What kills me about this is we just went through this recently! Gay marriage approval was abysmal until about 2010 or so. Then it skyrocketed as more pols came forward to support it.
US politics has degenerated into a circus of violence against minorities, and those who in the past sought to moderate the violence now look the other way.
But this is a spectacle for the viscious, despairing masses: The real agenda is mass larceny.
It's a heist movie.
.5% of Americans identify as trans. Demonizing trans folks sucks. They don't have any power, and when folks make them a target...they get targeted for violence. America should be compassionate enough to accept differences. But we aren't.
Depends on what questions you ask. Also, 2 years ago the answer would have been much clearer but Republicans have successfully moved the dialog so you need a lot more caveats.
This whole “resistance was bad” thing, when 2016-2020 many democrats actually DRAMATICALLY moved public opinion and won almost every serious fight they had a shot at. And the lesson now is…never do that again? Because there was a backlash against all the winning.
the trick is that many of the influentials within the party agree with the right on multiple issues, and will try to push for these policies regardless of how tactical they actually are
Absolutely. It all reads as an intentional misreading of the data to excuse swinging the direction they already want to swing to align with their wealthy donors (who’ve already abandoned ship). Slash so many of them hang out with donors more than real people and thus are deeply out of touch
They are deathly afraid that they have lost a good chunk of their funding source, SV billionaires, and in their twisted minds (and of their consultants also hooked on that sweet cash fountain) that takes precedent over constituents wishes
Donor cash feeds Democratic consultant firms. Those fees for those commercials were intended to purchase those consultants newer, bigger yachts. They were never meant to influence voters or actually win elections.
Likely it's money and goodwill from the techbros slowly dried up after the democrats decided to finally enforce the Sherman Act, and went after Google, also I've heard that the progressive backlash against GenAI really pissed off the techbros against progressive politics.
My calculations are that the (establishment) democrats want to win back the techbros, and they want to appeal to them by treating LGBTQ+ minorities, who are overrepresented among the arts that GenAI threatens, as lesser human beings.
voters can tell that democrats are spinless demons just calculating messages and running numbers. that's why we hate the DNC. i say this as a registered DemonRat who voted blue up and down the ballot
gay marriage is an example of where the court decision + Biden's support *changed* public opinion by creating a (sometimes) productive national conversation on the issue!
Same sex marriage arose in the early 90s when lawsuits forced the issue in HI and the backlash began. The 90s saw 33 ballot losses. The increasingly popular LGB civil rights agenda was frozen. It was not until 2010 that popular opinion swung. LGB still don't have housing/job fed civil rights.
Good article but...
Ds are going to keep losing if they can't separate LBG issues from TQ issues.
They are going to keep losing if they can't separate "trans rights" from "males in females' sports and spaces" issues.
If you are a het and did not grow up having to contend with conservatives and Christians, were not up close and personal with LGB politics over the past few decades, then you're putting LGBT at risk based on a misunderstanding of how minorities must negotiate entrenched hostile power to win.
People are movable on anything. To move the gender theory components of the trans political agenda would require a level of political organizing and other-centered persuasion that the Discord victim crowd could never leave their comfort zones to do bc it cuts to the conservative Christian core.
Of course, Democrats could align themselves where the voters already are on health care, retirement, minimum wage, higher ed financing, etc. But they'd prefer to focus on trans issues that entail decades of skirmishing to avoid being poltiically responsive to majorities where they are.
Well, yes. They've also grown more restrictive on immigration.
Want to know why? Because Republicans and their enablers have been framing the debate on both for at least a decade and Democrats and the media have been letting them, instead of showing actual spine.
Naw.. vast majority of people aren’t following any framing at all. They don’t even think about it. And the majority of Americans want immigration reform but also want a path to citizenship. Nothing that Trump is selling.
I am more and more convinced that we should replace democracy with a sortition system where representatives are selected at random from the broader population the same way we do jury selection.
Right wing party demonises minority.
Right wing press runs with it.
Useless lib party adopts bigotry to appeal to moderates, making the bigotry politically acceptable and moving Overton window Right.
Useless libs lose minority and allies votes.
Useless libs lose.
When are the liberals gonna realize you can’t decide NOT to cater to the minority vote and then turn around and blame said minority when you lose elections?
The Democrats could very easily win over the left wing if they actually made an effort but they’re too busy playing nice with the moderates.
+Playing nice for moderates gained them no new votes. They already got the moderates who’d more easily go dem to move during Trump’s 1st presidency. Moderates that have voted for Trump & his allies for years aren’t going to change & aren’t going to go for Republican lite if they’re going to change
All it did was lose them reliable Dem, liberal, etc. votes they take for granted as well as moderates who felt they became wishy-washy or too Republican. We have the data to show as much.
Aranea’s reply+surveys show the portion of independ/mod voters (which increased by 11mill) voting for Harris was no different from the proportion who voted for Biden or was worse:
Independent Vote 2024:
Harris: 49%
Trump: 46%+I wins in AZ, PA, NC, & GA
Public polling on expansion of welfare programs. Comparisons of numbers of eligible voters to people who actually voted. Economic data representing the fact that most Americans are pretty fucked by the system as it operates.
Obviously no one is forced to do anything, including politicians and voters, but not voting Dem is pretty strategically short-sighted if you don't want the country moving to the right.
Well the dems should have thought about that before moving too far right for people to support? Trying to appeal to Cheney Republicans, signalling trans rights would be down to state law with no national fight, arming and enabling a genocide.
Seriously how does voting for a party that is moving right AGAIN stop the country moving right rather than enable it, which you think non voters being repulsed by the Dem Strategists and DNC does, somehow?
When Republicans win, they implement their right-wing ideology, whether through judges or legislation, which then causes liberals/leftists to have to spend years fighting to just recover what was lost. For example, Abortion rights could be a decades-long fight now.
A lot of leftists held their noses and voted for the lesser senile racist in 2020, then watched Dems do nothing to protect abortion, continue to build the border wall, expand oil drilling, and finally supporting genocide. Dems don't even maintain the status quo anymore, never mind repairing anything
Now, it's possible that Republican overreach will cause a backlash, but that doesn't undo the damage in the courts and elsewhere, and it's not guaranteed. Democrats moved right after Reagan, not left, and you can see the temptation to move right now that Trump has won the popular vote.
What left wing? The left already votes Democrat. The number of leftists not voting Democrat is extremely small. Presidential elections tend to be decided by ideologically mixed swing voters who tend to only show up in presidential elections.
Democrats should both appeal to swing voters and try to shape the electorate at the same time. Some issues, as the article above says, are malleable, but others have high salience and hardened opinions, in which case politicians don't have much ability to change voter opinion.
There are TONS of people who decided not to vote in the last two elections because the Democrats have displayed time and time again that they’re not willing to fight back against the right and are comfortable maintaining the status quo.
It seems pretty clear to me that the outcome of "throwing minorities under the bus to appeal to bigots" is "Nazis will never vote for a fake Nazi when there's a real Nazi in the race, but those minorities and their allies will never really trust you again"
I'm getting sick of increasingly complex explanations for how stupid they are when it's actually become much easier to imagine they're just as evil and hate voters
and by appealing i mean intelligible to median voters. like immigrants are why your life sucks is an easy to understand policy position so it appeals to people who dont think too hard about anything
There was basically no political messaging from Democrats at all. They made no attempt to shape political consensus. Their talking points were "Israel good. Immigrant bad. Economy good. Cops good. Republicans good."
They basically tried to get away with a milder GOP platform. Against the GOP.
Surveys showed no one cared about trans people 10 years ago. it's been a relentless onslaught by Republicans since 2015 that moved public opinion while Democrats just made barely any pushback
Roughly 20% of Americans do sports of any kind. Less than 1% of young athletes reach elite status. It's estimated there are 1.6 million trans people in the US. 20% means 320000 maybe do sports. Potentially there are 3200 elite trans athletes across all sports in the US and 68000 cis athletes
But it's probably less than that. They banned (I think) trans people from doing college sports or something and it affected 10 people. I'm not sure what they banned, but it was definitely 10 people it affected
What prompted ALEC to start going after trans people in states all over the country was not sports but a handful of cities passing laws giving them civil rights protection like from being fired for being trans
It's a fallacy to think that just because voters aren't in control of their beliefs that elites are. Everything is determined by structural forces. Everyone is powerless.
Finally, a counterintuitive social science principle that SHOULD get its own airport bestseller, so that left-of-center politicians will read about it….
Because trans people are people. Because expending political capital to protect those who would otherwise suffer is the core of liberty. Because trans rights are human rights. Because we have to protect CHILDREN from reactionary nonsense.
I hate that in the rush to jettison trans rights we've almost entirely ignored that the Democrats were completely unable to articulate their support. At BEST this makes them seem like phoneys but when people look to Newsom they'll change to agree with him, further eroding support.
They are unable to counter common anti trans talking points that are easily factually refuted, instead getting flat footed and mumbling sort of vague stuff.
It's wild to me that in the aftermath of November it seems like very few of them even bothered to learn about an issue that they knew they'd be hammered on.
Instead they just lament how unfair it is that they are expected to stand up for people which makes them look like liars to the right who believe they secretly agree on all this woke shit and scumbags to progressives.
Agree!! The Democratic Party doesn’t eat itself, it acquiesces and sacrifices the smaller groups within to maintain what power and money they do have. That is why we end up dividing and falling, every damn time. Quit betraying our groups within!!
"Many political strategists imagine that voters hold a handful of heartfelt positions"
Or in some cases, these political strategists hold specific positions (or know what their employers want them to say) and suddenly static public opinion exists against trans rights but not for soaking the rich
When Democrats soften their positions/limit the window of public perception by shifting where they stand on an issue as a standard bearer for one of two choices voters can pick from, doesn't that ensure that public opinion will only wind up in that framing like a self fulfilling prophecy?
This phenomenon is extremely obvious on the right, where it's possible to track how Trump's whims become Republican orthodoxy. It would be just as easy to track among Democratic partisans if they ever tried leading.
If someone with a ton of influence and similar charisma to Trump came out forcefully for trans rights things would right themselves in a hurry. Unfortunately the only person who meets this criteria is Obama
This is true to some extent, but the problem is that trans advocates are both kind of nuts and the worst kind of assholes. Quietly taking pro trand positions ahead of the electorate would be fine, calling anyone who disagrees with tampons in men's washrooms a fascist does not make friends.
The article is interesting, tho I'm not buying it hook line & sinker.
The comments are frightening. Apparent, self proclaimed self hating democrats attacking/slandering their own party. IMO that is the biggest problem for the the party & future.
Democrats are empty suits and the public can plainly see it. The leadership believes in nothing. They constantly throw their own constituents under the bus. If the party does not drastically change quickly, it's not functionally any different from a suicide cult.
The increase in Republican men and women saying that women should return to their traditional roles in society is disturbing, but one has to wonder if this is just some kind of empty partisan signaling.
It is very unlikely that Republicans have changed their behavior in the space of 2 years, and it is also unlikely that 48% of Republican men and 37% of Republican women would agree that women should not work outside the home or that women should not have bank accounts in their own name.
Also, as the NYT article points out, there is other research showing that US society and US public opinion is still overall gender egalitarian or becoming more so. All that said, these trends among Republicans could become more significant in the future, so they're certainly not good.
As a decades-long Dem activist and sometimes semi-pro worker, I cannot endorse this message more passionately!
LEAD, don’t follow. Compete away from, not against.
Yeah. Directly taking away people's money is a specific thing that is limited in this respect. Also, telling groups directly that you're going to eradicate their rights tends to backfire. That's why bailing on Arab-Americans and the queer community was stupid.
No one really believes that. How do you change your gamete size? How about your 10 trillion cells? Every single one of them have X and Y or X and X chromosomes.
Also there are a great many more karyotypes than XX and XY and cells that don't even have nucleotides (like red blood cells) so rather than generalizing about a biology you don't understand, perhaps you should engage with a taxonomy you also don't understand.
I no longer produce gametes, so you could reasonably assume I've reduced their size to zero... if you insist on being pedantic rather than examining that your argument is entirely semantic (definition of sex) rather than biological.
Great piece. The fact that the party thinks that their activity (and that of the right) isn’t included in the cause of changes in public opinion shows a severe lack of any thinking
I have tried to resist thinking Dem cowardice and back peddling is due to large donor corruption, but it’s getting harder and harder not to come to that conclusion.
this is part of my ongoing series tentatively titled "democrats doing the exact opposite of what the political science says you should do." subscribe for more!
Read this immediately after seeing the Newsom horseshit and it was extremely vindicating and at at least slightly healing - there are so few cis ppl pushing back on the “throw us under the bus” nonsense so this was really appreciated
Comments
But this is a spectacle for the viscious, despairing masses: The real agenda is mass larceny.
It's a heist movie.
Also see comments
They consider the empowered progressive wing of Trump's first term to be a "failure."
Ds are going to keep losing if they can't separate LBG issues from TQ issues.
They are going to keep losing if they can't separate "trans rights" from "males in females' sports and spaces" issues.
Want to know why? Because Republicans and their enablers have been framing the debate on both for at least a decade and Democrats and the media have been letting them, instead of showing actual spine.
“move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate”
broader electorate = a small cadre of the rich, since they don't want our money any more.
Right wing press runs with it.
Useless lib party adopts bigotry to appeal to moderates, making the bigotry politically acceptable and moving Overton window Right.
Useless libs lose minority and allies votes.
Useless libs lose.
See you in four years I suppose
The Democrats could very easily win over the left wing if they actually made an effort but they’re too busy playing nice with the moderates.
Independent Vote 2024:
Harris: 49%
Trump: 46%+I wins in AZ, PA, NC, & GA
Independent Vote 2020:
Biden: 54%
Trump: 41%
A kind of bizzare worship behaviour got implemented and deprogramming it's going to be hard.
Seems short sighted to vote FOR that, tbh?
There are TONS of people who decided not to vote in the last two elections because the Democrats have displayed time and time again that they’re not willing to fight back against the right and are comfortable maintaining the status quo.
Gay people. Trans people. People of color. Immigrants. Single parents. People living from paycheck to paycheck.
Get a feel for how sick we are of BOTH parties at this point. Then maybe you’ll understand.
So what happened in the 2024 election?
They basically tried to get away with a milder GOP platform. Against the GOP.
Studies have shown there are no biological advantages after two years on hormones
There are barely any trans athletes, and even less that are winning medals
(It probably already does and they haven’t)
The reason Americans don't like Democrats is because they're telling people what to think. Throwing hissy fits over trans-gressions is exactly that.
I vote for Democrats despite that annoying virtue signaling shit not because of it.
Or in some cases, these political strategists hold specific positions (or know what their employers want them to say) and suddenly static public opinion exists against trans rights but not for soaking the rich
MAGA is unbelievably, unhealthily, loyal to Mango Mussolini. Progressives and the far left are absolutely NOT.
At the drop of hat too many libs abandon the ONLY party that even considers supports their interests.
The comments are frightening. Apparent, self proclaimed self hating democrats attacking/slandering their own party. IMO that is the biggest problem for the the party & future.
I am tired of the finger pointing and losing.
Once that happens there may be a chance for POTUS... not a second before then tho.
Till then I just cant see it happening.
Fuck you.
Right back at you dumb fk
Their actual constituency is the parade of wealthy lobbyists and donors they luncheon with.
But they'll let you kick the ball next time, Charlie Brown.
Far left will NEVER win the POTUS election as long as there is an electoral college. It will never happen, period.
Local, state, congress... sure. But reality is they wont win an EC election. Sadly that is the system.
There has never been a "far left" politician in national political office.
Preserving people's civil rights is as centrist as it gets.
"Far left" is the abolishment of the stock market and the capitalist class.
They need us to vote for them, then fuck us over every time to appease the wealthy party circuit.
Leadership explicity wants to move away from small donors!
they could _lead_ here and instead they keep choosing betrayal.
LEAD, don’t follow. Compete away from, not against.
Public changing rooms and bathrooms aren't "private" anyway. They're public. It's right there in the name.
He's got some ridiculously bad numbers that he at least pretends to believe.
Every 2 years another trans person I or a friend I know dies.
This spineless behavior is being paid for in blood.
If they drag me off to the ovens, will Gavin Newsom shrug and say “I agree”!?