I think the prob is this: liberals think it's possible to move centrist voters 10% to the left, and thereby capture a majority. The real question is whether these centrists actually exist. It's no longer clear that they do. But in attempting to capture them, liberals are willing to alienate the left - ThreadSky

gwillow.me • 5 days ago

I think the prob is this: liberals think it's possible to move centrist voters 10% to the left, and thereby capture a majority. The real question is whether these centrists actually exist. It's no longer clear that they do. But in attempting to capture them, liberals are willing to alienate the left

Reposted from Auntie Wow

Most people see your question and think, Why don't leftists vote with liberals? My question is, Why don't liberals want what leftists want, and if they do want the same things, why aren't they willing to fight for it?

Comments

bhahne.bsky.social•5 days ago

Per cognitive linguist George Lakoff of _Don't Think of an Elephant_ fame, there is no such thing as "centrism" or "a centrist voter":
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/no-center-no-centrists_b_60419

chuckcivil.bsky.social•5 days ago

I'm not entirely convinced there ever -was- such a thing as a true centrist - that is, a person who truly contains equal parts of opposed value sets.

If a centrist is just born out of convenient, day-to-day compromises, both sides are chasing imaginaries.

Better to court and convert non-voters.

tr3vin.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think a core problem that we are facing is that a lot of how things work don't actually serve people the way we need. Liberals generally want to preserve that, while the leftists and the right are in for more significant change. In order to preserve it, the liberals make some bad deals.

tr3vin.bsky.social•5 days ago

People can see that they something needs to change, but when they have the trifecta the liberals will talk about the minutia of how the parliamentarian works. The low information voters who have other things going on don't have time for that stuff. That is where the right comes in and gets traction.

tr3vin.bsky.social•5 days ago

Take something like trans kids in sports. It shouldn't matter, but it does for bad reasons. For a lot of people, sports are the lottery that gets them into the lottery of higher education, that helps with the lottery of employment.

The trans bit gets the focus instead of getting rid of lotteries.

tr3vin.bsky.social•5 days ago

That is how the right brings in people. They know something needs to happen and then the podcasts and politicians come in and give them an easy solution. The liberals will then chase this instead of proposing actual solutions, solidifying the bigotry while losing people on both sides.

jakethequick.bsky.social•5 days ago

This feels spot on. In the last campaign there was a certainty that “for every leftist we lose we’ll pick up two moderate Republicans” only for those so called moderate republicans to vote for Trump.

griseldagimpel.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think there's also this myth that undecided/centrists voters have political views exactly in the middle, when a lot of them are low-information voters with chaotic mish-mash political views.

gwillow.me•5 days ago

100%

credle.bsky.social•5 days ago

This is it right here - and you arent getting them with well thought out policy positions, your going to get them with being loud and repeating simple concepts. You don't necesarily need to alienate the left to do all that

spiderlegsmusic.bsky.social•4 days ago

The democrats actually hate the left in their own party

davestrock.bsky.social•5 days ago

Yeah I think this is largely true, and I'd argue that group doesn't exist.

However I'd also argue a huge chunk of non-voters/independents would join a leftist emancipatory movement that actually meant it.

davestrock.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think most liberals can't see past someone saying "I'm not racist but..." even though the rest of the sentence is "... I've been taught that we don't have enough to go around and X group is taking it from me"

You don't fix that by pointing to GDP and screaming about the first half of the sentence

davestrock.bsky.social•5 days ago

It's hard to tell them who the real villains are without implicated a lot of liberals 🤷‍♂️

shinjutruegentle.bsky.social•5 days ago

What if D's were to try something similar to Gingrich's wildly successful "Contract with America" in the 90s? Find 10 "80%" issues that align with the party platform that 80% of American citizens agree with. If the left has, say, 5 of those, but 5 are more centrist, does this alienate?

shinjutruegentle.bsky.social•5 days ago

It's very difficult to say what a "centrist" is during this massive political realignment. For example, if you believe societal laws need to progress with society, but carefully & in step with established law & institutions, you are a Burkeian conservative- yet I'd argue that is a center-left now.

gigiomics.bsky.social•5 days ago

They probably do exist? The problem is that liberals keep "course-correcting" after every loss to go to the "center" vs an increasingly far right opposition and thus have overshot the actual "true" center. So the centrists they're looking for....are on the left.

onlyhumannature.bsky.social•5 days ago

Yep.

guatshakes.bsky.social•5 days ago

Yeah, I think the centrist who is movable in the short term by running a left-er candidate is rarer than many think.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/25/2024-election-moderate-candidate-voters/

absolutereality.blog•5 days ago

That article is just him making predictions about what an election result "should" be based on district demographics and then comparing it to actual election results. It has no explanatory power for (undefined) moderate voting behavior, despite his out-of-scope conclusions.

guatshakes.bsky.social•5 days ago

Un-huh. It's not definitive, it's limited in scope, and therefore limited in applicability to the public as a whole. Hence my prefacing that w/ "Yeah, I think." I included it mostly because it illustrates the stuff that mainstream Dem leaders are going to be looking at when they make decisions.

absolutereality.blog•5 days ago

Yeah, unfortunately the author also somehow thinks that his words have no relation to policy, despite it being very likely that Dem leaders read WaPo. Stuff like this just confirms their priors so they don't interrogate the claims or data.

kevincow.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think leftists are more willing to support liberals than liberals think. A lot of leftists got coconut-pilled early on, despite Kamala not being their ideal candidate.

It's those appeals to centrists that drove them away. Bringing out a Cheney, not taking a stand against the Gaza genocide, etc.

ladyerika.bsky.social•5 days ago

A few years ago Abigail Thorn said that the future of politics was, for better or worse, becoming less about centrists, and more about right-wing populism vs left-wing populism, and with Trump v Harris being a battle of right populist vs centrist liberal, she was kind of proved right.

joekalicki.bsky.social•5 days ago

Yeah, in the presence of an extreme white supremacist right, we need a left to be extreme in its inclusive populism and make the people choose a side. People want something, and humping on about retaining the status quo excites nothing in anyone.

profbanks.bsky.social•5 days ago

Extremely well said.

carlballard.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think there's a definition problem. Harris votes to Sanders's left when they are both in the Senate, but she's a lib. Yemen is a left cause until voting for the median Democrat ends the genocide. Abolish ICE is a left movement until Sanders opposes it. It feels like it's not policy driven at all.

lokiwolfson.bsky.social•4 days ago

You have introduced the hammer to the nail’s head.

zombiesarejerks.bsky.social•5 days ago

The liberals also keep letting the right choose the narrative.

The right made a big deal about pronouns, and liberals pushed back, instead of saying "stop talking about high school sports, ya weirdos. People can't afford rent."

davestrock.bsky.social•5 days ago

This is a big one.

denniskdraws.bsky.social•5 days ago

Yeah, I’ve seen this divide.

Liberals want more people to change their vote.
Leftists want to motivate more non-voters to vote.

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply