Seth Masket is tired of stale old stories about why Democrats lose elections:
What are the narratives going to be Tuesday night? It’s fairly easy to know these ahead of time....In all circumstances, Democrats will be advised to moderate.
Republicans interpret election losses very differently from Democrats....Democrats are constantly trying to downplay their more liberal members’ desires....Contrast this with the behavior of Republicans, who largely ignore abhorrent statements from the likes of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and downplay attempts to undermine democratic elections by Trump supporters.
It sure doesn't sound like Republicans interpret election losses differently from Democrats. Masket himself says here that both parties try to downplay and ignore their own most extreme members—which they do, since this makes obvious sense.
At the same time, it's also true that Democrats tend to lose more than Republicans do when they're perceived as extreme. Maybe that's unfair, but it's reality. The reason for this, as always, is that the United States is a center-right country. I know you're tired of hearing that too, but I don't care. It's true:
The good news here is that liberals are taking share away from moderates. The bad news is that conservatives are still well ahead, 36-25%. In every election, liberals begin in a deep hole compared to conservatives.
And that's not all. It's also a simple truth that centrist voters tend to be more scared by extreme liberalism than by extreme conservatism. The reason, once again, is obvious: if you feel sort of cautious about change, it's always safer to vote for a conservative—even an extreme one, since they'll just keep things extremely the same. You can always change your mind later, after all. But if some extreme liberal manages to pass Medicare for All, you're stuck with it forever.
All of this means that, yes, Democrats need to moderate if they want to win over centrist voters. And like it or not, there are things centrist voters don't like about us liberals:
- They think we're too lax on crime.
- They think we're constantly making up stupid new rules.
- They think we want to let in too many illegal immigrants.
- They think we want to spend money endlessly and drive up the debt.
- They were appalled by the looting and rioting during the BLM protests of 2020 and think Democrats should have denounced it more vigorously.
- They think wokeness is ridiculous. They want us to stop talking like academics from another galaxy.
- They do not like being called racist.
You don't need polls or long treatises to understand these concerns. All you need is a few center-right friends—assuming you have any. And remember: it doesn't matter whether these concerns are legitimate or whether they're based merely on ignorance or Fox News demagoguery. They exist no matter what.
Now, if Democrats end up doing poorly on Tuesday, the real reason is that the party in power always does poorly in midterm elections. But the secondary reason will indeed be that Democrats have spent the past few years moving to the left and allowing folks like Bernie and Elizabeth and Alexandria and Katie to become the best known faces of the party—all the while convincing centrists that good ol' Joe Biden is little more than a captive of these progressive do-gooders.
That's OK with me. In this household we all love Katie (Porter) and would vote for her multiple times if we could. But I'm not a centrist. I think Medicare for All is a great idea and I'm not opposed to funding social programs with higher tax rates on the rich. Democrats already have my vote.
But my center-right friends? They're kind of scared of us these days, and that's enough to keep them voting for Republicans even though they agree that Republicans have gone nuts. How hard is this to understand?
I guess one response to a Republican victory is to let them to blow stuff up and cause chaos. Then all those center right folks might come to fear them instead of democrats.
TFG separated kids from their parents, and we’re still trying to reunite some of those families. He cozied up to dictators and didn’t bother with national-security briefings. He refused to believe US intelligence reports. I could go on an on, but none of this erratic, chaotic, dangerous behavior inspired hesitation in the so-called ‘moderates’.
Exactly - this is the problem Mr. Drum and center right pundits ignore. I'd say that democrats simply have solutions to problems no one cares about - well, not enough people care.
Or maybe moderates simply don't find the erratic behavior all that dangerous. They aren't immigrants. They feel no danger from dictators etc.
Since 1992, Republicans have prevailed in the popular vote once so I will posit this as evidence that US is not a center-right country. The real issue or question is what is “conservative”. One could argue that The Democratic Party is the Conservative party in the US as least as compared with Europe. The point is that labels are just labels and do not truly reflect the totality of a person’s views. I do agree that Dems need to pick up their marketing.
By global standards, the Democratic party is a center right party, therefor the US is a center right country.
If you can't beat Hershel Walker, Oz, and the other crazies on the Right, you've got real problems that need addressing.
Yeah, that is absolutely true. Things are broken in a new way, at least within my lifetime (54)
Scaring people is the mainstay of Republican strategy. Crime, people with dark skin, debt, crime, people with dark skin, rinse and repeat. Fuck policy. Who needs that? Independents swing to the right when scared. That's all they need.
A lot of my trouble with this line of thinking is this contrast:
Exhibit A:
"in marketing you have to deal with reality regardless of whether you're tired of it."
Exhibit B:
"it's always safer to vote for a conservative—even an extreme one, since they'll just keep things extremely the same."
There's some failure to deal with reality here somewhere.
Thank you different_name! I'm sick and tired of white guys manspaining to the folks who will be on receiving end of the GOP's extremism. Kevin isn't going to be direly impacted by the GOP's extremism but folks like me will have their health threatened, their jobs threatened and their retirement cratered if the GOP wins.
How does one resolve "[Republicans] just keep things extremely the same," with "Republicans have gone nuts?" If your "center-right" friends can keep those two thoughts simultaneously I'm not sure that just caving to their demands will help.
Right. Banning abortion, cutting Social Security and Medicare are not "keeping things the same". Which means we're dealing with irrational people.
I just want to address this "center-right nation" question before everyone starts dumping on Kevin. May I propose a way to think about this that can bridge the divide?
We are center-right when it comes to self-reporting and aspiration. Many (most) would like to think of themselves as independent, self-made and personally upright. But as we all know, when asked directly, many will want Social Security, a safety net and a government that shaves off as many of life's thorns and rough edges as possible, and maybe realizes that inter-personal "integrity" is an insufficient criteria or roadmap for governance. And that equality is as important an issue as so-called "liberty". Thus in a more substantive way we are center-left.
The Democrats' deficit in the marketing department has to do (among other things already mentioned) with appealing to this aspirational dimension. I think of Repubs, and especially Trump, as possessing a kind of genius for navigating a middle-school social scene. (Not necessarily even high-school level.) (And perhaps we never really leave middle-school.) How do you get to be one of the cool kids? By embodying certain myths that delineate what "virtue" consists of, and most importantly, being a "winner". This may seem to require abandoning liberal caring virtues, but I don't think so. It's a presentation problem. Herein lies the difficulty as it requires high art. Think FDR. When I think of appealing to centrists, I think of it as a presentation problem. And I'm willing to jettison some issues in pursuit of larger goals. The details remain to be sorted out.
Achieving "cool" status by being a winner seems a lot like my high school. In fact, it sounds a lot like my life.
FDR was a political genius. I don't know of anyone in either party who can pull that off now.
There are experiments with preverbal infants that demonstrate their preference for puppets that act in ways that are socially accepting and friendly, and they haven't been to high school yet. In other words, we're born understanding the importance of mutual respect.
I'd go so far as to say that mutual respect, as a cognitive process, emerged when our most recent reptilian ancestors became our earliest mammalian ancestors. Regardless, I see the current level of animosity as a recent anomaly.
What life and great literature repeatedly teaches is that mutual respect is an investment with a negative short term ROI that is small relative to a much larger positive long term ROI.
One question is, when did we learn that things can't get done without disrespect? I find it useful to think that it happened sometime after Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and before Karl Marx' Das Kapital (1867).
The key question is, how do we, as Moderates convince the Left and/or Right to stop acting on the basis of the self-confirming idea that the current political animosity is human nature?
We could say, "Start with the assumption that human nature = mutual respect, and on that basis read the doctrine of any legitimate religion/philosophy, including the scientific principle, which says, "Don't misuse the scientific method. Instead, be as skeptical of yourself as you are of others." And the response will be, "But they'll take advantage of me (us) if I (we) act that way." To which I say, choose the "small short term pain with the much larger long term gain" option and stop choosing the "small short term gain with the much larger long term pain" option, which is what MLK meant when referring to the arc of the moral universe concept.
And save the Republican party from itself by voting Democrat on Tuesday.
Kevin may have accurately described the attitudes of some people he regards as centrists/moderates in his little part of California. However there's no evidence they are typical of swing voters in the states where this election will be decided.
Most people's votes are based on emotion. They have nothing to do with "policies". Policies are used as rationalisations for irrational choices. The vast majority of Americans who vote will do so for the party which has become part of their sense of social identity. The candidate's identity and the policies they claim to favor are immaterial.
The small bloc of persuadable voters, on the other hand, pays a lot of attention to the candidates, and votes for the one they find most admirable. Naturally this means different things to different voters: one picks Walker because they have fond memories of his football heroics, another chooses Warnock because he's a pastor. Some will vote for a party's candidate out of visceral hatred of a figure from the other side.
I've come to the tentative conclusion that Republicans have a better track record than Democrats in selecting candidates who speak strongly to swing voters. Where we see an unhinged ignoramus in Marjorie Greene, lots of voters typically described as "unengaged" see a spunky little woman with the character to mix it with the pros in Washington and end up an influential national figure. Where we see Kari Lake as a performance artist cynically acting as a female Trump, they see a polished media performer determined to do what's right for her state competing against a colorless public servant who just doesn't seem to have what it takes.
And so on for other key contests. Kevin is right that marketing is crucial, but Democrats seem stuck in an outdated mindset where "marketing" = spending a fortune on TV commercials. Republicans have realised that the candidate, not the advertising, is the marketing campaign. That's why candidates like Oz and Bolduc and Vance and Walker have a good chance of flipping the Senate, despite their complete unfitness for elected office on any objectively rational analysis.
Yes, R's have realized that Americans will vote for celebrity. Thanks Ronald Reagan.
It certainly seems that Americans, they want a little bit of excitement in their political lives. Why vote for boring candidates who realize that governing is hard work?
Brave New World, indeed.
I don’t always agree with Kevin but this is spot on.
I would add that part of the narrative about voter suppression is that when we lose elections we wouldn’t if there wasn’t suppression.
Assume that’s true. You need power to change this, so you need to get power with the actual electorate. But instead of trying to do this, Democrats blame everything else. It’s rigged. It’s racist. It’s voter suppression. It’s campaign finance. It’s not enough vote by mail.
All of that is true, but you can’t change the results by whining about the refs after the game is over. That’s what Democrats do every time they lose and even though they are correct, the never take the next step and say: therefore it is urgent we get power and fix these problems immediately!
And a large measure of why is that since the netroots that Kevin was part of, it’s has not been allowed for Democrats not to fight fire with fire, so democrats have to run attack ads and filibuster judges and all of that shit, but can’t just not talk about every 12 year olds right to hormone therapy, even if their winning actually meant more protections for transgender rights?
And here we are in the phases of grief of Trumps return and wondering why.
Donald Trump started whining (to the refs? Who is that? The FEC is non-functional and the Republicans deliberately made it that way) well before the 2020 election happened, and he still is two yeas later. And yet it's the Democrats you describe doing this?
Democrats - for example Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama - have tried to compromise with Republicans on economic matters. They moved well to the right of where the Johnson and even Nixon administration were on general economic matters. Republicans' response was to up their exploitation of racism and religion and reject any kind of rational discussion about economic matters or even to have an economic platform that might win votes (other than Trump's obviously fake promises). They are going to try to win by fighting the culture wars and if they win they are going to pass economic programs which the majority of the country does not want.
The problem is not that Democrats are too far to the left of the country, it is that Republican have increasingly relied on irrational group instincts - race and religion - to the point where their voters have lost touch with reality. You can't understand American politics unless you understand how racism and religion cause people to elect the politicians whose economic policies they actually do not want. The majority of lower-income Republican voters are not afraid of "socialism", they are afraid of losing their racial and religious superiority. Once they have reached an extreme of irrational partisanship they believe anything bad that their leaders (such as Trump and Fox News) tell them about the other side.
Another thing you have to understand is that the big media are mostly socially liberal but economically conservative. They are actually part of the economic elite themselves and they depend on other parts of the big-business establishment for their income. They will generally oppose any economic movement that they think threatens big business. Kevin himself has recognized that Republicans win by inciting hate, but today he seems to be taking up a kind of standard media story about the economic alignment of the country.
Thank you Skeptonomist. Asking us to Compromise in this political moment in time is acting like Neville Chamberlain. It didn't work then and it won't work now.
There are only rational voters and irrational voters - there is no middle. You either believe it takes a village or that every man is for himself and only man, not women and only if you are lighter than a paper bag and attend my church. And the mushy middle is simply voters who tune out only voting for candidates based on "likeability" or "he hates the folks I hate".
The framing of this post is a bit off.
First of all, it has never been more important in my lifetime to distinguish between Liberals and Leftists. It just makes no sense whatsoever anymore (if it ever did) to treat the Left as anything even in the same universe as a monolithic entity.
I personally consider myself a Liberal. I typically vote straight Dem. Yet I view a lot of Leftists these days as quite possibly insane.
So this statement from Kevin could be modified:
“there are things centrist voters don't like about us liberals”
I think this is more accurate: “A lot of self-identified centrist voters mistakenly see no difference between Liberals and Leftists, and, as a result, there are things they don’t like about Liberals even though Liberals themselves also don’t like those same things.”
Regarding some of Kevin’s examples:
“They think we're constantly making up stupid new rules.”
The Leftists are indeed constantly making up stupid new rules (see the debate over the use of the word “women”), and it bothers the hell out of a Liberal like me.
“They were appalled by the looting and rioting during the BLM protests of 2020 and think Democrats should have denounced it more vigorously.”
And they’re right.
To cut DEMs some slack though, I am at least happy that President Biden used his state of the Union address to specifically condemn the “defund the police” movement. But, yes, more Dem courage against the Leftists would be nice.
“They think wokeness is ridiculous. They want us to stop talking like academics from another galaxy.”
And Wokeness is ridiculous. And academics do too often speak in an unforgivably arcane “crit speak” dialect. I am currently in grad school in a liberal city; I think I can confirm these facts with some amount of authority.
“They do not like being called racist.”
No one does. Kendi’s modern version of anti-racism might be the most counterproductive social movement I’ve personally witnessed in my own lifetime.
So, yes, this situation is not really about the ancient binary between Left and Right. Any analysis that leaves out the (fairly) recent Uber-radicalization of the far left isn’t really getting at the heart of the problem.
I agree, but I think it is only relevant if you have liberals who are willing to call out their disagreements with the "left."
But I remember in the 2020 primary debates when there was a question about decriminalizing crossing the border illegally, and no one had the balls to state that it should remain a crime. In general, liberal politicians don't disagree in public on even the most extreme left positions.
One example: WRT illegal immigration, a pro-worker position could (and I'd argue, *should*) be that it should be very difficult for an illegal immigrant to work without papers in the US. And to make this happen, employers should be fined if caught employing such people. Why? Because someone who's here illegally and vulnerable to being deported can't push back against terrible pay or working conditions, and this hurts all workers.
Similarly, we need to reform H1B visas, since right now, H1B workers are locked into a specific employer, which again gives the employer too much power. It is very difficult to change jobs before you have a green card, and that needs to change.
There's also a fairness argument that says that people who cut the queue to get into the US are being unfair to those who are stuck waiting in a queue.
You can temper this with help for dreamers, but if you want to get public support for immigration reform, you have to make it clear that you're going to make the system more fair for people trying to immigrate legally and for the people who are here already and aren't looking for more competition for jobs.
“I remember in the 2020 primary debates when there was a question about decriminalizing crossing the border illegally, and no one had the balls to state that it should remain a crime.”
I suspect your memory is inaccurate. Joe Biden, Beto O'Rourke, and probably others primary candidates opposed decriminalizing border crossings. Joe Biden's position is the one that counts, because he is the person who won the nomination.
Also, your wording implies that the only reason that someone would support decriminalization is cowardice, and I see no basis for believing that. Perhaps some of the candidates simply thought it was a good idea.
What on earth are you talking about????? The only insane ones are the Putin and China apologists, none are in good standing with the Democratic party nor are they holding high offices in the US. There's a lot less difference between Rep AOC and Senator Mark Warner for instance than Senator Mark Warner and Rep Mark McCarthy.
A veritable army of Straw Men
-Who is making the new rules, and how many are they? How are they enforcing them? Is it elected Democrats, or the fringe 0.1%? As far as the word “woman”, there are specific situations where the people involved prefer to be called something different. It may not make any sense to you at all, but in my opinion, people should get to decide what they are called. They are not demanding that anyone have a label forced on them, but they get to pick their ownlabel. Not a crime against humanity,
-BLM rallies - 96% of them were non-violent. Democrats, with few exceptions, condemned the 4% of the attacks that were violent, which apparently was not enough. Republicans condemned 100% as violent, but they don’t need to address that obvious lie.
-Wokeness is essentially being alert to racial prejudice and discrimination. Period. I hope you don’t find that ridiculous, What Republican distortion of that word do you find ridiculous? And why blame Democrats?
-They do not like being called racist. But if you vote for a party that has undeniably racist members who get little to no pushback, and that has undeniably racist policies, maybe you should think about that, rather than blame the person pointing it out.
-Uber-radicalization of the far left? What does that mean? The far-whatever is always radical. The question is how powerful the fringe is. What is the worst thing that AOC has said or done? Ha she stolen classified documents? Has she supported anything like QAnon? Has she outright lied about election results? COVID misinformation? Repeated Russian propaganda?
I could go on and on, but you get the point.
Has it occurred to you that you’re doing an incredible job of proving Kevin’s point?
Democrats have more center-rightele ted officials than do the Republicans if you use the rest of the world as a frame instead of using the current GOP extremism du jour as a measuring stick.
Democrats also received most of the votes in elections over the last 20(?) years.
"Democrats also received most of the votes in elections over the last 20(?) years."
And that has help how, exactly? If you want to get stuff done, you have to win the electoral college, and you have to have 51 Senators.
To do that, you need more than a majority of the country -- you need to compete in some relatively Republican states.
At a certain point after so many instances of the majority voting one way and our outdated constitution putting the opposites in office, the status quo will not stand. We are reaching that point sooner rather than later.
No, you need 60 Senators...
No, you only need 51 Senators who are willing to abolish the filibuster.
Democrats enact policies--don't do so well at bumper sticker slogans.
Democrats refrain from bald-faced lying too--puts them at s serious disadvantage.
The bottom line, though, is the Republicans do a great job at blaming government for every problem, break things so gov't. not very effective, then complain louder. At it's a lot easier to break things than to build them up.
The point about Republicans adopting lying as a core political strategy is very important. It presents Democrats with Hobson's choice: allow the lies to go unchallenged, or spend their time playing defense while Republicans set the agenda and dominate the media.
Kevin says, for example, that centrists think we're "too lax on crime". Why do they think that? Because Republicans have been saying so for my entire lifetime, and the media has gone along with the meme. So Dems can either say "Not so!" and try to change the subject, or invest considerable resources in assembling evidence that it's not true and getting it across to voters. Either option is bad, but there are no others.
Democracy relies on all the main participants voluntarily adhering to certain fundamental norms of behavior, one of which is engaging in good faith arguments based on evidence. Once a major player goes rogue, as Trump Republicans and the Supreme Court have, the whole democracy project collapses. There is simply no way the remaining participants can unilaterally reimpose it.
Excellent point. Fact of the matter is, the Democrats are NOT radical in any way shape or form. The white guys whining about the need to move to the center need to wake up and smell the coffee.
Kevin, you're ignoring a lot of things in this post:
1. Republicans identify as 66% conservative. Democrats identify as 58% liberal, 42% moderate or conservative. If a Republican moves right, that risks losing some support among moderate Republicans but the majority will become more enthusiastic. A Democrat moving right risks convincing the majority of their core supporters that they aren't worth supporting. If you get those 3% of swing voters but 5% of your base supporters opt not to vote at all, you've gone backwards.
2. What Democrats do doesn't matter. You yourself have repeatedly shown that the economy works better under Democratic presidents than Republican ones, but the Republicans can still run on "fixing the economy" despite their record and despite having no plan to fix anything. A centrist Democrat running to the right can still face millions of dollars in ads hammering them for supporting "Defund the Police," even if they never advocated or supported any such thing: if they run ads refuting the claim, they're wasting money and possibly turning off their base, and if they ignore the claim, people assume that it is true. Republican political ads and news organizations can simply and flatly lie, all the time, with no obvious consequences, and certainly no loss of credibility among most viewers; suspicious independents will simply disbelieve everyone, become disgusted, and refuse to vote for anyone.
3. The Republican platform isn't meaningfully "conservative" if, by that term, you mean changing nothing. The mainstream party wants to seize control of state governments, use them to punish their political enemies within the state, and want to be in a position to override the results of future votes on the grounds of "voter fraud" which they invented. It wants to continue massive regressive tax cuts benefiting only the wealthy, without cutting spending, in order to force Democrats to cut social programs. It overturned Roe v. Wade and now wants to ban contraception more generally. None of these things are "status quo." The most extreme Republican office holders advocate locking up their political opponents, believe QAnon is accurate, and support violence in the name of their causes. That in no way equates to keeping things "extremely the same" and the comparison was unworthy of you.
4. Republicans have already presided over a massive transfer of wealth to a tiny percentage of Americans. The top 1% of Americans hold 33.2% of the country's wealth, while the bottom 50% hold 2.6%. American billionaires spent $880 million on mid-term advertising (CNBC), with a ratio of 3:2 in favor of Republicans; every tax cut frees up more money for billionaires to invest in politics, while that poorest 50% of Americans lack the wealth to compete. The "conservative" Supreme Court deregulated political spending, and we can expect them to overthrow yet more regulations in the name of keeping things "extremely the same."
Maybe the conversation you should have with your center-right friends is to ask them what Democrats they've voted for in the past, and why. If they never voted for a Democrat, they probably aren't worth appealing to; if they have, surely figuring out why they did is a better starting place then searching for reasons they aren't this year.
The problem with "it's always safer to vote for a conservative—even an extreme one, since they'll just keep things extremely the same" is that it relies on an outdated and archaic definition of "conservative". Modern conservatives were known as "reactionaries" when I was a youth. Conservatives then wanted to preserve the status quo, while reactionaries sought to return to "the good old days" as they imagined them to have existed. These days, conservatives seek to return to the good old days (e.g. MAGA) while the defenders of the status quo are now known as moderates.
I don't think Dems can go further right, because what moves a lot of people into the Dem camp is a pet issue, and everyone's pet issue is different. Suddenly a person has a gay kid, or needs to buy insulin, or has a parent who has alzheimers and little savings.
Most people pay little attention to policy, and they certainly spend no time on policies that arent relevent in the moment. Republicans get to coast on a "we're hard working and responsible, just like you" vibe, in large part because your average person doesn't pay enough attention to the subtext behind the platitudes. They dont want their kid's teacher arrested for having "And Tango Makes Three" on the shelf, but also have no clue that the candidate who says "parents should control their kid's education" actually endorses something that extreme.
Democrats are pretty popular, in the sense that they get the majority of votes very often. But getting the 60% they'd need to get past gerrymandering is probably possible. For one thing, the media loves horse-race coverage, and will never allow a Dem blowout. "Dems will cruise to victory" doesn't sell newspapers. "Too close to call" does, as does "Republicans stand to win big." That's because their audience is largely center-left and will read articles based on fear more often than triumph.
"that's enough to keep them voting for Republicans even though they agree that Republicans have gone nuts.
I guess then answer to dilemma you pose is giving the GOP all power and letting said centrists find out what a reactionary, not conservative, radical reactionary regime look and feels like. Am I right?
If we're using the old Gallup poll on ideology, you will notice that 30 years ago actual Leftists made up only 17 percent, of the voting public. Now it's 25 percent. While far from a majority it's also not an insignificant number when it comes to coalition party like the Democrats which means it has to take their views into account to keep said party relatively unified. Clinton could afford to ignore the Left back in the day. Biden cannot.
And, if we use this same poll, the number of people calling themselves conservatives has largely stayed flat. 30 years ago, 36 percent called themselves conservative. Same as today in spite Fox News, all the radio talk shows and other forms of conservative media. It hasn't changed those numbers one bit.
Now if I combined the number of people calling themselves moderate with those calling themselves Liberals, that's what, 62 percent of the electorate. So why aren't we a "Center-Left" country, hmmm? Please do explain Kevin.
I don't disagree with your reasons why some centrists vote Republican but why can't you imagine some moderates voting for Democrats on issues like abortion rights or gay marriage or marijuana legalization or climate change.
My point is, the door swings both ways. It just depends on what topics and events are priorities for said centrists at the time of the election.
The US constitution bakes in advantages for rural states and rural voters, the GOP by quickly creating several rural GOP friendly states in the second half the 19th century built in a power base that distorts the will of the people versus who takes office and power in the US.
I did a spreadsheet of state population by political leaning a year or so ago; I’ll try to share it. Interestingly, the ten smallest states are evenly split by party; the largest states (who lose out in the Senate) also split. It’s the middling (by population) states where the Republican Party holds sway. I semi-seriously believe that the real underlying factor is that Republicans do well in the states most steeped in mythology - the Lost Cause, or the rugged, individualist pioneer - i.e. the Deep South and the Mountain West. People look back nostalgically to a mythical Golden Age, and vote for the party that promises to restore it.
Luckily for Kevin's friends and the rest of us, if we lose this election, that whole scary voting problem may just go away for good.
It is not a good sign when you respond to someone by misunderstanding their point. Masket is clearly saying that Democrats distance themselves from their liberal members while Republicans pretend that their most radical members are fine, people are just misrepresenting what they said. The equivalent would be if Democrats explained that defunding the police can be don by giving jobs that involve social service people rather than police, instead of saying those leftists are unacceptable. If people think that the left is more extreme than the right one reason why is likely that the extremists on the right get criticized by people on the left, like Jon Chait, which shows the criticism is partisan. But people on the left get criticized by people on the right and people like Jon Chait, showing it is bipartisan. Is it a surprise that while most censorship comes from the right, most people think that most censorship comes from the left?
That said, polls showing how people self-identify show the country to be center right, polls that ask about issues tend to show the opposite. At a time when conservatives do not actually want to conserve anything, that makes it far from an a priori fact that moderate views will do better for Democrats. In fact the Democratic habit in Republican leaning swing states has been to put up moderate candidates and have them lose to Republicans. It is far from clear that this is a better strategy than appointing candidates who have strong opinions. Sherrod Brown does not win in Ohio because he runs as a moderate. Not that that one case proves much, but that is usually how the moderate side tries to establish that their losing candidates did better than a more liberal candidate would have.
There is actually a mathematical problem with Drum's argument here. After all Democrats tend to get more votes than Republicans, only certain anti-Democratic features keep Republicans with their share of power. That means that if there are more conservatives than liberals that moderates vote for the left over the right by significant margins. That makes it unlikely that the moderates are really more scared of the left than the right, or at least does not provide supporting evidence.
Obviously Democrats want to get more votes than they do. But the fact that Democrats get more votes than Republicans in almost all presidential elections, in Senate races if one counts the different sizes that candidates represent, and more often than not in overall Congressional votes is a good reason to be suspicious of any argument that says that the country is more inclined to vote Republican than Democrats .
Now if you want to argue for going with more moderate candidates the obvious way to do it is precisely to point out that despite the fact that Republicans start with a huge advantage in self-assigned conservatives over liberals and still get fewer votes shows that the Republican habit of embracing its extremes is a bad strategy. But the argument above tries to reach this conclusion with just about the opposite argument. That suggests the conclusion has more appeal than the argument.
+1
Except that the Republican strategy isn’t ‘bad’, it’s efficient in the flawed system set up by the Constitution.
Ok, well I completely disagree as much as is possible.
Kevin talks about “center right” as if everybody agrees on some 0 -100 scale- there is no such agreement.
The anti abortion “ gay is an abomination” crowd are at 100 on their scale and that’s it. They vote R and could care less if we se up machine guns on the border.
The anti tax crowd who also wants zero regulations on their particular business could care less about abortion but they are also 100 on their own scale and that’s it.
The anti affirmative action crew is 100 on their scale. They stopped worrying about social justice when lynchings snd forced segregation ended. No cakes for gay or bi racial weddings, thank you very much.
Now on to the stupid. The anti environmentalists insist on being stupid, Trump allowed them to be proud of it.
The stupid anti globalists are the only part of the Repub coalition who may have a valid point, but good luck with this little slice.
Finally, the dumbest of the dumb, the Qanon election denying crew. there is no dem proposal which is craven enough to reach them. I once saw a tee shirt that said “Trump 2020 because f-you. Twice”. please let me know the policy proposal which could reach this set of morons.
The problem isn’t that dems aren’t center enough, my god, Joe Biden is the exact center to a fraction of a millimeter! the problem is the R coalition equals 40% and in our system you can win with that
^This!
I’ve been saying for a long time that Republicans have put together a coalition of single-issue voters. To your list, we can add the gun nutz (“…when you pry them from my cold, dead hands!”) and the prayer-in-school, ‘we’re a Christian nation’ crowd.
I think it has more to do with structural over-representation of conservatives in the current system, although certainly Democrats haven't done themselves any favors in alienating a lot of white, non-college-educated voters.
But then there's Fox News, and if you want an answer as to why Republicans don't feel the need to constantly denounce the crazy people in their party, it's because the ultra-conservatives only see the positive stuff about Republicans and negative stuff about Democrats, and certainly don't see their politicians equivocating on stuff to win over a moderate set of voters.
Which is a fair reminder that these folks tend to be a bunch of low-information voters. We're talking about the center-right folks who literally didn't believe that Romney could hold those bad conservative opinions, because he seemed like such a nice guy and surely a nice guy that some of their conservative neighbors and friends support wouldn't do that?
Drum: "It sure doesn't sound like Republicans interpret election losses differently from Democrats. Masket himself says here that both parties try to downplay and ignore their own most extreme members—which they do, since this makes obvious sense."
This reading is exactly the opposite of the point that Masket makes in his article. I guess you can do that when you use ellipses to cut out what goes against your own narrative.
Here's Masket:
Indeed, consider prominent Republicans who, following an attempted attack on the speaker of the House, made light of Paul Pelosi’s injuries and spread conspiracy theories about him. Try to imagine if one of Biden’s children had mocked Steve Scalise after his 2017 shooting, as Donald Trump Jr. did recently with the Pelosis. If that had happened, Democrats would still be apologizing for it to this day.
Masket is drawing a contrast between the two parties, not saying they are the same, for crying out loud. Republicans can be overtly fascist every fucking single day and never pay a political price for it. A Democrat notes that a certain contingent of Republicans (but not all!) are acting "semi-fascist" and the Dem gets endless coverage about going too far.
People take cues from the media and the media is broken, leaning over backwards to normalize GOP extremism and make Dems sound extreme for speaking common sense. Right-wing propaganda and corrupted right-leaning media control the news cycle. Dems have no equivalent messaging operation. It's a big part of why the country is in the toilet politically.
Critique might have had some truth in 1984. Not true now. Democrats are quite centrist. Also, it's "conservatives" who have turned the world upside down by shipping jobs to China; quite obviously that's why they spend so much time trying to blame that on others, "global elites" and such.
Gonna be interesting to watch in the next few years as it dawns on people how poorly Republican financial policies are for businesses and individuals. Will the media still report that Republicans are better for the economy? Maybe.
On one hand, you have Medicare For All, Universal Pre-school, and legalized cannabis.
On the other hand, outright fascism.
US voters: better safe than sorry, let's go with the outright fascism.
At least a few liberals and lefties are starting to get it. The trajectory we've been on and are still currently heading involves civil unrest. Pair it with societal collapse that is ongoing, not oncoming, and we're going to end up with Ecofascism. Unless of course we adopt Strong Federalism, or split this country into two pieces. Or, if we can convince conservatives that breathing is for libtard America haters.
Also, for the love of God, quit saying you want to ban firearms, semi-automatic firearms, etc. Kevin, the fact that you left that one off is telling.
To be clear: it's never going to happen...and you better believe when the right-wing death squads come, your local sheriff not only won't be there to help you, they'll probably be providing intelligence and weapons to their friends in the 'squad'.
Fascism = Information Overload x Fear.
/rant
It's folly to not point out one of the very structural dangers of our country is guns. We tried keeping quite about guns but that failed - instead this allowed the radicals to collect vast armories for the coming "race war" that are a clear and present danger to the country. There are quite a number of gun owners who are now supportive of regulation of guns, they too are horrified at what is happening now.
The problem however is the same problem we have with the other issues - our Constitution is too far tilted to preserve the power of rural voters and wealthy oligarchs.
Guns are a "problem" in the same way racism is a "problem".
You can't blink your eyes and wiggle your nose to make them go away.
They are both symptoms of a sick society, not the causes.
I think it boils down to this:
Cheating will beat fair play every single time if cheating is not punished.
When your opponent lies about you for years, is caught lying and suffers no consequences, then you can't win. Your true and important statement (for example) that Black Americans are treated differently and society should be awake to that fact is twisted in the worst possible way, and now Wokeness is perceived as a central Democratic policy that nobody can exactly define but is really bad. It's a lie. But the purveyors of that lie suffer no consequences, so it is a win for them.
Repeat for crime, open borders, spending, election fraud, climate change, etc.
Kevin listed a litany of misinformation (with perhaps a kernel of truth, a kernel which is miniscule in comparison with actual faults of Republicans) and then said that whether or not it is true, we have to address it.
Think about that. When lies are without consequence, you can spend all day spreading them. Your opponent is stuck on defense and will try to use the truth to fight back. But the truth takes time and trust and comprehension to work. Cunningly formed lies just go right to the emotional part of the brain and go down much easier. Addressing each and every lie carefully is a losing strategy.
The only solution is to have people care about cheating in political discourse.
I have no idea how to address that, other than through the media.
There is one other solution: start lying and cheating as much as the other side does. I'm not recommending that, but it does have an end-justifying-the-means comfort factor to it. If we get to that point, democracy is probably truly dead.
"When your opponent lies about you for years, is caught lying and suffers no consequences, then you can't win."
Thanks, mainstream media. And to some extent, thanks Kevin Drum. Republican lying has never been a big part of his message.
Republicans have found the magic key to winning elections. It is to emotionalize them using lies and quarter-truths. That this strategy destroys democracy means nothing to them.
The only thing left is to see what the dog does with the car he has just caught.
Stopped reading this at "both parties try to downplay and ignore their own most extreme members—which they do, since this makes obvious sense."
Kevin, have you seen the Republican party?!? It's a shiteshow on steroids turned up to 11 and I see no indication that the party leadership is turning down the volume on the crazy at all. Hell, MTG is one of the, effective, leaders of the party at this point.
Yes, Kevin is quite wrong on this. Republicans are taking the crazy and running with it.
Of course, this wouldn't work if Republican voters weren't so susceptible to crazy themselves. I don't know. Kevin is hardly worth reading anymore. The comments are generally much more intelligent than he is, and the only reason to come here.