Frankly, the Democrats have done nothing but pander to people who hate them, who will never vote for them, and fucking LOVE their opposition for years now. If there is one thing to take away from the Trump campaigns, it's that pandering to an imaginary moderate is not nearly as effective as being really exciting to your base. All ceding ground to the opposition does is lead to disillusionment and apathy amongst the people who might vote for you. You win over no one with morally bankrupt, least common denominator bullshit.
What you are advocating for is the same bullshit that cost the Democrats the election in 2016, and in 2024. We've tried it your way and it is nothing but a losing strategy. People want progress, people want change. If a candidate can't at least have balls to lie about wanting that too, then they are unfit to win an election.
In that case, the base of the Democrats, as you seem to define it, is destined to be a permanent minority in national elections.
And maybe you are right. I'd love to see America move to 4 or more major parties. With the far-left and far-right of each separated out into their own parties. Would even settle for 3 parties.
They're really not a permanent minority, though. Obama's campaign promises (not to be confused with his actual politics once in office) demonstrate that positive, progressive change is a perfectly popular political position.
And frankly, that's all besides the point: The reason exciting candidates do so well (Trump, Obama) is because voter turnout in the US is abysmal. It's gotten better (because the Fascists are excited for Trump, and everyone else is at least a bit energized by "oh god we can't have the fascists win"), but it's still very true that if you could convince at a quarter of the nonvoters (half of the half that might vote for you) to show up to the polls, you'd have a blowout victory the likes of which haven't been seen since the Bill Clinton campaigns.
The Democrats have been playing a strategy that tries to win over the rational fringe of the Republican party, but it's becoming increasingly obvious to apparently everyone but the DNC that those people don't exist. The kind of person who can be convinced to vote for Trump (ESPECIALLY TWICE) are not the kinds of people the Democrats will ever win over without royally pissing off most of their voter base.
> Obama's campaign promises (not to be confused with his actual politics once in office) demonstrate that positive, progressive change is a perfectly popular political position.
But as you said, Obama didn’t govern the way he was perceived to have campaigned. And up and down this thread people express their disillusionment with him. Including you.
So I’m not sure how Obama campaigning to the left of how he governed makes the case that without Democrats moving to the center they can successfully turn out the number of supporters needs to win national elections. Unless we keep electing people then throwing them out next cycle because they didn’t govern like they campaigned (which is which I think we’re going to see for the foreseeable future)
Also this was almost 20 years ago. The country has gotten significantly more polarized since then. I’d make the case that since Obama the democratic part has failed to move to the center, but instead clung to identify politics. And in the case of presidential elections anointed the nominees rather than give citizens a real chance to choose them.
Hope I’m wrong, since Democrats don’t seem to be moving to the center and I also don’t want federal governments like this one. But I’m not convinced I am.
Obama won off his campaign. That suggests that enough people agreed with his platform to vote for him. He didn't win additional votes by shifting to the center: he shifted to the center after already having received said votes.
And polarization of the voter base helps that argument: people want real, radical change. On both sides of the political spectrum. The right is having their demands heard through the rise of Trump's fascist tendencies. The Democrats need to notice that the "moderate" Rebuplicans were more willing to vote for a fascist than for a moderate Democrat, and re-evaluate their platform.
> pandering to an imaginary moderate is not nearly as effective as being really exciting to your base
The takeaway should be there is no one size fits all.
Under Biden, donors pushed climate and identity politics that don’t work outside far-left Democrat strongholds. Then Kamala clumsily tried finding a centre in a multidimensional policy space which may not have a definable centre.
Mamdani won New York. But “moderates,” i.e. politicians who spoke to economic populism and don’t get distracted by the base, kept Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey. If we want to control national politics, we have to concede that West Virginia and Arizona voters don’t care about the same things as folks in Manhattan and San Francisco. That’s okay. We can embrace that diversity. But it also means we have to respect it and cut out the name calling because a promising candidate on the other side of the country doesn’t embrace your pet issue or identity language.
(Obama campaigned for Mamdani and Spannberger and Prop 50.)
> If we want to control national politics, we have to concede that West Virginia and Arizona voters don’t care about the same things as folks in Manhattan and San Francisco. That’s okay. We can embrace that diversity. But it also means we have to respect it and cut out the name calling because a promising candidate on the other side of the country doesn’t embrace your pet issue or identity language.
What you are advocating for is the same bullshit that cost the Democrats the election in 2016, and in 2024. We've tried it your way and it is nothing but a losing strategy. People want progress, people want change. If a candidate can't at least have balls to lie about wanting that too, then they are unfit to win an election.