I'm saying is that if the campaign had focused mainly on making a positive case for our ticket and our ideas, that would have made the difference. It's what I've said for years: We need to campaign FOR(as President Obama did)rather than just against. And like him, we need to ask people for their votes, not just demand them.
I'll deal with your other points here:
TPP was the subject of organizing efforts across the country. The AFL-CIO prioritized killing the deal. We should have run ads in heavy rotation in the Upper Midwest emphasizing that, if elected, we would stop that deal and that we'd offer a new strategy to revive the Rust Belt.
Trump hit the trade issue over and over and over again. If he didn't say TPP(he did publicly vow to kill it, for the record) in every speech, it was obviously what the he meant.
That agreement was thrown in my face over and over and over again in the conversations, in person and online, that I had, in "the real world".
Even if you don't believe TPP itself was widely known, the damage done by NAFTA and GATT before it, damage disproportionately affecting working people and the poor of all races and in much of the world, is common knowledge and is burned into the memory of working-class communities of all colors everywhere, and you could walk into any union hall or any working-class bar and hear people talking about it.
Standing Rock was a huge issue with activists all over the country. Working against that was just as important to antiracist work(the pipeline is an attack on the physical survival of one of the most vulnerable groups of indigenous people in the country. People were freezing in the North Dakota fall and winter over that. You couldn't run ads on that IN the Upper Midwest...you'd target them to college towns where we needed to get volunteers and break down the Stein vote(we could have held her to half of what she took, and that, by itself, would have flipped Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania(look at the returns and you'll see what I'm saying).
Even without formally saying "we stand with Standing Rock", we could have done something to reach out to that struggle...we could have sent warm clothing or tents out to them(in the spirit of President Kennedy sending out hot coffee to antinuclear demonstrators outside the White House during his administration). Things like that do a lot to open people to us. as a party.
And I'm not going to post again for the rest of the day, please know this about me:
Nothing I post is part of a "strategy" or of some sort of plot to make Bernie into a global emperor or anything. This is just what I stand for on my own. And I do it all to help us, in some small way, to get to a better place. If you don't agree with me...fine. But could you please stop acting like I can't be trusted or as if I have a hidden agenda? I don't. What you see is all there is.