The lesser of two evils.

[dmallind]

114. How well do left-of-Democratic candidates do when they are available?

About the most that they normally do to change things is make a 49-51 R-D race into a 49-48-3 R-D-X race (either that or they make a 38-62 race into a 38-59-3 race, which changes nothing).

That way we still don't get the socialist policies. We just get more batshit crazy policies as committe and procedural votes go the R way.

If there were a huge swathe of support for them - if they made those races 49-20-31 even once in a while, we'd still get the same batshit crazy results now, but at least we could say "look DNC - if you governed like these socialist policy favoring candidates want, who are more popular than your Eisenhower-style corporatists, then you'd get back to 49-51 again and we'd all get what we want; you'd be in power and we'd get socialist policies". What can we really say though now? "Trust us DNC if you put out a manifesto and voted in support of these socialist policies that garner a tiny fraction of your current support, you'd somehow do far better than they do and we'd all win together"?

There are some socialist policies I'd really like to see myself (as well as some I would not). I like socialized roads as much as anyone. Nationalized health care and banking would be peachy with me too, as would more centralized and standardized curricula and education processes. Heck let's go for utillities while we're at it, if we can make them flexible enough to pursue renewables at the expense of extraction jobs if need be. But support even for what I want, let alone nationalizing mercantile organizations and entire manufacturing industries, is simply not high enough to be either elected or enacted here at this time, and advocating for them as policies is a sure-fire recipe for being out of power, and even out of all but a bare few handfuls of seats in Congress.