Saved you a click: Shift to the right and become more moderate
AKA, move more to the center of the ever-rightward-shifting Overton window.
If the Overton window is shifting based on how voters are voting…then yeah. If you want to be elected, you run to be the candidate who gets 50%+1 of the votes, that is how it works. If the voters shift right you have to shift right or you’ll lose.
The voters are a lot further to the left than we realize. It is the donor class that is further to the right.
Which is why nothing makes me feel less American than an election. It’s always a stark reminder of just how far out my politics are, and how I’ll never be ruled by a government I actually consent to be ruled by.
Which is pretty much exactly why the Left loses all the time.
You’ll never get someone you agree with 100% of the time. Meanwhile, the Right will vote for a dead pimp if he’s got an R next to his name.
Yes, yes, vote blue no matter who, I know.
But that doesn’t mean I like it.
The Moral Majority remade the GOP in the 1970s and 1980s with a grassroots campaign. If the normal attendance at a local GOP clubhouse was twenty people, the MMs would show up with fifty. They started getting county clerks and sheriffs elected, and soon the Party realized they were dependent on Falwell and his church people.
The Right works 24/7/365 while the Left acts like they are heroes if they vote at all.
A lot of those people are literally getting paid to do their “grassroots” advocacy. It’s not because the average conservative voter is more dedicated or more passionate, it’s because their activists (and sometimes literal actors) have been funded by a variety of billionaires for decades.
When the Unions were getting started the bosses paid to have strikebreakers bust heads.
I doubt there are fifty people who agree with me in the entire country.
I’m resigned to being miserable. Don’t do that. Don’t give me hope.
Sometimes hope is what we need to keep going in what looks like an insurmountable challenge. It’s simply a way to motivate people. Conservatives have used hope to motivate their base. Conservative voters are willing to show up because they have hope that they can change our society (in a negative way, for the record) using the political process. They have been wildly successful at that. We can harness the same resources and use it against them. Only we can theoretically do it better, because we have the most important thing: numbers.
It’s up to all of us to step up, show leadership ourselves, and grind this shit out. We have to fight the GOP, a good deal of Democratic Party leadership, and the media every single day. We have to work primary campaigns, push out moderates in the primaries, and remove every GOP member possible during general elections. And we have to do it for decades. It works. It has worked before. I don’t care if we’re motivated by hope, hate, or hunger. We just need to stay motivated.
It took the GOP fifty years to kill Roe V. Wade. Like I said, they worked 24/7. If you think you’re the only person who thinks like you then you’re as egotistical as the guy who thinks everyone agrees with him
Which is pretty much exactly why the Left loses all the time.
Checks the Executive Branch and The Senate before scratching their head in puzzlement.
It’s almost as if you’re ignoring the GOP obstruction. Also, most people wouldn’t call the Dems ‘Left.’ They are center Right at best.
The voters didn’t shift to the right, at least not in any meaningfully quantifiable sense. Souzzi won a Biden +10 district by ~+8. Less, but pretty feasibly in the noise for a low turnout special election.
That is only measuring the midpoint of the electorate vs the candidate so it doesn’t actually tell us much. Theoretically the district could have gotten 30% more conservative and the candidate was 28% more conservative than Biden so he won by a similar amount.
If that’s the lengths you’re going to go to question objective measurement, then your claim the Overton window is shifting is even more unmeasurable bullshit. And for reference, this exact candidate won in 2020 by 12. Same situation, maybe a slight drift, but pretty solidly in the noise.
Again, that doesn’t preclude the candidate and the district moving together. But the question isn’t whether it happened in this case, it’s whether it WOULD be effective to run further to the right in a district that had shifted right, which is unquestionable. That takes zero “lengths,” it’s just whether or not you think voters vote for representatives who agree with them on issues.
Notice how eager they are to interpret any win as evidence that they must move to the right.
When Beshear won in Kentucky, they didn’t move to the left because a progressive won.
Bingo
extrapolating from a single win in one district a year from the general election; what could go wrong?
Dems always learning the wrong lesson, big oof but not surprised.
Same thing Biden started doing in 2020
Not to say he was ever progressive or anything, hes just trying to sway nonTrump repubs
And Biden won too. Seems like the plan is a good one.
Solid strategy for sure, but im not a fan as a progressive. Glad hes prolly gonna beat trump tho.
Just because one asshole was shown to be a huge liar and damaged his party’s reputation doesn’t mean anyone else is gonna change their vote.
one asshole was shown to be a huge liar and damaged his party’s reputation sooooooo we’re… not…? talking about trump?
imagine believing that it was santos who damaged his party’s reputation
