What, if anything, do the Democrats stand for?

Episode 49 Sneak Peak

We’re coming up on a year of midterms. After the year we’ve had — and everything we’ve chronicled for you on Krystal Kyle & Friends, especially the rise and fall of our hopes for the budget bill — it seems almost laughable to ask the questions, “Do the Democrats deserve to keep their power?” and “Do they even want to win?”

We’re a long way out from the grand promises of $2k stimulus checks that helped sweep Georgia’s senators into office and boost Biden’s campaign for the presidency. Now, we’re looking at major rollbacks of proposed healthcare expansion, paid family leave, free community college, and more. In a year that has heaped even more dire straits on the stretched-thin working class, this is injury and insult. And Democratic supermajorities aren’t saving us.

Now, a report from Politico shows that Biden supporters don’t really have a handle on what their administration is up to these days. Here’s a particularly telling passage from the article:

“Voters couldn’t name anything that Democrats had done, except a few who said we passed the infrastructure bill,” the center-left group Third Way and its pollsters said in a report, obtained first by POLITICO, on focus groups they ran in Virginia.

What does this spell out for the midterms? Mass support for policies like Medicare for All suggest that voters are on the lookout for substantive, material solutions to the major economic and public health crises we’re dealing with. Left with few significant Democratic victories for the working class to point to, these supporters may well choose not to stick around. Read the whole report below:

Matt Stoller @matthewstoller

Most voters “could not articulate what Democrats stand for. They could also not say what they are doing in Washington, besides fighting.” And those were just the people who voted for Biden. The Democratic brand is broken. The infrastructure bill isn’t fixing it.In one recent focus group, even those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 weren’t exactly sure what the party stands for.politico.com

November 23rd 2021

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We’ll be talking about the political terrain of the Democratic Party and much more with this week’s guest, David Doel of The Rational National. Subscribe now to join us for the video on Friday, or tune into the audio on Saturday. And while you’re waiting, we hear the Mayor Pete documentary is really something.