Scott sent me a couple of items. First, this piece about the real behavior of voters, versus the notion that a candidate who positions themselves exactly in the middle of the left and right of the Democratic Party will lead to certain victory:
If you ditched the simplistic theoretical “centrism maximizes vote-share” model, and thought about how the world actually works, Hillary Clinton looked like a terrible candidate and Sanders looked vastly more “electable.” After all, Clinton was under investigation by the FBI. Where does that fit in the equation? She was the ultimate insider candidate, running against an outsider politician whose entire pitch was that D.C. was a “swamp” filled with corrupt elitists. My own argument at the time was that Sanders was the one best positioned to counter Donald Trump’s pseudo-populist appeal, because he could say he agreed that D.C. was corrupt, and expose that Trump was not offering real solutions to the problems he diagnosed.
As more time passes, I think that Sanders would have won in 2016. That said, the real issue in 2016 was the lack of a truly contested primary. But the key point here is that the “split the difference” candidate in 2016 lost to Donald Fucking Trump, a candidate that wasn’t “splitting the difference”. The piece also talks about the Stevens/El-Sayed primary in Michigan, pointing out that Stevens is actually a bad candidate, no matter how much difference she splits. I’m not in the thick of it like Kay, but what I’ve seen from El-Sayed has been inspiring and interesting, and what I’ve seen from Stevens has been, to use Tim Walz’ expression, “weird”.
Moving on to Wisconsin, this:
You can hear the screams from DC if you listen carefully: “Oh nooooo Hong is going to win, she’s too far left, and we’re going to lose the WI governor’s office!” If you look at Hong’s campaign site, you’ll see that she supports crazy leftist positions like universal childcare, paid leave for all, cheaper healthcare and fully funded public schools.
People don’t like datacenters polluting their back yards. They want to be able to go to the doctor without fearing bankruptcy. They want their kids to go to free, good public schools, where they get a free lunch. And they don’t want kids to be murdered in Gaza with bullets and bombs that we paid for. The difference can’t be split on these issues, and the base is going to vote for candidates who support those issues, no matter how many millions are spent by third parties.
