General Discussion

and those who didn't support him largely agreed with him on most things anyway.

I didn't start this thread with any malicious intent. I wanted to hear what people had to say.

OK...maybe not every single centrist votes, but they are at about the highest-possible turnout. There's nothing we could do to win any more of them to us, at least not without losing an equal number of votes on the left.

Where do you think there are "new voters" to be had? What sort of people would you appeal to? Almost all nonvoters(and I've made turning nonvoters into voters as much a part of my argument as anything else)are somewhere on the left, and are generally poor. The poor aren't going to start voting unless we actually offer policies that make a difference in their lives. Those are all going to be left policies, because there aren't any untried ideas that could help them that are in the center of the spectrum.

It's been repeatedly pointed out that Bernie lost in those demographics. I get that. He lost because, for whatever reason, they trusted Hillary more. They didn't think he was too far left(polls among people in those demographics put them to the left of most of the country and to the left of most of our party leadership on the issues) or because they are somehow against the very idea of social democracy. While they won't support him as a candidate, there's no reason to assume they'd oppose the very concept of strengthening our economic justice commitment.

I get your hostility to the man-but the ideas of that campaign don't deserve your automatic opposition.

And we don't have enough votes if we anathemize all of the ideas and reduce our pitch in 2018 and 2020 to "stop Trump". Trump does need to be stopped, but we will never win a majority of the votes by leading with that.