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Republican Gov. John Kasich to speak at DNC

Even though he visited a town twenty minutes away from me I stayed at home. I guess I’m just a bad Trump loyalist.

I don't know if you're a Trump loyalist or not. Definitely biased towards the GOP though;)
 
I don't know if you're a Trump loyalist or not. Definitely biased towards the GOP though;)
We all have our biases. I have been known to play the devil’s advocate at times. ;)
 
Gee, what do you do when your fellow republicans are voting against you?
That could be because when Trump falls the Republican party could become will become collateral damage .
 
I will not, for the life of me, understand why the Democrats are giving a platform to that asshole.

Because the DNC would rather platform (and listen to) Republicans than progressives.
 
AOC won in a district a Democrat can't lose in. We don't think anything of a conservative Republican being primaried by an even more conservative Republican in a rural Southern district. So why do we think it is the future of the party when a liberal Democrat loses in a primary to an even more liberal Democrat in a very liberal district?

The Democrats flipped more seats in a midterm election than they ever have in 2018, and in the vast majority of the districts they flipped, they won with more moderate candidates. For example, my congresswoman is Sharice Davids, she lives around the corner from me, and she ran as a more moderate candidate and managed to flip a congressional district on the Kansas side of the Kansas City metro. The future battles are going to be in the suburbs, especially the more diverse inner-ring suburbs, and AOC type candidates don't flip those districts. If the Democratic Party wants to have a long term majority, their future is center-left.

First of all, your conscious and hilariously disingenuous dismissal of AOC's upstart victory in not just defeating but utterly crushing a long time, entrenched and powerful incumbent like Crowley that had all the money and establishment backing in the world is noted. I bet you thought Engels getting completely toasted by Jamaal Bowman was totally insignificant as well.

Second, no; when it comes to policy positions, progressives are vastly (and increasingly) more in alignment with the general populace. If you want to talk performance in 2020, of all those Dems in competitive districts, the more conservative candidates tended to underperform:




Just because you might prefer to believe something doesn't make it true.
 
First of all, your conscious and hilariously disingenuous dismissal of AOC's upstart victory in not just defeating but utterly crushing a long time, entrenched and powerful incumbent like Crowley that had all the money and establishment backing in the world is noted. I bet you thought Engels getting completely toasted by Jamaal Bowman was totally insignificant as well.

Second, no; when it comes to policy positions, progressives are vastly (and increasingly) more in alignment with the general populace. If you want to talk performance in 2020, of all those Dems in competitive districts, the more conservative candidates tended to underperform:




Just because you might prefer to believe something doesn't make it true.


How many liberal Democrats flipped competitive house districts in the last 10 years versus how many moderate Democrats flipped competitive districts?
 
I picked John Kasich over Trump back in 2016.


Everyone wanted to elect an outsider, someone who wasn't a politician or lawyer, so Trump won.

You reap what you sew, and we sewed a turd.
I had Kasich yard signs. Old school conservatism where things like honor, integrity, truth and the commanding sense between right and wrong were valued and considered good character traits. Those days are long gone. Now, old republicans like that are far and few between. They just dismiss them and call them RINO's. <sigh>
 
How many liberal Democrats flipped competitive house districts in the last 10 years versus how many moderate Democrats flipped competitive districts?

When I feel like trawling through 10 years of data, I'll let you know.

Point is that the immediate trajectory favours progressives, not 'moderate' Dems, and this is doubly true when it comes to policy. I'm not saying that there isn't a place for more conservative candidates in the party, because there's always going to be ridings where certain left-leaning ideas/positions just won't fly for the next 10-20 years and a Republican-lite strategy can work, but to claim that the future of the party is 'left of centre' in light of the overwhelming and growing public concurrence with core progressive policy going on supermajority, and places like Texas and Georgia turning blue, is laughably tone-deaf and smacks of wishful thinking/willful ignorance.
 
When I feel like trawling through 10 years of data, I'll let you know.

Point is that the immediate trajectory favours progressives, not 'moderate' Dems, and this is doubly true when it comes to policy. I'm not saying that there isn't a place for more conservative candidates in the party, because there's always going to be ridings where certain left-leaning ideas/positions just won't fly for the next 10-20 years and a Republican-lite strategy can work, but to claim that the future of the party is 'left of centre' in light of the overwhelming and growing public concurrence with core progressive policy going on supermajority, and places like Texas and Georgia turning blue, is laughably tone-deaf and smacks of wishful thinking/willful ignorance.

The recent trajectory has seen the Democrats losing in competitive districts and only increasing their vote share in solidly blue districts that they win no matter what anyway.
 
When I feel like trawling through 10 years of data, I'll let you know.

Point is that the immediate trajectory favours progressives, not 'moderate' Dems, and this is doubly true when it comes to policy. I'm not saying that there isn't a place for more conservative candidates in the party, because there's always going to be ridings where certain left-leaning ideas/positions just won't fly for the next 10-20 years and a Republican-lite strategy can work, but to claim that the future of the party is 'left of centre' in light of the overwhelming and growing public concurrence with core progressive policy going on supermajority, and places like Texas and Georgia turning blue, is laughably tone-deaf and smacks of wishful thinking/willful ignorance.
Laughably tone deaf and willful ignorance? Seems questionable given that the Dem POTUS candidate who ran as a moderate just won more votes than anyone in history, yet the Republicans nearly won the House apparently due to concern that progressives would have too much power even with moderate Biden in the WH. I think it's you who's seeing what you want to see.
 
The recent trajectory has seen the Democrats losing in competitive districts and only increasing their vote share in solidly blue districts that they win no matter what anyway.

That probably has more to do with record polarization than a failure of progressive politics. Last I checked, the majority of those candidates in said competitive districts were playing ball in exactly the way you want them to and many of them lost anyways; as stated, the more conservative a candidate was in 2020, the worse they tended to do. While I don't think that veering to the left is always going to work in competitive regions as stated earlier, it might be worth entertaining the idea that:

A: Republican turncoats in a highly polarized context are few and far between and trying to appeal to them may do more electoral harm than good ultimately in that it comes at the expense of other groups.
B: Independents aren't necessarily centrist, and often have a surprisingly progressive lean on policy.
C: Playing to policy that is popular in a given district is a winning strategy.
 
Laughably tone deaf and willful ignorance? Seems questionable given that the Dem POTUS candidate who ran as a moderate just won more votes than anyone in history, yet the Republicans nearly won the House apparently due to concern that progressives would have too much power even with moderate Biden in the WH. I think it's you who's seeing what you want to see.

It's the margin of victory that matters, and this election was closer than it had any right to be in light of Trump's colossal incompetence and failures; even Joe's biggest cheerleaders couldn't help but admit this.

I am convinced that in the absence of COVID, Biden wouldn't have had a snowball's chance in hell.
 
That probably has more to do with record polarization than a failure of progressive politics. Last I checked, the majority of those candidates in said competitive districts were playing ball in exactly the way you want them to and many of them lost anyways

Because the current face of the party are Democrats in D+40 districts and thus Democrats running in R+3 districts are getting painted as for the Green New Deal and so on, even though they aren't.
 
Because the current face of the party are Democrats in D+40 districts and thus Democrats running in R+3 districts are getting painted as for the Green New Deal and so on, even though they aren't.

You'll have to forgive me if I don't take these spurious claims at face value without evidence.

Yes, I'm sure candidates ideologically opposed to progressives love to blame them for their failures as opposed to taking accountability for their failed campaigns and this is a matter of record, but I've yet to see any actual evidence that AOC and progressive ideas have cost conserva-dems their district.
 
It's the margin of victory that matters, and this election was closer than it had any right to be in light of Trump's colossal incompetence and failures; even Joe's biggest cheerleaders couldn't help but admit this.

I am convinced that in the absence of COVID, Biden wouldn't have had a snowball's chance in hell; at the very least he would have surely lost.
I'm not sure how the fact that Trump nearly won even after mangling a pandemic supports the theory that a progressive would have done better. Trump was dying to run against a progressive--he didn't even bother to change his strategy after Biden got the nomination ... and seventy million plus people bought it. Plus if COVID hadn't happened Trump would be running in a position of massive strength on the economy. The Republican base is rabidly anti-socialist--even against moderate Dems. Run Trump against an actual progressive he gets the same voters easily, and you're left hoping that there are more progressives energized to vote than the 80 million Biden needed to win this election, who there is no guaranty would also vote for a progressive.
 
I'm not sure how the fact that Trump nearly won even after mangling a pandemic supports the theory that a progressive would have done better. Trump was dying to run against a progressive--he didn't even bother to change his strategy after Biden got the nomination ... and seventy million plus people bought it. Plus if COVID hadn't happened Trump would be running in a position of massive strength on the economy. The Republican base is rabidly anti-socialist--even against moderate Dems. Run Trump against an actual progressive he gets the same voters easily, and you're left hoping that there are more progressives energized to vote than the 80 million Biden needed to win this election, who there is no guaranty would also vote for a progressive.

The key difference is that a more progressive candidate would have leveraged policy that supermajorities of people support; Biden by contrast was running Hillary's 'Orange Man Bad' campaign warmed over with policy taking a backseat if featuring at all, despite that having been proven a failure; in many cases, these policy positions have bipartisan support.

I mean just look at these numbers:
Federal Job Guarantee, 79% support: https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-ame...pport-federal-jobs-program-for-the-unemployed
Medicare for All, 72% support: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2...dicare-all-fox-news-poll-shows-72-voters-want
Federal Legalization of Marijuana, 68% support: https://news.gallup.com/poll/323582/support-legal-marijuana-inches-new-high.aspx
Wealth Tax on Billionaires, 66% support: https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-ame...rs-believe-billionaires-should-pay-wealth-tax
Green New Deal, 64% support: https://thehill.com/policy/energy-e...n-new-deal-yielding-gains-despite-gop-attacks
Free Public Colleges, 63% support: https://www.studyinternational.com/news/free-college-tuition/
A Big Infrastructure Spend, 62% support: https://www.vox.com/2020/5/21/21262211/infrastructure-spending-poll-stimulus
 
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