What now for the Dems?

[Augustus]

What now for the Democrats? After loosing three (two badly) national elections in a row and demonstrating that they are having more and more difficultly fielding candidates in the south and midwestern parts of the country. Not just presidental candidates but the house and senate as well. The implications are that while a Clinton style leader might come along and carry parts of the south, the Dems have essenitally cconceded controll of the Congress to the Republicans.

Are the Dems really as Zell Miller says "a national party no more" due to their poor showing in the south and midwest?

If not is the answer to go harder left and further define the distictions between the parties? Similar to what Goldwater's loss did for the Republicans.

If so then what do the Dems need to do to become competive in the south and western states, without depending on massive economic downturns?

BTW lets not replay the election or bitch about the character of the voters in the discussion (e.g. OMFG!! Bush voters = fundies!!11! they are teh SUX!!!11!+!!1!). They are what they are and the Dems are going to have to get them onboard to become competitive again.

[Joe]

A Clinton-type personality will come back and rebuild the party.

[AdmiralKanos]

The only way to get the fundie idiots onboard is to field a fundie idiot candidate. Sadly, it's that simple. These people will always vote for the fundie if given a choice, and the Republicans will keep fielding fundies, so the fundie idiot demographic is nicely locked up unless the Democrats give up on this whole Thomas Jefferson "separation of church and state" 200-year experiment and run with the fundies.

[Augustus]

A Clinton-type personality will come back and rebuild the party.

Interesting. The modern Democratic Party has always been a union between the East Cost wing of the party (e.g. Kerry, Kennedy(s)), the dying husk of the Southern (e.g. Clinton) and the relitively new West Cost (e.g. Jerry Brown, Grey Davis, ect).

The old southern wing is dying off (e.g. Louisiana elected OURIGHT its first Republican US Senator since reconstruction), and is more and more marginazied for exactly the reasons Mike stated. The Eastern and Western wings of the party are extreemly uncomfortable with running a candidate with a social conservative stripe. Combine that with the results for the votes on gay marriage, and it looks like a likely near term Democratic candidate is going to find themselves exactly in the position that Dean was (e.g. "lets not talk about God, Guns, and Gays"). That is going to hammer them in the heartland and to some extent with the voters above 60.

The problem with a Clinton style rebuilding of the party is it doesnt stick. A southern figure like Clinton will emerge (and might win) but eventually the Eastern wing of the party will exhert controll again, as seen in this current go round. The East coast has too many powerful figures that occupy important spots in the Democratic party to take a sideline.

[MKSheppard]

The problem with a Clinton style rebuilding of the party is it doesnt stick. A southern figure like Clinton will emerge (and might win) but eventually the Eastern wing of the party will exhert controll again, as seen in this current go round. The East coast has too many powerful figures that occupy important spots in the Democratic party to take a sideline.

Southern Democrat Party?

Hey, Minnesota has the Democrat-Farm Labor party

[Augustus]

The problem with a Clinton style rebuilding of the party is it doesnt stick. A southern figure like Clinton will emerge (and might win) but eventually the Eastern wing of the party will exhert controll again, as seen in this current go round. The East coast has too many powerful figures that occupy important spots in the Democratic party to take a sideline.

Southern Democrat Party?

Hey, Minnesota has the Democrat-Farm Labor party

There are a 'few' Southern Democratic Govs, and some old timers that have what essintally are generational seats in Congress. Example - Robert Byrd who will hold his WV seat in the Senate until he turns to dust.

[Guardsman Bass]

What I thought was unusual is that Tom Daschle, the Senate Democrat majority leader, was from the deep south.

As for the Demos, unfortunately they are probably going to have to go more centrist, in order to keep liberal and middle class voters on the coasts.

[theski]

What I thought was unusual is that Tom Daschle, the Senate Democrat majority leader, was from the deep south.

As for the Demos, unfortunately they are probably going to have to go more centrist, in order to keep liberal and middle class voters on the coasts.

Daschle is from ....SOUTH DAKOTA

[Rogue 9]

And just what is unfortunate about centrism?

[LadyTevar]

There are a 'few' Southern Democratic Govs, and some old timers that have what essintally are generational seats in Congress. Example - Robert Byrd who will hold his WV seat in the Senate until he turns to dust.

There's some rumors that he'll stick around past that.

[Petrosjko]

Bill Richardson is one to watch out for, in the Democrats. I believe it's a misperception that they have to break the south... breaking a few western states from the Republican L could have changed things dramatically.

Richardson supported the New Mexico concealed carry law against the protests of the granola-eating Santa Fe crowd, and thus unlike Kerry he wouldn't have to engage in bullshit 'Lookie! I'm a hunter!' photo ops that actually turned off more gun rights voters than they engaged, from my observation.

If Kerry took Ohio and New Mexico, he would've won the election, Solid South or no. Richardson very well could as either presidential or veep candidate.

[Darth Wong]

And just what is unfortunate about centrism?

That's a good point; centrism is not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, simple-minded people prefer black and white thinking to shades of grey. When presented with shades of grey, they will say "pick a side! Black or white!"

And that mentality is precisely what the Bush campaign team brilliantly seized upon in this election campaign. They sure as hell aren't going to drop this tactic until it stops working, so it means that we will not see any successful centrist candidates in the near future. Get used to it, because the idiots that buy into that kind of black/white extremist thinking aren't going to go away.

[Col. Crackpot]

The only way to get the fundie idiots onboard is to field a fundie idiot candidate. Sadly, it's that simple. These people will always vote for the fundie if given a choice, and the Republicans will keep fielding fundies, so the fundie idiot demographic is nicely locked up unless the Democrats give up on this whole Thomas Jefferson "separation of church and state" 200-year experiment and run with the fundies.

I wholeheartedly endore this idea. Give the GOP back to the beancounters, neo-cons and capatalists! Let the Dem's have the jesus-freaks.

[Pablo Sanchez]

I wholeheartedly endore this idea. Give the GOP back to the beancounters, neo-cons and capatalists! Let the Dem's have the jesus-freaks.

The GOP can't win without the Jesus Freaks, which is why they courted them in the first place.

[Augustus]

I wholeheartedly endore this idea. Give the GOP back to the beancounters, neo-cons and capatalists! Let the Dem's have the jesus-freaks.

The GOP can't win without the Jesus Freaks, which is why they courted them in the first place.

You may be right, but it was'nt until 1988 that Christain Conservatives became a motivated voting block. They have always been part of the American electorate but broke between both Replublicans and Democrats. What changed was Pat Robertson making a end run for the Repub. nomination in '88 - that movtivated Christain Conservitives to begin to energetically organize. His challange scared many of the old Nixon/Regan era Republicans and they reacted by begining to adopt the new group specifically into the party.

[Darth Wong]

Sadly, that's why Pat Robertson doesn't run any more. He doesn't need to.

[HyperionX]

What Democrats need to do is stop letting Republicans define what they are and start grow a pair of brass ones. When you see an idiot in the controls, denounce him for just that. When you see massive hypocrisy, pork barrel spending, reckless policy, denounce Republicans for just that. Kerry was just too cordial in running his campaign, and didn't go negative until it was absolutely necessary. No more of that. Just attack attack attack and attack some more until the Republican opposition becomes a cartoon character stereotype of what they are, because right they really are just that kind of cartoon character. Only when the public sees the Republicans as simply wrong will they consider a Democrat at the helms.

[Perinquus]

The only way to get the fundie idiots onboard is to field a fundie idiot candidate. Sadly, it's that simple. These people will always vote for the fundie if given a choice, and the Republicans will keep fielding fundies, so the fundie idiot demographic is nicely locked up unless the Democrats give up on this whole Thomas Jefferson "separation of church and state" 200-year experiment and run with the fundies.

Who says the Democrats need to get the fundie idiots onboard? They have been quite capable of winning elections without that demographic, as 8 years of Clinton proved quite well. I really don't think the fundie idiots are that important. They are really not a majority or Americans, though it may sometimes seem that way. They can be a very active group though, and so like many noisy minorities, wield an influence out of proportion to their numbers.

The problem is that the democrats are kind of clueless when it comes to nominating presidential candidates. Over and over again since 1972 they have run candidates who are just too liberal. Let's leave aside for a moment any pejorative connotations the word may have acquired; whether or not liberal is a derogatory label is an argument for another thread. But I heard one commentator say politics in America is played between the thirty yard lines (at least presidential politics). Candidates who are seen as being too far toward either end - be it too far to the right, like Goldwater in '64, or two far to the left like McGovern in '72, or Dukakis in '88 - get buried in landslides. I think this is correct. Once again, the Democrats have run a very liberal candidate; he has been ranked as the senate's most liberal member - and remember, this was not by conservatives looking to demonize him; this was a liberal organization that so identified him. Like it or not, Kerry has the image of a very liberal politician. Now he was running against what is probably the most thoroughly disliked president since Lyndon Johnson (at the end of his second term, when disillusionment with Vietnam was high), or maybe even Herbert Hoover. Bush is hated by many Americans. I can't remember a president in my lifetime who had so many people so firmly set against him. And even with all this ill feeling about Bush, the very liberal candidate still couldn't beat him. If Kerry had been running against a Republican president who was not so hated (like Bush's father in '92), or a popular one, like Reagan, I'm convinced you would have seen another landslide GOP victory.

The problem is that the democrats do not seem to learn from history. Every time they run a very liberal candidate for president they lose. McGovern in '72, Mondale in '84, Dukakis in '88, Gore in '00 (perhaps the least liberal of the bunch), and now Kerry in '04. The only two Democratic presidents of the last three decades were the ones not seen as being very liberal. Carter was seen as a moderate, and as a Washington outsider (which made him look good in the aftermath of Watergate, and of Ford's pardon of Nixon). Clinton also ran as a moderate, "new Democrat". This pattern ought to be obvious to Democrats, but they just don't seem to get it. Instead, when they lose, rather than get back to the center - the course which has provided them with their only successes - they instead go further to the left. Hubert Humphrey was defeated by Nixon in 1968, and in 1972, the Democrats responded with a more liberal candidate than Humphrey was: McGovern. After Carter lost in 1980, they should have gotten another moderate; instead they ran the more liberal Mondale. And when he lost, they ran the still more liberal Dukakis. When Gore lost in 2000, they once again chose to run a more liberal candidate than his predecessor. And once again they lost.

This trend is not confined to presidential politics either. After the election of 2002, when the Republicans expanded control of the house, and regained the senate, the democrats chose to make one of their most liberal representatives - Nancy Pelosi - their minority leader. In fact, they voted overwhelmingly to do so. This led moderate Democrats, like Rep. Martin Frost and some others openly criticized this choice, fearing it would create a permanent minority party. Frost and others of like mind apparently have recognized that when the party presents too liberal a face to the public, swing voters flock to the GOP in response.

I think the key problem is that when the primaries come around, it is the more liberal candidates who really energize the Democratic base. I suppose this shouldn't come as a surprise; the extremists of both parties tend to be both louder and more active. I think this favors the liberal candidates over the moderates in the primaries, and thus, they end up getting the Democratic nomination.

But the Democrats really fucking need to wake up and smell the goddamn coffee. I say this as a conservative who usually votes Republican. If the Democrats really do marginalize themselves it will ultimately be bad for the country. No party should retain a hold on power too long. Complacency and arrogance can too easily set in. They can lose touch with their constituencies. And no party has a monopoly on good ideas. I am, as I said, conservative, so I tend to agree with Republicans on more iddies than I do Democrats. However, I am also an atheist. I do not want to see the right wing fundies gain too much power. I'd like to see the Democrats remain a viable alternative, and a reasonable balance to the GOP. I want to see Democratic candidates like Harry Truman again, or even JFK (socially somewhat liberal, but fiscally more conservative). They need to get their shit together and run better candidates than people like Kerry.

[RedImperator]

The next step for the Democrats will be to form a circular firing squad like they always do in times of crisis (see Ted Kennedy challening Jimmy Carter for the nomination in 1980 or the current feeding frenzy on DU).

[Col. Crackpot]

The next step for the Democrats will be to form a circular firing squad like they always do in times of crisis (see Ted Kennedy challening Jimmy Carter for the nomination in 1980 or the current feeding frenzy on DU).

dear god i wish i could see that! cursed user restrictions!

[HyperionX]

You guys talk too much of liberal vs conservative stuff. The problem with Democrats as they are stereotyped as "out-of-touch liberals," even though many liberal policies are widely supported like more health care, gun restrictions, raising the minimum wage. Let me say this just once, LIBERIALISM IS NOT THE PROBLEM. It's how it's packaged which is unappealing. Democrats need to repackage their message, so it will be more appealing to those who generally disagree with "liberalism". More importantly, as in this last election, people just didn't care for liberalism one way or the other at all, it was all about moral values. If Democrats need to counter this they need to utterly denounce Republicans as immoral assholes and corrupted politicians and are just hiding behind the veil of morality.

It seems to me that a lot of you guys are just conservatives who are just looking from outside the window inside and thinking that the whole world thinks like you and thus for Democrats to win they must think like you. This is BS. The developed world generally thinks more like Democrats that Republicans, so you can stop this preaching to your own beliefs. Go back to before McGovern and before Dukakis: Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were unabashed liberals and they ruled the political universe, so liberalism can clearly survive on its own. However, what is needed is to discredit conservativism before people will come to liberalism. Perhaps with the disaster of the next 4 years this may come easier than previously expected.

[theski]

The next step for the Democrats will be to form a circular firing squad like they always do in times of crisis (see Ted Kennedy challening Jimmy Carter for the nomination in 1980 or the current feeding frenzy on DU).

dear god i wish i could see that! cursed user restrictions!

HEHEHEHE that is why its good to be a mole.....

[Perinquus]

You guys talk too much of liberal vs conservative stuff. The problem with Democrats as they are stereotyped as "out-of-touch liberals," even though many liberal policies are widely supported like more health care, gun restrictions, raising the minimum wage. Let me say this just once, LIBERIALISM IS NOT THE PROBLEM. It's how it's packaged which is unappealing. Democrats need to repackage their message, so it will be more appealing to those who generally disagree with "liberalism". More importantly, as in this last election, people just didn't care for liberalism one way or the other at all, it was all about moral values. If Democrats need to counter this they need to utterly denounce Republicans as immoral assholes and corrupted politicians and are just hiding behind the veil of morality.

It seems to me that a lot of you guys are just conservatives who are just looking from outside the window inside and thinking that the whole world thinks like you and thus for Democrats to win they must think like you.

Then you are wrong. Go back and read my post again. If you had read it carefully, you would see this is what I don't want. I want an opposing party that thinks differently on some issues, because as I said, no party should hold onto power for too long, and no party has the market cornered on good ideas.

This is BS. The developed world generally thinks more like Democrats that Republicans, so you can stop this preaching to your own beliefs. Go back to before McGovern and before Dukakis: Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were unabashed liberals and they ruled the political universe, so liberalism can clearly survive on its own. However, what is needed is to discredit conservativism before people will come to liberalism. Perhaps with the disaster of the next 4 years this may come easier than previously expected.

The whole nation was more liberal in the 1930s. A politician as far to the left as Henry A. Wallace (Roosevelt's 2nd VP) couldn't get elected dog catcher these days. Truman was not that liberal, not by today's standards. Even Kennedy, as I said, was socially liberal, but was fiscally conservative - he lowered taxes, which is something no liberal candidate since him has even proposed doing. Johnson was quite liberal, true, but he had certain key advantages going for him: 1. he was successor to a charismatic, martyred president, and 2. he was running against a very uncharismatic GOP candidate who was also perceived as being rather extreme right wing (as I said, no successful candidate can go too far from the center; the margin of error seems greater toward the right than the left, but there's still a line, and Goldwater appeared to have gone past it).

Liberalism is the problem. It's not how it's packaged that's unappealing. Liberalism is unappealing, at least to a majority of voters. Oh, I don't mean any hint of liberalism, of course, but any candidate who is perceived as being too liberal drives the swing voters toward the Republicans. History bears this out.

The problem with liberalism, as it relates to the voters is that the liberal position on certain issues simply does not appeal to most Americans. It's not the way it's presented; it's the position itself. For example:

Religion - like it or not (and being an atheist, I kind of don't myself), religion is a powerful source of cultural identity in American society. Most Americans, even the ones who only go to church at Christmas, do not like perceived attacks on religion. Liberal opposition to the Ten Commandments, Nativity sets in public parks, the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, etc. tends to turn off most voters. As I said, I am an atheist, so I tend to have a different view of all this than most conservatives, but whether you like it or not, or whether I like it or not, this part of the liberal stance simply does not resonate with most voters, or if it does, it does so in a negative way.

Crime - Liberals are perceived as being soft on crime. One of the most potent ads in the Bush Sr. campaign against Michael Dukakis was the one about Willie Horton, and the weekend furlough on which he committed another murder. And it worked like gangbusters, because the majority of Americans thought: "why the hell would you let a convicted murderer out of prison on a weekend furlough?" The ACLU regularly champions the rights of accused criminals. Liberals frequently oppose things like 3 strikes laws and tougher penalties, capital punishment. The 3 strikes laws are a great example of what I mean. I remember reading all the hubbub about one case where a two-time felon stole a slice of pizza from a child. He was sent up for life under California's 3 strikes law. The outcry from the left was considerable. Life? For stealing a slice of pizza?!? That's out of all proportion to the crime!!! What they don't get is that it was not just for the slice of pizza, it was for a long and well documented pattern of criminal behavior that only led up to his stealing the slice of pizza. If you or I stole that piece of pizza, we'd get a slap on the wrist. For something so trivial, a first time offender might not even get charged, and even if he does, the penalty is light. What put this guy in the clink for life is the fact that he was an incorrigible repeat offender, so disdainful of the rights of others that he's willing to swipe a slice of pizza from a child, and so poor in his decision making skills that he even the threat of life in prison was not enough to dissuade him. He was an incorrigible reapeat offender, and sooner or later he was simply going to offend again. Given this fact, it's better he went to jail for somthing like this, rather than something where he'd killed or seriously hurt someone. Liberals often don't seem to get this, but this reasoning makes perfect sense to most people in this country.

Maybe some liberals think that society will have to be forced to deal with social injustice as a way to deal with crime, but whatever their motivation, liberals do have a not entirely unearned reputation as being soft on crime. Again, this does not appeal to most voters. The issue is not how this is packaged. I can't imagine how you'd package a lenient toward criminals approach so as to make it more appealing.

Big government - Liberals are seen, again not altogether undeservedly - as championing bigger government, more government regulation, and higher taxes. This is an area where most Americans are willing to accept a government large enough and powerful enough to fulfill certain roles, and are willing to pay taxes high enough to maintain such a government, but again, liberals are seen as favoring these things to a higher degree than most Americans are comfortable with.

These are just a few examples, but I could probably think of more if I tried. They are areas where the liberal position simply does not find support among a majority of Americans. It's not the packaging.

[HyperionX]

There you go again, doing exactly as I said you are doing. Soft on crime, big government, religion? These are nothing but stereotypes created by the Republicans and it is something you've totally fallen for. No one is "soft" on crime, or that there isn't religious liberals, or for bigger government for the sake of bigger government. That's the problem, these labels. Get rid of them and you'll see that most Americans are for bigger government when it comes to health care, military, and social security, and the rest is self evident. I'll say it again. Everyone is for liberalism, unless it's called liberialism. The rest is just Republican propaganda.

[Nova Andromeda]

What now for the Democrats?

--The answer is quite obvious. Despite the horrors of the last years (from the minority view point) the Democrats couldn't win and instead got massively owned. There is only one option left, become republican party mark II. They could simply resign themselves to being a minority party and keep representing the the northeast and west, but that can't be good for the northeast or the west or the people who live there.