Democratic lawmakers have faced eruptions of anger at town hall meetings across the country this week, as constituents have coupled their fury over President Donald Trump’s actions with deep frustration over what they see as a feckless Democratic response.
Only so far as they continue to hold and respect them. We’re now 0/3 on that front, so… yeah. It’s not impossible, but they’ll fight you every step of the way and then some. Creating/hijacking a third party and strategically contesting election will probably accomplish your goals faster. Remember that the only reason the GOP was taken over twice was because the party leadership approved of it.
Yeah people forget that the Democrat party doesn’t need to even hold primaries, let alone respect the outcome. The DNC admitted to pushing Hillary to the forefront and were the ones that dragged Biden out of retirement because it seemed like Bernie might win the second time. The good politicians seem like exceptions.
Need to start promoting working families type party.
Not just presidential matters. Local and state are much less fucked with. A 3rd party in first past the post just creates a split of neolib/socialists while the fascists remain united. Division in the American system is just a way to have the other party win. Republicans allowed the Tea party because that is what they wanted as well. Neolibs won’t allow a split progressive/socialist with the exception of Bernie (because how do you fuck with Vermont).
If you start local and strategically spread (or create a mass movement and go for the jugular) you can remove the neoliberals from the equation and make socialists and fascists the only two choices.
Or work to implement ranked choice voting. The more localities use it, the more comfortable people get with it (the primary anti-ranked choice argument is it’s “too confusing for voters”), the more chance it has to be adopted by more states beyond the current Maine and Alaska beachhead.
And. And work to implement ranked choice voting. The FPTP system is the root of all this. The reason you can’t realistically consider voting for a third party, and why those who did (or sat home since they had nothing realistic to vote for) handed power to Trump.
But all that will take time and is not going to help in the next couple of elections. So there also needs to be a short to medium term plan.
I’m not talking about Presidential primaries. I’m talking about state and local. Make it so the Democratic Party is full of progressives, socialists, social democrats, whatever your favorite brand of left-wing politics is. I’d be dammed careful about communists because that word is a fucking non-starter with the American electorate. Hell socialism is as well but it’s not as poisonous as communism. When the party is full of… I don’t know the proper term because every word I think to use (leftist? Lefties, maybe?) has been co-opted to mean a specific ideology. But make it so the Democratic Party as a whole leans further left, and those people have to be tapped to fill key roles because their presence is so large.
You are absolutely wrong about creating/hacking third party. Ross Perot couldn’t pull it off despite spending about 80% what the major parties spent and capturing nearly 19% of votes in a vastly more friendly media environment. In order to achieve just that lofty level of irrelevance, a third party candidate would have to spend about $350 million and buy Fox News or Facebook. Third party isn’t going to happen. Presidential primary isn’t the place to start.
This is way. Democrat voters want change, but they’re not speaking to the system in a language it understands. The party changes not from the top down, but from the bottom up. That only happens when people with different views stand for, and win, lower level positions. Every voice changed lower down on the totem pole changes the presure on the people making decisions further up. Ultimately enough movement lower down means the top eschalons are pushed out and replaced too.
Whether it’s possible to find enough candidates to start filling the party, I don’t know, but just focusing on the primaries (or lack thereof) for the top job is missing the wood for the trees.
I volunteered this election with our state house district committee of the Democratic party. The grassroots is effectively neutered and you can believe that they are carefully managed to be sure nothing rises up that the national party cannot control.
The Democrats are managed opposition.
Thank you for putting the effort in. The party apparatus isn’t going to want to change, but I’m not sure that it’s managed opposition as such, so much as those who are ‘in’ being happy with their lot and doing what they feel they need to to stop that being taken away.
There’s two ways to use that to change the situation, either demonstrate that their comfortable position will be taken away if they don’t change their politics, or take it away by finding a candidate you can rally enough support behind. Neither is easy, and both require getting people involved en-mass at the lowest levels of politics, which is going to be hard work with the party pulling against you. It’s not impossible though, AOC and Sanders are both candidates of a different stripe and have, so far, held their places. Imagine how different things would be if they were replicated even a few times?
The problem is that they’ll, again, fight you every step of the way. An ideological takeover will have to happen over their dead bodies, and meanwhile they’ll keep demanding concessions so they don’t expel you from the party and disallow you from running for primaries. The crux of the issue with the ideological takeover route is that this contradiction will lose you legitimacy in the eyes of your supporters as you’re forced into compromise after compromise in order not to alienate the neoliberals, and they’ll give you fucking nothing in return.
Uh… obviously you can’t win an election with only 19% of the vote?
That’s exactly my point. No third party candidate will ever do that well again because the environment that enabled him will never exist again. He had 20% of all TVs tuned to his little whiteboard fireside chats in an age when there was nothing else to do.
No third party that isn’t self-funded by a multi-billionaire is ever going to have the money to spend like a major party, but even if they did, they would never have 20% doing nothing but watching and listening for 30 minutes, but even if they did they will still fucking lose. Horribly. Without a single electoral vote. Just like Ross.
Ross did that well because of disappointment with the political establishment, which… gestures broadly. He also had clear issues that held back his campaign, issues that someone running for 2028 or 2032 will be able to fix. Also while the environment of 1992 won’t exist again, the environment of 2025 didn’t exist in 1992. In the words of (maybe) Winston Churchill: Never let a good crisis go to waste.
A Socialist party would not only not have a chance in hell, the votes it would siphon off would lead to a resounding victory for the Reich Wing. A strong Socialist candidate (or several) in the Democratic Primary wouldn’t win either, but would drag the debate to the left and force/enable the more moderate candidate to support the kinds of goals and programs that used to define the Democratic Party in order to win, without being labeled and dismissed as “Socialist” by swing voters. However, we’ve already seen what happened when leftists decided to sit out the General election because nobody was good enough for them.
At the presidential level, yes the DNC has been terrible with candidates. However they aren’t in charge of the other races. They can give money, but they can’t stop Socialists and other leftists running in primaries and winning them or general elections from school board to senator and everything in between. They can make it harder for these people to win, but they can’t stop or control city, county, or state elections. We need a base of elected officials pushing them to change their tack.
Okay I could be wrong, but can they not make up excuses bar whoever they don’t like from primaries? Or make up other excuses and run their own neoliberal candidate and split the vote anyway? They just… nominated Harris in 2024 so clearly they’re not obligated to even hold primaries.
Presidential primaries are the weird ones because they’re spread over all the states. Otherwise candidates just need to do whatever to get on the ballot(usually gather signatures) and then win the election. Parties can throw their weight behind one candidate in particular but that’s not the same as declaring a winner. AOC got into Congress by beating a party backed incumbent in a primary.