Summary:
Democrats are becoming increasingly concerned about a possible drop in Black voter turnout for the 2024 presidential election, according to party insiders. The worries arise from a 10% decrease in Black voter turnout in the 2022 midterms compared to 2018, a more substantial decline than any other racial or ethnic group, as per a Washington Post analysis. The decline was particularly significant among younger and male Black voters in crucial states like Georgia, where Democrats aim to mobilize Black voter support for President Biden in 2024.
The Democratic party has acknowledged the need to bolster their outreach efforts to this demographic. W. Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, highlighted the need for Democrats to refocus their attention on Black male voters, who have shown lower levels of engagement. In response, Biden’s team has pledged to communicate more effectively about the benefits that the Black community has reaped under Biden’s administration, according to Cedric L. Richmond, a senior advisor at the Democratic National Committee.
However, Black voter advocates have identified deep-seated issues affecting Black voter turnout. Many Black men reportedly feel detached from the political process and uninspired by both parties’ policies. Terrance Woodbury, CEO of HIT Strategies, a polling firm, suggests that the Democratic party’s focus on countering Trump and Republican extremism doesn’t motivate younger Black men as much as arguments focused on policy benefits. Concerns are growing within the party that if they fail to address these issues, disenchanted Black voters might either abstain or, potentially, be swayed by Republican messaging on certain key issues.
Maybe… Maaaaaayyyyyyybeeeee the Democrats need to nominate someone who is actually worth getting excited about instead of just being not-Trump.
Because if voters are excited, they may start voting in primaries…
Every since Obama beat Clinton 15 years ago, party leaders seem more motivated to make sure their pick wins the primary than a Democrat winning the general.
“Moderates” seem ineffictive because they’re not trying to just win, they’re trying to win by as little as possible. Like a corrupt pro athlete who’s not throwing the game, but trying to win by less than the spread.
They know the reason most people vote for moderates like Biden, is if they don’t, someone like trump would win. It’s just the party leaders would rather trade back and forth than let Dems like FDR win every election for decades.
Ever since Obama beat Clinton 15 years ago
Jesus I thought you were exaggerating and then I did the math
If you think that’s bad:
Biden’s first presidential primary was 35 years ago…
He was the expected front runner due mainly to his (at the time) exceptional public speaking but got caught plagiarizing speeches, lying about his grades in law school, and even people finding out he cheated while in law school by plagiarising papers.
But everyone forgot about all that because he spent 8 years standing next to Obama. And the only reason he got that job was to make old white people less uncomfortable voting for a Black guy.
That’s a great way to put it. Both parties are funded by dark money interests, one drives us to the right and the other keeps us in place. This is described as the ratchet effect
and millions are claiming the democrats are radicals, little do they know that the country was more progressive on certain fronts 50 years ago. So they have to resort to blaming gays and trans, because everything else about the current staye of the country is kinda right-wingy to begin with.
I’d rather we nominate someone who is electable, i.e., palatable to centrists, even if they’re not as exciting as someone who would move the Overton window leftwards.
What if is instead of focusing on a vanishingly small number of centrist swing voters, you focused on the 35% of non-voters by improving their material conditions?
The majority of non-voters believe there is no material difference between candidates. Improving candidates is not going to fix that. The problem is lower level civic engagement rather than “Pick a more leftist candidate.”
Because those people just don’t show up to vote.
Maybe all the people bitching need to show up EVERY ELECTION and then they’ll start getting good candidates. But time and again progressives and everyone else just decide to not vote so therefore don’t even come close to getting what they want. Vote in every election for even dog catcher like it’s your religion and maybe you’ll start seeing change.
I don’t think that was the main reason.
IMO, Biden was nominated because he was a fairly uncontroversial (by mainstream sensibilities anyway) white male candidate who also isn’t that attached to many positions that would threaten the powers that be.
Biden is a weather vane that swings in accordance to the winds. Which is all that was needed to beat a historically unpopular candidate like Trump. Thankfully, Trump is such a bad option that even Biden can be a palatable candidate.
Why this fossil didn’t bend the knee and allow another younger, more exciting candidate step up for 2024 is beyond me though. But I guess seeing the average age and mental capability of Congress, it shouldn’t be surprising. IMO, everyone over the age of 65 should be ineligible for elected office. They are at retirement age, and have no real, justifiable stake in the future. They should retire with the knowledge they won life and can live out the rest of their days in comfort and leave running the country to people who have skin in the game and the energy/mental faculties to actually play it.
Biden joining + everyone else dropping out was the last hope the establishment had to kneecap Bernie, and it fucking worked
Why this fossil didn’t bend the knee and allow another younger, more exciting candidate step up for 2024 is beyond me though.
Probably because the geriatrics fucked two whole generations of politicians by not stepping down when they should have.
Gen X and millennials don’t have enough horses in the race with the experience necessary to run for president because they got fucked by the boomers.
We’re going to be in for an exciting ride over the next two decades as something like 40% of Congress retires or dies in office without anyone with experience available to replace them.
And this is on both sides.
Biden won because black women liked him and they actually go out and vote in the primaries, unlike the louts in this thread who are literally talking about how they won’t vote.
Well…maybe it will be his time and we will get Harris. We can dream I guess.
Your dream is Harris?! Shit, no. No, no, no.
My hope is that Biden is staying in the race until the 11th hour to be the lightening rod and the dems have someone better to step in.
Of course, that would require some intestinal fortitude and a few brain cells and I don’t think the dem leadership has that.
This shit right here. Both times I was exited for a candidate he got thrown out because the party leaders didn’t like him, first with Hillary, and then with Biden. I’m just going to continue to vote for not-trump because I know how bad it will be but I don’t want any centrist democrat almost as much as I dont want trump.
Anyone “worth getting excited about” is going to challenge the status quo too much - even nominally - for the DNC to be okay with it. They are conservative in the descriptive sense. “No-one’s standard of living will fundamentally change.”
I get that we have many problems that aren’t really being actively solved, but personally I’ve been pretty happy with this return-to-status-quo term as compared to the previous non-status-quo term… and right now the narcissistic traitor is leading the nomination polls.
You’ve been pretty happy with status quo have you? Great, love that for you. Sounds like being apathetic to the problems is working out for you specifically. I certainly wouldn’t want you to have to think about the enormous numbers of disenfranchised, poor and minority people who overwhelmingly don’t turn out to vote because they don’t see a real difference in their lives between parties and the dems aren’t doing anything to prove to them why they should care. That sounds like it wouldn’t be comfortable for you, and that’s the top priority here.
Or maybe you need to understand that the down ticket races are more important than the presidency?
Change in the US starts at the bottom. Not the top.
Fuck the presidency. Just vote for the candidate that isn’t going to burn the country down.
You want real change? Real progressivism? Vote progressives into local offices. Your young, progressive education board member today is your congressional rep tomorrow. Your congressional rep today is your presidential hopeful tomorrow.
Let the status quo dems toss whatever geriatric they want at the presidency and vote them in so we don’t get another trump, or worse, a president desantis or something.
Presidents don’t often push new laws anyway. You want to change the country? Help take the House and the Senate. As long as the president is the same party they’re not going to veto progressive legislation.
I was about to write something like your comment.
You want real change? Real progressivism? Vote progressives into local offices
Show up to every local election. Pay attention at the local level. Use your passion against the two party system to get third-party candidates elected to your state house.
Or maybe grow up and realize that political offices and the people that fill them shouldn’t be “exciting”. Maybe the problem is that we all want someone exciting… With no regard for competence.
“I’d have a beer with him.” Who gives a fuck???
Problem is that you need to convince tens of millions of people to grow up. I think this chap here is merely suggesting we give the idiots what they want.
Candidates that will the whole party will find exciting are basically a once in a generation event, if that. This generation’s such candidate was Obama. Democrats as a party are reliant on far too big of a tent to make this a viable strategy or thought process.
A candidate that I, a far left progressive, would get excited about is a candidate that a lot of center-of-left or moderate voters would find boring. Even within wings of the party there’s not going to be lockstep excitement (go back to Dec 2019 and ask Sanders supporters how “excited” they’d be for a Warren candidacy!).
This line of argument is consistently just people pining for candidates that more closely reflect our own ideological views, not a reflection of the reality available to us. There was no such candidate in 2016 or 2020 and won’t be for 2024. I’m not going to hold my breath for 2028 either. Maybe by 2032 we might see the next Obama, someone that excites the whole party.
Maybe… Maaaaaayyyyyyybeeeee the left voters need to actually show up to vote.
Now everyone is going to say they voted in a presidential election, possibly even a primary which makes them a rarity! Those aren’t what we’re talking about. The right has made it a point to vote on everything even as small as schoolboards so the only people voting in the tiny little races are the right wing rage crowd or the centrists who are being pulled to the right. Yes, the presidential vote matters, but frankly those lower down votes mean a lot more and if you watch how the Republican primaries are going, shows exactly how much power that batch that will show up has over a party.
This is some real “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” energy. If “just vote” actually worked, they’d change the system just enough so it doesn’t. Assembling establishment voltron in 2020 during the primaries is just a tiny taste of the lengths that democrats will go to in order to prevent a progressive candidate from winning.
Thing is, it isn’t “Just vote”, it’s being absolutely active every step of the way. Dunno what your territory is but my state we’re having an absolute route of the ultra-right wing going for every local position with the Republicans national conference funding them, the Dems have considered the entire state a lost cause.
So kinda, yea, it is a pull yourself up by the bootstraps, and anyone else who you can pull up as well because we’re sure as hell not getting help from the top, but it’s either that or sit on our fucking hands and go “whelp”. Remember, whether you like her or not, AOC primaried the supposed “2nd in command” Democrat. If you don’t like the establishment, you root it out from the bottom.
It will only last a few more years, but in the near-ish future the problem will take care of itself. (They’re both very old)
Black voters might either abstain or, potentially, be swayed by Republican messaging on certain key issues.
If Republicans magically sweeten up on Tim Scott, that’s going to be hella bad. We’ll be energy independent as bee’s homes melt and with a dude significantly more partial to racists than anyone that’s black should be.
That link is weird. Honeybees are not native to Arizona; they’re an introduced species from Europe and Africa. There are native bees, but they don’t build nests of easily meltable wax.
https://www.pollinator.org/pollinator.org/assets/generalFiles/AZ_bee_guide_FINAL.pdf
I have a suspicion that Tim Scott, if given full up-close magnification as a front runner, would creep people out with his unmarried, maybe-a-virgin, obvious Christian closet-case routine.
Refusing to be who you are, and instead allying yourself with the very people who hate who you really are, is some Stockholm shit by way of South Carolina.
They are tired of being promised 40 acres and only given lip service. The DNC uses minorities as political pawns to be used and tossed aside the day after election and minority communities have caught on. Hopefully they will turn out in huge numbers to support Cornel West. Someone that offers the same rhetoric and policy Bernie did without being a party sheepdog.
Splitting the vote is liberal bullshit myth, we wouldn’t vote for your shitty candidates if there were no 3rd party candidates running
Yes! He’s running as a green. And the democrats are ‘concerned’ and telling people don’t vote third party or else you’ll get trump!
But then when asked why they won’t add something like STAR voting to their platform, they go quiet. They love holding us hostage and don’t want to give that up! 🤣
If you vote third party in a presidential election then it is a wasted vote.
If third parties want to win presidential elections then they need to start by consistently and widely winning governorships, becoming state senators, reps, etc. They can’t win, and they won’t shift public debate, by running for president.
As a third party candidate, which is useful presuming one wants to split the left.
Split the vote is liberal myth. If there were no 3rd party candidates we still wouldn’t vote for your shitty corporate owned neo liberal warhawks.
Voting for a right wing party like the DNC does not position you on the left
Cornell West, who’s campaign is being run by Jill “lunch with Putin” Stein. I thought more of West than to be an obvious Republican plant. I don’t even care what I think about Biden, he is the incumbent president and will be the candidate. I’ll vote for him in a second because the alternative is literally the likely destruction of the United States as we know it.
This isn’t hard. The US is a two party system right now. I don’t understand why people think a third party is ever a good idea right now. Maybe third parties should run in local elections instead of this dumb spoiler candidate for the president vs
Nice liberal bullshit neocon talking points you have there. We have a 2 party system because liberals allow it. They are so comfortable with the oppressive status quo and are terrified of the idea of being inconvenienced by the progress of others. There was a reason MLK warned society about liberals. They are the sole reason nothing meaningful for the general public ever gets done.
We won’t be voting for your shitty CEO owned warhawk candidate, so if Dems lose the WH this was the work of Dem voters.
We have a 2 party system because liberals allow it.
No, we have a 2-party system because of Duverger’s Law, and liberals are the ones advocating for ranked choice voting, which fixes the situation and allows for more diversity of viable candidates.
I’m living in reality, however unpleasant that may be. No “left” third party candidate will do anything but get Trump another term. I want better things for this country, but the way to get them isn’t to help elect a fascist hopeful dictator. Change needs to start at the bottom, you seem really motivated, you should go run for City council and start making the change you want to see. Right now your answer to not liking one candidate is to choose the one that probably would love to put you in a reeducation camp.
The thing is that there’s never a “good time” to vote third party because we’re locked in to a forever crisis. And if you think the democrats will fix it, I think that you’re mistaken. IMO, the democrats haven’t been serious about fixing stuff basically since Johnson. Carter had a lot of good ideas, but his legacy as president is basically “that guy where gas prices started going up”; Clinton did address some problems (like the deficit), which got the republicans big mad, but failed to address a bunch of other serious issues that would have been much less painful to solve in the 90s; Obama’s basically the same way, only two wars kept him from even dreaming of a balanced budget. The democrats basically just stop making things actively worse for a little bit. Sometimes I wonder if this is what it was like to live through the demise of the Roman republic; Caesar is coming, our democracy is floundering and ineffectual, and the best that we’ve got is to shrug and vote for “not a Nazi”. Don’t get me wrong: never, ever vote for the Nazi, but come on, we have got to do better than that or things or going to keep getting a lot worse.
I want more candidates like Cornel West.
I am excited to vote. Maybe another candidate can catch my attention too… please? The one party system outside of swing states is boring. Biden was a not Trump vote which is also boring. We can do better than the current voting arrangement.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Democrats are worried about a potential drop next year in turnout among Black voters, the party’s most loyal constituency, who played a consequential role in delivering the White House to President Biden in 2020 and will be crucial in his bid for reelection.
Such warning signals were initially papered over by other Democratic successes in 2022: The party picked up a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania, Sen. Raphael G. Warnock won reelection in Georgia and anticipated losses in the House were minimal.
Advocates expect that trend to continue, particularly with Vice President Harris on the ticket and the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who both made history as the first Black women in their roles.
Williams acknowledged any growth in support among Black voters could be harder for the GOP if Trump is the nominee — and there will be many other groups, including suburban White women, that the party will have to worry about in that case.
In Detroit, liberal organizers targeting Black turnout have made education about how politics work a centerpiece of their pitch, along with concrete examples of policies that have benefited people from state and federal legislation.
“There is a slow leaking of Black men from the base because the issues that they care about aren’t being addressed,” said Branden Snyder, executive director of Detroit Action, whose organizers tell people the exercise is more like writing a Yelp review to spur change.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
fuckin find a decent nominee then
If the DNC didn’t say there would be no primary on day 1 then we might have actually been able to see people step forward. Marianne Williamson is at least running on the issues and is physically capable of having a two hour conversation. Biden… not so much
Capable of a two hour conversation maybe, but a strong candidate? Not even close
I think if there was a regular debate schedule it could have gotten interesting. But with the way it is now, you’re absolutely correct
I don’t know why they’re so content to hitch themselves to terrible candidates. I’ve never in my life voted Republican, and the last time I was excited about a democratic nominee was Obama (RIP young idealistic me). Hillary had more baggage than a travelling circus, and felt a lot like just dead ass casting a vote for Goldman Sachs to run the oval office; Primary Biden made Jeb Bush seem like a live wire, besides not really having much to get excited about on his platform. Bernie was basically the only exciting thing the democrats have had going in soon to be over a decade now. The part has to do better.
Williamson is a nutcase, and Kennedy is a racist anti-vaxxer. How about we get a serious candidate or two?
As if Biden wasn’t already a serious candidate with a provable winning record.
Biden is clearly the better option and it shows by how much money the Republicans and the far right are dumping into “Democratic candidates” like RFK Jr and Dr. Cornell West. Which is also why the Right wingers and their “Democratic” proxies are the only ones trying to push for a democratic primary that would set a new precedent by primarying an incumbent Democratic President.
The only person this infighting about these unqualified challengers to Biden helps is Trump or whatever MAGA loyalist that replaces him once Trump finally winds up in prison. (Hopefully)
In 2020 there were double digits dems in the primary…
In 2024 we’re expected to believe the only choice is Biden or a Republican.
If you’re pissed “there’s no other nominee” be mad at the party leaders who aren’t allowing a primary. And realize there’s 100s of people qualified to run as a Dem
Double digit nominees…that all lost to Biden.
We gonna drag them up again? So they can lose again?
… That’s what a primary is for. So people can, like, actually choose.
There are a LOT of people who don’t want Biden for another four years. There are people who didn’t like him, but have warmed up to him.
Would he win a primary? Yeah, probably, because of incumbent advantage.
But that should be for people to decide.
Maybe one that isn’t older than average life expectancy already let alone after another term. Just an idea.
Cool, if that candidate showed up and won the Democratic primary in 2020 I would have voted for them. As things stand I’ll go with the most viable one that’s most likely to defeat fascism. That’s the incumbent, Joe Biden. I don’t care if he’s elderly.
