Yes!!! Thank you for this thorough debunking of the centrist bs that just keeps losing. In 2016 my very red state had an huge amount of people of all ages but especially young people very excited about Sanders. Guess what? They either voted for you know who or sat it out. Centrism is dead, we have got to move on for the very survival of this country and its people. Keep preaching!
I didn’t vote for him myself. I guess the point that I didn’t state is that a more populist message of things like addressing corruption, taking power out of the hands of the super wealthy, taking care of the people with healthcare and education is probably a good idea and definitely will be popular with the younger people that need to get energized and involved. It doesn’t have to be a “Democratic Socialist” message. Seems pretty mainstream to me to do what we expect government to do.
Young people don't vote, every political campaign centered on young people magically getting out to vote has failed miserably. I wish it wasn't so, but it is. No candidate has meaningfully moved the needle. You have to convince the typical voter, which is a white, non-college dude living in the suburbs.
That’s true, it’s broken my heart for years. But the simple points I outlined appeal to everyone except selfish wealthy people. I’m just an average, middle of the country, middle of everything, voter and that’s all I want. But at the rate the current regime is radically changing the systems, what I think is necessary will also be a very substantial and radical change. We will have to decide what kind of society we want when the fascism finally falls - as it always does.
“The author condemns Democrats for being “too judgmental” and “too focused on cultural focus.” But that doesn’t come from the left. It comes from the center who use the over-the-top, annoying elevation of specific identities to appear like progressives without adopting their economic platforms, which irks corporate donors and threatens the centrist establishment.” Utterly correct! Dead-on accurate. Terrific analysis, Joe.
Fun fact: Everyone knows that whenever the NYT "Editorial Board" publishes an article, it is almost always written by David Leonhardt. In fact, he actually confirmed that he personally wrote this one - implicitly - when he got into a Twitter fight defending it a couple days ago. He's also the same one who said Mamdani would annihilate the Democratic Party and said Bernie Sanders was a threat to the Constitution. Just to understand the full context of the person we're talking about who wrote this piece.
New voter activation is precisely how Insane Clown won in 2016. After re-electing a black president in 2012 Republicans famously vowed to stop being The Stupid Party. They quickly reconsidered and decided to become even stupider in search of The Missing White Voter. Insane Clown brought that strategy to fruition beyond their wildest dreams, defeating 16 other Republicans by proving that he was better at being them than they were.
Kamala's campaign was not center left or right. It was like Seinfeld about nothing. We're Not Goin' Back! When We Fight We Win! What We Stand For Is What We Fight For! Aside from abortion Kamala stood for nothing and fought for nothing. Meanwhile Insane Clown was making a mockery of Kamala at every turn (and she was making a mockery of herself with her laughable attempt to portray herself as a gun enthusiast) and she wouldn't put the pom poms down for a minute and throw a punch.
Make no mistake Biden was asleep as far as the border and that became painfully obvious when DeSatan and Abbortion started shipping immigrants to blue cities and Democratic mayors and governors started bitching and we all looked like a bunch of idiots. Make no mistake Defund The Police is and always will be our albatross. Make no mistake there is no middle on forces of nature, climate crisis and pandemics. There is no middle on voting rights, Citizens United, Presidential Immunity, income inequality, book banning, theocracy, sanitizing of slavery, DEI, Ukraine, or the 2020 election being stolen from Insane Clown. The Way To Win is to take a position that is correct and stand behind it even if polls say otherwise, climate crisis and LGBTQ rights being prime examples. That is leading. The Way To Lose is what this article and countless others like it suggest, to be slaves to and paralyzed by polls. That is not following and not leading and is precisely why we lost in 2024. Make no mistake Move To The Middle is a euphemism for Shut Up And Do Nothing.
Hi, Joe. The other day, I got an invite from Harper's Magazine to attend a gala event at which the first annual James C. Goodale First Amendment Award would be presented to "A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, in recognition of his leadership in defending the freedom of the press and championing the truth in an era of misinformation and polarization."
I have some thoughts on whether "polarization" is as bad as misinformation, either as a general principle or particularly given the Times's institutional view, as you highlight, of where the poles are.
Further down, the invitation notes that "[t]his historic evening would not be possible without the extraordinary generosity of our early sponsors." Prominent among those ten sponsors: The New York Times Company.
(Also among the sponsors: the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, best known most recently for buckling to threats from Trump and agreeing to do $40 million in pro bono work for his administration.)
Sorkin is best described through analogy to the Newsroom. He is the exact media figure the show railed against. He basically wrote Will’s on-air apology by describing his own behavior and saying it is bad
Joe - Lakshya Jain wrote an article called "How our surveys work" in The Argument last month. Believe it or not, their survey methodology includes weighting the poll sample to 45% 2024 Trump voters and 43% 2024 Harris voters! I explained to Lakshya yesterday that is totally wacky and makes no sense, because it's skewing the poll to a sentiment from a year ago that no longer exists, and also ~3% of the electorate has died and/or turned 18 since November 2024.
His response: "It's not wacky for a national poll of registered voters." Basically "trust me bro"!
Obama did not govern as a "moderate". A wolf in sheep's clothing, he governed as a corporatist who espoused a radical utopian economic ideology--neoliberalism--that created, by design, egregious levels of wealth inequality.
Still, with this shit. Collect your thoughts and put them into a single comment box, bro. Nobody is gonna read your scatterbrained bullshit, like this.
Maybe you are angry because you spend your life quibbling over The Argument's polling methodologies. lol.
(Hint: please go talk to a normal American in Pennsylvania and you'll see how deeply, deeply unpopular far-left politics is. But you won't because you like your bubble)
My god this reads like a parody. You need to spend 5 minutes looking at the reps who won in Trump districts. What do they have in common? They are moderates. Literally every leftist rep in a safe district underperformed.
Sanders lost, get over it. Just because a small group of young people voted for him, he still lost.
Yes!!! Thank you for this thorough debunking of the centrist bs that just keeps losing. In 2016 my very red state had an huge amount of people of all ages but especially young people very excited about Sanders. Guess what? They either voted for you know who or sat it out. Centrism is dead, we have got to move on for the very survival of this country and its people. Keep preaching!
Last time I checked Bernie lost.
What left-wing socialist candidate has won statewide office? I'll wait.
Bernie Sanders won a statewide election in 2024.
I didn’t vote for him myself. I guess the point that I didn’t state is that a more populist message of things like addressing corruption, taking power out of the hands of the super wealthy, taking care of the people with healthcare and education is probably a good idea and definitely will be popular with the younger people that need to get energized and involved. It doesn’t have to be a “Democratic Socialist” message. Seems pretty mainstream to me to do what we expect government to do.
Young people don't vote, every political campaign centered on young people magically getting out to vote has failed miserably. I wish it wasn't so, but it is. No candidate has meaningfully moved the needle. You have to convince the typical voter, which is a white, non-college dude living in the suburbs.
That’s true, it’s broken my heart for years. But the simple points I outlined appeal to everyone except selfish wealthy people. I’m just an average, middle of the country, middle of everything, voter and that’s all I want. But at the rate the current regime is radically changing the systems, what I think is necessary will also be a very substantial and radical change. We will have to decide what kind of society we want when the fascism finally falls - as it always does.
“The author condemns Democrats for being “too judgmental” and “too focused on cultural focus.” But that doesn’t come from the left. It comes from the center who use the over-the-top, annoying elevation of specific identities to appear like progressives without adopting their economic platforms, which irks corporate donors and threatens the centrist establishment.” Utterly correct! Dead-on accurate. Terrific analysis, Joe.
Fun fact: Everyone knows that whenever the NYT "Editorial Board" publishes an article, it is almost always written by David Leonhardt. In fact, he actually confirmed that he personally wrote this one - implicitly - when he got into a Twitter fight defending it a couple days ago. He's also the same one who said Mamdani would annihilate the Democratic Party and said Bernie Sanders was a threat to the Constitution. Just to understand the full context of the person we're talking about who wrote this piece.
New voter activation is precisely how Insane Clown won in 2016. After re-electing a black president in 2012 Republicans famously vowed to stop being The Stupid Party. They quickly reconsidered and decided to become even stupider in search of The Missing White Voter. Insane Clown brought that strategy to fruition beyond their wildest dreams, defeating 16 other Republicans by proving that he was better at being them than they were.
Kamala's campaign was not center left or right. It was like Seinfeld about nothing. We're Not Goin' Back! When We Fight We Win! What We Stand For Is What We Fight For! Aside from abortion Kamala stood for nothing and fought for nothing. Meanwhile Insane Clown was making a mockery of Kamala at every turn (and she was making a mockery of herself with her laughable attempt to portray herself as a gun enthusiast) and she wouldn't put the pom poms down for a minute and throw a punch.
Make no mistake Biden was asleep as far as the border and that became painfully obvious when DeSatan and Abbortion started shipping immigrants to blue cities and Democratic mayors and governors started bitching and we all looked like a bunch of idiots. Make no mistake Defund The Police is and always will be our albatross. Make no mistake there is no middle on forces of nature, climate crisis and pandemics. There is no middle on voting rights, Citizens United, Presidential Immunity, income inequality, book banning, theocracy, sanitizing of slavery, DEI, Ukraine, or the 2020 election being stolen from Insane Clown. The Way To Win is to take a position that is correct and stand behind it even if polls say otherwise, climate crisis and LGBTQ rights being prime examples. That is leading. The Way To Lose is what this article and countless others like it suggest, to be slaves to and paralyzed by polls. That is not following and not leading and is precisely why we lost in 2024. Make no mistake Move To The Middle is a euphemism for Shut Up And Do Nothing.
Hi, Joe. The other day, I got an invite from Harper's Magazine to attend a gala event at which the first annual James C. Goodale First Amendment Award would be presented to "A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, in recognition of his leadership in defending the freedom of the press and championing the truth in an era of misinformation and polarization."
I have some thoughts on whether "polarization" is as bad as misinformation, either as a general principle or particularly given the Times's institutional view, as you highlight, of where the poles are.
Further down, the invitation notes that "[t]his historic evening would not be possible without the extraordinary generosity of our early sponsors." Prominent among those ten sponsors: The New York Times Company.
(Also among the sponsors: the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, best known most recently for buckling to threats from Trump and agreeing to do $40 million in pro bono work for his administration.)
Sorkin is best described through analogy to the Newsroom. He is the exact media figure the show railed against. He basically wrote Will’s on-air apology by describing his own behavior and saying it is bad
Joe - Lakshya Jain wrote an article called "How our surveys work" in The Argument last month. Believe it or not, their survey methodology includes weighting the poll sample to 45% 2024 Trump voters and 43% 2024 Harris voters! I explained to Lakshya yesterday that is totally wacky and makes no sense, because it's skewing the poll to a sentiment from a year ago that no longer exists, and also ~3% of the electorate has died and/or turned 18 since November 2024.
His response: "It's not wacky for a national poll of registered voters." Basically "trust me bro"!
The article explaining The Argument's methodology (miraculously, not paywalled) is linked in my exchange with Lakshya, here: https://substack.com/@arancor/note/c-169742565
Liberals keep losing because Americans hate hippies worse than Nazis.
Obama did not govern as a "moderate". A wolf in sheep's clothing, he governed as a corporatist who espoused a radical utopian economic ideology--neoliberalism--that created, by design, egregious levels of wealth inequality.
Things Joe cannot offer a leftist solution to: winning the senate. And how any "progressive" plan is useless without doing that.
And guess what kiddo! You need moderates to win senate seats, not socialists.
Except for when moderate Biden beat Trump. And non socialist Obama beat Romney. And when moderate Joe Manchin won in WEST VIRGINIA.
So dumb I cannot even begin to process it.
Yes, Matt. We know you're so dumb you cannot even begin to process this article.
You left *3* separate comments in response to it, instead of putting all your feedback in one.
Learn to fucking post, bro. Christ.
Rancor please leave the dem party so we can go back to winning, please.
avoiding the topic at hand, I like it. Typical.
Still, with this shit. Collect your thoughts and put them into a single comment box, bro. Nobody is gonna read your scatterbrained bullshit, like this.
And yet you still do :)
Please tell me how many socialists have won governorships? I'll wait.
Please tell me why you're this level of insufferable fucking loser
Maybe you are angry because you spend your life quibbling over The Argument's polling methodologies. lol.
(Hint: please go talk to a normal American in Pennsylvania and you'll see how deeply, deeply unpopular far-left politics is. But you won't because you like your bubble)
Still waiting for that mysterious example of some leftist winning a major election. You seem quite angry, perhaps that's because you can't do it.
I wonder why.
Real quick, who won the 2016 Democratic presidential primary in West Virginia in a landslide?
Sorry, do you think a primary means they win the general election? You are bragging about a ... primary?
lol.
My god this reads like a parody. You need to spend 5 minutes looking at the reps who won in Trump districts. What do they have in common? They are moderates. Literally every leftist rep in a safe district underperformed.
Sanders lost, get over it. Just because a small group of young people voted for him, he still lost.