Welp, folks, now that the right to abortion and the entire right to privacy may be about to be demolished, it’s past time to realise that we need our candidates to win the popular vote over and over again in races big, small, and in between. Before we have Huge numbers of deaths of pregnant women — a number that is already too big. Not to mention the other shenanigans the right wing will get up to if abortion prohibition stands.
So how do we increase the chances that we win the popular vote? I was relistening to Evita and this part stuck with me:
Don’t cry for me Argentina, for I am ordinary, unimportant,
and undeserving of such attention unless we all are.I think we all are.
This is how we win: Every vote is important. No one is ignored. We create ads that appeal to everyone or at least most, we volunteer to talk door-to-door or with other communications (T shirts? Bumper stickers?). We reach out to those who voted GOP because of other priorities, those who didn’t vote (nonvoters were the biggest “voting” bloc), everyone. We try to reach everyone, and we will reach enough to flip the narrative and the numbers.
There are several issues that we can fight for, that have been mischaracterised by the GOP. Of course abortion is one. Here’s another one: “Tough on crime”:
The GOP is trying to make inroads on urban and suburban voters with “crime” rhetoric, with more success than you might think, www.usnews.com/…
Is the GOP really more law and order then the Democrats? www.washingtonpost.com/…
Republicans used to be the party of “law and order,” denouncing Democrats for being weak on crime. They now demonstrate on a near-daily basis their indifference to law enforcement and contempt for those who enforce laws against their political allies.
-snip-
Unlike Democrats who demand harassers be held accountable regardless of party, Republicans’ ire is reserved for accused Democrats only. Moreover, the right-wing now assumes that the president should micromanage the Justice Department, as the former president did to ensnare designated targets.
-snip-
Law and order. Respect for the police. Reverence for the impartial administration of justice. Enforcement of the law against the rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless. These are the attributes of a constitutional democracy. That’s not what Republicans want these days.
And from Salon, www.salon.com/…
Whatever happened to the Republicans as the “party of law and order”? True, Richard Nixon, who first branded the party that way, was lying when he famously said, “I am not a crook.” Both Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal rank among the most notorious examples of executive branch lawlessness in our nation’s history. But through it all, the narrative commitment to the brand never wavered. It was a source of moral and political strength, always to be contrasted with “soft on crime” Democrats, however contrary the front-page facts might be.
-snip-
In turn, dramatically increased polarization is a predicted result of historical trends described by structural demographic theory (SDT), which I wrote about previously in October 2016, reviewing “Ages of Discord,” an analysis of American history by evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin. SDT identifies three underlying factors contributing to increased levels of political instability: mass immiseration (stagnant or falling wages, worsening health, declining well-being), elite overproduction (increased competition for wealth and power), and fiscal distress (a product of both public debt and trust in public institutions).
-snip-
In short, the lawlessness at the top of the GOP isn’t new — just vastly more blatant than it was during Watergate. But the infrastructure supporting, defending and excusing it is dramatically more powerful and robust, and the authoritarian mass base is much more consolidated within their voter base.
So let’s consider increasing our margins in the suburbs this fall by talking about who is really concerned about crime — in addition to medical safety and privacy, currently at high risk. They might be reachable on these issues if we can prove that our party is more likely to protect them.