General Discussion
Showing Original Post only (View all)It would be nice if the centrists in this party did some introspection, too. [View all]
The fall campaign was run exactly as the centrists insisted that it be run.
It focused almost entirely on negative ads against the other party's candidate and spent far too little time talking about how good OUR platform was(or on acknowledging the role in the runner-up campaign in improving that platform, which would have done a lot to persuade more supporters of the runner-up to believe that they hadn't been crushed and that a decision to vote for our nominee would be a validation of their work in the primaries and the caucuses, and would have persuaded undecided voters to support our ticket because we had a lot of good things to offer that they may not have been aware of).
This wasn't a choice made by our nominee...it reflected what our party's "professionals" mistakenly see as "common sense"-in other words, the idea that, in a race versus any Republican, our party can never win the argument-that our ideas can never be more popular than the ideas of the Right, and that therefore we can ONLY defeat the Republicans by personally discrediting their nominee.
You'd think the pros would have noticed that this approach has NEVER worked.
It never worked against Nixon.
It never worked against Reagan.
If it could have worked against anyone, it should have against Trump. But even there, when our opponent was demonstrably a bigoted, misogynist scumbucket, it still didn't work. That should tell us something.
If we had run by making the argument FOR our approach-AND our platform-we could have carried the Upper Midwest.
Yes, those who voted third-party or didn't vote should have voted for our nominee.
But at this point, bashing those who didn't serves no good purpose.
What we need to do is to find paths to unity...and those paths need to be based on every faction of this party treating each other with respect.
And if this party wants people to work with it, it needs to listen to the reasons people who could have worked with us chose not to. There's nothing to lose from that and the future to gain.
The path to unity is respect, not shaming.