Clinton 1 and Obama were our last successful Dem candidates. You need a charismatic candidate with a consistent message that speaks to everyone if you want to win the popularity contest. Gore, Clinton 2 and Harris failed on both of those counts. Biden won only because of pandemic and government abuse/mismanagement backlash, he would have lost to Trump in other circumstances.
No, please no. Newsom is a textbook greasy CA neoliberal, a Newsom presidency would do next to nothing for the working class and bring a load of benefits to the wealthy.
I generally support his policies on education, environmental protection and long term economic stability but his positions on housing, single payer healthcare, corruption and democratic representation are awful.
So far he's: vetoed a statewide upzoning bill that would get dense housing built statewide near public transit corridors, vetoed ranked preference voting across CA, opposed single payer healthcare and let the CPUC ride roughshod over utility customers and saddle them with PG&E's felonious wildfire liability. The dude is Grey Davis's protege and was basically raised by the Getty family, he's absolutely not the candidate to run in a tight economy where populism is surging.
Edit: fun fact, we called him Teflon Gavin when he ran San Francisco. Nothing sticks to this guy's PR. Fox news consumers have had 10+y of "commie California's Gavin Newsom" poured into their heads in preparation for his eventual Whitehouse run and that will matter when he presents his slick well-fed wealthy self to middle America.
Democrats have absolutely shit messaging and refuse to speak to the working class unless they deign to condescend and you're blaming checks notes "blue MAGA"? What planet are you on?
Yeah, this is exactly what I'm saying. You don't win a fucking popularity contest by choosing to ignore 80% of voters or tell them that "we wouldn't do anything differently" after 50y of wage stagnation during a housing crisis.
Harris's platform was literally "we'll keep doing the same things that haven't been working for the bottom 85% for 30y" and people are shocked she didn't win the election. This was a referendum on neoliberal business as usual and they lost, hard.
Will they learn from this or accept any responsibility or change their platform for the next race? Find out over the next couple of weeks as they scramble to find a scapegoat to blame instead of actually thinking about policies that would help the vast majority of the public.
Never underestimate the obstruction from establishment Democrats at every level of government. We passed a bill authorizing statewide use of ranked preference voting in CA and our neoliberal democrat governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it. I generally support his policies but this one was a flat out "fuck you" to everyone alienated by the neoliberal business as usual party that runs our state.
This election, like every failed election effort since 2000, was a referendum on the democratic party platform: neoliberal business as usual for the top 15% sprinkled with "we're not Republicans"
Find widely known orgs that use the platform, the BBC comes to mind here. Search for other well known orgs to point out so you don't just have one example. Highlight the fact that other platforms are cross linking to the fediverse (Meta'a threads for example) so a fediverse presence will give the city a presence on those platforms with no extra effort needed. Point out that Twitter has become an unreliable platform due to ownership change and that that situation could replay itself at any time on any centralized platform. Help people get Mastodon working on phones if needed - the official app is quite good. Basically just sell the platform as best you can, don't go heavy on ideology and focus on practical benefits.
In my experience many of the people who haven't quit are self medicating for attention or depressive reasons. Of the folks I know who vape about half were diagnosed with ADHD later in life (30+) and quit after finding a stimulant medication that worked for them. The rest are unmedicated and self medicating with nicotine and coffee or energy drinks. Self medicating is overlooked in virtually every discussion about nicotine and I'd like to see it considered more often when the topic comes up instead of just leaping straight to "nicotine use bad" or "nicotine users should be punished" like most discussions do.
Edit: there's also some interesting research re: nicotine's neuroprotective properties that gets lost in the prohibition fervor
We need folks <55 to show up for every single election to get progressives elected into local, state and national positions.
2016 is when the youth vote started reliably turning up for presidential elections. That's great but it's not enough to drive policy change, we need young folks participating in primaries (which they tend to sit out,) congressional elections, state elections, county elections and local elections to build real political power
55 still outnumber <35 by anywhere between 2:1 and 8:1 in almost every election except the presidential race. Until that changes progressive candidates don't have a chance at local, state and national positions that act as the springboard to higher office and progressive stances aren't a day to day political priority.
TL;DR: The <55 vote needs to turn out in force for every election every year (plus primaries!) and vote for progressives that represent their interests. Until that happens politics will remain dominated by neoliberal and conservative homeowners who show up reliably every time.
The problem with accelerationism is that it almost always leads to authoritarianism rather than the glorious socialist revolution everyone wants. We don't need a global economic crash to shift to progressive policies, we need everyone to show up to every election (not just once every 4y) and vote for progressive candidates at every level of government. You do that and suddenly progressive policies are on the menu and progressive local politicians start running for state and national posts - then you can start doing things to address poverty, income inequality, the low taxes the wealthy pay, etc.
Clinton 1 and Obama were our last successful Dem candidates. You need a charismatic candidate with a consistent message that speaks to everyone if you want to win the popularity contest. Gore, Clinton 2 and Harris failed on both of those counts. Biden won only because of pandemic and government abuse/mismanagement backlash, he would have lost to Trump in other circumstances.