To quote Jeff Daniel’s character from a scene often shared around the social media campfire, The Newsroom, “If being a liberal is so great, why do they lose elections so god damn always?”
It’s a really good question.
Those of us who consider ourselves to be “liberals” or “progressives” think of ourselves as being on the right side of history, but yet time and again in election after election, in all states save a very few, we lose elections.
Oh sure we pick up a seat here and there (there are currently two I think, or three democrat assemblymen in Tennessee) but by and large we lose on the state and local levels. Nationally we come into office only after the Republican Party has had the reigns for a while and made a mess of the national economy.
Don’t believe me? Do a google search for the last 100 years of the number of recessions and then do a google search for who was in office on the national level during and right before those recessions. The correlation between the two is astonishing to me, and very revealing.
Republican Party economic policy of cutting taxes, while I admit sounds good, tend to mostly benefit the wealthy and corporations, and by and large are the root cause of national economic downturns. If you don’t want to do the googling yourself, you could listen to an economist podcast or read one of Robert Reich’s books.
While I’m sure there is one or two out there who support the notion that the government should not collect taxes but for the most part economists agree that taxing is necessary but executed poorly. The bulk of the taxes are paid by those of us who are not actually wealthy, or making much money, and there are plenty of areas where taxes could be levied, such as on mega million (or billion) dollar inheritances, but are not.
I remember when trump won the last time and honestly it is still a shock to me that any of the multiple revealed facts about this person did not disqualify him. Not as shocking as the fact that being a convicted felon and under indictment for conspiracy to overthrow the government wasn’t enough to disqualify him from office this time, but I digress.
At the time in 2016 everyone who had a microphone, save a few on the far right, were convinced Hillary Clinton would be our next president. These same folks also predicted that Kamala Harris would be our president now (shows what they know).
Actually the fact that polling data is so horribly wrong these days is another interesting fact which someone should be researching right now. We used to be able to rely on this data and many companies and politicians alike used to be able to use this data to guide their actions, but for some reason that data is wrong more often and to a greater extent than it is right these days, and I am convinced that says something extraordinary about our society.
So democrats lost this time and back in 2016 and in the same ways, presidency and both houses of congress, setting up a two year run for trump to do whatever trump wants to do. This time around it could also be argued that his party has control of the Supreme Court as well, which means the final check in our checks and balance system has been corrupted, or at the very least become overly biased toward one political party and way of thinking over the other. A scenario which should never exist in my estimation but one which has existed several times in our history.
Again google up some data, or better yet go to the supreme court’s website. There they list all the courts which have existed and all the decisions they have made and then draw your own conclusion as to the bias of the court.
I have resisted the urge to add my two cents into the what happened? debate because I’m not sure it makes any difference to be honest. People much wiser than I asked the very same questions in 2016 (Clinton even wrote a book about it) as they are asking now and arriving at many of the same answers to boot, yet nothing changed in the tactics, policies, and general approach to campaigning between the two elections.
I am openly biased about my belief that education, or the lack thereof, is the reason our country is in the state it currently is in (in general our population lacks critical thinking skills, the ability to extrapolate, reading/comprehension, and a general understanding of how the government of this country actually works). The only thing I think of as worse than lack of education, is acquiring education and not using it. That’s what the democratic part did over the last four years. They acquired a bunch of education into why they lost the 2016 election and then proceeded to do next to nothing different in 2020.
What could they have done differently?
I’m glad you asked, but before I tell you let me tell you a story.
I live in California, at least for now, but I don’t live in the part of California that most people think of when they think of California. I live in the Central Valley, the large midsection of the state running from Bakersfield in the south to Sacramento in the north. The Central Valley is the fertile farmland that last I recall still grows somewhere around 1/7th of the world’s food, and as a rural farming and ranching area it has been dominated by republican policies and politics for as long as anyone can remember, just like every other major rural farming area in our country.
and like every other rural farming area which is dominated by republican policies and politics the Central Valley of California has had the worst economy in the state for the decades these policies have been in place. Like rural republican states around the country the Central Valley of California is a welfare state.
The Central Valley, like Kentucky or Tennessee or any other republican supermajority state, does not produce enough revenue to support itself and must rely on the revenues generated by other parts of the state to survive.
Yes the famed “welfare queen” Reagan once warned about does exist and her name is Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee….in fact according to Google’s AI,
“According to recent data, states like Alaska, Louisiana, New Mexico, Kentucky, Montana, and Arizona tend to receive a larger percentage of their state budget from federal funds than they contribute in taxes, meaning they receive more money from the federal government than they pay in overall federal taxes.”
to that list the Central Valley of California should be added as the welfare state of the state.
That is important but not my point.
I had a conversation with my wife’s aunt a few months back. She is an extraordinary lady whom I like very much, she is unique in that she currently lives in Tennessee but spent a good chunk of time living in California. The part you think of when you think of California, specifically just south of San Jose in what used to be a little bedroom community of Morgan Hill.
So unlike most people who live in the welfare states of the American south, she has some experience with California and not because she “rescued” herself as some of the current bloggers and YouTubers describe themselves but as a person who was born and grew up in the south, had an opportunity to move to California which she took (and made significantly more money I might add), and then for personal reasons I won’t go into here she moved back to the south.
The conversation I had with her was enlightening. We talked about the area we had both lived in and why she had moved back to the south. She asked me about why I would want to move out of California and if I was considering Tennessee. It was a great conversation but then she asked a question which ended the conversation at the time and directly lead to me writing this post.
She asked me what else I liked about living in California and I said, “beyond my family being there, I get paid more here than I could in other states for the same job, the taxes are low, but mostly I think it’s what I am used to.” I’m sure I said other things as well but this is the gist of it.
Her reply ignored all that I said except for one thing, “you think the taxes are low there?” she asked, “what makes you think that?”
“Yes I do because I have never owed taxes at the end of the year, sales taxes are low, property taxes are capped at 1.25%, in general taxes are lower there than most other states.”
Her reply exemplifies the thing democrats are missing about republican and the so called independent voters. She said, “Well property taxes on my house in California was over $3000 a year. I think that’s pretty high.”
Now I could have continued the discussion with her but I could see by the look in my wife’s eyes I had already spoken on the subject enough for her taste. She’s seen me go into verbal battle with others before and probably did not, no I will say definitely did not, want to see me go after he aunt in the same ways I go after my father (ardent trump supporter) for example.
My wife’s aunt clearly defined what this half of the population bases their opinions and their votes on, a single often taken out of context fact about their daily lives.
Is $3000 a lot to pay for property tax?
Maybe, if taken by itself it sure seems like it. The truth is houses in California tend to cost more (much, much in some cases) than an equivalent house in Tennessee costs. A $3000 property tax bill is what would be owed on a $240,000 house. That is about twice what the average house in Tennessee sold for at the time my wife’s aunt lived in California.
Over the past few years, let’s say five to ten, housing prices in Tennessee have increased significantly, but let’s not get too far off course here.
Unlike other states, or areas in other states, the part of Tennessee my wife’s aunt lives in has not raised the property tax rate in quite a while. According to www.ownwell.com the part of Tennessee my wife’s aunt lives in has a property tax rate of 0.66%. That ain’t bad, but that is not the only tax levied in that area.
Not to be overly critical of Tennessee but there are multiple taxes on top of property tax that a homeowner must pay and while the property tax itself is quite low and there is no state income tax, the amount of tax paid by the average homeowner in Tennessee is significantly higher than those paid by the average homeowner in California.
but my wife’s aunt doesn’t see that, she only sees the difference in property tax. That is how she and the half of the country that voted republican this year see things.
Sure the overall tax rate is lower in California than it is in places like Tennessee, but if you engage into a conversation with someone who lives in Tennessee or Texas or any other red state and they will point out how much lower their property taxes are–as if that is the only tax they pay.
The economy as a whole has been doing fantastic in the past four years in all areas except one, the average cost of consumer goods. What a person can roughly expect to pay for things like eggs and gasoline and other consumer goods. Something known in economics as the Consumer Price Index, and while it is going down nationally, the average person does not understand that. They only understand what they see–my grocery bill went up.
The average person does not understand national economics. This, I think, is a factor of education spending being gutted over the past decades, the fact that the average reading level in the US is something around third to eighth grade level…..but for the purpose of this post why the average person does not understand economics (or politics or government) is not as important as the fact they do not understand.
To be fair I don’t think the average person gives a damn about the big picture when they cannot, or are struggling to, afford to feed their family. I don’t know about you but I have been in a position where I was hoping the number at the register did not go above a specific point because I knew what was in my bank account, or pocket, or on my food stamp card, and it is a feeling I would not wish on anyone.
At the same time the average person struggling doesn’t seem to be interested in discussing the fact that they are struggling is a result of out of control corporate greed, the wage disparity, and the fact that average incomes have not nearly kept up with inflation over the past 50 years.
When a population is only focused on one factor of a big picture issue, such as the economy, it doesn’t matter what the truth is or what factors make up that truth. It only matters what that person is focusing on.
The republicans are really good at this. Democrats really suck at this.
Had I gone after my wife’s aunt with the facts about the differences between our two state’s tax collections I would have been correct, but I would have at best made my wife’s aunt feel like she was wrong to focus on her property tax bill as a measure of her current tax load. At worse I could have made her believe I thought of her as stupid.
That is what democrats seem to do, they bust out the facts to try and disprove what the potential voter is complaining about, while the republicans commiserate with them.
Democrats, or liberals as they refer to us all, maybe without intending to, talk down to the general public. When Harris or Biden before her, went on television and talked about how wonderful the economy was doing, while the average person is wondering why a dozen eggs or a loaf of bread is now two or three times as expensive as it was a few years ago, the average person thinks democrats are talking down to them or are completely out of touch with reality.
I doubt that anyone would willingly vote for a party or a person who they believe talks down to them.
And they didn’t.
Worse than that roughly 20 million people who voted democrat in 2020 didn’t bother to vote at all in 2024. Maybe these people were wondering why groceries were suddenly so expensive too.
I saw a clip online of Harris being interviewed. A news reporter asked her what if anything she would have done differently over the past four years. Harris replied, “Nothing,” and that is when she lost the election.
She could have said anything after that, she actually talked about her plans to address something or another in the economy, but it didn’t matter because the part of the audience she was hoping to reach with that interview stopped listening after that word came out of her mouth.
That simple “nothing” indicated to a large segment of the voting population that Harris did not understand or care about their struggles at the grocery store, or running their small business.
That is why we lose so god damn always. When the word on the street comes back that the population has a concern, instead of telling them we understand their concern, or we are going to address their, we blast out the facts that should prove their fears and concerns are unnecessary and in the process make people think we are calling them stupid.
While the republicans may be outright lying to people (the president does not actually have the power to change the cost of a dozen eggs, that’s congress) that they will fix this issue (tariffs will actually make things worse), they are telling people what they want to hear to feel better about their current situation.
Put another way, the republicans placate the population with sweet sounding lies. I don’t recommend we do that but I do recommend that if we want to start winning more elections and making some of the policy changes this country needs to improve itself and the lives of the people living in it, we need to start specifically speaking to what the population says it is worried about.
In psychotherapy we are taught to speak to the patient on their level, where they are, and address the concerns they bring forward the way they bring them forward. That is speak to the patient about their issues the way they bring these issues to therapy, not your interpretation as an outsider or an educated person. To do otherwise is to potentially alienate your patient. A patient who feels alienated in the room with me will likely drop out of the treatment they came to me to receive.
A voter who feels alienated by one party votes for the other party, or worse doesn’t vote at all.
Save the facts for the reports.
