I don't see how we can win the house, the Senate, the Pres, or the SCOTUS

[skjpm]

The Repubs. have a solid 270-280 votes in the electoral college, now that it is clear we will never win Florida. So no Pres. for awhile.

There are more red states than blue states, hence, they will always have more senators.

Redistricting has put Repubs. in more uncontested House seats than Dems., so no House.

And this means, they will control the SCOTUS.

I don't see any hope of ever making gains. We are in a Republican country for the next few generations.

[NJCher]

1. OK, well, we'll all just give up and accept it then

(is that what you came here to hear?)


Cher

[skjpm]

2. Or we can set realistic goals.

The red states aren't going to wake up and change. Therefore, we have set meaningful goals based on reality.

[Crunchy Frog]

3. If that's the case, then my realistic goal

Is to emigrate to a sane country as soon as it becomes feasible for me to do so.

Fuck this living in a one party theocracy!

[lovedems]

4. I disagree. Look at Colorado, they have a shifting democraphic and could

turn blue in 08. So could Ohio. So could Florida. New Hampshire turned blue this year.

Just look at the number of red states that are "barely red". Bush didn't win Iowa or New Mexico by a large margin.

Any number of those states can turn blue in the next 4 years.

[formernaderite]

13. Kerry didn't win Wisconsin or Michigan by large margins either....

...we need some number crunchers that do forcasting, migration trends just to keep the seats we have right now. I have no doubt that the right is looking closely at all democratic held seats in red states. We better get ready for 2006.

[unblock]

5. the key to redistricting is to first win control at the STATE level

they hold the key. any state that gets redistricted in 2010 will be redistricted by that state's legislature. plan now.

[skjpm]

6. Yes, we need to start small

State legislatures are important. We need to vote. We need to vote for mayors and councilmen. A lot of things which happen on a national level are decided by these smaller bodies. But we're not going to get anywhere with the big races until we build from below.

[fidgeting wildly]

7. Exactly.

We have got to start now, working on the state level. We can turn this thing around if we can pack our state legislatures with Dems in time for redistricting in or shortly after 2010. It's not really that far away, and we have a lot of work to do to get it done, but it can be done!

[formernaderite]

14. As much as I hate the right's redistricting.....I hate redistricting....

...it is a total power play and does not take the citizenry into account. Both the left and right have abused this power, and created a pessimistic voter base that doesn't even bother to vote in many cases.

[unblock]

15. not entirely true

redistricting is playing at the margin in a game that BROADLY, albeit not specifically, protects the citizenry.

everybody in the state winds up in one district or another, so everybody has exactly one representative. that's a pretty good start at fairness right there.

beyond that, the ability to gerrymander is limited by at least a few basic principals, among them the need to have contiguous districts and to avoid blatant discrimination (i'll admit that a partisan court system could selectively overlook this).

in a state as large as texas, gerrymandering only squeezed out 5 or 6 more seats for the republicans. while this is underdesireable, it does show the limits. republicans, even with the control they have over texas, could not completely eliminate democratic representation.


nobody finds gerrymandering tasteful, but it's a small price to pay for an otherwise pretty good system.


personally, i have advocated in the past, a number of alternative election protocols, such as, everyone votes from among ALL the candidates, in priority order, after which the top vote gettings (according to any of a number of schemes) become the representatives. the devil is in the details of the rules, but this could work very well.

it does, however, create the situation that any one citizen does not have a specfic person to point to as "my" representative.

[hughee99]

8. 25 Years ago we had most of this

We had the house, Senate, and Pres. The Repukes got control by starting at the state level in the early 70's. It took almost 25 years for them to get the house and senate. I don't think that we can expect to reverse this trend overnight either, I think we need to dig in and prepare for a long battle, rather than complain and make each loss to out to be "end of the world" senarios. I'm not saying that you're doing this, but I have seen a lot of it since last tuesday.

[skjpm]

9. I think we should focus on small goals instead of big ones

I just don't see the big things happening. But we should work for, and celebrate, each mayor, each state representative, each city council seat we win. That will set us up for larger goals.

[seabeyond]

10. now that it is clear we will never win Florida.....wtF

we have won it in 2000, 2004, and see what happened in 2002 with bushies being re elected.

these words are words bushco need the nation to say. it is a lie. why promote it, why even say it

[Catt03]

11. If Democrats can get it together

we have a great opportunity in 2006 to change the Senate and House, at least balance it.

Also, politically, Bush has about 1 year to 18 months to make all these changes he states he will do. Then he is a lame duck president. Senate and Representatives will be more concerned with their own political future rather than saving Bush's rear. My feeling is that Bush cannot go to the extreme right, religious fanatics and keep the electorate behind him. And the self centered Congress will not allow him to take them down.

This the time when politics is really local as the Democrats can cause a lot of damage to the current Republican majority in 2006. That is just two years and there is alot of work to do in that amount of time.

.

[Walt Starr]

12. If the Democrats are strategic, a lot of inroads can be made

We won't take anything back for a while, but we can pick up Senate seats in 2006 and retake the Senate in 2008 by being strategic about issues and using the correct language in the rhetoric.

We could make incredible inroads into Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. If you do just a cursory examination of the county data you'll see I'm right.

We need to be strategic on an extremely granular level, looking to plans based upon voting wards, not states and not groupings of states. Writing off an entire region of the naation was a fool's mission. It allowed the enemy to attack our weaknesses while protecting his strengths in the same overall battlefield.

Unfortunately, I believe everything that was wrong about the Democratic Party this election cycle will only be enhanced while the things that were done correctly will be ignored and we will go on to an even larger defeat in 2006 whereby we will no longer even have the power of the filibuster in the Senate, then we'll go on to lose every state except New York and D.C. in 2008 after the Hillary run.

There are two parties in this nation, the evil party and the stupid party. I am a proud member of the stupid party.

[PurityOfEssence]

16. Actually, the House is our best bet and our best strategy

They made less gains than were brought forth by the Texas redistricting; if that's the case, had they not pulled that off, they would have lost something like two seats. They won big in '94, lost in '96, '98, '00 and only won a very small margin in '02.

We should ruthlessly target vulnerable Congresspeople and tar them as pro-torture, pro-war, anti-worker, pro-rich and hammer them into the ground. Control of the House gives us the power to subpoena, set the agenda, impeach Scalia and all sorts of things.