If you're thinking of voting third party this fall, please reconsider.

[Ken Burch]

43. OK, but the responsibility to prevent non-voting goes both ways:

Obviously, you're not always going to get what you want(nobody expects to instantly get everything), but there are more effective ways to help people want to stay in the game than the way we usually handle it as a party...the activists get stopped and disregarded, and they get told "you HAVE to vote for us anyway".

How about finding ways to say "we didn't do what you wanted this time, but if you stay with us, we will NEXT time"? or "After this election, we will listen to your ideas, treat them with respect immediately put you to work using those ideas to registering new to improve our showing next time, because you matter to us and winning matters to us and we can't win without you"?

How about, when legislation gets badly watered-down(like the healthcare bill)or abandoned(like card-check for unions), using that to spur people to fight for making things better, telling them "now, you can get to work and organize public support and effective electoral efforts so we can pass what you wanted this time in the NEXT Congress". Taking that attitude(rather than just screaming "you should have voted&quot would have made a massive difference in 2010-as would NOT conceding defeat in 2010 in the middle of August and NOT running national ads defending the programs Obama passed and featuring people who had benefited from those programs-and would make a massive difference in all future midterms especially. Winning midterms is about firing up the activists to activate the base...that is the ONLY thing that works. We can't win midterms if the party doesn't try to keep people stoked.

Finally, how about NOT treating activists, especially young activists, as if they owe it to us to shut up and know their place? Maybe actually listening to them and treating their ideas with respect, even if we can't always get everything they want done? It's not as though there was anything the Obama activists wanted in 2008(or the Sanders activists wanted and still want in 2016)that would harm anyone else in this party or would have been in any significant way unpopular.

I don't care what you think about me...I'm in for the long-haul...but it looks as if a lot of the people who run this party still care more about being the ones in charge than about things like expanding this party and making it more vibrant and more electable at all levels.
We are always going to lose if we look like a party of jaded middle-aged insiders who keep talking about "you meddling kids" like we're the unmasked villain at the end of every episode of "Scooby Doo".

Idealism and activism are not the enemy. The young are not the enemy. Change isn't the enemy. We need the demanding and the unsatisfied in our party. Having high standards and having people who care about those standards are the only things that make political work worthwhile.