Democrats, you are still doing it wrong. You still don’t get that this is not the time to shoot for the stars with all of the policy ideas on which you have been ruminating for years. The success of far left progressives in some parts of the country does not mean that far left progressives can win nationwide. In fact, much of the country is the same as when Trump was elected with those that supported Trump still out there believing his nonsense.
I took the Washington Post candidate quiz which includes all 10 of the candidates that were in the last debate. My results were not what I expected but it doesn’t change my opinion about who I’m going to vote for because I want a candidate that can beat Trump, not one who best matches the results of a quiz. The majority of the debates and public discourse among Democrat candidates is about how their policies differ and yet it’s all meaningless when you factor in that policy changes require an act of Congress. Literally.
Let’s take a relatively simple policy for starters. Some of the candidates say we should have 3 months of family medical leave while others say we should have 6. We currently have zero and getting from zero to any positive number is going to require Congress to approve. And Congress is not full of people who have been trying to get 6 months of leave and just have been waiting for the right President to come along. No, many of them are going to vote against any family medical leave and the longer the leave duration, the easier it will be to vote against. It seems likely that we’ll get to 3 months of family medical leave within the next 5 to 10 years. And therefore, due to the influence of Congress, it doesn’t matter whether a candidate says they want 3 months or they want 6 months — we’ll still get the same result.
The big debate is over Medicare for All. While all the candidates believe that health care is a right, not a privilege, there is the question of what is the right way to get there — either eliminate private insurance or add a public option. While eliminating for-profit insurance industry might seem like the best way to accomplish health care as a right, it’s obvious that is not a battle that will be simply won by the next Democrat President. Neither Sanders nor Warren is going to be able to say “see, I got elected saying I want to eliminate private insurance so that’s means we’re done here, right?”. No, the battle with Congress for changing the Affordable Care Act would wage for the better part of the next Democrat President’s term and in the end, the most we can hope for is a public option — eliminating private insurance is decades away if it ever happens. Which means all of the debate happening now over which is better is not only moot and distracting at best, at worst it damages whoever ends up being the Democrat nominee to the point where they may have a harder time beating Trump.
So why are we having a debate about who can be the furthest left liberal? The practical reality is that if any of these people were elected, their varying degrees of liberalness would be lopped off by Congress. And therefore, the net result of all of these candidates is effectively the same.
The same once they are in office, that is. But to get into office, they need to appeal to the country at large, not just Democrats. The country at large is being alienated by some of the candidates in the primary campaign with talk about grand progressive plans. And the more entrenched candidates are with their progressive plans now, the less likely they are to get elected to be President. Utopian idealism doesn’t get candidates elected —it gets Trump 4 more years.
The primary process is another example of how broken our political system is. We have Democrats and Republicans voting in primaries to choose the candidate that most appeals to them. Then the two people who represent two sides end up head to head where many people like neither. Ideally, we’d have Ranked Choice Voting, no primaries, and no electoral college. But until the day when we get to the ideal way to vote, we need to recognize that we can’t be advocating for idealism in our candidate’s policies. We need pragmatic candidates who will appeal to the greatest number of voters. And now, more than ever, the country needs the Democrats to recognize that they have been doing it wrong so far, swallow their liberal pride, and choose somebody who can definitely beat Trump. To a pulp.
