Bill Clinton’s last-minute endorsement of Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral race is all too fitting: both men represent the corporate Democratic establishment, opposed by socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani, that has abandoned the working class.
Put it in the pile?
We’ve got a massive stack of evidence showing that progressive policies and candidates are popular and win elections; that centrists and moderates lose elections; and that the main reason why Democrats fail to perform is when they try to get RW’ing voters instead of activating their base, trying to get LW’ing voters. We’ve got like 2.5 decades of consistent data showing this. The two problems we have are 1) we have a media and Democratic consultant class for whom maintaining control of the party is a higher priority than maintaining control of government as a party, and that 2) these people and the voters have very different interests that don’t align and are basically exclusive to one another.
The biggest opposition to Democrats winning elections isn’t Republicans, it’s Democrats who are wrong about where the country is at, who are wrong about how elections work, and who can’t be removed from any office because at its core, the Democratic Party is a fundamentally undemocratic institution (like, we’ve had supreme court rulings on the matter).
So stack it up. The evidence is clear that Democratic socialist policies win Democrats elections. But with apologists always willing to come out and make apologies for business as usual, well never be able to to break the blood brain barrier within the DNC.