Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
Sadly, I pretty much have to pull the lever for whatever social-democrat naif the Dems put up in '20, just because as a Floridian, I have to vote to remove the current occupant.
Let's be honest, anyone but Sanders or Warren will pull off the Social Democrat language once the general election hits. If Sanders's campaign demonstrated Hilary's weakness among young Democrats, he also demonstrated the continued favorability of Third Way Dems among the African-American community (where he did very poorly). That's why Harris is the best bet forward, she has the best ability to energize both camps and remain non-committal to one side or the other.

Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
You're right, I should have compared against the potential candidates who chose not to enter the race. I'm doubtful on the face that Harris, Gillibrand, or Warren could have been safer in 2016 - but I acknowledge that Biden would have been the safest possible front going in. Not that safe because 2016 would have been genuinely was a plenty good time to have an intramural falling out over Biden's liberal conservatism (further right than Clinton ended up).

Interesting note on favorability: By the Sanders Gallup polling I linked earlier, Clinton's favorability (77%) among Democrats in September 2018 is equal to Sanders' favorability (78%) among Democrats in the same period. Discuss.
Favorability among Democrats was never the issue, but favorability among independents which is still dismal compared to Trump 2 years into his presidency. That tells you how bad of a candidate she was in hindsight.

BTW Acetaminophen, since you expressed preoccupation with electoral-geographic-demographic issues

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
here are two articles on how deregulation and retrenchment of Antitrust enforcement drained wealth and jobs and white collar workers from rural America and mid-sized Cities toward large coastal metropolitan zones. The suggestion is basically to reverse these trends of 'urban coastal elite privilege' and engender competition for jobs between all parts of the country. One putative side effect may be eliminate the Democrats' Senate disadvantage, to weaken the economic anxiety of (currently) flyover whites and thereby reduce the racial anxiety that is the other side of the coin. Which - hopefully drives enough whites to vote third party or abstain, I guess, from voting Republican...? As long as we're going to be scaring white upper-middle-class urban liberals with the specter of genuine desegregation, we might as well...

(Yes, there is an obvious flaw in this reasoning that elides the role of the modern international economic framework, plus existing and mutually reinforcing metropolitan social and infrastructural assets, in drawing efficiencies from geographic clustering of the highest-value industries. A neoliberal policy can disrupt the old ways, but nullifying it won't alone encourage the reproduction of those arrangements just as they developed within their contingent ecologies. We may still be prompted to ponder certain privileged interrelationships all the same. Good thing too that most of the articles' recommended commitments are independently desired among the Left.)
Yep, this is in alignment with separate posts I have made in the past. I agreed with Rorty in "Achieving Our Country" that during the mid 20th century, the American Left transitioned away from the socialist roots of pre-WW2 into a cultural Left. Now that the economic arguments have been left behind for 50 years, the result is an anxiety that threatens to reverse all of the cultural progress we have made. In my opinion, it's time to focus less on identity politics and absorb the plight of the discriminated under a Social Democratic economic banner aimed at giving midwest residents the 'prosperity they deserve/swindled from them by corporations'. The GOP under Trump have adopted their own form of identity politics under the identity of "disgruntled christian whiteness", and we can see the long term issues with trying to form a big enough coalition with just that demographic, but the Left has been afraid to vigorously apply that same logic on itself. Bill Maher sometimes calls it out for what it is, (paraphrasing) "Everyone after 2012 thought demographics gave the Democrats the future. Trump looked at the landscape and said 'There's still a lot of white people here.'"

I still believe Democrats may not take back the Senate (consistently) for at least two decades because of the inherent structure of the chamber. But by pressing through the GOP erected barriers on the state level (i.e. gerrymandering and winner-take-all delegates), the Left may be able to consistently control the executive and lower house. In which case, we may have a golden age of conservative moderation on an otherwise dominant liberal agenda in the Federal government. Only question then is whether the GOP would continue their policy of obstinate shutdowns and legislative blockage or if they would allow themselves to influence the policy through amendments and reconciliation.