Yeah I know but my point moreso being id think Sullivan would HAVE to be vulnerable if Murkowksi felt the need to play the games she did where as he has been a silent nobody this entire administration who voted for everything. Whatever dem running against him can absolutely use all of that and brow beat him for it. It's the perfect way to isolate him as a Trumpian stooge and get all of Murkowskis moderate darling republican votes
I think you have things a bit muddled. Murkowski lost her primary in 2010 because the right-wing loonies perceived her as moderate/RINO/whatever. She won the write-in by assembling the coalition you describe - Democrats (largely Natives) and moderate independent and GOP voters. Now, she has to keep that coalition happy because if they desert her, the right-wingers won't carry her to victory because they still view her with suspicion. They'll just primary her again. In other words, she's simultaneously proved she doesn't need the national party or the rabid base but has also worked her way into a corner where she has to appear more moderate to survive.
I don't think Biden is saying that, though.
Good assessment.
The danger is letting republicans off the hook for anything they ever do, instead of using it against them to make them lose, which both hurts us downballot at the polls, and hurts us in the future when Republicans brazenly do the exact same shit. All just so Joe Biden can serve Joe Biden's goal of becoming president.
I suppose its not dangerous per say, only because this kind of messaging has been normalized to such a degree that it may as well mean nothing, but its entirely ignorant of what politics has unearthed about the current electoral system. "Going back" is impossible with the way the GOP is today, and when the GOP has been doing such evil shit, the fact that the Dems aren't is what makes them polarized, and this is supposed to be reason to compromise?
Well, uh... I guess no one can accuse them of not having convictions. They just have the wrong ones.
If this is an anti-Northam/Fairfax thing than he'll probably just be wrecked in the next election cycle. The district's half black. (He's not black.) https://ballotpedia.org/Virginia_State_Senate_District_16
Electoral politics is such that you don't need to make "everyone" happy.
The harsh truth is that harsh truths will not get people to change party allegiance.
Okay but that only leaves business as usual and that has only led to incrementalism on a ticking timebomb of a planet. As much as I hope the Tump base is only interested in Trump and not the GOP, that would be idealism as well. So should I just conclude that the system is basically a back and forth hell? Because as far as grassroots efforts to register people to vote, the system allows for disenfranchisement to happen and gerrymandering, again, without consequence.
Demographics suggest that the Republican Party is dying already.
So has Glenn Greenwald. So has Michael Tracey.
I mean, I guess that exhortation didn't apply to the black president in the White House.
The Dems pointed out that the GOP sucks at healthcare in 2018 and that worked out. IDK maybe my thinking is not rational, but it beats sitting around waiting for the GOP to die a slow death while the rest of the world dies and people get their rights stripped away depending on where they live. Plus, even if the GOP dies, what happens when another conservative party takes their place? The cycle would just continue under different names. The dream scenario would be the Dems become the party that faces of against an even more progressive party, but that's probably not rational is it?
Every candidate is talking about the policies and actions of the current administration and GOP-led senate doing real harm to real people.
The electorate would have to change dramatically to make a scenario like that plausible.
That's actually the playbook for beating guys like Trump, that "boring regular issues" approach is how they finally beat Berlusconi. Moral arguments get teflon'd off, you have to just run a boring standard election against them. And unfortunately this was backed up in both the 2016 results and 2016 ad focus testing where all the morality based stuff performed the worst. Clinton thought it was 1964 again but people were snowed. And also racially polarized along party lines.
But not all of them are willing to back solutions that will go beyond the current admin and support the vast majority of people. Instead we are getting half measures that are sure to take two steps to the right in the legislature all in the effort to appear bipartisan, which further demotivates people to actually vote for the Dems.
