If Liberals are so smart why do they lose so goddam always?

[Admiral Yi]

Law and order is definitely a right wing policy in the US.

The problem is only crazy and stupid people vote Republican right now, and it's hard to figure out how to get crazy and stupid people to vote for you without being crazy and stupid yourself.

[Sheilbh]

Not sure I'd call law and order a right wing policy.
Hang the paedophiles sure (paedo is a word that gets my inner pedant riled up lately). But they also tend to be big on massive budget cuts to law enforcement.

I guess the key problem here is breaking through with anything more complex than 2 dimensional thinking - guy who says let's kill all the thievs will do better than someone with a plan to invest in policies to reduce crime happening in the first place.
This is a key reason conservatives, especially in their modern guise, tend to have an advantage over the left. Emotions and simple solutions to complex problems trump workable thought out plans to actually tackle problems.

You can't just pull out policies and poll them on their own. Because people aren't voting for policies they're voting for politicians or parties. Policies don't and shouldn't matter to any normal voter - they're an issue for wonks.

What matters is the strategy that is around the policies. Why are you arguing for those policies? How do they relate to other bits of your program/manifesto? And what's the purpose of all those together? In addition you also need to be credible, so people believe you will - or will at least try to - implement those policies. If you do the thinking on that it's not about emotion or complexity because you will know how to explain what you're trying to do in a sentence or two.

But if all you've got is a grab-bag of policies with nothing to cohere them, or you've no trust on delivery then it doesn't matter how popular policies are on their own - voters won't buy your program. And that's what politicians/parties are selling (as well as ability to deliver).

[frunk]

I disagreed with AR on that - my view was there was no better moment and it was essential to put something on the record urgently.

In retrospect I think he was probably right and I was wrong about it.

To me it's the same mistake they made with all of the other investigations.  They seem to be half-hearted and incomplete.  The investigation should have started right away, but let it run as long as necessary to collect the information.  The fact that they chose not to get testimony in the face of opposition during the first impeachment was ridiculous for something that important.  Take the time to get it right and make it stick, or make it even uglier for the Republicans to vote against it.

[Admiral Yi]

You can't just pull out policies and poll them on their own. Because people aren't voting for policies they're voting for politicians or parties. Policies don't and shouldn't matter to any normal voter - they're an issue for wonks.

Policies do and should matter.  If weed is legalized their lives change and they should and do care.  If stimulus checks are sent, same.  Increases or decreases in taxes, same.  Less or more cops on the street, same.  Drunk driving gets more strict, same.  So on and so forth.

[Josquius]

You can't just pull out policies and poll them on their own. Because people aren't voting for policies they're voting for politicians or parties. Policies don't and shouldn't matter to any normal voter - they're an issue for wonks.

Policies do and should matter.  If weed is legalized their lives change and they should and do care.  If stimulus checks are sent, same.  Increases or decreases in taxes, same.  Less or more cops on the street, same.  Drunk driving gets more strict, same.  So on and so forth.

Yes.
I'd say policies should be 100% the main thing that voting is for.
I don't care if someone has the personality of a slide of toast and is crap at making speeches. If they have good ideas and seem competent then that's who I want in charge.
But then politics by its very nature (being shit) does go the opposite way.
I think more democratic nations tend to have things a bit straighter here.

[Sheilbh]

Policies do and should matter.  If weed is legalized their lives change and they should and do care.  If stimulus checks are sent, same.  Increases or decreases in taxes, same.  Less or more cops on the street, same.  Drunk driving gets more strict, same.  So on and so forth.

Sure but that's having an opinion on an issue. People do have that - it might not be very strong. There's only a few issues where I think I have a clear view on something in a yes/no way. People probably have a sense of the direction they want society to go in.

Or it's an argument for politics existing. Those things matter and politicians work out policies - how do they deliver them, increase or decrease which taxes, more police on the street could be operational spend more on admin support so police are on the beat for more of their shift and less on fancy equipment. What are the priorities within those policies. They put that together as an agenda or a program and we vote based on whether that matches with our sense of direction or not.

It's why pulling apart an entire program into disaggregated individual issues, separate from who's promising them is a fool's errand that tells you nothing. Because it all matters and that's what voters base their vote on. In terms of the Democrats they're bad at that bit, which is the reason their "messaging" is an issue.

Although there will be a few single-issue voters, for sure.

Yes.
I'd say policies should be 100% the main thing that voting is for.
I don't care if someone has the personality of a slide of toast and is crap at making speeches. If they have good ideas and seem competent then that's who I want in charge.
But then politics by its very nature (being shit) does go the opposite way.
I think more democratic nations tend to have things a bit straighter here.

I totally disagree and find it strange for this view now - for me the biggest argument against say Trump or Johnson, or Corbyn or Melenchon for that matter, is who they are. It's their personality and their suitability for office that I think is the most important thing. It's a small c conservative thing but I think character matters - probably far more than their legislative program.

Even today I was listening to a podcast on the French election and they were discussing how "normal" Le Pen's policy documents were. There was nothing crazy or frightening the horses in them. But there is a profound difference between her and Macron it's in who they are, the agenda they represent and the direction they want their policies to take society. Just looking at policies in isolation won't tell you that which is why it's not what politics is about in a representative democracy - but could be in, say, Switzerland or California.

[Grey Fox]

Because they want to be right not win.

[Valmy]

Who said we were smart?

I think that is the part of the premise that we must question here 

That is not to say Liberals are not smart, but obviously not smart in the ways that win elections.

[Jacob]

My superficial take on the Democrats (the Liberals are doing pretty well up here in Canada):

1. The woke faction could do with being a little more forgiving of the shortcomings of the non-woke faction. If someone is only 80% of the way there, don't condemn them but work with them on the bit where there's overlap while continue to argue to push them the remaining 20%.

2. The non-woke faction ideally stops accepting the Fox News framing of woke issue. Stop throwing your allies under the bus and ceding ground on things like Critical Race Theory. Even if you're not ready to go to bat for them, at least do the work to stop accepting the Fox News take as accurate. Realize that they're trying to poison you and turn you against people you should work with and act accordingly.

3. Do some opp research and identify GOP wedge issues, then hit those hard.

4. Find one or more narratives about how to improve the lives of one or more sections of average Americans and push those hard. Make it aspirational and contrast it with the petty bigotry of the GOP.

5. 50+% of the GOPsphere is about grifting their followers. If you can amplify the story of how the GOP is exploiting and using its adherents in venues that they actually see that could peel some folks off.

6. Whine less.

7. Amplify the GOP's lack of decency, but in a way that doesn't focus purely on culture war targets.

[Valmy]

7. Amplify the GOP's lack of decency, but in a way that doesn't focus purely on culture war targets.

This angle did enable us to win a senate seat in Alabama for a short time. Anything is possible with the scum and villainy the Republicans run.

[The Minsky Moment]

I disagreed with AR on that - my view was there was no better moment and it was essential to put something on the record urgently.

In retrospect I think he was probably right and I was wrong about it.

In retrospect the impeachment did nothing to increase prices so seems irrelevant to the question.

[viper37]

You need a centrist face on progressive policies.

Research tends to show time and again if seperated from a context of being attached to a side, left wing policies tend to be very popular.

I don't think it's even about policies.  I can't form many coherent policies from the Republicans right now, except being anti-Dems.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Man, Berkut really loves posting about how the far left is destroying the Democratic party. This is bullshit and frankly stupid. Very few voters go into a polling place and say, "Man, I wanted cheaper health insurance, LGBT rights, respect for the rule of law, but man that AOC and that Bernie Sanders get way too much attention in the party, I better vote for a White Nationalist who supports qAnon theories."

That just isn't reality.

Very few people in the entire country are making choices like "do I vote for Hillary of Trump" or "Do I vote for Biden or Trump?" Instead a lot of people in '16 were thinking "ehh, do I go vote for Hillary who kinda sucks or do I just stay home?" And in 2020 a lot of people were saying "well Trump really sucked so I guess I'll go vote this time and vote for Biden." We don't have "straight" elections for anything really. Our House seats are gerrymandered in many States and even when not deliberately gerrymandered, because our politics now break heavily along urban vs rural lines, many districts just simply aren't meaningfully contested. Our Senate seats are contested statewide, but only a handful of States have a close enough split between the partisans for people who are persuadable to actually make a difference.

The electoral college incorporates many of the same problems with the Senate.

Like there isn't some playbook Schumer and Pelosi can pull out that wins them Mississippi or Wyoming's Senate seats. Likewise there isn't a meaningful playbook that McConnell and gang can put together that is going to make them competitive in New York or Massachusetts. Note that this trend is going in the way of being more like this--we used to be able to talk about your Democratic Senators spread around some random states like the Dakotas and a few Southern states, or your Repbulicans sneaking wins in New England, that's mostly done now and not likely to come back anytime soon.

To have any meaningful conversation you need to refine it to something beyond "why do they lose so goddam always", because obviously they don't. In fact since 1992 Democrats have almost always won a plurality of total votes cast nationwide in Presidential elections, and in most Senate and House elections. Ignoring that we have a system in which one side can very significantly get more votes, sometimes by a lot, and still lose, ignores a huge part of the problem.

Democrats win all the time--they've barely lost a meaningful election in California (a state with more people in it than Canada) in a decade. Ditto New York State (just not quite as big), they rarely lose across New England, New Jersey, Delaware, they've locked up New Mexico pretty solid. They win mayoral elections in just about every city in America with more than 150,000 residents, almost 100% of them.

By some metrics Democrats not only win, they win more than Republicans. But when it comes time to determine who wins the Electoral College, the United States Senate, and the House of Representatives, the votes of the Republican base simply count for more. All of those institutions are dominated in total number by more seats/States that massively overrepresent white conservatives as compared to their share of the national population.

So here's the real answer--they lose the races you're talking about because white conservatives are going to vote for a white conservative party, and because of how polarized the country is the Democrats cannot meaningfully field white conservative candidates or field white conservative messaging. Like there's no option to run a Joe Manchin in Alabama or Idaho--if Joe Manchin was 25 he would be a Republican, but because he's 75 and from a dynasty of West Virginia Democrats from back when being a Democrat meant supporting the United Mineworker's Union and hating blacks, Joe was stuck with the party that is now toxic in his state. There is no meaningful way to go back to that without imploding the Democratic party.

[Razgovory]

I disagreed with AR on that - my view was there was no better moment and it was essential to put something on the record urgently.

In retrospect I think he was probably right and I was wrong about it.

In retrospect the impeachment did nothing to increase prices so seems irrelevant to the question.

Biden should have simply arrested Trump and charged him with the appropriate crime when coming into office.  The problem wasn't that we went to far with impeachment it was that we didn't go far enough.  Instead of lawsuits and congressional subpoenas we should have warrants and raids.  We won't get a next time.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I cut that post off without getting to my final point to avoid it being over-long but also so it would stand alone as its own thought--the real question I think most people that ask Berkut's simplistic question actually care about is "why do Democrats seem to lose more than they should." They don't--they actually win probably a little more than they should in some respects, but most of their wins don't help them in the ways people care about because of the way our country is structured.

I would propose a better question is this: given that control of the country's Federal government is largely determined by about 6 to 8 states, what could Democrats do to more reliably win enough of those states to control the Federal government? The answer is a mixture of "I don't know" and they will still lose sometimes no matter what they do, so what the hell are we really talking about? I guess we're really talking about paring down "winnable losses", a winnable loss would be the 2016 Presidential, the 2020 Maine Senate election, several House elections in moderate districts in 2020, etc. Let's be real clear--I think some messaging and Strategy shifts could have meant that the Dems didn't lose House seats in 2020 and possibly ended up with maybe a 52 D Senate. I do not think there is any permutation of strategy, no matter when it was implemented (i.e. Day 1 of Biden's Presidency) that will protect the Dem House majority in 2022--likewise there was no winning strategy for the Dems in 2010, Republicans in 2018 or 2008 etc.

At least some of these elections expose a brutal reality of our system--because we have narrowed down the portion of our country that gets to make a meaningful decision, and because those States where that occurs are very polarized and close to a split electorate, the ~10-15% of voters that political scientists have found almost always vote against whomever is in power, have an outside influence. These are people who, for whatever reason, reliably go and vote and always vote opposite of their prior vote the election previous. There is no actual logic that could drive such people, and thus we can assume they are largely driven by emotional dislike for whoever is in charge. If we had more national elections these people would be less important because the weight of the country being somewhat more in line with the Democrats would likely overwhelm the GOP much moreso than happens now.

Note also that at no point since 2012 has the GOP in a poll of party favorability pulled higher than 37%, and its unfavorable has never dipped below 43%--and by the way that 43% was back in 2012, while it has seesawed since, it has trended ever-upward, its unfavorability hasn't dripped below 50% since 2013 (the closest it got was in January of 2017--Trump's first month in office.) If we judge a political party on how it persuades people one would have to question why is the GOP so disliked--and they became markedly and consistently more disliked 10 years ago and have never recovered? The fact that they are still so competitive in spite of that is primarily attributable to a system of elections that gifts their base with far more power than they would have in systems used in most other democratic countries.