20% of eligible voters can't be reached by the Dem. Party w/out abandoning the Dem. Party base.

[Garrett78]

I'm not sure why some object so strongly to the notion that 20-25% of eligible voters can't be reached by the Democratic Party without the Democratic Party abandoning its base. That seems like a pretty obvious point. Someone posted an article from the Rude Pundit that makes that point. It's made in a less colorful way in this piece: "On Rural America: Understanding Isn't The Problem."

Trump didn't put forth any substantive policy positions, and I don't think many of his supporters were sitting around having nuanced discussions about trade or any other issue. If trade was such an important issue, Rob Portman wouldn't have kicked Ted Strickland's ass in Ohio. And the median income of Trump supporters is substantially higher than the median income of Clinton supporters.

No Democratic candidate for president has won the white vote since LBJ, and that's not because Republicans are the party of sound economic policy.

Of course Democrats need to do a better job of messaging, of making it clear that progressive politics is key to improving economic conditions.

Of course Democrats need to do a better job of GOTV, fighting voter suppression, combating gerrymandering, and attempting to reach those who don't ever vote. Even small improvements in those areas would pay huge dividends.

But the fact is racism, sexism, misogyny, heterosexism, xenophobia and Christian supremacy take precedence for tens of millions of voters. It's not that 100% of them are unreachable, but the time and effort necessary to undo the brainwashing is time and effort that can be spent in much more productive, efficient ways.

It'd be one thing if most people were working from a set of agreed-upon facts (which is even less the case in this age of 24/7 infotainment with media personalities who say it's not their job to fact check). There'd still be disagreement over causes for and appropriate responses to those facts. But millions of people flat out deny facts while subscribing to patently false beliefs. Presenting them with facts has a tendency to backfire, as studies have made clear. The false beliefs become more ingrained. That's true across the political spectrum, but it's a matter of scale. While most everyone will cling to at least some false beliefs, there are those who simply live in an alternate reality. If you want to dedicate time to pulling people out of that alternate reality, more power to you.

[dawg]

1. We need to nationalize state office elections in a major way.

States turn red at the local level first. Republican state legislatures draw up gerrymandered districts, throw up barriers to minority voters, close polling places, and generally make it more difficult for Democrats to win elections in their states.