Raphael Warnock knows the way forward

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If there was a "coup" (besides the Putin thumb on the scale) it was the DNC stonewalling Sanders when he had momentum in 2016. He would have crushed Trump.
This is nonsense. I will repeat it until I'm blue in the face. Bernie Sanders was never and will never be the Democratic nominee for President. He's not a Democrat. The Democratic Party would never support a nominee who isn't a Democrat.
 
If you're referring to me, I definitely didn't say that because I would never use that word.

Here's a tip: during the middle of a hotly contested election is not the greatest time to be telling liberals that there is something wrong with the Democratic Party. If you think you're going to get buy-in on "we suck" from people all-in trying to win the election, I mean what are we doing here? A lot of us were out on the campaign trail working with the Democratic Party. There are so many good people making a real difference, so many people who were busting their ass and putting in time and money and blood and tears to get us to victory. Shitting on the Democrats during that campaign is never, ever going to be well received.

Obviously the election put things in a different light. And since everyone else is offering their own election post-mortems, I will offer mine. Of this I am quite confident: moving "left" is a bad strategy that Democrats will not adopt because it is a bad strategy. Moving to Bernie Sanders politics is probably the worst idea possible.

Stick to what has always worked for us. "In order for my children to be OK, I need my neighbors' children to be OK" is a message that is more or less undefeated when we've run with it. We can't always run with it, because it's a campaign message. It's not a governance message. It works best when people are feeling hopeless -- which is to say, when Republicans are in control. But I cannot think of a major campaign that liberals have undertaken with this message that has lost. WJC's campaign embraced some of this.
True, not great timing. But the context around the comment was to address the accusations being made on here at the time. The......."what's wrong with the voters and why won't they vote for Harris" type of comments. About three and half weeks before the elections was when that stuff was running wild on here. Then she started a uptick in the polls and things settled down a bit on that front.
 
If Democrats hated Bernie so much, why was it necessary to sandbag him in 2016 and 2020? Shouldn’t he have lost without that kind of interference if your theory is correct?
And here we go! In my experience, Bernie Sanders supporters always end up in the conspiracy bullshit eventually. Joe Biden won twice the votes as Bernie Sanders during the primary. HRC beat him by about 12 points.
 
I think it was more so about every other candidate dropping out to endorse Biden when it was clear that Sanders had a ton of momentum.

You can look at his numbers with Black voters in 2020. It’s not true that they didn’t like him. Stop lying.

He wasn’t even fully running when a lot of these states had their primaries in 2020. It was during Covid.

Stop gaslighting. You've now completely destroyed your credibility. Everybody here knows how and why Bernie lost. Biden cleaned up with black voters in SC. Only after that did anyone else drop out. Also, why do you think all the other candidates endorsed Biden? Elizabeth Warren endorsed Biden. I mean, what the fuck are you even talking about here?
 
If Democrats hated Bernie so much, why was it necessary to sandbag him in 2016 and 2020? Shouldn’t he have lost without that kind of interference if your theory is correct?

What you’re really saying is: Democratic Party insiders would never support Bernie as the nominee. Him not being a Democrat was a convenient way to dismiss him. Plenty of rank-and-file Democrats, including myself, were more than willing to support him.
Plenty < a majority.
 
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True, not great timing. But the context around the comment was to address the accusations being made on here at the time. The......."what's wrong with the voters and why won't they vote for Harris" type of comments. About three and half weeks before the elections was when that stuff was running wild on here. Then she started a uptick in the polls and things settled down a bit on that front.
All right, fine. In the future, if you're expecting me to crap on my party during the campaign, you're going to be disappointed. Even if what you say is 100% accurate.
 
Do you understand how rich that is coming from you? You’ve started two threads today about what you think the Democratic strategy should be. The first one got no traction so you started a second.

Anyone else saying I had main character syndrome, I’d take a second to analyze it. Coming from you? Jesus Christ.
Main character syndrome is about generalizing from your own experience as if that experience is factually representative of the world. I am not going to argue with you about this. I will let people judge for themselves. But plenty is not a majority. That's a fact, and not just in my own experience.
 
Brother I’m 25. I know what main character syndrome is. Thank you for explaining that to me though. It’s probably about the 80th time you’ve explained something to me that I’m already aware of. It’s just as patronizing the 80th time as it was the 1st.
I take back that allegation because it's not how I want to be communicating. I am just tired of hearing bullshit about how Bernie would have won if only the world wasn't aligned against him. He ran twice. He didn't really come close either time. Young leftists love him. Other people don't. It's a hard lesson to learn that the people who should be liked aren't. This is a perennial problem with youth politics, and I won't except myself from when I was young.


BTW This is a message board, not a private dialogue. I frequently post for the benefit of posters who aren't necessarily participating in the discussion.
 
Getting back to the topic at hand, I think there is something to be said for harnessing Christianity in a certain way. In many ways, Christianity birthed liberalism.

In context of the times, Christianity was the only real going concern. It birthed every idea ,pro and con with few exceptions. Not meaning to take you to task. It's a trigger for me because it's always "true" and always some sort of sop to Christianity.
 
party of individual freedom, including religion.

That's how you can start to win back in even the red states
I disagree. We cannot be THAT party. Freedom of religion to Trump voters means Christian nationalism. It would help us, I think, to quote Bible verses.
 
Clearly I just need to stop mentioning Bernie at all. Something about him makes liberal Democrats foam at the mouth when they would otherwise agree with what I’m saying.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I think there is something to be said for harnessing Christianity in a certain way. In many ways, Christianity birthed liberalism.

The point I was making was that civil rights and economic rights have always been connected at the hip in America. Language of economic rights was a huge part of the civil rights movement in the 60s. These two things are supposed to coexist. I only brought Bernie up because he was an active participant in the civil rights movement and that informs his politics.

MLK was socialist for God’s sake. This stuff has a deep tradition.
1. Bernie makes us foam at the mouth because we perceive him to be one of the causes of the 2016 debacle. I'm not going to argue that point here. I will say that I believe it, and I have good reasons to believe it (whether or not they are empirically accurate), and lots of other liberals who lived through it do too. I mean, you kind of lived through it but not the same way as those of us who have been fighting for a long time.

2. The point I was making is that the Warnock clip above can the fount of all sorts of political programs. It's consistent with Bernie's message. It appeals to black people and likely Latinos. It's consistent with protecting gay rights and women's rights.

We will need to sort out exactly how those programs play together, but I nominate this as our political framework. I need my neighbor's children to be OK in order for my children to be OK.

3. And seriously, folks, we need someone who can get a crowd going like that. I mean, Kamala got plenty of applause this cycle, but there's just something distinctive and effective from voices emanating from the black church. I guess it's been a style refined from the many decades spent learning to offer hope and optimism to a population that has been treated so badly and has every reason to just be pissed off at the world.
 
1. I swear to God, if Dems are still talking about this "we need better messaging" bullshit by next week, I'm going to lose my mind. Here's the problem:

A. Dems have traditionally had three core constituencies: working class whites (especially men), professional women (who care about issues like glass ceilings and reproductive rights more than the working class), and black people. Somewhere along the way, we also picked up gay people.

B. It turns out that the first category hates the people in the other categories. We literally just witnessed that play out over the past year, the past three years, the past ten years. It also turns out that black people don't like professional women all that much, and certainly not gay people. And professional women are not that numerous and some % of them are pro-life voters who are probably unreachable.

C. You cannot win elections consistently when parts of your base hates another part of your base.

There is no amount of messaging that can paper over this basic problem. Thus do we need a plan. And if the plan doesn't take account of this reality and address it head-on, then it is a shit plan that will guarantee future losses.

2. I've been thinking back to the DNC. To me, the most powerful part was the close of Raphael Warnock's speech. Link below for those who don't remember. It still gives me chills.

"In order for my children to be OK, I need all my neighbor's children to be OK" is what liberal politics is all about. That was the tenor of the MLK message. That was Barack Obama's message. And it's a message that everyone can rally around.

3. This is to say that we need more Christianity in Dem politics. The Pubs have given us an opening by embracing a Christianity of hate. And we can take that mantle by expressly embracing our shared religious traditions. That doesn't mean we need to be bigots. Warnock, after all, talked about the children of Gaza and of Israel to be OK in that speech.

What's the most enduring image or memory of Obama's presidency? For me, his singing at the Charleston funeral is high on the list, and I don't think I'm alone in that. Obama was a competent technocrat and a person fully conversant in the Christian tradition.

4. This isn't exactly my wheelhouse, and it's not my intuition either. [Note to people who think I'm arrogant: I'm literally suggesting that Dem politics move away from my areas of expertise, which is to say that I'm suggesting sidelining myself to some degree, so maybe ask yourself what arrogance really means.] I expect pushback. And if you ask me how, I won't be able to tell you because I don't really attend a church.

But if you look at the most resounding victories of liberalism over the years, they were the Civil Rights movement and Obama '08. Those two victories were based on the same principles.



The part that really got everyone going starts at 12:33 or so (or 12:42 if you want to skip the runup).

"You cannot win elections consistently when parts of your base hates another part of your base."

The most hated president in all of our lifetimes, and possibly ever, has not only increased his popular vote every year, but increased his total in every racial demographic except white people. Other Republicans made large gains in POC voters, specifically Ted Cruz.

Maybe Republicans just talk about things that matter to all (most) voters and avoid identity politics that POC generally don't seem to care about.
 
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"You cannot win elections consistently when parts of your base hates another part of your base."

The most hated president in all of our lifetimes, and possibly ever, has not only increased his popular vote every year, but increased his total in every racial demographic except white people. Other Republicans made large gains in POC voters, specifically Ted Cruz.

Maybe Republicans just talk about things that matter to all (most) voters and avoid identity politics that POC generally don't seem to care about.
That's what I think. Democrats got by for a long time on identity politics: let's get the first POC/woman/gay to some major political office, but not worry that a whole lot of people's lives weren't getting a whole lot better. They sold it so well that they managed to convince a great part of our losing coalition that the only reason so and so wasn't elected was because the vast number of Republicans were racist, misogynistic or homophobic.

It's time to reject that strategy and focus on improving people's lives. And it's there for the taking. People see how skewed the income spectrum is. There's a huge desire for unions right now. Folks even recognize that we can give the middle class a tax cut while still asking the extremely rich to pay a whole lot more. Time to make it happen.
 
"You cannot win elections consistently when parts of your base hates another part of your base."

The most hated president in all of our lifetimes, and possibly ever, has not only increased his popular vote every year, but increased his total in every racial demographic except white people. Other Republicans made large gains in POC voters, specifically Ted Cruz.

Maybe Republicans just talk about things that matter to all (most) voters and avoid identity politics that POC generally don't seem to care about.
Sorry I just started laughing uncontrollably at the suggestion that Republicans in general (and Ted Cruz specifically) don't engage in "identity politics."
 
Agree about Sanders messaging.

Just look at this Masterclass of messaging - the perfect political ad: People working, working together, finding motivation, connecting with each other for a united American ideal.

If there was a "coup" (besides the Putin thumb on the scale) it was the DNC stonewalling Sanders when he had momentum in 2016. He would have crushed Trump. I don't agree with a lot of Bernie's policies but McConnell and Bernie would have each had to compromise. It would have been fine. Bernie would have never fired the Pandemic Team in 2018...because there wasn't a pandemic. FAIL


Bernie wasn’t beating Trump. Trump beat Hillary and Kamala by branding them communists, what do you think he would have done to Bernie?
 
Sorry I just started laughing uncontrollably at the suggestion that Republicans in general (and Ted Cruz specifically) don't engage in "identity politics."
I'm sure I'll get a lot of pushback on this opinion, but I think the Republican (aka white guy) identity politics is in response to the identity politics on the left.

Identity politics didn't exist, at least not to any meaningful degree, under GWB. Politics was ideas for groups regardless of skin color. It's developed since then. Most of Trump's schtick is convincing people that he fighting for them against the byproducts of identity politics from the Left.
 
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