The Democrats - where next?

[jon1959]

Many interesting opinion pieces around this last week on the Biden Democrats. This in particular:

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...08e0d6ec8180ed

The heft of the Democratic coalition means the party is swollen and overburdened, attempting to be all things to all its voters.

Democratic infighting is an old story, one that comes up perennially, sometimes ascribed to generational or regional differences: the younger, more city-dwelling Democrats want universal healthcare and demand racial justice; the older, suburbanite Democrats shush them, worrying they will scare off the white suburban swing voters whom centrists believe that Democrats need for a majority. The conflict is repeated ad nauseam, whether Democrats lose or whether they win.

But the truth is that the Democratic party is indeed a deeply divided one. The coalition that swept Joe Biden to victory was massive, diverse and profoundly self-contradictory. It contained older Black voters with religious convictions that are not dissimilar to those of the white evangelicals who power the American right, and it contained younger Black voters who believe fiercely in transgender civil rights and the dismantling of the police state. It contained white college-educated women who took offense at Trump’s crass language and it contained young Latino voters who feared for his threats to their citizenship. It is a coalition composed of the vast majority of all the Americans who are not white and a sizable minority of the Americans who are, of people who identify as socialists and people who see socialism as a serious threat to their way of life, people who desperately fear for abortion rights and people who deeply oppose them. The Democratic coalition, in other words, is huge – composed of people with competing, mutually exclusive goals, people who, in the end, probably would not always like each other.

[jon1959]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...election-party

Democrats face a reckoning, four years in the making, after an election that accomplished their mission but did little to resolve urgent questions about the party’s political future and serious internal divisions.

Moderates argue that Biden’s success, which included reclaiming three states in the rust belt Trump won in 2016 and expanding the map to sun belt battlegrounds, was evidence that a moderate who rejected liberal appeals was best positioned to build a winning coalition.

“There are clearly some parts of the Democratic brand that voters across the country did not feel comfortable with,” Erickson said. A post-election analysis by Third Way found that Republicans effectively weaponized ideas like defunding the police and Medicare for All against Democrats in competitive districts, even if they did not support such policies.

“They are dead wrong,” Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator who lost to Biden in the Democratic primary, wrote in an USA Today op-ed. He noted that every House co-sponsor of Medicare for All and all but one co-sponsor of the Green New Deal were re-elected, including several competitive districts.

“The lesson is not to abandon popular policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, living wage jobs, criminal justice reform and universal childcare,” Sanders wrote, “but to enact an agenda that speaks to the economic desperation being felt by the working class – Black, white, Latino, Asian American and Native American.”

In the muddled aftermath, lawmakers, activists and the party’s grassroots are all vying for influence. Battles have flared on multiple fronts: the makeup of Biden’s executive branch, the new administration’s legislative agenda and the approach to a pair of Georgia runoff elections which will determine control of the Senate. If they fall short, there is deep disagreement over the extent to which Biden should work with Senate Republicans and Mitch McConnell, a take-no-prisoners tactician.

Democrats will have an opportunity to test their competing theories of change before Biden takes office, via Georgia’s Senate races in January. The stakes couldn’t be higher: if Democrats pull off upset victories, the Senate will be equally divided, with Vice-President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote.

[Rjk]

I've been wondering "the republicans, where next?"
do they stick with trump, or trumpism or try to distance themselves from this madness in 4 years time.