News Article: The Moderate Middle Is A Myth

[TIDE-HSV]

I think we are about to test this guy's theory in the 2020 presidential.
I think there is a good bit of the middle that will not, cannot hold their noses and vote for Trump. His behavior is just not acceptable.
If the Democrats nominate a sane person, they could well pick up a lot of those voters.
If, on the other hand, they nominate an extremist, they may fire up their base, but they stand to lose convince-able middle of the road voters.

My fear all along. I'd had to see the US democracy sacrificed on a cross of "progressive-ism," which I can see happening...

 

[selmaborntidefan]

Buchanan too since the erroneous votes for him in Palm Beach Co.

Look, I'm willing to concede that it is POSSIBLE that (as the phrase at the time said), "More Florida voters went to the polls intending to vote for Gore." That's POSSIBLY true. It's also demonstrably true that a Nader voter was something like four times more likely to vote for Gore than for Bush.


The problem with those analyses, however, is they ignore a crucial question:
How in the hell was a candidate running with the background of the greatest peacetime economic expansion in recorded history AND the nation at peace and feeling good - how was that candidate even in a competitive race much less against a relatively inexperienced neophyte who had trouble with words more than two syllables long?


The failure to address THAT problematic question is the failure of the Democrats as a party. The question is not, "What happened the cost us the close election," it's, "Why was the election ever close in the first place?" And mostly it's because Gore was not a particularly good candidate any more than HRC was in 2016.

Obama and Clinton and Reagan were good candidates (although Reagan was prone to the gaffe similar to Biden nowadays), the kind you turn the sound off on your television and just watch and say, "Pretty effective."

Gore and HRC (and Trump and Bush 41 and Dukakis) were not.



Btw - while I don't dispute your overall assessment of the Green Party, I think such things like that become necessary so long as Coke and Pepsi insist on a trust with one another. Several Presidential races - certainly prior to the 20th century - had 3 or sometimes 4 "major" or "near major" parties, and the country survived.


Sure, it took a war, but it survived.

 

[selmaborntidefan]

I think we are about to test this guy's theory in the 2020 presidential.
I think there is a good bit of the middle that will not, cannot hold their noses and vote for Trump. His behavior is just not acceptable.
If the Democrats nominate a sane person, they could well pick up a lot of those voters.
If, on the other hand, they nominate an extremist, they may fire up their base, but they stand to lose convince-able middle of the road voters.

I agree with this in general terms.


The problem, of course, is that party primaries (as you know better than I) are dominated by activists who impose purity tests on the candidates. That's a danger in both parties (Trump being the best example), but the GOP isn't having a primary (at this point) in 2020.

The best example of what disaster can befall the Democrats is what happened in 1984. John Glenn might not have won a damned thing in the primaries, but he mortally wounded Mondale with a commercial tagging him as "the candidate of the special interests." After Glenn withdrew, Hart did the same thing (basically) so while Mondale was winning the nomination, he was getting bludgeoned as a high tax, high unemployment candidate who was checking all the boxes (blacks check, women check, labor check, etc).

Of course, that won't happen to the same extent this time (the GOP couldn't win California if they had the only candidate on the ballot, for example), but the method could conceivably play out the same.


All Trump needs to win is what Nixon got in 1972 - a candidate whose ideas make the candidate more revolting than the incumbent.
"It was just the kind of election Nixon liked - to get them to vote against the other guy." - John Sears

 

[NationalTitles18]

Put simply, third party voters are scapegoated by politicians and their supporters who don't want to admit that they failed and its their own fault. They don't want to ask themselves the hard questions about what they did wrong and what they could do better. Their choices include continuing to scapegoat and never learning a thing or being adults. Most times lately it seems the former.

 

[81usaf92]

Except Gore didn't carry his HOME STATE.......

.

Gore lost because he couldn't hold Clinton's South dominance that he had in 92 and 96