Feingold and Grayson - It's just not all that simple, I think.

[MineralMan]

The loss of both Feingold and Grayson, along with a number of other Democrats, including some Blue Dogs, tells me that there's no simple answer to why we lost the House in this election. No simple answer at all. It isn't that we aren't far enough left or that progressives won all their races. It's just not that simple.

What happened yesterday is still going to need a lot of analysis, and we're going to have to look at this from more than one angle. If we're going to recover the House in 2012, we're going to have to figure out exactly what went wrong and how to fix it.

I wish there were a simple answer. It'd make everyone's work a lot easier in the next two years. But, there's not such a simple answer.

Personally, I'm leaning toward an economic cause for this upheaval. The economy sucks, and nobody really understands how to fix it. It looks to me like the voters reacted to it not seeming to be fixed in two years by voting against those currently in power. At least, they seem to have done that in some places, and in numbers large enough to shift control in the House, and almost in the Senate.

I sure don't see any solutions coming down the road for our economic woes, though. This new crop of Republican sure aren't going to fix it, and gridlock sure isn't going to fix it. What happens to the economy over the next two years, and how we, as Democrats, propose to fix it is going to determine the outcome in 2012, I'm pretty sure.

Our losses were mixed. Both progressives and Blue Dogs lost. That should give us all pause and make us spend more time analyzing what happened. I don't think this is the time to lay blame on any particular wing of the Democratic Party. I think it's time to have a look at how we can sell the voters into believing that we can fix things again. If we disintegrate through in-fighting over things that weren't the reasons for our loss in 2010, we may get an even worse message in 2012.

Just my opinion. Yours may differ.

[sufrommich]

1. Bernero lost in Michigan too. If he's not a liberal Democrat, I

don't know who is. Looks like the depressed Midwest is turning red. It's about the economy, whoever can produce jobs will win.

[Yeshuah Ben Joseph]

2. There is a simple answer

Shittizens United. And by extension, every so called "Democrat" who allowed Chimpy to nominate the most unqualified "justice" in the history of the Supreme Court.

You know, the Howdy Doody looking fuck who couldn't even get the Presidential oath right?

[Inuca]

12. This is plain silly

"unqualified" is not in the long list of Roberts faults

[Yeshuah Ben Joseph]

16. Really now?

He was not a judge of any kind until 2003. And he only got THAT job because he gave Chimpy about 10K to help steal Florida in 2000. And every decision he made in that court favored the corporatists as well.

[eyepaddle]

19. He may be refering to Alito,

or possibly Harriet Miers.

[treestar]

26. Not getting the oath right - has to be Roberts

[Mimosa]

3. It always comes down to how people perceive their own security and well-being

MineralMan, your comments ring true.

And another factor was the Fox News, Limbaugh, Beck crowd. Every time I clicked on Fox News ugly Karl Rove was pontificating. Those evil bastards actually had a plan.

[HopeHoops]

4. Unfortunately, we live in a land of idiots with short attention spans and even shorter memories.

Did ANYONE with enough intelligence to calculate single-digit addition in their head actually think Obama was going to turn the country into Disney Land in two years with the GOP blocking every fucking thing he tried to do? I doubt it. Sadly, the majority of people in this country can't do that simple addition.

Now it is up to the Democrats in the Senate to turn the table on the GOP and block any of their half-assed bills. I'm all for cooperation if it is in the best interest of the country, but the GOP doesn't give a flying fuck about the country - they just care about their corporate sponsors.

[MineralMan]

6. Yes, but equally unfortunately, that IS the electorate.

So, how do we turn them around? That seems to be the real question. I'm thinking that calling them idiots probably isn't the most productive path.

[HopeHoops]

11. Asswipes? Dickheads? Fuckwads? Dingleberries? I'm open to suggestions.

:evilgrin:

Just kidding. I agree with you. You can't win them over by calling them "idiots" or other similar terms, but educating the willfully ignorant is like sucking on a rock to get water - good fucking luck.

[treestar]

24. It might work

Really, I've run into that kind of thing - having clients who are being boneheaded, lose your temper with them and they start respecting you - it's odd but there is an element who, if you call them on their being willfully ignorant, might think about it.

[treestar]

17. If there is any way to get them to pay more attention

Right now it just seems the cool thing to do is to be cynical towards all politicians. The Republicans can manipulate ignorant people with their simple, inconsistent messages, and people with only shallow interest don't see the inconsistencies.

People are actually proud of the way they don't know much about politics. They think they are above it all. Yet that is not good for their own interests.

[MineralMan]

23. Good point. But we MUST find a way, I think.

I'm not sure how. I'm not that clever.

[snot]

5. I.m.h.o.,

Dems lost it through their failure to take meaningful action re:

1. Election reform (both electronic voting and campaign finance, including corporate money);

2. Media reform (restore restrictions on consolidated ownership and the Fairness Doctrine); and

3. Restoring public education.

Americans are not stupid; they're misinformed and even brainwashed. Dems have lost control of most messaging, and without that, they can't even control the agenda, even with majorities.

Without progress on those 3 crucial issues, no other progress is secure or even possible.

[crazylikafox]

35. I think you're right

Now what the hell can we do about it? I'm so frustrated this AM. But instead of being upset like I've been by elections in the past, I'm really angry. I suppose that's a good thing.

[snot]

44. Thanks! Well,

for one thing, when I've tried to talk about these issues in the past, I get back a lot of crickets or worse. I guess they're just not as "juicy" as other issues?

Maybe it would help to have more voices raising them?

Maybe start by K&R'ing this: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9461424 ?

[laundry_queen]

48. No crickets here

I agree with you. Until those things are addressed, the rest is pointless.

[NJmaverick]

7. Economy is the number one issue with voters

they punished the Democrats for failing to clean up the GOP's mess in 20 months.

[suzie]

57. +1,000,000

[walldude]

8. "I'm leaning toward an economic cause"

That is it exactly. People vote with their pocketbooks. According to the DU poll yesterday most people are not doing better financially than they were in 08'.

[MineralMan]

14. Yes. When the pocketbook is hurting and it's unclear

how it's going to be fixed, many voters react by voting against whoever's currently in office. I was afraid of this happening, since it's obvious that the economy is not going to be corrected quickly. The Democrats got in in 2008 over this very issue. Not enough happened in two years, so control of the House got shifted in 2010. However, the Senate held...just barely...but it held. It was a shift, but not as dramatic a shift as in 2008. What we do next will have huge influence in 2012. We need to think very carefully about that.

[Inuca]

9. I agree, it's not simple

I do not have an answer, but surely the economy has a LOT to do with it.

I would also not link Feingold and Grayson. Feingold was quirky, but a good and serious senator. I will miss him greatly. I know that I am in a minority, but I am not a Grayson fan, and I am not surprised he lost. I do not think that a "who barks the loudest" contest is constructive nor does it lead to effective government. I do not like extreme demagogues, whether they are from the right or the left. I do not trust them. And Grayson IMHO was a demagogue.

[BootinUp]

10. Excellent analysis by Anita Dunn on MSNBC

she went through Chuckie's questions and gave logical answers to every single one.

No mandate for the Repukes.

The message throw all the bums out.

This was a negative wave election, caused lower turnout for Dems. (Chuckie brought up stats showing lower turnout in some states in Midwest/Rust Belt)

Its the Economy.

Country wants the bickering to stop.

[Inuca]

20. "No mandate for the Repukes"

True, and the smart ones among them understand that. Compare for instance Rubio's and Paul's acceptance speeches last night. We'll see how they will actually deal with it.

[bullwinkle428]

13. Re: "Midwest going red" - Iowa has one of the lowest unemployment

rates in the nation, and returned all 3 (out of 5 total) of its incumbent Democratic Congressmen, so toss that info into the mix analysis!

[MineralMan]

18. Good point. Minnesota returned all but one Democrat, but

the state's economy sucks, so they flipped both state houses.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

It's pretty simple

more conservative voters than liberal showed up yesterday.

[BootinUp]

27. I needed a chuckle.

[unblock]

15. blue dogs lost because of the economy; progressives lost because of citizens united

blue dogs are always vulnerable, they need to bring home good news, and that's a steep, uphill battle when there's 9+% unemployment.

progressives lost because they became targets for massive cash from billionaires and corporate money hell-bent on getting rid of them. citizens united helped pave the way, but in truth it's just one step in a long line of decisions and laws and traditions that let money more and more determine the outcomes of elections. there were a few glaring examples last night of how money can't ALWAYS buy an election, but it sure can make a BIG difference.

[treestar]

30. Did the Repukes have more money?

Whitman lost, that is, having the most money doesn't always translate to a win. To support your argument, you'd need stats to show the Rs who won this time had more $$ than the Ds.

[unblock]

40. yes, that was one of the glaring failures of money; mcmahon was another.

but feingold was outspent 4:1, and it worked there.

overall, the democratic party did well in terms of fundraising compared to the republican party, but outside interests (which is where much of the corporate money went) surely went to support republicans, or more likely, to bash democrats. i rather suspect that had much to do with feingold being outspent.

[johnnie]

21. It's pretty simple

Shitty economy and dark president.

[sabrina 1]

22. The answer if very simple, and was very predictable.

'Some Blue dogs'? Lol, trying to minimize what happened to the Blue Dogs maybe? 23 of them are gone. That is where the biggest losses were. We needed to get rid of them. Now we can get some real Dems to regain those seats without having to bother with primaries. Thank YOU Repubs and teabaggers.

That's half of what was lost right there. No self-respecting Democrat could have held their noses and voted one more time for those Republicans pretending to Democrats. Good riddance.

Grayson was targeted, but he'll be back, hopefully in a more powerful position in what I hope will now be a new Democratic Party. We played by the right of center rules for ten years, it never worked. We got very little in return, but no regrets, we had to see it play out. Now, no more of the lame excuses that sounded more like Republicans than Democrats. We're over that.

What happened was teabaggers and Republicans came out and they put lots of effort and money into those races. Democrats and Independents in Blue Dog areas, did not have much enthusiasm. And in the end since they vote with Republicans anyhow, it worked out well.

Most of the progressives won. Including Charlie Rangel, as predicted, despite the president foolishly asking him to resign.

All in all it is not as bad as it seemed at first. Getting rid of the Blue Dogs would have had to happen anyhow.

The biggest losses were Feingold and Grayson and they were outspent and did not get the backing of the Party. Another big mistake we can blame Rahm for.

[fascisthunter]

not supporting the left has been a big issue

I seriously think I can't put up with it anymore.

[HughMoran]

33. blinders

quite entertaining how people only see what they want too.

[Bryn]

58. We lost a perfectly good democratic candidate, Bill Halter, thanks

to the White House/DLC. They backed a loser Blanche Lincoln. See what we got now in AR? The Big Dumb Repug Boozman! Even without votes for John Gray, a green and Trevor Drown, an independent, Blanche was still WAY WAY behind! We *knew* this would happen when we lost a very good chance with Bill Halter.

[Jakes Progress]

25. Its not simple. But the pundits and the political advisors

must have simplicity. It has to be explained before the commercial break. I noticed the news that most advertisers are switching to 15 second ads for television. Even multimillion dollar, whiz-bang video extravaganzas of more than 30 seconds are too long. So the advisors want short answers -short in length and short in term. I'm afraid I'm growing too cynical to believe that the people in charge will nuance this.

As for the electorate, we must remember those 15 second commercials.

[fascisthunter]

28. PROPAGANDA... it's why people are convinced to vote against their own interests

they all vote for the elite why believing they are some kind of populist movement.

[bread_and_roses]

29. Ds failed on the economy and message, period

The Ds never countered the R message, never held the Banksters truly accountable, never acknowledged unemployment as a crisis and dealt with it that way - and the day before the election our President was out there touting another "free trade" agreement.

Because the Ds are too indebted to our Corporate Masters, they could not give the citizenry a coherent alternate narrative to the Rs "big gub't, cut spending" spiel. They put the foxes in charge of the henhouse with their economic appointments. They allowed the Rs - the freaking R's, for goddess sake - to seize the populist rhetoric and drape themselves as champions of the people.

How could Feingold and Grayson stand against the wave that unleashed? It's not like either had much backing for their positions from either fellow Ds in Congress or the WH.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/03-0

This latest free trade idiocy caps a long list of failures from the White House economic team:

-Failure to treat sustained high-levels of unemployment as the national emergency it is.

-Failure to pass a bank bailout package that placed any tough conditions on the banks.

-Failure to pass a Wall Street reform bill that was big enough or bad enough to make the big banks reign in those infuriating bonuses.

-Failure to put even a single CEO responsible for the financial crisis behind bars.

-Shameful failure to address the housing and foreclosure mess that will soon put one in four families in American underwater with their mortgages.

No wonder the people are voting to throw the bums out.

[NoNothing]

43. Give this man a cookie

He is correct.

The losses were mostly - not entirely, but mostly caused by two things:

1. The economy sucks and is hurting people.
2. The Democrats did not act like the economy is a top priority.

For all the good the health care bill does, the main message it sent to the voters was: WE ARE MORE CONCERNED WITH HEALTH CARE THAN THE ECONOMY. Simply put, this was the wrong message for this election cycle. If Democrats had passed some historic ECONOMIC legislation - say, a massive WPA-style jobs bill, or COMPLETE OVERHAUL of the banking system - I think we would have done much, much better even though the economy still sucks. The voters will reward you if they at least believe you are TRYING. The problem was they didn't believe we were even trying very hard to fix the economy, that it was a lower priority than other things.

[dmosh42]

31. Big money controls the ads, along with economy, euals....

Repuke victory. Many people don't know squat about their candidates, so get a one minute blurb to get their support. All the TV ads that I saw were all negative attack ads, appealing to local hatreds and general terms like 'socialist'. I'm in the south, where we don't want gov't to control things, but don't close the military bases, or NASA, or the TVA, etc. Hipocrites and dumb fucks!

[MineralMan]

32. Thanks for your comments, and I hope this thread continues

to generate more ideas. Unfortunately, I've let a work project slip badly due to the election, and have to turn my attention toward it, or my economy's going to collapse. :rofl:

So, I'm going to be absent from DU most of the time for the next few days. I'll check in off and on, but I really must get some work done.

[littlewolf]

34. Grayson had it right .... gerrymandering .... 17 times GOP

then he won it on Obama's coattails .... no coattails this time .....

[Dappleganger]

46. One good thing which happened in FL yesterday was Amendments 5&6 passed.

Hopefully that will fix some gerrymandering issues here.

[cascadiance]

36. An f'd up corporate media is to blame...

The corporate agenda wants to get rid of progressives like Feingold and Grayson. They also want to consolidate their control of right wing districts to the Republican Party and not leave it in the hands of Blue Dogs, who they probably see as less reliable than Republican henchmen... The corporate media helped them do this by perpetuating the dumbification of America.

It is interesting to look at the exit poll analysis of the gubernatorial race here in Oregon, which is still not decided between Kitzhaber and ex Portland Trailblazer star Chris Dudley. If you look them up, you'll find that those that are younger and those that made between $30k and $75k all went for Dudley, and those making less than $30k and more than $75k all went for Kitzhaber. And those younger folk voted for Dudley too as opposed to those that are older. That kind of defies expectations. Then you think though about how the media builds up the deification of athletes, etc. and have to wonder if that played in to the younger crowd between $30k and $75k voting more for Dudley against their own interests. A better media that didn't deify an athlete like Dudley, but looked more closely at his admonishing waitresses and how they get paid too much because of the minimum wage might have made this a more decisive race for Kitzhaber. It's been a long time since Republicans have been in the governor's seat in this state, and I'm afraid of what it will do to things like those administering our new "vote by mail" system, etc. too if Dudley were given the keys to the governor's mansion.

[elleng]

37. Its about the MONEY, now in rover's hands. Don't think much analysis req'd.

[jannyk]

38. Correction: It was not just 'some' Blue Dogs

but fully HALF of the Blue Dogs got creamed.

[MineralMan]

39. Hmm...half is some.

Some of the Dems who lost were also first-termers, who got there in Red states in the Obama wave. That many of those lost in 2010 is no big surprise. That they are on the conservative end of the Democratic spectrum is also no surprise, given where they were elected. Again, it's not that simple.

[BootinUp]

41. There was definitely blood-letting on the progressive side as well

Tom Perriello
Carol Shea-Porter
Mary Jo Kilroy
John Hall

not to mention Grayson and Feingold.

[MineralMan]

50. Right. Both ends of the Democratic Party lost races.

That's what I'm getting at here. It's not just a political position issue. There's something else at work, so we need to identify that and not dwell on our political differences within the party. We have two years. If we play our cards right, and the economy doesn't recover enough in that period, we should be able to reverse this thing in 2012. At least I hope so.

[Gold Metal Flake]

42. We need more painless filibusters and key fobs.

Oh, and more war. That will help.

[Faryn Balyncd]

45. We have allowed the RW propaganda machine to equate progressivism with Rahm's corporatism.....

Large proportions of their brainwashed listeners think healthcare legislation that mandates that Americans purchase corporate insurance at unaffordable prices with no public option is "SOCIALISM"...

And that bailout of corrupt corporations is what we get when we elect "progressives".

We have allowed 24/7 RW propaganda to defile the English language and re-define the issues.

In doing so, we have forced progressives like Feingold and Grayson to run under a tainted banner not of their making.

Yes, there are complexities.

But you seem to imply that those of us who think we should not try to pass off fatally compromised legislation as "reform" are saying simply that "we aren't far enough left". (As if opposition to corporate cronyism is a something that has no appeal to the great majority of Americans.)

And you also seem to imply that the defeat of progressives like Feingold and Grayson (who ran in an environment in which bad corporatist legislation produced by Rahm & Max had been successfully portrayed as "progressive" or even "socialistic") is a repudiation of progressives and true progressivism.






Who is being simple-minded here?

[TwilightGardener]

47. It's hard to make sense of scattered races and results--I'm not sure

how much of the results are due to national or regional anger over the economy or any number of issues, or whether it's local factors, personalities, money spent, the incumbents' legislative achievements, etc. No clear pattern. Edit to add: that won't stop DUers from interpreting the results according to their own pre-set agendas, however.

[TBF]

49. You're right that it's the economy -

voters wanted change in 2008. Wars, unemployment, foreclosures, etc...

I think many of us missed the ball by focusing on health care (and fighting over incremental vs. public option). Job one should have been the economy with a major jobs program. Improve the economy and then move on to other issues.

I don't think people want more conservative policies, I think they simply voted their pocket books. They are out of work, or worried about their jobs, so they voted for the other side as a protest.

[Scurrilous]

51. K & R

:thumbsup:

[seabeyond]

52. exactly my point with the thread on the two. nt

[MineralMan]

53. Well, if you stand back and take a wide look at the situation,

it seems pretty clear that it wasn't either wing of the party that got hurt, so it's hard to lay blame on that side of things. For me, that just leaves the economy as the principal factor.

[seabeyond]

54. also if you look at demographics, there are areas that didnt have "issue" with obama progressive

or incumbent and voted them back in. so was not a national tidal wave

[MineralMan]

55. That's true, too. In my districts, the progressive candidates

won handily, as I expected they would. And by large margins. The DFL-endorsed candidates won, virtually across the board. We even won the Sheriff's race, replacing a long term incumbent. My congresswoman, Betty McCollum, a genuine solid progressive, won with almost two-thirds of the vote.

Blue dogs lost in many areas, but they lost because they were Democrats in conservative districts. Most were marginal already, and the "wave" just washed over them. Where they are is why they were Blue Dogs. That's the only kind of Democrat who could win there. Now, they're gone.

Feingold and other progressives lost because their constituencies simply no longer supported their positions. It's hard to be a progressive these days and get elected. People are voting their pocketbooks, not their ethical values. Tough times.

[seabeyond]

56. reason.... nt