If anything, from a min-maxing electability standpoint, now is when you curry favor with activist groups at the risk of spooking median voter, because one is more likely to remember in 3 years.
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My genuine concern is that BlueSky is very skewed and not seeing that 1) the median primary voter is engaged but not following the online play by play, 2) the not as partisan online right is genuinely intrigued by what he's doing, 3) he is more popular in-state than he's been since maybe the recall.
I love BlueSky for organizing and following news and fellowship at a dark time, but it is a bad way to measure broader political attitudes or predict political futures. Which is fine! That's not its function (nor is it X's nor was it old Twitter's).
I think this is less BlueSky being skewed and more Newsom trying to flag Third Way and Techbro donors since he's going to get diddly/squat from anyone else.
If I were a betting man, I'd say it means he's gonna run in 2028 and drop out after a poor showing in South Carolina or whatever non-Iowa State votes first. Maybe he'll stick around longer, but probably not meaningfully.
Being a Republicans favorite Dem is a losing strat in a Dem primary.
The online right, however unfaithful to the Republican Party, is never going to support a California Democrat. California is the epitome of “far-left” misgovernance in their minds.
Probably not. I just don't think reflexively analyzing what he's doing or predicting outcomes sitting here in March 2025 (what would a 2028 election even look like, Jesus) makes a lot of sense. I'd rather have people try a bunch of different shit and see what happens.
The last election kinda demonstrated that vast swaths of activists groups will fucking hate you even if you deliver real material policy changes at a great political cost. Trying to curry favor with them is worse than useless.
The Trump people are burning political capital like silver nitrate, the idea that it will be advantageous to be closer to them in 2027 is at best shaky to me
Also the one thing he got credit on from lib/left people who otherwise thought he sucked was his hatred of Republicans. It's gonna be hard to get that image back when there's three years of him palling around with the likes of Steve Bannon
Though a lot of Democrats learned from the Harris campaign that spooking the median voter a few years early can come back to bite you. I have no idea what he’s thinking with this project; is there any chance, however far-fetched it seems, that he doesn’t want the nomination?
‘It’s a widespread view that party accommodation of radical right core issue positions reduce the radical right's success…. We do not find that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. Our results suggest they lead to more voters to the radical right’
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Being a Republicans favorite Dem is a losing strat in a Dem primary.
and no, a transphobic dem in 2028 isn’t good for us either
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-science-research-and-methods/article/does-accommodation-work-mainstream-party-strategies-and-the-success-of-radical-right-parties/5C3476FCD26B188C7399ADD920D71770