...Democrats run like Republicans to capture the conservative voters that do show up. That's the lesson of 2010 that Democrats are putting into play in 2014.
Faced with a treacherous political environment, many Democrats are trotting out campaign ads that call for balanced budgets, tax cuts and other more traditionally GOP positions. Some of them are running in congressional districts that just two years ago broke sharply for President Barack Obama.
The Republican-flavored ads provide an early glimpse of how Democrats will wage their 2014 campaign. Democrats, hampered by Obama’s rising unpopularity and the tendency for conservatives to turn out at higher levels than liberals in midterm years, face the reality that swing congressional districts favorable to them in 2012 will be far less so in 2014.
Whether the Democrats running in those districts can survive what party strategists acknowledge is a deteriorating national political environment will largely hinge on how well they can appeal to more conservative voters.
“It’s a different kind of electorate,” said Ben Tulchin, a San Francisco-based Democratic pollster. “If you’re running in a competitive district as a Democrat in a nonpresidential year, you want to strike a more moderate tone.”
Moderate tone my ass. Democrats are running Tea Party campaigns because Tea Partiers are the only people who regularly vote in midterms. The rest of voters, especially liberals, stay home and complain about why there are no liberals in Congress.
Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff, who’s running in a district that Obama won in 2012 and 2008, has started airing a commercial that strikes a tea party theme. It highlights his record as speaker of the state House of Representatives when, he says, he helped balance the state’s budget.
“It’s really pretty simple. You don’t buy things you can’t pay for,” Romanoff states.
As Romanoff narrates, a graph of the nation’s soaring debt pops up on the screen. The image looks strikingly similar to one that appears in a Web video Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan released in 2011 to sell his controversial budget plan, though a Romanoff spokeswoman insisted that the campaign hadn’t borrowed from the former GOP vice presidential contender.
New Hampshire Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, whose district broke for Obama by a yawning 11-percentage-point margin in 2012, is running an ad that touts her support for small-business tax cuts while showing her touring a local microbrewery. Separately, former Iowa state Sen. Staci Appel, in a district Obama won by 4 percentage points two years ago, underscores her record of fighting overspending in state government, a populist theme often heard from tea party-aligned conservatives.
So yes, because liberals stay home and don't vote, the electorate is conservative. Democrats run as conservatives to get their votes, because conservatives are the ones voting. We're not.
If liberals don't give a damn about voting in midterms,why should Democrats give a damn about liberals who don't vote?
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4 comments:
Because it's Presnit Obummer's job to keep the left enthused not all this political stuff.
Didn't you forget the super-progressive memo?
If liberals don't give a damn about voting in midterms,why should Democrats give a damn about liberals who don't vote?
That
is it in a nutshell. The hysterical ninnies at the Daily Kos and
FireDogLake are whining like a gross of sirens that no one is trying to
buy their votes with leftie positions, but the fact remains that the
faux radicals have proven themselves to be a weak reed of political
support and the Democratic candidates are looking for votes where the
votes are likely to be found.
Just so there are no mistakes, let
me state for the record that I AM EXTREMELY ANGRY OVER THIS STATE OF
AFFAIRS. Ever since Reagan in 1976 I have been urging the Democrats to
stick together and fight at all costs to keep the Republicans away from
the levers of power. We have always had our internal defectors: the
Dixiecrats, the Gypsy Moths, the Boll Weevils, the Naderites, the
Liebermans. but they were generally on the Right and we could afford to
see them go as part of the grand swapping of bases that occurred since
Nixon and his Southern Strategy.
The Purity Troll Left and the
various single issue nutbag campaigns, like the anti-vaxxers and the
Chronic Lyme Disease woo woos and the other anti-Science types, have
shot their own feet off by crippling the one organization that could
represent them and in doing so they have crippled the entire country.
All sorts of worthy leftist causes are lying dormant because of these
jokers and their electoral sabotage.
I would love to see Single Payer Healthcare, but we are not going to get it.
I would love to see nationalization of the credit system, but we are not going to get it.
I would love to see free universal college education, but we are not going to get it.
You get the idea, and screw you Ralph.
Let me just say this: everyone loves to hate on Big Pharma and the patents and the price gouging, but everyone is happy that GlaxoSmithKline is on the scene with the Ebola serum.
Just like Monsanto with Roundup and the GMO seeds, how do we choke off the bad stuff without simultaneously choking off the expertise that makes the good stuff happen.
Just to follow up a day later, those goat feltching morons at the Daily Kos - home of the self proclaimed Base of the Democratic Party - have been lining up to spit on Hillary Clinton and make public declarations of contempt for the Party, taking fervid vows to stay home from the elections in November. This is to teach a harsh lesson about the power of the Purity Troll Left (as opposed to the intelligent Left to which I pledge allegiance) and wrench the Party away from its present Third Way New Democrat orientation.
Efforts to suggest that this might be the time to straighten up and act like the party's base are being crushed with a ruthlessness not seen since the mighty orange warriors fought off the human wave attacks of the paid NSA disruptor trolls in the summer of 2013. That was a bloodbath for the ages.
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