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Wait, so if candidates actually run on what voters want, they can succeed?
Amazing
Posting this to offend the white supremacist mods in the politics forum
I don’t consider any of Mamdani’s proposals especially left-wing, either. They’re all bare-minimum, common-sense social programs that pay dividends. The fact that people are going mad over this tells you exactly how far gone the US has become.
Dems continue to be baffled by the popularity of progressive politicians. They can’t fathom Americans wanting less & less to do with their moderate-right-wing bullshit, while the far-right moves farther & farther right.
It's the foreign influence within the DNC brought in after private money flooded US politics. Get rid of Citizens United and the system will do a lot to correct itself.
Lol, no it really isn't. Citizens vs United was the culmination of decades of the DNC constantly bending over backwards to compromise with conservatives.
Basically in the late 80's and early 90's the legislative grid lock we all know and love today was becoming the status quo. So a strategy of compromising with "moderate" conservatives over policy that benefited aspects of both parties was popularized by the Clinton's.
This "Thirdway politics" led to short term benefits, and allowed the Clintons to get a death grip over the DNC. After a short period conservatives took advantage of this tactic of compromise to drag the DNC further and further to the right. Basically every sitting senator and most of the politicians in the house made their political careers by being the best at compromising with the right.
It's always foreigners, isn't it? What about the domestic private money flooding US politics? What, because they're American billionaires, it's fine?
Republican: I can't tell a socialist from a communist but I can be racist at the same time.
There’s also kind of an answer here to why people voted for Trump.
People are angry. They don’t necessarily know the best policies to resolve the country’s poor direction, but it’s clear to so many people that what we have isn’t working.
Many of us have had a conversation over drinks with a confident person at a party who maybe has a job you don’t understand well, and who just speaks confidently about all the things that are fucked up, and what they’d do in charge. As long as they don’t make claims of “Things are mostly okay”, they can make up any target: Immigrants, trans people, government overspending on overseas programs. The key is, they have to match the voter’s anger. The rest follows naturally.
I’d also say that’s how Obama got elected. He had a message of hope and change.
I have two points to add to this:
1 - As a liberal, there was nothing more frustrating than having to vote for Kamala, a candidate who was aggressively "pro-cop", especially as many in the country were protesting for defunding cops. Youre not going to energize most people with an angle like "You want us to vote to stop Trump?"
2 - As a person who is part of the black/immigrant community, the government has a history of ignoring us for decades. It's not the federal government, but the local government too. Systematic racism has always kept us down. And I hate to say it, Trump got a wall going. Trump has ICE harassing immigrants. These are newsworthy events, even if they're in the wrong fucking direction. But a Democrat has a history of never wanting to create a ripple as they appeal to all sides.
I know people who voted for Trump specifically because they thought the best way to make things better in the long run was to elect someone who would make things drastically worse first. That it was necessary for him to win to teach a lesson to various dysfunctional parts of the system that would otherwise be complicit in a decline to the same destination, differing only in speed.
It's unfortunate that fascists don't give back power. I have a coworker who was getting fed up with people like Macron succeeding over here, and he was saying "sometimes I wonder about Le Pen getting elected, maybe it'll work to show how bad they really are at doing anything and people will finally vote left" (he's from Algeria, he absolutely 150% isn't a far right voter or even heavily religious himself) and when he saw Trump the first time, on Jan. 6, it finally registered in his head that you really can't give fascists a single step in the door, ever, even if they're shit at doing anything, you have to erase them everywhere because they're not shit at keeping and abusing power.
What's even more unfortunate is that the other people who are in power most of the time ("center right") don't actually want to keep fascists out of power if doing anything costs them power.
Shocker progressives are popular because checks notes … they fight for everyone not just the rich
I don't think anyone is actually shocked. It's quite obvious that if you push policies that benefit large numbers of people, you might get support from large numbers of people. Of course that's not a guarantee, but it doesn't need to be.
But many Democrat politicians have been keen on appeasing their corporate backers by pretending otherwise, even though they knew it, we knew it, Bernie was saying it The cat has been out of the bag for a long time.
absolutely disappointing that the Democrats would rather have a sex pest mayor than someone just a LITTLE more left than them.
They knew, that's why they threw Bernie Sanders under the bus over and over. The ones controlling the DNC do not want to lose their corporate backers if they allow true social equality.
Don't worry guys. I'm sure the democrats will learn this this time around...
Any politician criticizing Mamdani receives money from AIPAC…
Wow what a coincidence,
Free Palestine from the apartheid genocidal colonizers, the fascist Israeli regime!
They’re not shocked, they’re alarmed that the left has gained such a clear and dramatic groundswell of support and that they found a flaw in a mechanism they have traditionally used to tilt the scales in favor of machine incumbents.
They are taking steps to mitigate this, I would absolutely expect them to even overtly rig the general, and everyone should be paying attention to who owns the voting machines, whether the software is audited, and how the votes are tabulated.
Frankly I don't know what folks should have otherwise expected. The "standard" candidate was a former governor who left the office in disgrace after misconduct.
Even if people were for whatever reason skeptical of a progressive candidate, the business as usual candidate was such a bad idea that people would rather go for it than vote for Cuomo.
Now we watch as Cuomo probably ruins everything by running in the general anyway. The same reason why people say the progressives that can't win Democrat primaries should bow out for general elections without RCV applies to "centrists" in the same boat. A progressive candidate won fair and square, stay out of his way.
It appears that the success of Mamdani isn’t so much a vote against Trumpian politics, but more a vote against the stale nothingness of the Democrats top brass
People worth their salt, especially academics, mentioned this multiple times, neoliberal politics is no longer working. People want anything away from the forty-year old, outdated policies. Populism is getting a bad rap (either unintentionally or deliberately) but it is simply democracy. When surveyed, many voters who'd be open to vote right are also willing to vote left provided that bread and butter issues that affect day-to-day lives are addressed. Mamdani won the primary because he ran on providing common sense policies that the duopoly parties and oligarchs have brainwashed many Americans to fear. It seems that Americans are gradually waking up from establishment conditioning.
If American progressives continue with running on addressing bread and butter issues, and take away the narrative from the right, then the country could be saved from fascism. There may not need be a civil war to oust the Trump administration, but only time will tell.
Come on, look at the alternative that the PARTY chose. Cuomo was meant to be handed that position.
The parties don't give a shit about what the public wants. They have an agenda and they're working towards it. Any time a candidate comes along and tries to really help people with policy changes they are stabbed in the front by the other party, and stabbed in the back by their own.
The funny thing is that The Betoota Advocate is a satirical newspaper - but this is not satire
My expectation is that this will motivate them to pull another Ross Perot. They will spend all of their time working with Republicans between this election and the next dreaming up institutional hurdles to a socialist making headway in a political campaign, just like they made it institutionally impossible for third parties to sniff a presidency.
If Mamdani actually does try to do the things he says he will (which I doubt) those efforts to institutionally hamper non-conservative candidacies will be doubled.
That's pretty positive honestly, my bet is they try to imprison or kill him like every other popular socialist in modern history.
If Mamdani pulls it off, I hope he can keep his promises or at least give a good fight for common sense. For the moment, the USA is fucked up.
It's almost as though people want good policies. Bah, the people are fools! Let's move further to the right to capture moderates!
-Dems
While I'm glad he won and the message this sends to Democrat leadership, I think making this claim: "It seems the pendulum is swinging back towards left-wing politics" is very premature.
He won a Democrat primary in a deep blue city in a blue state, the same that elected AOC.
I don't think this really signals much other than, yes NYC likes leftist candidates, as we already know from AOC. This may or may not signal any kind of larger pattern about American political feeling as a whole.
If the same doesn't happen in cities and states across the country, it will just be disregarded as a fluke.
NYC is overwhelmingly democratic, but not left. They have a big share of rather conservative Democrats, which makes the victory of AOC and Mamdani even more impressive.
It’s a huge poke in the eye of democrats who say anything left of Hitler loses elections.
I think part of the victory is actually showing the ability for the DNC leadership to project force is greatly diminished. They pulled out all the stops. AIPAC, DNC, The entire media apparatus, all the ad buying, the poison pill of hypocrisy, and finally, the sex pest Bill Clinton.
The victory here is very, very much that you win elections with people power, not $. The rumblings of this were actually that judicial election in Wisconsin which got Elon pushed out of the WH. And frankly, its signature was detectable in 2024 where no matter the spending, Democrats couldn't motivate voters to show up.
Center right cumuo who is also a sex pest
Well well well, looks like not being republican lite does the trick
Liberals in shock at effective policy choice 🙄