Monday, July 05, 2010

Chin up, Dems. The long-term numbers are all in our favor

The email inbox hummed a little today with people passing around a political situationer by Robert L. Borosage, of the Campaign for America's Future. Monday being a rainy day with nothing special on, I shunned the delete option and actually read it. Here's a link to it: http://www.alternet.org/story/147361/

My overall impression was that there wasn't much in it we hadn't heard before, though it's a useful summary of the difficult political situation. I wouldn't argue with its facts, though I'd like to hear more advice than Chin up, the incumbent president always loses in mid-term elections, organize hard and do your best.

Later in rolled an email from The Democratic Strategist reporting on demographic analysis by Ruy Teixeira, whose work we progressives have been reading for several years. Here's a link to his paper:
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2010/06/pdf/voter_demographics.pdf

The drift therein is that demographic change is almost all in the Democrats' favor. The population groups that vote Democratic are mostly growing, while the Republican base is not. The paper runs close to 40 pages, but the first three pages will give you most of what you need with 3-4 minutes reading.

So I passed this back to the same list of email addresses the Borosage article had gone to, with this prescription:



This is even longer than Borosage's hand-wringer, but if you take 3-4 minutes and read the first three pages of this demographic look at our political landscape, you will see that we Democrats have all the advantage, while the Republicans may have a last gasp this year but are doomed thereafter and far into the future.

For now, my thoughts are that we must:
--Carefully identify and get to know our allies among those who vote but aren't otherwise politically active.
--Maintain allegiance of the Democratic base.
--Study the opposition and counter its arguments wherever we find them.
--Use social media and new technology to multiply the impact of our better ideas.
--Refine and intensify the tried and true methods like voter registration and GOTV.



Your thoughts are welcome in the comment section below.

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