Sorry for the delayed response. Melbourne cup holiday and all of that.
Anyone proposing this in the US system is either naive, talking about a very specific set of seats, or a republican. The US system is first past the post, not the Australian preferential voting. Voting for anyone other than one of the two major parties is a vote for the opposition. You vote Green/Independent, you’re giving the Republicans your vote.
The two exceptions are the primaries (where go for it) and a seat which is safe left, and the only decision is which left candidate will win. Everywhere else, you’re splitting the vote which helps the other side of politics.
Sure things could be improved. But you have to remember that most of the things Democrats really want are major changes. That requires a filibuster proof senate majority. The reality is that most of the time what the Dems can pass is much more limited.
It also hurts that the Republicans vote far more in line. Whereas Democrats have traditionally acted more independently, which means getting the outliers to vote is harder. People forget that the ACA was passed with no room to spare, with Kennedy leaving his death bed to vote.
I posted an article above talking about how much harder it is for Dems to message well, fundamentally because the Right owns a big chunk of the media and is willing (and allowed) to lie, while the rest of the media is so concerned with appearing unbiased, they give both sides equal weight and time - even when one side is not necessarily playing fair and isn’t equivalent.
An example would be the wall to wall airtime given to Hillary’s emails, whereas similar indiscretions in the Trump whitehouse get a few articles here and there.
If I misunderstood you that the two are the same, my apologies. But to say the Dems are no friends of the people, while advocating a strategy that strengthens Republicans (voting Green/Independent) smacks of implying Dems are no better than Republicans. Your further comments show you really are for worker rights, which means in my mind your proposal to vote Green/Independent and essentially vote Republican is, IMO, crazy.
The Dems are not perfect. But they’ve been far greater friends to the people of America than the alternatives, and my list above shows that their policy positions are ones that will help many Americans.
Can you provide some other evidence of the people being shat on by Dems other than the bankers getting off? What exactly was the illegal thing the bankers did? They clearly made major mistakes, but that doens’t automatically mean they did anything illegal. You do know that TARP was passed under Bush, right? The bail out of the car industry was directly aimed at saving US jobs, should that not have happened either?
The ACA had plenty of cost controls, they just didn’t get the fanfare. Or you think it was coincidence that rates rose the lowest in decades under Obama? The ACA also had a huge expansion of medicare, which directly helps the poor. To argue the cost has skyrocketed, while ignoring costs increased the least under Obama, is either ignorance or misrepresenting the impacts of the ACA.
Obama did his best to keep out of the wars, reducing the commitment to Iraq and Afghanistan. To say he expanded the wars seems pretty disingenuous. The tax cuts were during a period they needed whatever stimulus they could for the economy, and the Republicans were tying their hands.
The 16 Democratic senators voting that way is disappointing. But the reality is that the US isn’t particularly left leaning, and far more Republicans voted for it, and more Dems voted against it than 16.
You seem to be ignorant that the bank bailout, TARP, was passed under Bush. Not Obama. His administration merely managed it.
You also seem to be blaming Obama for doing things the left wanted. In 2008, the left wanted him to be bipartisan. We were all a bit more naive back then and actually thought that the Republicans wanted to manage well, rather than rule at all costs. Obama did exactly what he promised in the campaign, and tried to build bridges. He also had the worst recession since the Great Depression to manage.
The result of that was that they spent 6-9 months trying to build a consensus across industry and the political parties, to get a bipartisan result. Which, if they’d achieved, would have been fantastic since we only need to see how much the right have used the ACA as a punching bag since, despite it being a Right plan. The political reality is that the Republicans strung them along, then wouldn’t support anything, and the Dems in right leaning states who had to vote, pushed for a more right leaning plan. What the US got was what was practically possible.
In hindsight, it would have been much better for Obama to negotiate initially with those right leaning Dems, and scrap the rest of the long process. But that’s hindsight talking, and as I mentioned the left wanted Obama to be bipartisan in 2008.
Its also very disingenuous to imply the Dems had a supermajority for long. Between the delays in sitting the senate, and then Kennedy dying, they actually had a very narrow window to pass anything. What they did with that window was pass the largest expansion of healthcare in the US for over 50 years.
Obama lost the house in 2020 because he was black, because the US was going through the worst recession since the Great Depression, because the Dems are usually pathetic at mid-term turn-out, and because the Republicans spent 18 months demonising the ACA, despite the fact it improved the lives of millions of their constituents.
You seem to have this view that Obama could do things that weren’t actually possible. There were practical limitations on what he could get through the Senate.
You also seem to again have ignored that the ACA had some of the most price suppressing impact for decades on the rate of health insurance increases.
It is interesting to see the differences between CNN and NYT regarding numbers for the house. Do they use different data to provide updated margins or are they just using best guess?
There are certain obstacles. For instance, and granted this one is used a bit, there are 60 times more voters in California than Wyoming but both deliver two Senate reps iirc. Now if they could get Wyoming people to vote blue…
It’s still sizeable - current prediction is a dem win by 9.2%, the second-biggest popular vote margin in the past 25 years, only trailing 2008.
Of course, popular vote % is of secondary importance - a lot of repubs are holding on cos of ruthless gerrymandering and voter suppression etc. In Georgia, for instance, the repub candidate for governor actually holds office overseeing the elections - he is supervising the integrity of his own vote count. And North Carolina has actually been ordered to redraw its electoral boundaries byy the supreme court, in order to eliminate an unconstitutional Republican gerrymander, but the new court (with Kavanaugh and Gorrsuch) ruled there wasn’t time to do this before the election, so today’s vote is being held with unconstitutional boundaries. But the dems getting their noses in front is critical when it comes to winding that stuff back when districts are redistributed in 2020.