General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: In 18 years since Naders run, what has been accomplished by attacking the Dem party from the left? [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)His campaign wasn't really about the ads, though. It was about the personal appearances, where he won by spewing bile.
The voters we needed to motivate to get to the polls were the young people who backed the runner-up in the primaries.
These were and are young people whose loyalties hadn't been solidified yet...voters who had valid reasons to feel excluded by the process and the system and justification for their distrust for the party leadership.
We should have treated them as a swing bloc-not that they'd vote Trump, they wouldn't, but that they'd swing between possibly voting for us, possibly voting third-party, or just not showing up.
These were never going to be brought to the voting booth in November by ads calling out Trump's scummitude or by demands that they vote Democratic just because they supposedly owed us their votes. Those kinds of appeals could only alienate them.
And we never needed to use those kinds of appeals to them, because there was actually a lot of good in our platform, a lot of things THEY agreed with, that could have won them over if only we'd reminded them of the role those people had in putting that stuff there.
We needed acknowledge the validity of what they had done, to admit that they had built real support for what they wanted, and that the party needed to be in partnership with them in order to achieve a long-term realignment.
And we easily could have sent that message without disrespecting or abandoning any of the groups that preferred the nominee-groups that never actually disagreed with the idea of a greater emphasis on economic justice, since they had been some of the primary victims of corporate greed-and by blending the social justice message of the nominee with a strengthened economic justice message.
That's all I've tried to say.
And there was nothing negative or destructive in any of the things I've argued for there.
It's all about helping us do better in the future...and NOTHING ELSE.