Is this why Dem’s Approval Rating Polls are so bad?

[wmheel1287]

I didn't say everything was hunky dory. I said a majority of Americans (R, D and I), with the exception of things related to kids and sports, support trans rights.

And since when does what a majority of Americans feel on a particular issue matter? What matters in our society is what the majority of the controlling party's elected officials feel on an issue....not even their own constituents.

We don't have any semblance of a representative democracy.

 

[ZenMode]

And since when does what a majority of Americans feel on a particular issue matter?

Since they started voting?

What matters in our society is what the majority of the controlling party's elected officials feel on an issue....not even their own constituents.

I agree, which is why were discussing how the Dems messaging, particularly as it relates to trans issues, cost them votes.

We don't have any semblance of a representative democracy.

We do.

 

[4thgenheel]

I didn't say everything was hunky dory. I said a majority of Americans (R, D and I), with the exception of things related to kids and sports, support trans rights.

and once again, your narrative glosses over the fact that the majority of the people in the party with total power at the moment are extreme, unapologetic transphobes.

 

[4thgenheel]

Since they started voting?

I agree, which is why were discussing how the Dems messaging, particularly as it relates to trans issues, cost them votes.

We do.

sure, sure, sure.

Public Opinion on Abortion

While public support for legal abortion has fluctuated some in two decades of polling, it has remained relatively stable over the past five years.

www.pewresearch.org

and lawmakers in ohio just introduced an unbelievably extreme abortion bill with no exceptions for rape or incest that would criminalize abortion for providers and patients and likely outlaw IVF and some forms of contraception despite the fact that their constituents just voted to enshrine abortion access in the state constitution less than 2 years ago.

republicans do whatever the fuck they want, popular public sentiment be damned.

 

[BlueSmoke]

Of course you can’t manufacture charisma, but you can help create the conditions for real leaders to emerge. Obama didn’t come out of nowhere; he rose in a moment when the party still knew how to tell a bigger story. Trump, for all his flaws, came out of a base that felt spoken to and a media ecosystem built to amplify him.

......... And it seems that, too often, the party treats insurgent energy as a problem to be solved rather than energy to be harnessed.

Couldn't agree more with the last sentence.

We will never know on Obama. He also rose when there was a massive economic meltdown. (but I see your point. Dems did at least nominate him)

 

[superrific]

And it seems that, too often, the party treats insurgent energy as a problem to be solved rather than energy to be harnessed.

How do you harness insurgent energy? It's almost by definition impossible, given that it is insurgent. Its whole purpose is to resist harnessing.

We got a taste of insurgent energy after Floyd. What we got was "defund the police." That was a political disaster from leftists who didn't think things through. That's what you get with insurgent energy. I mean, maybe you can harness it and keep people on message and not shooting ourselves in the foot, but I'm skeptical.

A lot of this conversation feels like designing a satellite to communicate with God. We know how to make a satellite! So all we need is that last step. How hard could it be?

And again, I understand that nothing can be done if it's not tried; there is always value in talking about the first-best; this is a message board, not a business pitch for a DNC offshoot group or something similar, etc. It's not a bad conversation to have by any means.

It just seems to me that it should be a both-and here. Criticizing the Dems for not doing this inchoate strategy that has never worked before (even if the previous attempts were diluted), has no clear road map for success, and relies on optimistic assumptions about the nature of cultural warfare seems stupid. Why not let Dems do their thing, and you do your thing, and if the two overlap and are compatible then there's a happy marriage and I will support you for a vice-chair position at the DNC?

 

[wmheel1287]

Since they started voting?

I agree, which is why were discussing how the Dems messaging, particularly as it relates to trans issues, cost them votes.

We do.

Show me where the singular issues are that our current leadership and elected representation represents the feeling of the majority of Americans.

It will be a VERY short list.

 

[Paine]

How do you harness insurgent energy? It's almost by definition impossible, given that it is insurgent. Its whole purpose is to resist harnessing.

We got a taste of insurgent energy after Floyd. What we got was "defund the police." That was a political disaster from leftists who didn't think things through. That's what you get with insurgent energy. I mean, maybe you can harness it and keep people on message and not shooting ourselves in the foot, but I'm skeptical.

A lot of this conversation feels like designing a satellite to communicate with God. We know how to make a satellite! So all we need is that last step. How hard could it be?

And again, I understand that nothing can be done if it's not tried; there is always value in talking about the first-best; this is a message board, not a business pitch for a DNC offshoot group or something similar, etc. It's not a bad conversation to have by any means.

It just seems to me that it should be a both-and here. Criticizing the Dems for not doing this inchoate strategy that has never worked before (even if the previous attempts were diluted), has no clear road map for success, and relies on optimistic assumptions about the nature of cultural warfare seems stupid. Why not let Dems do their thing, and you do your thing, and if the two overlap and are compatible then there's a happy marriage and I will support you for a vice-chair position at the DNC?

You’re interpreting “insurgent energy” in the narrowest, most chaotic sense, but that misses the point. I’m not talking about spontaneous unrest with no direction. I mean the kind of bottom-up momentum that has historically fueled real change: labor in the 1930s, civil rights in the 1960s, even the Sanders campaign more recently. That energy wasn’t inherently destructive, it just didn’t come from consultants or think tanks.

The point isn’t that insurgent energy is easy to manage. It isn’t. But parties can either engage with it or watch it go elsewhere. Often what gets labeled “insurgent” is just the voice of people shut out of institutional politics for too long. When Democrats treat that energy as a threat rather than a resource, they lose touch with the very people they claim to represent.

You brought up “Defund the Police” as a cautionary tale, but I think it proves my point. The George Floyd protests were a moment of raw mass energy—millions demanding justice in the middle of a pandemic. But unlike past movements, the left lacked strong labor unions, churches, or membership organizations with the infrastructure to guide and channel that momentum. There was no pipeline from outrage to program. That’s why “Defund” filled the vacuum. It wasn’t the product of a coordinated strategy; it was the absence of one.

The lesson isn’t “don’t trust insurgent energy.” It’s that the left needs to rebuild the institutions that can shape it by turning passion into program and protest into power.

This isn’t utopian. It’s historical. Real gains, from Social Security to civil rights, came when popular pressure and institutional capacity aligned, not when parties tried to manage everything from the top down. You say Democrats should “do their thing,” but if that thing keeps failing to inspire or mobilize working people, then it’s time to question it.

You asked, “Why not let Dems do their thing, and you do your thing?” But that assumes our projects don’t fundamentally conflict. If “doing their thing” means clinging to a strategy that keeps bleeding working-class support and ceding terrain to the right, then no, we can’t just coexist and hope for a happy overlap. This isn’t a startup pitch to the DNC. It’s a fight over direction: whether the party orients toward mass politics or retreats into technocracy, donor appeasement, and symbolic rebranding. That’s not a difference in tone. That’s a difference in what politics is for.

This is about power, not purity. Durable, majoritarian, working-class power. And you don’t build that by sanding down every demand. You build it by meeting people where they are, telling a story they believe in, and treating their energy not as a threat, but as the starting point.

 

[heelinhell]

The Indy could have endorsed you in the Democratic Primary and you still would have been crushed.

You were running against a long-term incumbent who RARELY faced primary opposition and when he did, he won 80-90% of the vote. In the General Elections, he routinely won 60%+.

David Price had voted against invading Iraq in 2002. He wasn’t vulnerable from the left on that front.

Dubya was POTUS; and, would be until 1/20/2009. Your three primary issues were not going to be acted upon - the GOP controlled the House and had roughly a 55-45 majority in the Senate from 2005-2007. After the 2006 elections, the Democrats held a small majority with 233 House seats and 49-to-49 Senate seats with two Independents (both caucused with the Democrats; but, one was Joe Lieberman). The 60 vote filibuster in the Senate prevailed. Your legislation wasn’t passing the Congress onto the Oval Office desk - where it would be vetoed by Dubya.

A GOP President was in the White House. Your agenda was going nowhere.

You were running against a Democratic incumbent with 20 years of name recognition.

The media wasn’t lazy in not covering you. They’d rightly assessed your candidacy and decided, “He doesn’t stand a chance.”

If we’d have had public funding of elections divided equally among all the candidates, you’d have been crushed by name recognition.

Ask Brad Miller about his 1988 run for NC Secretary of State against Rufus Edmisten (and few liked Rufus).

love you like a brother, zoo, but you continue to miss the point of my campaign. It was not to unseat David Price; it was to get David off the back bench and step forward to cosign and advocate for the Conyers resolution to consider impeaching GWB.

 

[Zoo_View]

love you like a brother, zoo, but you continue to miss the point of my campaign. It was not to unseat David Price; it was to get David off the back bench and step forward to cosign and advocate for the Conyers resolution to consider impeaching GWB.

I respect you for running. That takes a lot of guts.

Dubya was not getting impeached. There wasn’t a groundswell of support for impeaching Dubya.

 

[superrific]

Fair enough about insurgent energy. I think you probably should find a different word than insurgent, because I think my initial interpretation accords with the general understanding of that term -- but that's a nit and it's not important here.

If you are structuring your project to conflict with the DNC you are going to get crushed. You know that. So it's both-and, or just them.

You should take my discomfort with your ideas -- not just mine, but all the discomfort expressed here -- as representative of what you will face everywhere. Your historical precedents are not convincing because they aren't apt. Your plans are hand-waving at best. You make a lot of assumptions with little evidence. Fine -- it's a message board. We're all spitballing ideas. I don't think anyone here is against you per se. We are skeptical. You've made a case for the plausibility of this strategy, but not its truth or workability.

Meanwhile: you really need to drop all references to Marx or anything Marxish. Material analysis? Rubbish that phrase and find something that won't turn off half the population before you even say hello. Given what you're trying to do, your rhetoric should remind of Woody Guthrie, not SDS. Remember always how Bernie nuked himself when talking about Castro back during the 2020 primaries. In politics, Castro = all bad. It doesn't matter if that's the whole truth. It's true enough and vitally important.

Also: never mention Northern Europe. That's another way Bernie and DSAs gets in trouble. You're talking about an old fashioned American populist campaign. Not exactly 1896 or 1930-31 or 1964, but those are your family members. Use that language, like MLK did. Saying, "the Danes do this and look, they are happy" has been a line of thinking with a long track record of failure. Ideally, the world wouldn't be like that, but it is. Remember what kills fascists: guitars, not Legos.

 

[Paine]

Fair enough about insurgent energy. I think you probably should find a different word than insurgent, because I think my initial interpretation accords with the general understanding of that term -- but that's a nit and it's not important here.

If you are structuring your project to conflict with the DNC you are going to get crushed. You know that. So it's both-and, or just them.

You should take my discomfort with your ideas -- not just mine, but all the discomfort expressed here -- as representative of what you will face everywhere. Your historical precedents are not convincing because they aren't apt. Your plans are hand-waving at best. You make a lot of assumptions with little evidence. Fine -- it's a message board. We're all spitballing ideas. I don't think anyone here is against you per se. We are skeptical. You've made a case for the plausibility of this strategy, but not its truth or workability.

Meanwhile: you really need to drop all references to Marx or anything Marxish. Material analysis? Rubbish that phrase and find something that won't turn off half the population before you even say hello. Given what you're trying to do, your rhetoric should remind of Woody Guthrie, not SDS. Remember always how Bernie nuked himself when talking about Castro back during the 2020 primaries. In politics, Castro = all bad. It doesn't matter if that's the whole truth. It's true enough and vitally important.

Also: never mention Northern Europe. That's another way Bernie and DSAs gets in trouble. You're talking about an old fashioned American populist campaign. Not exactly 1896 or 1930-31 or 1964, but those are your family members. Use that language, like MLK did. Saying, "the Danes do this and look, they are happy" has been a line of thinking with a long track record of failure. Ideally, the world wouldn't be like that, but it is. Remember what kills fascists: guitars, not Legos.

Appreciate the good faith engagement. On the historical precedents, I’m not arguing for nostalgia or simple replication. I’m pointing to how real shifts happened when institutional politics intersected with organized pressure from below. That’s not a romantic theory, it’s our political history.

I’m not interested in framing this as “conflict for conflict’s sake.” The goal is majoritarian politics that speaks to people’s conditions and gives them a reason to believe again. If party leaders embrace that, great. If they resist it, history shows that’s not the end of the story.

I actually think the Democratic Party is one of the last viable vehicles for rebuilding mass politics in this country. Nearly every other civic or labor institution has been fully hollowed out. That’s why the stakes feel so high. If we don’t reclaim and repurpose what remains, the alternative isn’t simply technocratic drift anymore. It’s continued retreat in the face of the far-right or worse.

 

[superrific]

Appreciate the good faith engagement. On the historical precedents, I’m not arguing for nostalgia or simple replication. I’m pointing to how real shifts happened when institutional politics intersected with organized pressure from below. That’s not a romantic theory, it’s our political history.

I’m not interested in framing this as “conflict for conflict’s sake.” The goal is majoritarian politics that speaks to people’s conditions and gives them a reason to believe again. If party leaders embrace that, great. If they resist it, history shows that’s not the end of the story.

I actually think the Democratic Party is one of the last viable vehicles for rebuilding mass politics in this country. Nearly every other civic or labor institution has been fully hollowed out. That’s why the stakes feel so high. If we don’t reclaim and repurpose what remains, the alternative isn’t simply technocratic drift anymore. It’s continued retreat in the face of the far-right or worse.

It's also possible that Trump engenders a revolt among the tired MAGA -- the ones who have been along for the ride, without a lot of excitement (think, perhaps, Heelyeah or even heel79) -- by a) not doing the popular things he promised; and b) doing the unpopular stuff that people didn't hear or take seriously.

The truth is that the Supreme Court isn't going to let us doing anything really good. Those JINOs (Judges in Name Only) have to be defanged first. So the first order of business in 2029 assuming we have majorities is to get rid of the filibuster and then do serious court reform. Forget expanding the Supreme Court. We can just cut it out of the process. We will need to, especially if Trump gets to appoint a new voice.

 

[ZenMode]

Show me where the singular issues are that our current leadership and elected representation represents the feeling of the majority of Americans.

It will be a VERY short list.

Not necessarily a singular issue, but voters perception is that Democrats are more focused on social issues than issues that most americans actually care about - like economic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/us/democrats-ipsos-poll-abortion-lgbt.html

 

[wmheel1287]

Not necessarily a singular issue, but voters perception is that Democrats are more focused on social issues than issues that most americans actually care about - like economic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/us/democrats-ipsos-poll-abortion-lgbt.html

That's not remotely close to a rebuttal of what I said. You are the one posting polling on singular issues as wome sort of evidence that legislators won't pursue the opposite. I said that polling on individual issues rarely reflects what legislators do.

 

[ZenMode]

That's not remotely close to a rebuttal of what I said. You are the one posting polling on singular issues as wome sort of evidence that legislators won't pursue the opposite. I said that polling on individual issues rarely reflects what legislators do.

I can't really speak for all legislators or your concern about legislators. I can only tell you what appears to be the reason that Democratic legislators aren't in a position to have more say on legislation.

 

[SnoopRob]

Remember what kills fascists: guitars, not Legos.

I'm pretty sure I could figure out how to kill a fascist with Legos.

 

[SnoopRob]

You’re not wrong that corporations spoke up because they feared profit loss, but you’re missing what made those losses a threat in the first place. Businesses didn’t spontaneously act out of principle. They reacted to pressure from boycotts, from public ridicule, from cultural backlash. And that pressure came from a terrain that had already shifted. HB2 became politically toxic and economically risky because people made it look absurd, cruel, and backwards. That wasn’t some decision made in a vacuum. It was emotional politics doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: reframe the stakes and force the other side to respond. McCrory couldn’t respond and lost.

When a bland, uncharismatic moderate can beat an incumbent Republican in a Trump state, something shifted. Not because voters fell in love with the Democratic Party, but because the GOP overreached and got publicly tagged as cruel, weird, and reckless. That’s not nothing. That’s how narrative defeats happen.

I mean, watch Coop’s opening statement in this debate, along with the first question:

Cooper was a bland, uncharismatic moderate who beat another bland, uncharismatic moderate who was unpopular with his own party by a tiny, tiny margin for numerous reasons. He also benefited from a shift in the opposition party that drove moderates to him and away from his opponent based on national politics (the emergence of Trump). Cooper is the pretty much the poster child for electoral turnout that drives a small victory but leaves the winner without any kind of mandate to govern beyond basic governing.

HB2 was a small retreat in one state in which the greater movement (transgender opposition) has continued to progress toward success for those behind it.

I think you make way, way too much of both Cooper's victory and the repeal of HB2 if your goal is to create a better society, as both were limited victories in the face of many other defeats in similar situations.

 

[Mulberry Heel]

One curious fact about NC politics is that we have a long tradition of electing moderate/centrist Dem governors while increasingly voting Republican (aided by gerrymandering in legislative and House races) for just about everything else, except the State Attorney General's office. In fact, McCrory's single term as governor (2013 to 2017) was the only GOP interruption in a series of Democratic governors dating back to 1992. Hunt served a second series of two terms in the 90s, Mike Easley served from 2001 to 2009, Bev Perdue from 2009 to 2013, Cooper his two terms (although as Snoop pointed out, he barely won in 2016 by just 0.2%), and now Stein. This pattern hasn't been replicated in other Southern states, so we're rather unique in that regard.

 

[Centerpiece]

One curious fact about NC politics is that we have a long tradition of electing moderate/centrist Dem governors while increasingly voting Republican (aided by gerrymandering in legislative and House races) for just about everything else, except the State Attorney General's office. In fact, McCrory's single term as governor (2013 to 2017) was the only GOP interruption in a series of Democratic governors dating back to 1992. Hunt served a second series of two terms in the 90s, Mike Easley served from 2001 to 2009, Bev Perdue from 2009 to 2013, Cooper his two terms (although as Snoop pointed out, he barely won in 2016 by just 0.2%), and now Stein. This pattern hasn't been replicated in other Southern states, so we're rather unique in that regard.

This is why I contend NC is a very purple State. Somehow we keep voting for Trump (3x in a row) but yet vote Dem Guvs. Of course the Pubs helped Stein this last go around by nominating the worst candidate in history for the office…

NC has some great cities and Metro areas from the Mountains to the Sea and every area in between, all surrounded by rebel flags in a sea of red.

Of course Kentucky is as red as you can get and keeps electing Beshears…