Quote:
Originally Posted by albionmoonlight
I could be wrong about this, but I have a feeling that a LOT of Democratic voters care much more about beating Trump this time around than about which candidate gets the nomination
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Speaking only for myself, because I suspect I think about the minutiae of elections much more than your average voter (Republican OR Democratic), but I think the odds are staggeringly against anybody in the Democratic field being able to enact policy for at least two years.
Structurally, the playing field is tilted against them. We're unlikely to witness a Presidential year where Republican turnout is as depressed as it was in 2018. I expect a Republican House to be one outcome of the '20 elections no matter how favorably Democrats are viewed by the electorate.
(Even if they hold the House, they're going to be dancing on the knife's edge in that chamber until they can recapture enough state houses to have an effect on redistricting, but that's another matter.)
Republicans are on defense in the Senate this cycle, but they're fighting on favorable ground. It isn't like '18 where Democrats had to play defense all over the map with a bunch of those seats in Trump Country.
To control the Senate, they realistically probably need to flip at least four seats. Doug Jones is probably not getting re-elected as a Democrat in Alabama unless he runs against Roy Moore again, and maybe not even then. So that means running the table on their other seats and flipping four Republican seats to compensate for the loss of Alabama. I see Maine and Kansas as possibilities, with Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina as dark horses. If everything breaks right, they COULD take those five seats, but I think 2-3 of the 5 is a more realistic outcome.
That leaves them with a probable caucus of 48-49 and McTurtle dusting off "our biggest responsibility is to make sure ___ is a one-term president" from his Obstruction Greatest Hits playbook.
So, okay; a Democrat wins the White House, but barring an incredibly unlikely confluence of events in 2020, it doesn't matter what their policy goals are. Even though the Senate map looks rosier in 2022, the reality is that the Democratic coalition is reactive, not proactive. They're likelier than not to pat themselves on the back after beating Trump, say "yay us, democracy saved," and then go back to sleep until the next Presidential election. They're kinda like the "this is fine" dog that way. They don't show up regularly unless Crisis Mode is engaged. So even though 2022 looks like a better opportunity for Democrats to recapture the Senate, I'm not particularly optimistic.
So, no, I don't want Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. I'm, honestly, done with their generation. I want a younger generation of leaders to put the old shits out to pasture. But I'm not going to die on any particular policy hill aside from "don't be Trump" from the group, either. Even if I'm really really sold on Buttigieg, or Booker, or Harris, or whomever, their policy goals are, speaking practically, going to remain aspirational.
It's not so much 'caring more about beating Trump than about which candidate gets the nomination' as recognizing that the political realities of the moment are such that any Democrat who wins is vanishingly unlikely to accomplish much in the way of governance beyond keeping the lights on, so why get hung up on 'who' that Democrat is?