Dems Rebuild

[Big Red 40]

I definitely think the left is splintered a bit . Progressives and mainstream Democrats  need find common ground and band together if they’re going to win against the GOP. 

[Big Red 40]

7 minutes ago, RedDenver said:

Dems haven't supported unions and workers rights since the Third Way policies took over starting with Bill Clinton. Nor have they been strong on market regulations.

Obama tried to regulate the markets more than any Republican has , and at the very least didn’t weaken Unions/workers rights as Reagan for instance did .

[RedDenver]

20 minutes ago, Big Red 40 said:

Obama tried to regulate the markets more than any Republican has , and at the very least didn’t weaken Unions/workers rights as Reagan for instance did .

More than the Republicans is an extremely low bar.

[Big Red 40]

Agreed lol 

[zoogs]

Yes, I agree. It's also a bar that has to be cleared first. We failed to do so in 2016, spectacularly and at all levels, and we will be paying a terrible price for a long time.

[Danny Bateman]

Unbelievable that this is an option (a gun-loving moderate who prosecuted the KKK) and the GOP still finds a way to turn him into a free-wheeling puppet of the liberal elite who's going to let the country get destroyed by illegal immigrants, ISIS & the like, all while performing abortions on the Senate floor.... en route to nominating a bigoted, twice-expelled jurist and serial pedophile who preyed on multiple young women, bothered them in school, had to be watched at high school football games & got banned from a local mall.

 

I'm just a carpetbagger from up north, but Jones strikes me as a legitimately great representative of Alabama , sans his pro-choice stance which ruffles a lot of feathers down there.

 

Why are we where we are today?
 

 

[RedDenver]

The Dems tilt the field in favor of the establishment:

 

PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATS FIGHT FOR ACCESS TO THE PARTY'S VOTER DATA

Quote

 

In Washington's 9th district, Sarah Smith, a Justice Democrat running a primary campaign against incumbent Democrat Adam Smith, was told that access to VoteBuilder required the endorsement of 50 percent of legislative district clubs, plus one, as well as the backing of the state party chair. But state legislators often wait until close to the actual primary to make an endorsement, Smith says, meaning her campaign would have to spend the majority of the race waiting around for endorsements before gaining access to the data. And even then, the likelihood of sitting party officials endorsing a challenger over an incumbent is low.

 

Smith says she asked to see where that bylaw is written down, but was refused. The Washington state party didn't respond to multiple requests for comment.

 

As a last resort, Sarah Smith's campaign spokesman asked the party for a letter stating they were being denied access to VoteBuilder; at least then, they could get access to SmartVAN. In response, the Smith campaign says they received a Kafka-esque email claiming that even though campaigns can't access VoteBuilder without the endorsements, "in our eyes, a campaign that doesn't have endorsements hasn't been denied."

 

 

[BigRedBuster]

Interesting question. 

 

 

[zoogs]

That'd be disappointing, to say the least. 

 

How can progress in this or any other area be made if we have Democrats expending energy pretending that political expediency is actually, in an alternative interpretation, really about values?

[BigRedBuster]

 

[zoogs]

Really?! That's a hell of a stat.

[funhusker]

6 minutes ago, zoogs said:

Really?! That's a hell of a stat.

As a "white Christian", I'm really starting to have a hard time justifying my place in the world as such.  Not because of "big scary liberal government", but because of other people who claim to be "white Christians."

[BigRedBuster]

9 hours ago, funhusker said:

As a "white Christian", I'm really starting to have a hard time justifying my place in the world as such. 

 

I fully understand and can appreciate this feeling.  I have felt it too.

 

I work hard to separate my own Christianity from what many Americans have made Christianity into.  They are two very different things.

[zoogs]

A lot of those non-evangelical voters who heavily leaned Jones were also Christian -- a preponderance, even, I would imagine. I think something that gets downplayed a lot is that there's a religious left, and they very much do not share the fixations of the religious right.

[Danny Bateman]

Here's a really interesting relevant post from 538's live election night blog regarding the modern meaning of evangelical:

 

What Tonight’s ‘Evangelical Vote’ Doesn’t Mean http://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/alabama-senate-election-results/?lpup=22055126

 

Essentially, the traditional definition of evangelic and what it means in a modern political sense have diverged:

 

Quote

So it’s worth considering whether “white evangelical” is a term that has lost much of its religious context and has come to mean essentially, “white conservatives who are Christian and not Catholic.” In that case, saying that these voters back Moore and Trump is somewhat circular: most white, Christian conservatives back Republican candidates, after all.