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It is Important to Understand That We Are Losing [1]

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Date: 2022-11-02

I hesitated to publish this. It is more strident and certain than maybe is deserved. But looking over the front page and diaries, it is depressing how little respect for the likelihood that we are going to lose there is, how little thought and preparation for what to do after we lose there is. We are not in a functional democracy, haven't been for a long time. Our only hope is to keep things from getting completely untenable until the younger generation can impose its more liberal will on the country. Putting everything into just elections is a recipe for ensuring that doesn’t happen. So here it is — call me a defeatist if you must, but if you give an actual damn about American democracy, you MUST start thinking about what is most likely and how to keep the flame alive in the coming dark.

Enough of the poll unskweing, enough of the pollyanna nonsense. It is inconceivable at this point that polls that have undercounted Republican turn out are suddenly undercounting Democrats. This notion hangs on two elections — one where it was a simple abortion support yea or nay and one swing district — that happened months ago. Every non-partisan poll released in the last week shows the House out of reach and the Senate falling into GOP hands — without even taking into account the fact that the GOP has made not responding to polls a culture war item. Early voting is similarly meaningless — the GOP has made it a requirement to be in good standing in the party to not vote early. They will show on election days in even greater percentages that they did in 2018 and 2020.

We are about to get destroyed. We can argue about why later (in my opinion, the Dems never made abortion a truly national issue by plainly stating that if you give us two new senators and the House we will restore Roe, they never countered the inflation attacks with the simple, and true, message that corporations were profiteering, and they never countered the crime attacks by pointing to the criminality of Jan 6th. You may have other reasons.), but it is important that we stop pretending and start preparing.

Why? Because five minutes after the polls close and the fact that we have lost both houses (We will lose the Senate races in, at a minimum, WI, OH, NH, NV, AZ and GA) it will become “common sense” that

1. Abortion is not a winning issue, and we should throw away woman’s right

2. Social spending is forever off the table because it causes inflation

3. LGTBQ+ are icky and cost us suburban moms, so we can throw them under the bus too

4. Crime is always a winning issue for the GOP, so there can be no police accountability

This is coming, because the “centrist” media believes these things and will immediately press the Dems to abandon core constituencies right away. And without pushback, they almost certainly will. We should be talking, right now, about how the Dems failed to push back on these issues — that timidity in message not policy lost these campaigns. And we should be, right now, demanding that the lame duck do at least

1. Expand the court

2. Give DC statehood

3. Remove the debt limit

4. Reinstate the Child Credit

5. Codify marriage rights

Will any of it happen? Maybe not, likely not. But some of it might. And we can make it absolutely clear that anyone who doesn't back these will face primaries and organized resistance. And we can make it clear that we won't stand by and let the Dems abandon democracy and people who need help without a fight.

Normally, I wouldn't care if people stuck their heads in the sand. But we cannot afford that — the press and the GOP are already prepared with their demands and talking points. By not acting now to counter them and strengthen the backbone of Dem politicians, we will lose a lot more than just the House and the Senate.

So vote and GOTV and all the rest and pray for a miracle. But stop pretending that light at the end of the tunnel isn’t an oncoming train — if anything is to survive the crash we need to prepare for reality.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/2/2133185/-It-is-Important-to-Understand-That-We-Are-Losing

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