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2020 Democratic Candidates Tracker

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Brainster said:
You've got that backwards. If Trump is damaged goods, then the Democrats don't need to go with a moderate; they can afford to play to the base.
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The Democrat's base is moderate. That's why registered Democrats overwhelming voted for Clinton in 2016 Primaries.
 
The Don said:
He will be so long as he wants to be. No matter what comes out of investigations or what he does as President, the current GOP are too spineless to impeach or do anything else to get him out of office and will block any attempts by the Democratic Party and/or the forces of law and order to do likewise.
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There is, as Trump suggested about his opponent, the 2nd Amendment option. But then that makes Pence the incumbent, something the Dems don't want to face.
 
LSSBB said:
No, it's by picking candidates people don't find compelling. When they do, people vote for them. When people find you compelling, you get the Teflon.
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I'd think one candidate receiving 3 million more votes than the other would be a reasonable indicator of who the voting public found more compelling.
 
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Delvo said:
The idea of going "moderate" is exactly how Democrats have been losing for years.
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Exactly how many years have they been losing? I seem to remember that there was a Democratic President not that long ago. Osama or something.
 
Delvo said:
The idea of going "moderate" is exactly how Democrats have been losing for years.
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LSSBB said:
No, it's by picking candidates people don't find compelling.
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There's so much overlap that it's not clear to me that there's a difference at all. Moderate is inherently uncompelling. I suppose I can imagine the possibility of a candidate who is neither compelling nor moderate, but it's rarely what we actually have available.

PhantomWolf said:
Exactly how many years have they been losing? I seem to remember that there was a Democratic President not that long ago. Osama or something.
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During whose Presidency his party lost a thousand seats in Federal & state legislatures and governorships... and that slide didn't even begin with him.
 
Cl1mh4224rd said:
I'd think one candidate receiving 3 million more votes than the other would be a reasonable indicator of who the voting public found more compelling.
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Not at all. Her opponent was the most unpopular candidate ever and the margin was tiny even against that. She was the perfect symbol of what's been wrong with the Democrats' approach: put up an unpopular Republican Lite in the name of centrism to try to get votes from the other side, get nobody from the other side, get minimal support even from your own side either, lose, and then go on arguing about how & why you need to do even more of the same thing next time, all while every poll shows how wrong that is because a liberal candidate would have won handily.
 
Delvo said:
Not at all. Her opponent was the most unpopular candidate ever and the margin was tiny even against that. She was the perfect symbol of what's been wrong with the Democrats' approach: put up an unpopular Republican Lite in the name of centrism to try to get votes from the other side, get nobody from the other side, get minimal support even from your own side either, lose, and then go on arguing about how & why you need to do even more of the same thing next time, all while every poll shows how wrong that is because a liberal candidate would have won handily.
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Is it your opinion, then, that Sanders would've won against Trump? I'm not sure of that.
 
Argumemnon said:
Is it your opinion, then, that Sanders would've won against Trump? I'm not sure of that.
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I can't speak for Delvo, but IMO part of the Democrats' strategic error is that Clinton had the Democratic leadership so in line that the only ones to challenge her were Sanders (not a Party member) and Lincoln Chafee (defunct Ford model).
 
Delvo said:
The idea of going "moderate" is exactly how Democrats have been losing for years.
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In Opposite World, yes.

They won the White House the last three times they did so with moderates. Jimmy Carter saved the party from the populist left and was not seen as he is today, he was definitely a moderate. Bill Clinton made his name on cashnapping businesses from the rust (union) belt and giving them incentives to move. He was a corporatist Democrat. Barack Obama was a moderate liberal. Look at what he didn't do at Commerce, The Fed and Wall Street.

Each of those had different appeal, but in all three cases their playing to the middle worked out very well.
 
Delvo said:
Not at all. Her opponent was the most unpopular candidate ever and the margin was tiny even against that.
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And yet still more compelling then her opponent. This argument that 2 isn't really greater than 1, simply because they are so close in value, is beyond ridiculous. Don't play ignorant about how comparative adjectives work.
 
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Delvo said:
During whose Presidency his party lost a thousand seats in Federal & state legislatures and governorships... and that slide didn't even begin with him.
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This has far more to do with how Democrat voters have viewed the importance of those elections. Democrat turnout has always been low for them, not because of the candidates, but because they were not seen as important as the Presidential Elections, which get good turn out. Similar was true for the Republicans until they worked out that they could gain control Nationally by gaining control locally, and so they started targeting local elections and getting their vote turned out for them. The Democrats seem to be realising that they need to catch up fast there, and the turn out in Virginia and New Jersey along with close races in whet used to be deep red districts would indicate they are understanding that all elections are important, well almost, there are still a lot of Republican held seats that are likely to be unopposed next year.
 
PhantomWolf said:
The Democrat's base is moderate. That's why registered Democrats overwhelming voted for Clinton in 2016 Primaries.
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Yes, the Democratic party overall tends to be moderate, but their base--the activists, the bloggers, the people doing the envelope-stuffing and dialing for dollars, are going to be more liberal than the party overall, for the simple reason that there are no passionate moderates. The same applies to the GOP, although of course there the base is more conservative than the party overall.
 
Foolmewunz said:
They won the White House the last three times they did so with moderates.
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Carter is before my memories begin and possibly before the phenomenon I'm talking about began. Clinton's campaign did indeed include some moderate/conservative themes along with the mostly liberal ones, but he got 43% of the vote and was handed a "win" by Perot sapping away Bush's votes. Obama campaigned as a liberal, and can only be described as moderate based on how he governed, not how he campaigned, which made him a big disappointment to people who'd voted for him based on what he was supposed to do. Clinton II avoided issues & stances and campaigned on feelingism & platitudes, and couldn't manage better than rough parity against an inept rabid orange baboon. Polls asking about Sanders/Trump have consistently had Sanders doing around 10 points better than Clinton all along. Polls asking about the issues instead of candidates have been consistently showing that liberal stances are what the American people favor by wide margins, including smaller majorities even among Republican voters. And in both of the recent rounds of non-Presidential elections, the Democrats who lost, and lost biggest, were the ones who had campaigned the most by trying to look like Republicans, while those who won and won biggest were the ones who contrasted themselves against Republicans the most by clearly spelling out liberal stances on the issues; voters who had significant differences to choose among went with the farthest left option they had, and those who had little or no real difference to choose among didn't.

Or, a shorter observation of the same general thing: we all know which party has been gaining the most ground lately and which one has been losing the most lately. Now, which strategy has which side been using? The side that's been actually standing for what they stand for has been winning; the mealy-mouthed group-hug party has been losing.
 
Cleon said:
I can't speak for Delvo, but IMO part of the Democrats' strategic error is that Clinton had the Democratic leadership so in line that the only ones to challenge her were Sanders (not a Party member) and Lincoln Chafee (defunct Ford model).
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That falls in line with the old jab: I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat.

Cats don't like to be herded. Attempting to organize democrats only weakens the party.
 
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