General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How the extreme left gave us Nixon, Bush and now Trump [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)As the late Bill Paxton would say, it's "Game over, man! game over!"
In your posts on this board, you talk about issues as much as anyone else. Issues, particularly anti-personal oppression issues are what drive your political involvement, and I admire the passion you bring to those issues-issues I'm in 100% agreement with you on.
What is this party for without issues?
What is politics about without issues?
We can't increase turnout without talking about issues.
We can't change any voters' minds without issues.
Personal qualifications don't seem to matter to voters. In every election we've lost since 1964, our nominee was always more qualified than his or her Republican opponent.
"Ground game" doesn't work without issues.
How do you get voters to the polls with an issue-free campaign?
Even re-enfranchising voters doesn't make any difference if issues aren't in some way centered.
The voters whose votes were suppressed want to hear what the candidates will do that makes some difference to them.
The Trumputsch did not occur because voters didn't care about healthcare, or because issues don't matter...it's because Trump is an effective demagogue who sold a fantasy vision to just enough voters in just enough states to scam his way in(and did so, in part by running on a set of specific policies and promises...horrible policies and promises, but specific-AND because of what Comey and the Russians did-AND because the Democratic strategy, the strategy we've used in every losing presidential election since 1976, of basing the fall campaign primarily on warnings about the vileness of our opponent, rather than emphasizing what our party was FOR and asking people to vote FOR our party rather than just against the other party-in other words a total rejection of the strategy that elected Barack Obama twice with majority popular vote support-didn't work.
We can't depend on personality, either.
Our nominee is a far more balanced and decent person than the guy who held the office.
We need to re-enfranchise the voters who were suppressed, but just doing that, important as it is, won't turn what happened in November into victory in '18 and '20.
If we didn't win doing what we did this year, doing the same thing the same way means we'd never win again.
It's obviously impossible to go from Electoral College defeat to Electoral college victory(let alone getting out of long-term decline on every other level of electoral support