'There is hard data that shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate'

[iamthebandfanman]

"The Republican Party has earned a reputation as the anti-science, anti-fact party — understandably, perhaps, given the GOP's policy of ignoring the evidence for global climate change and insisting on the efficacy of supply-side economics, despite all the research to the contrary. Yet ironically, it is now the Democratic Party that is wantonly ignoring mounds of social science data that suggests that promoting centrist candidates is a bad, losing strategy when it comes to winning elections. As the Democratic establishment and its pundit class starts to line up behind the centrist nominees for president — mainly, Joe Biden, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris — the party's head-in-the-sand attitude is especially troubling."

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/02/there-is-hard-data-that-shows-that-a-centrist-democrat-would-be-a-losing-candidate/

[Downtown Hound]

1. Yawn.

[George II]

2. The primary basis behind Pitetty's "basic thesis" is flawed:

Piketty's basic thesis is that poorer and less educated voters were historically the kind of voters who voted for left and left-liberal parties. These voters understood that their class interests did not align with the right-wing parties of the rich; thus, historically, the "high-income, high education" voters picked the right-wing parties.

The base of the republican party and conservatives are poorer and less educated voters. The base of the Democratic Party and liberals is middle-class well educated voters.

[lapucelle]

6. The Salon writer links to his own earlier exegesis on this topic.

Take a look at it, and you'll know everything you need to know about him.

[lapucelle]

3. "Economist Thomas Piketty wrote a paper about this in 2018, though the Democrats paid no attention."

Good thing "Democrats didn't pay attention". We won big in 2018.

[JI7]

4. there aren't really any centrists running

Biden is mainstream if the democratic party.

centrists are people like evan Bayh and ben Nelson.

[Tarheel_Dem]

5. Already posted. Did you bother to look?

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1287&pid=138364

[left-of-center2012]

10. "Did you bother to look?"

Some of us didn't see it the first time and I'm glad it was reposted.

[Tarheel_Dem]

14. Well, I guess you told me.

[Uncle Joe]

7. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread iamthebandfanman.

[iamthebandfanman]

18. Come again ?

President Obama what ?

[left-of-center2012]

9. Thanks for posting

Ignore the criticism.

[colsohlibgal]

11. Could Be

I think the thought of pulling in more white older than Millennial men is almost wishful thinking....I think we will be stronger appealing to People of color, Millennials, and women in general.

I also think this: I just heard Hickenlooper say what I heard Biden say....that they could get McConnell and the republicans to work with them, to compromise to get things done. That seems highly, highly unlikely, this isn’t the 80s anymore.

I think we need to tack left, not toward the center. The Millennials skew quite liberal. Plus maybe after all these men maybe it is time for a woman.....Warren or Harris would win IMHO

[Gothmog]

12. Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder?

Most economists are ignoring the work that this article is based on http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-why-are-economists-giving-piketty-cold-shoulder

But despite Piketty’s resonance with public experience and apparent applicability to the economic environment of global finance, his book was mostly greeted with hostility by the academic economics profession. There was a sense among academic economists that the book was a hostile action from within, and aside from Nobel Prize–winners Robert Solow and Paul Krugman, who both published reasonably favorable reviews in the highbrow popular press, the reaction was, in general, quite harsh.

In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson wrote, “If the history of grand pronouncements of the general laws of capitalism repeats itself—perhaps first as tragedy and then as farce as Marx colorfully put it—then we may expect the same sort of frustration with Piketty’s sweeping predictions as they fail to come true, in the same way that those of Ricardo and Marx similarly failed in the past.” In the Journal of Political Economy, after praising Piketty’s lifelong research agenda assembling inequality statistics for income and wealth (as do all the reviewers named here), Lawrence Blume and Steven Durlauf wrote, “Capital is, nonetheless, unpersuasive when it turns from description to analysis. . . . Both of us are very liberal (in the contemporary as opposed to classical sense), and we regard ourselves as egalitarians. We are therefore disturbed that Piketty has undermined the egalitarian case with weak empirical, analytical, and ethical arguments.”....

But perhaps the greatest rebuke of Piketty to be found among academic economics is not contained in any of these overt or veiled attacks on his scholarship and interpretation, but rather in the deafening silence that greets it, as well as inequality in general, in broad swathes of the field—even to this day. You can search through the websites of several leading economics departments or the official lists of working papers curated by federal agencies and not come across a single publication that has any obvious or even secondary bearing on the themes raised by Capital in the Twenty-First Century, even in order to oppose them. It is as though the central facts, controversies, and policy proposals that have consumed our public debate about the economy for three years are of little-to-no importance to the people who are paid and tenured to conduct a lifetime’s research into how the economy works.

This dearth of reaction to such a critical work is not healthy. It is as if the rapturous reception by the public increased the resentment among Piketty’s academic economist colleagues. As an appeal to the public to resolve, or at least have a say in, what the experts consider their own domain, Piketty appears to have questioned the very value of having a credentialed economics elite empowered to make policy in the name of the public interest but not answerable to public opinion. The economics elite, it seems, answered by stonewalling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so it would not have the impact on economics research agendas that it merits.

No one in academia is taking this book seriously and so it is hard to base election results on this book

[Tarheel_Dem]

15. Good read. Thanks for posting.

[Gothmog]

17. The fact that the academic world is ignoring this study is meaningful

I am not sure that this study actually supports the claims made in the OP but in any case at best this study has not been accepted in the real world. There is no need to nominate an unelectable candidate based on the unproven theory that are based on a study that has not been accepted in the real world

[LanternWaste]

13. Thankfully, this 'hard data' sourced from 2013 was ignored during the mid-term win.

Allowing thirty-three of the forty GOP seats Democrats picked up were won by candidates who had been endorsed by the moderate NewDem PAC.

[iamthebandfanman]

19. there are currently

101 members of the house that are affiliated with the new democrat coalition (newdem pac)..
there are currently 95 house members in the congressional progressive caucus.
thats not that big of a difference number wise.. just sayin'.

'new dems' is literally just people from the now defunct DLC...