OK. The election is over. Ossoff lost. Trump is gloating over the loss. And we’re standing here scratching our heads over why we can’t seem to win anything? What’s the problem?
First is a simple problem that we were running in a hard-red district. It wasn’t a guarantee no matter how you look at it. Second? We don’t have a deep bench. So we run people like musicians and investigative reporters instead of councilpeople and mayors and state reps and senators and governors and so on. Third? Third is the biggest problem of all. We have an image problem.
The Right reviles liberals across the board. We’re baby-murderers. We’re communists. We hate bald eagles and big trucks and guns and apple pie, so how can we POSSIBLE be anything but Communists come to take over America. They want Liberty Prime to rise up and smite us, because we’re _evil_ and crap like that.
But this accounts for what, 40% of the electorate? Why aren’t we winning 60 to 40 then? Simple. We haven’t given the other 60% a reason to vote for us.
How can we fix that? There’s a wide variety of answers here, almost as many answers as people on the site. Those ideas are all GOOD ideas, but when you have 47 different ideas being screamed at you from multiple directions? Well, here’s the quandary. It all starts sounding so pie in the sky and disjointed, and the power brokers can easily distract us from the real task. Our ‘presentation’ platform needs to be simple, direct, and shared across all Democrats, nation wide.
Fair Play
Everyone deserves a fair shake at life. This encompasses so much. Black rights. Hispanic rights. Gay rights. Muslim rights. Disabled rights. And it also covers an area many people feel abandoned on. Working stiff rights. Part of the reason we can’t get a working majority is because we have abandoned the concept of everyone getting a fair shake at life in favor of emphasizing a particular class of rights from the list above, and getting in massive arguments. With this? When a Native American complains that his group isn’t among the groups enumerated, we as a collective can say, “When we say fair play, we mean fair play for everyone. Welcome to the team.”
Universal Healthcare
Obamacare is broken. It was broken by obstinate behavior by the Right, and money-grubbing bastards on the left. It needs fixing, and we all know what that fixing is. Medicare for all. Single-Payer. We need to come out, and stand behind this notion 100%, with no hemming and hawing on the matter at all. Know that for every vote we turn off by standing up for Universal Healthcare, we’ll turn plenty more on.
Universal Education
In the same vein, we have the need to provide free college for all. This should be positioned as the way in which we’ll convert from the manufacturing based economy that has gone the way of the Chinese and the Robot, and start empowering people to have a shot at a different career. Universal Education, not financed under crushing student loan debt, would go a long way to resolving the twin crises of student loans and being out-performed by a robot.
Economic and Environmental Sustainability
I combine these two things in order to point out that they both must come together. The average joe wants to save the environment, but not at the expense of how he lives his life. But today, more than ever, he doesn’t have to! We should be pointing out that modern LED lighting makes far better light, with far less heat and waste, meaning that you get a lower electric bill for the same lighting as your old bulbs put out, and you save the planet a few extra tons of CO2 as well. We won the war on CFCs by pointing out that we could get our work done with far less impact on the environment with materials besides CFCs. We need to look at that campaign and see how it was done. You can’t expect people to give up the trappings of modern society, but perhaps you can convince them to do more with less.
We need to come up with basic campaign planks like the above and make them front and center of our discussion. When side-planks are mentioned, they need to refer back to our core ‘soundbyte’ planks. If you can’t, then your messaging is doomed to fail, and we’re going to have far more disappointments.