If you’re a pro-Democratic person like me, and most likely you are since you’re reading Daily Kos, then your goal, like mine, is to increase the size of the blue slice on this chart:
Some Americans are so-called “yellow dog Democrats” — people who always vote Democratic. If those folks were in the majority, then we’d certainly win the White House and every other office.
But life’s not that simple. Those folks aren’t a majority. They are a small minority.
And so, obviously, in order to get Democrats elected, the Democratic Party and pro-Democratic folks like you and me need to be inviting toward folks who don’t always vote Democratic.
We need their votes. Indeed, we desperately need their votes.
We need the votes of leftists who sometimes vote Green (they’re in that small gray slice on the chart). We need the votes of independents who sometimes vote Republican (they’re in the big red slice on that chart). And we need the votes of people who sometimes don’t vote at all (they’re in that very big tan slice).
If you’re reading Daily Kos, there’s also a reasonably good chance you are a political junkie who has heard that Briahna Joy Gray, the national press secretary for the Sanders campaign, is among the majority of Americans who haven’t always voted Democratic. In particular, she voted for the Green presidential candidate in 2016. We know she did, because she said so back then in a tweet — because in the modern age of social networking, many people share — with anyone who cares to listen — their candidate preferences and their Star Trek preferences and sundry other things on their minds. Of course, not that many people really give a darn what’s on your mind, especially if you don’t happen to be famous. And at that time, Gray was hardly a well-known person, even among political junkies. Indeed, it wasn’t until she was hired on as Sanders’s press secretary, and her obscure tweet was discovered and resurrected from the depths of Internet memory, that the regular denizens of Daily Kos first became aware of her Green vote. As I noted in a diary after she was hired, Kossacks in the relatively recent past had tended to be quite congenial toward mentions of this rather obscure but talented leftist political writer named Briahna Joy Gray:
If you search the comment thread in that [rec-listed diary about an article penned by Gray] I wrote a year and a half ago, and the other one I wrote less than a year ago, you’ll find not a single mention of the fact that Gray voted in 2016 for Jill Stein.
So, how do you act toward a person when you find out that they don’t always vote Democratic? Well, because we desperately need everyone’s vote, I hope you act the way Kamala Harris does:
Contrast Sen. Harris’s approach with the counterproductive ways one might act toward folks who are currently standing with us on our side of the aisle. One might:
- Diss them because of how you know they voted in 2016
- Diss them because of how you imagine they might have voted in 2016
- Diss them because of how you imagine they might vote in 2020
It should go without saying that Sen. Harris’s approach makes more sense!
Yet, in the comment threads on Daily Kos — the premiere Democratic website — we see some folks repeatedly suggesting that Gray, the press secretary of a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination — should not have been hired because she voted Green in 2016.
We see some folks repeatedly dissing Nina Turner — a former Ohio Democratic state senator and currently a national co-chair of the Sanders campaign — because, since she’s an outspoken leftist Democrat, some folks imagine she might have voted Green in 2016. (Some folks go further than speculating and repeatedly claim that Turner endorsed the Green candidate or said she voted Green, even though it’s been repeatedly pointed out that there is no evidence of this.)
Now, how do you think people who sometimes vote Green and those who did vote Green in 2016 (they are in the gray area on that pie chart) would feel if our Democratic presidential candidates had a litmus test against hiring anyone who voted Green in 2016? Remember, our job is to try to increase the blue area on the chart. In order for that happen, we need to act in ways that encourage folks in the other areas of the chart to move into the blue area.
We also see some folks in the comment threads on Daily Kos stewing because they imagine that some leftists or independents who currently support Sanders won’t end up voting Democratic if he doesn’t win the nomination.
Well, yes, that would happen. There are some people who won’t end up voting, or won’t end up voting Democratic, unless their favorite candidate wins the nomination. That happens every cycle. That happened even way, way back in 2008 when we had no democratic socialists running for president.
We can stew about this, we can imagine that person X or person Y or person Z is going to defect, and so we can start dissing them right now, or we can put our imagination on the shelf. We can embrace folks, like Kamala Harris does.
Because we need their votes. We desperately need all the votes we can get.