Unfortunately, the Democrats keep going back to the well of “what are you going to do, vote for the other guy?” Their success on this has been hit or miss the last few cycles. In fairness, it’s been a viable strategy in the past, if Democrats can get those few persuadable voters in the middle of the political spectrum to vote Democratic and not Republican, that’s a net win for the Democratic candidate. But, that begs the question of “are there enough persuadable voters left to offset losses when parts of your base stay home?” With Biden’s continued support for Israel’s actions, it seems that their political calculus says, “yes”.
However, we’ve seen this go both ways in the last few cycles. Clinton deployed the tactic in 2016 and commenters were out in force to brow-beat any of the deplorables who offered anything less than a full-thoated support of her turn. It got her the popular vote, but that has never mattered, she lost the election. The “vote blue no matter who” force was on full display again in 2020 and managed to eek out a win. And here you are again, ramping up for 2024. It’s going to be interesting to see how it works out this time.
Biden in 2020 had the advantage of being somewhat unknown. Everyone knew him as Obama’s Vice President and that provided him some of Obama’s popularity. This time around, he’s much more of a known quantity and he’s going to be running on his own record. Brow-beating people with “anyone but Trump” seems less likely to work when voters may be looking at specific policies and actions which they find at odds with their beliefs. When Biden was more of an unknown, it was easy for voters to map their own views onto him. We see this with polls which include “generic Democrat/Republican” as an option. People map their own views onto the “generic” view and so are more supportive. When a candidate becomes a known quantity, support can drop off, as the voters know which areas they agree and disagree with a particular politician. In the same way, Biden’s policies are now more understood by the voters and people may be less inclined to support him based on those policies.
Personally, I’m doubtful this sort of brow-beating is going to work this cycle. Biden’s popularity isn’t fantastic and he’s too well known for people to map their views onto him. Moreover, responding to people being upset with his actions with a brow-beating seems like a poor response to peoples’ legitimate issues. It seems more likely to convince them to disengage or push back even harder. Sure, what are they going to do, vote for the other guy? No, probably not, but they may also not show up on election day. And with the closely divided state of the US electorate, that might just be enough to swing things the other way.
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Since when is Centrist defined as “I will shutdown the border as soon as you sign that bill”, “More kids in cages than the last guy”, “No prosecutions for leaders who incite a violent coup”, “More weapons for genocide”, “Let’s destroy the economy of our allies”, “We must keep the torture center at Guantanamo open”, “Who’s Epstein?”, “No I won’t pardon Peltier”, “No I won’t commute sentence of political prisoners”, “Yes, more black people in jail”, “Yes, it’s OK for prisoners to produce $11Bn in goods for private companies through slave labor”, “I swear we’ll do something about women’s health but it won’t be part of our political platform for the election”.
All of the evidence says we have the same two groups of white supremacist leaders we have always had: the plantation owners who bought the slaves, and the financiers who sold the slaves. You want to claim that the financiers are “centrist” in that formulation because they don’t personally whip people?
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