Bernie Sanders is (by far!) the most popular politician in America

Go to the source article and look at the charts- That’s not 28% total, it’s a 28 point spread.

As in, 30% have an unfavorable opinion of him, while 60% have a favorable opinion.

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They don’t seem to agree…

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F’that. I’ll stay on my coast, thankyouverymuch. The “heartland” can burn as they embrace GOP rulership and policies.

Get.No.Votes.

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How could that be when Bernie Sanders is so popular and his brand of politics is so obviously the wave of the future?

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Which is more or less what I said, eh?

Then your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to educate those folks directly, in language they understand, of, first off, what’s in your policies for them, and then and only then, what they are losing and what they stand to lose. (Note that the Donald did something like this in his own inimitable mendacious fashion: he promised the people left behind that he would bring jobs back, as well as dog-whistling the Others that were “bringing the country low”. It’s a similar narrative path, just very immoral and dishonest. There are very few tools that can’t be used for ill as well as for good, eh?)

There are more ways than corporate media to get a message across, and one of the best ways to mobilise is still door-to-door, face-to-face. You can’t count on the corporate media or politicians, so don’t.

Start with education as a subject. A lot of people’s children aren’t going to get very far with the education system currently in place. Start with how it is funded - that’s a winner-take-all system if I ever saw one, but I’ll bet it’s holding back even the well-funded schools. (There’s no incentive to be really good, really efficient because they’re a lot better than those inner city schools, amirite?) The benefit of getting a foot in this particular door is that you start helping the minorities as well - it becomes a win-win situation.

Uneducated people are uneducated, they aren’t necessarily stupid. Many of the results of the last election are due to the fact that they think something is wrong as well - they have been kept from an accurate picture of just what that something is.

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Are you here to play games or to have a real conversation with people?

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Part of having a conversation is pointing out the obvious contradictions in other people’s positions, don’t you think. If it is mind-numbingly obvious that the Democratic Party ought to be swinging Bernie’s way, on the basis of his personal popularity as well as the popularity of his positions, a party explicitly build around following up on Bernie’s candidacy ought to be viable. If it wouldn’t be, then the point of the article is thrown into doubt.

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Because clearly your framing is the only framing and your two choices are the only choices, without any nuance, of course.

Shouldn’t we go back to discussing what black kids are allowed to wear to graduation?

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Ah! Looking for an in for some ad hominem, now! I can see you are sincerely concerned with the etiquette of conversation!

So politely I inquire how that could possibly apply to the present conversation.

I think you misunderstand what those Latin words mean.

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Hard to build a party infrastructure from scratch, no? How 'bout the Dems lend him theirs? He certainly can’t do any worse than they have been doing.

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It isn’t like they’re really using it to do their jobs.

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In this context I take them to mean “directed at the person,” as in not addressing anything I’ve said here, but instead digging around for something else by which to attack me personally so as to indirectly discredit my position here.

You didn’t really reply to the rest of it, did you? Your framing is not the only framing so your choices offered are not the only choices available.

If I said “You’re stupid so your argument is invalid!”, That would be ad hominem.

As to my remarks, I didn’t find you to be a good faith participant the last time you showed up here at all and waded into charged politics.

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There are of course, no structural impediments to initiating a third party. No ballot access issues, no advertising factors, no funding problems that would preclude success on the basis of good ideas alone. Your alternate reality is a simple one, IMHO.

Sanders people who intend to win long term are right to remain within an existing party apparatus and attack from the bottom. We should be running for city councils and school boards, with our eyes on 2035. That is exactly how the ultra-rightists succeeded in placing majorities in high office. It took them 20-30 years of constant, behind the scenes effort. My greatest fear is that they will truly eradicate democracy via (further) redistricting in 2020 and by successfully calling a constitutional convention after they gain control of >33 statehouses + legislatures. They would happily eliminate democracy (as we know it) if they do.

It can’t happen you say? Right. It’s been thought about and is provided for in our laws. After the election of Trump, I no longer discount long shots.

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I suppose you can try to hijack it. Seems kind of disengenuous to whine when they try to stop you, doesn’t it?

And I doubt you’ll be able to frankly. And I doubt the party building thing is really comparitively that difficult. Or that the advantages of having one of your own wouldn’t be pretty good roi.

It isn’t hijacking. We are the people. The parties belong to us, don’t they?

The rest of your argument is a bald faced dishonest and you know it, with gerrymandering and the like.

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Clearly, I mean we’ve had someone who tried it succeed once in the last 150 years.

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…they’re going to take us with them, you know. When Trump irks North Korea, it isn’t going to be Topeka that gets nuked first, it’ll be all those wonderful populous targets on the coast.

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