How did we get here?

[Ol Janx Spirit]

23. So true. And IMO, the 2010 midterms was the most disastrous point on this timeline we now follow....

Citizens United came earlier that year and allowed corporations to pour money into campaigns against Democrats that voted for the ACA. The TEA Party rose during this time and energized Republicans to "Fire Nancy Pelosi."

Meanwhile, a lack of Democratic "enthusiasm" led to the loss of 63 House seats--the largest single-election shift since 1948. Democrats barely retained control of the Senate, but critically Republicans flipped control of 20 state legislative chambers and won 6 governorships, which allowed them to dominate the critical redistricting process following the 2010 census.

We are still living with the repercussions of that horrible result.

52 million new voters have registered in the intervening years since that election, and it is likely that many of them have no knowledge of that catastrophe for the Democratic Party or what it did to skew our politics. They've only ever known the extreme partisanship that Citizens United and redistricting brought us after 2010. To them this is how politics has always been. It's hard to blame them for being cynical about political parties, but somehow reaching them is going to be critical to saving Democracy as we have known it.