It has been remarkably effective to find a niche wedge issue and drive it to the forefront.
Abortion, guns, big city crime, religion…the practical impact these issues have on most people’s daily lives is dwarfed by economic policy but it hits the emotional nerve centers and has a crisp message.
And that’s how you get people voting against their best interests time and time again
One of the interesting takeaways was about dating compatibility (they are a dating site after all). They found that republicans tended to pair well with other republicans, more than any other group paired with itself, and far better than democrats paired with other democrats.
https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-democrats-are-doomed-or-how-...
Any time the other party comes to power, they are unable to make significant change or headway - and the Republicans are proven right.
The Dems are by default the party of Governance so unless they too get on board with gutting institutions, and removing safety nets, they will always be stuck with this weak hand.
The Republican strategies (all of which are publicly discussed in various news articles over the years) do not need to manage a big tent, because even when out of power, they simply need to ensure governance is ineffective.
And given their near mind control via Fox and their content economy - they can even blame the opposition for problems when they are in power.
A Democratic party that was serious about winning elections would turn sharply left, get new candidates, and start the long process of selling voters on things that they can feel some romance in: ending suffering, universal childcare, universal healthcare, good union jobs, a struggle to take back our country from the money interests. Imagining a future where we aren't all climate refugees in Northern Canada.
Unfortunately, the Democratic party is not serious about winning elections. They keep their fossilized leadership in place while their mental capacity deteriorates until it's simply no longer tenable to pretend that they are capable of governing. Younger candidates are considered a success if they can successfully fundraise, even it they can't actually win the elections that they're fundraising for. In every instance, party operators are out for themselves rather than trying to win and deliver material benefits to voters. Republicans at least win (barely, and usually with some extreme gerrymandering), even if they can't deliver materially.
The only alternative I can see right now is a return to the Old Left playbook: a confrontational labor movement. Maybe there are other alternatives that will emerge but I've yet to see one as promising as just organizing your workplace.
This belief gives people a reason to expect that their protest is recognized, without doing significant harm to electoral outcomes.
This isn’t the ONLY problem here, theres reasons progressives feel disillusioned by the party, but the rule of power is that its must be grasped.
The Tea Party movement ate the Republican Party from the inside - they primaried politicians and used their Fox/Media economy well.
Sigh...
You can't mischaracterise a phrase and then say it's wrong. That isn't what it means.
Like, I'm an adult who never intends to have children, but I still support robust public education. I could make some arguments about how paying taxes for schools is somehow in my best interest. But the reality is I support public education because I think it's the right thing to do, not because I think it will personally benefit me.
The thing is, conservatives and Republican voters don't lean that way because they're just too stupid to vote for Democrats. It's because they have a different moral framework. And that's something that can be hard to reconcile and address. Changing someone's political views requires changing their entire worldview, which is incredibly difficult.
Robust public education would have gone a long way toward preventing the disaster currently unfolding. The very fact that Trump is aggressively gutting every part of the government that once supported education and science is (indirect) evidence of this.
An educated populace makes better decisions, and requires me to spend less time standing out there with a sign stating the painfully obvious.
I blame Clinton and his “it’s the economy stupid” nonsense people believed.
It appears that they have (finally!) removed that stupid page but it's still linked-to (https://democrats.org/who-we-are/) on their website. Here's a copy from June https://web.archive.org/web/20250615042752/https://democrats...
I am not on the list. My brother is not. My son is not. Most men I know are not. That's the entire problem with making a list; you can't help but exclude.
Do democrats support me and my interests? Have I been voting against my own interests by supporting a party who excludes me from their stated in-group?
You can find many articles pointing out problems with that page, which is probably why they finally took it down.
Electing Trump was a big FU to that attitude. The astonishing thing is that liberals are so cocksure of themselves that they have not yet figured out this simple truth and are still carrying on as if Trump were simply an anomaly rather than a predictable response to their own actions. The magnitude of the tone-deafness in the Democratic party is simply staggering. And I'm a Democrat, or at least I was until I realized how utterly incompetent they are.
[UPDATE] Ironically, the fact that this comment is being downvoted into oblivion actually demonstrates the very point I am making.
[UPDATE2] With regards to my saying that Democrats are incompetent, this is manifestly true at least with regards to 1) winning elections and 2) controlling Donald Trump. Maybe they are competent at other things, but that seems like a bit of a moot point to me under the present circumstances.
It is provable that, for example, having a strong emergency response infrastructure is in the best interests of the people of the United States, and especially in the best interests of, e.g., Floridians. Natural disasters happen, and having a strong, coordinated response to assist the victims of natural disasters is in society's best interests, even if individuals (generally wrongly) think that they are self-sufficient enough to handle that situation.
So what I'm saying is that while folks that are "voting against their best interests" may on an individual level have decided that their best interests are different from the best interests of their neighborhood/region/state/country, it doesn't make them <i>right</i>.
A rural voter voting for candidates who will enact policies that will close the only hospital within 100+ miles of where they live is, by definition, voting against their own best interests, as it is in their best interests to have access to that hospital when it becomes necessary, as it could literally be a matter of life or death. Those voters opinions of what might be in their own best interests don't actually matter in terms of determining their best interests, but it matters a lot in terms of getting them to vote against their own best interests.
What Democrats are incompetent at is coming up with messaging that stands a chance of being more convincing than the blatant lies and propaganda of the modern Conservative media machine.
This is the fundamentally patrician attitude that is killing the democratic party, and it should
Again, it is stating a fact. It is not in those voters best interests to vote for politicians whose stated goal is policy that will cause that hospital to close.
There is nothing derogatory or "patrician" in that. It is a cold, hard fact. Politics are politics, and facts are facts. That people choose to go with feelings and reject facts is beside the point. Their feelings do not determine their best interests.
But we also have a long history of using regulations and other inducements to get people to act in their own best interests. The current regime has just decided that it will act in the best interests of monied interests, to the detriment of a large swath of the people who voted for them.
Now, if you want a liberal, "patrician" attitude, here's one: Fuck 'em. They voted for politicians who openly told them they were going to do things that would be absolutely horrifically bad for them. Let them deal with the consequences and feel morally superior because they've "owned the libs," or whatever other BS helps them sleep at night as their poor, mostly rural communities fall apart around them. Do I think it will get them to vote for politicians who have their best interests in mind? Absolutely not, at least not at a scale necessary to change elections results.
I spend a fair amount of my time in rural America. It's not pretty, and it really doesn't matter if it's a red state or a blue state, rural America is hell bent on its own destruction. It's a shame, but apparently, it's what they want. So let 'em have it.
Let me state again, and plainly: What a person thinks is in their best interests, and what is actually in their best interests are two completely different things.
But you did a great job of boiling down the typical Trump/Republican voter's ethos: "Is it cutting off your nose to spite your face? Probably, but after years of someone looking down that nose at me I might be tempted to cut it off as well and damn the consequences."
This is what we are dealing with in the United States at this point: Stupid people that are pissed off that they're not allowed to be stupid and through their own stupidity endanger the lives of the responsible adults in society.
"That's the patrician attitude, the idea that the vast majority of the population is too stupid to make decisions for themselves with the ipso facto evidence being that they don't want the same things that the patrician does."
Well, when an ever-growing portion of the population is proving that out, maybe the stupid people are the problem. Case in point: anti-vax attitudes, we're having measles outbreaks because stupid people refuse to vaccinate themselves and their children.
Your entire argument in this post seems to be that "Democrats did a bad job of keeping their promises, so I'm going to vote for stupidity, even if it hurts me."
This is such a tired refrain. As a libertarian who was telling my aghast friends in 2016 that Trump was really speaking to people's frustrations and likely to win (thus you know, demonstrating that I at least understand many of those concerns, if not outright share them), this still doesn't explain it. For the most part Trump's policies do nothing to effect his (non-financier) supporters' professed interests, yet they keep lapping it up and coming back for more.
Perhaps with my libertarian biases, I could still be putting too much emphasis on the economic and liberty-based complaints rather than the contingent that wants to criminalize healthcare, put a handful of unlucky brown people in concentration camps, and other negative-sum social policies. But it still really doesn't feel that is where the broad support is coming from in the first place.
Ultimately from where I'm sitting, the responsibility for the communications breakdown mainly rests on Trump supporters for seemingly making "owning the libs" into their primary KPI. The Democratic party certainly has a similar "rabid" dynamic with regards to social justice / diversity, but that's a much narrower contingent (vocal, but still only a slice of policy) whereas for the Republicans it has broadly taken over the entire party platform.
Trump isn't a disease, he's a symptom. He's an emergent property of a system that has been hilariously blatant about the fact that it doesn't value the people it needs to to continue functioning. Trump fits in a hole the government left in the hearts of the American people when it decided that its primary operating principle is "give the voters just enough to get them to put us in power give everything else to the donors and then buy stock in their companies". Doubly so because the lesson the Dems learned from Obama was that they can exploit identity politics to give the populace a symbolic victory and then govern in a way that directly transfers wealth from their voters to the donor class. Since 2008 the Democratic primary has been a game of "Who will you accept neoliberal market worship from?" An african american man (08, 12), a woman (16), your choice of an old white man, a mixed race woman or a gay man (20), the same mixed race woman from 20 who flat out told us when asked if there was anything she would do differently than the historically-unpopular old white man said "Not a thing that comes to mind" (24). They're the Pizza Party, the manager at work who has been given the impossible task of trying to buck up a completely demoralized staff while not being permitted to offer them anything of substance. The neoliberal wing of the Democratic party has been feasting on the seed corn since 1992 and can't figure out why the fields are empty and their serfs are angry.
Their response to Trump has been internally contradictory to a delightful degree as well. In 2015 HRC specifically instructed Dem-aligned media to elevate Trump's campaign with the theory that he would frighten people so badly that they'd vote for her without her having to offer anything substantial to voters. You'll remember the focus of the campaign was threefold: she's a woman and it would be neat to have a woman president, she's qualified, it's her turn. More of the same policies that pissed everyone off, very little in the way of material support that actually makes the average person's day to day life better, a lot of scolding people for not already being on the Dem side rather than figuring out what it would take to get them on the Dem side ("basket of deplorables") and generally treating voters as a resource that needs to be managed and then exploited for maximum value rather than as the people that you as an elected official serve.
To me, the defining feature of the modern Democratic party is their self-assurance that Trump is an idiot combined with a complete unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that that idiot just keeps kicking their asses. If your opponent is weak but consistently puts you on your back what does that make you?
- from California
If it turns out that Obama is in the Epstein files, my friends won't have to get rid of their Obama hat, or their Obama sneakers, or their Obama cologne, or their Obama watch, or their Obama bible, or take down their Obama flag, or delete their Obama NFT trading cards.
Both parties are alien and hostile to me, but for very different reasons.
The people who have the most success in terms of engagement against Anti-Vaxxers are not the pro-vax or normal people. Its the Anti-anti-vaxxers
The vibe of being able to fight for a moderate position, extremely - is what is currently working in debates.
Being treated like a worthy adversary, or being beaten by someone they can respect is one of the avenues is likely going to succeed more.
(Unfortunately this will not happen. Because two things will have to be split: national debt and the nuclear arsenal. Heavy Sigh…)
I wish all y’all would just own up to the fact you hate each other for a million different reasons and can’t play nice together.
Speaking to you as a progressive here I wish we had more viable parties.
You’ve not seen an “in the house we believe” yard sign?
It goes both ways.
Tribalism coming to the Dems is taking FAR too long. People recognize that tribalism is working for the Republicans, so it’s natural that they are going to eventually imitated the winning strategy.
Seriously, I can’t believe it took this many decades for it to happen, and only after Trump made its efficacy blindingly obvious.
PS: Tribalism is not good for the overall health of a polity. Its just that people imitate whatever strategies appear to work.
We’d be much better off if we can judge those ideas and sort the bad from good, rather than who they come from.
- They're in favor of giving asylum to those who really deserve it (yeah, I'm sweeping a huge amount under the rug of the word "deserve"), but they're not in favor of "open borders" or large numbers of people coming here not through the legal process.
- They're in favor of equal opportunity and helping those who are downtrodden, but not in favor of "white guilt" or hiring/admission quotas.
- They're in favor of giving someone a break, but not in favor of giving criminals an infinite number of breaks (whether violent criminals or just shoplifters).
When the Democrats won in 2020, they took that victory as an endorsement of everything they believed in. It wasn't. It was a declaration that we didn't believe in where Trump wanted to take us.
When the Republicans won in 2024, they took it as an endorsement of everything Trump stood for, and everything he will decide to stand for in the future. It wasn't. It was a vote against the Democrats implementing everything they wanted to over the last four years.
In fact, it's not just the Republicans who make that mistake. I keep reading "you voted for this". Well, not exactly - there are a bunch of people who voted against open borders, but did not vote for militarized thugs grabbing people off the street based on skin color. (Yes, I know, their vote enabled that. My point is that their intent was not that at all, but only to vote against an open border.)
The bulk of the population doesn't want the Democratic platform or the Republican platform. They want some kind of sanity, avoiding the extremes of both sides.
(You say that the Republicans only have extremes? Not so. They also have "stop doing what the Democrats are doing". In some cases, that's not a bad idea.)
There is not a single national-level Democratic politician who advocates for open borders. If there is, please tell us who.
The feeling of an open border is due to a confluence of our asylum laws, the Constitution, and a surge in relative desirability of the United States vis-a-vis the rest of the world. The President cannot directly change any of these factors.
The reason it feels like some of that has changed is because we have a President who is flouting our asylum laws [1] and the Constitution [2], having the net effect of making our country less relatively desirable [3]
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-limits-trump-asylum-crack...
[2]: https://www.gwlr.org/kilmar-abrego-garcia/
[3]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/american-dream-migration-us-slows-...
In any case, did you identify any good GOP policy ideas here?
I grew up in a Dem household but I don't vote dem because my parents did or because I'm a party member (I'm not), it's because the lesser of the two evils is almost always the blue side.
And this was before the GOP literally became a cult. Now it's not even a choice.
What I am asserting is that it would be better if we were able to judge ideas based on the merit of the idea rather than who it comes from. That is, in my experience, not happening and the electorate for both dem and rep are guilty of this behavior.
But as today's GOP is the Party of Trump™, and they now vote in lockstep, it's a simple "nopes".
I abhor partisan politics -- Washington warned us against them at the beginning and he was right.
There it is... everytime, like clockwork, the false equivalence.
But I’m talking about the electorate who, in both cases, largely do not seem to evaluate the strength of ideas or policies, but, in many examples I can cite, judge ideas based on who it comes from.
I don't want to be rude, but I don't believe you. I also have seen the polling and the country does not believe it as a whole. Democratic voters also don't believe it either. If you personally have an income >150K you are likely completely insulated from real Americans. The perception is that the Democrats care more about Israel and their donors than the country. Only 8 percent of Democrats are supportive of Israel but almost 90% of Dem senators are (I made this number up, the rest are real).
edit: the Republicans are publicly grifting, lest you think I like the Republicans. My overarching point is that ~60% of American's don't own homes and are completely uninvested in this country. They have completely given up, or are in a state of giving up. The Republicans and Democrats are extremely vile reptilian grifters who sold out this country.
There were great campaign finance laws on the books, but Republican-appointed judges have steadily eroded those over the years, culminating in Citizens United. We have to overrule that awful case if we are to ever have working campaign finance laws in this country again. There's only one way to overrule that case, and that's with Democrat-appointed judges. Those judges typically do not answer to donors and so don't have the same incentives you've identified.
I really don't think that the Democratic establishment as we know it has much time to live. Democratic voters are not interested in the center-right. They want to go left. Candidates that move things to the left do well without expensive campaigns.
For the majority of the problems I see that I believe the government should be addressing, one side says "that's not a real problem" and the other side offers a really bad solution that they also won't realistically be able to make law.
Could it be that there’s simply bigger news?
… Oh wait. They didn’t? Huh, I wonder where the disconnect is. I guess no lobbyist wrote a check to remove that from the Government.
2. The current media is incentivized to collect ad revenue. Currently, the best known scheme is to outrage or scare readers so they keep refreshing the page. So, in that respect, the current media is doing great business.
Liberal policy in the US since Clinton has failed to deal with this, focusing instead on absolute prosperity (GDP per-capita). And progressive policy has been ineffective since they promise equality, including with minorities.
Eg: https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi...
If there was also a free flow available, why would the government need to build an alternative?
[0]: https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/01/ftc-finds-t...
It's also weird that we have to file taxes at all. Other developed countries have their revenue agencies automatically calculate the taxes for you and send a return. The only reason we don't is because of Intuit and H&R Block lobbying like crazy to prevent this. It's rent seeking at it's worse
The number of people their "free" products actually serve dropped drastically a couple years ago. They will upsell or dark pattern you to paying for it as best and as deeply as they can.
This was an interesting read on the subject: https://chrisgiven.com/2025/07/the-things-that-cannot-be-cha...
It is working "for" the people who have (perceived?) grievances against others, and are enacting pain on those Others.
People are happy to screw themselves if they screw Others (even more):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness
The cruelty towards Others is the point (regardless what you, yourself, get hit with):
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
I'm 55. At no point in my life has the GOP pushed any policy initiative that would help regular humans. Instead, they've been the party of fearmongering -- about women, about drugs, about immigrants, about African Americans, about gay people, and the devil, about trans people, etc.
The Dems have been the party that advanced actual helpful policies, but holy crap do they ever have a messaging problem IN ADDITION to an effectiveness issue. But at least their marching orders are actually helpful.
Calling back to a time before the middle-aged GP could even tie his own shoes is not really much of an argument.
You're overstating the case a bit. Nixon and Ford were not bad for most people. Nixon's motives might have been extremely self-serving on domestic issues - but he was re-elected in '72, amid the Vietnam War and many other troubles, with 60.7% of the popular vote. Take a peek at his domestic policies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Domestic_policy He didn't need Watergate, nor any other dirtywork to easily win the election - he just couldn't keep himself from scratching his Paranoid Creepy Idiot itch.
Yes, after Ford, the GOP was taken over by a team-up of "Conquer, Loot, and Pillage" fiscal conservatives, and "Dump Jesus and Jimmy, 'Cause Our Rightful Kingdom is of This World" religious conservatives.
Flip-side, I don't see the Dems nearly so favorably. In the Carter-ish years they phased out most of their historic concern for ordinary Americans. In favor of hanging out with rich & slimy, and performative concern for ever-smaller minorities.
I supposed my opinion may be colored by the fact that I have friends who can afford to be alive today because of the ACA, so...
"Well, the masses must not be stupid, as restricted-franchise and anti-democratic folks have suggested, because this seems to kinda work. Let's study voter behavior to learn more about this."
to
"Uh. OK so we checked a hundred different ways, several times each to be sure, and they're in-fact incredibly poorly informed and have awful reasoning skills and their behavior, in aggregate, isn't driven by what we might hope it is at all. But, uh... I really want there to be a good outcome here, so, um, let's make some fuzzy guesses at how some kind of Wisdom of Crowds thingy and some sort of system-equilibria-seeking effects might save us? And let's keep double-checking those studies that kept proving voters are really dumb, because maybe... maybe we got something wrong?"
to
"Yeah all that was bullshit cope on our parts, it's all wrong. It's amazing this works at all. Voters are amazingly stupid, to a degree that's so hard to believe we spent decades and decades making sure—like it's proven about as surely as is the law of universal gravitation; cannot practically be educated out of that, maybe at all, and especially not if we first have to get them to vote to make that happen; and everything's basically held together by noise and circumstance and social norms, until it isn't. Go ahead and make that whisky a double. And line up another."
If one mistakes the kayfabe for genuine, an awful lot of observed behavior and outcomes remain confusing... the science is there if anyone wants it (reading lists for relevant courses are widely available, journals are not that hard to come by, or just grab Democracy for Realists and follow up with reading criticism of it and checking its sources) and at least the basic fact that very few voters think or behave remotely like anyone hoping for a well-informed, rational, and empathetic electorate might hope, is depressingly solid.
This is understood by everybody operating at a level of importance in media and politics, so a bunch of what they do (and its efficacy) will also be confusing if one disregards it. Even when they talk about how they believe in the voters, and blah blah—that's part of the kayfabe, that's a marketing message, they 100% don't believe that because not only is it definitely not true, you also lose elections (or viewership, or whatever) more often if you act like (not say—act like) it's true. It's not a lie they can afford to hold on to past the lowest levels of their professions, as they'll be concretely punished for the gap between their belief and reality and replaced by others who get it.
It helps to stop assuming people want what they say they want and start assuming that they want the predictable effects of their actions, then try to figure out what benefits those actions have or desires those effects may fulfill. When the group does something that's against your principles or best interests, there's an implicit question: do you value being part of the group more than you value this thing that we're transgressing against? When you look at it in this lens all sorts of behaviors start to make sense.
Also the reason to get rid of free tax filing is to exploit the American people, not just to hurt them for its own sake. Tell them they have to do something, make it as convoluted as possible, then sell a service that does it for them. It absolutely does hurt them, but that's not the driving force behind the effort.
I wonder if people actually know how much of their income is taxed away?
federal tax, state tax, local tax, property tax, sales tax, gas tax...
I wonder how much we actually get to keep, and I wonder how many people are aware of it both now and historically?
It's all about "owning the libs" by any means necessary. Nothing more, nothing less.
And its like... how do you really believe that? Like yeah both parties have the same corruption but welcome to politics.
So at this point I am convinced it is willful ignorance on both sides (or ulterior motives when I see certain left leaning people STILL bring up Biden or Harris in relation to trump as if either of them matter anymore in the slightest given our current situation, at this point I don't care what Biden did or did not do). Seeing something that goes against their views of "this side is bad" and just trying to talk it away as some "abuse of government power" or something to justify why it should not have been a thing in the first place while ignoring its real benefits.
Very complicated.
I’ve heard it described as “I know I’m being robbed, but I was already being robbed. I know this is a poor environmental choice, but the dems acted like we’re all children, thinking we have no choice but to support them. When they try to force through new social norms like they’ve been doing, it doesn’t even feel like my country anymore.”
I have to agree, they definitely encouraged the attitude of “either you agree with this new thing or you’re a Nazi”. Well, they certainly found out.
Of course this backlash is so bad it’s going to trigger another.
Positioning this as a program from the previous admin (therefore bad).
Positioning this as a win for privatization (therefore good).
And people not willing to look at politics as something beyond a sport.
Quite frankly, I believe both parties are pretty foul, and people should be looking outside of them for policy positions that actually help people, but I suppose that makes me naive or whatever.
No, that’s not plausible.
The article suggests Trump wanted to help tax software companies, but that overlooks the fact that Trumps previous increase to the standard deduction greatly simplified taxes for many filers. So that’s probably not it, either.
Trump is hell bent on raising taxes via tariffs, so it doesn’t seem likely that personal income taxes are a big part of whatever he’s planning.
Personally, I wish the government would start sending a bill, not putting the onus on the filer to make the calculation. That seems most sensible to me.
anymore?
Are you implying that the GOP would have been for a free Direct File in years prior?
They wouldn't have.
This is not a new stance. I'm not sure why anyone in the Republican party would be shocked by this news, or why it would change their opinions.
This is similar to the Republican party doing something anti-abortion, and then Liberals being shocked, and saying, "You guys are really still going to vote for these people?"
Yeah, it's what they expected.
Look at the Eisenhower campaign planks. A pro-union, pro-minimum wage Republican party isn't just possible, they did it and they won on it.
Is today the last 20+ years?
If you go back far enough, the democrats and republicans are completely unrecognizable, and anybody who would recognize them is long dead...
Also, don't expect them to do anything that benefits anyone other than their billionaire cronies.