13 Takes For The End Of 2021
I’ll start this out with being a buzzkill.
My general rule of thumb is that if a Republican elected official and/or Fox News talking head publicly engages in COVID-19 vaccine skepticism/denialism, they're definitely fully vaccinated not least since Fox News has a vaccine mandate.
Given that many federal Democrats' go-to modus operandi is to call anybody who doesn't support every single thing the Democratic Party does and says an irredeemable racist, it's no wonder lots of voters don't vote for Democrats, even if they did before! People calling all those Clinton-Northam-Biden-Youngkin voters in Virginia evil racists instead of figuring out why they voted for Youngkin after consistently voting Democrat is evidence of this phenomenon. It genuinely feels like so many Democrats’ goal isn’t to win elections to help marginalized groups but to virtue signal their moral superiority.
"X policy will benefit Democratic voters" and "X policy will electorally benefit Democrats" are two different things. This is @ repealing the SALT cap and anything regarding student loan forgiveness.
Democrats have zero leverage over Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) because Democrats need Manchin to stay a Democrat more than Manchin needs to stay a Democrat. Without Manchin being a Democrat, Mitch McConnell is majority leader; Joe Biden wouldn't be confirming federal judges at a record pace, and possibly wouldn't even have a full Cabinet like McConnell would possibly let Biden have Labor Secretary Sherrod Brown if he was in a good mood. It's not Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer's fault that they can't bully Manchin into voting like Patty Murray (D-WA); it's the American electorate's fault that they didn't elect more Democratic senators so now, a guy who reps a state Trump won by 40 is the 50th Democratic senator.
In retrospect, the 2020 Democratic primaries were a total waste of time since we all spent a year and a half arguing about the semantics of policies that had zero chance of passing due to the makeup of our Congress and 6-3 conservative Supreme Court.
I'm so over people lauding Nordic (or Scandinavian because apparently there's a difference between those two terms, not that I knew that as someone who literally lived in Finland) countries as paragons of political virtue when their entire country's population is that of like half of Ohio. The US is also the most racially and ethnically diverse country in the world bar none, and Americans of all backgrounds have long formed coalitions with other groups unlike their own to bring about a better future for everybody. For instance, the Black-Jewish Alliance in the American South was powerful and influential during the Civil Rights Movement and in 2021, a modern iteration of the alliance elected senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, a literal bastion of the Confederacy. And, to ceaselessly whinge about how the US is unable to instantaneously achieve what some country a quarter of the size of Florida was able to do really disparages all the hard work Americans have done for almost 250 years to create a more perfect union.
One of the things that made the “America is right-wing” concept click for me was realizing that the areas most supportive of allowing Afghan refugees into the country were all MUCH too expensive for the refugees to settle down in and actually integrate into the community. Wealthy liberals virtue signal about supporting illegal immigration or raising the refugee admissions cap because they’re most likely never going to interact with illegal immigrants or refugees, but publicly supporting those things still gets them progressive clout. It’s also extremely telling that many of those same white liberals aren’t remotely enthusiastic about legal immigration reform because legal immigrants compete with them for high-paying jobs and with their kids for college admissions, which is why these liberals are trying to ban calculus in public schools and get rid of the SAT, but I digress.
Most federal Democrats are well to the left of the American electorate on immigration since the majority of American voters, especially legal immigrants, flat out abhor illegal immigration, and that's not even including the >70% of the population that's white. $450k payments to families of illegal immigrants who were impacted by Trump's family separation policies polled at 19%, and >50% of Americans think the Biden Administration should entirely shut down the Southern border due to the "Border Crisis." My personal theory is that in like 2013, some undercover GOP operative told Dems that the way to winning the Latino vote was to go all in on illegal immigration and we didn't realize that Latinos and other legal immigrants who can actually vote in American elections don't support illegal immigration at all. The point is, it's not actually federally elected Democrats' fault that Congress can't pass immigration reform, it's the fault of the American electorate, and that's not fixable by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeting a righteously angry thread.
Like, I'm sorry that elected officials in deep blue districts resent having to tailor the entire Democratic Party's messaging to the median voter in Pennsylvania but unless they have the votes to abolish the electoral college and/or the Senate, that's how it's gotta be. Look at it like this: AOC’s district has been held by Democrats since before my grandparents were born and if she loses a primary, a Democrat will still hold that seat. Abigail Spanberger's district was held by a Republican until 2018 when she flipped it. There is no comparison, and this excerpt is evergreen.
Speaking of AOC, she makes us millennial women of color who never shut up look bad; I probably think I’m smarter than I actually am, but I’m also objectively right a lot more than AOC is.
Leftists and the media will always give men that vote Republican more sympathy and consideration than they'll ever give women who've voted Democrat up and down the ballot since before my mother was born, but that's not new information, is it?
Lastly, based on this DM I got from a friend, Democrats need to learn to flat out lie to voters again like we used to do back in 2006 when Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) ran on “tighter borders” and then voted for every single pro-immigration reform possible when elected to the Senate. And, other elected Democrats need to let them lie through their teeth and not make long and pithy tweet threads about how border security is a racist dogwhistle the moment Tim Ryan alludes to protecting American jobs when also running for Senate in Ohio.
