The Democratic Party needs some victories
South facade of the White House, Washington DC. The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the President of the United States.
March 20, 2023
I was chatting with some Democratic acquaintances recently and got mostly excuses why the party has been losing so many elections.
They say things like, “Well, gerrymandering makes it impossible for Democrats to win.” Or “We’re outspent by rich donors.” Or “Young people are not interested in politics.” And “I’m very busy.”
All true.
But instead of excuses, Democrats need to find innovative ways to overcome these disadvantages in Florida, Iowa and wherever the party has been crushed in the last elections. A two-party system like the United States needs, well, two successful parties offering different solutions to the serious challenges we face.
My Democratic friends get very busy with all their other volunteer work (garden club, SPCA, signing petitions, protesting things, the Art society, etc), jobs, church, family and travel. These are all very worthy. As a result, Democratic Party work is just a small piece of their very active lives.
Democrats need to implement the Four Imperatives for Victory. What are these four?
- Hire lots of full-time professionals! Working on, organizing and building a bench of great candidates and creating really exciting, creative, appealing voter recruitment and registration. Part-time volunteers will never compete with the Republicans.
- Remind themselves that winning elections is THE most important goal of politics. To that end, they need to limit the party agenda and messaging to topics that appeal to enough voters so Democrats can win elections. Don’t write off voters that you think you don’t need such as rural and small-town folks, which is where Democrats are doing poorly (according to a recent poll, 65% of rural voters view the Democratic Party negatively.)*
- Dems need to get over their insistence that they have to get money out of politics. That’s almost impossible to do. So, Democrats need to raise more money than Republicans. In politics as in war, you can’t just fight one battle and then go home. You need to finance that long journey to victory.
- Democrats need to stop saying, “Oh, but this person is such a good individual and candidate,” when that person has actually lost races in which they have been a candidate. Candidates that win are tailored to the constituency that’s voting. A winning candidate in Iowa might not be in Georgia. A winning candidate in a rural district in Iowa may not do well in Cedar Rapids.
Unless Democrats incorporate these four imperatives, they risk losing more Iowas and Floridas and may become a permanent minority party.
Dave | Jul 31, 2023 at 1:49 am
I’m curious why the opinion piece refers to our political system as a two party system? Was it because the author wants it to be a two party system, or because it’s seen as a de-facto two party system? Ether way, that’s likely a big part of our problems
Dentistadjunct | Mar 22, 2023 at 5:27 am
Maybe the democrats need to dump the Stalinists, violent campus antisemites, pedophiles, and union grifters that the rest of taxpayers of this country are sick of.
Nuke | Mar 23, 2023 at 8:43 am
“The rest of the country?” What polls are you reading? And to which Stalinists, Antisemites, pedophiles, and union bosses do you refer? And how exactly do the Dems “dump” them? Your comments do not speak to any real solutions; they speak the tired old dog-whistle tropes that are not based in fact; it’s a similar tactic to the modern GOP, who have no platform and distract from that very fact by fearmongering about non-issues (e.g. drag shows, trans folks in sports) or trample on the right to privacy (e.g. women’s health) while hiding behind the First Amendment’s freedom of religion to target the marginalized. And all of this in the name of bootstrapping social Darwinism known as unregulated capitalism. Again, what is the GOP solution to real problems (e.g. infrastructure, underfunded education, mass shootings)? Answer: there are none of note, especially not in Iowa.
David Jackson | Mar 25, 2023 at 9:44 am
Nuke, if it’s a “dog whistle” why did you hear it?
Education is not underfunded, this has literally been explained to you on this platform before. Mass shootings are the product of fatherless, over-medicated, kids who hate their better adjusted peers in our failing schools nobody seems to want to secure or clean up because the outcomes of those failing schools are politically lucrative to politicians who want to push centralize government power to save the resulting crumbling society from itself. Semi-automatic rifles, aka “assault weapons of war” as the hyperbolic propagandists like to call them, have been for sale in the US for nearly a century, but mass shootings have only gotten worse in the last 30-35 years…why is that? A basic statistical analysis would prove if your scapegoat existed before the problem did, than your scapegoat is just that and not your root cause of the problem.
Well whether it’s the ignorance of the voters our failing schools produce who go onto perpetually vote for the same fairy tale social policies which incentivize single parent homes, abysmal education, and rampant demoralized degeneracy, or the propaganda power that poorly educated students (not tho mention dead bodies) provide social engineering politicians the opportunity to parade around on the news to push their agendas, turns out perpetuating the same failed policies is actually good for politicians who push them. When your objective is to “fundamentally change” a country by destroying it from the inside out so you can rebuild it, simultaneously pushing narratives for people to feel self-righteous about doing it so they never think about what they’re doing, is political genius really. Too bad the democrats cant even take credit for that, they had to copy Marx’s homework.
By the way, another point of logic that outweighs feelings, nobody’s right to privacy gives them the authority to commit murder. But if you’re so concerned about rights you may want to look into what political faction in this country is attempting to outlaw free speech by calling everything they don’t want people to hear “misinformation”, legislate away the right to keep and bear arms by calling it “gun safety”, outlawing private property in the name of “climate justice”, outlawing equality of opportunity in the name of “equity”, and outlawing due process though the continued use of outrage mobs and pushing authoritarian social credit style mutations of the law like implementing ESG.
Nuke | Mar 27, 2023 at 9:17 am
The dog whistle refers exactly to those who hear “trans rights” and act as if the sky is falling should parents retain rights to seek the guidance from a medical professional to determine what is best for their kid. Imagine the GOVERNMENT telling you you can’t try to help your kid through a difficult situation. The dog whistle refers exactly to those who hear “women’s reproductive rights” and act as if abortion isn’t a life-saving procedure in so many cases. Imagine the GOVERNMENT telling your partner that she can’t have an abortion in spite of the ectopic pregnancy literally threatening her life. How is it not murder to knowingly prevent someone from receiving life-saving care? I recognize that is not how the law currently sits in IA, but it sure seems like a slippery slope when you have a governor and a state legislature that ignores a near consensus in the medical community (see Texas laws on abortion).
Perhaps it will help to think about this not from a social or a scientific perspective; perhaps looking at it from an economic perspective will help. The threat of a brain drain is real here in IA (stay focused here, as I am not here to debate “blue” states’ folks leaving to states with lower taxes). With more and more restrictions on the care that OB-GYNs and their colleagues can provide, fewer trained professionals will settle here to take care of the unborn and the infants, not to mention care for their mothers. Also, what teacher or university professor would want to start a career here? How many engineers and aerospace professionals will leave this state b/c of the ever-increasing actual threats to personal freedoms? It seems the ultimate goal is to make IA less diverse and more uneducated (which may be the whole point, as an educated populace is a threat to those in power, who are predominantly white, Christian, male). Bottom line: unpopular Draconian religiously-inspired laws that infringe on the basics (like personal freedom and the right to privacy and ACTUAL parental rights with medical professionals) means fewer high-earning folks in the state economy; this means less tax revenue for the basics (e.g. safe roads and bridges to keep the consumers fed, not to mention getting to work to make the money to pump into the local economy).
Your post has lots of words with the only solution being, apparently, to do absolutely nothing about very real social issues. The fact is that ALL politicians have failed; maybe we can actually agree on that. The education system has been undermined (hint: schools fail, in part, b/c of massive class sizes brought about by fewer folks entering the teaching profession); women have been subjugated (see wage gap). The brain drain is real and has already begun. And will only get worse on IA’s current trajectory.
David Jackson | Mar 28, 2023 at 8:35 pm
By definition of the term dog-whistle it’s only heard by those who are attuned to hear it, and not only do you hear it, it is apparent in your answer it’s designed to cause emotional outrage rather than rational analysis. Those kept perpetually aggrieved, angry, and self-righteous make much more reliable voters for a party narrative than people who think independently.
First, and I understand this will come as a shock, there’s not such thing as “(insert demographic here) rights” there are just rights. If you believe in equal rights for all human beings, then what do “women’s reproductive rights” or “trans rights” etc., even mean? Either they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all people or they’re redundant.
What’s best for their kid is what the comprehensive medical and psychological evidence dictates, not what social trend makes them feel superior what a political party promotes to take advantage of the fervor. Removing perfectly healthy tissue from kids too young to consent to a tattoo, isn’t “trying to help your kid through a difficult time”. Neither is giving them cross sex hormones which can cause permanent developmental damage. Telling depressed, social maladjusted kids, with no medical history of chromosomal issues or improper sex-reassignment at birth due to genital malformation, that they’re trans and should get surgery and/or hormone treatments simply because they can be manipulated into agreement while they’re too impressionable to legally consent to anything else, is one of the sickest forms of child abuse ever invented. But somehow, protecting children from this by outlawing it no different than any other kind of sexual abuse is a problem for the far left. Huh.
Abortion isn’t a life saving measure in “so many” cases. At all. The fact the Daily no longer allows links is a shame, you need some information from sources other than those written to satisfy your bias. The vast majority of abortions are elective procedures to kill an unwanted child and have nothing to do with the health of the mother. Fearmongering propagandists will lump the stress of waking up to feed a hungry baby in the night as a “women’s health” just to pad the numbers. Also, the termination of an ectopic pregnancy is not an abortion. The removal of an embryo from a place outside the uterus which medically cannot survive where implanted is vastly different.
This “brain drain” theory is as irrational as the identity politics you’ve based it on. You have personal freedom not freedom over others. An educated populace has to be educated, not indoctrinated, and basic logic and biology supports the very laws you want to label “religiously-inspired” so you can pretend the self-worshiping atheist cult is a special constitutionally protected anti-religion under the guise of the separation of church and state phrase which isn’t in the Constitution. How many engineers, aerospace professionals, OB-GYNs, etc. will leave or refuse this state? Only the partisan ideologues who put partisanship above their profession. More like cutting the fat than brain drain.
“I am not here to debate “blue” states’ folks leaving to states with lower taxes.”
-Nuke
Lol, I like the quick defensive move of trying to dismiss the California exodus, again what do the comprehensive facts say and not just the cherry-picked ones? Taxation in California has been higher than many other states for decades, funny most of the population decline keeps trending with the further left CA goes.
“…women have been subjugated (see wage gap)”
-Nuke
The first sign someone doesn’t seek out information other than what supports their political bias…they still cling to the wage gap myth. This has been disproven so many times it’s akin to flat earth theory. There is NO evidence the difference in earnings broken down by sex is sexism or “subjugation” at all. When controlling for the same education, same years of experience, etc. there is no gap in what women make vs men. When some shameless propagandist writes an outrage piece comparing single women at age 40 to single men at age 40 siting a wage gap, conveniently leaving out they included every woman who had voluntarily taken years off of work to raise kids but who now happens to be single in with the women who have never taken time off just like the men, the soft brains get triggered into outrage. Turns out if you compare women who’ve had the same continuous work experience as the men, leaving he only viable being their sex, there-is-no-wage-gap. The political left and comprehensive facts go together like oil and water.
“Your post has lots of words with the only solution being, apparently, to do absolutely nothing about very real social issues.”
-Nuke
Lol, no the alternative to the abject destruction of a limited government republic isn’t “nothing” but I’m sure to the agenda driven it seems that way. When you’ve convinced yourself your political tribe is marching “forward” for ”progress” you’ve allowed yourself to see everything else as regression. Republicans are managing to do some of what needs to be done, school choice is huge part of it, stopping ideologues from mutilating children is another, but they also need to push to end any and all incentives to single parent homes targeting the present welfare system. From general crime, mass shootings, the extreme rise in transgender identification in otherwise healthy children, the perpetuation of out of wedlock birthrates, fatherless homes are directly linked to all of them. But gee, what do all of those have in common? They pay off for the Democrats don’t they, perpetuating the very problems the party advertises itself as a solution to election after election.
The evil genius of the Democratic Party and the ideological left in general is selling counter productive policy to the masses using shameless moralizing hyperbole and ringing slogans, then when said policy fails to improve the issue, makes it worse, and/or causes a whole other issue, double down and claim they need more government power with even more policy in order to make things better, as given the failures degrade the capacity of the electorate to smell BS, it exponentially grows support. This perpetuates ad-infinium until enough of the swing vote gets tired enough it decides to try out the Republicans again. However, overall society trends further to the left as more failing schools and single mother homes produce a higher percentage of irresponsible people who care more about feeling good about themselves for getting the praise of their social group for voting for moralizing hyperbole and ringing slogans than they do voting on the basis of facts and analysis. Have US schools gotten better or worse since the created of the ever growing Dept. of Education? Has poverty increased or decreased since the creation of the welfare state? Has racial minority unemployment gotten better or worse since minimum wage laws and affirmative action?
I will agree with the fact is that ALL politicians have failed, or at least failed America, the problem is how. Where Republicans have failed America because they’re largely incompetent, Democrats have failed us because they’re anti-America in nearly every way possible, again looking to “fundamentally” change a country whose fundamentals define what most sane people would agree is good and just.
Steffen | Mar 21, 2023 at 7:06 am
What do YOU think Democrats need to emphasize and what should the party NOT focus on so much?
David Jackson | Mar 25, 2023 at 10:03 am
Having party leadership that has the courage to overtly reject the pseudo-intellectual, crackpot, subversion narrative that America was built on oppression and has to be rebuilt by contemporary moral ideologues. Party leadership that puts economic fact above tax and spend fallacy. Party leadership that cares about the long-term strength of the US to put facts ahead of emotional rhetoric geared towards the lowest common denominator. Party leadership built around patriots like Jim Webb and Tulsi Gabbard and not traitors like Schumer, Pelosi, Rice, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. But this is like asking a tiger to not have stripes isn’t it?