Not that it particularly matters, although legitimacy is a real concern, but the chances that a Republican might win the popular vote just went down considerably as California’s Governor Jerry Brown signed several new laws into effect that will vastly reduce the number of eligible voters who are not registered. Currently, there about six million people who could be on the Golden State’s voter rolls but who are not. Most of them are young.
If they use the state’s DMV, they will now be registered unless they opt out. They’ll also find it easier to vote early or by mail.
It may not even take a week for the Breitbrats to put out a fraudulent video on the subject.
If this were adopted nationwide we wouldn’t have to suffer through the GOP “landslides” every midterm.
As stupid as the GOP is, the Dems have them beat in one area: they refuse to wrap their heads around the fact that low turnout is killing them.
Sadly, low turnout is probably more a feature than a bug to many elected Democrats, who seem to prefer being the other party of business over representing the huddled masses.
Even stupider is how the Democratic Party feels fit to blame the mysterious, all-powerful waves of emoprogs and Firebaggers rather than the moderates in the party for midterm drop-off — even though progressive partisans are the most hardy voters election-to-election.
But it’s a lot easier to bash imagined purity trolls for not stepping up to the plate rather than some 22 year old Latino college graduate who only voted in one election prior to this. A lot of people will think you’re funny and insightful as long as you punch down in this manner even if you continue to recycle the same two or three asinine jokes about appropriators or socialists or whatever the fuck for several years.
But realism!
But Supreme Court!
But Nader!
I keep joking about this idea, but the proportion of serious to joking is slowly rising, even though I can’t see it actually happening:
The Republican Party is no longer the party of conservatives. They are reactionaries, at least in terms of their leadership and their base. In terms of most Western democracies, they are roughly the political equivalent of far-right nationalists.
The Democratic Party has become the party of conservatives, at least at the leadership level, and some of their rank-and-file. If they embraced that and became the American Conservative Party or something like that, they might be able to capture the conservative-leaning voters who currently still vote Republican. The Dem leaders keep chasing those voters anyway, they might as well be blatant about it. Plus they’ll be better positioned to capture more of that lovely corporate backing they keep begging for.
That leaves the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, who could finally ally with Greens, Working Families Party people, and most the folks left-of-center who mostly don’t vote, because who the heck would they vote for and they’re bored with the Dem efforts to scare them into voting against. Call it the Working Democracy Party, or something like that.
It’s a silly pipe-dream, of course. Still, a boy can dream.
Economic centrists/conservatives, especially in a two-party system, will never form a majority party purely on their own merits. They’re parasites that need to attack to the back of more popular agenda in order to do their work, whether it’s on the back of social moderates (GOP before Reagan), social conservatives (GOP after Reagan), or social liberals (what they’re trying to do with the Democratic Party) in order to survive.
The Democratic Party would best be served short and long-term telling these boat anchors to fuck off as they attempt to climb off of the sinking Republican ship onto to the Democratic one. Even if the Democratic Party did formally split into two, the economic conservative faction wouldn’t last for very long — unless the Republican Party completely collapsed and they were able to pick up these confused voters. Whereupon the American Conservative Party ends up looking like the old Republican Party again or morphs into the Populist/Fascist Party.
Exactly.
Please tell me what the Democratic party stands for. In a few sentences. And you can’t say “not Republicans”.
That last part is the kicker, of course, because that is exactly how the Democratic party has defined itself in the last 3 decades. “Not Republicans”. Ask anyone what the GOP stands for and they can tell you – yes, it’s all lies compared to what they actually do, but it’s well known: less government, strong military, pro-business, lower taxes, less welfare, balanced budget (really had trouble writing that last one given that when given control they have had the biggest deficits ever).
The Democrats could be the party of Fairness and Future. Or something else catchy. But the placebo party that stands in for a missing party on the left stands for nothing. Nada.
So the reason they don’t get votes in the midterm is that they don’t give the midterm voters the reason to stop their lives, reduce their weekly take home pay, and stand in line at their precincts to vote.
And Martin/Boo has been guilty, too, of blaming a few left wing bloggers and commenters for the low turnout in 2010 because some of us were critical of Obama. Nope – people didn’t stay home because a few commenters read by no one who isn’t enveloped in political news bad-mouthed Obama. They stayed home because Obama – who let the economy stink to high heaven despite warnings from many within his own party – didn’t give those voters a reason to vote.
Yes you can. This is American politics. We have mass parties — each of which is already a coalition.
You don’t win with a Vanguard Party committed to an ideology. You get the Democratic party of 1860, and a civil war instead.
Today’s GOP looks like it is just that, but its success is despite, not because, of its vanguard-party orientation.
The thing is, the post-Obama Democratic Party is already more ideologically coherent than any other majority coalition since, what, when the Constitution was incorporated? This includes the New Left (which was ambivalent on gay and women’s rights and was more confused economically) and the New Deal Coalition (which had Northern liberals, Midwestern Populists, and Southern white supremacists).
What’s more, the Democratic Party can also enhance its internal people by humping the progressive issues even harder. It’s not like, again, the New Deal days in which the Democratic Party couldn’t risk pushing economic leftism harder than it already was doing without losing the Southern Congressmen. On all of the big-ticket issues for the Democratic Party (immigration, climate change, economic intervention, foreign intervention, law enforcement malfeasance, worker’s rights, health care redistribution) there aren’t regional fractures. Or ideological ones for that matter. Even the establishment Dems don’t disagree with the notion that we need to move to the left on financial regulation and education, as we can see from Hillary Clinton’s platform changes, they disagree with the feasibility and wring their hands over the blowback that has nothing to do with the policy per se.
The coalition is far from its breaking point. I’m sure eventually the Democratic Party in its current form will have internal divisions that will have it revert to a more traditional coalition of interests. The Democratic Party will eventually have to make hard choices about genetic modification, strong AI, workforce demobilization, and if climate change goes south immigration. But the party is a few electoral cycles off from that point.
I don’t really agree with you about where the Dem party is, but I will give you a thumb’s up for at least mentioning issues like genetic modification. Far too many are acting like the only real issues are the ones we’ve been fighting over since the 19th century (if economic) or late 20th century (if social). It’s hard to get anyone to take these technology-driven issues seriously because the old left-right paradigms do not provide an adequate answer.
I’m not so sure — this is a hurdle, and I’m glad it’s being taken down in California, but actually getting people to vote is another one.
Unless we had a mandatory vote (a la Australia) or at the very least, a mail-in ballot like Oregon and Washington, you’ll still see low turnout midterms.
We could do with a few less people running around saying, ‘All politics is a shuck; truly intelligent people already see right through it; no one I know votes, they know it’s a scam; don’t vote, it just encourages them.”
This doesn’t necessarily fix midterm drubbings very much, even if adopted nationwide.
Too many Democrats are enamored by the White House and think the rest of Congress is pointless. The son of a bitch is that as Democrats have continued to stay home on non-Presidential elections, even if a Democrat is in office, they have to end up using executive orders to get shit done.
It’s basically a positive feedback loop of electoral negligence. And yes, I will blame the people who don’t vote, because a democratic republic requires interested, educated voters.
Remember, don’t vote. It just encourages them.
Only abstention prevents complicity.
And you’ll look good not doing it.
This is exactly the kind of crap I was talking about, DXM. You have a bunch of snark and hippie-punching but your sarcasm isn’t even pointed at the right problem.
WRT this subject, your snide attacks on voters and will never rise above more-pragmatic-than-thou self-satisfaction. The Democratic drop-off voters from Presidential to midterm elections aren’t driven by frustration or cognitive dissonance; they’re driven by apathy. Unlike your emoprog strawmen, you can’t shame these voters by reverse psychology into voting because their motives are different.
I don’t care about shaming people who don’t vote, but shaming isn’t the same thing as blaming.
The problem is that far too few people give a shit because they’re either naive and bought the propaganda that tells them BothSidesDoItTM, or literally just don’t give a shit.
I guess my lack of empathy for non-regular voters’ apathy stems from me giving a shit and voting in every possible election since I was 18, being an election judge in my 20s (the youngest in a county of 800,000 people) and simply paying more attention to the world around me than spending time on facebook looking at irrelevant pictures of food, or crushing candy on my phone.
I get it that a whole segment of the population doesn’t see the point in voting because it doesn’t immediately affect them in any particular good way, but Democratic voter apathy is, in my opinion, part and parcel of why the American Reactionary party is able to continue winning enough seats to fuck this country over.
So, you can excuse Democratic voter apathy, but for those of us paying attention, you should also excuse our disgust with people who are making the affirmative choice to sit back and do nothing while this country goes up in flames.
No, they aren’t entirely to blame, but they sure as shit aren’t a part of the solution either.
California has historically been the first adopter of many policies that then spread to numerous other states (like the 1975 bill legalizing homosexuality in the state, signed by the very same Governor Brown). Let’s hope this proves to be such a policy.
Freaking awesome Moonbeam is God in my book. He actually explained to the voters that more taxes will close the deficit. Then got them to vote for a tax increase overcoming 35 years of propaganda. Now he makes voting easier for millions of people. Wow! I bet his maid isn’t pregnant either! If he has a maid.
By the time I got to the end of the post, I understood what you were saying, and of course there’s the link; but I have to say, I found the phrase
“vastly reduce the number of eligible voters who are not registered”
impenetrable.
yeah I had to read that sentence a few times too
Some things are simple. The GOP wants to limit voting to the “right” people – double entendre intended. The Democrats want to let everyone vote. The GOP wants vote recording and counting machines to be functioning optimally in the “right” precincts. The Democrats want them to be functioning optimally everywhere.
One of the attributes of fascist ideology is the lack of believe in democracy – only the “right” people’s votes should be counted. For elections that have too many of the “wrong” votes it is perfectly valid – per fascist ideology – to void the election through government overthrow.
One good thing Thom Hartmann does on his radio show is to play that 1980 Paul Weyrich excerpt where the ALEC co-founder talks about how the GOP wins when voter turnout is low.
Dems have long needed a more organized, forceful response to GOP attempts nationwide at voter suppression. What we’ve offered so far, by my reckoning, is the usual soft-voiced “disappointment” type of polite disagreement with Repub tactics, the kind which barely registers on the radar with voters. It should be a top issue in this campaign for our side, but isn’t. I think Sanders occasionally mentions it, but apart from him …
Meanwhile, the GOP has made enough inroads in enough key states with voter ID requirements to make this next election again cause for concern.
Also in need of reform: our EC system. Still need a few more states, totaling at least another 100 EVs, to get that nationwide interstate compact to kick in.
Thanks for mentioning the Weyrich clip. This can’t be shown enough:
Sanders is not the only POTUS candidate attacking the GOP’s assault on voting rights:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/05/politics/gop-responds-clinton-voting-rights/
http://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clintons-bold-plan-voting-rights/
Excellent find re Hillary’s proposals, buried beneath the garbage of emails and Benghazi.
This could put some of the heretofore “safe” CA red districts in play.
Would be sweet to wave bye-bye to Kevin McCarthy, Issa, Calvert, Rorhabacher, Hunter, and all the recently elected GOP reps.