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And the sad truth is that democrats will continue to nominate candidates that are so appalling they'll still be rejected in favor of this lunatic or someone lik

And the sad truth is that democrats will continue to nominate candidates that are so appalling they'll still be rejected in favor of this lunatic or someone like him. Pathetic options on both sides. The two party system is failing the country. If there was literally anything in the middle, I feel like we'd be better off than lurching from one extreme to the other.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
c54 8mo ago
What kinds of middle policies would you like to see? Genuine question. This is a surprising opinion to me because I see the democrats as a center left largely moderate party. Agreed that the democrat candidates are appalling and generally show no conviction.
- hedora 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mattydread 8mo ago
    This is complete nonsense. Moderate Democrats loudly and vigorously support all these things. Either you’re ignorant or you’re trolling from your actual far-right position.
    - hedora 8mo ago
      - Prosecution of criminals. Ah, yes, lots of ICE officers are locked up in state prisons, and Trump's empire is being dismantled out from under him. There are lots of state-level investigations involving the $4B in bribes he took this year. - Free market economics. If this were true, it would be possible to buy fire insurance in California, and Biden would have broken up dozens of monopolies. No spending bills would pass without provisions to do more of this because a coalition of the moderate democrats, libertarian republicans and far left democrats have more than enough votes to fillibuster and override vetos. - Freedom of speech / privacy / assembly California is rolling out mandatory age verification laws for operating systems this year. Remember: I'm talking about moderate democrats. These are the ones that are more likely to vote for Trump appointees than some Republicans. These are the ones that cast the deciding votes to make sure health care would be rolled back for millions of americans this past January. There are about 10 of them in the senate, which is enough to give the republican leadership the ability to pass whatever the heck they want, even with internal consent.
      - bigyabai 8mo ago
        Fillibustering random things because of Californian local law isn't going to fix things at the federal level. It wouldn't correct the (bipartisan!!!) manipulation of American monopolies, nor effectively combat the "think of the kids!" rhetoric that both parties love. Free market economics and freedom of speech have been worn down for decades. The bipartisan value of this private/public sector cooperation is indeed disgusting, but very deeply entrenched.
        hedora 8mo ago
        I gave high-level and then concrete examples of state and federal problems created by moderate democrats working with conservatives to block what would be considered far-right policies anywhere else on earth.
- mindslight 8mo ago
  Talking about the "middle" is the wrong way of framing it. The problem is that the Democratic party sandbags any meaningful reforms, as they're still beholden to that same Epstein class when it comes time to campaign. For example the Democrats' grand attempt at healthcare reform included making it mandatory to patronize the "insurance" cartel! Is it possible for regulatory capture to be any more brazen? So people get frustrated with the hamfisted top-down plans tailored for those deeply wed to the system, tire of the hypocrisy, and then either stay home or vote for the alternative that doesn't even bother promising to try and constructively fix anything. It's a game of bad cop worse cop. We desperately need ranked pairs voting.
  - tzs 8mo ago
    Several countries with universal healthcare use the "you have to buy private insurance" model, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland. There doesn't seem to be anything inherently wrong with that system. ACA has survived 12 years and enabled a lot of people to obtain health insurance that would not have been able to otherwise, with Republicans wanting to kill it that entire time but failing to do so. Do you think there was any other system Democrats could have passed instead that would have lasted that long?
    - diogenescynic 8mo ago
      >ACA has survived 12 years and enabled a lot of people to obtain health insurance that would not have been able to otherwise, with Republicans wanting to kill it that entire time but failing to do so. My insurance is more expensive than ever and quality of care lower quality than ever. >Do you think there was any other system Democrats could have passed instead that would have lasted that long? Medicare for all. Or lower the age gradually (cover kids and elderly first). They should have voted on it during the pandemic but Pelosi blocked it and AOC wouldn't do anything. They're all fakes.
      - tzs 8mo ago
        You'd probably have the rising cost issue no matter what had happened, because that problem affects pretty much all first world health care systems. The US is way more expensive than others, but the ratio of US costs to the costs of others has stayed roughly constant over at least the last 40-50 years.
- diogenescynic 8mo ago
  I'll get downvoted by both sides but this is what a winning political party policies look like for most of Americans not in NYC or in SF Bay Area, LA, SD, Seattle, Portland: -Medicare for all -Lower income taxes (federal and state) cut all the useless bloat like the $20B in homeless spending we can't even account for in California -Free state college tuition for local residents (we need to significantly decrease cost of college) -Universal background checks on guns -Ban abortion after 20 weeks -America first and only (stop being Israel's bitch) -Strong on crime laws (none of this bullshit we deal with in blue states where we catch and release violent offenders constantly and let people run over and kill entire families with ZERO consequences) -Having no stance on DEI, LGBTQ, or other cultural issues that serve only to divide and distract
  - palmotea 8mo ago
    > I'll get downvoted by both sides but this is what a winning political party policies look like for most of Americans not in NYC or in SF Bay Area, LA, SD, Seattle, Portland: I don't agree on all the specifics, but I think that's the absolute right way to be thinking about this. If you actually want to make things better, you need to have empathy for people who aren't like you. Despite their self-image, I don't think liberals are actually any better at empathy than anyone else. > -Having no stance on DEI, LGBTQ, or other cultural issues that serve only to divide and distract This is a key point. The focus on those issues is probably the only reason the plutocrat/big business Republicans even have a chance.
    - tastyface 8mo ago
      "This is a key point. The focus on those issues is probably the only reason the plutocrat/big business Republicans even have a chance." The right spends *far* more money and airtime on these issues than democrats actually do: https://abcnews.com/US/trump-spends-millions-anti-trans-ads-despite-polls/story?id=115001816 https://abcnews.com/US/trump-spends-millions-anti-trans-ads-... In other words, it is largely a moral panic manufactured by the right. If democrats give in, the right will concoct a new one, ad infinitum, until democrats and republicans are indistinguishable.
- AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
  The Democratic Party may be center left and largely moderate. Democratic politicians are further left than that, especially the ones that seem to attract microphones. Now, the mainstream media plays the most outrageous statements because they attract the most eyeballs. And the Republicans play up the most outrageous Democratic statements (a process sometimes called "nut harvesting"). But the point is, what the average person hears is the most extreme statements made by Democrats, and that frames their view of the Democratic Party. You want to change that? Stop the more extreme ones from talking into microphones. If you can't do that (and you can't), then the next best is to have someone authoritative (say, the senior member of the House, or the chair of the DNC) officially and publicly repudiate the more extreme statements.
  - diogenescynic 8mo ago
    The furthest left member of Congress, AOC, voted to give Israel more military aid and never pushed for a floor vote on Medicare for all. None of them are center left. They're all right wing.
  - asacrowflies 8mo ago
    Do you have an example of one of these extreme left positions??
apothegm 8mo ago
The problem isn’t that the candidates are appalling. They’re not. It’s that the left is shit at messaging.
- palmotea 8mo ago
  > The problem isn’t that the candidates are appalling. They’re not. It’s that the left is shit at messaging. The "the left is shit at messaging" is an excuse to distract from having a bad message (or at least a message with bad parts), so that message doesn't get revised into something better. Basically: "we don't want to change so we can win, so lets hope all we have to do is say stuff better." Here's something to think about: > And the stakes of politics are almost always incredibly high. I think they happen to be higher now. And I do think a lot of what is happening in terms of the structure of the system itself is dangerous. I think that the hour is late in many ways. My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win. > Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats. > And one of my biggest frustrations with many people whose politics I otherwise share is the unwillingness to match the seriousness of your politics to the seriousness of your alarm. I see a Democratic Party that often just wants to do nothing differently, even though it is failing — failing in the most obvious and consequential ways it can possibly fail. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/interesting-times-ross-douthat-ezra-klein.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/interesting-times...)
- tim333 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - krapp 8mo ago
    I mean yes, the "impression" you get is bar for bar that of the standard right-wing Trump voter, down to the bad-faith interpretation. People who think the way you do in the US were always going to vote for Trump and were never going to vote for a Democrat, regardless of their platform. If you're pointing out that the left's message didn't appeal to to the right, that seems tautological.
lawn 8mo ago
I cannot even imagine how someone can be more appalling than Trump. Is being black and a woman that bad?
- diogenescynic 8mo ago
  She was drunk and incompetent and had literally no platform or politics other than 'not being Trump' and being a black woman.
  - mrguyorama 8mo ago
    Ah, right, she should have been Secretary of Defense then.
    - diogenescynic 8mo ago
      Remember https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/non-binary-ex-biden-nuclear-official-who-stole-luggage-was-traveling-on-taxpayer-dime-report-says-department-of-energy-official-sam-brinton https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/non-binary-ex-biden-nucle... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Levine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Levine That is why democrats are losing. This isn't normal and 80% of the country outright rejects this. Democrats refuse to make even the smallest compromises to just go back to what was 'normal' only a few years ago. How willing to win are they really? Doesn't seem like they care to win if they won't give up the policies that are holding them back. Voter registrations tell you the story--democrats down 5M since 2020 and republicans up by about the same. Democrats have to change course and quit digging the hole deeper.
      - lawn 8mo ago
        So it's not just black women that bothers you, it's trans people too. Yet you prefer pedophiles and rapists.
        diogenescynic 8mo ago
        No, it's incompetent mentally ill weirdos being put in charge of things that they should because of DEI and woke virtue signaling that I disagree with. And again, if that's the hill that democrats want to die on when they think the entire country is under siege... then it shows just how unserious they really are. Those are elitist and luxury beliefs.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

c54 8mo ago

What kinds of middle policies would you like to see? Genuine question. This is a surprising opinion to me because I see the democrats as a center left largely moderate party. Agreed that the democrat candidates are appalling and generally show no conviction.

hedora 8mo ago
[flagged]
- mattydread 8mo ago
  This is complete nonsense. Moderate Democrats loudly and vigorously support all these things. Either you’re ignorant or you’re trolling from your actual far-right position.
  - hedora 8mo ago
    - Prosecution of criminals. Ah, yes, lots of ICE officers are locked up in state prisons, and Trump's empire is being dismantled out from under him. There are lots of state-level investigations involving the $4B in bribes he took this year. - Free market economics. If this were true, it would be possible to buy fire insurance in California, and Biden would have broken up dozens of monopolies. No spending bills would pass without provisions to do more of this because a coalition of the moderate democrats, libertarian republicans and far left democrats have more than enough votes to fillibuster and override vetos. - Freedom of speech / privacy / assembly California is rolling out mandatory age verification laws for operating systems this year. Remember: I'm talking about moderate democrats. These are the ones that are more likely to vote for Trump appointees than some Republicans. These are the ones that cast the deciding votes to make sure health care would be rolled back for millions of americans this past January. There are about 10 of them in the senate, which is enough to give the republican leadership the ability to pass whatever the heck they want, even with internal consent.
    - bigyabai 8mo ago
      Fillibustering random things because of Californian local law isn't going to fix things at the federal level. It wouldn't correct the (bipartisan!!!) manipulation of American monopolies, nor effectively combat the "think of the kids!" rhetoric that both parties love. Free market economics and freedom of speech have been worn down for decades. The bipartisan value of this private/public sector cooperation is indeed disgusting, but very deeply entrenched.
      - hedora 8mo ago
        I gave high-level and then concrete examples of state and federal problems created by moderate democrats working with conservatives to block what would be considered far-right policies anywhere else on earth.
mindslight 8mo ago
Talking about the "middle" is the wrong way of framing it. The problem is that the Democratic party sandbags any meaningful reforms, as they're still beholden to that same Epstein class when it comes time to campaign. For example the Democrats' grand attempt at healthcare reform included making it mandatory to patronize the "insurance" cartel! Is it possible for regulatory capture to be any more brazen? So people get frustrated with the hamfisted top-down plans tailored for those deeply wed to the system, tire of the hypocrisy, and then either stay home or vote for the alternative that doesn't even bother promising to try and constructively fix anything. It's a game of bad cop worse cop. We desperately need ranked pairs voting.
- tzs 8mo ago
  Several countries with universal healthcare use the "you have to buy private insurance" model, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland. There doesn't seem to be anything inherently wrong with that system. ACA has survived 12 years and enabled a lot of people to obtain health insurance that would not have been able to otherwise, with Republicans wanting to kill it that entire time but failing to do so. Do you think there was any other system Democrats could have passed instead that would have lasted that long?
  - diogenescynic 8mo ago
    >ACA has survived 12 years and enabled a lot of people to obtain health insurance that would not have been able to otherwise, with Republicans wanting to kill it that entire time but failing to do so. My insurance is more expensive than ever and quality of care lower quality than ever. >Do you think there was any other system Democrats could have passed instead that would have lasted that long? Medicare for all. Or lower the age gradually (cover kids and elderly first). They should have voted on it during the pandemic but Pelosi blocked it and AOC wouldn't do anything. They're all fakes.
    - tzs 8mo ago
      You'd probably have the rising cost issue no matter what had happened, because that problem affects pretty much all first world health care systems. The US is way more expensive than others, but the ratio of US costs to the costs of others has stayed roughly constant over at least the last 40-50 years.
diogenescynic 8mo ago
I'll get downvoted by both sides but this is what a winning political party policies look like for most of Americans not in NYC or in SF Bay Area, LA, SD, Seattle, Portland: -Medicare for all -Lower income taxes (federal and state) cut all the useless bloat like the $20B in homeless spending we can't even account for in California -Free state college tuition for local residents (we need to significantly decrease cost of college) -Universal background checks on guns -Ban abortion after 20 weeks -America first and only (stop being Israel's bitch) -Strong on crime laws (none of this bullshit we deal with in blue states where we catch and release violent offenders constantly and let people run over and kill entire families with ZERO consequences) -Having no stance on DEI, LGBTQ, or other cultural issues that serve only to divide and distract
- palmotea 8mo ago
  > I'll get downvoted by both sides but this is what a winning political party policies look like for most of Americans not in NYC or in SF Bay Area, LA, SD, Seattle, Portland: I don't agree on all the specifics, but I think that's the absolute right way to be thinking about this. If you actually want to make things better, you need to have empathy for people who aren't like you. Despite their self-image, I don't think liberals are actually any better at empathy than anyone else. > -Having no stance on DEI, LGBTQ, or other cultural issues that serve only to divide and distract This is a key point. The focus on those issues is probably the only reason the plutocrat/big business Republicans even have a chance.
  - tastyface 8mo ago
    "This is a key point. The focus on those issues is probably the only reason the plutocrat/big business Republicans even have a chance." The right spends *far* more money and airtime on these issues than democrats actually do: https://abcnews.com/US/trump-spends-millions-anti-trans-ads-despite-polls/story?id=115001816 https://abcnews.com/US/trump-spends-millions-anti-trans-ads-... In other words, it is largely a moral panic manufactured by the right. If democrats give in, the right will concoct a new one, ad infinitum, until democrats and republicans are indistinguishable.
AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
The Democratic Party may be center left and largely moderate. Democratic politicians are further left than that, especially the ones that seem to attract microphones. Now, the mainstream media plays the most outrageous statements because they attract the most eyeballs. And the Republicans play up the most outrageous Democratic statements (a process sometimes called "nut harvesting"). But the point is, what the average person hears is the most extreme statements made by Democrats, and that frames their view of the Democratic Party. You want to change that? Stop the more extreme ones from talking into microphones. If you can't do that (and you can't), then the next best is to have someone authoritative (say, the senior member of the House, or the chair of the DNC) officially and publicly repudiate the more extreme statements.
- diogenescynic 8mo ago
  The furthest left member of Congress, AOC, voted to give Israel more military aid and never pushed for a floor vote on Medicare for all. None of them are center left. They're all right wing.
- asacrowflies 8mo ago
  Do you have an example of one of these extreme left positions??

apothegm 8mo ago

The problem isn’t that the candidates are appalling. They’re not. It’s that the left is shit at messaging.

palmotea 8mo ago
> The problem isn’t that the candidates are appalling. They’re not. It’s that the left is shit at messaging. The "the left is shit at messaging" is an excuse to distract from having a bad message (or at least a message with bad parts), so that message doesn't get revised into something better. Basically: "we don't want to change so we can win, so lets hope all we have to do is say stuff better." Here's something to think about: > And the stakes of politics are almost always incredibly high. I think they happen to be higher now. And I do think a lot of what is happening in terms of the structure of the system itself is dangerous. I think that the hour is late in many ways. My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win. > Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats. > And one of my biggest frustrations with many people whose politics I otherwise share is the unwillingness to match the seriousness of your politics to the seriousness of your alarm. I see a Democratic Party that often just wants to do nothing differently, even though it is failing — failing in the most obvious and consequential ways it can possibly fail. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/interesting-times-ross-douthat-ezra-klein.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/interesting-times...)
tim333 8mo ago
[flagged]
- krapp 8mo ago
  I mean yes, the "impression" you get is bar for bar that of the standard right-wing Trump voter, down to the bad-faith interpretation. People who think the way you do in the US were always going to vote for Trump and were never going to vote for a Democrat, regardless of their platform. If you're pointing out that the left's message didn't appeal to to the right, that seems tautological.

lawn 8mo ago

I cannot even imagine how someone can be more appalling than Trump. Is being black and a woman that bad?

diogenescynic 8mo ago
She was drunk and incompetent and had literally no platform or politics other than 'not being Trump' and being a black woman.
- mrguyorama 8mo ago
  Ah, right, she should have been Secretary of Defense then.
  - diogenescynic 8mo ago
    Remember https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/non-binary-ex-biden-nuclear-official-who-stole-luggage-was-traveling-on-taxpayer-dime-report-says-department-of-energy-official-sam-brinton https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/non-binary-ex-biden-nucle... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Levine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Levine That is why democrats are losing. This isn't normal and 80% of the country outright rejects this. Democrats refuse to make even the smallest compromises to just go back to what was 'normal' only a few years ago. How willing to win are they really? Doesn't seem like they care to win if they won't give up the policies that are holding them back. Voter registrations tell you the story--democrats down 5M since 2020 and republicans up by about the same. Democrats have to change course and quit digging the hole deeper.
    - lawn 8mo ago
      So it's not just black women that bothers you, it's trans people too. Yet you prefer pedophiles and rapists.
      - diogenescynic 8mo ago
        No, it's incompetent mentally ill weirdos being put in charge of things that they should because of DEI and woke virtue signaling that I disagree with. And again, if that's the hill that democrats want to die on when they think the entire country is under siege... then it shows just how unserious they really are. Those are elitist and luxury beliefs.