I am an independant swing voter who generally votes Dem.  I’m looking out for a chance to swing left though, if MA can ever get candidates who are left of the Dems and not either completely disconnected from reality, naive or corrupt.

@ anoNY2
This is such a tired meme, blaming/giving credit for Ralph Nader voters deciding the 2000 election. I blame fraud on the part of Republican operatives, massive amount of nepotism (when your brother is the governor of the contested state, your cousin calls it for you on Fox News, and several of the Supreme Court justices were appointed by your father, what else is it?) and Al Gore’s shitty campaign and unwillingness to fight.
The man couldn’t even carry his home state.

—signed someone who was in college at the time and voted in her first election.

If you’re going to talk about swing voters significantly affecting an election, look at 1992.  Remember Ross Perot?

I don’t get the levels of partisanship in America.  Near as I can tell, no more than half of Canadian voters actually committed to who’ll they’ll vote for before they campaigning starts.  (See, e.g., the Federal elections in ‘84, ‘93, ‘08, where 20%+ of votes changed their minds after the write was dropped.  And innumerable provincial ones.)  I mean, I pay a lot of attention to politics, but over the 12 years I’ve been able to vote I’ve voted Liberal, New Democrat, and Green federally (and if I had it all to do over again, I’d have voted Progressive Conservative in 2000), and Liberal, and New Democrat provincially. 

I don’t get it.  Someone who pays attention should notice changes in platforms, local candidates, leaders, political/social/economic climate that take their perspective to different places.  Someone who doesn’t pay attention should be the one who votes how their grandfather did.

FWIW, it looks like Kornacki’s speculation is exactly what’s happening.  For months now, Obama has been beating all of the Republican candidates in the polls (the reason Romney has been treated as the default front-runner is because he was losing by the least - he was down only 4% or so while everyone else was in the double digits), but losing to the Generic Republican.  But in the Gallup poll of 8/4 - 8/7, <a=href"http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/08/obama-surges-to-lead-against-generic-republican.php?ref=fpblg”>he started winning that as well</a>.

As for the main point of the post, I think we should thank the Republicans for their slow, steady work as well.  They’ve spent the last forty years pandering to rural, white, Christian Southerners (and/or the Lords of Business) as if they were the only Real Americans, and it’s cost them a lot of people who would otherwise be their natural allies - believe me, few of the Latin@s I know vote Democratic because they’re liberals.  They’ve just had one party telling them for the last forty years that they’re not welcome, and now that they’re a demographic worth courting, they remember.

Html fail. 

Let’s try again.

Most people’s votes are set in stone before the candidate is even selected.  People forget this, because lots of voters call themselves “moderates” or “independents”, but those designations usually mean “partisan but have absorbed the toxic notion that there’s something wrong about being partisan, so I’m going to pretend that my vote is up for grab, even though it’s not, because I like deluding myself that I’m open-minded”.

I’ve been a registered independent my entire voting life. In practice I’ve voted for Democrats each time, mainly for the whole “spoiler leading to worse results” logic governing the elections I’ve been eligible to vote in. (I voted for Gore, but I had NO idea how horrible Shrub would be.) I did not register as a Democrat at first because of that whole “I’m open minded” idea. The only reason for me to change party affiliation is to affect a party’s primary and really change the general election, which I haven’t really seen the opportunity for me to do.  (I really didn’t think Obama or Clinton were substantially different from each other in ways that mattered.)

Now, because of events in my personal life and politics over the past ten years, I am FAR more radical than I was twelve years ago, and I feel like there’s no real home for me in either major party.

What will it take for some of these “swing voters” to wake up and smell the coffee?

How many decades of Republican hostility toward all aspects of government (except for the War Department) are they willing to tolerate before ceasing to elect hateful Republicans?  How much untaxed wealth has to go to the Top 1% before they realize it’s all gone and no one else will ever see a penny of it?  How meager a social safety net are they willing to accept before they realize they might need it too and it won’t be there for them?  How much worse must the roads get before they realize they’re never going to be fixed?  How many bridges need to collapse before they discover maintenance is not optional?  How many times do the Wall Street casinos need to fleece us all before they realize it must stop?  How many wars do we need to sacrifice our money and young people to before they realize they can’t continue unchecked?  How many American cities (and Americans) do we need to write off before it sinks in?

Most importantly, when will you actually learn to think for yourselves instead of buying and repeating pre-canned, self-serving propaganda from the very people who are robbing you blind while claiming to be innocent, neutral, non-partisans?

Just like death and taxes, government is an inevitability.  If you get more than a handful of people living together, a system of rules and leadership will develop, or chaos ensues.  If we’re going to have government, and only silly libertarian Randroids doubt its necessity, then it behooves us all to make sure that it is functional, efficient, and fair.  Continuing to elect people to government office who are dedicated destroying that same government is self-evidently counterproductive, especially after reviewing the last 40-years of Republican misrule.

This is like the joke about the man who keeps hitting himself in the head with a hammer, because it feels so good when he stops.  Look around you, swing voters, and stop voting for Republicans so the pain will stop.  Don’t leave us and our children living in a Road Warrior-style hellscape…

The answer, MikeEss, is blowin’ in the wind.  The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Sorry.  Raised on folk music.  Couldn’t resist.

I’ve noticed that Progressives seem to be all hung up on who wins elections.

However, you can win elections and still lose on the important issues, or lose elections and still win on your issues—I think that the experience of the last 4 years bring it out.  If there is widespread and real support for something, it’s going to happen, even if the top politicians are against it.  But if there isn’t a strong consensus for it, even a political minority can block it.

Universal health care failed, even thought a President and quite a few congress people were elected promising it, because there wasn’t a general consensus on it in the population.  (There was a weak consensus that the general idea was nice, but not for any particular model.)

On the other hand, same-sex marriage seems to be going through, despite extreme opposition on the part of the Republican party and many power groups, and (at best) tepid support from the Democratic party, because the idea has caught on in society at large.

but it still seems there vote would be “up for grabs” if the Democrats had a candidate less connected to Clinton.

But the precise problem with Gore is that he ran away from Clinton’s record instead of embracing it.

This is what allowed it to get so close that the Nader voters mattered in the first place.  He should have been running as a successful incumbent - “You want 4 more years of good times, then vote for me and we’ll make it even better”.  Instead he tried to run himself as “not Clinton” - going so far as to bring on Joe Lieberman as his Veep - a man that a lot of Democrats hated even at the time because he was part of the Clinton witch hunt.

Gore got the worst of both worlds.  The far left of the party were convinced that he was just Clinton continued and the center of the party - who actually WANTED Clinton continued - didn’t get the case made that if that’s what they wanted they should vote for him. 

Nader only “cost” him the election in the sense that Gore and his advisors set Gore on a path to failure because they thought Clinton was a liability instead of an asset with the middle of the country.  Had they embraced Clinton’s record - and noticed that people in the middle of the country didn’t give a Rat’s Ass about the Republican witch hunt and in fact liked Clinton despite of it - they could have made a successful run.  Instead they set themselves up to be disliked by people to their left AND to their right.  Not a formula for winning an election.

I don’t get the levels of partisanship in America.

I’m not a poli-sci person, but my guess is that because gridlock is part of the structure—a parliamentary system has a more direct cause-effect relationship between policies & results—voters’ stakes appear to be mostly rhetorical and incremental.  The dominance of a given political identity in the media influences policy outcomes by creating pressure on members of the opposing party to comply.  It’s bizarre, convoluted, horribly ineffective, and bad for both the parties and individuals because of the self-flattery (as Amanda noted, Americans are horribly prone to political narcissism- we usually believe our mythologies) involved, but that’s what it is IMNSHO.

And I’m as guilty as anyone of it, mind you—my liberalism is very much a result of growing up among cultural conservatives and despising the self-righteousness that’s so prevalent within the culture.  I try to avoid the idealistic vanities associated with the left- ‘perfectability of man,’ anyone?—but the truth is that I think liberalism is more chaotic on many levels, but still the essential characteristic of societal development, period.  Look at liberal countries or states compared with their more conservative counterparts; they’re hardly problem-free, but they are still typically way ahead in almost every quality-of-life measure.

I almost didn’t vote for Gore because of Lieberman, and I had stopped being registered Dem at that point.  Or, I agree with NonyNony, except it was Dems and anyone left of them hated Lieberman as he had already shown himself to be an insurance Co schill, among other odious things.
If I had to have a party to vote in primaries here in MA, it would have to be Dem, but since I don’t and they are more the default party than anything in particular I care for here, I’ll continue to be unenrolled.  Before moving to MA, I was registered as a Dem for just that reason.

anoNY2: We all saw the lengths the GOP went to in order to steal the 2000 election. It’s a matter of public record: Daddy Bush’s friends on the Supreme Court handed the White House to Junior on a silver platter. That trumps everything. Point your finger at Nader all you want, the bottom line is that the Rethugs stole 2000.

I’m not saying this as a Nader fanboy; I think Ralph Nader has made enough serious miscalculations and just plain out-and-out stupid mistakes over the years to merit rejection, the worst obviously being when he joined the fascists’ “protest” over Terri Schiavo. That one was particularly egregious, and he should have known better; you don’t publicly unite with the worst kind of nazis and religious crackpots over some higher principle (and one that they certainly don’t share), whatever your stated reasons.

But the GOP stole the 2000 election, end of story. At absolute worst, Nader was one of a dozen factors that made the election close enough for the Rethugs to get away with what they did, so why do the people who continuously focus on his role ignore every other factor involved? When a group of Republican thugs invaded a poll station and kept the vote from being counted because they thought it wasn’t going to go their way, and not a single prominent Democrat uttered a hint of complaint - let along suggested that these fuckers possibly face criminal charges - I knew we’d entered very dangerous territory.

Amanda wrote:

just because Republicans are hated that much.

Really?  Somehow, as hated as you believe Republicans to be, Republican House candidates won a majority of the votes cast in 2010, defeating a whole lot of incumbent Democrats, people who had already proved their ability to win an election just two years previously.  We had big losses in 2006 and 2008, but, since 1994, those hated Republicans have won 12 Congressional chambers compared to 5 for the Democrats (with one tie, the Senate in 2000); that’s a fairly lengthy record of not-hatred for the GOP.

We need to remember that the reason these “swing” voters are all-powerful is that only about 60% of eligible voters turn out in Presidential years and 40% in off-years (and we saw in 2010 how different those two electorates can be). We’re in a vicious cycle where politicians ignore the concerns of the non-voters because, well, they don’t vote, and the non-voters see the political system as having nothing in it for them- lather, rinse, repeat. Anybody who really breaks into this cycle (as Obama pretended in 2008 he was trying to do) could bring about a lot of change surprisingly quickly. If it ever does get figured out, we’d all better hope it’s figured out by the good guys.

One of the built-in problems we have is that our antiquated, dysfunctional presidential form of government actively works to frustrate any attempt to change this situation. Witness Obama’s “post-partisan”, above the fray shtick which, let’s face it, is probably a good re-election strategy- and one likely to occur to almost any President simply by the political logic baked into the system- however devastating it is for the Democratic Party and the country. It’s no accident that most countries, as they have adopted democratic constitutions over the centuries, have opted for some form of parliamentary system.

Somehow, as hated as you believe Republicans to be, Republican House candidates won a majority of the votes cast in 2010

Which amounted to a surprisingly small fraction of the votes won by Obama in 2008. The off-year electorate is far smaller and less representative of the country. And many polls show that they’ve pretty much worn out their welcome and you’ll be disappointed in how many are right back out the door in 2012.

If you must troll, put a little more effort into it than that.

“If you must troll, put a little more effort into it than that.”

I don’t think Dana’s heart is in it these days.  Even he must see that the Tea-Bagging Terrorists are insane, and the current Republican Party (since it contains the Teabaggers too) is bound to follow them down the rabbit hole.

It’s pretty bad when they’ve gone so far to the right that Ronnie Reagan would be a heretic and the Barry Goldwater of 1964 sounds like a solid and reasonable man in comparison, not to mention Nixon…

Go away, Dana. You are a horrible and dishonest human being who is shilling for a immoral, false belief system. We have no time for you moral and intellectual cowardice.

I don’t get the levels of partisanship in America.  Near as I can tell, no more than half of Canadian voters actually committed to who’ll they’ll vote for before they campaigning starts.

America has exactly two functional political parties, and one of them (guess which) has contributed virtually nothing of value to the federal government for 30+ years. So there’s nothing intelligent or open-minded about being open to the possibility of voting Republican.

The state and local levels can be different, of course, but here in Georgia at least, all the state level politicians are themselves Republicans and Democrats, and have largely given up having their own platforms and have begun simply parroting the talking points of their respective federal-level party members.

The lesson I take from 2008 and 2010 is that swing voters don’t matter. What really matters is whose base is more enthusiastic.  Democrats had great years in 2006 and 2008 because they were motivated; Republicans won 2010 because they were even more fired up.

So if that’s the case, “all this blogging and analysis and campaigning and whatnot” is even more important. You’re not trying to change people’s minds, you’re trying to remind the people whose minds are already made up to stay engaged.

You know why we don’t hear any more about the Blue Dog Democrats? Because they’re pretty much gone: Replaced with Tea Party Republicans. The question is: Did the demographics of those districts change so substantially in the couple of years between the elections, or were the Blue Dog Democrats so poisonous to the voting base that no one bothered to turn out and re-elect them? My money’s on the latter.

Also, to Amanda:
And to make it worse, the very small number of people whose votes are up for grabs are pretty much the polar opposite of the thoughtful citizen who has an open mind and spends the weeks before the election somberly reading up on the candidates before making a well-informed, well-considered opinion. Swing voters tend to be the most ignorant ones, which is probably why they manage to keep voting for Republicans, in between voting for Democrats, even though they basically never like the results of voting Republican.

Thank you so much for that. “On the fence voters” and “centrists” are enormous chucklefucks, by and large. I don’t happen to like either party, either, but I also don’t think that if a Democrat is in office and the economy sucks, voting for a Republican is a sensible answer.

Dedicated Republican voters are at least a slight step better in that they actually know what they stand for (even if what they stand for is remarkably stupid and hateful), and aren’t just voting to punish or reward the current leaders for an economic situation that swing voters don’t begin to comprehend the causes or nature of.

Dana, stop being so pathetic and read the polls. The worst thing Repiblicans can do for their popularity is win and remind voters what horrible people they are.

Mr Ess wrote:

I don’t think Dana’s heart is in it these days.  Even he must see that the Tea-Bagging Terrorists are insane, and the current Republican Party (since it contains the Teabaggers too) is bound to follow them down the rabbit hole.

Oh, on the contrary, Dana’s heart is very much in it!  We saw a strong, comeback victory in 2010, and 2012 is looking pretty good.  Presidential re-elections are, in the end, a referendum on whether the incumbent President has been a success or a failure, and, right now, President Obama looks a lot like a failure.

But, who knows?  If the economy turns around and unemployment drops significantly, President Obama will get the credit for that, and be re-elected; it could happen.  I just don’t think it will.

Amanda wrote:

Dana, stop being so pathetic and read the polls. The worst thing Repiblicans can do for their popularity is win and remind voters what horrible people they are.

In the end, there’s only one poll which counts, and that’s the one held on election day.

But, for being such “horrible people,” Republicans still manage to win a good number of elections.  Perhaps your ideas about what constitutes a horrible person is somewhat different from a significant part of the electorate.

I think you overestimate how much the electorate hates Republicans.  The polls indicate a deepening conservative trend, if anything.  The electorate has swallowed the myth that spending cuts and austerity measures produce confidence fairies in our more elegant gated communities.  Obama has done nothing to dispel that, and he’s either going to continue the same failed policies or lose the independents for caving to the right on the debt deal.  I like the idea of encouraging Elizabeth Warren to mount a primary challenge.  She wouldn’t win but represents the kind of classical liberal Democrat that many who voted for Obama wanted.  Her high profile would instantly garner media attention and provide a welcome contrast to the patrician neoliberals currently in charge, and just maybe nudge the Obama paradigm of framing nearly every issue in right-wings terms.

Fortunately for the Blue Dog mantle, Obama seems more than prepared to take up their preferred policies.

Mighty Ponygirl wrote:

You know why we don’t hear any more about the Blue Dog Democrats? Because they’re pretty much gone: Replaced with Tea Party Republicans. The question is: Did the demographics of those districts change so substantially in the couple of years between the elections, or were the Blue Dog Democrats so poisonous to the voting base that no one bothered to turn out and re-elect them? My money’s on the latter.

Many of the blue dogs came from areas with conservative Democrats as well as Republicans, but those conservative Democrats are often older, sticking with a party identification that they’ve had for their entire lives, while their children became Republicans because they, too, were conservative, but they weren’t really that strongly identified with the Democrats.  Those types of districts will slowly become more and more Republican. 

I saw this continually when I lived in Kentucky and Virginia; the local Democratic officeholders were simply more conservative than the Democrats at the federal level, but their constituents had been Democrats for generations, and were slow to change.  The national Democratic Party left them, and that left only the GOP for the next generation.

Obama has done nothing to dispel that, and he’s either going to continue the same failed policies or lose the independents for caving to the right on the debt deal.

I don’t think he’ll lose the independents for that; the independents don’t see the debt deal that way. By and large, they’re the most in favor of “compromise,” and the likeliest to swallow the notion that raising the debt ceiling was a victory in itself (which it was, if you consider narrowly avoiding an iceberg a victory rather than a near-disaster), and that deficit reduction is important or helpful.

Thanks, because it is genuinely annoying how much time the media and politicians spend talking about the 2% of the population that claim to be independents or swing voters. In my experience the people who claim to be independents fall into three categories:

1 - The knuckleheads Amanda describes who aren’t paying attention.
2 - People who are trying to get attention and stir up debate among their solidly Democratic friends. (And the ones I’ve met all live in Park Slope or DuPont Circle)
3 - People who are planning to vote for a Democrat but are afraid to tell their tea bagging, small town relatives for fear of having nowhere to go for Thanksgiving.

*The worst thing Repiblicans can do for their popularity is win and remind voters what horrible people they are.*

That would only happen in a rational-thinking population, one that hasn’t materialized here yet.

Well, Dana, I know I’m looking forward to a Perry/Bachmann Republican ticket.

Either that will lead to a Republican re-evaluation of their growing insanity, after another stunning loss to the Kenyan Usurper, or after a Republican win (SCOTUS primed and ready to step in as needed) the brand new Republic of Gilead will commence hanging “libruls” (definition: anyone to the left of Michele “Crazy Eyes” Bachmann) on telephone poles across America.

Either way, it’ll be fun to watch… from a safe distance…

Perhaps your ideas about what constitutes a horrible person is somewhat different from a significant part of the electorate.

Perhaps you can get the stick out of your ass and demonstrate a real reason why anyone should vote Republican, Mr. Pico.

The truth of the matter is that someone who actually pays a lot of attention to politics is going to become a partisan, and there’s no shame in that.  It’d be like following sports or music intently without ever developing opinions about any teams or bands.

But politics isn’t like sports or music is it?  The Saints winning or losing or preferring pop to jazz isn’t going to let people starve, start a pointless war, or violate anyone’s rights.  Much partisanship (see Daily Kos as exhibit “A”) seems to treat politics as a sporting event.  Where it all becomes “Yay Team!” poll horserace non-sense, or my party right or wrong.

I am well informed about the issues and actively engaged in advocacy work (I work at Legal Aid).  But I am not partisan.  Why?  Because I don’t give a flying turd about any of the parties.  I care about issues and policy.  Parties can be useful as organizing devices to affect changes in policy and promote issues.  But in the end, the important thing is the issues and the policy.

Let me be blunt: I care about enlarging (not just preserving) the social safety net, Medicare for All, an end to starting aggressive wars, civil rights, and civil liberties.  I don’t care about whether someone is waving a red flag or a blue flag.  I am a solid LEFT progressive (not a !@#$ing ‘liberal’).  I don’t do “Yay Team!” for a political party.

As for alternatives to the Democrats, there are a few.  There is the Green Party, the Socialist Party, and (luckily I live in New York) the Working Families Party.

“But, for being such “horrible people,” Republicans still manage to win a good number of elections.”

Horrible, reactionary, koolaid-drinking, morons voting for horrible, soulless, talking-point-spouting, Reichwing panderers, none of whom either know, or care, about objective fact or reality.  Awesome!

But don’t make them mad, or they’ll run you down with their Medicare-provided HoverRounds while screaming about Big Guvmint!...

“Perhaps your ideas about what constitutes a horrible person is somewhat different from a significant part of the electorate.”

I know my idea of what a horrible person is defined as would be strikingly different from the 27%-er hard-Reichwing nutballs.  Which apparently includes you.  And I’m okay with that…

Perhaps you can get the stick out of your ass and demonstrate a real reason why anyone should vote Republican, Mr. Pico.

Well, social validation from other Republicans is a good reason, along with stubbornly trying to prove that your judgment in being a mindless bush supporter wasn’t a mistake that outs you as a morally blind moron. Those are both reasons for voting Republican.

Re Richard’s mention of the WFP in NY (my native state and one that I returned to for a decade of my adult life), I do wish fusion voting would be adopted in a lot more places. It’s a relatively simple reform that could make a small but noticeable contribution towards making our system more democratic and accountable. (Though I do think the WFP got pretty well hosed by Cuomo this time around, but you can’t win ‘em all.)

The Dark Avenger wrote:

Perhaps you can get the stick out of your ass and demonstrate a real reason why anyone should vote Republican, Mr. Pico.

I am certain that nothing I could demonstrate would be acceptable to you, but that doesn’t matter: what matters is that many people do vote Republican, whether you believe they should or not.  President Obama won a great victory in 2008, but John McCain still captured 46% of the vote.  In 2010, Republican House candidates captured a majority of all House votes cast.  It’s pretty obvious that not everybody shares the predominant opinion on Pandagon, and those millions of Republican votes have reasons which are quite real to them.

I’m registered independent (In California, that is “Decline to State.”)  This is because the Democratic Party is too far to the right of me.  However, in a two way race, I’ll almost always vote for the democratic candidate.  (Last GOP vote was in 1980, for Millicent Fenwick.) 

I didn’t vote for Gore in 2000 because of Lieberman.  I felt that showed poor decision making.

But Richard, I don’t think Amanda’s said anywhere (and really, if you read this site it should be obvious given how much criticism of Dems goes on) that she or any other progressives should be all “Yay Team Donkey!!!1!11” at the expense of caring about specific issues.  I think we can all agree that if GOP members suddenly stop acting like….Republicans, maybe we’ll vote for them. In the real world, when it’s obvious that one party is actively trying to dismantle everything you care about, it’s not really practical that anyone on the left will sit down and make a pros and cons list about whether to vote for Barack Obama or Michele Bachmann because they’re So Above Parties.  I mean, come on.

I imagine party leaders have access to statistics that will tell them exactly what group of people is most likely to change the election. Most people vote the same way every election, and in fact, most states do so too. It’s only a small collection of swing states where your vote has any value and independents in those areas are probably exactly the target audience of a disproportionate number of campaigning efforts.

I hope people will also realize that their vote doesn’t count just in general: there has never been a situation where 1 vote more would have made a difference, and holding the results against anyone who has ever voted the ‘wrong’ way is quite bad. Simply because your vote means nothing, the only thing you can do is vote symbolically to express some political belief you have.

Perhaps your ideas about what constitutes a horrible person is somewhat different from a significant part of the electorate.

Probably so, because I expect rationality and fairly astute self-criticism, combined with a considerable amount of forbearance towards others, in anyone who professes to be a decent person,  Republicans are, of course, just the opposite in their ridiculous self-regard and liking for public-policy hostility towards those of whom they disapprove, underneath a thin veneer of kindness within the tribe that they claim as exclusive to Good People™.  I’ve cut most of ‘em loose over the years and don’t feel any loss; in fact, it’s a relief to not have to navigate the ocean of self-serving rationalizations.  It is a problem in some electoral cases, of course, but as Amanda pointed out, Americans do seem to be pathological in their disinclination to see themselves honestly.

To be fair, I’m fortunate in this respect: without having living parents & by being on Facebook, I can neglect certain extended-family obligations, and I’m not affiliated with conservative institutions by social standing or profession.  Also, I’m happier with a smaller circle of genuinely respectful associations than a mass of superficial ones. 

Dana @ 31:

I took the liberty of fixing your text for accuracy.

“Many of the blue dogs came from areas with conservative racist Democrats as well as Republicans, but those conservative racist Democrats are often older, sticking with a party identification that they’ve had for their entire lives, while their children became Republicans because they, too, were conservative racist, but they weren’t really that strongly identified with the Democrats.  Those types of districts will slowly become more and more Republican. 

I saw this continually when I lived in Kentucky and Virginia; the local Democratic officeholders were simply more conservative racist than the Democrats at the federal level, but their constituents had been Democrats for generations, and were slow to change. The national Democratic Party left them, and that left only the GOP for the next generation.”

Amanda: “The worst thing Repiblicans can do for their popularity is win and remind voters what horrible people they are.”

Really?  You are saying that a successful Republican strategy would be to lose, or that winning an election would be a bad thing for them.

Reminds me of the recent Onion headline: “New GOP Strategy Involves Reelecting Obama, Making His Life Even More Miserable.”

-Jut

“Really?  You are saying that a successful Republican strategy would be to lose, or that winning an election would be a bad thing for them.”

Why is that so hard to understand?  More opportunities for Republicans to fuck things up means more things will be fucked up. 

There seems to be some level of belief among too many Americans that Republican/ conservative/ Teabagger rhetoric is just bluff.  The debt-ceiling bullshit should have provided proof that the radical Reichwing really does want to burn it all down.  A Republican POTUS win in 2012 will provide daily evidence that no matter how bad you think it is, Republicans can always figure out novel ways to make things far worse…

People forget this, because lots of voters call themselves “moderates” or “independents”, but those designations usually mean “partisan but have absorbed the toxic notion that there’s something wrong about being partisan, so I’m going to pretend that my vote is up for grab, even though it’s not, because I like deluding myself that I’m open-minded”.

Thank you for articulating so clearly something I’ve been uncomfortable with for years, but couldn’t pin down well enough to explain to others.  I’m going to print this out on a card.

@24 mightyponygirl:  My personal Blue Dog rep, Dennis Moore, retired last cycle, and was replaced by a guy, Kevin Yoder, who ran as a mostly moderate, but has gone all tea-party since.  I was at the first organizing meeting when Dennis first ran, and the organizer said: “Let’s go!  A Democrat CAN win in Johnson County!”  I thought, “Dream on, honey.  We have to run somebody for pride’s sake, but there’s no way he’s going to win”.  He did win, five terms, before retiring.  I keep calling Yoder’s office and reminding him that this is not a tea-party district that kept Dennis in office for 10 years, and if he votes all tea-party there’s no way he can win.  But he has to go all tea-party for fear of a primary.  I think he’s screwed either way.  If he’s too moderate, he’ll lose the primary, but if he’s too tea-party, he’ll lose the general.  Dennis decided not too run rather late, so there was no time to recruit a strong Democratic candidate, but there have been two years for somebody to decide now.  I’m hoping for Carol Marinovich, former mayor of Kansas City, Kansas. 
Sure, I’d prefer a socialist like Bernie Sanders, but this is Kansas, and considering that he was representing his constituents,  Dennis Moore was as far left as he could be and still keep getting reelected here.  That’s why Blue Dogs exist, and they’re a very good thing when the alternative is Tea-partiers like Kevin Yoder.

I guess there was a study that found that people who call themselves “independent” are actually more partisan than people who declare a party—in that a person who identifies as independent is much less likely to actually switch up their vote.

Does anyone honestly think that the 20-30% of republicans in this country are as a group so dangerous they would be contend to watch America burn if it meant they would win? It sounds so tribal. A lot of voters do end up picking republicans because they feel the country would be safer in their hands. Maybe they’re uninformed, but please don’t say they want to watch the world burn.

MikeEss: “Why is that so hard to understand?”

Let me edit Amanda’s quote, and maybe you will see: “The [best] thing [Democrats] can do for their popularity is [lose] and remind voters what horrible people [Republicans] are.”

You see how foolish that is?  The best strategy for each party in 2012 is to lose.  Nonsense!

MikeEss: “There seems to be some level of belief among too many Americans that Republican/ conservative/ Teabagger rhetoric is just bluff.”

“Astroturf,” anyone?  No, the reason why it is so popular is that there is a belief that it really is NOT the same old tired rhetoric they have heard from politicians in the past. 

-Jut

Mr Ess wrote:

“But, for being such “horrible people,” Republicans still manage to win a good number of elections.”

Horrible, reactionary, koolaid-drinking, morons voting for horrible, soulless, talking-point-spouting, Reichwing panderers, none of whom either know, or care, about objective fact or reality.  Awesome!

Now, who says you can’t be charming and persuasive when you want to be? 

” No, the reason why it is so popular is that there is a belief that it really is NOT the same old tired rhetoric they have heard from politicians in the past.”

Yeah, it’s so different from all those previous Republican politicians who also spouted off the same bullshit about tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts.

Tax cuts will make your dick larger and harder, tax cuts will bring back the luxurious full head of hair you had in high school, tax cuts will make you more handsome than ever and make you an irresistible chick magnet, tax cuts will make your kids smarter and more popular, tax cuts will turn your wife into a supermodel, tax cuts will transform your beat up old Oldsmobile into a shiny new Porsche, etc.

And ridding the country of abortion and gays and extra-marital sex will make God love us again.

This has been the exact same rhetoric from the Reichwing since Reagan first ran for POTUS in 1976 (at least).  And somehow putting it in new packaging and a launching more vigorous advertising campaign (“New and improved, with Retsyn™ and Genuine American Crazy Eyes™”) changes it from the same old crap to some stunningly innovative and creative solution to all our problems?  Huh?...

I think we can all agree that if GOP members suddenly stop acting like….Republicans, maybe we’ll vote for them.

If there were a complete political realignment, sure.  I thought the 1860 GOP platform was brilliant - the abolition of slavery was a very important issue.  But what have they done for us lately?  LOL.

I strongly agree with Steve. As Amanda pointed out, the number of “swing voters” is tiny. Let’s say they’re, at most, 10% of regular voters. Seeing as how the average turnout for national elections is roughly 50%, that means they’re, at most, 5% of the electorate. That leaves 10 times as many non-voters for progressives to focus on. One could argue that it’s more difficult to get non-voters to both vote and vote the way you want, but can one really argue that it would be 10 times harder than convincing incredibly ignorant and narrow-minded “swing voters”? If not, then it’s a better use of resources.

To be honest, one of the main reasons I was so impressed with Obama, even as early as the summer of 2007, is that he seemed like he’d actually appeal to habitual non-voters. And he did. The problem is that he’s not going to in 2012, because he’s unwise enough to think that 1996-level turnout benefits him in the current economic and political climate: http://www.fairvote.org/voter-turnout

As for the absurd myth that Nader lost Gore the 2000 election, I think it’s important to remember two important facts. 1) More registered Democrats voted for Bush in Florida than voted for Nader: http://www.cagreens.org/alameda/city/0803myth/myth.html 2) Gore’s campaign couldn’t even win his home state of Tennessee, which meant he could have lost Florida (which he didn’t actually lose) and still have won the electoral college.

Of course, most Nader voters were people who wouldn’t have voted anyway. They’re the same people who awarded Bill Clinton with record-breaking low-turnout in 1996, for being a sell-out and for caring more about “swing” voters than people who would form a natural progressive constituency. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1786/who-are-nonvoters-less-republican-educated-younger Of course, after years of seeing Dems back away from commonsense solutions to their electoral problems, one has to wonder if A) They actually want to win B) They’re afraid of becoming a truly progressive party.

“In fact, social science demonstrates that Americans are generally quicker to paint a rosier picture of themselves according to certain social standards than people in many other countries, for reasons that are still a little hazy. “

What do you mean exactly? Do you have links?

@ laika @52 - I, for one, do think exactly that.  It’s easy to believe if you realize that the core of conservatism is spite, the belief that someone, somewhere (probably some urban darkie) is getting something that they don’t deserve, but that you do. 

And yes, it’s tribal.  And the people who vote Republican because they feel the country would be safer in their hands are sorely mistaken.

MikeEss: “Yeah, it’s so different from all those previous Republican politicians who also spouted off the same bullshit about tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts.”

Um, it is.  It is tax cuts AND SPENDING CUTS. 

The complaint conservatives have with Reagan is not that he cut taxes, but that he increased the deficit by not addressing spending.  But, they generally think he was successful in the long run.

The problem with Bush I: he raised taxes when he said he would not.

The problem with Bush II: not that he raised taxes (he cut them), but that he did not control spending as well (and that is an understatement). 

The Republicans came in in 1994 and, within a few years, the budget was balanced.  Then, they started spending money like, well, Democrats.  The people threw them out, only to realize that Democrats also spend like Democrats.  So, maybe Amanda’s point was right.  The Republicans needed to lose in 2006 and 2008 to remind us what Democratic control is.  The thing that the Tea Party has added is a much more skeptical view of spending.

-Jut

@ Jutgory - Proof is in the pudding.  The last two elections of the Bush II era were disasters for the Republicans because they’d been in power for a few years, and people hated what they were doing with the country.  Democrats take power in 2008, the Republicans spend a few years devoted full-time to fucking things up with no need to produce any policies of their own, make the Democrats look bad, achieve huge victories in 2010.  Now, after less than 8 months in positions of actual responsibility in the House, they’ve made themselves so unpopular that it may very well give Obama a second term despite the state of the economy.

Does anyone honestly think that the 20-30% of republicans in this country are as a group so dangerous they would be contend to watch America burn if it meant they would win?

What? Sure they would. This is a typical reaction of the alienated and frustrated—to destroy everything in the hopes that a new, more pure society/system rises from the ashes. And in part, I can see their point: if you want to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the EPA, and public education, the only way that’s going to happen is if the rest of the country crumbles in a crisis.

Does anyone honestly think that the 20-30% of republicans in this country are as a group so dangerous they would be contend to watch America burn if it meant they would win?

Not all of them, but certainly some of them would rather let America burn than give minorities, women, and GLBTs an equal share of it.

The complaint conservatives have with Reagan is not that he cut taxes, but that he increased the deficit by not addressing spending.  But, they generally think he was successful in the long run.

You’re giving conservatives and their grasp of history too much credit. By and large they pretend that massive deficit spending is a Democratic trait, and ignore the fact that Regan pretty much single-handedly kicked off our present debt situation.

Democrats don’t “spend like Democrats” in the sense that conservatives accuse them of. “Tax and spend Democrats” are a myth. Republicans have been spending like Democrats since Reagan, and by and large Democrats have not.

The thing that the Tea Party has added is a much more skeptical view of spending.

Well, no. Again “skeptical” gives them a great deal of credit in that it implies they actually have a well-thought-out position, which they do not. They’re not so skeptical of spending that they’re willing to accept modest revenue increases in exchange for spending cuts, after all.

“A lot of voters do end up picking republicans because they feel the country would be safer in their hands. Maybe they’re uninformed, but please don’t say they want to watch the world burn.”

It’s indisputable that some have reached the “burn baby burn” stage in their political evolution devolution.  The only remaining question is what the actual numbers might be.

I’m sure there are many Americans who think there are only a radical few on the extreme right who are so nuts they want the country to go through a Second American Revolution to address the faults they perceive in what they believe to be a socialist America. 

(In fairness, there is no doubt an equivalent group of radicals exists on the extreme left.  BTW, that would be the actual extreme left, and not just Reichwing rhetoric that claims Obama is a radical socialist.  Those nutcase leftists are highly marginalized.)

Others of us would be able to argue that the percentages are much greater, especially if the destruction of America could be plausibly sold as a mere restructuring, and the deaths and injuries that would result were painted as being mild (“you have to break some eggs if you want to make an omelet!”).

Personally, I would say it’s quite easily 10-20% of Americans, and not limited to self-identified Republicans.  If real chaos actually did break out, many of them would sour on it pretty quickly, but in the vacuum of words and not action, there are a lot of them who can talk a good game in support of what would otherwise be known as revolution…

(In fairness, there is no doubt an equivalent group of radicals exists on the extreme left.  BTW, that would be the actual extreme left, and not just Reichwing rhetoric that claims Obama is a radical socialist.  Those nutcase leftists are highly marginalized.)

If we’re talking the “actual extreme left,” I’m not convinced of that at all. I’m pretty sure the Overton window has been far right of center long enough that the actual number of people coming into radical leftist beliefs of their own accord is shrinking. Because you have people coming into center-left beliefs who are under the impression that they themselves are radical, largely unaware that serious opinions exist farther to the left. (I’m not saying that they should be obligated to move left, just that they shouldn’t kid themselves about how far left they really are, in reality.)

“partisan but have absorbed the toxic notion that there’s something wrong about being partisan, so I’m going to pretend that my vote is up for grab, even though it’s not, because I like deluding myself that I’m open-minded”.

Yup. I’m guessing that probably 9 out of ten people who claim to be “independent” cannot honestly claim that they have cast votes for candidates in both major parties in presidential elections over the past 20 years. A quick way to make them realize that referring to themselves as “independent” is disingenuous as hell is to ask them who was the last Republican presidential candidate they voted for and who was the last Democratic presidential candidate they voted for. If they’re still unwilling to acknowledge the obvious, ask them the same question about U.S. Senators and then state governors. If the answers indicate a clear party preference at that point (which it will 90% of the time) and they’re still unwilling top admit the obvious, they’re just being an ass.

I’m extremely partisan in my political leanings, and I feel absolutely no need to apologize for that. It’s silly to me how many low info voters are unwilling to acknowledge the own partisanship or even admit that partisanship in and of itself is not really a bad thing (though I do believe we would be much better off if we had far fewer Republican/conservative partisans in this country).

On the other hand, same-sex marriage seems to be going through, despite extreme opposition on the part of the Republican party and many power groups, and (at best) tepid support from the Democratic party, because the idea has caught on in society at large.

No.  Having followed it from the Baehr vs Lewin case, it is because the judiciary at various levels sat down and analysed the situation and said “People, the gay marriage advocates have a case” and made rulings to that effect.  That’s what prompted the debate and managed to get people’s heads around the idea that “if Adam and Steve tie the know it’s their business, not mine”.

Without various judicial rulings saying that gay marriage had to be allowed due to consistency with State constitutions, the idea would not have caught on in American society at large.

In fairness, there is no doubt an equivalent group of radicals exists on the extreme left.

I for one can’t wait to join the Donner Party

I hope people will also realize that their vote doesn’t count just in general: there has never been a situation where 1 vote more would have made a difference

This is one of those issues where it’s rational for one person to decide their vote doesn’t matter, but when large numbers of people all decide that and don’t vote, it actually changes the outcome.

North Carolina turned blue in 2008 because a lot of people decided to vote who don’t usually. Those people didn’t just magically appear in 2008; they just didn’t vote before because they figured it was pointless and their vote wouldn’t count anyway. But this time they were motivated to send a message. You’re right—people voted symbolically. But their symbolic vote actually changed the way NC’s electoral votes were delivered. Those electoral votes didn’t swing the presidential election outcome, sure. But those voters elected a bunch of other Democrats to other positions, too.

So symbolic voting can actually get real results.

Also: I agree Nader was more of a symptom than a cause. In other words, progressives were disillusioned with Clinton, and Gore didn’t do anything to change that. He campaigned even more rightward than Clinton was. So the protest vote for Nader was probably more of a count of people who otherwise wouldn’t have voted. Nader running didn’t cause Bush’s election. I agree wholeheartedly; that election was stolen.

But one of the things that made it possible to steal the election was the prevailing idea that Bush and Gore were basically the same, so liberals/progressives/Democrats didn’t bother to vote against Bush. I was one of them; I know.

So that’s why I get frustrated now with the meme that Obama is the same as McCain would have been, and it doesn’t matter if the Republican wins next time. Because President Gore would not have been the same as President Bush, even though President Gore would probably have caved in to the Republicans just as much as President Obama does (or President Clinton did). I thought otherwise. I was deeply, incredibly wrong. I would have done anything to have Clinton back during the Bush years.

That’s not to say I was wrong to be disillusioned and angry with Clinton. He made a lot of decisions that I still think were wrong and stupid; a lot of giving the Republicans what they want, a lot of adopting Republican rhetoric and framing, military actions, conservative social policies, etc. I frankly disagreed with him on a lot of things, just as I frankly disagree with Obama on a lot of things. I don’t want to sweep that under the rug.

But when my choice is between having to deal with Obama’s level of fucking up, and Bachmann/Perry/Romney’s level of fucking up? I know which I’ll choose. Voting for Obama doesn’t mean I think he’s perfect, it doesn’t mean I’m putting my stamp of approval on everything he ever did. But I do really think he’s significantly better than the alternative.

Basically, I feel like it’s more important to vote against the dangerous beliefs of the right wing than it is to vote against Democrats who cave in too much. Pushing the Democrats left needs to happen by other means.

The “sports game” model of political reporting is part of what’s given “partisanship” a bad name, like choosing a party is like choosing a sports team or being Green or Purple Drazi. Supposed opposition to “partisan bickering” is what keeps the ‘centrists’ and ‘independents’ from declaring the side to which they clearly belong. (That, and a good helping of “both sides do it” bullshit.)

I’m not partisan because I have any institutional loyalty to the Democratic Party. I’m partisan because the other party has spent over a century opposing everything I believe in, and the Democrats are the best I’ve got. Sure, I wish they were different, but I’ll work with what I have to.

But, for being such “horrible people,” Republicans still manage to win a good number of elections.  Perhaps your ideas about what constitutes a horrible person is somewhat different from a significant part of the electorate.

And occasionally, Dana, Republicans get what they deserve.

May every Republican get what they deserve.  In your case, this would involve being dropped in downtown Baghdad with no money or passport, wearing an American flag t-shirt.

And to make it worse, the very small number of people whose votes are up for grabs are pretty much the polar opposite of the thoughtful citizen who has an open mind and spends the weeks before the election somberly reading up on the candidates before making a well-informed, well-considered opinion.

Yup. That’s exactly how George W. Bush was able to make the election close enough to steal in 2000 - the stupid mushy middle voters chose him because he seemed like the better candidate “to have a beer with”.

To be fair, the stupid mushy middle vote has also worked in favor of Democrats as well. While I’m certainly happy that Obama won in 2008, the mushy middle chose him mostly because: a) he wasn’t Bush or a member of Bush’s party; and b) Plouffe and Axelrod ran one of the most best executed presidential campaigns ever seen. A lot of mushy middle voters chose Obama because they were swayed by the sentimentality of his historic candidacy - they were voting principally on emotion rather than reason. There was a strong reason-based argument to choose Obama over McCain, but a lot of those mushy middle voters wouldn’t have been able to clearly articulate that if asked at the time.

In any case, I’d be lying if I said this voting bloc doesn’t worry me next year, because the national mood towards our current economic situation is quite dismal, and more often than not, the mushy middle responds to that by voting out the incumbent president. If the economy remain this gloomy through next November and Obama still manages to get re-elected, it will go completely against the voting trend that has been in place at least since FDR’s defeat of Herbert Hoover in 1932. I still have hope that Obama can get re-elected in spite of all of this, but I have to admit that I’m starting to worry that there’s a good chance that he may wind up losing.

@Triplanetary: I’d agree with you about that one. I used to think I was a radical leftist when I started getting into politics. Then I started doing some serious reading found out there are a whole lot of positions way to the left of mine.  Which is why it’s so irritating that “Not wanting old people or poor people to starve.” is being painted as a fringe leftist position when it’s mostly a center left position, and barely even center left.

I do so love the right wingers that spew about how spending cuts are necessary though. Tea Party demands for spending cuts can pretty well be summed up as “Stop spending all that money on dirty brown people and spend it all on programs that benefit me or kill brown people!”. Cut spending, but don’t cut the military or medicare, even though they’re two of the most expensive programs.

...lots of voters call themselves “moderates” or “independents”, but those designations usually mean “partisan but have absorbed the toxic notion that there’s something wrong about being partisan, so I’m going to pretend that my vote is up for grab, even though it’s not, because I like deluding myself that I’m open-minded”.  That’s a widespread phenomenon in the U.S.”

aka: Fucking Centrists.

Ralph Nader’s voters in 2000 had all the power in that election in that they made a Bush victory possible.

Anyone still parroting the “Nader!  2000!  EVIL!” bullshit is telegraphing “Fucking Fuck You You-Dirty-Fucking-Hippies because no matter how many times the c(entrist)onservative DLC(entrist)s stick knives in the eyes, face & back of progressives, the c(entrist)onservative DLC(entrist)s are entitled to those votes & progressives are obligated to vote for them because FUCK YOU WE SAID SO THAT’S WHY.  Don’t like it?  Fuck You & Tough Shit.  Whadyagonnado?  Vote Republican? *snicker*”  Nader Trashing = Hipster Bashing = Hippie Punching, now & forever.

@75 ...ZOMG but Perry just got crowned top coyote by John King!  We’re all doomed unless ya stay in your veal pen and STFU!

FWIW, I mostly dis Naderites because a person would have to be a completely blithering idiot to think that he could have governed even had he been elected POTUS—no one in Congress would have worked with him, and precious few individuals with good credentials would have joined his administration.  Yes, yes, it was a matter of self-expression, Sending a Message, etc., but it wasn’t an exercise of the franchise in any meaningful way.  I’m sure some smallish percentage of Nader votes would have gone to Gore, but the truth is that most of his voters were effectively abstaining (as do Ron Paul voters, actually; fringe-candidate supporters aren’t participating in the process so much as they’re protesting it).  They’re easy to punch because they were highly visible, which they wouldn’t have been had they merely stayed home… OTOH, visibility was clearly what they wanted, so better to grow up and deal with the negative repercussions.

I don’t get the levels of partisanship in America

—-SNIP—-

I mean, I pay a lot of attention to politics, but over the 12 years I’ve been able to vote I’ve voted Liberal, New Democrat, and Green federally (and if I had it all to do over again, I’d have voted Progressive Conservative in 2000), and Liberal, and New Democrat provincially.

You answered your own question - you’re in Canada.

We don’t have numerous institutional political parties here with the resources to win elections, we have two. Democrats and Republicans. Sure, you can support candidates from the Green, Reform, Libertarian or The Rent Is Too Damn High Parties if you want, but at the end of the day, the winner is going to either be a Democrat or Republican. The two major parties are entirely too entrenched and too well-connected to the plutocrat class to be threatened by 3rd parties in America.

It’s cynical as hell and it sucks, but it is what it is. It’s been this way my whole life and throughout most of this country’s history, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. Here, third parties are guppies trying to take down whales. I’m not gonna get into another debate about whether progressive voters were right or wrong for supporting Ralph Nader in 2000, but I will say that if any of them genuinely believed he had a realistic chance of getting elected president that year they need to come back to reality. There was absolutely no chance in hell that Ralph Nader was going to be elected president in 2000 (nor is there any chance he will EVER be elected president), and those who claim to have believed otherwise at the time are either lying or stupid. Anybody with an IQ above that of maple syrup knew that Nader wasn’t going to become president in 2000, regardless of whether they wanted him to or not. I’d love to see a Democratic Socialist candidate like Bernie Sanders get elected to the presidency, but I know that if I cast my vote for a third party presidential candidate, I’m doing so strictly out of protest rather than an actual belief that it might lead to that person actually getting elected.

I live in a slightly red-leaning swing state which was the very last state to declare a winner in the 2008 presidential election. McCain beat Obama in Missouri by a little under 4,000 votes out of 2.9 million cast. The race was won by a margin of 0.1% here. The Republican presidential nominee is probably going to be leading in the polls next year, but not by a huge margin (though that might have been different had St. Louis’ bid beaten Charlotte’s bid for next year’s Democratic National Convention). I don’t have the luxury of throwing my vote away on someone who doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming president, so I will be voting for our mediocre center-right leaning DLC candidate instead of his Republican opponent, who will absolutely be much further to the right than he is. On January 20, 2013, either Barack Obama will be getting inaugurated into his second term, or someone who is unequivocally a lot more conservative than Obama will be getting inaugurated as our 45th president. I’d rather be painfully unimpressed and frustrated by four more years of milquetoast policy than be mortified by the extreme right wing agenda that will be imposed on all of us should Obama lose next year. I’m choosing a hamster poop sandwich over a hippopotamus poop sandwich.

Progressive ideological purity is nice to muse about, but I don’t have the time or money to approach voting from anything other than a purely pragmatic perspective. If the choice is between two evils, I still choose the one who is objectively the lesser evil, even if I’m completely underwhelmed by them.

FWIW, I mostly dis Naderites because a person would have to be a completely blithering idiot to think that he could have governed even had he been elected POTUS.

I’d take that step further. A person would have to be a complete blithering idiot to think that Ralph Nader has ever had any realistic shot at actually getting elected to the presidency. If you voted for Nader in 2000 as a protest against the rightward tilt the Democratic Party has taken over the last 20 years or so, more power to you. I disagree with that strategy because I don’t believe it is particularly effective, but I get it. If you voted for Nader in 2000 because you genuinely believed that it might lead to him actually becoming the next President of the United States, you’re an idiot. Anybody who claims they voted for Nader in 2000 because they really thought he could win is either lying or stupid. That also applies to every other 3rd party voter in every presidential election in my lifetime.

My understanding is that the main motivation for voting for Nader in 2000 was to secure Federal matching dollars for the Greens, so that they could push hard enough to be worth co-opting, like how the Progressives were in the 20s and 30s.

What folks don’t really understand is the visceral loathing the Establishment Dems have for the DFHs.  They’d rather lose, die, and burn their families in their own homes with acid than win and implement Progressive policy.  Republicans are the enemy; they hate all Americans and want our country to fail into poverty and misery.  The Democratic Party is the battleground between people who want this country to do well and people who want it to do well, but only if the hippies take it in the shorts.  Since the only way this country can do well is if hippie policy is put into place . . .

But blaming Nader voters is stupid.  Nader voters didn’t make Al Gore pick Joe “I was so awful the Democratic Party eventually kicked me out” Lieberman as VP.  Gore was on his own personal self-destructive death spiral, and it wasn’t unreasonable for America to wonder if somebody with those kinds of issues was a good pick for the football.  The problem was, of course, the lack of an alternative.

The “sports game” model of political reporting is part of what’s given “partisanship” a bad name, like choosing a party is like choosing a sports team or being Green or Purple Drazi.

Despite the fact that I actually agree with 99% of the pro-labor positions taken by Ed Schultz, I still find him excruciatingly painful to watch. He’s like the Rush Limbaugh of the left. I think he serves somewhat of a purpose in that he can reach white rural and blue-collar pro-union Democrats better than most of his colleagues, but he’s still not really my cup of tea.

I saw an interesting article last week analyzing the progressive niche that MSNBC has carved out for itself in the past few years in their evening programming. The article heaped praise on Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow for being extremely articulate advocates for progressivism while not reducing themselves to left-leaning versions of the screaming clowns on Fox, but it was highly critical of both Schultz’ and Chris Matthews’ combative styles. I wouldn’t exactly call Chris Matthews a progressive, but his resume indicates that he’s a Democrat. Prior to becoming the obnoxious Tweety, he was a speechwriter for President Carter and a staffer for former Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. The article was also critical of the style of Al Sharpton, who is currently hosting the 6pm ET timeslot on MSNBC, though the network has yet to make a long term commitment to him. To MSNBC’s credit, I’m glad they’re considering an African-American for a permanent hosting position (long overdue), but I would prefer them to make the offer to Michael Eric Dyson or Melissa Harris-Perry, both of whom are excellent.

Whatever!

Our little island decided that mainland America is doomed. We all called a time out and decided to relocalize our economy, develop community owned PV, wind, and tidal electrical supplies, and dedicate ourselves to growing our own food to feed 100% of our population. It’ll take about ten years, if we have that long. Then we’ll go back to seeing if the socialist utopia, unfettered capitalism, or aracno-syndicalism takes the day. I’m betting on the spiders myself!

@52: look at their “negotiation” on the debt ceiling. Look at how they APPLAUDED when the US’s credit rating was downgraded. The definitely want to watch it all burn.

At absolute worst, Nader was one of a dozen factors that made the election close enough for the Rethugs to get away with what they did, so why do the people who continuously focus on his role ignore every other factor involved?

I believe Ralph Nader’s choice to run in 2000 was highly narcissistic, and I think that if he hadn’t run, Al Gore would have almost certainly emerged as the clear winner on Election Night in 2000, and there never would have been a recount in the first place. I think the Bush campaign was only able to steal that election because it was close enough to steal in a way that the American public would never be in universal agreement about whether it was actually stolen or not. Pulling the shenanigans they did when the vote margin was less than 0.05% of the entire vote in Florida would have been impossible if they had to deal with a margin of 10,000+ votes instead of 500. I believe that Al Gore actually did win Florida, but I also believe that he barely won it. So I get why some on the left look at Nader’s 97,000 Florida voters and say to themselves, “If only he hadn’t run”.

Having said that, you’re right that it is unfair to heap all or even most of the blame on Ralph Nader for the outcome of that election. While it is probably true that Gore would have become our 43rd POTUS had Nader not run, there were plenty of other factors that also contributed to the outcome of that race. The malfeasance of SCOTUS, choosing Lieberman as his running mate, adopting DLC positions, and what appeared to be a somewhat arrogant belief that his election was inevitable all led to Al Gore’s defeat. He didn’t have any control over Nader’s candidacy or the ridiculous ruling by SCOTUS, but had he not chosen Lieberman as his running mate and had he not run such an awful campaign, the SCOTUS ruling would have never been a factor in the first place. He could have won despite Nader’s candidacy had he not made the mistakes he did. Coming out of an incredibly successful and prosperous two-term Democratic Administration, the race should have never been close enough to steal in the first place. In light of that, it must be said that Al Gore had an enormous role in why he didn’t become the 43rd President of the United States, despite the impact of Ralph Nader’s candidacy.

Does anyone ever like to point out the polls which show that people voting for Republicans generally believe that their candidates’ positions are the opposite of what they really are?

That’s why Republicans can be horrible people and still get elected.  You can pull the wool over the eyes of some of the people all of the time.  And the media is complicit.

PS, Nader trashing isn’t hippie-punching.  Nader-trashing is ignorance trashing.  If you thought voting for Nader wouldn’t affect the election?  You were wrong.  If you thought Nader had a chance to win?  You were wrong.  If you thought Nader’s federalmatching funds would be used to promote the Green party?  You were wrong.

I live in the hills with hippies.  Politically ignorant hippies may vote for Green party or the Ferret-party (I’m not joking), but ones that are actually active and effective vote Democratic.  Which is why they make such a fuss about splitting up our county at the federal level.

Does anyone honestly think that the 20-30% of republicans in this country are as a group so dangerous they would be contend to watch America burn if it meant they would win?

It doesn’t matter if Mom and Pop Republican personally want to bring down the government (after all, that might mean the end to their Social Security checks). It matters that the Republican LEADERS want to burn it down.  Mom and Pop would be horrified if it all came crashing down.  That’s the disconnect - they vote for leaders who would destroy everything they hold dear, and would not see that their own voting caused it to happen; the very definition of denial. They themselves, individually, do not want destruction, but in aggregate, they are very dangerous.

I hope people will also realize that their vote doesn’t count just in general: there has never been a situation where 1 vote more would have made a difference

At the federal level, no.  At the local level it has happened, at least in my home jurisdiction, and probably elsewhere too. The election prior to my being able to vote was a tie—the returning officer cast the deciding vote, which I’ve heard was chosen by picking a name out of a hat.

That tie changed the seat from Liberal to Conservative for the first time in over two decades, and after proving himself to be a politician who would stand up for his constituents, he smoked the Liberal candidate in the following election with a 600 vote lead.

So, while it’s the aggregate of votes that counts, sometimes it can come down to a single person’s decision.

“What will it take for some of these “swing voters” to wake up and smell the coffee?What will it take for some of these “swing voters” to wake up and smell the coffee?”

I think that’s a misunderstanding of the “swing voter” population. Sure, some people are swing voters election after election, but plenty of others do wake up and smell the coffee, and are then replaced by new low-information types, either young adults who haven’t really been paying attention buy sorta think they ought to vote, or older people who have lost patience or lost interest. It’s sorta like those doppler-radar rain clouds—part of what makes rain in a particular place is movement of particular air masses, but part of it is the topography and confluence of frontsthat makes a non-rainy airmass become rainy as it passes through some areas.

Which is actually a good thing, because if we assume that “swing voters” isn’t some monolithic bloc, we can work longterm to get some kinds of people to move into the category and others to move out, in our direction.

If more Democrats voted for Bush than Nader (not surprising, not many people voted for Nader), how are you going to convince anyone but yourselves that we need more Progressive, more Liberal candidates?

It’s really surprising that on a blog this generally sophisticated nobody is mentioning the role of the corporate media in persuading people to vote Republican even tho Republican policies will make their lives dramatically worse.

And occasionally, Dana, [url=“http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/pa-judge-gets-28-1097263.html”]Republicans get what they deserve.
[/url]
May every Republican get what they deserve.  In your case, this would involve being dropped in downtown Baghdad with no money or passport, wearing an American flag t-shirt.

???

This is all what I found on the matter:

About the only “good” thing you can say about the Associated Press’s coverage of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella is that they have been consistent. That is, the wire service, led by reporter Michael Rubinkam, up to and including today, has consistently and disgracefully failed to tag the infamous “Kids for Cash” jurist and his judicial colleague in crime Michael Conahan as a Democrat.

The consistent failure is all the more unforgivable because, as shown here, one the earliest AP reports on the topic clearly stated that “Both are Democrats.” Shortly thereafter, the sentence disappeared. Since then, to my knowledge (shown here and here), in the 2-1/2 years since the story first broke, no AP report on what the it has described as “one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record” has tagged either judge as a Democrat.

http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2011/08/11/name-party-pa-kids-cash-dem-judged-sentenced-no-party-id

A registered Democrat , Ciavarella has cross-filed on the Democratic and Republican tickets for the May 16 primary. His opponents cross-filed as well.http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2172137/posts

Cosign the last paragraph of the post:  What we’re witnessing now is the triumph of an ideology that started to take over 50 years ago, when the mainstream media thought they were utter loons.  The tools of communication are different now, but we need to start the long hard slog of taking over the Democratic Party.  I’m assuming I won’t be alive to see it succeed (I’m 40), but it has to start.

Somewhat along those lines:  helen w h, it looks like you’re in luck:  Elizabeth Warren is seriously considering a run for the MA US Senate seat.

Manju, he’s a old-style machine “Democrat” who was endorsed by both parties - and acted as an authoritarian.  In any contested area, he would be running Republican.

We don’t have numerous institutional political parties here with the resources to win elections, we have two.

That’s not how it works though.  Two of the five “institutional parties with the resources to win elections” are less than twenty years old, and began with basically no resources (Reform was famous in their first campaign for being too poor to fly, and candidates having to eat ham sandwiches out of brown paper bags).

What’s really missing, it seems, is that American elections never seem to end in a rout.  If the Republics had a senate seat and three congresscritters, space would open up for a viable replace on the right.  Ditto the Democrats.  The routing of the Progressive Conservatives in ‘93 (from 169 out of 295 to 2 out of 295 seats) opened up space for the BQ and Reform.  BQ and Reform didn’t have much money.

So basically you’re confused that American politics don’t work like Canadian politics, is that about right?

@Brian: yes.  This is because Canada didn’t have slaves or a botched Reconstruction after a Civil War.  American politics is impossible to understand if you don’t understand race.

I voted for Gore in 2000.

But if we’re talking about long-term political effects, the people who voted for Nader were totally justified.  It’s saying “you want my vote?  Then you’ll have to actually work for it by having policies closer to Naders”.  Voting for what you actually want, rather than Republican-lite blue dogs is the only way to not get Republican-lite blue dogs.

I voted for Obama in 2008, because he appeared to care about torture, civil liberties, war, accountability, and government transparency.  In each of these cases, he’s shown himself to be on the wrong side, but not as bad as the Republican position.  That’s not actually what I want, and an anemic step towards public healthcare is not enough to outweigh that, so I cannot vote for him, and will instead vote third party. “The Republicans are worse” is not an adequate rallying cry.  I need something to vote for, rather than something that I don’t want to vote against quite as much.

”“The Republicans are worse” is not an adequate rallying cry.”

...and therein lies the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.  Republican voters “know” Democrats are worse, regardless of who the Democrat is or what they’re proposing.  In fact, it matters not at all what the real issues are, what the policy positions are, etc., no matter what, the Democrat is wrong, and the Republican is right.

In the political game of Reichwing Three Card Monte here in the US, no matter how many times the Republicans take their money, the Reichwing Rubes will always pony up for another try, with a belief, utterly unsupported by the history of the last 40-years of Republican misrule, that this time they’ll win.  And as long as the Republican politicians and opinion-makers can make The Deficit!, or The Gays!, or The Illegals!, or Abortion! the focus of the campaign rhetoric they usually prevail, while the Reichwing Rubes voting for them lose yet again…

Rather than being in the middle, or being uncomfortable being partisan, many independents are actually too far to the right / left to be comfortable identifying with the parties, but would still never even considering voting for the other side. If you think that the democratic party is a center-right corporate party and you would really prefer to vote feminist-marxist but there are no viable candidates that reflect your views,  you may well identify as independent just because of your distaste for the dems, but that doesn’t mean your vote is ever up for grabs by the GOP. Similarly with far-right libertarians.

How do you define “many”?  Because in a country with 300 million people, you can have 100,000 people who think something, and that’s “many,” but it’s a trivial percentage.

Camipco FTW.  I would most likely vote for Elizabeth Warren, certainly would prefer that to the vote I reluctantly cast for Coakly, but would have preferred her as a Wall Street watch dog for a solid 6 years.

I am certain that nothing I could demonstrate would be acceptable to you, but that doesn’t matter: what matters is that many people do vote Republican, whether you believe they should or not.

And, as in California, as the population becomes younger and less Caucasoid, they will start voting for Republicans less and less, even as their Tea Party buddies lament this revoltin’ development.

Why didn’t the Republican candidate for AG in CA even come close to winning, despite being far more qualified for the office than either Republican candidate for the Governorship or the Senate?

Because, they had the Republican label on them.

That’s the future,  Mr. Pico.  Your grandchildren will regard voting for Republicans as quaint, like someone today would say about a 19th Century ancestor who voted for the Whig party.

Manju, he’s a old-style machine “Democrat” who was endorsed by both parties - and acted as an authoritarian.  In any contested area, he would be running Republican.

Yeah, autocratic old-style democratic machines like Chicago have been known to churn out Republicans.

I too was clapping when that Repub Blago went to Jail.

Manju, do you know what “contested” means? Chicago crony politics is its opposite.

Right Alysia: so Blago, Obama, Dailey, B.Rush, Mosely Braun, etc “would be running Republican”  “in any contested area”.

No, Manju, it means that if the judge in question was running against Daley, Obama, etc, he’d be running as a Republican, not a Democrat,  in their area and his, and the converse is true, ithey would run as Democrats against such as he.

Why are you so determined to find all the ills of the Universe that originate with Democrats, Manju?

Did LBJ scare one of your parents sometime during their childhood?

Why are you so determined to find all the ills of the Universe that originate with Democrats, Manju?

I’m sorry, but did I take a just convicted registered republican who was the product of a Republican machine and assert that he was a Dem while wishing all other Dems meet a similar fate? Did I even take the Dem in question and blame his problems on Democrats?

Phoenican took a registered Dem who is presumably the product of the Democratic machine in PA (“he’s a old-style machine “Democrat””) and made him into an Republican for no reason whatsoever. Then she wishes; “May every Republican get what they deserve”.

And I’m the one who is determined to find ills in the other party?

Did LBJ scare one of your parents sometime during their childhood?

Look, Michelle Bachmann has made statement indicating that she’s unaware that the founders owned slaves. If someone pointed out that they did, would it be an appropriate progressive response to say; “Did Jefferson scare one of your parents sometime during their childhood?”.

I’m sorry, but did I take a just convicted registered republican who was the product of a Republican machine and assert that he was a Dem while wishing all other Dems meet a similar fate? Did I even take the Dem in question and blame his problems on Democrats?

Somehow, the conversation with you is all about the ills from Democrats, Manju, don’t play the innocent fool.

Phoenican took a registered Dem who is presumably the product of the Democratic machine in PA (“he’s a old-style machine “Democrat””)

Except there is no such thing as a Democratic machine in PA, or they wouldn’t have a Republican governor there in office, would they?

And I’m the one who is determined to find ills in the other party?

That’s it, exactly.

If someone pointed out that they did, would it be an appropriate progressive response to say; “Did Jefferson scare one of your parents sometime during their childhood?”.

It’s called sarcasm, Manju, and the fact that you thought my proposal was a serious ‘progressive’ response demonstrates your lack of understanding better than if I wrote 100 words on the subject.

BTW, Manju, comparing yourself to a misinformed Republican candidate does a great disservice.

To Michelle Bachmann.

Except there is no such thing as a Democratic machine in PA, or they wouldn’t have a Republican governor there in office, would they?

Great, even better. I was taking her word for it. (“he’s a old-style machine “Democrat””). The machine served as an excuse for his party affiliation. If it were not for the machine, in Phoenican’s view, he would be a Repub. But now it’s settled. He is a real Democrat. 

It’s called sarcasm, Manju, and the fact that you thought my proposal was a serious ‘progressive’ response demonstrates your lack of understanding better than if I wrote 100 words on the subject

.

I know its sarcasm. If you took issue with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, would a sarcastic response like “did Nixon shoot your dog” be appropriate? It implies the stated reason for taking issue with Nixon is not sufficient…or even worse, non-existent.

If it were not for the machine, in Phoenican’s view, he would be a Repub.

If you took issue with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, would a sarcastic response like “did Nixon shoot your dog” be appropriate?

I dunno, I wouldn’t compare myself to a Republican candidate who is a bit of a nutcase or a disgraced Republican President, but that’s because I don’t think the universe revolves around me.

Taking issue with Nixon’s Southern Strategy is tantamount to comparing yourself with Nixon?

Trying to turn a sarcastic remark into some sort of political analogy with RMN is stupidity Manju, so live with it.

DAGCM: Lets just agree that if Nixon were running against Obama he’d do it as a Democrat…and call it a day.

Nope, Manju, let’s keep pretending that you bring something to the discussion when you always change the subject purely because you’re such a great political thinker.

Well, what to do DAGCM? I’m a registered republican…an an old-style machine “republican” in a state with no republican machine. So clearly the Dems are to blame for my behavior!

Or something…

Well, what to do DAGCM? I’m a registered republican…an an old-style machine “republican” in a state with no republican machine. So clearly the Dems are to blame for my behavior!

Or something…

Actually, it goes back to your family:

ACTION:
Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It’s just our bringing up-ke
That get us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks,
Golly Moses, natcherly we’re punks!

ACTION and QUARTET:
Gee. Officer Krupke, we’re very upset;
We never had the love that every child oughta get
We ain’t no delinquents,
We’re misunderstood,
Deep down inside us there is good!

ACTION:
There is good!

ALL:
There is good, there is good,
There’s an tapped good,
Like inside, the worst of us is good.

Those are the wrong Jets, DAGCM. Our Leader’s got electric boots and a mohair suit.

Nah, Manju, you’re a victim of society, a pawn of greater forces than you can possibly imagine.

Well, can you blame me?

These forces are so powerful that they can create old-style machine Democrats out of Republicans, and do it in areas where there is “no such thing as a Democratic machine”.

With all these Republicans in drag walking around, its no wonder poor little Marcus Bachmann is confused.

So he clings to his guns, religion, and Bachmann Turner Overdrive Diaries.

Manju, you get to get out of your own idiotic POV before you have something worth responding to these days. 

I’m a little baffled about PiaToR - Did he have a sex change I don’t know about, or is Manju paying as little attention to other commenters (ones far more prolific and long term than he, in this case) as he does to everything else.