1) a weirdly hostile (“restore Roe is unpopular”) but on the right side post
2) an overly pessimistic (“this can’t happen”) but broadly correct about the hurdles post
3) a completely detached from reality (“Dems can win by losing”) post
Discourse is broken, folks.
Demonstrating that you can’t do a thing you want to do by falling on your fucking face while trying is not good politics. It makes you look like a loser. It’s like saying entering the hundred meter dash with your shoelaces tied together is the first step toward setting the record.
Can anybody provide me with an example (specifically an example involving Democrats, actually) of an issue specifically building support through successive high profile failures?
Health care reform didn’t get tried for nearly 30 years after it failed in the nineties, and that was like 20 years after the previous time it had been tried.
There's arguments for messaging votes you know are going to fail, but that's not really what's being talked about and those also have a bunch of separate risks (see: Republicans and Obamacare).
Putting something up for a vote when they know it will fail is neither necessary not sufficient to indicate to me that they'll pass it once they have the ability to
Part of my hypothesis is that they don't understand that Congressional votes can be and are counted, and so they hear "inevitably going to fail" as, at best, "likely to fail" and they say "you 'know' you're going to lose? How can you possibly know that‽"
Getting something to the floor you know will fail is "trying" in the sense that flapping your arms is "trying to fly"
Like, it's not like you can't know the outcome in advance, so either you don't, in which case you're an idiot, or you do & are going ahead anyway, in which case you're an idiot.
Actual smart move: support and run on Restore Roe (which is, in fact, popular and easy to say and remember), and then after you win, accomplish that by moving mountains to repeal the Comstock Act
Actual result of 3)
a)Media says Dems are feckless
b)Pundits say abortion is a bad issue for Dems
c)Left says that Biden failed on purpose and thus proves there is no difference between the parties on abortion.
There might be some overlap between that and Dems focusing on appealing to broad swaths of the pro choice majority and winning referenda rather than choosing maximalist language and maximally visible hills to die on.
Still waiting for an example of Democrats getting praise for trying and failing rather than being called feckless losers who didn't really want to do it anyway.
Every time I’ve seen it tried (student loans, trying to shut down the government over DACA under Trump), it immediately reduced to “they did it wrong or else they would have succeeded.”
We all remember how the Republicans passing eleventy seven different Obamacare repeal messaging bills has helped to build grassroots support for repealing Obamacare.
Also asserts facts not in evidence about public opinion. People are broadly familiar with Roe after 50 years and know what restoring it directionally means. The Comstock act was on no one's radar until like last year and I don't see any evidence it's yet ripe for campaigning.
They truly do not get how politics function, mostly bc theyve given themselves such a severe case of internet brain that they can no longer understand that the avg voter simply does not pay attention to things at the same level that they do & thus doesnt respond to “messaging” acts like partisans do
It's a bad case of policy brain being overly literal. "Restore Roe (derogatory)" is assuming that it will perfectly restore the pre-Dobbs status quo of red states being a giant PITA over at least surgical abortions. But a fed law can preempt a lot of red state BS in a way that Roe/Casey did not.
No, but if you are sufficiently deep into the pro choice space Roe is (rightly imo) seen as an imperfect compromise at best, and “restore Roe” is an almost “safe, legal, and rare” level of triangulation.
I mean…I think as a general rule people who are in the persuasion business owe it to themselves to maintain an understanding of when they are speaking purely within their own circle.
Plenty of reproductive freedom activists actually do understand, they are doing killer campaigns to defend abortion rights in Kansas and Ohio, but that communication style doesn’t go viral on here, because it’s about convincing normies not overly online weirdos like us.
Also, Andrea seems to have no idea Dems are already coordinating w abortion groups re Comstock repeal. The article below was out when she was RTing a post claiming "Dems won’t do this. They’ll continue to use voters as an escalator as our bodies slide single file into hell": bsky.app/profile/oute...
It’s one woman. I don’t know who AG is, but her opinion is not likely correct. Reproductive rights, restoring Roe, is winning elections, bringing over Rs, like no other issue. Of course Comstock should be cleaned up, and will if possible (is not going to happen now because Ds don’t have the House).
