Monday Open Thread

4 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

1. How about starting by suing Amendment 80 supporters. You want a fight they took your likeness and lied about what you said… What are you going to do? Nothing. 

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2. "Microtargeting and Identity Politics Killed the Democratic Brand." Rachel Bitecofer's first post-election discussion.

   Bitecofer agrees that focusing on identity politics (socio-cultural) messaging has become problematic for the Democratic Party. Note that Republican do a lot of identity politics as well, think evangelicals & gun fetishists. HOWEVER, Identity POLICIES are not the issue – people broadly support identiy policies like non-descrimination.

   The problem Bitecofer sees is the brand management of the Democratic Party as a whole.

   As for me, ParkHill… I would still argue that the ability of the Republican propaganda machine to distract and reach low-information voters is the biggest part of the problem. I mean, liberal support for gay rights was smothered by Republican propaganda into "trans operations in prisons". That may be stupid, but it worked.

   Very well worth reading the whole article. Why & how on earth are the Republicans seen as the "Party of the working class":

   This one graph tells us exactly why Democrats lost. 

   First and foremost, it tells us that the Democratic Party has a brand and that brand is “they stand up for marginalized groups.”

   Now, that’s a great brand to have if you’re like me, an ideological liberal who cares deeply about the rights of the powerless!!

   The issue is just about a quarter of the electorate is liberal and psychologically predisposed to care about marginalized groups.

   The rest of the electorate doesn’t get the warm fuzzies we get from marginalized groups, because most humans are hardwired to prefer in groups over out groups and Republican strategists have exploited this expertly.

   Now, let's focus on the time window on the graph. As you can see, the Democrats used to have a massive advantage with the working class which began to erode around the same time of the Reagan Revolution and round two of Nixon’s Southern strategy.

   Please keep in mind, the erosion also corresponds with the diversification of America both in terms of ethnicity and gender and reflects in part the backlash to civil rights!

   But there is another important lesson. The same three decades where people stopped seeing Democrats as the party of the working class are the exact same three decades Republicans launched economic war on them.

   Can a party of union-busters financed by industry and bankers “represent the working class?”

   Apparently so, as long as they distract them enough from the economic warfare they are conducting against them by leveraging new technology to construct grievance politics as a backlash to our identity politics strategy.

   And it doesn’t just work on White people, folks! Today’s working class are NOT the working class of the 1940s or even the 1960s. 

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   1. If we are lucky enough to get another election in this country, the messaging must focus on telling America the story of what happened to all their money, their rural communities, their paychecks, and their health under Republican Party governance.

      Keep in mind the pocketbook deliverables Democrats brought to working class and middle class Americans over the same time period

      A short sample:

      Bankruptcy reform

      Minimum Wage increases in Blue states

      Card card APR reform

      Student loan reform

      Medicare Part D

      The Affordable Care Act

      Not to mention keeping millions of people from becoming homeless in the pandemic with the foreclosure and eviction freezes, something Republicans would have cut early in 2021.

      Of course, as I explain ad nauseum to you my constant readers, voters have no idea these things happened, let alone why it happened and who tried to stop it from happening: the Republican Party. And they will never know if we don’t tell the story:

      When it comes to economic policy for working Americans, Democrats deliver and Republicans just don’t. 

      We must make the GOP’s brand the party at war with working America.

      That is the story America needs us to tell them if we get the chance. 

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3. There are many voters who respond to the most immediate events in their lives.  Things that are good, they have "earned."  Things that are bad are the fault of someone else — and too often that someone else is the political party "in charge." And the "party in charge" is whoever is President — no matter how much support is available in Congress or from the Courts.

   So, if people focus on gasoline prices, the "official" data shows

   Oct 26, 2020
   $2.143

   Oct 28, 2024
   $3.097

   That $0.95 rise is what people have in mind — no awarness that $2.14 in 2020 would have been $2.59 in 2024 — so about half the difference is "inflation" — and income went up over 20% in those 4 years.  And no awareness that Presidents have relatively little say about the price of gasoline (or anything else). 

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