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[Reelya]

Again, this is a strawman. i didn't say "centrists are more electable".

I said ... you physically cannot win without picking up the moderate vote. However you go about it. This is just a reality check. You cannot win with only die-hard liberals voting for you.

so what's the strategy then? How are the Democrats going to appeal to Joe Average who doesn't have a strong party affiliation either way? Just relying on the other side to implode isn't always guaranteed to work.

For example and to point out the difference between appealing to the center vs "being a centrist candidate", Sanders was potentially more appealing to the center voters who aren't party affiliated than Clinton was. He did better in polling vs Trump than Clinton did for this reason.

EDIT: One example of why the current strategy is lacking is demonization of people who voted for Trump last time. They clearly have the numbers where it counts. Those are the people you need to win next time, so pushing them away is a losing game. Sure, you can loudly say they're all terrible people with views that don't matter, but how exactly is that going to change the outcome of the next election?

[Enemy post]

I found out about John Oliver when an angry guy on Reddit compared my humor to him. It was the nicest insult anyone's ever given me.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

There is no "moderate vote" in reality. Nor is there really a conservative or liberal or socialist vote. Looking at it like that leaves one utterly incapable of explaining and learning from voter patterns like Sanders/Trump or Obama/Trump. It leads one to utterly mad conclusions like "Trump is a true moderate president who managed to split the center".

Medicare For All is supported by most Americans, and is an issue far too "left" even for most of the left Democrats. Where the fuck is that strat? Most Americans also support radical election law reform and just about everyone is sick of capitalism, but cannot articulate their feelings because those discussions are exiled from mass media.

Trump literally got some of the anticapitalist vote by knowing nothing about economics, because his deviance from The Line was water to the desert of economic political discussion in the US.

Winning voters just doesn't work like popular analysis portrays it. Demonstrably. I could say that "centrists will vote for socialist candidates if they have them available", but that's still misrepresenting how all this really works.

[Max™]

I mean, the Democratic Socialists of America are a thing and actively trying to push the DNC further left to pick up voters who simply don't bother showing up when given a giant douche or a giant turd sandwich to pick between.

[EnigmaticHat]

I'd also point out that US political discussion gets pushed into narrow channels that don't fully express what's going on in the country.  Abortion, LGBT issues, states rights, whatever the fuck the vagaries of "small government" and "the economy" are supposed to be.  The information we're provided about candidates distills complicated issues into a series of yes-no questions.  Bernie and Trump both had issues outside those questions and only could get their messages across by being so entertaining and difficult to summarize that news companies would just show footage of them talking.  And yes I would say Bernie was entertaining, he was dry but he was blunt and very determined to stay on message.

Other issues outside the yes-no summarization: environmentalism wasn't part of the mainstream political discussion until Al Gore went and made it part.  Nowadays, legalizing pot (and more broadly, undoing "hard on crime" and "the war on drugs") is an issue that's been broadly important to many Americans for a long time yet its been mostly absent from the party platforms and the mainstream news discussions.  Although that's changing.  Let's see... police reform, huge issue on the local government level but tiny issue on the state and federal level.  Net neutrality is another big one.  Foreign policy is a huge issue that gets neglected.  When politicians get asked questions about diplomacy they get asked fundamentally shallow questions like "what would you do to promote peace in the Middle East?"  There's just no effective way to answer that until you're elected, and no one is going to say that they don't *want* peace in the Middle East.  A question like "do you believe we should continue sending arms to Saudi Arabia" or "Do you think the cartels are a threat to the US?  Is it our place to try to stop them and if so what would you do?"  Or even something like "if the EU had an economic disaster right now would you loan them money to keep countries from defaulting or would you cut them off?"  Just... something vaguely hardball that would reveal something of substance about how a candidate thinks.  Obviously every candidate in a primary* is going to have the same answer to a vague question like "what will you do to win Americas' wars/help the economy."

I guess what I'm saying is in the US we so rarely see candidates running on their own issues.  Al Gore, Bernie and Trump being obvious exceptions.  Most candidates slot themselves into the same party line issues.  And so we get the odd situation where the 2000 elections and 2016 elections featured similar talking points in a vastly different world.  Or at least that's what it feels like, I'll admit that I've only been politically aware for like 10 years.  Someone older than me can talk about that one but from where I'm sitting it feels like our political "issues" have remained static through like 4-5 decades of important change.

*...prior to 2016

[SalmonGod]

Colbert is amazing.

John Oliver... He does a great job of introducing people to issues, with well thought out summary information and perspective.  But I find his humor really annoying.  Awkward, jarring, forced delivery of jokes that are usually total non-sequitur instead of anything witty.  It's like... "Dry informative political rant dry informative political rant dry informative political rant LIKE CHE GUEVARA RIDING A GIANT CHINCHILLA IN SPACE dry informative political rant dry informative political rant."  Probably doesn't help that I don't think he's a very charismatic guy in general.

[Rolan7]

Heh, that's pretty much my take, except I do find him charismatic.  Probably the British accent.
I haven't seen any of his stuff recently, but I really enjoyed... no, appreciated his explanation of police "asset forfeiture".  It's madness, and somehow reality.

The comic relief parts (literally, relief from the dry but useful explanations) are pretty clownish.  Just didn't bother me.  Or maybe they're the reason I don't actively seek out his work.

[PTTG??]

Wait, how did Gore force the Republicans to be anti-environment?

[Max™]

Environmental discussion didn't happen much until Nixon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Domestic_policy

[Dorsidwarf]

Wait, how did Gore force the Republicans to be anti-environment?

I assume because he turned pro-environmentalism into a dem issue, and the republicans have to be diametrically opposed to all dem issues

[PTTG??]

Democrats are pro-homeostasis, by the way.

[Il Palazzo]

Democrats are pro-homeostasis, by the way.

Are you calling Democrats conservative?

[Hanslanda]

I'm a Democrat but I identify as a conservative.

[EnigmaticHat]

Democrats are pro-homeostasis, by the way.

Fucking gay agenda.

I'm a Democrat but I identify as a conservative.

There's a large minority of democrats who are left leaning on some issues, right on others.  I believe its known as the centrist wing of the party.  My mom is "left on social issues, right on economics" and my dad is an old economic values Republican who's become disconnected from the party.  I think there's a lot of people like you, but many are either independents or non-voting Republicans and thus don't get much representation outside swing states.

[Karnewarrior]

I'm a Democrat but I identify as a conservative.

I, too, am Trans-party. Do you think we can get into the Pride Parade? 

There's a large minority of democrats who are left leaning on some issues, right on others.  I believe its known as the centrist wing of the party.  My mom is "left on social issues, right on economics" and my dad is an old economic values Republican who's become disconnected from the party.  I think there's a lot of people like you, but many are either independents or non-voting Republicans and thus don't get much representation outside swing states.

I'm actually a Conservative of the old, Teddy Roosevelt type. I'm not particularly concerned about the moral or ethical implications of Climate Change as I am about the threat it poses to Human life and more importantly the resources it might destroy that could be better used by future generations.

Modern Republicans, though, are literal Morganites. "Ethics of Greed" indeed; they either don't care about robbing the future generations or straight up don't believe that the resources are finite, and it's biting everyone in the ass and they don't /care/. The big issue is that the Reps have support from the religious crowd, which is almost entirely supported by their Anti-Abortion stance. A Democrat who was willing to take the Pro-Life platform would probably pull the rug right out from underneath the Reps, although possibly at too high a cost in support from their own base.

Still, preservation of the species/environment > Women's rights, at least for me right now. I'm personally in favor of Abortion being legal before a certain point, but it's hardly the most important thing to me.