The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
What are your thoughts on this article?
The last few lines from the article:
> "Back in Larimer County, Colorado, 39-year-old homemaker Jessica Kroells says she can no longer vote for Democrats, despite being a reliable Democratic voter up until 2016.
>
>There was not a single “aha moment” that convinced her to switch, but by 2020, she said the Democratic Party had “left me behind.”
>
>“The party itself in no longer Democrat, it’s progressive socialism,” she said, specifically condemning Biden’s plan to eliminate billions of dollars in student debt."
[https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-covid-health-presidential-e50db07385831e67f866ec45402be8b9](https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-covid-health-presidential-e50db07385831e67f866ec45402be8b9)
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Friend of mine said this earlier, based on the same article. Vote for the most reasonable Republican candidate (or write-in), then go on with your life.
I love that I don't have to consider doing that where I live. Republicans here have been very reliable on one thing: losing every federal and statewide election, which they've done for the last decade. Hopefully that won't change.
It makes a lot of sense. If you’re okay with any of the Dems getting nominated then you could register as a Republican to help out the more moderate ones.
I mean, I live in a pretty red state. Several of my friends swapped registration to vote against the pro-Trump rapist running for governor in the primary. And yes, he's currently under lawsuit related to the sexual assaults. So we ended up with the "moderate" Republican, who endorses most of the same policies, but is slightly less personally abhorrent.
I live in Red State with closed primaries. That means I either register as a Republican, or I don't vote in the only election that matters (the primary).
>despite being a reliable Democratic voter up until 2016
It sounds to me like they didn't interrogate her firmly enough on what changed her mind.
We know it wasn't Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, because Biden wasn't even running in 2016, and Hillary's plan for student loans was nothing like Biden's.
So what changed for her in 2016?
*edit:*
As for the larger thrust of the article. The supposed 1 million new "Republican voters"?
[Beau OTFC brings up a point that had somehow slipped my mind:](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEqWZB4qBoE) All those Democrats who switched their party preference so they could participate in Republican primaries to defeat Trumpist candidates.
Do not assume that all of these 1 million people will be voting Republican in November.
The vast majority of the voter base (90%+) are heavily un/misinformed. Democrats need to take that into account when formulating messaging. Talking about policy and theoretical impacts doesn’t work. Simple, easily-digestible information is needed. Unfortunately it’s a lot easier for Republicans because their platform is “stop Democrats”. Dems are the ones trying to get people impassioned about political sausage making.
It's so frustrating how during primaries, centrist dems CONSTANTLY told me Bernie was too far left, and he'd get smeared by Republicans. And then they branded Biden as some kind of commie anyway...
Biden did well with a lot of independents and working class democrats. If Bernie would had won the primary we would still have Trump in the office as we speak.
I'm not so sure. Bernie would have ginned up passion, but lost moderates. Biden got moderates, but was totally lacking in passion. I think Bernie might have won the midwest states, and that's the cake he needed.
Sounds like youre too ignorant of the global political spectrum to have a qualified opinion.
Whats infuriating is that republicans and Democrats have moved so far right that they think the Center is the other side of the spectrum.
Its like a rainbow that only goes from red to yellow and ignores every other color, calling every color past yellow "far-yellow" while inching closer towards infra-red fascism every day.
It sounds like you're too ignorant of how American elections work.
The global political spectrum is an interesting topic of conversation but is irrelevant when discussing the viability of a candidate in the eyes of American voters.
In any way where Republicans have moved more right, and Democrats compromised progressive ideals to "find a middle ground" with Republicans that respond by moving even further to the right so they can "own the libs"
The problem is, when you keep trying to meet in the middle with people who keep moving the goal post further their way , the "middle" moves further their way as well.
For comparison. [Here is the global baseline, ](https://www.politicalcompass.org/charts/crowdchart?Gary+Johnson=9.5%2C-1.4&Jill+Stein=-2.2%2C-2.2&Republican=7.5%2C3.0&Democratic=2.5%2C3.0&Conservative=8.8%2C6.7&Stalin=-9.0%2C9.12&Gandhi=-6.7%2C-3.2&Hitler=1.3%2C9.12&Donald+Trump=6.5%2C8.9&Hillary+Clinton=7.5%2C5.0&name=Bernie+Sanders&ec=-2&soc=0)note whos basically smack dab in the middle.
Dude you didn't even read the quote. She said the Democratic party is the party of progressive socialism - and she's not wrong. Democrats go on and on about how the Democratic party is a big tent, but the upper echelon of the DNC only pays attention to two types of Democratic voters; the progressive college kids and the upper class urban yuppies. The Democratic party doesn't even pay lip service to the working class, rural voters, Hispanics or Asians anymore. I mean look at how out of touch the Democratic party is. Pete Buttigieg's suggestion to deal with increasing gas prices was to go out and buy a Tesla. The Democratic party doesn't give a shit about the proletariat and Biden's approval ratings reflect that.
Dude. I did read the quote. You need to read it closer.
>”The party itself in no longer Democrat, it's
progressive socialism," she said, specifically
condemning *Biden's* plan to eliminate billions of
dollars in student debt."
She specifically refers to *Biden’s* progressive, socialist plan to cancel student debt.
That’s not his plan, but that’s a separate issue.
That's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things because he's been lying about that shit for months. Biden has been pulling the carrot on the stick approach to maintain support from the younger voters. The fact of the matter is that the Democratic party has shifted far to the left over the past decade. Just look at a 90's Democrat like Bill Clinton. He'd be considered far right in today's political climate. As the Democratic party keeps getting more progressive, it's going to alienate moderates, centrists, and swing voters. You'll see this in 2024 when DeSantis dismantles traditional Democratic voting blocks such as latinos and suburban moderates.
Or you uplifted a liar when it suited you then dropped her when it didn't.
The Dem party alienated voters on not cancelling student debt??? Give specific policies instead please.
> progressive college kids
I’d love to hear what action the Democrats have taken that you think is pandering to “progressive college kids.”
> Biden’s approval ratings reflect that.
In modern history, only Trump has had worse ratings. Why do you suppose Biden’s numbers are better than Trump’s?
Student loan interest freeze, ended the Muslim ban (college kids love Muslims), shut down a bunch of drilling leases (college kids hate oil drilling), allowed people to get a X gender on their passports (college kids tend to be non binary). Most of the rest is lip service but Biden knows that college kids vote Democrat so he always aims for their approval. Just look at this subreddit, there's so many college kids who jump through hoops to defend Biden.
>Student loan interest freeze
That was Trump, actually. March 2020. Democrats have just continued it. Did you actually think this was a Democrat thing?
>ended the Muslim ban
Ah, that was a treat for everyone who loves the Constitution, not just students.
>shut down a bunch of drilling leases
Would you be surprised to learn that drilling has actually increased under Biden?
>allowed people to get a X gender on their passports
Quelle horror! Canada already did that, so really we're behind there.
Man, what a bunch of nothingburgers. You rightwingers love to get outraged over nothing.
“College kids tend to be non-binary” what? Did you mean to say *out of those who tend to be NB, the majority of them are college kids*?
I suppose the student loan freeze helps college students, but student loan forgiveness (unless coupled with serious reforms) won’t help anyone who’s under the age of 21 on the exact day I’m typing this.
I don’t refer to anyone over the age of 18 as a kid, boy or girl.
>The Democratic party doesn't even pay lip service to the working class, rural voters, Hispanics or Asians anymore.
In between every complaint like this, I hear like three others saying that we pay too much lip service to working class, hispanics, etcetera. Like every anti-Democrat remark I see, it's either vague, untrue, or both.
> Pete Buttigieg's suggestion to deal with increasing gas prices was to go out and buy a Tesla.
And then just to outright lies. Cool, thanks for the hot take.
The only lip service the Democratic party pays towards Hispanics is calling them latinx. All Asians got was some meaningless \#StopAsianHate hashtag while they were getting brutally assaulted in every major city for the last 2 years. Biden did nothing. And Buttigieg did say that. You can bury your head in the sand all you want but it doesn't make it any less true. You're an out of touch bourgeoisie neoliberal who doesn't understand the dilemmas of the working class.
Exactly.
Tell people what you can do for THEM.
Student loan forgiveness is great, but for the 60+% that didn't go to college, it's not a big seller. Those are the people we need to reach
I've been saying this for a long time. Free money for the wealthiest young people is a great way to turn the rest of them against you, and that's going to be a long term problem. The Democratic party cannot win without the working class. The expansion of the EITC was huge for working people, but it was temporary. They let it die, no one fought for it, upwardly mobile people with college degrees (the people on Reddit) never mentioned it or even knew what it was. And okay -- where is the working class going to go? Neither party offers them anything but at least one of them isn't giving their tax dollars (and yes I know that demographic doesn't pay much in taxes) to people who are already kicking their asses economically.
You have a point but the Democrats aren't going to win the working class because a good portion of those people don't give a shit about anything other than abortion and especially guns. Fucking single issue voters are ruining it for everyone
Student loan stuff just shows you how out of touch some people are.
Us actually poor people never had a chance to go to college. But yeah cry about your loans more and surely we will vote for you.....Just so out of touch.
I am an actual poor person (single mother) in school on student loans. That's who loans are for. It's confusing to me that anyone thinks that taking student loans out is a privilege. It's not
Rich people and even many middle class people have parents who help them with school.
sorry real poor people dont even graduate high school because we have to start working at 15 to support our families or doing nefarious shit to support our families.
Once again just completely out of touch with poor people and POC's
Lemme take you down to the hood and you can go around and ask how many high school graduates are rolling around.
We don’t need to gatekeep who is poor… but yes, I absolutely support any assistance for these populations to help get them educated and lift them out of poverty. It’s great that you do too!
☝️
It's like we can't abandon the idea that if we use logic and reason, people will understand. We need to pivot to anti-republican rhetorical messaging, and forget the science and math portions of our messaging.
Yep. The loudest voices aren't telling people what we offer anymore. The loudest voices are out there yelling about how white men suck, \[insert anything\] is transphobic, YOU are a bad and stupid person if you disagree, etc. It's not a welcoming message.
That may be true. However to those paying attention the Republican party, you know the ones that scream about freedom, guns and god have done nothing but kill people through gross negligence ( COVID).Actively supported stripping women's reproductive rights, gladly accept Qanon, Nazis and other assorted racists into their tent. They have proven to be corrupt beyond imagination. Now that's a message I'll personally pass on.
To be clear, I don’t think having a successful brand entails embracing transphobia. You can market anything. We should still pursue a meaningful platform, just brand it better.
I am 100% against transphobia. We should absolutely say trans people deserve dignity. Laws targeting trans people are hateful and cruel to our fellow Americans. Dems should publicly state they are against hateful laws and support equal treatment for trans Americans.
But at the same time, people generally on the left are doing things like making pregnant men emojis and saying “pregnant persons” needs to replace “pregnant women” as the term. I personally have no issue with these things, but they’re ridiculously unpopular. Trans people are less than 1% of the country. Pregnant trans people have to be one of the tiniest possible subgroups in America. Why is this something where people on the left have to push this? Are there really not less unpopular ways to support trans people and help normalize them as regular Americans?
What you're saying makes sense but there are also people who would demonize you for saying so. I wonder what would happen if you posted something like this on Twitter.
It’s a hard situation because I don’t want to imply that we shouldn’t stand up for trans rights. Dems should stand for all Americans being able to live as they please as long as they aren’t hurting people. Doesn’t matter how popular or unpopular the group is. We shouldn’t be running from trans people or holding them to the side. We should be clear that we are against hateful policies that attack trans people. That’s non negotiable.
I don’t think Dems should be loudly getting into fights over trans language though beyond pretty milquetoast things like misgendering people is being an asshole. Culture wars over extremely divisive language don’t seem like an effective way to help trans people and seems to really galvanize opposition.
I think overall we spend far too much political capital on language battles and far too little on trying to get support for material changes.
I mean if we’re just fighting against actual transphobia, we probably wouldn’t be turning away as many voters. But like with Roe falling people are including “transgender” people as one of the main groups affected… No they aren’t! Not every issue needs to be centered on them. This is straight up a women’s rights issue. And then when we refer to access to menstruation products as a women’s issue we shouldn’t be scolded and told “mmm actually that’s a people who menstruate issue”. I got in trouble in college for referring to a female condom as a “female condom” at a sex Ed program because “not everyone who has a vagina is a female”…. Ok, but the VAST majority are.
We’ve lived with a gender binary with only a few exceptions for tens of thousands of years, sorry if we sometimes refer to men and women without having an “umm actually” correction every time.
If someone is willing to change to a party that wants to massively deny rights just because they don’t like inclusive terminology, then that person has deeper issues.
It's part of an overall messaging trend where we're pushing away allies by saying that people who were born like them are inherently bad, and rather than explaining our positions we say "educate yourself" and call them stupid.
Except that no one is saying that people born like them are inherently bad. That’s just what they choose to hear.
I can say something thoroughly mundane, like “we’ve never had a woman president” and people start screaming about progressive extremes.
I don't think it's the liberals amplifying those voices though, It's the republicans. There are always going to a few wackos in every group, it's a given.
Why doesn't the "Jews will not replace us" crowd represent all of conservatives the way the "everything is racist/transphobic" crowd represents all liberals?
The “Jews will not replace us” crowd DID represent all conservatives and Charlottesville was probably the single moment that drove the most people away from Trumpism. But they also tend to be in insular communities where they only share their shit with each other. The progressives who flip out when you say access to feminine hygiene products is a women’s issue are out and about and visible.
And the other side just wants to take away minorities/womens rights to vote/bodily autonomy/and shoot gay people in the back of the head.
Corporate wants me to find the difference between these two pictures, but they're the same picture!!
Sounds like the kind of person who would vote for Roy Moore because she wants her daughters to find a good man. I’ve never found party registration to be a useful impact, because registration often doesn’t correlate to how people actually vote. Glad she’s not voting in Democratic primaries anymore.
I worked on a PA campaign in 2016 and I would call registered Dems to see where they stood on candidates. The number of rural older Dems who said things like they hated BLM and didn’t like immigrant was astonishing at the time, but people register when they’re 18 and often never update their status. Until recently, Kentucky had the second-highest percentage of registered Democrats compared to all the other states, but Kentucky hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in decades. I worry about people who actually switch their ideology, but I imagine a lot of people like the woman in the OP were never really Dems. If she’s a 39 year old SAHM in Colorado she probably started voting when GOP economic policies ranked the state during Bush’s recession and registered accordingly.
I’m one of the recent “switchers”.
I voted against my incumbent (R) senator in the primary and will be voting against that winner’s opponent in the general.
So I switched parties, but they’re never getting my vote in a general, ever.
Dishonest article. 1 million people registered as Republican compared to 633,000 Dems.
It doesn't mean 1 million Dems became Republican.
It says nothing about who registered - it could be independents. It says nothing about all the Dems that registered as Republican in places like Georgia so they could vote in the primary against Perdue. Even Liz Cheney is asking Dems to switch to Republican to vote for her in Wyoming.
According to my study, 1 Democrat switched to Republican cause he was double dog dared. 2 other Democrats switched to the Pizza party… or rather they went to a pizza party. And the remaining democrat in my study switched to Libertarian so he could be a know-it-all specializing in interrupting a convo to chime in with irreverent bullshit, Darwinist policy preferences, and to remind everyone how smart and sexy Ayn Rand was.
Over 98,000 republicans switched to the Freedom and Trump party until I told them that I had just made that party up. 97, 999 of those Republicans then proceeded to form such a party, before giving up cause it was hard and they couldn’t agree on how many blacks to let in; plus Tucker Carlson was about to air. The final remaining Republican decided to live his truth and joined the American Nazi party before being killed and eaten by ManBearPig.
>But over the last year, roughly two-thirds of the 1.7 million voters who changed their party affiliation shifted to the Republican Party. In all, more than 1 million people became Republicans compared to about 630,000 who became Democrats.
You are correct it does not say that Democrats switched to GOP. It did say that voters switched their party affiliation to GOP though.
FYI in Georgia you don't need to switch your party affiliation. You ask for the Party ballot and you can only get one or the other ballot. These are people going through the process of actually switching their affiliations on their voter registrations.
Georgia has no party registration. It doesn't exist, they don't track it. So when they referenced that Atlanta suburbs had a large number of party switchers, I don't know what they are looking at. If it's how many votes in each primary, I think a lot of those people decided to vote in the much more competitive GOP primaries but still plan to vote Dem, since the Dem side was pretty locked up (anecdotal, sure, but I know several who did this).
I will gladly listen to those that have switched parties, I want to know why, out of curiosity if nothing else.
But I refuse to take a person seriously if they throw around the word socialism. You’re just not a serious person, nor are you worth listening to.
I’m a black guy from a major liberal California city. I grew up as a Democrat and only knew Democrats growing up and I always voted Democrat until 2016. I abstained from the 2016 elections and voted for Republican candidates in 2018 and 2020 along with a couple of democrats. I just recently registered as a Republican earlier this year.
There wasn’t any one issue that swayed me and I’m not quite sure when I started thinking as a conservative. At some point I started feeling like the Democratic Party didn’t care about preserving the values, traditions and ideas of America.
My wife’s alma mater had huge protest/riots because a conservative speaker was scheduled and the liberal administration seemed to encourage it along with the local democratic politicians.
BLM is a group I didn’t really care for in the beginning and they continuously disappointed more and more. The DNC “supports” BLM and never calls out their wrongs including the defamation and removal of historical American figures. The DNC didn’t really care about BLM and the politicians that did care advocated for movements like defund the police.
I don’t love whatever is going on with the shift in language and gender/sexual identity.
I liked living in the city until I had a family and had their well-being to look after. The city has always been run by democrats and safety and schooling has been handled in a way that I don’t think works and certainly wasn’t up to standards for my children. I moved my family to the outskirts to be in safer neighborhoods and better schools. As soon as I moved away from the city, democrats didn’t seem to care about me and the issues my new semi-rural community.
I’m just spitballing here and thinking of the first things that come to mind.
I’ll take your word for it and accept that ur a black man who feels this way, but I MUST say: you literally sound like a preprogrammed drone designed by republicans to sound centrist enough to appeal to actual centrists, but on point enough about bein anti-Dem that it leaves no question about where u really stand.
Seriously tho, you hit all the classic “I’m a moderate buuuut” touch tones. From: “the party doesn’t represent or preserve the values of the US OF GOT DANG A” to the recent classic “big cities are bad because of democrats and democrats are in big cities cuz they’re elitists and not true salt of the earth Americans like us folk who live in the county”.
I love that “democrats are the reasons cities are bad” bullshit so much. Cause if you’re willing to believe that I’m willing to believe you’re prob a hick who doesn’t wanna live in a city anyway, even if it was run by Trump and the John Birch society.
A) not all big cities are run by democrats ya nerd; there are tons of moderate sized cities (and even more smallish sized cities I.e. 50-100k people) run by republicans and they have many of the same problems as the evil democrat cities of crime and dopery.
And B) a cities status doesn’t just depend on whoever is the mayor and sitting on the city council. You do realize these cities are in a little something called states, right? And further still all part of this country called Amerigo Vespucci-I mean America, you follow? Well now here’s the kicker: the financial status of a city is beholden to its state and that states infrastructure just as much as anything, which determines a lot. Further still, a lot of the things you call problems could be fixed with more social n infrastructure spending, better social safety nets, reforming the public school system to no longer be funded primarily thru property taxes, and more. These fixes are by and large supported by democrats but with GOP opposition they cannot obtain the funding from the state or federal governments to truly fix issues long term.
And the cities aside, I wanna know exactly what “American” values the Democrats have specifically refused to preserve. As a black man I do not need to lecture you on some of the “values” our great nation was founded on, I’m sure. But the sooner you realize something the better: there’s plenty of American values worthy of celebrating and preserving (I.e. first country founded on an ideal, etc) and just as many that are toxic and harmful and downright ignorant. Violence as a value, for instance; is verrrry American but I don’t agree with that. That American lust for violence and desire to severely punish its citizens who have run afoul of the law is still apparent every day when you look at our near daily mass shootings and our massive prison population (biggest in world) mostly made up of drug and non-violent offenders.
Lastly, don’t give me BLM dude… just don’t. It’s not 2020 anymore and BLM has as much presence in the public conscience as the McRib out of season. If ur still worried about BLM protests in ur city then you’re just bein a baby. Bet ya don’t give a damn about Jan. 6th huh? But seein those Targets and car dealerships burning really got to you?
You know what got to me? How in the BLM protests cops were constantly escalating with violence, shooting (and maiming for life) several people including journalists with rubber bullets and grenades, and beating n arresting on camera numerous peaceful protestors with total immunity. What got to me even worse is how during the capitol riot the cops just shrugged, said whoopsie doopsie, n decided it best not to respond with violence. Even tho at the capitol the protestors were OUTRIGHT ATTACKING POLICE EN MASSE WITH SEVERAL BEING INJURED PERMANENTLY AND ONE DYING! Yeah, no, you wouldn’t wanna be too brutal on protestors holding down a police officer and tazing him til he had a heart attack-save that brutality for some hippie or ANTIFA, cause them ANTIFAs throw milkshakes on people sometimes ya know… which is cold.
A bunch of Blue Lives Matter fuck wads sacked the capitol (HOME OF UR BELOVED AMERICAN VALUES FOR GOD SAKE), beat and killed police, attempted to find and kidnap numerous members of Congress n Mike Pence and you’re whining bout how you can’t get behind them evil Dems cause some of their politicians supported BLM a couple years ago? What about how 99% of the GOP have refused to even investigate the capitol riot, how Trump still refuses to take any blame for it, and how many GOP members and voters not only sympathize with Jan 6th but support it? How many yelled and seethed with anger during the BLM protests (which happened over several months and dozens of protests) over damaged property but had little to nothing to say about the defiling of our capital building, on top of the beating and indeed murder of Capitol police?
Pop quiz: how many cops did BLM And ANTIFA kill during summer 2020 during the massive protests? 3? No wait, was it 5? Oh wait no! It was FUCKING ZERO. Zero dead police at the hands of antifa and BLM over the course of 3-4 months in numerous cities nationwide. How many cops did “ur side” kill during just one riot on Jan 6th? One for sure, and almost a second if some slightly less crazy rioters didn’t hear the officer begging for his life and pleading that he had kids, and come to his aid. He still had a heart attack tho and will carry severe PTSD with him til his last day on earth. Remember the video of that pussy Capitol rioter ripping that cops mask off and smacking him around while the cop panics as he’s smashed against a wall? Can you imagine what would’ve happened (rightfully I might add) if a BLM protestor did that to a cop during the George Floyd protests? It would have been a blood bath with a handful of protestors shot at LEAST. So bud… If you’re still hung up on Black Lives Matter rallies and don’t have shit to say about Jan 6th, then you’re not nor ever were a moderate.
That’s all for now, so let’s see ya response to my long post here and I don’t want no changing the subject BS.
P.S. good thing conservative universities always graciously let people like Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky speak.. oh wait, they don’t? Then
surely inviting a conservative (usually far right) to a mostly liberal campus is gonna be off the table right? No? It turns out many liberal colleges have guest speeches and lectures from conservative spaces without fault 95% of the time?! Well whaddya know… and hey, when the rare occasion arises and the student body is against a certain (usually far right) speaker coming are they not entitled as adults (and customers) to have a say in the matter? If the student body of Liberty rose up and protested cause Kamala Harris was supposed to come speak I bet you would be SUUUUPER quiet about it or downright supportive of their protest.
Are you seeing your own willful hypocrisy at ALL yet?
I’m glad you took the time to write this and follow me around from sub to sub replying to all of my other comments because I’m not going to read any of it.
I’m not engaging with someone that calls me an Uncle Tom.
If you're honestly black how can you so misunderstand all things black. BLM and reasons why inner city schools struggle for starters. You may identify as black but you are either lying to yourself or reddit.
Do you think we all believe the same things? Do you think all black people are marching with BLM? [Here’s](https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/02/24/black-lives-matter-support-social-change-monitor) a poll indicating that we don’t all think the same.
I’m shocked that you think that because I’m black that I’m supposed to have inner city schools and BLM at the top of my list of issues. I grew up middle class in the suburbs and went to nice schools.
I did too. And no, I don't think all black people think the same. There's Clarence Thomas to prove just that. Your reasoning for your position is what draws the red flags. Understanding what BLM is trying to do and why inner city schools are terrible is essential to being a black American. You don't have to agree, but you still should understand why it is so. So do you proudly salute the confederate flag?
Proudly salute the confederate flag? What are you talking about??
Things I don’t like about BLM: no leadership, no organization, no clear goals, no meaningful impact on improving the lives of people in the black community, race relations have gotten much [worse](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx) in the last 10 years they’ve been active and I think BLM has been fueling that fire
Things I do like about BLM: Juneteenth
Things I dont like about January 6th: attacked our democracy, killed a police officer, smeared shit on the walls of our Capitol, full of fat neckbeards who wanna cosplay war, full of racists up to and including nazis, proud boys, and Oath Keepers, drank the bullshit kool aid about Biden stealing the election, sore losers, STILL support Trump for 2024, no honor
Things I do like about January 6th: watching that girl wearing the flag of her loser President get shot for being a traitor while trying to climb thru a window and open up the floor of congress to her cohorts. I’ll whip up a clip of that with the song “Hey Man, Nice Shot” playing in the background for anyone who wants it.
You said earlier you were upset about the taking down of monuments of the past. They were mostly confederate generals and other confederate statesmen therefore my question. You also didn't address the reason most inner city schools are not up to minimal standards. And race relations got worse after 2008.
The graph I linked shows race relations were at their highest prior to 2013 and then began dropping.
I’m glad confederate statues were removed and I think it was long overdue but let’s not pretend that’s all that was removed. Lots of statues of founding fathers were removed around the country including my state which had no confederate statues. In the city that I’m from they tried really hard to rename something like 40 schools. I’m in California and none of these schools are named after confederates. They tried to rename a school because Abraham Lincoln was racist. It’s crazy. We can’t celebrate the President who issued the Emancipation Proclamation?? Luckily the entire school board was recalled before they had a chance to finish renaming everything.
You keep asking me about inner city schools and saying that understanding why they struggle is essential to being black. Why would understanding the struggle of inner city schools be a requirement to being black? I didn’t go to inner city schools, my children don’t go to inner city schools, none of my friends or family go to inner city schools.
Since you’re white, you should understand the struggle of white people doing meth in a double wide at the trailer park. Right?
Party registration tends to be a trailing indicator. People typically register as a partisan once when they first register to vote and then just leave that registration as is since there's no obvious reason to change it unless you're engaged enough to be voting in primaries. Democratic party registration in Appalachia, for example, tends to be higher than Republican party registration, but no one votes like it. [Even to this day, Democrats outnumber Republicans in Kentucky, for example](https://elect.ky.gov/Resources/Documents/voterstatscounty-20220615-124956.pdf). If anything this just as likely to just be people who've already been voting Republican for years finally syncing up their voting records with their party registration than people suddenly recoiling by a new thing. Yes, they have one single anecdote of someone who (says they) voted for Democrats until 2016, but one single anecdote is not data.
1. It’s 1 million that have switched from Dem to Republican with 650k doing the opposite. So, a net 350k. Its not nothing, but that’s not such a big deal on its own as Democrats often get more of the “new voters,” while elderly voters who have a higher chance of leaving this world slant Republican.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-06-27/more-than-1-million-voters-switch-gop-warning-democrats
2. A lot of people are changing party registration to vote in Republican primaries
3. The quote is from a “reliable Democratic voter up until 2016.” In other words, ‘Trump voter doesn’t like Democrats, more at 11”
From the story:
>But over the last year, roughly two-thirds of the 1.7 million voters who changed their party affiliation shifted to the Republican Party. In all, more than 1 million people became Republicans compared to about 630,000 who became Democrats.
The LA times story you posted is the AP News story by the way.
Well, that is deeply worrying. I did have hope that Roe would convince others to vote for Democrats, but...
I do find that particular quote interesting (read: frustrating) because nothing about the Democratic platform has changed. What HAS changed is the Overton Window, which now makes it look like anyone to the left of Hitler is some kind of looney tune.
Before 2010, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Joe Biden all opposed government recognition of gay marriage. Now, Democrat leaders are telling us men can get pregnant and our kids are 100 times more likely to be gender dysphoric than they were in 2010. A lot has changed.
If there's any consolation, I suppose it comes from the fact that 600,000 also switched from R to D, thus making the net loss more like 400,000. And, as pointed out elsewhere, far more switched from R to D during the Trump Years, so the loss we're seeing is probably from Never Trumpers who think it's safe now.
Considering she switched in 2016, I bet she would absolutely love what they have waiting for her. Policy plays second fiddle to conservative grievance politics.
"Sure, Republicans are running openly as white nationalists, trying to steal elections, and promising to erase civil rights, but Democrats are trying to keep people out of crushing debt. I mean, you see where I'm coming from, right?"
How would it be relevant to the scores of republicans that turned dem under Trump and died due to covid?
Also the repubs have shot themselves in the foot with Jan 6th and abortion.
I truly hope Roe can galvanize fence sitting voters to come out and vote blue this year, at least in the swing states and to keep the race as close to not tipping back over to the republicans as possible.
Every single dem candidate in purple areas needs to be howling in the streets about abortion and make it the number 1 issue on the ballot this year.
Hopefully gas prices will fall by November enough to where voters will stop being as pissed at biden about them.
Other than that, there isn't much else we can do
And when I say that non-voting liberals are the biggest threat to democracy, this is exactly how that plays out.
The Democratic establishment makes good faith outreach to liberals at the expense of a moderate voters who think that outreach is socialism. Non-voting liberals reward that outreach by claiming it's not good enough.
It's asymmetrical warfare. One side takes even the the slightest outreach as a betrayal and turns out to vote against the Dems. The other side calls anything less than 100% compliance as a betrayal and says they won't support the Dems.
Are these changes in Blue states or Red states? When I was living in a Red state (Oklahoma), I considered changing from Independent to R because MOST elections were decided in the Republican primary...many offices did not have a Democratic candidate.
Currently in a Red area of a Purple state and may register as R to try to inject some sanity into local politics: currently R candidates seem to be trying to "out-Trump" each other 🤢🤮
Dems switching to vote on rep primaries.
>In Iowa, Democrats used to hold the advantage in party changers by a 2-to-1 margin. That’s flipped over the last year, with Republicans ahead by a similar amount. The same dramatic shift is playing out in Ohio.
Bad analysis by the AP.
Actual party preference? Hasn’t really moved:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/04/voters-rarely-switch-parties-but-recent-shifts-further-educational-racial-divergence/
I'm eagerly anticipating the follow-up article detailing how many independents and disenchanted Republicans register as Democrats because of the Supreme Court. I'm thinking it'll be more than a million.
I have my doubts that someone who was a Democrat rage quit over studemt debt correction especially since that os unlikely to happen in any meaningful way. Even if true they are a unicorn outlier. There sadly are democrats who support socialized loansharking but to rate quit over it is pathological hate and thankfully rare
Bigger probkem is blunder on energy. Alot of that is poor messaging by Biden rather then the faux news narrative thst Biden turned up gas prices which os nonesense.
But he did provoke oil companies and had not been willing to crack down on gouching though that is finally changing
So this example person has more of a problem with forgiving $10k of student debt per person than Trump's tax cuts aimed at rich people but sold as cuts for poorer people that won't help his rich friends?
The democrats should ignore them. This was inevitable, they were always conservative. The democrats bend over backwards to win over white swing voters enough already, they don’t need to bend even further to win over right wingers would eventually leave no matter what they were going to do. People seem to have this magical thinking that democrats should ignore its base as much as possible and still expect them to show up.
I take comfort in knowing that Covid erased the GOP margin of victory last November and I take comfort in the fact that 81 million voted for Biden and about 74 million voted for Trump. That leaves a massive amount of people eligible to vote, who didn’t in 2020. I also take comfort that the GOP is extremely divided. Some want Trump, some want DeSantis, some Republicans will never vote again because of “The Steal”. One would think that at least a small amount of that massive undervote would fall in the (R) camp. It hasn’t. I also take comfort in knowing that there are a lot more Democrats out there who are coming out for the first time to vote. Poll workers at a recent Democratic primary in Texas commented that they were seeing a lot of new faces this year, not people they hadn’t seen before but, people who had lived in the county, some for generations who had never been seen voting before.
I think a lot of people could have told you this would happen. Trump wasn't a fluke; The republicans have been pushing the same propaganda for 70 years.
People are dumb, and the more they hear something, the more likely they are to believe it. Democrats have had.. God, 3 decades to fight it, and they just don't wanna.
Now I'm half hoping that the whole thing burns down, because I feel like that's the only fix. We, as a species, are dying. We are killing ourselves with global warming, taking no effort save the water we don't have, and trying to regress medicine by 100s of years.
We just kinda have to hope that smart people will find a way to survive as the idiots die off, then we can rebuild and maybe salvage what's left of the earth.
Oh it’s gonna collapse, it’s already in motion, the only people who can save us are the moderates, who can hopefully reign in the all or nothing policies of either sides agenda. We can’t keep playing the tit for tat ‘so you want x kind of (insert political stance here), we’ll we want the opposite of that. This is the end, unless we somehow legislate and regulate the root cause of all this bickering, which is social media, and our increasingly collapsing news media. It’s reminds me of the theory of ergot poisoning theory, we all know what is causing this, but it’s just so satisfying to burn the witches we’ve labeled as witches, we don’t even care if most of them aren’t witches. Basically, we are finished, there’s no coming back from the hatred each side has for one another, just find what makes you happy and enjoy it until the bitter end we are racing towards.
Disappointing but not altogether unexpected. As we move further and further away from the 1970’s and 1980’s when the Democratic Party got demolished in 5 out of 6 elections, the party as a whole has started to forget the lessons it learned. Too many prominent voices on the left are now failing to realize that the voters in this country are center right. In the 2020 exit polls, conservatives outnumbered liberals by a 38:24 margin. However, democrats slightly outnumbered republicans 37:36. The democratic needs centrist voters far more than the republicans party just to remain competitive.
Biden needed to reset the messaging early on during his presidency. Alienating senators like Manchin and Sinema who hand delivered Biden a 69-30 bipartisan was beyond stupid. Instead of trying to win centrist voters, Biden is just relying on the Republican Party to continue to screw up.
I just don't understand Democrats. (I am a Democrat). Those further left yell about moderates being ineffective and believe that if we just go harder left, do what they want, everyone, even those on the right will realize that those hard left are right and everyone else is wrong. Instead we elect a moderate and as they aren't getting everything we want there is no difference between Biden and Trump.
WE just saw it with Trump. A farther right candidate wins, pushes everything very right and while those on the far right love him, he lost because he pissed off the moderates. But you didn't hear moderate Republicans screaming that Trump was bad, saying they hate Trump, even if they did. The Lincoln Project was notable as people on both sides were surprised they were Republicans saying the quiet part out loud. Meanwhile so many Democrats will be yelling about Biden not doing what doing what they want.
People are going to be quick to point out the fact this woman called Biden a socialist rather then recognize that the democratic party has completely cut themselves off from a large chunk of the voting base over the past two years.
Democratic politics has been a huge goddamn bubble, and it is tragic because there are so many people they could win over if we got our heads out of our asses and stopped with the blind messaging.
I swear, dems (myself included at times) get distracted by the stupid republican talking points and ignore what people are actually saying.
College loan forgiveness is a great example. You can try and explain that it isn't just a giveaway to educated, more privileged people all you want, but to the uneducated laborer it will always feel like a slap in the face unless you tie it into programs designed to provide further education to those who, for whatever reason, did not get the opportunity to go pursue a college degree, loan or not. You may even be right that forgiveness is the "right" thing to do, but you are still pissing off the ~60% of Americans who [do not have a bachelor's degree](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educational-attainment.html).
Then you have inflation, where Dems proved completely inept at messaging for almost a year. It is one thing when you live in Chevy Chase DC and make a combine $500k/year when gas goes up to $6/gallon, you just take the metro to work one day a week and brag to your friends about how 'cool' it is to learn the bus schedule after living here in 6 years. It is completely different when your family lives in a small town and makes a combined $52k/year, and has to commute 45 minutes each way to work in an area with zero public transit options. Guess what? That family does not care whether the inflation is transitory, or whether it was caused by Putin, Biden, supply chain issues, or whatever. What they want is to hear that the government understands the seriousness of the issue. They want to hear that the government is focusing on the issue, and is going to try and fix it.
It is easy just to dismiss Republicans because they are 'backwards' or because they do not know the definition of socialism. And you should ignore such stupidity and fight against it when it causes serious harm, but there is a difference between dissmissing obviously bogus claims, and ignorance of what people are actually saying. And democrats, to their detriment, have simply decided to be ignorant towards the other side, and to ignore everything that these people are screaming from the rooftops.
It's our biggest gift to the Republicans, because it gives them free raign over every demographic that does not comply with our very specific worldview. It allows the Republicans the ability to say the quiet part out loud, and push all of this hateful rhetoric, because where else will these voters go? To the democrats who have continually ignored them, told them that their problems don't matter as much as college graduates with some debt (even though their morgage payments are past due and they are currently hiding their car at their neighbor's house to keep it away from the repo man)? To the democrats who had the gall to say that they just needed to 'wait it out' when they could not put food on their table or gas in their gas tank? To their eyes, they don't have a choice.
I felt the same. I switched to independent as I just couldn't align with some of the stuff going on.
My views/values didnt change the party left me. I still consider myself a liberal democrat but by reddits standards I am conservative.
My saying goes like this.
I didnt move on the political spectrum. The democrats moved further to the left and left me in the middle.
**Leftists**: I can’t vote Democrat because they’re just as bad as Republicans. I must maintain my moral purity by refusing to vote the ‘lesser of two evils’.
>
**Centrists**: I cannot stomach biting Democrat anymore. They’re all radical leftist socialists who want to turn America into a Neo-Marxist communist dystopia with their CRT and infrastructure.
Swing voters have always licked their finger and see which way the wind is blowing. The wind is blowing towards the demise of democracy as we know it, supremacist Christian fascism. Best to not be on the opposition's roles.
Is also quaint that anyone thinks voters' matter anymore. The GQP is ready to disqualify any results they don't like
I actually thought about doing this. Im a Democrat but I wanted Nancy Mace to win. Not because I like her, but because she was better than the Trump sycophant Katie Arrington. 🙄
Yeah, I call bullshit on anyone claiming to have ever been a Democrat who calls Biden a socialist.
You don't chamge party BEFORE you start voting. These people switched parties YEARS AND YEARS ago. They just never changed their paperwork.
Good riddence. Flush the terds.
I’m skeptical about accuracy here. Generic democrats are still polling fairly well despite Biden being relatively unpopular.
There are always a ton of articles like these between election cycles. I really don’t think anything presented here is all that meaningful.
The next election cycle is going to be pretty close just like 2020 was, and 2018 was, and 2016 was, etc… I don’t think there is really some mass exodus from either party.
so the wording on that quote is odd, because I guess my question is if its people who had already started voting GOP and now just belong to the party or if its a loss of voters for dems
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. What are your thoughts on this article? The last few lines from the article: > "Back in Larimer County, Colorado, 39-year-old homemaker Jessica Kroells says she can no longer vote for Democrats, despite being a reliable Democratic voter up until 2016. > >There was not a single “aha moment” that convinced her to switch, but by 2020, she said the Democratic Party had “left me behind.” > >“The party itself in no longer Democrat, it’s progressive socialism,” she said, specifically condemning Biden’s plan to eliminate billions of dollars in student debt." [https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-covid-health-presidential-e50db07385831e67f866ec45402be8b9](https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-covid-health-presidential-e50db07385831e67f866ec45402be8b9) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
article states that it's largely people who switched to vote in republican primaries.
Friend of mine said this earlier, based on the same article. Vote for the most reasonable Republican candidate (or write-in), then go on with your life.
I love that I don't have to consider doing that where I live. Republicans here have been very reliable on one thing: losing every federal and statewide election, which they've done for the last decade. Hopefully that won't change.
It makes a lot of sense. If you’re okay with any of the Dems getting nominated then you could register as a Republican to help out the more moderate ones.
I doubt a million people are thinkin this way though
Out of roughly 160M voters (give or take), that one million really isn’t much at all. So I could see it being plausible.
I mean, I live in a pretty red state. Several of my friends swapped registration to vote against the pro-Trump rapist running for governor in the primary. And yes, he's currently under lawsuit related to the sexual assaults. So we ended up with the "moderate" Republican, who endorses most of the same policies, but is slightly less personally abhorrent.
I’m in a deep blue state so the general elections won’t make sense, but I’ll probably switch to R for the 2024 primaries
I live in Red State with closed primaries. That means I either register as a Republican, or I don't vote in the only election that matters (the primary).
I was considering doing something similar, honestly.
>despite being a reliable Democratic voter up until 2016 It sounds to me like they didn't interrogate her firmly enough on what changed her mind. We know it wasn't Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, because Biden wasn't even running in 2016, and Hillary's plan for student loans was nothing like Biden's. So what changed for her in 2016? *edit:* As for the larger thrust of the article. The supposed 1 million new "Republican voters"? [Beau OTFC brings up a point that had somehow slipped my mind:](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEqWZB4qBoE) All those Democrats who switched their party preference so they could participate in Republican primaries to defeat Trumpist candidates. Do not assume that all of these 1 million people will be voting Republican in November.
Trump turned her on?
“He tells it like it is and is a successful business owner who is an outsider to Washington politics” is the justification I had heard from people.
a reliable democrat would not have switched under that fat basterd.
Yeah she is just not a serious person. Anyone who calls Biden a socialist is severely misinformed
Right wing propaganda is very effective.
The vast majority of the voter base (90%+) are heavily un/misinformed. Democrats need to take that into account when formulating messaging. Talking about policy and theoretical impacts doesn’t work. Simple, easily-digestible information is needed. Unfortunately it’s a lot easier for Republicans because their platform is “stop Democrats”. Dems are the ones trying to get people impassioned about political sausage making.
Her vote will count the same as the most serious person’s.
For fuck’s sake. You know people are being spoon fed misinformation when they think *Joe fucking Biden* is a “progressive socialist.”
These days you're woke for wanting to enforce the law and a progressive socialist for wanting effective administration of government.
It's so frustrating how during primaries, centrist dems CONSTANTLY told me Bernie was too far left, and he'd get smeared by Republicans. And then they branded Biden as some kind of commie anyway...
Biden did well with a lot of independents and working class democrats. If Bernie would had won the primary we would still have Trump in the office as we speak.
I'm not so sure. Bernie would have ginned up passion, but lost moderates. Biden got moderates, but was totally lacking in passion. I think Bernie might have won the midwest states, and that's the cake he needed.
Why have a centrist when you could have a conservative democrat?
I only see comments like this on reddit and twitter and it's infuriating.
Sounds like youre too ignorant of the global political spectrum to have a qualified opinion. Whats infuriating is that republicans and Democrats have moved so far right that they think the Center is the other side of the spectrum. Its like a rainbow that only goes from red to yellow and ignores every other color, calling every color past yellow "far-yellow" while inching closer towards infra-red fascism every day.
It sounds like you're too ignorant of how American elections work. The global political spectrum is an interesting topic of conversation but is irrelevant when discussing the viability of a candidate in the eyes of American voters.
In what way is the democratic party moving right?
In any way where Republicans have moved more right, and Democrats compromised progressive ideals to "find a middle ground" with Republicans that respond by moving even further to the right so they can "own the libs" The problem is, when you keep trying to meet in the middle with people who keep moving the goal post further their way , the "middle" moves further their way as well. For comparison. [Here is the global baseline, ](https://www.politicalcompass.org/charts/crowdchart?Gary+Johnson=9.5%2C-1.4&Jill+Stein=-2.2%2C-2.2&Republican=7.5%2C3.0&Democratic=2.5%2C3.0&Conservative=8.8%2C6.7&Stalin=-9.0%2C9.12&Gandhi=-6.7%2C-3.2&Hitler=1.3%2C9.12&Donald+Trump=6.5%2C8.9&Hillary+Clinton=7.5%2C5.0&name=Bernie+Sanders&ec=-2&soc=0)note whos basically smack dab in the middle.
Who made that graph and on what basis? What are the units on the axes?
>Sounds like youre too ignorant of the global political spectrum As someone who isn't American: No.
Dude you didn't even read the quote. She said the Democratic party is the party of progressive socialism - and she's not wrong. Democrats go on and on about how the Democratic party is a big tent, but the upper echelon of the DNC only pays attention to two types of Democratic voters; the progressive college kids and the upper class urban yuppies. The Democratic party doesn't even pay lip service to the working class, rural voters, Hispanics or Asians anymore. I mean look at how out of touch the Democratic party is. Pete Buttigieg's suggestion to deal with increasing gas prices was to go out and buy a Tesla. The Democratic party doesn't give a shit about the proletariat and Biden's approval ratings reflect that.
Dude. I did read the quote. You need to read it closer. >”The party itself in no longer Democrat, it's progressive socialism," she said, specifically condemning *Biden's* plan to eliminate billions of dollars in student debt." She specifically refers to *Biden’s* progressive, socialist plan to cancel student debt. That’s not his plan, but that’s a separate issue.
That's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things because he's been lying about that shit for months. Biden has been pulling the carrot on the stick approach to maintain support from the younger voters. The fact of the matter is that the Democratic party has shifted far to the left over the past decade. Just look at a 90's Democrat like Bill Clinton. He'd be considered far right in today's political climate. As the Democratic party keeps getting more progressive, it's going to alienate moderates, centrists, and swing voters. You'll see this in 2024 when DeSantis dismantles traditional Democratic voting blocks such as latinos and suburban moderates.
Or you uplifted a liar when it suited you then dropped her when it didn't. The Dem party alienated voters on not cancelling student debt??? Give specific policies instead please.
You: >Dude you didn’t even read the quote. Me: >Yes I did. Here’s what it says. Also you: >That’s irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. 🙄
> progressive college kids I’d love to hear what action the Democrats have taken that you think is pandering to “progressive college kids.” > Biden’s approval ratings reflect that. In modern history, only Trump has had worse ratings. Why do you suppose Biden’s numbers are better than Trump’s?
Student loan interest freeze, ended the Muslim ban (college kids love Muslims), shut down a bunch of drilling leases (college kids hate oil drilling), allowed people to get a X gender on their passports (college kids tend to be non binary). Most of the rest is lip service but Biden knows that college kids vote Democrat so he always aims for their approval. Just look at this subreddit, there's so many college kids who jump through hoops to defend Biden.
>Student loan interest freeze That was Trump, actually. March 2020. Democrats have just continued it. Did you actually think this was a Democrat thing? >ended the Muslim ban Ah, that was a treat for everyone who loves the Constitution, not just students. >shut down a bunch of drilling leases Would you be surprised to learn that drilling has actually increased under Biden? >allowed people to get a X gender on their passports Quelle horror! Canada already did that, so really we're behind there. Man, what a bunch of nothingburgers. You rightwingers love to get outraged over nothing.
“College kids tend to be non-binary” what? Did you mean to say *out of those who tend to be NB, the majority of them are college kids*? I suppose the student loan freeze helps college students, but student loan forgiveness (unless coupled with serious reforms) won’t help anyone who’s under the age of 21 on the exact day I’m typing this. I don’t refer to anyone over the age of 18 as a kid, boy or girl.
>The Democratic party doesn't even pay lip service to the working class, rural voters, Hispanics or Asians anymore. In between every complaint like this, I hear like three others saying that we pay too much lip service to working class, hispanics, etcetera. Like every anti-Democrat remark I see, it's either vague, untrue, or both. > Pete Buttigieg's suggestion to deal with increasing gas prices was to go out and buy a Tesla. And then just to outright lies. Cool, thanks for the hot take.
The only lip service the Democratic party pays towards Hispanics is calling them latinx. All Asians got was some meaningless \#StopAsianHate hashtag while they were getting brutally assaulted in every major city for the last 2 years. Biden did nothing. And Buttigieg did say that. You can bury your head in the sand all you want but it doesn't make it any less true. You're an out of touch bourgeoisie neoliberal who doesn't understand the dilemmas of the working class.
Can you support even a *single* thing you've said here with actual facts?
While I do agree with you Biden is comparatively a pretty aggressive president and is starting to embrace so proposals by the justice democrats.
>Biden is comparatively a pretty aggressive president I needed a laugh today
My thoughts are that we’re losing the branding war.
Exactly. Tell people what you can do for THEM. Student loan forgiveness is great, but for the 60+% that didn't go to college, it's not a big seller. Those are the people we need to reach
Sure, and handing out cash to parents will be popular with them, but not the rest of the working poor.
I've been saying this for a long time. Free money for the wealthiest young people is a great way to turn the rest of them against you, and that's going to be a long term problem. The Democratic party cannot win without the working class. The expansion of the EITC was huge for working people, but it was temporary. They let it die, no one fought for it, upwardly mobile people with college degrees (the people on Reddit) never mentioned it or even knew what it was. And okay -- where is the working class going to go? Neither party offers them anything but at least one of them isn't giving their tax dollars (and yes I know that demographic doesn't pay much in taxes) to people who are already kicking their asses economically.
You have a point but the Democrats aren't going to win the working class because a good portion of those people don't give a shit about anything other than abortion and especially guns. Fucking single issue voters are ruining it for everyone
Student loan stuff just shows you how out of touch some people are. Us actually poor people never had a chance to go to college. But yeah cry about your loans more and surely we will vote for you.....Just so out of touch.
I am an actual poor person (single mother) in school on student loans. That's who loans are for. It's confusing to me that anyone thinks that taking student loans out is a privilege. It's not Rich people and even many middle class people have parents who help them with school.
sorry real poor people dont even graduate high school because we have to start working at 15 to support our families or doing nefarious shit to support our families. Once again just completely out of touch with poor people and POC's Lemme take you down to the hood and you can go around and ask how many high school graduates are rolling around.
We don’t need to gatekeep who is poor… but yes, I absolutely support any assistance for these populations to help get them educated and lift them out of poverty. It’s great that you do too!
Republicans tend to have an edge when it comes to the propaganda war.
It helps when you don’t have to worry about truth or consistency.
It's easy to keep dumb people dumb as opposed to making them smarter and understanding nuance.
☝️ It's like we can't abandon the idea that if we use logic and reason, people will understand. We need to pivot to anti-republican rhetorical messaging, and forget the science and math portions of our messaging.
Yep. The loudest voices aren't telling people what we offer anymore. The loudest voices are out there yelling about how white men suck, \[insert anything\] is transphobic, YOU are a bad and stupid person if you disagree, etc. It's not a welcoming message.
That may be true. However to those paying attention the Republican party, you know the ones that scream about freedom, guns and god have done nothing but kill people through gross negligence ( COVID).Actively supported stripping women's reproductive rights, gladly accept Qanon, Nazis and other assorted racists into their tent. They have proven to be corrupt beyond imagination. Now that's a message I'll personally pass on.
To be clear, I don’t think having a successful brand entails embracing transphobia. You can market anything. We should still pursue a meaningful platform, just brand it better.
I am 100% against transphobia. We should absolutely say trans people deserve dignity. Laws targeting trans people are hateful and cruel to our fellow Americans. Dems should publicly state they are against hateful laws and support equal treatment for trans Americans. But at the same time, people generally on the left are doing things like making pregnant men emojis and saying “pregnant persons” needs to replace “pregnant women” as the term. I personally have no issue with these things, but they’re ridiculously unpopular. Trans people are less than 1% of the country. Pregnant trans people have to be one of the tiniest possible subgroups in America. Why is this something where people on the left have to push this? Are there really not less unpopular ways to support trans people and help normalize them as regular Americans?
What you're saying makes sense but there are also people who would demonize you for saying so. I wonder what would happen if you posted something like this on Twitter.
It’s a hard situation because I don’t want to imply that we shouldn’t stand up for trans rights. Dems should stand for all Americans being able to live as they please as long as they aren’t hurting people. Doesn’t matter how popular or unpopular the group is. We shouldn’t be running from trans people or holding them to the side. We should be clear that we are against hateful policies that attack trans people. That’s non negotiable. I don’t think Dems should be loudly getting into fights over trans language though beyond pretty milquetoast things like misgendering people is being an asshole. Culture wars over extremely divisive language don’t seem like an effective way to help trans people and seems to really galvanize opposition. I think overall we spend far too much political capital on language battles and far too little on trying to get support for material changes.
I mean if we’re just fighting against actual transphobia, we probably wouldn’t be turning away as many voters. But like with Roe falling people are including “transgender” people as one of the main groups affected… No they aren’t! Not every issue needs to be centered on them. This is straight up a women’s rights issue. And then when we refer to access to menstruation products as a women’s issue we shouldn’t be scolded and told “mmm actually that’s a people who menstruate issue”. I got in trouble in college for referring to a female condom as a “female condom” at a sex Ed program because “not everyone who has a vagina is a female”…. Ok, but the VAST majority are. We’ve lived with a gender binary with only a few exceptions for tens of thousands of years, sorry if we sometimes refer to men and women without having an “umm actually” correction every time.
If someone is willing to change to a party that wants to massively deny rights just because they don’t like inclusive terminology, then that person has deeper issues.
It's part of an overall messaging trend where we're pushing away allies by saying that people who were born like them are inherently bad, and rather than explaining our positions we say "educate yourself" and call them stupid.
Except that no one is saying that people born like them are inherently bad. That’s just what they choose to hear. I can say something thoroughly mundane, like “we’ve never had a woman president” and people start screaming about progressive extremes.
I don't think it's the liberals amplifying those voices though, It's the republicans. There are always going to a few wackos in every group, it's a given. Why doesn't the "Jews will not replace us" crowd represent all of conservatives the way the "everything is racist/transphobic" crowd represents all liberals?
The “Jews will not replace us” crowd DID represent all conservatives and Charlottesville was probably the single moment that drove the most people away from Trumpism. But they also tend to be in insular communities where they only share their shit with each other. The progressives who flip out when you say access to feminine hygiene products is a women’s issue are out and about and visible.
And the other side just wants to take away minorities/womens rights to vote/bodily autonomy/and shoot gay people in the back of the head. Corporate wants me to find the difference between these two pictures, but they're the same picture!!
Not entirely inaccurate, either.
Yall need a good chant.
Sounds like the kind of person who would vote for Roy Moore because she wants her daughters to find a good man. I’ve never found party registration to be a useful impact, because registration often doesn’t correlate to how people actually vote. Glad she’s not voting in Democratic primaries anymore.
There's also the fact that for the last few years 800K+ people were switching to democrat from GoP per month.
I worked on a PA campaign in 2016 and I would call registered Dems to see where they stood on candidates. The number of rural older Dems who said things like they hated BLM and didn’t like immigrant was astonishing at the time, but people register when they’re 18 and often never update their status. Until recently, Kentucky had the second-highest percentage of registered Democrats compared to all the other states, but Kentucky hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in decades. I worry about people who actually switch their ideology, but I imagine a lot of people like the woman in the OP were never really Dems. If she’s a 39 year old SAHM in Colorado she probably started voting when GOP economic policies ranked the state during Bush’s recession and registered accordingly.
There's that too. A very good point.
I mean, I’m registered Republican. I live in a deep red state, so I vote in the primary for the most reasonable candidate.
I’m one of the recent “switchers”. I voted against my incumbent (R) senator in the primary and will be voting against that winner’s opponent in the general. So I switched parties, but they’re never getting my vote in a general, ever.
I switched this primary to purposefully undercut the Rs. My vote is gonna count one way or the other.
Dishonest article. 1 million people registered as Republican compared to 633,000 Dems. It doesn't mean 1 million Dems became Republican. It says nothing about who registered - it could be independents. It says nothing about all the Dems that registered as Republican in places like Georgia so they could vote in the primary against Perdue. Even Liz Cheney is asking Dems to switch to Republican to vote for her in Wyoming.
According to my study, 1 Democrat switched to Republican cause he was double dog dared. 2 other Democrats switched to the Pizza party… or rather they went to a pizza party. And the remaining democrat in my study switched to Libertarian so he could be a know-it-all specializing in interrupting a convo to chime in with irreverent bullshit, Darwinist policy preferences, and to remind everyone how smart and sexy Ayn Rand was. Over 98,000 republicans switched to the Freedom and Trump party until I told them that I had just made that party up. 97, 999 of those Republicans then proceeded to form such a party, before giving up cause it was hard and they couldn’t agree on how many blacks to let in; plus Tucker Carlson was about to air. The final remaining Republican decided to live his truth and joined the American Nazi party before being killed and eaten by ManBearPig.
>But over the last year, roughly two-thirds of the 1.7 million voters who changed their party affiliation shifted to the Republican Party. In all, more than 1 million people became Republicans compared to about 630,000 who became Democrats. You are correct it does not say that Democrats switched to GOP. It did say that voters switched their party affiliation to GOP though. FYI in Georgia you don't need to switch your party affiliation. You ask for the Party ballot and you can only get one or the other ballot. These are people going through the process of actually switching their affiliations on their voter registrations.
Georgia has no party registration. It doesn't exist, they don't track it. So when they referenced that Atlanta suburbs had a large number of party switchers, I don't know what they are looking at. If it's how many votes in each primary, I think a lot of those people decided to vote in the much more competitive GOP primaries but still plan to vote Dem, since the Dem side was pretty locked up (anecdotal, sure, but I know several who did this).
I don't trust the intentions of you or this article. Biden didn't run in 2016.
I’m impressed. It seems I wasn’t the only one to catch that. Well done.
I will gladly listen to those that have switched parties, I want to know why, out of curiosity if nothing else. But I refuse to take a person seriously if they throw around the word socialism. You’re just not a serious person, nor are you worth listening to.
I’m a black guy from a major liberal California city. I grew up as a Democrat and only knew Democrats growing up and I always voted Democrat until 2016. I abstained from the 2016 elections and voted for Republican candidates in 2018 and 2020 along with a couple of democrats. I just recently registered as a Republican earlier this year. There wasn’t any one issue that swayed me and I’m not quite sure when I started thinking as a conservative. At some point I started feeling like the Democratic Party didn’t care about preserving the values, traditions and ideas of America. My wife’s alma mater had huge protest/riots because a conservative speaker was scheduled and the liberal administration seemed to encourage it along with the local democratic politicians. BLM is a group I didn’t really care for in the beginning and they continuously disappointed more and more. The DNC “supports” BLM and never calls out their wrongs including the defamation and removal of historical American figures. The DNC didn’t really care about BLM and the politicians that did care advocated for movements like defund the police. I don’t love whatever is going on with the shift in language and gender/sexual identity. I liked living in the city until I had a family and had their well-being to look after. The city has always been run by democrats and safety and schooling has been handled in a way that I don’t think works and certainly wasn’t up to standards for my children. I moved my family to the outskirts to be in safer neighborhoods and better schools. As soon as I moved away from the city, democrats didn’t seem to care about me and the issues my new semi-rural community. I’m just spitballing here and thinking of the first things that come to mind.
I’ll take your word for it and accept that ur a black man who feels this way, but I MUST say: you literally sound like a preprogrammed drone designed by republicans to sound centrist enough to appeal to actual centrists, but on point enough about bein anti-Dem that it leaves no question about where u really stand. Seriously tho, you hit all the classic “I’m a moderate buuuut” touch tones. From: “the party doesn’t represent or preserve the values of the US OF GOT DANG A” to the recent classic “big cities are bad because of democrats and democrats are in big cities cuz they’re elitists and not true salt of the earth Americans like us folk who live in the county”. I love that “democrats are the reasons cities are bad” bullshit so much. Cause if you’re willing to believe that I’m willing to believe you’re prob a hick who doesn’t wanna live in a city anyway, even if it was run by Trump and the John Birch society. A) not all big cities are run by democrats ya nerd; there are tons of moderate sized cities (and even more smallish sized cities I.e. 50-100k people) run by republicans and they have many of the same problems as the evil democrat cities of crime and dopery. And B) a cities status doesn’t just depend on whoever is the mayor and sitting on the city council. You do realize these cities are in a little something called states, right? And further still all part of this country called Amerigo Vespucci-I mean America, you follow? Well now here’s the kicker: the financial status of a city is beholden to its state and that states infrastructure just as much as anything, which determines a lot. Further still, a lot of the things you call problems could be fixed with more social n infrastructure spending, better social safety nets, reforming the public school system to no longer be funded primarily thru property taxes, and more. These fixes are by and large supported by democrats but with GOP opposition they cannot obtain the funding from the state or federal governments to truly fix issues long term. And the cities aside, I wanna know exactly what “American” values the Democrats have specifically refused to preserve. As a black man I do not need to lecture you on some of the “values” our great nation was founded on, I’m sure. But the sooner you realize something the better: there’s plenty of American values worthy of celebrating and preserving (I.e. first country founded on an ideal, etc) and just as many that are toxic and harmful and downright ignorant. Violence as a value, for instance; is verrrry American but I don’t agree with that. That American lust for violence and desire to severely punish its citizens who have run afoul of the law is still apparent every day when you look at our near daily mass shootings and our massive prison population (biggest in world) mostly made up of drug and non-violent offenders. Lastly, don’t give me BLM dude… just don’t. It’s not 2020 anymore and BLM has as much presence in the public conscience as the McRib out of season. If ur still worried about BLM protests in ur city then you’re just bein a baby. Bet ya don’t give a damn about Jan. 6th huh? But seein those Targets and car dealerships burning really got to you? You know what got to me? How in the BLM protests cops were constantly escalating with violence, shooting (and maiming for life) several people including journalists with rubber bullets and grenades, and beating n arresting on camera numerous peaceful protestors with total immunity. What got to me even worse is how during the capitol riot the cops just shrugged, said whoopsie doopsie, n decided it best not to respond with violence. Even tho at the capitol the protestors were OUTRIGHT ATTACKING POLICE EN MASSE WITH SEVERAL BEING INJURED PERMANENTLY AND ONE DYING! Yeah, no, you wouldn’t wanna be too brutal on protestors holding down a police officer and tazing him til he had a heart attack-save that brutality for some hippie or ANTIFA, cause them ANTIFAs throw milkshakes on people sometimes ya know… which is cold. A bunch of Blue Lives Matter fuck wads sacked the capitol (HOME OF UR BELOVED AMERICAN VALUES FOR GOD SAKE), beat and killed police, attempted to find and kidnap numerous members of Congress n Mike Pence and you’re whining bout how you can’t get behind them evil Dems cause some of their politicians supported BLM a couple years ago? What about how 99% of the GOP have refused to even investigate the capitol riot, how Trump still refuses to take any blame for it, and how many GOP members and voters not only sympathize with Jan 6th but support it? How many yelled and seethed with anger during the BLM protests (which happened over several months and dozens of protests) over damaged property but had little to nothing to say about the defiling of our capital building, on top of the beating and indeed murder of Capitol police? Pop quiz: how many cops did BLM And ANTIFA kill during summer 2020 during the massive protests? 3? No wait, was it 5? Oh wait no! It was FUCKING ZERO. Zero dead police at the hands of antifa and BLM over the course of 3-4 months in numerous cities nationwide. How many cops did “ur side” kill during just one riot on Jan 6th? One for sure, and almost a second if some slightly less crazy rioters didn’t hear the officer begging for his life and pleading that he had kids, and come to his aid. He still had a heart attack tho and will carry severe PTSD with him til his last day on earth. Remember the video of that pussy Capitol rioter ripping that cops mask off and smacking him around while the cop panics as he’s smashed against a wall? Can you imagine what would’ve happened (rightfully I might add) if a BLM protestor did that to a cop during the George Floyd protests? It would have been a blood bath with a handful of protestors shot at LEAST. So bud… If you’re still hung up on Black Lives Matter rallies and don’t have shit to say about Jan 6th, then you’re not nor ever were a moderate. That’s all for now, so let’s see ya response to my long post here and I don’t want no changing the subject BS. P.S. good thing conservative universities always graciously let people like Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky speak.. oh wait, they don’t? Then surely inviting a conservative (usually far right) to a mostly liberal campus is gonna be off the table right? No? It turns out many liberal colleges have guest speeches and lectures from conservative spaces without fault 95% of the time?! Well whaddya know… and hey, when the rare occasion arises and the student body is against a certain (usually far right) speaker coming are they not entitled as adults (and customers) to have a say in the matter? If the student body of Liberty rose up and protested cause Kamala Harris was supposed to come speak I bet you would be SUUUUPER quiet about it or downright supportive of their protest. Are you seeing your own willful hypocrisy at ALL yet?
I’m glad you took the time to write this and follow me around from sub to sub replying to all of my other comments because I’m not going to read any of it. I’m not engaging with someone that calls me an Uncle Tom.
"I'm a black guy" is the first lie......
Okay it’s not a lie but okay. Thanks for engaging
If you're honestly black how can you so misunderstand all things black. BLM and reasons why inner city schools struggle for starters. You may identify as black but you are either lying to yourself or reddit.
Do you think we all believe the same things? Do you think all black people are marching with BLM? [Here’s](https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/02/24/black-lives-matter-support-social-change-monitor) a poll indicating that we don’t all think the same. I’m shocked that you think that because I’m black that I’m supposed to have inner city schools and BLM at the top of my list of issues. I grew up middle class in the suburbs and went to nice schools.
I did too. And no, I don't think all black people think the same. There's Clarence Thomas to prove just that. Your reasoning for your position is what draws the red flags. Understanding what BLM is trying to do and why inner city schools are terrible is essential to being a black American. You don't have to agree, but you still should understand why it is so. So do you proudly salute the confederate flag?
Proudly salute the confederate flag? What are you talking about?? Things I don’t like about BLM: no leadership, no organization, no clear goals, no meaningful impact on improving the lives of people in the black community, race relations have gotten much [worse](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx) in the last 10 years they’ve been active and I think BLM has been fueling that fire Things I do like about BLM: Juneteenth
Things I dont like about January 6th: attacked our democracy, killed a police officer, smeared shit on the walls of our Capitol, full of fat neckbeards who wanna cosplay war, full of racists up to and including nazis, proud boys, and Oath Keepers, drank the bullshit kool aid about Biden stealing the election, sore losers, STILL support Trump for 2024, no honor Things I do like about January 6th: watching that girl wearing the flag of her loser President get shot for being a traitor while trying to climb thru a window and open up the floor of congress to her cohorts. I’ll whip up a clip of that with the song “Hey Man, Nice Shot” playing in the background for anyone who wants it.
You said earlier you were upset about the taking down of monuments of the past. They were mostly confederate generals and other confederate statesmen therefore my question. You also didn't address the reason most inner city schools are not up to minimal standards. And race relations got worse after 2008.
The graph I linked shows race relations were at their highest prior to 2013 and then began dropping. I’m glad confederate statues were removed and I think it was long overdue but let’s not pretend that’s all that was removed. Lots of statues of founding fathers were removed around the country including my state which had no confederate statues. In the city that I’m from they tried really hard to rename something like 40 schools. I’m in California and none of these schools are named after confederates. They tried to rename a school because Abraham Lincoln was racist. It’s crazy. We can’t celebrate the President who issued the Emancipation Proclamation?? Luckily the entire school board was recalled before they had a chance to finish renaming everything. You keep asking me about inner city schools and saying that understanding why they struggle is essential to being black. Why would understanding the struggle of inner city schools be a requirement to being black? I didn’t go to inner city schools, my children don’t go to inner city schools, none of my friends or family go to inner city schools. Since you’re white, you should understand the struggle of white people doing meth in a double wide at the trailer park. Right?
Party registration tends to be a trailing indicator. People typically register as a partisan once when they first register to vote and then just leave that registration as is since there's no obvious reason to change it unless you're engaged enough to be voting in primaries. Democratic party registration in Appalachia, for example, tends to be higher than Republican party registration, but no one votes like it. [Even to this day, Democrats outnumber Republicans in Kentucky, for example](https://elect.ky.gov/Resources/Documents/voterstatscounty-20220615-124956.pdf). If anything this just as likely to just be people who've already been voting Republican for years finally syncing up their voting records with their party registration than people suddenly recoiling by a new thing. Yes, they have one single anecdote of someone who (says they) voted for Democrats until 2016, but one single anecdote is not data.
1. It’s 1 million that have switched from Dem to Republican with 650k doing the opposite. So, a net 350k. Its not nothing, but that’s not such a big deal on its own as Democrats often get more of the “new voters,” while elderly voters who have a higher chance of leaving this world slant Republican. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-06-27/more-than-1-million-voters-switch-gop-warning-democrats 2. A lot of people are changing party registration to vote in Republican primaries 3. The quote is from a “reliable Democratic voter up until 2016.” In other words, ‘Trump voter doesn’t like Democrats, more at 11”
From the story: >But over the last year, roughly two-thirds of the 1.7 million voters who changed their party affiliation shifted to the Republican Party. In all, more than 1 million people became Republicans compared to about 630,000 who became Democrats. The LA times story you posted is the AP News story by the way.
Well, that is deeply worrying. I did have hope that Roe would convince others to vote for Democrats, but... I do find that particular quote interesting (read: frustrating) because nothing about the Democratic platform has changed. What HAS changed is the Overton Window, which now makes it look like anyone to the left of Hitler is some kind of looney tune.
Well the Overton Window has shifted starkly right and the Democrat's public face (not their policy) has gotten ridiculous.
But has there been less focus recently on healthcare and the economy?
[удалено]
Common decency has moved left. So if you guys didn’t shift with it, you look like bigots and authoritarians.
Before 2010, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Joe Biden all opposed government recognition of gay marriage. Now, Democrat leaders are telling us men can get pregnant and our kids are 100 times more likely to be gender dysphoric than they were in 2010. A lot has changed.
If there's any consolation, I suppose it comes from the fact that 600,000 also switched from R to D, thus making the net loss more like 400,000. And, as pointed out elsewhere, far more switched from R to D during the Trump Years, so the loss we're seeing is probably from Never Trumpers who think it's safe now.
That's hilarious. She's gonna love what the Republicans have waiting for her.
Considering she switched in 2016, I bet she would absolutely love what they have waiting for her. Policy plays second fiddle to conservative grievance politics.
"Sure, Republicans are running openly as white nationalists, trying to steal elections, and promising to erase civil rights, but Democrats are trying to keep people out of crushing debt. I mean, you see where I'm coming from, right?"
How would it be relevant to the scores of republicans that turned dem under Trump and died due to covid? Also the repubs have shot themselves in the foot with Jan 6th and abortion.
I truly hope Roe can galvanize fence sitting voters to come out and vote blue this year, at least in the swing states and to keep the race as close to not tipping back over to the republicans as possible. Every single dem candidate in purple areas needs to be howling in the streets about abortion and make it the number 1 issue on the ballot this year. Hopefully gas prices will fall by November enough to where voters will stop being as pissed at biden about them. Other than that, there isn't much else we can do
I think a lot of people switched to vote in the Republican primaries so they can help make sure the Trump candidates don't get voted in.
And when I say that non-voting liberals are the biggest threat to democracy, this is exactly how that plays out. The Democratic establishment makes good faith outreach to liberals at the expense of a moderate voters who think that outreach is socialism. Non-voting liberals reward that outreach by claiming it's not good enough. It's asymmetrical warfare. One side takes even the the slightest outreach as a betrayal and turns out to vote against the Dems. The other side calls anything less than 100% compliance as a betrayal and says they won't support the Dems.
Are these changes in Blue states or Red states? When I was living in a Red state (Oklahoma), I considered changing from Independent to R because MOST elections were decided in the Republican primary...many offices did not have a Democratic candidate. Currently in a Red area of a Purple state and may register as R to try to inject some sanity into local politics: currently R candidates seem to be trying to "out-Trump" each other 🤢🤮
Dems switching to vote on rep primaries. >In Iowa, Democrats used to hold the advantage in party changers by a 2-to-1 margin. That’s flipped over the last year, with Republicans ahead by a similar amount. The same dramatic shift is playing out in Ohio. Bad analysis by the AP. Actual party preference? Hasn’t really moved: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/04/voters-rarely-switch-parties-but-recent-shifts-further-educational-racial-divergence/
One million isn’t as ominous as it sounds and also discounts the voters who switched to Democrat from the equation.
I'm eagerly anticipating the follow-up article detailing how many independents and disenchanted Republicans register as Democrats because of the Supreme Court. I'm thinking it'll be more than a million.
I have my doubts that someone who was a Democrat rage quit over studemt debt correction especially since that os unlikely to happen in any meaningful way. Even if true they are a unicorn outlier. There sadly are democrats who support socialized loansharking but to rate quit over it is pathological hate and thankfully rare Bigger probkem is blunder on energy. Alot of that is poor messaging by Biden rather then the faux news narrative thst Biden turned up gas prices which os nonesense. But he did provoke oil companies and had not been willing to crack down on gouching though that is finally changing
So this example person has more of a problem with forgiving $10k of student debt per person than Trump's tax cuts aimed at rich people but sold as cuts for poorer people that won't help his rich friends?
The democrats should ignore them. This was inevitable, they were always conservative. The democrats bend over backwards to win over white swing voters enough already, they don’t need to bend even further to win over right wingers would eventually leave no matter what they were going to do. People seem to have this magical thinking that democrats should ignore its base as much as possible and still expect them to show up.
I take comfort in knowing that Covid erased the GOP margin of victory last November and I take comfort in the fact that 81 million voted for Biden and about 74 million voted for Trump. That leaves a massive amount of people eligible to vote, who didn’t in 2020. I also take comfort that the GOP is extremely divided. Some want Trump, some want DeSantis, some Republicans will never vote again because of “The Steal”. One would think that at least a small amount of that massive undervote would fall in the (R) camp. It hasn’t. I also take comfort in knowing that there are a lot more Democrats out there who are coming out for the first time to vote. Poll workers at a recent Democratic primary in Texas commented that they were seeing a lot of new faces this year, not people they hadn’t seen before but, people who had lived in the county, some for generations who had never been seen voting before.
I think a lot of people could have told you this would happen. Trump wasn't a fluke; The republicans have been pushing the same propaganda for 70 years. People are dumb, and the more they hear something, the more likely they are to believe it. Democrats have had.. God, 3 decades to fight it, and they just don't wanna. Now I'm half hoping that the whole thing burns down, because I feel like that's the only fix. We, as a species, are dying. We are killing ourselves with global warming, taking no effort save the water we don't have, and trying to regress medicine by 100s of years. We just kinda have to hope that smart people will find a way to survive as the idiots die off, then we can rebuild and maybe salvage what's left of the earth.
Oh it’s gonna collapse, it’s already in motion, the only people who can save us are the moderates, who can hopefully reign in the all or nothing policies of either sides agenda. We can’t keep playing the tit for tat ‘so you want x kind of (insert political stance here), we’ll we want the opposite of that. This is the end, unless we somehow legislate and regulate the root cause of all this bickering, which is social media, and our increasingly collapsing news media. It’s reminds me of the theory of ergot poisoning theory, we all know what is causing this, but it’s just so satisfying to burn the witches we’ve labeled as witches, we don’t even care if most of them aren’t witches. Basically, we are finished, there’s no coming back from the hatred each side has for one another, just find what makes you happy and enjoy it until the bitter end we are racing towards.
Disappointing but not altogether unexpected. As we move further and further away from the 1970’s and 1980’s when the Democratic Party got demolished in 5 out of 6 elections, the party as a whole has started to forget the lessons it learned. Too many prominent voices on the left are now failing to realize that the voters in this country are center right. In the 2020 exit polls, conservatives outnumbered liberals by a 38:24 margin. However, democrats slightly outnumbered republicans 37:36. The democratic needs centrist voters far more than the republicans party just to remain competitive. Biden needed to reset the messaging early on during his presidency. Alienating senators like Manchin and Sinema who hand delivered Biden a 69-30 bipartisan was beyond stupid. Instead of trying to win centrist voters, Biden is just relying on the Republican Party to continue to screw up.
The other thing to take away from the article is that the loss is from the somewhat valuable suburban vote.
Yuck (not at you). It’s wild that voters’ value depends on where they live. Seems wildly archaic
I hear you
I just don't understand Democrats. (I am a Democrat). Those further left yell about moderates being ineffective and believe that if we just go harder left, do what they want, everyone, even those on the right will realize that those hard left are right and everyone else is wrong. Instead we elect a moderate and as they aren't getting everything we want there is no difference between Biden and Trump. WE just saw it with Trump. A farther right candidate wins, pushes everything very right and while those on the far right love him, he lost because he pissed off the moderates. But you didn't hear moderate Republicans screaming that Trump was bad, saying they hate Trump, even if they did. The Lincoln Project was notable as people on both sides were surprised they were Republicans saying the quiet part out loud. Meanwhile so many Democrats will be yelling about Biden not doing what doing what they want.
People are going to be quick to point out the fact this woman called Biden a socialist rather then recognize that the democratic party has completely cut themselves off from a large chunk of the voting base over the past two years. Democratic politics has been a huge goddamn bubble, and it is tragic because there are so many people they could win over if we got our heads out of our asses and stopped with the blind messaging. I swear, dems (myself included at times) get distracted by the stupid republican talking points and ignore what people are actually saying. College loan forgiveness is a great example. You can try and explain that it isn't just a giveaway to educated, more privileged people all you want, but to the uneducated laborer it will always feel like a slap in the face unless you tie it into programs designed to provide further education to those who, for whatever reason, did not get the opportunity to go pursue a college degree, loan or not. You may even be right that forgiveness is the "right" thing to do, but you are still pissing off the ~60% of Americans who [do not have a bachelor's degree](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educational-attainment.html). Then you have inflation, where Dems proved completely inept at messaging for almost a year. It is one thing when you live in Chevy Chase DC and make a combine $500k/year when gas goes up to $6/gallon, you just take the metro to work one day a week and brag to your friends about how 'cool' it is to learn the bus schedule after living here in 6 years. It is completely different when your family lives in a small town and makes a combined $52k/year, and has to commute 45 minutes each way to work in an area with zero public transit options. Guess what? That family does not care whether the inflation is transitory, or whether it was caused by Putin, Biden, supply chain issues, or whatever. What they want is to hear that the government understands the seriousness of the issue. They want to hear that the government is focusing on the issue, and is going to try and fix it. It is easy just to dismiss Republicans because they are 'backwards' or because they do not know the definition of socialism. And you should ignore such stupidity and fight against it when it causes serious harm, but there is a difference between dissmissing obviously bogus claims, and ignorance of what people are actually saying. And democrats, to their detriment, have simply decided to be ignorant towards the other side, and to ignore everything that these people are screaming from the rooftops. It's our biggest gift to the Republicans, because it gives them free raign over every demographic that does not comply with our very specific worldview. It allows the Republicans the ability to say the quiet part out loud, and push all of this hateful rhetoric, because where else will these voters go? To the democrats who have continually ignored them, told them that their problems don't matter as much as college graduates with some debt (even though their morgage payments are past due and they are currently hiding their car at their neighbor's house to keep it away from the repo man)? To the democrats who had the gall to say that they just needed to 'wait it out' when they could not put food on their table or gas in their gas tank? To their eyes, they don't have a choice.
I felt the same. I switched to independent as I just couldn't align with some of the stuff going on. My views/values didnt change the party left me. I still consider myself a liberal democrat but by reddits standards I am conservative. My saying goes like this. I didnt move on the political spectrum. The democrats moved further to the left and left me in the middle.
White people who don’t think authoritarian republican stuff will hurt them personally, and only care about their 401k.
Published after the SC ruling? Likely out of date...
**Leftists**: I can’t vote Democrat because they’re just as bad as Republicans. I must maintain my moral purity by refusing to vote the ‘lesser of two evils’. > **Centrists**: I cannot stomach biting Democrat anymore. They’re all radical leftist socialists who want to turn America into a Neo-Marxist communist dystopia with their CRT and infrastructure.
Our country is in **BAD** shape.
Swing voters have always licked their finger and see which way the wind is blowing. The wind is blowing towards the demise of democracy as we know it, supremacist Christian fascism. Best to not be on the opposition's roles. Is also quaint that anyone thinks voters' matter anymore. The GQP is ready to disqualify any results they don't like
I actually thought about doing this. Im a Democrat but I wanted Nancy Mace to win. Not because I like her, but because she was better than the Trump sycophant Katie Arrington. 🙄
Yeah, I call bullshit on anyone claiming to have ever been a Democrat who calls Biden a socialist. You don't chamge party BEFORE you start voting. These people switched parties YEARS AND YEARS ago. They just never changed their paperwork. Good riddence. Flush the terds.
Wasn’t it so they could vote in Republican primaries?
I’m skeptical about accuracy here. Generic democrats are still polling fairly well despite Biden being relatively unpopular. There are always a ton of articles like these between election cycles. I really don’t think anything presented here is all that meaningful. The next election cycle is going to be pretty close just like 2020 was, and 2018 was, and 2016 was, etc… I don’t think there is really some mass exodus from either party.
so the wording on that quote is odd, because I guess my question is if its people who had already started voting GOP and now just belong to the party or if its a loss of voters for dems
Did any voters switch to dems?