Also Loki, I think you need to show your work on the "Republican solidarity is what moved the party farther right" theory. For example, I think "a black person in the white house is what moved the party farther right" is just as valid, potentially more so, and backed up by the fact that Democrats are looking poised to win a ****load of elections this November because of an orange person in the white house. And TD disagrees with you too:

Good for TD? I gave reasons based on historical events for my position. I don’t see anything like that in the quoted post.

No.

True Progressives have shown they won’t reliably show up at the polls. If the candidate on the ballot doesn’t pass every purity test imaginable then they’re effed. This is a self-defeating strategy. Good for primaries I guess, but in a general election you’re only hurting the causes you pretend to care about. And yes, if you won’t pull the lever for someone who supports 85-95% of your positions because it’s not 100% and you’d rather have nothing than most of everything, you don’t really care about anything other than your own feelings.

Finally getting around to listening to the audio recording from The Intercept's story and it's really driving home how lol Max's posts are. Remember, what he's so against is:

People being handed power without getting the votes is just the worst, right? And yet in this conversation:

Max is on...Hoyer's side?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

The thing is if the party is going to pick a candidate and put its thumb on the scales and shower with money, contacts, etc, why even have a primary? What's it accomplishing?

If the party is right to decide and progressives should vote for the candidate of they think it's in their best interest or not if they don't why not just announce that candidate X is the Democrat candidate for district Y and go to the general?

No, you didn't, you just asserted that certain correlated events ("Republicans all show up, then they moved right") were causative. I can do that too: a black person won the presidency, then Republicans moved farther to the right.

Sorry but this sounds an awful lot like "wow such betrayal that you don't show up to vote for us after we ****ed over your candidates". It also ignores the valid tactical logic that staying home can force the party that's ****ing over your candidates to come to the table with you; like TD suggested, it's a tough decision between a) vote for the Ds but never get what you want, and b) withhold your support to try to force negotiation with your wing of the party, but higher risk of RWNJ winning.

You haven't refuted that at all, you just blindly assert stuff about "feelings" because it makes you feel better.

Loki,

You have no idea what people who didn't show up wanted. I doubt they were generally more progressive than the average Dem other than not wanting to vote for the pandering, waffling, egomaniacal, unprincipled, power hungry, elitist stuffed suits offered up by both parties.

This may not be rational (as far as being self-serving), but people want someone with some principles, even if they don't agree with them entirely.

„Our sandwiches contain less feces than the other leading brand!“ - if the Democrats managed Subway

You act like negative campaigning is poor strategy, but we in this forum spend more time on stupid Trump tricks than on the virtues of single payer. It seems like leftist amyglidas (sp) get tickled by negativity too.

If you say your favorite car in the world is a Ferrari and someone shows up on your door with a Ferrari they’re giving to you, but you turn it down because one tire had low pressure and you disliked the delivery driver's haircut, do you think it’s fair to say you don’t really love Ferraris that much?

A general election in America is a choice between two outcomes. People who stayed home or voted for Stein, Johnson or Trump were all supporting more police brutality, more insane conservatives on the judicial branch, a stolen Supreme Court seat, more dead children from gun violence and a higher abortion rate. That’s a fact.

And that Ferrari's name was...Hillary Clinton

Okay, but half of the eligible voters in the country don't see it that way. Many people want someone to vote for and not someone to vote against. You are the one who is not living in the real world and wishing things were a different way.

You assume there is 85-95% agreement or that the candidates are Ferraris with low tire pressure. Sure, if you frame it like that your position seems reasonable.

Well yeah, I guess I have realistic, non-childlike views of candidates. I didn’t think obama was going to poop rainbows when he got elected. He was going to be a politician that supported many of the things I support, more so than the other viable alternative of McCain or Romney. He wasn’t going to be all things to me, but he was going to mostly favor the things I favor. That’s politics.

I guess I care about policies, not people, so I don’t see it this way. If you’re only in politics to vote for a specific person then you’ve proven that I’m right that you don’t care about actual causes. This is called a cult of personality, not politics.

That’s a false dichotomy though. You could support the party and principles you claim to hold dear and try to change the party from the inside. You think the dem party is going to be super happy to invite the spoiled children who were trolling the DNC convention back? That’s how you think you positively affect change in a political party? By being disruptive and helping throw the Supreme Court to the GOP?

Self-righteous b*******. Just about everyone in this thread except maybe Max voted for Clinton in the general.

I guess you want a cookie for being better than the 60 million people who didn't vote. Fine, have a cookie but that's not going to win you elections.

Loki is ITT arguing against the efficacy of populist insurgency at a time when the party that was completely taken over by populist insurgency now controls the White House, both houses of congress, 31 state legislatures and 33 governorships.

How many of those did they have before the 2016 election? Seems like the nonpopulists were doing quite well. Trump won with three million fewer votes.

Populism!

- signed, someone who is #StillWithHer

This has at least been revealing in seeing how someone is dealing with the mental gymnastics of having their chosen political strategies rejected in the most resounding and humiliating way possible in the 2016 election - by doing zero self-reflection and remaining convinced that everyone else was the problem

And what do they expect that person they’re voting for and not against is going to do once they take power? Absolutely nothing? Or does the person they’re supporting hold some policies that their voters prefer?

What the hell is it even to be anti-populist? Are you a constitutional monarchist? You want majority rule but you just want low turnout? You just don't want people to really like the candidates?

I guess the answer is obvious. You want a small group of elites to pick two candidates and the people are allowed to choose from one of them. That's so much better than a one-party state.

Who even are you talking to?

Goofy,

Had Bernie won the nomination, I would have donated to him, phone banked for him, knocked on doors for him, voted for him just as I did Clinton. I would not regret it. Had he lost because sour Hillary fans had voted for Stein, I would be saying the exact same thing because I’m loyal to my principles, not people.

I don't think most of the swing voters, the ones who matter here, are that committed to policy. I have some faith in human nature and I think that a charismatic person who appears to be calling for goodness gets a better response than someone who is calling for badness. That's why Obama was way more popular than Trump. It's also why Bernie would have beaten Trump.

That's great for you personally, but this discussion has revealed some pretty scary things about how the 2016 election made you feel about the direction of the Democratic Party. Remember this famous quote?

So that was one of the most disastrous predictions of all time, yet you want to...stick with it? It's hard to glean exactly what you want the party to do (because you're mostly just going on and on about the ways in which you feel morally superior to people who stayed home, none of whom are posting ITT), but that's what I'm getting from snippets like this:

People like me and microbet have a plan to try to change the Democratic Party's fortunes: run on issues, have fair primaries, try to bring progressives disillusioned with centrist kingmakers in Washington back into the fold. What the **** is your plan, besides complaining about progressives?

Well okay, but complaining about the DCCC and political strategy are not mutually exclusive.

And a system where money from large corporations is important is always going to seriously disadvantage those who are not friendly to those corporations.

I mean the more progressive candidate lost to the candidate that then lost to Donald ****ing Trump so I'm not sure this logic really works.

It's not necessarily self-defeating. It might be, the EV calcs are kind of hard, but it's not obvious.

People don't show up for all kinds of reasons but I think we are specifically talking about people who would have shown up for a more progressive candidate.

Meh forum posting != political strategy

No, this is ridiculous. People can have strategies that go beyond the immediate election. This is essentially raising to protect your hand.

I agree you can take varying tactics between those two extremes but again it's not obvious that your strategy is better.

Tilted,

As I said before I don't think people will show up just because a candidate is more Progressive. Having more integrity is something that will bring more people though. And the logic that Bernie lost to Hillary means that he would lose to Trump is wrong. The general is not decided by people who voted in the primaries. By and large their votes are already locked up. Look at the election in 2008. Obama essentially tied Hillary. And that was before she had Secretary of State on her resume. Do you think that she would have done anywhere near as well in the general as he did?

Can you believe that I'm with her was actually their slogan? And other people are being accused of a cult of personality.