Quickly Nominating Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren Is Democrats' Best Chance at 2020

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67. Now see those were all reasonable arguments, even though I may not be in complete agreement.

I applaud and thank you for your dedication to turning Texas blue, and I can concede that nominating Warren or Sanders might not be good for the electoral prospects of down-ballot Democrats in Texas. But then again, selecting a nominee who's advocating a harder shift leftward could conceivably energize a large enough body of eligible voters who don't reliably participate in the electoral process to render conventional wisdom moot. We saw that in 2008 with President Obama.

That said, however, we are also still perhaps not affording adequate consideration to the reasonable assumption that there will be significant smear campaigns run against whomever we nominate, and that a staggering percentage of Republican voters will buy into them no matter how patently absurd they are. Furthermore, I don't think any among us here believe that Trump would be any more hesitant to risk impeachment to get dirt on any of the other candidates. He is not a man of deep thought. He didn't focus in on Biden because nobody else poses a risk. He focused in on him because Putin and RW media told him to, and he has the analytical prowess of a carrot, to match his complexion.

And that being the case, how prudent is it, really, to discount the value of the enthusiasm and energy a Warren or a Sanders raises among the younger generations who don't reliably vote in large enough numbers, and disregard the risk of not merely not putting the policy goals of the younger generations at the top of our consideration, but actually disparaging them?

It may well be that neither Warren nor Sanders is the best choice as our standard-bearer, but at the same time, I do think it is in our collective best interest to give long and serious thought to why the more hard-left courses advocated by Warren and Sanders elicit such enthusiasm and energy among the younger generations, and harness what they bring to the table, rather than dismiss them reflexively. Do our perceptions about the positions they advocate remain valid in the current times?

It's worthwhile to consider, for example, that in order to reach and maintain the "center" so many support, we may well need to plot a course much harder left than our perception of ourselves as "centrist" makes come naturally, because the scale has been dragged so far to the right, and an entire generation has been left feeling unrepresented because we've spent the last three decades being so cautiously centrist, and the net result has been a dramatic rightward swing.