I have a simple question

[DemocratSinceBirth]

First a predicate. Thirty nine of the forty one House seats we picked up were picked up by center- left Democrats. Doesn't it stand to reason nominating a center-left Democrat gives us the best chance of wresting back the presidency?

[brush]

1. Makes a ton of sense.

[left-of-center2012]

2. If the country is 'center-left'

Is it?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

6. The 2016 electorate was 26% liberal, 39% moderate, and 35% conservative

https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2016

[The Valley Below]

3. We would do well to nominate the great liberal Democrat Joe Biden.

He is by far the candidate whose best positioned to win the electoral college and to help in critical Senate races by having long coat tails.

[unblock]

4. comparing apple cobbler for desert monday night to orange juice at breakfast thursday morning.

most seat pickups in congress are naturally going to be in swing districts, where center-ish candidates are most likely. so saying that most of the pickups were center-ish is not particularly informative.

presidential elections are rather different beasts than congressional ones. for starters, they're obviously national. even though california and other states may be a lock for one party or another, a candidates appeal in such states still matters because the fund-raising there has an effect on the swing states. so someone who can stir up big donations -- possibly due to a compelling ideology -- might be a better candidate in the swing states due to that fund-raising advantage.

moreover, presidential elections, are broadly speaking, referenda about the incumbent party, particularly if the incumbent is actually up for re-election. in many ways, it probably makes very little difference which candidate we put up, the ballot might as well read "trump" or "not trump". obviously that's overstating the point a smidge, but the choice of candidates matters a lot less than most people think, at least in terms of our likelihood of winning the presidency. if we win, of course, our choice of candidates matters greatly....

also, presidential elections are based on electoral votes by states, not by congressional district (other than nebraska and maine). so appeal across the state matters more than appeal to specific congressional districts, which might well be highly gerrymandered.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

5. That is why Trump is going to try to turn it into a choice election....

That is why Trump is going to try to turn it into a choice election. By choosing the wrong candidate we increase the probability of him doing so.

"...moreover, presidential elections, are broadly speaking, referenda about the incumbent party, particularly if the incumbent is actually up for re-election..."

[unblock]

8. you can't overly worry about that, certainly not in the age of donnie

once upon a time, it's certainly true that a party wouldn't want to nominate a candidate that had baggage or other attributes that wouldn't play well in the general.

but that's really a wash in the age of hyper-partisanship and over-the-top lies and propaganda. we could nominate the perfect saint and they would trash them with one invented scandal after another.

look what they've done in the past. one of al gore's biggest accomplishments was funding the early internet and getting every federal agency to put massive amounts of useful data on the web. he did more than anyone in government to bring about what we now call simply, the internet. and they turned his involvement with the internet into a scandalous political liability.

hillary had more solid qualifications than anyone, and they turned a tiny technical computer decision into a major scandal, completely overshadowing all her strengths and accomplishments.

they even trashed dukakis for wearing proper safety gear in a military photoshoot.

and all of these people were bashed as "socialists", no matter what their actual policies.


in the age of donnie, even their old practice of taking a shred of truth a contorting it wildly no longer requires that shred of truth.

no matter who we nominate, they will invent ridiculous crap out of whole cloth, so it hardly matters whether there's any truth to it or not.

what matters is how we respond to it, but the candidate themselves and the rest of the party. we have to call out their crap and stick to our nominee no matter what.

again, who we choose really doesn't matter until we actually win. *then* it matters.

[NYMinute]

7. Yes

[pecosbob]

9. How'd that work out in the last presidential election?

A simple question...

[DemocratSinceBirth]

10. Hopefully our candidate

Hopefully our candidate won't have a bogus FBI inquiry publicly reopened two weeks before the election. That was the condition that was satisfied that in the absence of it our candidate would have won.

[pecosbob]

11. That would be helpful, I agree.

[Kesaco]

12. What's the point of taking back the presidency if it represents

a continuation of the past 40 years?

[Tom Rinaldo]

13. The answer (for me) is why I switched from Warren to Sanders a few weeks ago

Sanders is ideologically leftist, sure, but he has strong populist appeal, and populist appeal does not fit neatly into ideological boxes. Sanders has strong anti-establishment credentials and that is hard to plot on a traditional right to left political spectrum. I am not directly comparing Sanders to Bobby Kennedy by any stretch, but RFK was the gold standard for politicians who could pull off doing something like draw supporters from both George Wallace and Eugene McCarthy. Some people, to varying degrees, can strike that chord, and Sanders to some degree is one of them.

All throughout the 2016 primary season national polls consistently showed Sanders matching up against Trump better than did Clinton, but traditional pundits never took that very seriously, because Sanders "is a Socialist" blah blah... It turns out that a lot of workaday Americans will put up with a so called Socialist if they honestly believe that he will fight tooth and nail for them, and that he isn't one of those so called "pointy head limousine liberals".

[JudyM]

14. That's right, I remember those polls. But winning by a wider margin only matters this time around.

We will not know who is leading until it’s down to 2 candidates.