Yeah, this was an odd write-up. I found this section particularly baffling.

It’s true that Democrats need to energize their base voters, but our analysis suggests that they’re unlikely to do so successfully through a strategy of blanket progressive appeals to an ideologically diverse base. Instead, Democrats need to persuade nonvoters with a clear and credible message about how the party plans to improve the economic lives of working people.

Now, credible eliminates the means-tested-to-death programs the Dems love so much, right out of the gate. This, much as the author seems loath to say it, leaves you with progressive ideas, or Republican/conservative ideas. Presumably, folks who cared enough to register as Democrats don’t like the conservative ideas, so we can fairly safely discard them as a winning move to get those voters out. Raising the minimum wage, universal healthcare, building more housing and/or implementing schemes to help people afford current housing, expanding benefits like WIC and EBT, free and universal university education, or taxing the rich and corporations to fund these sorts of programs are all clear, credible and progressive stances that would help working people.

It doesn’t get much more simple than, “I make minimum wage. They say they will make minimum wage a bigger number, so I will get more money.” or “My check would be bigger if I didn’t have to pay insurance premiums, and I could spend it on other stuff if my insurance actually reliably covered most medical expenses without me having to cough up $2500-$6000 a year out of pocket first.”

I’d also like to send out a special “Fuck you” to everyone who signed off on changing the position representing nonvoting Democrats and those who voted, depending on whether the nonvoters were more or less likely to respond in a certain way compared to those who voted in this section.

The second thing to notice about the demographics of Democratic nonvoters: They were overwhelmingly working class and relatively economically precarious. Democratic nonvoters were nearly twice as likely (60 percent vs. 32 percent) to have a household income of less than $50,000 per year, they were nearly three times less likely to hold a four-year college degree (47 percent vs. 17 percent), twice as likely to be gig workers (31 percent vs. 15 percent), and only half as likely to be union members (27 percent vs. 14 percent). Further, nonvoting Democrats were more than twice as likely as voting Democrats to report feeling the economy is worse now than a year ago (46 percent vs. 22 percent) or that their incomes had recently decreased. And, perhaps not surprisingly given their economic precarity, Democratic nonvoters were substantially more likely than voters to support increased state welfare spending (61 percent vs. 52 percent).

This seems more like extroverts’ misconceptions of how introverts are, rather than an actual issue to me. I don’t tend to seek out relationships with highly extroverted people who can’t stand the idea of a moment where nobody is saying something, regardless of how inane that thing happens to be. At present, my companion and I have known each other for pushing 15 years, and we’re just comfortable being quiet around each other, unless one of us actually has something to say. If one of us actually has something they want to communicate about their day, or some other typical topic for small talk, we’re more than capable of talking each others’ ears off, we just don’t feel any need to run through conversations like:

“How was your day?”

“Good, yours?”

“Also acceptable.”

on a regular basis, unless we actually have something we wanted to discuss.

It’s also not as though we don’t have any hobbies or interests. We’ve got plenty of shared ones, and enjoy discussing them and planning out future activities, we just tend to do it either solo or together, but without involving large groups. Even for those we don’t share, we enjoy discussing them with each other to a certain extent.

There’s a huge difference between disliking pointless, socially expected chatter to fill dead air, and having some sort of social anxiety that leaves you unable to sustain regular conversations with others in your life. People who are not introverted just seem to assume that we either wish we could do it, but have some sort of condition that prevents us from being able to do so without it causing us problems, or that we just never learned how to do it properly, and would enjoy it for some reason if they just kept trying to get us to do it more and practice. I’m sure there are people that would apply to, but it’s not universal, and many of us would just like to be left in peace, unless you actually have something to say. Sometimes, we even meet others like ourselves, and enjoy our peace together, without the pointless talk that we both know neither is really interested in.

Relevant meme:

I don’t know, they could at least obstruct as much as the Republicans did for them whenever the Democrats were in power and had a chance to pass actual progressive legislation, but chickened out and said they needed to compromise the shit out of it to make a bipartisan effort, since the Republican minority was blocking anything and everything they tried to do.

I, too, am far from being either of those things, but it sounds like you could just track purchasing power to get a rough idea. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding it, but it seems to me that, if inflation or other factors have eaten into your purchasing power and you haven’t gotten a corresponding raise to offset it, you can reasonably conclude that the economy is getting worse for you in your personal circumstances.

Nah, as in there’s no reason for anyone to bring up F1 as a comparison, for the reasons you listed, and plenty of other safety improvements.

I don’t think you understood what I wrote or the context it was written.

I understood what you said fine, but you sure needed me to spell it out for you that I was agreeing with your point regarding most forms of racing these days, so maybe cool it on these comments until you work on your own reading comprehension and grasp of context yourself, there.

Nah, F1 has come a long way from back in the day, and really done a lot for driver safety over the years. I’ve been following it since shortly after Jules Bianchi died, and the only time I thought “Holy shit, I’ve just seen someone die on live TV!” was Romain Grosjean’s crash, which he ultimately came away from with relatively minor injuries.

I think the motorsport equivalent would be something like the Isle of Man TT, or the motorcycle races at the Macau Grand Prix, where the approach to safety seems to mostly remain “Hey, don’t hit any of those stone/concrete barriers while going as fast as humanly possible, but if you do, there’s a doctor somewhere around, maybe they’ll get to you in time.”

Both of those events are, in all honesty, insane that they’re allowed to continue as is. The Macau GP seems somewhat better in terms of sheer death count, but despite being interested in motorsport generally, I don’t think I could ever make a holiday out of attending either one. I just don’t want to go somewhere that has a very real possibility of someone dying an avoidable death because “Ah, fucking health and safety have taken all the excitement out of racing, but we’re the real deal and hit stone walls at 200mph when we fuck up.”

The Democrats have cried about “the most important election of our lives” too many times, and people tuned it out. For people crying how terrifying a Trump presidency was going to be, their actions told voters that they would be happy to let this happen and keep working with the same individuals they told them would end democracy, and so far, they continue to work with the Republicans, with a very few conspicuous exceptions.

People warned the Democrats they could only run that play so many times before it no longer worked, yet they decided to stick with it anyway. If the Democrats wanted to win, they needed to have run a very different campaign, if not a different candidate.

I don’t know about that. I think in a lot of cases, it’s also down to our parents not getting any help for their mental health and not knowing how to deal with stuff they’re going through also making being around them a genuinely uncomfortable thing to do, even without anything like that going on.

That and a lot of people wind up having kids when they’re in no position to actually care for them and raise them properly, which aggravates the above, as well as providing material incentives to kick them out earlier.

Nope, it’s true. When I went for the first time a couple of years ago, my bank decided I needed more £50 notes than anything, and I got several “Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve seen one of these,” comments when I used them.

Also, fwiw, depending on where you’re heading in the UK, cashless payments can be way more prevalent than they are in many places. I’ve been to multiple bars in and around Manchester that just didn’t accept cash, and would bring out a card terminal to tap for every £2-3 beer I ordered.

On the other hand, bring a coin purse or something with you, because when you do use cash, you’ll get a ton of coins back, and it becomes a pain to have rattling about in your pocket real quick.

Didn’t even really need to overlevel him for that, though. He was fast and had a high special attack, so he got the first move in most situations and could oneshot most things. Even when it first evolved, my Kadabra carried me through pretty much every gym on its own, just because of how broken the psychic pokemon were in gen 1.

The last time I played gen 1, this was my strategy up until I caught an Abra. After that, once I got.some.levels on Abra and he got a psychic attack, my starter only came out when Abra ran out of moves. By the time you hit the Elite 4, you can just one shot pretty much everything with a well-leveled psychic Pokémon.

If it’s anything like my time on the night shift at a grocery store, there’s probably one person that’s been there for decades and only has to pack out one aisle of pillows, or some other bulky and light stuff, while everyone else has to cover 3 times as many shelves, with smaller and heavier items. But since that person has been there forever, they’re one of the holdouts with a decent contract that makes several times more an hour than anyone else, including the shift supervisor, and actually has decent benefits.

I mean, I know there had to have been some, but 2/3 of those are out of business and weren’t competitive with their Japanese rivals, while Zenith’s most recent “notable product” on Wikipedia dates from the 1970s and has been a subsidiary of a Korean company for nearly 30 years.

I think it’s mostly that they did way better than the US in terms of making many consumer technology products widely available at a higher quality and better cost than the US did. Like, Japanese brands were huge for televisions, audio equipment and similar goods. I can think of several that were the go to brands for TVs when I was growing up, but I can’t think of a single US-based manufacturer, even a crappy one.

They also did way better in terms of building out internet access and public transport than the US has done.

It might only be within a few limited sectors, but when those sectors account for the vast majority of peoples’ interactions with technology, it’s going to have a far greater impact on their perceptions of relative advancement.

Also, in the pre-internet days, it probably helped that non-Japanese people largely didn’t see all the ways that Japan can be an extremely conservative country, like their reliance on fax machines long after pretty much every other country with the means to do so had almost entirely left them behind as obsolete.

It’s seems like the 3d movies of the tech world. Every so often, they release a new iteration, tell us it’ll change everything, and while people get excited at first, they rapidly realize it’s not as useful as it was presented and often impractical. Start developing the next gen version, rinse and repeat.

It’s the little things like not understanding the historical context that something from the past fits in while simultaneously telling me Im wrong about the time that I lived through.

In fairness, that’s not necessarily a sign of them being young, but could be any number of things at play. I’ve had my grandmother literally tell me not to tell hew how things were during World War II, because she lived through it, when we were talking about well documented actions of major historical figures that she was confidently incorrect about. No amount of documentation about what Churchill, Stalin or Hitler did during a particular event could change her mind, because she lived through it, never mind the fact that she was like 10 at the time. /r/AskHistorians had a 20 year moratorium on discussing recent events for a reason. Then again, this is the same lady who left her church of decades, because she was sure she was better at interpreting the Bible and church doctrine than all the priests who spent years studying those topics in seminary, since she occasionally read random books of the Bible and was older than they were.

It could also just be peoples’ biases at play. A Marxist historian and a fundamentalist, conservative Christian historian will come to wildly different conclusions and interpretations of things like the significance and impact of the rise of the religious right in the US under figures like Ronald Reagan, despite looking at the very same events.

And it could always just be that people are essentially engaging in drive-by posting quite often on the internet. For all the good things it can bring us, and the sense of community that it often provides, I think that internet “communities” really just provide us with a close approximation of community, while fundamentally lacking key elements that help real communities to exist and function in the long term. Personally, I’m closer to the Democratic moderates/centrists that abound on Lemmy.world than I am to my coworkers or my parents politically, yet I find that political discussions here tend to lose all civility and sincerity much quicker than they do with my boss who is all gung-ho for MAGA in real life. Like, I actually got my boss to come around on things like taxing the rich and universal healthcare when I had a chance to explain them without the hysterical stuff Fox tosses out and with examples of how they would actually benefit him to have as a baseline during election season last year, and it was a more civil and less heated conversation than some of those I had here a few months prior about whether Harris was really a good pick when the Democrats announced her as their candidate last year.

Metallicy

Says the guy backing the same group that lost 4/7 presidential elections since 2000, including two (against Trump) that people thought nobody could possibly lose, since he was that terrible a candidate. You guys are killing it at getting people to agree with your platform, and it’s totally in line with what the broader population wants.

Great stump speech for why your preferred party isn’t just a bunch of people hostile to anyone who disagrees with them. With people like you representing them, I’m sure they’ll be able to win consecutive elections, rather than just getting the odd touch of power when people get tired of the GOP’s nonsense. Keep telling yourself it’s the voters that are wrong and stupid, and not your party, buddy.

People just don’t like them because they aren’t good enough.

It’s more that they’re still all in on incrementalism, while the problems people face are worsening by leaps and bounds, and they’re actively hostile to members of their own party who advocate for advancing the sort of large-scale, structural changes needed to actually resolve the various crises bearing down on the working class. They’re also at odds with their base on major issues, such as healthcare reform, a robust social safety net that isn’t means-tested to death, and their obsession with supporting Israel, because they’ve been captured by the purse strings of their major donors. It certainly doesn’t help peoples’ opinion of them as embodying the out of touch elites who are deaf to the plight of the working class when party leadership comes out against [https://www.businessinsider.com/we-are-free-market-economy-pelosi-rejects-stock-ban-congress-2021-12?op=1](Congressional insider trading) that our representatives are notorious for exploiting to enrich themselves via privileged knowledge they gain through their positions.

If they didn’t dump millions of dollars into primary challenges to progressive candidates that represent a challenge to the prevailing neoliberal order the Dem leadership so dearly loves, even when it means ultimately losing the race to a Republican, I doubt people would be so hostile to them, and the party would probably be in a better place. When party leadership won’t resolve their issues in a satisfactory manner, won’t listen to and incorporate criticism from their base, and actively fight their efforts to get elected officials who more accurately represent their views and values, it shouldn’t be a surprise that people decide to go elsewhere.

You can’t publish enough TikToks and youtube videos to media manage your way out of a hostile, out of touch group having a death grip on the party and refusing to admit that, perhaps, the present situation is vastly different today than it was 3-4 decades ago when they were first elected.

There are plenty of people, both politically engaged and those who only show up to vote every 4 years, who are legitimately dissatisfied with the Democratic Party’s deafness to the problems facing the average voter, and as long as the Democrats and their supporters continue to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it’s all down to a hostile media environment, the further down the path to complete irrelevance they’ll find themselves.