People who say 'DU does not reflect Dem voters' are right.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

35. Fear, anger, hate.

The 'appeal' of conservatism is a 'return to the status quo', to stasis, to a perceived 'better time' in the past. So to motivate those who just want things to 'stay the same' or to 'return', you have to present them with 'threats'.

What do 'progressives' (in the loosest sense of the word) want? For things to 'get better' So we try to use 'Hope', and seek 'Change'. But those are tough to make into ongoing campaigns unless you actually deliver the kind of change people were hoping for once you get into power. If you simply fritter away that power, people get discouraged, and lose hope because what was important to them didn't change. What was the Democratic message of 2014? I'm not sure, but I didn't see a lot of hope for change in the advertising I saw. In fact, I barely even saw any pushback on lies from Republicans claiming that they were responsible for whatever good things might have happened to people. In Ohio, Kasich and Mandel laid claim to the new jobs in the state, and no one even tried to proclaim they were a result of the stimulus, or even pointed out that the new jobs still hadn't made up for the jobs lost thanks to conservative financial sector deregulation crashing the economy.