Has right wing media pushed conservatives further right

Looks like our board Republicans are going to continue to have TDS (Transgender Derangement Syndrome) even after winning this election, huh? :LOL:

The Democrats should never mention the word “transgender” ever again under any circumstance. Not because it’s not a good idea to try to support and protect the marginalized (and the population group with the highest propensity for suicide), but because Republicans literally won this election by running a bunch of “Kamala Harris is for they/them and wants all conservatives to personally pay for transgender surgeries on illegal immigrants and moldy tangerines in prison.” Can’t help the marginalized if you can’t win elections.
 
superrific said:
I'm not arguing against any and all flagellation, LOL.

I don't know what Bill told the Harris campaign. It's possible that two things are correct: a) Bill was right that we needed to address it and b) there was no really good way to address it. I think he's right on the strategy here for sure. The tactics maybe were out of his control a bit.

I also don't buy that there's nothing that can be done. I just know that I don't have any good answers right now, and that the things I'm reading don't sound convincing to me either. I suspect the answer is that we are going to have to campaign more on hate than we do now. In 2008, Obama won on uniting the country. That day has passed. The reason that liberalism is retreating and authoritarianism is rising is largely because the authoritarians sell hate and hate sells better than love.
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Well, in your post you wrote "Why do we flagellate ourselves like this? If we must, can we just use a single-lash whip and not a cat o' nine tails?" It certainly didn't sound like you were supporting any flagellation or criticism of the party and its tactics. Just suffice it to say that I think addressing the transgender commercial directly would have been a better idea than completely ignoring it. As we will never know whether that would have worked given that it wasn't tried, I have no interest in continuing what is a relatively minor disagreement.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
We just lost an election in which we lost more Senate seats than was expected and even lost the national popular vote, which almost no one anticipated. To be perfectly blunt, maybe some flagellation is both necessary and justified. Clearly the tactics Democrats followed didn't work, and I don't buy that there is nothing that can be done to address these issues. You praised Bill Clinton in another post on this thread and he apparently told the Harris campaign that they needed to address that transgender commercial directly and rebut it. I happen to think he was right and knew what he was talking about.
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Also, the Senate performance appears not as bad as it did a few days ago. Unless something strange happens in AZ, we will have lost only one seat we expected to win -- Casey (and that contest isn't actually over yet). We should have won several of those races by more, so your point isn't wrong. I'm just saying it wasn't as bad as it looked.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
Well, in your post you wrote "Why do we flagellate ourselves like this? If we must, can we just use a single-lash whip and not a cat o' nine tails?" It certainly didn't sound like you were supporting any flagellation or criticism of the party and its tactics. Just suffice it to say that I think addressing the transgender commercial directly would have been a better idea than completely ignoring it. As we will never know whether that would have worked given that it wasn't tried, I have no interest in continuing what is a relatively minor disagreement.
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I don't know if the single-lash whip is the right terminology. Not an expert on whips or flagellation, lol. What I meant was, can we castigate ourselves one direction at a time? And it wasn't a serious request so much as an expression of frustration. I'm hearing equal parts (and not just on this board): Dems are out of touch because they don't understand women; they are out of touch because they don't understand culture; they are out of touch because they don't offer any economic policies to the working class (as if policy decided this election, LOL). It's suffocating. I don't think that all Dems are inveterate idiots who can't ever do anything right. And that's not aimed at you specifically, of course.

I don't even think we are disagreeing on that point. I was merely offering something of a sympathetic counterweight.
 
CFordUNC said:
Looks like our board Republicans are going to continue to have TDS (Transgender Derangement Syndrome) even after winning this election, huh? :LOL:

The Democrats should never mention the word “transgender” ever again under any circumstance. Not because it’s not a good idea to try to support and protect the marginalized (and the population group with the highest propensity for suicide), but because Republicans literally won this election by running a bunch of “Kamala Harris is for they/them and wants all conservatives to personally pay for transgender surgeries on illegal immigrants and moldy tangerines in prison.” Can’t help the marginalized if you can’t win elections.
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We also need to never put forth actual policy proposals. Those are for suckers. Those require us to make choices instead of promising everything to everyone by magic.

Plans are so 2008. Concepts of a plan are where it's at.
 
Lando said:
I remember when Democrats should have abandoned abortion access because as soon as Roe vs Wade was gone all the social conservatives would no longer have anything to motivate them.

Inching rightward to court Republicans has not been effective since 1996 and it comes with risk.
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I think that’s a totally fair and valid point but I think that it’s a little different with the transgender stuff, because even Republicans recognize (and oftentimes have) the need for abortion access, whereas they don’t believe that transgender individuals are really even worthy of basic human rights.
 
CFordUNC said:
I think that’s a totally fair and valid point but I think that it’s a little different with the transgender stuff, because even Republicans recognize (and oftentimes have) the need for abortion access, whereas they don’t believe that transgender individuals are really even worthy of basic human rights.
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I do worry that when/if the Trump administration goes after transgenders - and I think they will in a big way, given that they see it as a winning issue and that nearly all Trumpers regard them with disgust, fear, and loathing - that Democrats will not defend them out of fear of losing more support, especially given the apparent effectiveness of GOP attacks on Democrats on this issue. As I've already posted on some other threads, if I were a transgender person I'd be terrified right now given what is likely coming down the pike in a few months.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
I do worry that when/if the Trump administration goes after transgenders - and I think they will in a big way, given that they see it as a winning issue and that nearly all Trumpers regard them with disgust, fear, and loathing - that Democrats will not defend them out of fear of losing more support, especially given the apparent effectiveness of GOP attacks on Democrats on this issue. As I've already posted on some other threads, if I were a transgender person I'd be terrified right now given what is likely coming down the pike in a few months.
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Yeah. I reckon as long as they don’t try to play sports, maybe they’ll be alright.
 
Lando said:
Losing on gay marriage still stings for social conservatives. They will never stop on transgender people. They will never be safe from Republicans.
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Agree. When your information ecosystem is built on grievance, it’s hard for the hate to fade.
 
My thing about transgender people is that above all else I believe they deserve the exact same human rights as every single other person. I don’t believe that those rights necessarily extend to something like, say, sports participation, but I’m also not obsessive about it. I trust that individual sports leagues and sport governing bodies, rather than the federal government, should make their own determinations. Otherwise, I think that transgender people should be treated with the same considerations as anyone else. My general point on this thread is just that I think it’s very, very clearly a losing political argument for Democrats, and therefore it’s worth abandoning out of necessity- as I said, you can’t govern if you can’t win elections.
 
superrific said:
1. You're right, we will know more after people who know how to get good data and make sense of it weigh in. That's none of us here.
2. I'm not sure why Trump not campaigning on the economy doesn't tell us much. Here's what I see:

A. Trump runs virulently racist campaign for president in 2016. Wins. People look at the data. It was actually about race, and not about "economic anxiety."
B. Trump runs less virulently racist campaign in 2020. That's because most of the racism was aimed at China and Americans just don't respond to that distant racism nearly as much. Loses, although for a number of different reasons.
C. Trump runs the most vitriolic, racist campaign for president we've ever seen. Spends almost all of his time with incredibly nasty, mean-spirited and outright racist lies that would make Bull Connor blush. Wins, by a bigger margin than 2016.

So I predict that the data is going to show something similar to A in situation C. I don't know it for sure, obviously, but I'll bet that's what we find.

3. I can't comment on your point about Covid shutdowns. nycfan made a similar point some time ago. It's an interesting thought. I'm ill-equipped to evaluate it.
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If 45% vote on policy, 40% vote on race/fear, and 15% vote on economic anxiety, what issue decided the race?

What if the 45 and 40 were going to vote democrat and republican no matter what? In that case, the small percentage of 15% economic anxiety is what decided the race. That is really my point. I am sure in raw numbers, the issues you cite were more important to diehard Trump voters. But I think for the true swing voter -- think working class Latino -- economic anxiety was the real motivating factor.

Again, despite the talk of blowouts, this race was decided by roughly 1% of the voting population in three states voting for Trump rather than Kamala. If those 300k people pull a different lever, the result is totally different. And I just don't think Trump's campaign themes moved the needle that much with that demographic. I think 2022 inflation was far more influential.
 
Lando said:
Losing on gay marriage still stings for social conservatives. They will never stop on transgender people. They will never be safe from Republicans.
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Honestly, I'm not so sure that they've given up on going after gays and lesbians. I think the great majority of conservatives have never accepted gay marriage and they may try to use attacks on transgenders as a wedge issue to go after the entire LGBTQ community. People who say that gay marriage rights are safe are being way too complacent, imo. The Supreme Court could always overturn it under the guise of "restoring" such rights to the states, just as they did with Roe.
 
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