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[–] 30 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Taylor Rehmet, a Democrat and local union leader, won a runoff for a state Senate seat that’s been held by Republicans since 1992. What’s more, he bested the Republican Leigh Wambsganss despite having one-tenth as much money. Much of Wambsganss’s funding came from Dunn and the Wilks brothers.

Here's the DNC chair talking about it two weeks ago:

https://youtu.be/J9Nk7RcZh7k?t=46

We're not "over performing" this is the natural result of undoing the damage of 30 years of neoliberalism and especially the "victory fund". Up until a year ago the goal of the party wasn't "as many seats as possible" it was just to have a neoliberal president and at most House or Senate, but never both.

It's like going from a pitcher who wants to win but not cover the spread, to one who just wants to win by as many runs as possible.

Dems aren't intentionally holding themselves back, so we're going to keep seeing massive gains.

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Dems aren't intentionally holding themselves back, so we're going to keep seeing massive gains.

    Tbf, MOST of them aren't holding themselves back. Jeffries, Schumer, and a couple others are definitely trying their best to keep things as terrible as possible.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago*

    Well, I was saying Dems "as a party"...

    You're referencing the House and Senate leadership, who notably got elected a week or two before Martin, when the old DNCs threats of "vote neolib or we defumd your state party and let Republicans take all the seats" was a valid and well proven threat.

    They've been lame ducks this entire congress and everyone knows it. The media just won't say it because they're still trying to prop up neoliberals as effective and in control. Just because that will depress dem.primary turnout and help neoliberal candidates.

    Like, Jeffries and Schumer are literally trying to be as terrible as possible intentionally

    If a progressive Dem becomes president, they name the next DNC chair and neoliberals lose the party for good. They'd 100% rather a Republican wins 2028 if it's not a neoliberal, because that gives them a chance to take the party back.

    Like, I dunno man. I overestimate people a lot, but I really feel like all of this should be common sense and easy for people to figure out on their own.

    But it's seems like despite most people realizing billionaires are the problem, they still only listen to what billionaire owned propaganda says on the TV

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  • [–] 30 points 8 months ago (16 children)

    Taylor Rehmet, a Democrat and local union leader, won a runoff for a state Senate seat that’s been held by Republicans since 1992. What’s more, he bested the Republican Leigh Wambsganss despite having one-tenth as much money. Much of Wambsganss’s funding came from Dunn and the Wilks brothers.

    Republicans blamed low turnout for Rehmet’s victory, while pundits opined that the Trump administration’s unpopularity was to blame.

    In America today, these are the same thing. The way you win is by encouraging certain people to vote and discouraging other people from voting. Trump has been taking care of discouraging Republicans and MAGA from voting all by himself.

    I really think America needs mandatory voting to stop this behavior, but it's much easier to encourage or discourage people to vote than it is to actually carry out the will of the people.

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  • [–] 21 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    America needs mandatory voting to stop this behavior

    As much as that seems like a good solution, it's unlikely to win many supporters. You'd be better off making voting day a federal holiday.

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  • [+] 9 points 8 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    I think it should actually be moved to Wednesday if made a holiday. It should be pushed as far as possible from being an opportunity for a long weekend where people choose leisure over civic participation.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    Federal holidays do not guarantee a day off of work (edit: unless you're a government employee or work in a field that needs the market to be open). There are, however, state-level laws in some states that do guarantee time off to vote.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    it’s unlikely to win many supporters

    If I could just somehow get permission to amend the constitution for one day, I'd fucking shove democracy down people's throats so hard, totally against their will.

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  • [–] -4 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    I really think America needs mandatory voting to stop this behavior

    Yeah, forcing people to perform an act to legitimize an unjust system is really a great way to achieve reform.

    Please explain how that's supposed to work?

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    By at the same time also requiring some form of ranked choice for every election, and to have a "none of the above" option, and if over 50% of the votes have "none of the above" as the #1 choice the election must be redone with all new candidates. Everyone is thus able to truly vote for who and what they believe we have the turnout to never have to discuss the legitimacy of the winner.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    forcing people to perform an act to legitimize an unjust system

    I assume this means that you don't believe votes are properly counted and that all of our elections are "rigged."

    If you have that belief, then what reforms do you think are possible? Most people who I've heard express those opinions are far right wing people who want to discard democracy.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (4 children)

    Not the one you responded to but if I may hazard a guess I'd say they see non-voting as a protest against the two party representative democracy currently in place. 

    If you're forced to vote and there is no blank alternative, you are being forced to legitimise it whether you like it or not.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    In Australia, for example, which has mandatory voting, the only requirement is that you participate. So, you can do the equivalent of submitting a completely empty ballot if you want to protest.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    Mandatory voting creates more room for independent and minor parties to collect your vote, instead of just abstaining in the booth. The preference system tends to avoid outcomes that don’t reflect the electorate.

    In Australia, far left and far right politicians and candidates can and do bloviate all they want, but ultimately mandatory voting pulls politics back to the centre.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Meanwhile in California, a MAGA governor seems inevitable. Never underestimate the ignorance of the average American.

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  • 12 comments in c/politics@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 97 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    Progressive dems have been cleaning up over the past year. Hopefully the DNC doesn't plug it's ears and ignore the obvious. There's certainly a good number of corporate democrats trying to make this out to be a nothing.

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  • [–] 54 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    They're really trying to ignore it. It's going to be up to voters to make themselves heard in the primaries.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    They’re really trying to ignore it.

    Man, they suck at ignoring things...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Nk7RcZh7k

    I've never tried to ignore something so hard that I travelled back in time two weeks ago to retroactively support it.

    Maybe the DNC really is all powerful, I mean, they got a time machine

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    You serious? Nothing in that source contradicts anything I said. They don't discuss the progressive policies of the candidate at all, Ken Martin just plugs his strategy of focusing on smaller races. The fact they don't bring up his policies, just like how they always try to make Mamdani's popularity about his personal charisma instead of his policies, reinforces that they're trying to ignore progressivism's popularity.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    They don’t discuss the progressive policies of the candidate at all, Ken Martin just plugs his strategy of focusing on smaller races.

    Because this is a "smaller race"...

    just like how they always try to make Mamdani’s popularity about his personal charisma instead of his policies, reinforces that they’re trying to ignore progressivism’s popularity.

    That's not true either, and luckily I have a print quote for that one so we don't have to argue over timestamps:

    One is, he campaigned for something. And this is a critical piece. We can't just be in a perpetual state of resisting Donald Trump. Of course, we have to resist Donald Trump. There's no doubt about it for all the reasons we just talked about. But we also have to give people a sense of what we're for, what the Democratic Party is fighting for, and what we would do if they put us back in power.

    And that's really critical. And I think that's one of the lessons from Mamdani's campaign, is that he focused on affordability. He focused on a message that was resonant with voters, and he campaigned for something, not against other people or against other things. He campaigned on a vision of how he was going to make New York City a better place to live.

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dnc-chair-on-the-path-to-winning-back-voters-and-lessons-democrats-can-learn-from-mamdani

    But, if you think his opinions on policy matter, then you don't understand how he's running the DNC, even tho he's very open about it.

    If these candidates were piece of shit neoliberals, they'd get all the same support from the party, minus a few nice soundbites in interviews

    That's the strength of Martin, that he's legitimately non-biased. All progressives need is a fair primary, and that's what Martin gave Minnesota for a decade.

    If you're focusing on what he says on policy, you're just not looking at the right thing.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago*

    Hopefully the DNC doesn’t plug it’s ears and ignore the obvious.

    As soon as Mamdani won his primary, the DNC chair said we need a candidate that not only emulated his charisma, but also the popular policy position Dem voters want...

    That was months ago.

    It's been a year since that chair was seated.

    I think the problem isn't that anyone is plugging their ears, just that the billionaire owned media doesn't want people to be engaged with the DNC now that they no longer control it.

    I mean, here's the DNC chair talking about this race two weeks ago...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Nk7RcZh7k

    But you didn't hear about it.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago
    [–] 11 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    So as an outsiders, what I see most voters doing is what happened in 2020. Not everyone is terminally online and as plugged in to politics as we all are. So after 4 years of Trump enough was enough and more people went out to vote. You need hard times for this to happen.

    But after 4 years of good, all those people thought things would carry on regardless not thinking, or that they don’t need to as it’s a home run no one would want to return to Trump. But you get enough people thinking they don’t need to vote, combined with apathy and voter intimidation and manipulation etc and you get trump back.

    So now all the people are forced back out again.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago*

    I grew up in the '80s with Reagan and Bush. When Clinton won in '92 I breathed a sigh of relief and stopped paying attention to politics, thinking everything was going to be OK for a very long time. November 2000 was a rude shock when it became apparent that the world didn't work the way I thought it did. Far more of a shock than 9/11 was.

    For that matter, even the Clinton era was not what I thought it was at the time -- although it was certainly much better than the current era.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago

    Just waiting for them to come up with a version of this bill that keeps all these same restrictions but which adds an alternative of using digital identity verification processes administered by third parties. Then they can just approve Xitter and the like as verification partners, making the easy route available through platforms their side controls, all with no transparency or accountability.

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