What a great weekend. I found out, from the Times and the Post, and here on the Kos, that the reason the Democratic Party didn’t do as well as the polls said they were going to, was the progressives.
Polls
I’m starting here because this is the base of a great deal of angst. How could the polls be so wrong? They weren’t. Whoops! Well, they weren’t universally wrong. See, some of them were right. You know which ones. The conservative polls. Yeah, those guys we were told were lying and biased, they were closer to the truth. Why would that be? Maybe they lied and got lucky? It is much more likely that what folks said to one set of pollsters was different than what folks said to another set of pollsters. But what gets left out of this whole conversation is, why did folks vote so widely for Trump, polls or no polls? If your answer is the progressives, really? This reminds me a lot of, “It was the Bernie fans who cost Hillary the election.” One million Sanders voters switched over and voted for Trump, eight and a half million Democrats did. While the Sanders story makes good reading, it misses out on a large narrative, what happened to move that many Democrats to vote for Trump?
Blaming progressives for the outcome in 2020 is of the same vein. It is a lot easier story to write than, “Why in the world would so many rational folks vote for Trump when given the option of voting for a nice guy like Biden?”
Speaking of polls, if you look at the poll numbers you will see that a majority of Americans support the issues that progressives like AOC, Sanders and Warren argue for. Note, the linked poll isn’t even that great of a poll, if you look at wider ranging ones you get huge support for some very progressive ideas. If you dig deeper, you will see that the Democratic base supports those issues at an amazingly high level and that even conservatives support them at rates above 50%. Hmmm, yet somehow it’s the progressives who are at fault. As for the voices here writing, those progressives need to get out because they aren’t in step with the party, if the party is defined by its base and what its base wants, it’s leadership who is out of step. You can throw in the MSM. Oh, I know, the Kos isn’t influenced by the MSM, but all of these ideas that it’s the fault of progressives appeared there before I saw them here and I can’t help but drawing some conclusions.
Progressive vs Centrist
In the last three presidential elections we’ve had one candidate run on a very progressive platform, Barack Obama, one run on a center right platform, Hillary Clinton, and one run on a center platform with influence from the left, Joe Biden. Actually, Biden’s platform during the primaries was, I’m a functioning adult. Who knew the Any Functioning Adult signs, were serious?
Barack Obama killed, no really. He got a real mandate, 60 Senate seats, the House and all he wanted to do. So what did he do? He bailed out the criminal banks with our money, gave them a get out of jail card, he continued the wars in the Middle East, and he gave us the ACA. Yes, he became a centrist overnight.
The selling of the ACA is a tragedy. It has two parts, a private insurance debacle, and an expansion of eligibility of Medicaid. The private insurance marketplace, combined with a law that forced everyone to buy in, was hugely unpopular. And the plans there were unpopular too. So much so that when Trump removed the law forcing compliance, the private plans immediately fell and are still falling.
The expansion of Medicaid, that socialist monstrosity, is popular as hell! It’s still growing. Gee, I wonder why the progressives are still pushing Medicare for all? Must be because they don’t get it?
The cost of Obama’s swing to the right? He got blindsided in 2010. Remember that year? It’s when the GOP took over the country and rewrote districts.
Clinton was the definition of a center right candidate. And she made her positions clear. We might have to curtail social security, and other wonderful right wing positions. No one was surprised by this. Bill was a DINO. Most of the policies he pursued and accomplished were right out of the GOP playbook. Go and look, I’m not posting the links yet again. The end result, she got hammered by a wack-a-noodle racist who was also sexist. If you think this is all about pigs supporting Trump, I remind you, a lot of those pigs voted for Obama. Something doesn’t quite fit, even if the story is convenient.
Then, 2018 happened and a whole slew of very progressive candidates ran, and they won, some in fairly conservative areas. How can that be? And while the GOP held their Senate seats, in a year when they should have won even more, it looked pretty bad. Somehow, the progressive message didn’t hurt us in 2018 and it seemed to help quite a bit.
That brings us to Joe, a nice guy if ever I met one. Joe, like Hillary, was the party chosen. He was so chosen that he didn’t even put together a platform for the primaries. And he was losing up until the party lit its hair on fire and get their mainstays in the media to do the same. When Warren went up, they went after her, and when Sanders went up, they went after him. No one in the party or the MSM ever went after Biden, ever. He was the nice guy.
Joe is a centrist, he always has been. And when Joe got the nomination, he did two things, he went and talked with Sanders, and he chose a semi-progressive running mate. Why? No really, why? If the numbers show you that being centrist is best, and that will give you the win over Trump, why embrace those positions in any way? The reason, because the numbers are as clear to them as they are to me. Obama won on a progressive platform and the base polls progressive, overwhelmingly. Biden may be old, but his managers aren’t stupid.
Now, after the election, the piss poor outcome, and it was piss poor, he should have won 40 states against a thug, they need a scapegoat. You can’t say, we nominated a lack-luster candidate. You can’t blame Harris, you’ll offend pretty much everyone and it’s a bad place to start, I know, it’s the progressives, the’ll buy that. No, it’s not.
In 2020, the four most progressive members of the house, the squad, all won their elections. Nicely. The DNC had gone after them. Pelosi took it to AOC personally, the MSM, and the party labeled one of them as an anti-semite. Yet they won. It gets better, a number of very progressive policies passed, some in conservative regions. That would be because both liberals and conservatives like those policies, duh.
So why did the party do so poorly? Well, they put forth a bunch of centrist conservative candidates in Southern states, and none of them won. They put forward a lackluster candidate who ran on the, I’m a polite, functioning adult, and you should vote for me, platform. So, it must be the progressives?
It never occurs to folks to consider the following. Biden might have lost. If he hadn’t met with Sanders and taken on Harris, Trump might have beat him. What does that say about how a large chunk of Americans view the way our government works? What does it say that a huge chunk of young folks look at the way the Democratic Party works and are deeply dissatisfied? What does it say that the one thing that always gets done in Washington is that the rich and powerful get what they want? Maybe the problem isn't the progressives, maybe something else is wrong?