POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

That sounds like white supremacy anxiety, to me....

That's part of it, but the general phenomenon is "status threat." There are some people who are fine with throwing marginalized groups a bone, but they can't tolerate feeling like they aren't the dominant partner anymore.

My point, which I thought has been very clear, was that what flies in a heavily D district wont in one that is purple, and the evidence heavily supports that. I don't think pointing that out is any more snide than the one you closed with.

So let the primary electorate decide for themselves, or pick candidates to support based on indicators of quality rather than their policy agenda?

The point is that neither "run more moderates" or "run more progressives" is a winning strategy in itself.

Bush going to bat for Linda Sarsour for one, who is at best a polarizing figure. Or any number of Omar's past comments that people accuse of being antisemitic. While I, a Jewish person, do not believe they were (at least not outwardly), a sitting Member of Congress needs to be more careful about one's speech. My opinion anyways. My parents got mailers from the Republican Jewish Coalition tying Biden to those comments of hers so there is definitely an impact on some level.

Pelosi, for one, says things that are offensive to Republicans, and used in their ads, all the time. She's no backbencher, but is one of the least popular safe seat Dems in the country. Has anyone told her to cool off her rhetoric and consider the damage she may be doing to the party brand? Republicans are always looking for an opening - they would be running on a pro-police platform by default this cycle - and they're the ones one needs to campaign against, not fellow Democrats (unless one is literally running against one for office). From what I could tell Espy and Jones did a fair job of that without resorting to hippie-punching. On the other hand, apparently most purple-district Dems have to run on bashing Pelosi (see the Blue Dog challenges to her leadership in 2018). Is that just normal and expected, but the existence of a Green New Deal is an unacceptable burden for non-supporters?

We can agree that every politician is better off not making 'dumb dumb' gaffes, but the determination is subjective. If it's something recklessly polarizing with no policy dimension or recognizable advantage, such as - for a made-up example - Elizabeth Warren declaring the Republican voter to be a subhuman brute fit only for scratching dirt, we could all agree on its unhelpfulness.

I get that electeds in less-safe seats are by definition less safe, but the existence of a Democrat elsewhere as lowest common denominator can't be limiting on anyone else.

I'm interested to see how Lee Carter, the socialist in Virginia state politics who comfortably won elections in a purple district but who is a genuine slugger on Twitter it turns out, performs in 2021.

More than zero.

This isn't the ringing endorsement you seem to think it is. What are the ratios, 0/1 against 3/+++ ? How many candidates who endorse Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, or whatever, survived in purple districts?

https://twitter.com/MaxKennerly/stat...84432763539456

Here's the Dem vote margin for the 24 vulnerable Democratic House candidates compared to their GovTrack ideology score.

There's of course a million caveats here, but, in the aggregate: the more conservative their record in Congress, the worse they fared at the polls.

Six sponsors of Medicare-for-All won re-election in swing districts. SD, MT, and MS legalized marijuana. Florida raised its minimum wage. There are no majority-centrist districts; the districts are polarized, and the independents aren't centrists.

The issue is the party brand, not shit leftists say. That's not something easily fixed without being in power.