General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How the extreme left gave us Nixon, Bush and now Trump [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)1) There have been some people who ended up making unreasonable demands from the Democratic Party;
2) There has been an insistence on the part of those running the Democratic Party that no one had the right to expect much of anything from it, that it's intolerable to expect the party to commit to real change on some issues(such as economics and foreign policy/defense), and that everyone should just shut up and take what those on top of the party will give them.
I don't defend anyone's decision to vote third-party this fall. I spent months pleading with those who were planning to do so to support us. At the same time, the way the party approached these people(basically just pounding a fist on the table and demanding their votes, rather than, as I would have done were I in charge of things, emphasizing that there were many proposals from the insurgent wing that were added to the platform, that that campaign had made a difference, and that this was a party in which the insurgence could now work effectively for what they wanted) had no other effect than to reinforce the sense of alienation these people had and stiffened their resolve not to work with us.
I would have said, as I've said since the Seventies, that we should have campaigned FOR, not just campaigned against.
Is there a reason this party can't campaign in the fall as though our ideas could actually win votes and that we could win the argument with voters, rather than going back to the approach we've used in every campaign since the Seventies OTHER than the campaigns that elected President Obama of running against? Why did we go back to the approach that lost for us over and over and over again?
We had proof, in the polls that came out almost daily, that a campaign that focused mainly on attacking Trump was not gaining us votes, that the "moderate Republican women in the suburbs" demographic that was supposed to be won over by those ads simply wasn't working-can you think of any good reason why they stayed with that approach? Why they didn't switch to trying to inspire people or to focusing on OUR proposals?
What we did this fall failed both times with Reagan...it failed both times with #43...what was the point of ever doing that again?