For a while, and by a while I mean a day, I was worried that the left would catch on when Trump tweeted for all the world to see his strategy to tie The Squad to the Dems. But I now feel confident that they are as oblivious as ever.
FiveThirtyEight put out a staff chat article a few days ago titled
Will ‘The Squad’ vs. Pelosi Be A Big Problem For Democrats In 2020? Their answers are several different variations of 'No.' How Julia Azari is a Politcal Science professor I will never know.
There's some real winners in this article.
I don’t think they’re a problem, but it’s too early to gauge their party-building potential. And obviously, they make some people nervous. But if the goal is to engage young people, women and people of color, and keep the left flank of the party somewhat happy, they seem like a good bet.
Telling black people you plan to replace their support with illegal aliens is a good bet? Good luck with that.
It would be smart for the party establishment to think of this as natural tension between the wings of the party.
Lol. No, this is not natural tension.
We’ve (and here, I specifically mean academics and the media) way overemphasized the concept of party unity.
'Dems in disarray' is not a popular theme for nothing.
It’s just hard for me to believe that these four women really would have that much of an impact on 2020?
You will in 2020.
It’s [AOC talking about getting rid of the Department of Homeland Security] also probably a very marginal electoral risk in a world where Donald Trump is president and there’s much bigger news all the time.
Telling America you're gonna open the floodgates an let in the whole world is a marginal electoral risk? Hmm...
Part of the problem is that the lessons of 2016 aren’t clear. You could say that 2016 showed that there was a real push to move Democrats to the left.
They are clear for anyone who wants to learn them.
The party establishment is probably overstating the rise of the AOC wing in terms of affecting the 2020 elections.
The Dem establishment is frequently wrong... but not on this!
Most of this in relation to the Squad is marginal, though, no matter how many hot headlines Axios posts with polls that don’t actually say anything about AOC being the face of the party or about swing states.
Let me know how that works out for you in the Rust Belt.
So maybe party leadership is scared of losing control?
[...]
But is this kind of fear misplaced? How much is the Squad really moving the party to the left?
A year ago America wasn't talking about 70% marginal tax rates. Now we are. Does that answer your question?
the Squad are very effective at getting media attention, and the media is quite happy to play up the “Democrats IN DISARRAY!” storylines. So in that sense it does seem like a mistake for Pelosi et al. to hit back at them.
Yes they are effective at getting media attention. But it's not good attention.
And this probably, to put it bluntly, does make certain older vanguards of the party uncomfortable, because they consider themselves to be liberal, and that now they’re forced to reckon with the idea that they’re maybe not as liberal as they think.
Yeah, I'm sure that this is the problem. Older Democrats are uncomfortable that they are no longer the most progressive so they are trying to rein in the younger Democrats. Definitely. /sneed
there’s a lot of bullshit in which more establishment/centrist Democrats will deride a policy for being unpopular, when their real motivation against it is that they don’t like the policy.
The fact that centrist Democrats don't like someting that Republicans also broadly dislike is precisely what the word unpopular means.
Yes, Trump won, but that might say more about how we think about women in politics more than anything else.
Hillary lost because she's a woman. You're still going with that?
I may be discounting the impact of Democrats being perceived as too left/liberal.
Yes. Yes you are.
So yeah. They are just as clueless as the day after Trump's election.
