Thursday, July 20, 2017

"By buying into a myth about why (Democrats) lost in 2016, they are ignoring the underlying math about what really happened."

Dream team: Any Canon voters here? 

As a contributor to The Guardian helpfully explains:

(Hillary) Clinton has largely kept a low profile since the election, occasionally sending Twitter barbs in Trump’s direction. The best case scenario for Democrats is for Clinton – and her family – to stay away. The wise thing for the party to do is to abandon the failed “Third Way” centrist politics that she and her husband have come to exemplify. Even so, the Democratic establishment appears to not be learning any lessons

Our emerging 9th district race will be instructive in this regard. If Dan Canon wins the primary, he'll be pressured to stop talking genuine issues and position himself in the center, which actually is the right, which is why he shouldn't.

But area Democrats have been non-democratic for so very long that their old Dixiecratic habits will be dying a slow, agonizing death.

Just so long as we agree these habits need to die.

Democrats Are Trying to Win the 2018 Midterms in All the Wrong Ways, by Steve Phillips (The Nation)

If there are 7 million Obama-to-Trump voters, why didn’t Trump’s vote total increase by 7 million?

It is quite possible that Democrats are going to spend nearly $1 billion trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. By buying into a myth about why they lost in 2016, they are ignoring the underlying math about what really happened—and not only misspending huge amounts of money, but setting themselves up to lose again, in the critical contests to come.

Many progressive politicians and pundits have bought into the notion that millions of people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 defected from the Democrats and voted for Donald Trump in 2016. The strategic premise flowing from this conclusion—that the Democrats can prevail in the congressional and presidential races to come by winning those voters back—is influencing how tens of millions of dollars are being spent and will continue to shape the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars in the mid-term elections next year. But as my colleagues at Democracy in Color and I point out in the new report “Return of the Majority Progress Report: Another Billion Dollar Blunder?,” the premise driving this strategy is ill-founded and incorrect ...

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