is that they fluctuate depending on the individual’s (1) name recognition and (2) involvement in electoral politics. Individuals with higher name recognition tend to have lower net favorability ratings, and involvement in electoral politics increases unfavorable views.
One of the (many) remarkable things about the 2016 election is that the presumptive nominees from both parties have been extremely well-known national public figures for a long time. (Seriously, I’m not sure when two candidates with such well-known national status, for so long, have been the respective nominees for their parties).
The point being that we shouldn’t be surprised when the media breathlessly informs us that “this is by far the most unpopular pair of presidential nominees in history.” Both individuals have been in the public eye for a long time, and both are now (again, in Clinton’s case) in the mud-pit of American electoral politics. It’s not particularly surprising that both are so unpopular at the start of the campaign.
Among all these classes of professionals, all these institutions, that whole superstructure of US politics built around two balanced sides, there will be a tidal pull to normalize this election, to make it Coca-Cola versus Pepsi instead of Coca-Cola versus sewer water.
paulsimmonssays
…Clinton rules mean guilty until proven innocent, then and now. The Washington media is a machine that transforms crap about Clintons into headlines, and Trump is a bottomless supply of crap.
Along with that, Clinton being Clinton, and Clintonworld being Clintonworld, there is likely to be no shortage of missteps, malapropisms, unforced errors, and poorly chosen surrogates to keep the media busy even without Trump’s help. Stories purporting to (finally) bring Clinton down never lack for clicks. She is, after all, the most disliked national politician in American life … except Donald Trump.
So there you have it: an obvious choice that numerous institutions and individuals are committed to making as difficult, as unpleasant, and as drawn-out as possible. It augurs a substance-free, policy-averse, crap-happy campaign season, degraded even by the diminished standards of contemporary US politics. Wake me when it’s over.
…and that is what keeps me up at night.
Peter Porcupinesays
This is 6 months old.
paulsimmonssays
The trend lines on that Clinton graph are only marked in half-year increments. The interactive version is here.
JimCsays
n/t
Mark L. Bailsays
Clinton’s ratings. If this is a national average, I’m not really surprised or concerned.
1.There are places in this country that are hotbeds of Clinton hatred. Texas. Much of the Deep South. Places where she wouldn’t win an election if she were running against Chairman Mao.
1. She has endured ongoing smears from the right for 25 years. It would be surprising if her disapproval rating wasn’t significant.
2.
Mark L. Bailsays
3. She’s running against Bernie Sanders who draws Democratic voters toward him and against her.
4. Her approval ratings will improve when Bernie leaves the race and she is compared to Trump. A lot of Republicans are coming around to Trump, even though they hate him. This will happen with Hillary. Once people “have” to support her, they will begin to approve of her.
doublemansays
Check out the Vox piece I linked to above.
It brings up an interesting issue re: #4. The media is invested in having a race, which means that they will have to put the two on equal footing, and that may mean dragging Clinton down.
Mark L. Bailsays
Very possible. If it were up to me, I would have surrogates making press coverage and the VRWC a subplot of the story.
Predicting the press is even dicier than predicting the electorate. As James says, this is a realigning year. Trump will continue to get a lot of press, but he’s going to get it from many sides. Too early to be certain, but third parties may well crop up on the right. Trump still has a lawsuit to face, and mountains of dirt that the GOP and his opponents have been reticent to dig up.
The article you quoted and Paul excerpted is right. You can count on the Clintons for a decent amount of self-inflicted damage along with some deserved abuse.
jconwaysays
And I have no idea what will happen. But in that, I’m not alone. Nobody else does either.
Christophersays
We’ve struggled with attracting Reagan Dems (more Reagan than Dem IMO) for my entire lifetime and definitely yours, yet the electoral map has tended to favor us lately.
paulsimmonssays
that plays out in the electoral college in states where black and (increasingly Latino) voters constitute margins of victory. I note that “anti-Republican” does not automatically equate to “pro-Democratic”. Lower turnout in downballot races illustrate how low enthusiasm plays out, to Republican advantage.
Had the Republicans, post-G. W. Bush, not become so increasingly anti-Latino, thus swinging that cohort across intra-ethnic boundaries to the Democrats – Latinos were, prior to 2008, swing voters and increasingly voting Republican – Republicans would have a larger base in Presidential elections.
The failure to “attract Reagan Dems” is understandable, given the hard-wired class bigotry in Democratic outreach structures. This also plays out locally. A Massachusetts example is Republican gains in Worcester County, due to the condescending field aversion of the state Democratic party.
Christophersays
…with your assessment that Democrats are bigoted, condescending, etc to the lower classes who are after all exactly the people we spend a lot of time attempting to reach, especially since when I’ve asked you have not as I recall come up with specific things you think we should do differently.
paulsimmonssays
Insofar as specific suggestions are concerned:
1.) Rebuild self-sustaining and accountable ward and precinct operations from the ground up.
2.) Redirect field operations, in particular canvassing, to neighbor-to-neighbor outreach.
3.) Recognize that, in an era of cell phones and caller ID, phone banking has limited utility unless the caller has (or can establish) an organic connection with the contacted voter.
And conceptually:
1.) Consider why Party affiliation is shrinking, and the majority of Massachusetts voters are Unenrolled.
2.) Case study the geographic and socioeconomic-specific dynamics of the Republican resurgence in places like Worcester County.
3.) Case study the reasons why one-half of Charlie Baker’s margin of victory came from his increased support (relative to 2010) in Boston.
4.) Invest in a reputable pollster to find out how many Democrats know the identity of any of their Ward/Town Democratic Committee members.
In matters of institutional culture (and this goes to the class issue) ask why for all its pretenses to the contrary, Massachusetts has such a high and increasing rate of income inequality, and the Commonwealth spends less than the national average on public education.
I repeat: The issue is not rank and file Democrats, but the fact that there are, shall we say, discrepancies between rhetoric and reality, which tend to be substantively unaddressed to the detriment of the Party.
jconwaysays
And one that has substantially influence the enrollment strategy we are shifting towards. I think anything that reconnects the party elite with the grassroots is a good strategy. But trickle down doesn’t work politically and it won’t work for politics. I’d trade a Scott Brown back in the Senate for a hundred Elizabeth Warren’s on Beacon Hill. The local party is uninterested in that fight, and actively prevents it from happening.
Christophersays
…and number 1 varies from community to community.
Mark L. Bailsays
ward/town committees? I live in a small town, and most of our members are over 70. We draw straws when it comes to the convention: short straw gets to go. Unless it’s a nominating convention.
I have no experience with city Democratic committees. I’m asking.
jconwaysays
And we’d be happy to have you and/or members of your community. Launching 10 this month with at least 20 more on the way for the summer. Unlike the DSC, our candidates actually are committed to following our platform since they are running to make a difference and not just to make s living.
Christophersays
…but was the swipe at the DSC really necessary? If there are ways to make a living off of being a DSC member I missed that particular memo.
jconwaysays
What I won’t defend is the shameful way our elected leaders ignore the hard work you do and the platform they are supposed to uphold.
Christophersays
Every community has registered Dems who are active voters in every age group. Local committees should have access to Votebuilder to find out who those are. I consistently encourage the state party and campaigns to share their lists of add-on delegates and volunteers respectively, many of whom are young, with their local party committees.
paulsimmonssays
For what you want to do, it’s way too expensive.
Go to your town clerk’s office (or whomever administers local elections) and request the voter list in text format. Depending on the town, that list is available for free or at a very low cost. Assuming that your voter list has less than 65,000 names on it, suck the list into Excel. (Older versions of Excel get buggy at that point)
Among the file headers – which are systematized by the Secretary of State’s Elections Division – is “Party”.
Sort for “D” in the Party fields, and voila, you have your list of registered Democrats by precinct and street address.
Some people voluntarily submit their phone numbers, but I would advise that only people known to those voters contact them by telephone.
paulsimmonssays
…Microsoft Access will do the job just fine.
jconwaysays
It hasn’t been updated for the post-primary data yet, and it’s a beast. Thankfully my best intern broke it up by town for me, so now it’s incredibly helpful and easy to filter and cut.
paulsimmonssays
For local stuff – and remember we’re talking raw voters, not voter history – Galvin’s office refers people to their local election authorities.
Apropos of which, the same applies to the raw voter lists of a given municipality.
For Party-building purposes Democrats should consider that a lot of people on the voter list never cast a ballot. For example, as of the 2016 Presidential Primary, there were 382,946 registered voters in Boston, of whom 95,506 have never voted at any time since 1997 per my Boston list.
That’s a lot of deferred outreach, which is why I suggested getting the raw voter list.
jconwaysays
I was representing a party committee and not a town one. The town clerk probably has more updated local records and would make the most sense. The Boston lists are fascinating Paul.
Christophersays
…I’m fairly certain for free. Plus, I don’t think the lists from the clerks provide voter history.
paulsimmonssays
…all available from municipal election authorities.
The resident list, which generally only cites registered voter status.
The voter list, which lists name, street address, ward/precinct address, voter status (active or inactive), and political party of registered voters.
The voter history list, which lists those voters who cast ballots and the elections in which they voted.
For purposes of party-building my suggestion to mark-bail was to obtain the voter list.
Christophersays
It shows you which are very active and therefore may be most open to party involvement, but I have never known clerks to have those. I would still suggest Votebuilder for all of its functionalities.
merrimackguysays
The lists are by election, not voter. You get “these are all the people who voted in the town in the Nov 2014 election.” It does have address and registration. If you wanted to get a voter’s history, you’ll need to have some database skills. You could probably get pretty far using Excel, but that could get unwieldy.
merrimackguysays
I had a list of people who voted in the Scott Brown vs Jack E Robinson primary in December 2009. That’s a committed crowd.
paulsimmonssays
Some town voter history lists (like Boston) go back several elections; for other municipalities you can request that the town sort against past elections, specifying by election how far back one wants to go.
Speaking for myself, and specific to party-building, I prefer the raw lists.
Without going into the pros and cons of various NGP VAN products (and I like VoteBuilder’s turf-cutting application), municipal party-building can be done for less cost using locally available lists; and by using the raw voter list one can avoid over-targeting.
The trade-off is that the initial voter contact is largely dependent upon personal relationships between local activists and targeted voters. That said, if done correctly, organic growth results, in turn resulting in a better foundation for get-out-the-vote operations.
IMHO, one of the reasons behind low turnouts is the tendency of too many campaigns to ignore those voters outside a given contact universe.
Peter Porcupinesays
Consider running a challenge slate. All you need is a minimum of 3 Democrats, up to 35. Entrenched committees don’t bother to campaign usually.
We had a few contested GOP slates, a precursor of the Liberty and Trump slates at the caucuses
jconwaysays
The Obama Presidency should demonstrate that. The Democrats are at their lowest ebb of state legislative control, the Republicans have a Trump proof House majority, and our congressional leadership is impotent and weak. The states we do control legislators, IL and MA for example, have corrupt and conservative legislatures uninterested in advancing far reaching progressive legislation. And this inaction and corruption has the perverse effect of electing regressive governors in blue states, like MA, IL, MD, and MI to name a few.
MN and OR sends way more Republicans to office than we do, and they routinely elect and sign far more progressive pieces of legislation than MA. Dayton accomplished more in one term than Deval did in two, and that’s despite losing his state senate and having a split congressional delegation. O’Malley had Democratic houses, but they weren’t supermajorities like ours. The buck stops here, and it stops with the MA Democrats. All politics is local, let’s make our state a beacon for America again.
It’s embarrassing. The Democrats are in decent shape demographically to win the White House and failing on almost everything else. I know you know this, but it’s still stunning to see the map.
Christophersays
Control of legislatures is a poor indicator these days of popular partisan preferences. Presidential votes are counted and sorted differently.
Christophersays
Pretty sure that is an accurate statement.
jconwaysays
And ask what progress have they made? Outside of CA, OR and MN-I can’t think of any. New York had its longtime Democratic speaker hauled to the slammer, along with their senate leader. Bobby isn’t far behind here. And Mad Mike Madigan in IL is leaving office in pine box padded with graft.
States are where policies are made due to federal gridlock. It’s cold comfort to the parents of dead DCF kids in Massachusetts, let alone working women in the 30 states where GOP government have slashed social services and curtailed abortion rights, that we have the first female President and we get another liberal on the court. The myopia around here on the presidential front has blinded all of you to how useless the majority of Democrats in this state are and how fucked any nominee is going to be in 2018 for Governor.
Mark L. Bailsays
to New York Democrats. Corruption reigns on both sides. The Democrats just happen to be in power. There was Joe Bruno and Dean Skelos. That crazy bastard that threatened to throw a reporter over a balcony.
It does matter if we have the first female president. It does matter if we get another liberal on the Supreme Court. What happens in the states is affected by what happens at the federal level. The whole country is a mess. Stridency isn’t going to fix it.
jconwaysays
I’m saying Paul Simmons diagnosed a serious problem by saying the Dems aren’t doing so great at the local or state level so maybe they should do something and Christopher responds with “yeah but we are winning the electoral college” which totally misses the point.
Those things are important, but there is severe poverty, inequality, racism and lack of opportunity in this state and I do not see the party of FDR, which has a veto proof override, lifting a finger to solve any of it. My local Democrats in Chicago were Rahm Emmanuel and Mike Madigan. My local Democrats here are DeLeo and Marty Walsh. Neither of whom is particularly progressive, neither of whom will leave office without indictments reining down on their political operations. Our power as a community of activists would be leveraged far more locally and outside the Democratic Party.
Christophersays
Maybe I should have made that clearer. The party overall is winning more votes nationwide I believe. EC notwithstanding the winner of the popular vote almost always wins the presidency and in 2000 we did in fact win the popular vote for President. There was one recent cycle where Dems got more aggregate House votes than the GOP, but the GOP retained their majorities anyway. I would not be the least bit surprised if we found the same to be true for at least some state legislative bodies.
Have you even tried to work within the party, either here or in Illinois, by running for a party committee?
jconwaysays
I’ve been registered for 10. I’ve been active here. I’ve put in my time. I was a precinct captain for Deval and was happy Joel Patterson is my ward committee man. North Cambridge has a great one.
In Chicago the ward committees are tightly controlled by the aldermen and are not open to outsiders, though I was involved in U of C College Dems until the Hillary camp kicked the Obama supporters out, I founded and was the first campus director for SFBO on our campus. I was a precinct captain for Deval and have campaigned hard for Democrats here and across the Midwest. My frustration is genuine and I’m happy to organize this state. In four years who knows, you might be joining us
is that they fluctuate depending on the individual’s (1) name recognition and (2) involvement in electoral politics. Individuals with higher name recognition tend to have lower net favorability ratings, and involvement in electoral politics increases unfavorable views.
One of the (many) remarkable things about the 2016 election is that the presumptive nominees from both parties have been extremely well-known national public figures for a long time. (Seriously, I’m not sure when two candidates with such well-known national status, for so long, have been the respective nominees for their parties).
The point being that we shouldn’t be surprised when the media breathlessly informs us that “this is by far the most unpopular pair of presidential nominees in history.” Both individuals have been in the public eye for a long time, and both are now (again, in Clinton’s case) in the mud-pit of American electoral politics. It’s not particularly surprising that both are so unpopular at the start of the campaign.
I think this piece is spot on.
…and that is what keeps me up at night.
This is 6 months old.
The trend lines on that Clinton graph are only marked in half-year increments. The interactive version is here.
n/t
Clinton’s ratings. If this is a national average, I’m not really surprised or concerned.
1.There are places in this country that are hotbeds of Clinton hatred. Texas. Much of the Deep South. Places where she wouldn’t win an election if she were running against Chairman Mao.
1. She has endured ongoing smears from the right for 25 years. It would be surprising if her disapproval rating wasn’t significant.
2.
3. She’s running against Bernie Sanders who draws Democratic voters toward him and against her.
4. Her approval ratings will improve when Bernie leaves the race and she is compared to Trump. A lot of Republicans are coming around to Trump, even though they hate him. This will happen with Hillary. Once people “have” to support her, they will begin to approve of her.
Check out the Vox piece I linked to above.
It brings up an interesting issue re: #4. The media is invested in having a race, which means that they will have to put the two on equal footing, and that may mean dragging Clinton down.
Very possible. If it were up to me, I would have surrogates making press coverage and the VRWC a subplot of the story.
Predicting the press is even dicier than predicting the electorate. As James says, this is a realigning year. Trump will continue to get a lot of press, but he’s going to get it from many sides. Too early to be certain, but third parties may well crop up on the right. Trump still has a lawsuit to face, and mountains of dirt that the GOP and his opponents have been reticent to dig up.
The article you quoted and Paul excerpted is right. You can count on the Clintons for a decent amount of self-inflicted damage along with some deserved abuse.
And I have no idea what will happen. But in that, I’m not alone. Nobody else does either.
We’ve struggled with attracting Reagan Dems (more Reagan than Dem IMO) for my entire lifetime and definitely yours, yet the electoral map has tended to favor us lately.
that plays out in the electoral college in states where black and (increasingly Latino) voters constitute margins of victory. I note that “anti-Republican” does not automatically equate to “pro-Democratic”. Lower turnout in downballot races illustrate how low enthusiasm plays out, to Republican advantage.
Had the Republicans, post-G. W. Bush, not become so increasingly anti-Latino, thus swinging that cohort across intra-ethnic boundaries to the Democrats – Latinos were, prior to 2008, swing voters and increasingly voting Republican – Republicans would have a larger base in Presidential elections.
The failure to “attract Reagan Dems” is understandable, given the hard-wired class bigotry in Democratic outreach structures. This also plays out locally. A Massachusetts example is Republican gains in Worcester County, due to the condescending field aversion of the state Democratic party.
…with your assessment that Democrats are bigoted, condescending, etc to the lower classes who are after all exactly the people we spend a lot of time attempting to reach, especially since when I’ve asked you have not as I recall come up with specific things you think we should do differently.
Insofar as specific suggestions are concerned:
1.) Rebuild self-sustaining and accountable ward and precinct operations from the ground up.
2.) Redirect field operations, in particular canvassing, to neighbor-to-neighbor outreach.
3.) Recognize that, in an era of cell phones and caller ID, phone banking has limited utility unless the caller has (or can establish) an organic connection with the contacted voter.
And conceptually:
1.) Consider why Party affiliation is shrinking, and the majority of Massachusetts voters are Unenrolled.
2.) Case study the geographic and socioeconomic-specific dynamics of the Republican resurgence in places like Worcester County.
3.) Case study the reasons why one-half of Charlie Baker’s margin of victory came from his increased support (relative to 2010) in Boston.
4.) Invest in a reputable pollster to find out how many Democrats know the identity of any of their Ward/Town Democratic Committee members.
In matters of institutional culture (and this goes to the class issue) ask why for all its pretenses to the contrary, Massachusetts has such a high and increasing rate of income inequality, and the Commonwealth spends less than the national average on public education.
I repeat: The issue is not rank and file Democrats, but the fact that there are, shall we say, discrepancies between rhetoric and reality, which tend to be substantively unaddressed to the detriment of the Party.
And one that has substantially influence the enrollment strategy we are shifting towards. I think anything that reconnects the party elite with the grassroots is a good strategy. But trickle down doesn’t work politically and it won’t work for politics. I’d trade a Scott Brown back in the Senate for a hundred Elizabeth Warren’s on Beacon Hill. The local party is uninterested in that fight, and actively prevents it from happening.
…and number 1 varies from community to community.
ward/town committees? I live in a small town, and most of our members are over 70. We draw straws when it comes to the convention: short straw gets to go. Unless it’s a nominating convention.
I have no experience with city Democratic committees. I’m asking.
And we’d be happy to have you and/or members of your community. Launching 10 this month with at least 20 more on the way for the summer. Unlike the DSC, our candidates actually are committed to following our platform since they are running to make a difference and not just to make s living.
…but was the swipe at the DSC really necessary? If there are ways to make a living off of being a DSC member I missed that particular memo.
What I won’t defend is the shameful way our elected leaders ignore the hard work you do and the platform they are supposed to uphold.
Every community has registered Dems who are active voters in every age group. Local committees should have access to Votebuilder to find out who those are. I consistently encourage the state party and campaigns to share their lists of add-on delegates and volunteers respectively, many of whom are young, with their local party committees.
For what you want to do, it’s way too expensive.
Go to your town clerk’s office (or whomever administers local elections) and request the voter list in text format. Depending on the town, that list is available for free or at a very low cost. Assuming that your voter list has less than 65,000 names on it, suck the list into Excel. (Older versions of Excel get buggy at that point)
Among the file headers – which are systematized by the Secretary of State’s Elections Division – is “Party”.
Sort for “D” in the Party fields, and voila, you have your list of registered Democrats by precinct and street address.
Some people voluntarily submit their phone numbers, but I would advise that only people known to those voters contact them by telephone.
…Microsoft Access will do the job just fine.
It hasn’t been updated for the post-primary data yet, and it’s a beast. Thankfully my best intern broke it up by town for me, so now it’s incredibly helpful and easy to filter and cut.
For local stuff – and remember we’re talking raw voters, not voter history – Galvin’s office refers people to their local election authorities.
Apropos of which, the same applies to the raw voter lists of a given municipality.
For Party-building purposes Democrats should consider that a lot of people on the voter list never cast a ballot. For example, as of the 2016 Presidential Primary, there were 382,946 registered voters in Boston, of whom 95,506 have never voted at any time since 1997 per my Boston list.
That’s a lot of deferred outreach, which is why I suggested getting the raw voter list.
I was representing a party committee and not a town one. The town clerk probably has more updated local records and would make the most sense. The Boston lists are fascinating Paul.
…I’m fairly certain for free. Plus, I don’t think the lists from the clerks provide voter history.
…all available from municipal election authorities.
The resident list, which generally only cites registered voter status.
The voter list, which lists name, street address, ward/precinct address, voter status (active or inactive), and political party of registered voters.
The voter history list, which lists those voters who cast ballots and the elections in which they voted.
For purposes of party-building my suggestion to mark-bail was to obtain the voter list.
It shows you which are very active and therefore may be most open to party involvement, but I have never known clerks to have those. I would still suggest Votebuilder for all of its functionalities.
The lists are by election, not voter. You get “these are all the people who voted in the town in the Nov 2014 election.” It does have address and registration. If you wanted to get a voter’s history, you’ll need to have some database skills. You could probably get pretty far using Excel, but that could get unwieldy.
I had a list of people who voted in the Scott Brown vs Jack E Robinson primary in December 2009. That’s a committed crowd.
Some town voter history lists (like Boston) go back several elections; for other municipalities you can request that the town sort against past elections, specifying by election how far back one wants to go.
Speaking for myself, and specific to party-building, I prefer the raw lists.
Without going into the pros and cons of various NGP VAN products (and I like VoteBuilder’s turf-cutting application), municipal party-building can be done for less cost using locally available lists; and by using the raw voter list one can avoid over-targeting.
The trade-off is that the initial voter contact is largely dependent upon personal relationships between local activists and targeted voters. That said, if done correctly, organic growth results, in turn resulting in a better foundation for get-out-the-vote operations.
IMHO, one of the reasons behind low turnouts is the tendency of too many campaigns to ignore those voters outside a given contact universe.
Consider running a challenge slate. All you need is a minimum of 3 Democrats, up to 35. Entrenched committees don’t bother to campaign usually.
We had a few contested GOP slates, a precursor of the Liberty and Trump slates at the caucuses
The Obama Presidency should demonstrate that. The Democrats are at their lowest ebb of state legislative control, the Republicans have a Trump proof House majority, and our congressional leadership is impotent and weak. The states we do control legislators, IL and MA for example, have corrupt and conservative legislatures uninterested in advancing far reaching progressive legislation. And this inaction and corruption has the perverse effect of electing regressive governors in blue states, like MA, IL, MD, and MI to name a few.
MN and OR sends way more Republicans to office than we do, and they routinely elect and sign far more progressive pieces of legislation than MA. Dayton accomplished more in one term than Deval did in two, and that’s despite losing his state senate and having a split congressional delegation. O’Malley had Democratic houses, but they weren’t supermajorities like ours. The buck stops here, and it stops with the MA Democrats. All politics is local, let’s make our state a beacon for America again.
Look at this f*cking thing.
It’s embarrassing. The Democrats are in decent shape demographically to win the White House and failing on almost everything else. I know you know this, but it’s still stunning to see the map.
Control of legislatures is a poor indicator these days of popular partisan preferences. Presidential votes are counted and sorted differently.
Pretty sure that is an accurate statement.
And ask what progress have they made? Outside of CA, OR and MN-I can’t think of any. New York had its longtime Democratic speaker hauled to the slammer, along with their senate leader. Bobby isn’t far behind here. And Mad Mike Madigan in IL is leaving office in pine box padded with graft.
States are where policies are made due to federal gridlock. It’s cold comfort to the parents of dead DCF kids in Massachusetts, let alone working women in the 30 states where GOP government have slashed social services and curtailed abortion rights, that we have the first female President and we get another liberal on the court. The myopia around here on the presidential front has blinded all of you to how useless the majority of Democrats in this state are and how fucked any nominee is going to be in 2018 for Governor.
to New York Democrats. Corruption reigns on both sides. The Democrats just happen to be in power. There was Joe Bruno and Dean Skelos. That crazy bastard that threatened to throw a reporter over a balcony.
It does matter if we have the first female president. It does matter if we get another liberal on the Supreme Court. What happens in the states is affected by what happens at the federal level. The whole country is a mess. Stridency isn’t going to fix it.
I’m saying Paul Simmons diagnosed a serious problem by saying the Dems aren’t doing so great at the local or state level so maybe they should do something and Christopher responds with “yeah but we are winning the electoral college” which totally misses the point.
Those things are important, but there is severe poverty, inequality, racism and lack of opportunity in this state and I do not see the party of FDR, which has a veto proof override, lifting a finger to solve any of it. My local Democrats in Chicago were Rahm Emmanuel and Mike Madigan. My local Democrats here are DeLeo and Marty Walsh. Neither of whom is particularly progressive, neither of whom will leave office without indictments reining down on their political operations. Our power as a community of activists would be leveraged far more locally and outside the Democratic Party.
Maybe I should have made that clearer. The party overall is winning more votes nationwide I believe. EC notwithstanding the winner of the popular vote almost always wins the presidency and in 2000 we did in fact win the popular vote for President. There was one recent cycle where Dems got more aggregate House votes than the GOP, but the GOP retained their majorities anyway. I would not be the least bit surprised if we found the same to be true for at least some state legislative bodies.
Have you even tried to work within the party, either here or in Illinois, by running for a party committee?
I’ve been registered for 10. I’ve been active here. I’ve put in my time. I was a precinct captain for Deval and was happy Joel Patterson is my ward committee man. North Cambridge has a great one.
In Chicago the ward committees are tightly controlled by the aldermen and are not open to outsiders, though I was involved in U of C College Dems until the Hillary camp kicked the Obama supporters out, I founded and was the first campus director for SFBO on our campus. I was a precinct captain for Deval and have campaigned hard for Democrats here and across the Midwest. My frustration is genuine and I’m happy to organize this state. In four years who knows, you might be joining us