Welcome to our community

Be apart of something great, join today!

2025 & 2026 Elections

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies: 476
  • Views: 17K
  • Politics 
Osborn might lose, sure, but the idea that he’ll be “decimated” everywhere outside Omaha and Lincoln just doesn’t match the data. He polled neck-and-neck with Ricketts statewide earlier this year. That’s not a blue mirage, it’s a sign that with organizing and a working-class message, even deep red states aren’t politically monolithic.

The goal in a state like Nebraska isn’t to win every rural county. It’s to narrow the margins, to lose 65–35 instead of 80–20, while running up the score in the urban centers. That’s how Democrats have won statewide in other red and purple states.

Again: if we treat places like Nebraska as unwinnable, we make it true. But Osborn’s numbers suggest there’s more open ground than people think. That’s exactly why his campaign matters.
1.4M out of 2M people in Nebraska live in the Omaha and Lincoln metro areas. Most of the rest are farms and empty space. There are some wild topographic formations in western Nebraska.

Populist campaigns have a chance, whether Dem, Indy or OG Pub.
 
You are right that I'm not familiar with the body of literature you're talking about. I am always interested to learn new things and will try to explore some of it in the future.

However, I still remain unconvinced by the overall thesis that Republicans do better with these sorts of "local institutions" than Democrats do through some sort of long-term plan to build infrastructure. You say this:

You also say people live increasingly online, but they still vote where they live. They still send their kids to a school board-run school. Their local hospital is still closing. Their water bill still goes up. The right knows this. That’s why they contest library boards and county commissions in places Democrats have long written off. Why don’t we?

And whether you mean to or not, you are attributing the right's success to some sort of intentional ground-up grassroots movement; some sort of grand design to contest local institutions that Democrats ignore. Again, I don't think this is really an accurate depiction of how things have worked. The right doesn't contest "library boards and county commissions, or school boards, or whatever else, to some greater extent than Democrats. Are there areas where no Democrat candidate runs for things like this because they (the local people, not national Dems) see it as a lost cause? Sure. But the inverse is true as well - there are urban neighborhoods where no Republicans contest these sort of local races either. That isn't some major strategic difference between the left and the right. And most people who run for these sorts of organizations are doing so on their own initiative, not because of some carefully and strategically cultivated "pipeline" created by Republicans.

Also, with respect to this:

Reducing this to “church picnics” isn’t serious engagement. Republicans invested in building community-level leadership pipelines. That’s what the Tea Party did. That’s what Moms for Liberty is doing now. That’s what Skocpol calls “organized disinformation,” a fusion of local leadership and national propaganda. Pastors echo Fox News. Gun shop owners hand out GOP flyers. It’s not either-or. It’s synergy. That synergy is missing on the Democratic side.

To be clear, I am not "reducing" anything to "church picnics" - that was a literal example that you gave that I was responding to. You talked about church picnics and rotary clubs as key to Republican relationship-building and coalition-building while accusing Dems of abandoning those things, which again I think is not really accurate. But as to the broader point, I'm not sure groups like Moms for Liberty and the Tea Party really stand for the proposition that local organizing is what's important. I don't see those groups as having bonded and spread via local grassroots, in-person organizing. They spread online and across the country. They are not a "fusion" of local leadership and national propaganda; they are simply showing that networking and relationship-building of that type isn't local anymore. I mean, obviously all of the people in those groups live somewhere, where they are physically present. But I don't think those groups are spreading their membership through, like, Thursday night gatherings at the local bar or country club or community center or whatever. They are doing so virtually and digitally. That's the world we live in now.

You say that I "rarely offer a forward strategy of my own" and it's a fair critique, though from my perspective your strategy of "organize locally and expand that to a national movement that is disconnected from and/or cuts out the current Dem political infrastructure (which you obviously dislike) via unspecified means" is not much more specific or fully formed than anything I've said. It is certainly easier to poke holes in someone else's ideas than to offer some of your own. But as far as a master plan, I certainly would not agree that this is my big-picture position:

local organizing is obsolete, rural outreach is mostly pointless, and we should focus on elite messaging and national vibes. If that’s your theory of change, say so. But don’t pretend it’s neutral

I do believe that trying to build local networks on the ground in rural areas should not be much of a focus at the present; I do believe it is pretty unlikely to bear any identifiable fruit in the short or medium-term, and is a poor investment given that rural areas are the most strongly conservative at the moment and that the rural population is such a small percentage of the population as a whole. I not think that organizing is obsolete, but I do think we need to recognize that today's "local institutions" are largely not going to be nearly as local or in-person as they were in the past. Even if we accept the thesis that you, and apparently some of that literature, has espoused - that the modern Republican media/political machine was built on tireless ground work through civic institutions in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that provided the foundation for what talk radio, Fox News, and then social media did in the last 25-30 years, even as those same civic institutions withered and died - I'm not convinced that the future lies in on-the-ground local organizing, other than maybe in the densest urban areas where population density is highest. (Those sorts of major urban areas are where things like "community mutual aid groups, housing coalitions, canvassing hubs, tenant unions, and labor locals" can possible be effective - not so much in suburban areas.) I think there needs to be more attention to competing with conservatives in digital spaces (podcasting, social media, whatever even newer "New Media" is coming next) with more approachable, less "intellectual-coded" messaging. I think the phrase "we need a liberal Joe Rogan" is overused - I don't think liberals need to be emulating the "political know-nothing, everyone doe their own research" format generally - but it's probably something closer to that than, say, Pod Save America. The left needs to forget about radio and cable news and political debate panels and start realizing that you have to blend politics and culture to get people (especially young people) to pay any attention to it now.

I also do not advocate for anything approaching "elite messaging" but I also think that leftists now leaning into an "anti-elite" formulation that seems to accept Republicans' framing that anyone who is highly educated is an "elite" is deeply problematic. I do not think the left should be steering away from a coalition built around the educated, and further undermining societal trust in supposed "elite" institutions like public health agencies and large public universities. What we need to do is find a way to push back on the narrative that the interests of college-educated people and those of the working class are opposed; indeed many working-class people today are college educated. The left needs to find a way to stand up for education and science and public institutions in a way that doesn't make working-class people or rural Americans feel entirely alienated. Of both sides of the political spectrum start trending towards an anti-intellectual know-nothing strain then we will be well and truly fucked in both the short term and the long term.

We've talked about the policies I think Dems should be advocating for at the state and national level, and I don't feel the need to re-hash most of that.

But I do honestly continue to believe that large-scale change is not going to be possible unless and until there is a true national crisis, and/or Republicans really badly screw everything up the way they did in the 1920s and the early 2000s. That does not mean I am advocating doing nothing until then. What we need to do until then is do our best to compete in the short-term in state and national elections and to advocate for the structural things that can help steer the government backed towards being more representative of the nation as a whole - congressional reform (elimination of the modern filibuster, etc), supreme court expansion, PR and DC statehood, etc - while expressing clear-eyed, principled messaging about why such things are necessary. But we can't do those things without winning the elections that are most immediately in front of us. One of the problems with a view like yours that seems far more focused on the long-term than the short-term is that if you ignore immediate elections in favor of trying to build a base for 30 years from now you give up a lot of erosion that takes decades to recover in the meantime. I fully understand why progressives didn't like Hillary Clinton or what she stood for or how she campaigned in 2016, and I would acknowledge many of those critiques as valid, but losing that presidential election in 2016 was perhaps the most consequential electoral loss in decades because what it meant for the Supreme Court specifically and the federal judiciary more broadly. We would not be sitting here talking about the lawless Supreme Court and the blows it has dealt to the left if we had simply understood how important it was to win the 2016 election, which probably would have smothered MAGA (or at least the Trumpist brand of MAGA) in the cradle. Instead we delivered the Federalist Society - another group with massive influence on our current situation, influence I I notice you don't acknowledge because it doesn't seem to fit in the idea that local organizing is what got Republicans where they are - one free Supreme Court seat that then turned into three, plus a staggering number of federal judgeships.
 
Thanks for clarifying. That’s a helpful window into how you’re defining political action.

I think this helps get to the heart of our disagreement. You’re defining “when it counts” as the moment when a politician has formal, institutional power over a decision. But a lot of voters, and organizers, see a different kind of test: when power isn’t on the line, and someone could stay silent, do they stand up anyway?
That "different kind of test" is exactly the opposite of "when it counts." Those were your words.

It would make you a lot more persuasive if you acknowledged counter-examples, complexity and uncertainty. You pay lip service to that but it doesn't appear to affect your thinking in any way. This is a case in point. Mamdani's support over Gaza is literally the exact opposite of what you say voters really care about. On one hand, they want government to materially improve their lives, per your materialist analysis, and for liberals to deliver on that promise. But now you're saying that they are voting purely symbolically on Gaza. You can't have it both ways.

I'm not interested in hearing more spin or hiding inconsistencies under vague and abstract language. I'm tired of you trying to spin everything that happens into support for your ideas. Maybe that's a good trait to have in politics, but on a message board it's tiring. Or at least it is to me.

I can't remember ever seeing you express sentiments like, "this is hard to explain," or "this issue is complex and I would need to study it more." I mean, you say that you don't claim to have all the answers, but really? I've never seen you say that you would need to study something more, or that you maybe don't know the details about something. You present these arguments as if they are fully formed and complete theories of the world. They are not. You can make it hard to engage. I don't know -- maybe I do something similar from time to time, though I also readily admit when I might not have a complete perspective on something.

To take just one example: I brought up Marcuse a couple of times. You clearly have not read Marcuse. It's OK. But instead of saying that, you just said that Marcuse is out of style (which might be true but is irrelevant to my point). That could be a valid excuse for why you haven't read his work. We have limited time in life. But you presented that as a way of impugning his validity. Oh, people don't read Marcuse any more because we've moved past that. Aside from being false, it's really fucking annoying.
 
And whether you mean to or not, you are attributing the right's success to some sort of intentional ground-up grassroots movement; some sort of grand design to contest local institutions that Democrats ignore. Again, I don't think this is really an accurate depiction of how things have worked. The right doesn't contest "library boards and county commissions, or school boards, or whatever else, to some greater extent than Democrats. Are there areas where no Democrat candidate runs for things like this because they (the local people, not national Dems) see it as a lost cause? Sure. But the inverse is true as well - there are urban neighborhoods where no Republicans contest these sort of local races either. That isn't some major strategic difference between the left and the right. And most people who run for these sorts of organizations are doing so on their own initiative, not because of some carefully and strategically cultivated "pipeline" created by Republicans.
Eh. How do you know that? Skocpol wrote a book describing how the right did all those things more than Dems. I have no idea if it's an accurate depiction, but I'd like to at least read the book (or read enough to evaluate it) before judging. I mean, maybe Dems have ignored local institutions. How would you know one way or the other based on experience?

You know I'm a stickler for people having a basis of knowledge for their claims. I don't think either of us have that basis to support your contentions here.
 
I fully understand why progressives didn't like Hillary Clinton or what she stood for or how she campaigned in 2016, and I would acknowledge many of those critiques as valid, but losing that presidential election in 2016 was perhaps the most consequential electoral loss in decades because what it meant for the Supreme Court specifically and the federal judiciary more broadly.
Again, I think there's an emotional component here that needs to be acknowledged. Quite apart from what Trump's election specifically did to the judiciary as a whole, the 2016 loss was a gut punch for liberals in legal fields. Literally my whole conscious life we've been under the thumb of an increasingly reactionary, unhinged and comically reductive Supreme Court. In 2016, God finally cut us a break. We were going to FINALLY have a majority that could at least staunch the bleeding.

Instead, Scalia's death gave us Trump. The evil within him found a better host and became more powerful -- kind of like that movie with Denzel where he smokes the poison cigarette.

I don't think anyone who is 27 years old can really understand the incredible disappointment and anger over that. For me, teaching at a law school, it was particularly crushing. And if that person isn't going to take seriously our experience here, if he isn't going to address that liberals feel every bit as betrayed by the left as vice versa, then he's not going to be persuasive. He's going to get a lot of pushback -- ironically from the same source he has been lauding. Meeting US where we are requires greater humility than he has shown.

I'm trying to overlook some of that, because he's young and energetic and because I'm tired of internecine warfare. We've got to stop fighting with each other. I say that as someone who has mixed it up with him as much as anyone. I'm trying to do better. But I'm argumentative, always have been, and I'm not likely to change that much at this stage of my life. I play the cards dealt to me as well as I can. . .
 
1.4M out of 2M people in Nebraska live in the Omaha and Lincoln metro areas. Most of the rest are farms and empty space. There are some wild topographic formations in western Nebraska.

Populist campaigns have a chance, whether Dem, Indy or OG Pub.
To be clear, you cant really talk about "metro areas" as it pertains to politics in Nebraska. I said Osborn would dominate Omaha and Lincoln. And I mean literally inside the core of those cities. Even a mile outside of downtown Omaha is a political and cultural polar opposite of the city itself. Hell, 15% of the Omaha Metro population isn't even in Nebraska...its across the river in Council Bluffs. You can stay in a hotel in Council Bluffs and walk across the footbridge to the College World Series. In that 20 minute walk, you've gone from 85% Trump voters to 60% Harris voters. It's that dramatic.

Lincoln is a lot like Chapel hill. Ain't nobody gonna claim that west of Chapel Hill is much influenced by Chapel Hill itself politcally.
 
A bit premature. Adams or Cuomo could still win in November.
I don’t see it. Certainly not Adams. Right now, word on the street is that his best hope is to get Curtis Sliwa (yes, that old dude from the Guardian Angels) to step aside so he can slide into the republican slot on the ballot.

But Sliwa ain’t budging, so Adams and Cuomo are currently calling for the other to “do what’s best for NYC” and drop out. But both their egos are way too massive to ever do that. So they’ll end up splitting votes and Mamdani will win.

Cuomo might pose some challenge otherwise. Mamdani didn’t do well with the black vote, and Cuomo would have better luck with those voters turning out for the general. Plus there are still a lot of more casual (less informed) non-primary type voters who think highly of Cuomo for his covid leadership (nursing home disasters, sexual scandals notwithstanding). So there’s some chance for him. But thankfully I don’t see it.
 
But I also think you’re reacting not just to my tone, but to the fact that this framework is making more sense to a lot of people.
That's always where leftists end up. There's no such thing as disagreement. We know everything; our knowledge is unassailable; and if you don't agree it's because you are sold out to corporate America/ neoliberal/ threatened by a framework that is making more sense. Always how it goes.

My first reaction was GFY but I'll give you a chance to phrase your point in a manner that isn't insulting and invalidating. Let's see if you can do it. I've been trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. I've been defending your ideas where appropriate. If you are going to respond with this bullshit, then I will skip all that. I'm not making you prattle on endlessly about NYC politics, which you know nothing about (and it's not just me saying that -- pretty much every NYCer has either expressed the same or has just avoided). If you think you can lecture us about what happened in a city you don't know, where many posters actually live -- you're not doing the "meet people where they are" thing very well. Seems rather selective.
 
And to sort of touch on what super is saying - I think it's highly likely we're focusing on strategic questions that mostly only matter at the margins, when the real thing that has to happen is that the country has to fall into a crisis under conservative leadership to want to swing things back the other direction. What do, say, Obama 2008 and FDR 1932 have in common, when liberals swept into power on the back of populist messages of "hope and change"? Everything had gone to shit under Republicans. We can talk until we're blue in the face about the right organizing approach or the best way to spend election dollars, but a "blue wave" election like those probably won't happen unless and until the country goes to shit under Republicans again.
I think you are correct and Super thinks such a crisis is coming for the 2026 midterms. By then, some (but not all) of the shit from Trumps BBB will have played out.
 
Did Paine’s posts in this thread disappear? I was coming back to look up some of the books he mentioned but now I don’t see the posts.
 
Did Paine’s posts in this thread disappear? I was coming back to look up some of the books he mentioned but now I don’t see the posts.
The only one you need to know was Theda Skocpol's book on the Tea Party. Pretty sure Tea Party is in the name so you can find it. I think the others were either quite dated or just journal articles.

That was the one that interested you, at least.
 
Generally “left the board” means a poster just stops posting and/or visiting the site. How would one even go about eliminating their username and deleting their posts? And why would one do that?
 
Back
Top