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Zohran Mamdani won three US House of Representatives seats last week. Claire Valdez in NY-7, Brad Lander in NY-10, and Darializa Avila Chevalier in NY-13 each won the Democratic primary after being endorsed by Mamdani, knocking-off two incumbants in the process. These are all 80-20 Democratic districts, so there is no realistic chance of any of them losing in the November.
Darializa Avila Chevalier is the one still making headlines a week later. She is, as far as anyone can tell, an actual communist. Rumors are that she personally founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest when she was a student there in 2016. Her stance on policing? She's against it.
Center-left politicos are currently melting down that someone like this won and is being accepted by the party apparatus. Credit to them for denouncing socialism I guess, but did they not know who their base is? Did they completely forget all of those "defund the police" chants from 2020? Did they not know that those people vote Democrat?
Some people want to kick Chevalier out of the party, bless their hearts. This wouldn't work even if it were feasable. Democrats need votes from leftists to be competative nationally. A party at war with its own base cannot stand.
Disagree. All either party, donkey or elephant, actually needs to do to win elections is to be normal enough to win the center. The far left and far right are both small minorities, and they'll probably hold their noses and vote for their party anyway to prevent the "nazis"/"commies" from winning. (See: Christians voting for Trump.)
Unfortunately, you appear to be right when it comes to winning nominations. It's a really broken system - it's gotten so bad that the incredibly strong incentive of winning elections isn't enough to keep the parties sane.
"Normies" on the Democratic right will never vote for Republicans; it's socially unacceptable to even think about it. The Democrats' right flank is secure, so they can safely move left to keep the highly motivated socialists happy. Strategies aimed at the center don't work for that reason.
This seems most correct. In the Trump era, there's less willingness to (publicly) swing over to the other side by Dems who are disappointed with their own politicians' performance. I'm sure many will do so privately yet I'd guess in lower numbers than years past.
So the risk for Dems is mostly that their candidate is so off-putting or blatantly unqualified that voters stay home. But (moderate) voters staying home would mean that the more extreme wing, by actually showing up, is driving more of the outcome. In safer blue districts, you'd expect this would mean the extreme candidates can win unless the GOP opponent is able to eke it out.
I dunno, I haven't seen a situation where some Dem candidate is so bad that it actually activates more of their base to come out and cast a vote against them in protest. I bet some local elections it has happened.
Although it is 'odd' that I notice alt-right figures like Nick Fuentes flogging the "Trump/Other righty politician is too friendly with Israel, we must vote Democrat to punish them."
You never, ever, EVERRRRR see a lefty extremist going full "Vote for Donald/The Republican candidates down the ticket to teach our side a lesson!"
I'd say this has resulted in somewhat of a 'dual strategy' where the Democrat establishment, which historically has a tight leash on its own national-level candidates, will let extreme candidates run without interference at lower levels, whilst yanking the chain and ensuring that such candidates can't reach the point where they are contesting less safe, more critical positions. I also think this strategy is starting to get away from them.
There was a lot of talk about the establishment blaming Bernie-bros for doing exactly that in 2016. Not sure how credible.
I can’t decide whether I buy into the national vs. local strategy explanation. It could work; lower levels are a lot more visible than they were in 1992. If it were true, though, what’s the mechanism for tightening the leash? Are there a bunch of midlevel Dems who mellowed out to get a Senate seat?
@Dean convinced me, at one point, that Obama’s campaign basically hollowed out the Democrat back bench. I think that (and the ensuing Trump whiplash) might be enough to explain the issues.
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I think there were plenty of us who did this in 2016, and then again in 2020, both after the primaries, if you wanted to see the democrats go in the bernie direction after being disappointed by obama and democrat supermajorities in 2009. Although the culture war issues shifted such that I just abandoned the democrats anyway instead of trying to push them in any direction.
Actually the Fuentes strategic vote-for-democrats angle didn't really make sense to me at first, as someone who never really had much hope in the republicans in the first place, and am still just wanting to see the current democrats punished, wiped out, and remade as something else. But then I realized it's almost an identical feeling for him and other young guys as the 2016 era bernie bros: they actually want to see a lot of the current republicans wiped out and remade as something better, and are looking strategically to the future: 'if hillary wins, the democrats are actually more fucked long-term, she'll be the automatic candidate again in 2020, some goof is her VP next in line, no more competitive primaries for a long time, people learn the wrong lessons, etc.'. 'If vance & rubio aren't severely damaged, then there won't be an open competitive primary with any oxygen for something better / more extreme in the republican party for a decade or more'.
Maybe it's always guys in their 20s who are more willing to make moves like this. Though as you guys mentioned, for a lot of people who could never stand the social stigma of switching to voting republican, the usual (more cowardly IMO) path is just to try to loudly vote 3rd-party as punishment to at least be slightly strategic as a voting block.
I will say that having Labour win in the UK was almost certainly better than having the Tories limp back in, even if they had an anti-immigration leader. They would have been under constant attack from a Left who could plausibly claim that they would be able to fix voter concerns in a nice and sensible way and voters just need to get the Tories out.
That was Keir Starmer's whole platform, and it's failed totally. Now, the Labour government has done a lot of damage - decriminalising homelessness this morning, so now we can have our own tent cities! - but they've actually tried reasonably hard on immigration and (in a sense) on public order, and failed totally. Which has produced a much stronger sense of 'the current system is completely broken and needs radical (R)eform' than anything the Tories could have got a mandate for.
It feels kind of perverse to say "I hope my guy loses" but losing isn't always a terrible thing. I suspect Trump 2020 would have been a far less powerful president than Trump 2024.
Sometimes to win a war you have to choose to retreat from certain battles
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"I dunno, I haven't seen a situation where some Dem candidate is so bad that it actually activates more of their base to come out and cast a vote against them in protest. I bet some local elections it has happened." - Arguably a variation of this has happened in California local elections with Chelsea Boudin and various SF school boards members. You can at least piss off folks enough that they will vote to recall and that at least is some message.
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