What SHOULD Dems do?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It takes 3 votes to be rid of him and have a counter revolution. Nov. 2026. House vote (impeach), Senate vote (convict). It could be sooner if people can unite around the concept of rule of law. Then 2 votes. 1 house. 1 senate.

All this for...President Vance? No thank you.

Vance is the lesser of two evils. Congressional GOPers have no loyalty to Vance or mush.

[Anonymous]

They should pound sand. They lost. Badly.

They should advocate for policies that make our country safer, stronger, and less divided. They pretty much have done the opposite of all that for many years now.

They should have a real primary process that does not favor candidates who offer little more than a pulse.

This is the "find out" part of FAFO and it was largely self-inflicted. The architects of this outcome are people who will readily tell you that they are smarter than Trump by orders of magnitude. Lots of pride makes for a jarring fall.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Here it is Dems! The painful truth.

What Democrats should do is apologize.

The voters DO want servant leaders who care more about what THEY want than what WE believe.

The voters do NOT want know-it-alls, snobs, or leaders who resent voters for daring to choose the other party once in a while.

The customer is always right. We can either cling to our belief that WE are always right and the customers are wrong, or we can apologize for our past failures to give the customers what they want, apologize for disrespecting the customers, change our offerings, and try to earn back their business.

If we can’t even apologize, then they know we don’t intend to respect their wishes over our own beliefs going forward either.

Here is just a partial list of what swing voters and flyover state viters want us to apologize for:

1) Covid overreach. I know, I know, we f**king love science and the voters are stupid. It doesn’t matter. The voters reject our belief that we helped against Covid, and they are furious about forced masking of children, school closures, and forced injections on penalty of job loss. They were also very shaken by what they saw as our totalitarian streak. A lot of us were very cruel to neighbors and even family members. I know it will be very difficult psychologically for us to admit any fault here. We were on the right side of this, our intentions were good, etc. But so far basically none of us have said sorry to anyone for any of this. If we want swing voters back, we have to say sorry.

2) Illegal Immigration

3) Using affirmative action to harm white workers

4) LGBTQIA+ education in elementary schools. (I agree, it’s a good thing. It teaches kids tolerance. Rs make too big a deal of it. But remember, they are the customers. If we’re the “force unpopular things down your throat Party,” they won’t vote for us. We went too far (for THEIR liking), and for that, we should apologize

5) Inflation. Yes it was Covid, the Fed, and Trump’s fault too. But our team printed and borrowed and spent too much money.

6) Calling voters stupid racists

Think about it. We win’t like this prescription, but without it we can’t get the votes back

Democrats don't have a single damn thing to apologize whereas Republicans can never apologize enough for Jan. 6, and giving our country to a neo Hitler and Goering.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Substance. People want substance from their leaders. The packaging doesn't matter. Continue to try to shove neo-liberalism and corporatism down the throats of the electorate and it does not matter if your candidate is a white woman, a gay man, a black man, or what have you. It DOES NOT MATTER. It's the lack of substance that people are rejecting.

People are struggling to afford a basic standard of living. The GOP offers no solutions, but they do offer an outlet for their fear and anger. The Democrats only shot at countering fear and anger is with real substantive solutions. Raise the freaking minimum wage. Pass parental leave laws. Gut the for-profit medical industry. Address corruption and money in politics ON BOTH SIDES. Make owning a home a realistic dream for young people again. Make retirement a realistic dream for young people again. Make raising a family economically possible without a 6-figure salary again. Make it so every dang job can't require a masters degree while paying us poverty wages.

Stop arguing about what the candidate should look like and start talking about what people NEED and the solutions we can offer them to win their support.

The problem is that Trump’s challenge to the swamp forced Dems into a corner where we are now very pro-establishment. Democrats now believe and assert that the for-profit medical industry is not corrupt, and that anyone questioning it should be censored. Democrats can’t address corruption in government, they believe and assert that there is no corruption on the Democratic side, or even much wasteful spending at all. Democrats believe and assert that Biden’s economy was very strong, and that the affordability crisis is exaggerated by Trump voters. We came to these positions organically—we wanted to oppose Trump everywhere and always. But our pro-establishment stance is killing us in this climate of anti-establishment voters wanting change

These are very extreme interpretations of democrat beliefs. I don’t think any democrat believes there’s zero government waste, but they also do believe that the government isn’t a complete waste of resources and we should fund cancer, HIV, and epidemiological research, we shouldn’t delete whole departments because we think they aren’t 100% efficient, we shouldn’t fire thousands of Americans from their jobs either. Dems are some of the most critical of the healthcare industry around, but they also do believe in vaccines and medicine

This is just a convoluted way of admitting I’m right. These are very pro-establishment beliefs in the eyes of average voters, even if they feel wise and nuanced to you.

NP How is that "pro-establishment"? Serious question.

It’s pro-establishment to fight against audits and cost-cutting in government (while grudgingly admitting that okay maybe there is some waste) and it’s pro-establishment to promote for-profit corporate pharmaceutical products and insist that people should “believe” captured regulators (while grudgingly admitting that okay maybe the bloated health care industry is kind of corrupt). Defenders of corrupt systems don’t get to pat themselves on the back as reformers just because they admit the corruption as a side note).

NP...

Let's be clear on some things.

OIG, GAO, OMB, Congress, and other oversight agencies audited, rooted out corruption, and cut costs for years and nobody fought against it. Nobody defended corrupt systems.

DOGE is anti-establishment in that it isn't actually auditing anything or doing real cost cutting, it is just burning things to the ground. They are not finding corruption, they are fabricating bullshit reasons to destroy needed agencies and services.

. I wonder why the federal budget never declined by even one dollar after all those years of cost cutting by so many wonderful oversight agencies. I wonder how we got up to $7 Trillion in amnual federal spending.

Why do you suppose DOGE is acting so crazy? Could it be that rooting out stubborn waste requires drastic executive action instead of “processes” that have never ever reduced spending? Or do you really think that Trump and Musk are just sadists who want to “destroy needed services”? Pretend for a moment that they weren’t your political enemies, but your friends. Can you imagine any reasons for them to do this other than wanting to “destroy needed services”?

A huge chunk of our debt is because of Bush and Trump tax cuts. Those added TRILLIONS to the debt, far more than the government employees DOGE is attacking, far more than the paltry handful of contracts that DOGE has cut. FAR more.

I am all in favor of streamlining and modernizing government and making it more efficient. But that's not what DOGE is doing. It's breaking government and making it dysfunctional. Anyone close enough to government will tell you this. Even Republicans like Senator Curtis also said it, he said what DOGE is doing is "cold and dysfunctional."

The problem is that to streamline and modernize government, you need to take a step back and actually do a detailed analysis of the CFRs to find areas of overlap, areas of contradiction, policies and processes that are outdated and so on, along with any areas where the regs are out of whack with laws and court orders. You DON'T just take a machete and just start randomly swinging it, like DOGE is doing. And when identifying those problem areas of the CFRs, you will often actually need to go back to CONGRESS to have them revise the law, not just arbitrarily and capriciously make changes as DOGE when they don't have the authority to do so. Even the cuts aren't legal given the impoundment act.

They are not "friends" and they are not doing good work. Nobody who knows anything about government thinks so. Nobody.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I honestly don’t think there IS much to do.

Either the courts and/or Congress needs to stop the bleeding

I know Congress won’t, and the courts? We’ll see if there is any way for rulings to actually be enforceable

The 2 official ways to get rid of king Don-old are Impeachment or 25th. The current clowns won’t do it

Sadly, the bleak truth is our only actual way to stop this is war.

I wish there was another way. Truly.

Or we can use our vote during the next election.

I mean who do you think wins a war? Who do you think owns the half billion guns in this country?

Baby, there isn’t going to be another election.

Another cold hard truth.

Just stop. We’re done here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jon Stewart is ridiculing Dem leadership.
People want to dump Schumer for caving.
What would be an attack plan that makes sense?
I almost wish we had a parliamentary system right now, a dozen parties and coalitions forming and reforming.

Start by saying we will focus on US workers first , not corporations , not millionaires.

- mandate e-verify
- increase taxes on people making over 300,000
- repeal h1b
- eliminate opt
- fund to protect the southern border
- eliminate tariffs on friends. Increase them on enemies
- we will restore our commitments to Europe and Australia and east Asia


No help for hamas
No free sex change operations
No help for student loans
No reduction in salt tax for rich coastal elites
Get rid of pelosi and Schumer and completely replace DNC

No. Restore the SALT deduction and cut funds to red states. It’s about time we stop subsidizing their lavish lifestyles.

there you go. another Democrat clueless on why they lost.

just leave the f'cking party. we dont need people like you. you are the reason we lost and Roe was overturned. I want my daughter to have good health care and because of selfish urban elites like you we lost.

just go away.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I honestly don’t think there IS much to do.

Either the courts and/or Congress needs to stop the bleeding

I know Congress won’t, and the courts? We’ll see if there is any way for rulings to actually be enforceable

The 2 official ways to get rid of king Don-old are Impeachment or 25th. The current clowns won’t do it

Sadly, the bleak truth is our only actual way to stop this is war.

I wish there was another way. Truly.

There is one other option besides impeachment or war. Democracy. But to win that game, we’d have to drop our commitments to migrants and trans folks and stop calking the voters stupid. And that, my friends, we just can’t do. The one thing I will never say, no matter what, is that I was wrong about Trump ir that the voters were right to choose him. Hell no.

We doing have to drop our commitment to migrants, just illegal immigrants.

We didn't have to abandon the trans folks, just stop treating them like they are more important than anyone else because they have issues

And the voters didn't get to choose, there was barely a primary on either side.

The Democrats don’t seem to be able to drop their addiction to name-calling everyone who doesn’t agree with even their craziest, most far left takes.

Huh. The only name calling I see here is someone calling people crazy.

Good luck kicking your addiction!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When will the Dems find people to play the propaganda game as well as the GOP. We have to embrace the new reality. We have to reach them on their phones and appeal to their emotions.

It's not propaganda. Illegal immigration was bad. DEI was bad. The fart left has chased away the middle for lack of purity

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do any dcurbanmoms agree that Democrats should consider apologizing for a few things (like calling swing voters stupid racists) and trying to do a reset with swing voters? Or no? So far we’re running 100% against that idea. Does anyone think it could help? Or do we stick to our guns?

Neither. We should just change messaging and move on.

Change messaging to what? Change any policies, or no?

Obviously we need to back off from the modern rhetoric of DEI and go back to what won the civil rights struggle that all people are equal under the law. We need to stop splitting people up by identity and promote class unity. It’s so freaking obvious but I feel like I am screaming into the void while the black lady and white lady above snipe at eachother about their race. So stupid. With friends like these who needs enemies?

Republicans control that narrative, not dems. People aren't actually interested in class consciousness either, too socialist. When dems talk about taxing the rich, they're crazy, don't understand the economy, and are whackos who hate America and want it to be poor. When repubs talk about draining the middle class and democrat donors, they're draining the swamp, ridding corruption, and eliminating the waste.

Universal Basic Income has never been socialized by the Ds. Outside of Yang.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They should pound sand. They lost. Badly.

They should advocate for policies that make our country safer, stronger, and less divided. They pretty much have done the opposite of all that for many years now.

They should have a real primary process that does not favor candidates who offer little more than a pulse.

This is the "find out" part of FAFO and it was largely self-inflicted. The architects of this outcome are people who will readily tell you that they are smarter than Trump by orders of magnitude. Lots of pride makes for a jarring fall.

All of that describes MAGA perfectly. Our country is more dangerous, weaker, and more divided after two months of Trump and 30 years of Fox News. MAGA will indeed get to find out what it’s like to live in their dream christofascist paradise. People dying of measles in Texas, falling test scores in Florida, women bleeding out in hospital parking lots, cancer research halted, corporations being given the green light to add anything they want to our food. So much winning!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Here it is Dems! The painful truth.

What Democrats should do is apologize.

The voters DO want servant leaders who care more about what THEY want than what WE believe.

The voters do NOT want know-it-alls, snobs, or leaders who resent voters for daring to choose the other party once in a while.

The customer is always right. We can either cling to our belief that WE are always right and the customers are wrong, or we can apologize for our past failures to give the customers what they want, apologize for disrespecting the customers, change our offerings, and try to earn back their business.

If we can’t even apologize, then they know we don’t intend to respect their wishes over our own beliefs going forward either.

Here is just a partial list of what swing voters and flyover state viters want us to apologize for:

1) Covid overreach. I know, I know, we f**king love science and the voters are stupid. It doesn’t matter. The voters reject our belief that we helped against Covid, and they are furious about forced masking of children, school closures, and forced injections on penalty of job loss. They were also very shaken by what they saw as our totalitarian streak. A lot of us were very cruel to neighbors and even family members. I know it will be very difficult psychologically for us to admit any fault here. We were on the right side of this, our intentions were good, etc. But so far basically none of us have said sorry to anyone for any of this. If we want swing voters back, we have to say sorry.

2) Illegal Immigration

3) Using affirmative action to harm white workers

4) LGBTQIA+ education in elementary schools. (I agree, it’s a good thing. It teaches kids tolerance. Rs make too big a deal of it. But remember, they are the customers. If we’re the “force unpopular things down your throat Party,” they won’t vote for us. We went too far (for THEIR liking), and for that, we should apologize

5) Inflation. Yes it was Covid, the Fed, and Trump’s fault too. But our team printed and borrowed and spent too much money.

6) Calling voters stupid racists

Think about it. We win’t like this prescription, but without it we can’t get the votes back

Democrats don't have a single damn thing to apologize whereas Republicans can never apologize enough for Jan. 6, and giving our country to a neo Hitler and Goering.

+1,000,000

[Anonymous]

The problem the Democrats have is that most voters hate them now, but for different reasons. The far left and progressives hate them for not being far enough left, not recognizing economic issues, and not standing up to corporate interests. The moderates hate them for making stupid identity politics, open immigration, defund the police, and destroying education their apparently highest priorities. Both moderates and progressives unite to hate them for being utterly ineffectual at dealing with Trump.

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/21/democrats-house-senate-tea-party-trump

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Substance. People want substance from their leaders. The packaging doesn't matter. Continue to try to shove neo-liberalism and corporatism down the throats of the electorate and it does not matter if your candidate is a white woman, a gay man, a black man, or what have you. It DOES NOT MATTER. It's the lack of substance that people are rejecting.

People are struggling to afford a basic standard of living. The GOP offers no solutions, but they do offer an outlet for their fear and anger. The Democrats only shot at countering fear and anger is with real substantive solutions. Raise the freaking minimum wage. Pass parental leave laws. Gut the for-profit medical industry. Address corruption and money in politics ON BOTH SIDES. Make owning a home a realistic dream for young people again. Make retirement a realistic dream for young people again. Make raising a family economically possible without a 6-figure salary again. Make it so every dang job can't require a masters degree while paying us poverty wages.

Stop arguing about what the candidate should look like and start talking about what people NEED and the solutions we can offer them to win their support.

The problem is that Trump’s challenge to the swamp forced Dems into a corner where we are now very pro-establishment. Democrats now believe and assert that the for-profit medical industry is not corrupt, and that anyone questioning it should be censored. Democrats can’t address corruption in government, they believe and assert that there is no corruption on the Democratic side, or even much wasteful spending at all. Democrats believe and assert that Biden’s economy was very strong, and that the affordability crisis is exaggerated by Trump voters. We came to these positions organically—we wanted to oppose Trump everywhere and always. But our pro-establishment stance is killing us in this climate of anti-establishment voters wanting change

These are very extreme interpretations of democrat beliefs. I don’t think any democrat believes there’s zero government waste, but they also do believe that the government isn’t a complete waste of resources and we should fund cancer, HIV, and epidemiological research, we shouldn’t delete whole departments because we think they aren’t 100% efficient, we shouldn’t fire thousands of Americans from their jobs either. Dems are some of the most critical of the healthcare industry around, but they also do believe in vaccines and medicine

This is just a convoluted way of admitting I’m right. These are very pro-establishment beliefs in the eyes of average voters, even if they feel wise and nuanced to you.

NP How is that "pro-establishment"? Serious question.

It’s pro-establishment to fight against audits and cost-cutting in government (while grudgingly admitting that okay maybe there is some waste) and it’s pro-establishment to promote for-profit corporate pharmaceutical products and insist that people should “believe” captured regulators (while grudgingly admitting that okay maybe the bloated health care industry is kind of corrupt). Defenders of corrupt systems don’t get to pat themselves on the back as reformers just because they admit the corruption as a side note).

NP...

Let's be clear on some things.

OIG, GAO, OMB, Congress, and other oversight agencies audited, rooted out corruption, and cut costs for years and nobody fought against it. Nobody defended corrupt systems.

DOGE is anti-establishment in that it isn't actually auditing anything or doing real cost cutting, it is just burning things to the ground. They are not finding corruption, they are fabricating bullshit reasons to destroy needed agencies and services.

. I wonder why the federal budget never declined by even one dollar after all those years of cost cutting by so many wonderful oversight agencies. I wonder how we got up to $7 Trillion in amnual federal spending.

Why do you suppose DOGE is acting so crazy? Could it be that rooting out stubborn waste requires drastic executive action instead of “processes” that have never ever reduced spending? Or do you really think that Trump and Musk are just sadists who want to “destroy needed services”? Pretend for a moment that they weren’t your political enemies, but your friends. Can you imagine any reasons for them to do this other than wanting to “destroy needed services”?

A huge chunk of our debt is because of Bush and Trump tax cuts. Those added TRILLIONS to the debt, far more than the government employees DOGE is attacking, far more than the paltry handful of contracts that DOGE has cut. FAR more.

I am all in favor of streamlining and modernizing government and making it more efficient. But that's not what DOGE is doing. It's breaking government and making it dysfunctional. Anyone close enough to government will tell you this. Even Republicans like Senator Curtis also said it, he said what DOGE is doing is "cold and dysfunctional."

The problem is that to streamline and modernize government, you need to take a step back and actually do a detailed analysis of the CFRs to find areas of overlap, areas of contradiction, policies and processes that are outdated and so on, along with any areas where the regs are out of whack with laws and court orders. You DON'T just take a machete and just start randomly swinging it, like DOGE is doing. And when identifying those problem areas of the CFRs, you will often actually need to go back to CONGRESS to have them revise the law, not just arbitrarily and capriciously make changes as DOGE when they don't have the authority to do so. Even the cuts aren't legal given the impoundment act.

They are not "friends" and they are not doing good work. Nobody who knows anything about government thinks so. Nobody.

Its a legal slaughterhouse

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dems need to, as Ezra Klein put it, face why Trump won.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/democrats-need-to-face-why-trump-won/id1548604447?i=1000699618199

They need to stop their need for political purity and their resulting in-fighting. It's ridiculous to call for Schumer's resignation. It's the same as the GOP calling for judges to be impeached.

They need to refocus their message on the working class. The people barely surviving through a gig economy, with inflation and possibly stagflation coming their way. They need to look at whole systems to understand why there are housing shortages and not primarily focus on helping the most vulnerable. Don't stop helping them, but that can't be your main messaging. Your messaging has to be we are all in this together. Let's create opportunity for all, so that all can thrive.

You have to stop demonizing whole classes of people. Police, white men, Karens. Republicans themselves. It feels good. I get it. I feel it too. But you are alienating half the nation. We talk about being inclusive. Walk the walk. Include those you disagree with. Make genuine room for diversity of perspective too.

Didn't Ezra Klein argue Trump was going to back down rather than cause a constitutional crisis?

I think Klein is really good at writing click bait.

The Dems can't focus on the working class because they are beholden to their rich voters and haven't had support from the White working class for decades, now they are losing Latinos too.

And Asians. They're losing ground with Asians too. And the bigger problem is that they see things in terms of losing "asian votes" or "hispanic votes" where asian isn't a proxy for immigrant, educated, urban. Instead it's simply racial tribalism

The Asians need to be told they are BIPOCS, and therefore oppressed and deprived of unearned white privilege. Basically the Asians need to get back in their lane and shut up already.

[Anonymous]

We need more Kamala and more Tim Walz.

They are winsome and make people feel good about the future.