Summary
Democrats must reclaim their identity as the party of the working class to regain electoral strength.
Despite pro-labor policies under Biden, working-class voters feel disconnected, seeing Democrats as defenders of a failing system.
The party’s decline traces back to NAFTA and neoliberal economic policies that favored corporations over workers.
A generational effort to prioritize labor rights, fair wages, and economic security while addressing working-class frustrations are needed.
Without serious reform, Democrats will continue losing ground to populist alternatives.
No shit. Now convince the democratic party leadership that winning elections is more important that kissing donor ass.
Now convince the democratic party leadership that serving their constituents is more important that kissing donor ass.
Convince them of that, and the winning elections thing will solve itself.
The problem is “kissing donor ass” is a euphemism for serving themselves.
lol no it won’t. If I’m a Republican candidate, I can literally just say some culture war bullshit and still beat you in an election. Especially if you’re a woman or a minority.
Their goal is never to win elections. Their only goal is to prevent leftist movements and organization from gaining positions of power. To defend these status quo.
Don’t convince national Democratic leadership of anything. They’re too disconnected and don’t care about any state they don’t live in. Run for, and take control of state Democratic parties. Start telling national leadership your terms for your state supporting or working with them.
If enough people do that. They will change or become irrelevant.
Where can I sign up? Fuck it. I’ll run for something.
What state are you in? I will absolutely find you the info.
AZ
The state party has some resources here on volunteering and when the state committee meets for elections and whatnot.
You can go here and look at your county party website as well, they’ll have more info on how to get involved/run there. I looked at a few, most of them had a way of singing up to be a committee person.
Best of luck!
Should spread the word. I’ll help. We should have been doing this 20 years ago.
The only ones that get any level of power or influence within the party are ones that will defend the status quo. A system that’s operating as designed cannot be reformed from within.
It’s actually a pretty low bar to clear. You can even claim a decent annual wage off campaign donations if its your only income source, so a literal unemployed homeless person could run if he got the party endorsement.
The only concern is if the state has active politicians on the ticket that you would be competing against, such as career politicians, long time staffers, and volunteers who would be seen as more preferable. You could still fill one of those staffer, intern, and/or volunteer positions to make your voice heard as well.
most of them dont want to ruffle the feathers of the same donors that gets the GOP elected, theres one too many DINOS in the dnc, just need to rout out those first, which is a first step
What state do you live in?
Missouri. Not sure why you’re being downvoted for asking that. We generally even in larger metropolitan areas have a ton of offices that no one other than Republicans run for. Which is part of why this is a red state. National Democrats don’t even try to field candidates for anything but the biggest offices. Which often backfires denying them even those.
All states need to take back their leadership and a lot of the funding from the national party. The National Party should be nothing more than a body that coordinates the state parties. Not the actual leadership itself. That’s part of the reason they seem so disconnected. Because they are
People downvote you for anything other than agreeing with their echo chamber message. Not that I even disagree with what this thread is saying. That’s just how it is
The problem is they see large donors as the only path to victory as campaigns are expensive
The problem is that they see donations as the end goal and no longer give a shit if they lose.
They don’t have to be. Present the people with policies that they want and the public will do all the work themselves.
The problem is getting the word out is expensive. Advertisement buys aren’t cheap.
And guess what the innovation in advertising this last cycle was? Cheap, to voters, text messages asking for funding. Sounds like a great time to dump the dead-weight corpos and win some elections
And what was the turnover on those buys? The fact that texts aren’t expensive doesn’t mean that is effective.
They do get the word out. The problem is that we don’t believe them.
The best way is to bring single payer health care.
Every other G7 nation has it
They tried to do that the moment they had senate supermajority with caucusing ind over a decade ago, but caucusing ind Joe Lieberman voted against it and the GOP filibustered it in 2010.
They haven’t even had more than 50 since like 2013, they only had bare minimum to select majority leader in 2021 because of caucusing independents and VP tiebreaker.
If you want single payer then the only way to get that is not to change the DNC, it’s to convince millions more people to vote for them or to remove Republicans.
ACA was never going to be single payer. Lieberman played the bad guy to kill the public option, but it was pretty obvious it was only there to be bargained out in the first place.
Single payer, on the other hand, was never even considered to be an option.
They voted on singlepayer and it lost by Independent Joe Liebermans vote.
You cannot blame that on the DNC.
They have never once voted on single payer.
Then I guess Barrack Obama and thousands of protestors all halucinated it back in December 2009
Even Nancy Pelosi, who passed the bill in the house with 218 votes, has multiple comments about it being removed in the Senate.
That’s not single payer.
Convince the voters to stop falling for culture war bullshit then
Losing is more expensive
Here I thought “providing the better option in a binary race” would be enough; but snowflake voters need individual attention?
“Here. We’ll keep a traitorous felon out of office because that’s the choice” and people still preferred the felon.
I think we need to start by apologizing to the Democrats for being stupid. Not just “oops I voted wrong” stupid, but “oops I voted for the Russian agent who’s raped everything he touches and sold every secret he probably touched too, and is now oddly hellbent on destroying a country as a favour to Russia” stupid.
That’s a lotta stupid.
“We’re second worst and you will be voting for us no matter what we do” was going to fail eventually, and you were fools to keep doing it.
I feel like I have to cook so many times on this app.
Your hostage situation electioneering is the past, electoral reform is the future.
We will not be abused by people like you any longer. We will be free to vote how we wish. The people will have many options to choose from, and the democrats will have to represent people to earn their votes or be tossed into the garbage can alongside the republicans.
More democracy is the way forward, not this domestic assault you try to pass off as representation.
Videos on Electoral Reform
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems we can try out.
You will NEVER get electoral reform from republicans. You will get electoral dismantling.
The hostage situation is ongoing and you’re asking for every hostage to die.
Ok, keep voting for stupid things, win stupid prizes.
Winning elections by checks notes demanding voters apologize for not voting for you.
Brilliant.
They’re downvoting you, but you’re right. One day they’ll grow out of this communist shit
So long as they have corporate donors and insider trading, they will never be the workers’ party.
That would require removing mega-rich conservatives from party leadership. I don’t see that happening.
That’ll be the day.
The Democrat party is not a democratic party, they are a neoliberal, technocratic party. They don’t want the people to rule, they want neoliberal technocrats to rule. I don’t see that changing, anytime soon.
A workers’ party would have to be a majoritarian, democratic party, because the workers are the vast majority of the population.
MAGA took over the GOP in just a few years. I think the same thing can happen to the DNC. Just need a little propaganda, some charismatic leadership, and people willing to slander the establishment.
This took decades. They started in the 1970s. If you think this happened over a few years you are either young or paying attention to the wrong things
Eh, this particular movement started in the 1990s. Then they got focused in the 2010s.
There’s a lot of stuff that also started in the 70s, but the MAGA stuff is way more recent and beyond what they had dreamed would be possible in the 70s. They really, really didnt count on their voters largely giving up on any semblence - claimed or real - of principles. Which was a huge win for them.
The current maga we see today was started by the John Birch Society.
The Christian nationalism starts with Roe debatably even with the Civil Rights movement. The Christian nationalists are the driving force behind this movement. Remember when Iran revolted the religious elements didn’t take over immediately.
MAGA voted for Republicans.
If you’re suggesting the left change the DNC by starting to vote for them, then I’m in.
It won’t happen because Anyone left of center is too fucking worried about supporting a candidate that isn’t completely perfect in their eyes than they are about making actual progress.
Edit- and just like that, like moths to a flame, people come by to prove me right.
I dont think asking for “not in support of wildly illegal war crimes” was a big ask. But evidently the centrists were willing to throw the entire country to permanent fascism to stand on their principle that AIPAC money needed to continue to flow to DNC bank accounts. But yes, the voters are to blame here, clearly.
Leftists would never support a centrist candidate because we are not centrists.
Yes, AND it’s worth bearing in mind that some democratic strategists apparently think the path to being the “worker’s party” is to embrace social conservatism. Trans people aren’t the reason I will never retire, they aren’t the reason I’ll never be able to take my kids on a real vacation, or why we’re one “get fucked lmao” from being bankrupted by health insurance. The assholes in this party who have a vision of trying to capture moderate Republicans need to show themselves the door. Bernie and Trump both show that you’ll get the votes when you promise big changes to this busted ass system AND people believe that you’ll actually do it. Stop trying to be yesteryear republicans; start promising shit that hurts the big donors’ feelings and meaning it.
Bernie is a loser. So is Trump. Both have lost national elections.
Obama can’t relate 😎
Hillary and Kamala are bigger losers than Trump, apparently, having the same national track record as Gary Johnson.
And Bernie is bigger loser than all of them. Never seen the White House.
All of them are beneath Obama 😎
I guess? Bernie never lost to Trump.
But he lost to Hill Dog and Sleepy Joe!
Obama can’t relate 😎
Joe Biden was extremely left leaning for the average American. He did so many pro union things. He held an EV summit and didn’t invite Tesla, because they didn’t have a union. First president to cross a picket line. https://uwua.net/2023/10/president-bidens-union-record/ Democrat platforms have always been in the direction of higher taxes on the rich to fund more social safety nets. People just don’t like them because they aren’t good enough. When the alternative is explicitly anti-worker, anti-union, tax cuts for the rich, destroy social safety nets. This narrative needs to die. It’s not a failure of democrat policies or platform it’s just a failure of the media environment. It is purely a media problem. Democrats just need to start shitting out more tik toks and get more sycophantic youtubers like trump has, to jerk them off so the vibes shift.
People just don’t like them because they aren’t good enough.
It’s more that they’re still all in on incrementalism, while the problems people face are worsening by leaps and bounds, and they’re actively hostile to members of their own party who advocate for advancing the sort of large-scale, structural changes needed to actually resolve the various crises bearing down on the working class. They’re also at odds with their base on major issues, such as healthcare reform, a robust social safety net that isn’t means-tested to death, and their obsession with supporting Israel, because they’ve been captured by the purse strings of their major donors. It certainly doesn’t help peoples’ opinion of them as embodying the out of touch elites who are deaf to the plight of the working class when party leadership comes out against [https://www.businessinsider.com/we-are-free-market-economy-pelosi-rejects-stock-ban-congress-2021-12?op=1](Congressional insider trading) that our representatives are notorious for exploiting to enrich themselves via privileged knowledge they gain through their positions.
If they didn’t dump millions of dollars into primary challenges to progressive candidates that represent a challenge to the prevailing neoliberal order the Dem leadership so dearly loves, even when it means ultimately losing the race to a Republican, I doubt people would be so hostile to them, and the party would probably be in a better place. When party leadership won’t resolve their issues in a satisfactory manner, won’t listen to and incorporate criticism from their base, and actively fight their efforts to get elected officials who more accurately represent their views and values, it shouldn’t be a surprise that people decide to go elsewhere.
You can’t publish enough TikToks and youtube videos to media manage your way out of a hostile, out of touch group having a death grip on the party and refusing to admit that, perhaps, the present situation is vastly different today than it was 3-4 decades ago when they were first elected.
There are plenty of people, both politically engaged and those who only show up to vote every 4 years, who are legitimately dissatisfied with the Democratic Party’s deafness to the problems facing the average voter, and as long as the Democrats and their supporters continue to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it’s all down to a hostile media environment, the further down the path to complete irrelevance they’ll find themselves.
Incrementalism is just democracy, shit moves slow, people disagree, there are laws and procedures it prevents the country from wildly steering back and forth like a schizo. Not anymore now that Trump has won, we get to see those large scale structural changes now. There is no hostile out of touch group with a death grip on the dems, the far left just doesn’t vote, or they are not that big of a group. Moderate dems appeal to more Americans then the super progressives. Harris lost by like 1-2%, and that is AFTER trump/elon most likely rigged the election through suppression and probably also hacked voting machines. The far left not voting for Harris knowing full well that Trump is an actual fascist, is suicidal accelerationism that will get millions killed. Fuck em, get the fuck out, stop associating yourselves with dems. Make your own shitty fucking party and lose every election instead of pretending your dems and then throwing a hissy fit every time the candidate doesn’t do fascism the way you want.
Great stump speech for why your preferred party isn’t just a bunch of people hostile to anyone who disagrees with them. With people like you representing them, I’m sure they’ll be able to win consecutive elections, rather than just getting the odd touch of power when people get tired of the GOP’s nonsense. Keep telling yourself it’s the voters that are wrong and stupid, and not your party, buddy.
keep telling yourself that you represent “the voters,” any not a tiny group of white college kids
Says the guy backing the same group that lost 4/7 presidential elections since 2000, including two (against Trump) that people thought nobody could possibly lose, since he was that terrible a candidate. You guys are killing it at getting people to agree with your platform, and it’s totally in line with what the broader population wants.
Plus by 2024 he had over 90% of Class 1 Freight workers the sick leave their unions had fought for in the strikes earlier in his term.
It’s definitely an issue with the spread of information and not with actual policy stances.
I didn’t even know that one. It’s so sad how Biden’s name has gotten dragged through the mud.
There needs to be a worker’s party. It doesn’t have to be the Democrats.
That there are only going to be two viable parties in this country is a mathematical inevitability of how our voting system works, but there’s no reason why the Democrats have to remain one of those parties. If what they’re doing right now is the best they’ve got then they shouldn’t be difficult to replace. A damp sandwich could do a better job.
DAMP SANDWICH 2028
Its a first past the post 2 party system. It’s gonna have to be the Democrats.
Democrats have no intention of being pro-labor. They need to go away and be replaced by a better party.
Best they can do is embrace fascism.
yeah the party of insider trading will definitely be the workers’ party if you wish it hard enough.
But then the corporations are not going to pay them.
A two party system isn’t it and this can be the best time to start a new party, one that focuses on the worker’s not to say this party would completely destroy help for the wealthy but make them do what’s fair for living and operating in this country.
Theres a massive problem with propaganda in this country to the point where Unions, public school Educators, Farmers, Poor folk just barely managing to survive until their next paycheck would all rather vote for the guy who wants to make unionizing Illegal, who wants to dismantle the Department of Education and public schools, who wants to take away farmer subsidies so that small time farmers collapse in on themselves, and who wants to take away the very federal programs that help poor Americans survive. As opposed to a candidate who wanted to support more unionization across the country and support workers right to strike, who wanted the department of Education to remain in existence and had a teacher as her VP who talked about how teachers needed raises, who talked about going after big time corporations who also happen to be massive farmers and force the small time farmers to sell to them so that the small timers now make no or actually lose money while the corporation gets their subsidy, and who talked about raising the minimum wage to 15 an hour “at least” and supported legislation that would allow for said poor folk to get more benefits and be lifted out of poverty.
Democrats are and were pro worker, even if not perfect. But the workers abandoned them because at least the Republicans say they’ll fix everything right away. And hey if they don’t, these things take time. But if a Democrat is elected and says they’ll fix everything right away, that they’ll change the country and they don’t do it immediately, well that’s just because Democrats are incompetent.
Many many workers are voting for Republicans knowing it’s against their interests because of hatred and bigotry. The Democrats need to do better, the need to be reshaped into a more progressive party, and they need better messaging and marketing, but to say they aren’t already the pro worker party is fucking disingenuous at best and outright spreading far right propaganda at worst.
Democrats never lifted a finger for me. Every time I hear them doing something it’s somehow not helping me again. My wages have stagnated while their donors got richer. Obama bailed out companies that closed production anyway. Dems handled this election so poorly it’s barely believable. I genuinely don’t know if they’re actually opposition. They seem like they’re on the same team as the other guys from where I’m sitting.
biden was the most pro labor president in my lifetime.
Ain’t saying much.
And even he fucked over railroad workers when they striked.
No he didn’t.
You’re leaving out half of the story.
He ended the railroad strike, but worked and got all their demands met. He was very effective handling that.
Nope, they didn’t get sick leave: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/
Hey look at this other article from the same source a few months later: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/most-unionized-us-rail-workers-now-have-new-sick-leave-2023-06-05/
And also this one from the guv’ment: https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/biden-harris-administration-calls-class-i-freight-railroads-guarantee-paid-sick-leave
ive apparently blocked whoever youre replying to so they’re probably arguing in bad faith.
Claiming to be pro labor starts at livable wages.
They can’t. Middle class oil workers, workers in the gasoline auto-sector will not vote for Democrats. The same goes for many who are contractors; plumbers, electricians, HVAC.
Those working for Amazon might be able to unionize, same with Walmart. Hopefully they can get better pay, and hours. But they are not fighting the same fight as climate activists.
Trump might break teacher unions soon with school vouchers.
Democrats need to start with hyper-local issues, and organize around those.
I don’t know why these articles keep coming up, because the party at large already was. One or two turds in the punchbowl do kind of ruin ones appetite I suppose, but when you’re up against a fascist ideology completely based on lies and bullshit social posturing as issues, you can’t rely on something like being the “worker party” to combat.
Democrats need to fucking smarter and more nimble at turning the tables on lies and misinformation. That’s what we need. They’re fucking failing at that right now.
The problem with the DNCs version of being the “worker’s party” is that the left leaning policies they do pass tend to be things that feel intangible to most workers. They pass infrastructure bills that in theory create jobs, but in reality usually take way too long to actually implement and are killed or watered down by the opposition. Even before they are watered down, they tend to largely be hand outs to large corporations who capitalize the lions share of the funding before anything trickles down to actual workers.
Workers want to see a political party that aren’t afraid of taking direct action, they want to see tangible benefits.
A agree with this in general, but when you’re talking about an entire party, you have dig deeper into local affiliated reps, not the national reps. They aren’t paying much attention to incra crews scamming the system and taking twice as long to patch roads and whatnot.
you have dig deeper into local affiliated reps, not the national reps
The problem with that is that the national party is the one who funds/endorses a lot of the campaigns for local elections, especially in battleground districts. In a lot of cases the local DNC chapters are even more entrenched in centre-right/Third-way politics than the national leadership.
That’s how you get something like New York City who votes overwhelmingly DNC get Mayor like Eric Adams. Oftentimes it’s even easier for local institutions to be captured by organizations with capital.
Unfortunately, the GOP has enemy nations helping them with their campaigns/propaganda.
Are you so blind to the fact that a bipartisan system cannot possibly represent the people. The Democrats haven’t driven politics for the working man for a long fucking while…