Dean would be pushing blue dogs and "third wayers" day and night if he was chair of DNC and was employing the 50 state strategy... the approach is objectively denied by most DUers. They naively think they can elect a Boxer in a red state.

or else they just have never lived in a Deep Red state...

But you don't turn a Deep Red state towards the Blue by nominating candidates that are Pale Red.

Even Bill and HRC could never carry Deep Red states.

El Perro Grande only carried a handful of purplish-Red states. He never came close in states like Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina or Missi-freakin'-ssippi.

You can't deny though that nothing but disaster has come to the party on the Congressional and Senate level from dumping Dr. Dean. and going to the "Don't Even Try" strategies employed by his successors.

they put even put Sandford back in power.....Fuck even Brownback got reelected....and he fuck the state over royally!

We ran against Republicans by conceding the validity of their arguments....thereby destroying any case for not simply voting Republican.

The progressive wing of the party is totally blameless in that.

There were NO candidates to the right of the ones we ran in the South this year that could possibly have claimed to even BE Democrats. Mendel Rivers would have gone down in flames in SC. Lister Hill or George Wallace would have been creamed in Alabama.
Bill Clinton would have lost in a landslide in any statewide race in Arkansas(there's a reason he lives in New York, and it's not because of who he's married to).

My point is that we've lost Congress because, after Dean was fired, everyone who succeeded him let the party basically die in whole chunks of the country. What happened this year proves we can't afford to do that.

We need to build a real coalition of the have-nots. That's the only way. There is no "center" anymore, and there is no large pool of voters we can tap if only our party sends the message that "we hate the damn liberals as much as you do".

There are only the people who have been screwed by the last thirty-three years...but they are the majority, and they want BIG change on a lot of levels(real checks on corporate power, a real transfer of wealth and say back from the wealthy to the people, and a foreign policy that doesn't keep getting us into useless wars just so we can "project force".

We just need to find the way to connect with that majority.

no matter what you do.....sorry but its true. That is what the 50 State strategy was about....you just cannot run any Democrat in the Deep South....trust me I lived in one for over half my life...Both my parents are Republicans there too....people in those areas are conformists....none dare go against the grain for fear of being ostracized....In SC you have just two kinds of men....the ones wearing Izod shirts and shorts and penny loafers with no socks....and then you have the camouflage...those two looks are far far and away the predominant clothing style....why? Because they don't dare non-conform....

when Dean was DNC Chair.

why don't you tell me about the progressive liberal democrats who won in the red areas when dean was DNC Chair ?

What we did do was prepare the party infrastructure in those states for competitive races to come...races we could have been competitive in(and not necessarily just with "fuck the liberals" candidates)in years like 2010 and 2014.

What we've had since Dean left, by contrast, was almost nothing but defeat in Congressional and Senate races and a collapse in state legislative contests(which is half the reason we've been gerrymandered out of competition for the House).

We grew under Dean. Since then, we've collapsed.

Can anyone make ANY honest defense at all about the post-Dean tactics the party has used? Any defense at all?

Now we are on to revisionism...

There were hardly any races where the Dem ONLY won because she or he was from the party's right wing.

A few, but not many.

And it was the party's right-wing that sabotaged us in Connecticut that year by supporting Joe Lieberman as an independent against the actual Democratic nominee(and weren't punished for it by the party leadership at all, even though there was no justification for their disloyalty and treachery).

seats ?

Dean's 50 state strategy was long-ball. It was basically what the Republicans did after Goldwater's defeat. A lot of the work Dean had to do was drag Democratic State Committees out of mothballs in some states, pay off their debts and get them back in operation as an actual organization.

I think had we been working from his playbook over these past six years, the area where it would have been most apparent is at the more local level. Right now, the country is littered with local governments completely under republican control. The fact is, you don't usually run for Congress w/o having served your time and built up a campaign infrastructure and volunteer base from the more local level. That takes time and energy and money.

The problem was, Emmanuel and Obama's team wanted complete credit for the election victory in 2008 and so they kicked Dean to the curb. How they thought that the Kaine could do a damn thing, I haven't a clue. What a complete joke.

We can flip large chunks of the South by talking about how corporations are screwing the people(like William Jennings Bryan) and by running a major campaign(as we SHOULD have done this year)to make sure likely-Dem voters in vote-suppression states HAD the id's the states demanded and making sure to get those folks to the polls.

We just need to focus on the voters we CAN get...the people who have lost ground...and not waste time on finicky suburban types who still think they can get rich starting their own business(when in truth nobody can do that anymore)and who are still obsessed about abortion and gays(as fewer and fewer people are these days).

It's all about putting together a coalition of the have-nots. That's the only thing that CAN work...and that's what our party refuses to even try-which is why we've had our ass handed to us in the last two midterms.

Dean gave us BOTH houses(which Rahm would never have done and may not even have WANTED to do, based on his attitude towards most Democratic activists when he was chief of staff). Can anybody claim that any good at ALL came of getting rid of him and replacing him with...some other guys nobody remembers now?

Talk isn't enough by itself. Work is needed.

In ALL states with voter suppression laws, there is NOTHING more important for the Dems to be doing than making sure that vulnerable voters have the id's the laws demand. We should have been running carpools and, if need be, renting buses to get such voters to the state offices, helping them in their homes if we could, and then damn well driving them to the polls. Our ONLY hope of ever recovering in voter suppression states is to do all of that, starting now, in preparation for 2016.

We should be doing active grassroots candidate recruitment starting now, trying to encourage people from the activist groups to stand for congressional and Senate races(obviously, 2014 proves the detached, "distancing" centrist establishment types aren't worth recruiting...hell Ashley Judd, with all her weirdness, would have done better than Alison Lundergran "I'm scared of admitting I voted for a black dude" Grimes against McConnell-not that Ashley is my dream candidate by any means, just making a comparison).

We need to be looking at getting ordinary folks who have been victims of hard times to run for us on "fight the power" programs...not running like the party pros tell them, but speaking like ordinary hard-hit folks to ordinary hard-hit folks, the kind who've taken the blows and have a "I won't back down" attitude(to quote the prophet Tom Petty).

We need, in other words, to make sure that every campaign we run from now on is totally different than 2014, because if something failed this year, it will fail EVERY year from here on in.

...in less than two days.

a 50 state strategy doesn't HAVE to mean settling for right-wing Dems in some states...what it REALLY means is building up the party to where we can be competitive anywhere, even on progressive platforms.

Before Heath Shuler was imposed as the Dem nominee in his district in N.C., a progressive had come within fifteen votes of beating the GOP candidate. Obviously, that candidate would have won if the party had backed her like it backed Heath.

Here's the unchallengable truth...ditching Dean led the party to nothing but defeat in congressional voting. How can anybody still say that ditching him(which almost all progressives in the party spoke out against at the time)achieved anything at all?

The key is building the party up...and campaigning with the confidence that we can actually go out there and WIN THE ARGUMENT.

We lost this year because we conceded the loss of the argument and the irredeemability of our incumbent Democratic president before the campaign even began. It was a right-wing loss using right-wing, defeatist tactics...tactics the party knew could only lead to defeat from the start.

did you not notice...they voted for Liberal issues....but voted in the most Conservative Republicans?

For them its tribal....you have to understand that about Red Staters....My best friend in SC supports Liberal issues...but I simply cannot convince her the Republicans do not reflect her opinions (she even supports Choice and Obamacares for example).... yet she just keeps voting Republican anyway.

She wouldn't have voted for a Blue Dog.

She wouldn't even have voted for Zombie Mendel Rivers(sorry for the image).

The only answer in states like that is to build up black voter registration to a large enough level to make the party competitive. That's why I've been hitting the theme of making sure vulnerable voters in anti-voter states have the id's they need and working hard to get them to the polls.

And you put together a program that really puts people on the bottom first(as our party NEVER does)and hit the other party with the "party of the Bourbons" label.

You don't build it by trying to out strutting deep-voiced patriarch the strutting deep-voiced patriarch.

I hear the frustration you're expressing about SC(a state that Bill never came close to carrying and HRC never will carry), but lashing out at progressives isn't the answer.

Totally re-thinking the party and discarding everything strategic we've done in the last six years is the answer.

It's about mobilizing by class(maybe you don't actually use the "c word", but you use the idea)to unite the majority who've been screwed over in a real coalition for change.

The party didn't try to do that this year...it hasn't really tried since RFK, in my view...but that's the way forward...not triangulation, not distancing, not "we agree with you that our guy is bad" stances, but hard-hitting talk about those who've been left out and hard-hitting programs to help them.

I am not the only one on this thread trying to point this out to you either...my best friend is a prime example...she supports liberal issues like Equal Pay and raising Minimum Wage....yet she will STILL vote Republican.

Howard Dean understood them....you don't.

Dean's strategy was to recruit Dems that could win in conservative districts. This was done by recruiting Dems that treated the Democratic platform as a la carte. You had pro-life dems, anti-immigration dems, pro-gun dems, pro-fossil fuels dems, etc. getting elected. They won because they weren't forced to conform to a narrow definition of what makes a Democrat. This is the strategy that won us both houses.

This completely contradicts a litmus test.

They're not displacing progressives in the Capitol and they don't filibuster against a Democratic president.

Dean did a great job. Oh, and what's killing us is mostly not controlling enough state governments. Gerrymanders and vote suppression (along with $$$) built the Republican majority, and that all happens at the state level. We have to live with much of that until after the 2020 elections. At least that will be a year of national elections, which will help our turnout.

"herman cain will take away the black vote from obama" type shit i read elsewhere. "romney lost because he was too liberal, Gingrich would have won".

no details, no specifics. never mind that Romney did better than right wing candidates who got defeated . just as it doesn't matter that the democrats who won in conservative areas were blue dogs.

just dismiss it all and no need to respond or give specifics.

I mean really. In the other thread, you basically wrote off the Southern and Western Conservative states. http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025815637#post43

Seriously dude. You can't reject the argument in one thread and then demand a program that is demonstrably unworkable in another. Just make up your mind will you? Either we are better off without the DINO's from those conservative states, or we are at a disadvantage without the DINO's from those states.

"Rahm Emanuel, as the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, famously decided that the best way for the DCCC to claim big wins in the 2006 was to focus his efforts on select safe seats and back candidates that would be easily persuadable to Emanuel in office. He flatly rejected Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy. As a result, the Democratic Party did pick up 30 seats in the House in the 2006 election, but lost some really great progressive candidates like Darcy Burner, because they refused to give them any investment. Who knows how many more they might have picked up (and how much further left of the DLC/Blue Dogs Emanuel backed) if they had went with Dean's strategy. Certainly, Axelrod and Plouffe went more with Dean than Emanuel in their presidential campaign strategy.

Unfortunately, it looks like DCCC head Chris Van Hollen and DNC chair Tim Kaine are listening more to Emanuel in this year's mid-term elections. Justin Coussoule, who is enjoying the full endorsement of Blue America, openly tells Chris Jansing that he has received no support whatsoever from the DNC or DCCC.

That's why your support of our Blue America campaign is so critical. The stupid Democratic Party just doesn't get it. Howie Klein has done an amazing job of vetting these fantastic PROGRESSIVE candidates and that's exactly the kind of people we need to see elected, not the malleable DLC types."http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/justin-coussoule-confirms-obamakaine