2020 Presidential Election

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by BullDog

Here's an op-ed from a Republican strategist:

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/...vou-story.html

I agree with this 1000% percent. And yes most Democrats - especially Progressives - will hate it, but I think he is right. Spot on. Democrats had better be ready for a bloodbath against Trump and go for the jugular on the Mueller Report phony Barr cover up - otherwise, we just look like wimps.

Some quotes:

Trump may not be smarter than a toaster oven, but he’s going to be surrounded by people with brains, money and an existential desire to win.

They know that boutique policies in a Walmart nation won’t sell.

<snip>

Winning the AOC primary is all the rage, but in poll after poll voters tell us what they want their elected leaders to talk about and focus on. Even the big-picture issues Democrats think are game-changing winners often come with massive electoral trade-offs.

<snip>

Talk more like Mike Rowe, and less like AOC, and watch the people who switched from Obama to Trump take another look. A little more Bubba and a little less stern-faced, super-woke speech commissar.

<snip>

The notion that they have to choose between having a positive, progressive vision and beating Trump six ways to Sunday is simply false. They need to give Trump hell and put forward their own ideas. But the ideas had damn well not be subject to any simplistic left-wing litmus test.

<snip>

This is not a nation of socialists, no matter how far and how fast millennials are leaning left.

Buttigieg got in a whole lot of trouble over the weekend for using the term "coastal elites"

Spare us the lectures from Democratic candidates about how Democratic voters are the problem

If you thought we were past the tiresome “How can Democrats appeal to Trump-loving Trump voters in Trump Country?” conversation, I’m going to disappoint you. And I’d like to use some recent comments from South Bend, Ind., Mayor and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg to illustrate how problematic the discussion among Democrats is when it comes to thinking about different areas of the country and what kind of people live where.

<snip>

There’s a bit more to the discussion, but it goes on in that vein. Buttigieg’s intentions are good, since he wants to promote mutual understanding and common purpose. But he frames the problem as one that stems from condescending liberals who don’t sufficiently appreciate the lives and perspectives of people in the Midwest. In other words, the divide that exists is the fault of liberals alone. If they could just do more to understand the people who wind up voting for someone like Donald Trump, that would be the path to achieving unity.

<snip>

Just to be clear, I'm not saying you can't find liberals who are condescending toward conservatives and the places where they congregate, because you can. And resentment over that condescension is a powerful political force, in no small part because Republicans and conservative media spend so much time telling conservatives that elitist liberals are looking down on them.

But you can also find lots of conservatives who are contemptuous toward liberals and the places where they live. Yet if a Democrat ever insulted the “heartland,” there’d be hell to pay, while Republicans insult heavily Democratic places all the time.

i fought with a whole bunch of tweeters online about this bc the comments to the WaPo article were full of ppl saying "I'm a coastal elite and my state has farms, how dare he!"

But within a few minutes you also had stuff like "rural voters don't even know what's going on in the next county" and "all the red states care about is if they can still marry their cousins" and, like, that was what Buttigieg was talking about.

Every time the Texas lege does something heinous there is a whole flood of blue-staters saying "why don't they secede already, who needs them?"

The attitude that sees the flyover states as cousin-marrying bumpkins is what he was talking about, but the commenters chose to interpret it as narrowly as possible and claim he accused them of low awareness of heartland issues.

There is a huge swath of Trumpers that don't car about anything except "owning the libs" and every time "the libs" play dumb about their snottiness, we feed that movement.