Republicans do not always win but do play more hardball, and that is not a compliment. They aggressively use anti (small d) democratic tactics like gerrymandering, disfranchisement, etc. They also enjoy a large structural advantage in the Senate, because the average State is more rural and much more white than the average American.
Should Democrats win the Presidency and a Senate majority, they should prioritize (small d) democratic reforms, stuff that cannot be easily undone in 2024. In particular, make Washington DC a state. This is not hardball, it's just basic fairness: DC metro has one of the highest percentages of Black people, and DC statehood will make the Senate more representative of America (only partially - red states will still have an advantage).
My sense is that the Democratic party has an appetite for this. Should they gain power, they won't make the same mistakes. See HR 1.
I feel terrible for viewing this sad event through the lens of electoral politics, but RBG was a champion for voting rights.
I'm sorry but how exactly did they democrats get in the way last time when Obama was president? Rolling over and saying whats suppose to happen doesn't qualify as anything meaningful as far as I am concerned. If the democrats want support, they need to grow a fucking backbone and show us they deserve it.
You mean when they barely had a majority in his first two years, and that only with the conservative Blue Dog Democrats, and then nothing but bitter opposition trying increasingly unprecedented obstruction tactics for the next six? Remember how most of the people who whine about the ACA not including a public option forget that this came down to one person (Joe Lieberman) because they couldn’t get the votes otherwise?
That’s a great example of WHY you need to vote in every election: it’s not enough to get a narrow win, you need a margin to get much done. If you want candidates more to your liking, you need to start organizing at the local level and building a movement: politics go to people who show up. The GOP has minority approval for most of their positions but is in power because their voters show up at every election.
In the United States, one especially important thing to focus on is electoral reform. Currently, most voters have a binary choice where not voting for the Republican candidate is effectively the same as voting for the Democrat or vice versa. The best long term thing we could see would be more ranked or run-off voting so it’s viable to run multiple candidates.
> I'm sorry but how exactly did they democrats get in the way last time when Obama was president?
How could they? They didn't have the votes, because people didn't vote for democrats. You want democrats to have power in the government: make sure they have a majority.
Fail to see how that matters in states like California and when the former presidential candidate lost with a surplus of 2.5 million votes. Your vote for president only really matters in a handful of states regardless of how many popular votes you tally.
You've shifted your argument. Previously it was that you shouldn't vote because you didn't want to support democratic representatives who "don't have a backbone", now it's that you don't want to vote because it doesn't matter.
I'll also note that your vote for president has no impact on the senate's membership. It's entirely a non-sequitor.
Too bad that wasn't actually the way you win a Presidential election. There is an actual rationale for the Electoral college. Go ahead and argue for different rules but pointing out that the results would have been different if the rules were different isn't that informative.
The fact of the matter is, no matter who wins your vote for President likely does not matter anyway
The biggest problem we have is people seem to only care about the presidential election, your local city /county council, your mayor, your local auditor, property assessor, school board, and many other local positions have a much higher impact in your daily life than the president ever will, and your vote in those elections absolutely does matter
This is my conclusion too. Not only are democrats losers they perfectly fine with it too. They've let republicans out politic them every since Reagan. Another in a long line of humiliating political defeats at the hands of big money.
And if you look at the popularity of their platform it should've been all of them. Republican platform is buoyed by irrational pro-choice one issue voters and Russian funded NRA propaganda.
Democratic party isn't as popular because it's leaders are too principled to make the tough, unpalatable decisions republicans make everyday. They consistently fail to properly market their more popular platform and allow republicans to control the conversation.
I am going to take a stab in the dark, and guess you live on one of the 2 coasts, and have never spent any time in the Rust Belt, Iron Range, or the Breadbasket states???
Because the Democrats have been loosing those people for years and years now
//for the record I am libertarian and support neither party.. and I think Picking Harris as VP is what will cost Biden the elections
The Democratic platform is more popular. Far more people voted for Democrats for president and Congress in 2016 than voted for Republicans. Therefore their platform is the popular one, measured by the number of votes.
But due to the electoral college and antidemocratic structure of the Senate, votes in Republican strongholds have 3 times as much weight as those in Democratic strongholds.
