Yep. The housing crisis in California is really dragging down dem credibility. They really need to fight their wealthy constituents in order to just get homes built
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Yup see San Diego as a blueprint for this. This is the Democrats' biggest blind spot in the state imo.
The Democratic party is also hugely responsible for the student loan mess. The GOP could fairly easily make big inroads with college educated urban voters by addressing housing issues and student debt.
Funny thing is I've seen this point around, usually on conservative parts of the Internet. Problem is, it's not been shown so far to be true. In fact, Gen Z has been shown to be more liberal than Millenials as a whole.
This "fight" would only make sense in an America without the electoral college. So long as that stays in place urban Republican voters and rural Democrat voters are worthless.
This is what I was thinking as well, good point. The housing crisis is really only a huge issue in cities with a reputation for being Blue: San Francisco, Seattle.
But there's also cities like Houston and San Antonio which are also Democratic, yet don't have housing issues, so there's a chance that can be used as a counter-point. Also, I'll throw in Tucson, as much as I hate the city.
Not without massive and succesful vote rigging. Bigotry is really all the Republicans have, and Conservative judges. Their best strategies are election rigging, hoping population distributions continue to work in their favor, normalizing corruption, and to rely on our judicial branch to give them a pass on a lot of bullshit.
They can start targeting white folks who are no starting to experience the actual high cost of housing in many of these cities.
I feel like the narrative is already there regardless of facts. The right message and messengers can take advantage of this especially now that white folks are actually starting to feel the strain now. You can already see this with the whole 'Californians stop moving here' in Portland, Las Vegas and Texas to a lesser extent. Facts don't matter much when you can convince enough people to feel that they are going to be threatened by high housing costs.
"Maybe he should have looked into that mole that changed shape instead of suntanning 8 hours a day. That could fix his being dead of skin cancer"
Eh, not sure I'd call San Diego a blueprint since they have a much larger military presence that most other major cities don't
Johnson's gigantic victory was aided immensely by Labour's self-destructive campaign strategy. Can post up the article/twitter threads when I get home later when I've got direct access to all the necessary links, but their strategy was to ignore the new areas they won in 2017 and that were trending their direction and instead to go for those mythical unicorn WWC/nonvoters who are just waiting to be activated by far-left policy and it completely imploded because of course it did.
I can see writer's point. The housing crisis and the inequality it causes is definitely something that the dems have a blind spot for. It could be possible to cut into the margins in cities if they push for a conservative version of housing reform that encourages more construction. However, it is quite obvious that by reading the article that this writer falls into typical conservative rhetoric. Let the markets fix the problem or have corporations save the day. The problem that the author uses is valid criticism against the democrats, but it could solved by effective forms of regulation and legislation.
Conservatives have issue of trying to solve inequality with most roundabout way possible. The voters in these democratic strongholds want to see the government work and rather not have corporations trying to fix their problems. Also conservatives in USA ≠conservatives on the UK.
Conservatives have issue of trying to solve inequality with most roundabout way possible. The voters in these democratic strongholds want to see the government work and rather not have corporations trying to fix their problems. Also conservatives in USA ≠conservatives on the UK.
It's a similar story in Canada. Toronto voted against the Conservatives this past October but as more people are hit by the high cost of housing not to mention increased traffic I think it's inevitable that it will turn people against immigration.
Left wing parties have no answer to this problem.
Left wing parties have no answer to this problem.
I think far too much is being read into the tory victory, Corbyn was the biggest issue then Brexit, there is no love for Boris in the working class, the towns were just ripe from years of neglect and then the referendum looking as it was about to be ignored.
As cities get more expensive I might could see it from some politicians.
The Dems failure to court unions certainly hasn't helped them long term. I think a reversal of that trend might help push back against appeals to working class people.
Edit: Thing is the electoral college protects the power of the rural vote. So even if Republican's try to swing cities I think they won't need it to stay in power at least some of the time.
The Dems failure to court unions certainly hasn't helped them long term. I think a reversal of that trend might help push back against appeals to working class people.
Edit: Thing is the electoral college protects the power of the rural vote. So even if Republican's try to swing cities I think they won't need it to stay in power at least some of the time.
The thing with the lack of housing is it isn't going to make people push to the right and side with the GOP. They're going to go further left and either support deeply expanded housing or homes for all as a social right. The "gap" in the dems involves the same usual poisons; they can campaign on expanding housing, get into office, and then their donor class tells them "no, that would lower the value of our property" and it's put to a deep freeze.
When the ""answer"" is to not expand houses and put fucking boulders on the sidewalk, this is a conservative position. It means the solution has to be found in invisible forces, often away from their local environment. The only thing you can do from then on is be radical, and give homeless people the vacant seventh home of a venture capitalist.
Yea but it is supposed to be trending blue in the past decade like the rest of California.
They would have to account for absolving themselves any responsibility to those urban areas for decades and actively politicking against them including cuts to funding. Especially on infrastructure.
It feels too much like an outlier though. Heck the peeps there in the suburbs still elected the criminal scumfuck Duncan Hunter while the whole of Orange County went from red to blue.
As history has shown, nothing is constant. Everything changes, there may be a day when the typically "liberal" urban centers switch over. Look at the absolute shitshow the Democratic is currently in, there is zero confidence to be inspired by whatever the hell they are trying to accomplish. Keep up this nonsense and people may switch over. I've said it before, Trump and his 2020 presidency will be decided not on his platform, but by how weak the Democrats present themselves.
It's unlikely Republicans could find appeal in cities unless they tackled the reasons white flight occurred in the 90s.
If they found a way to promote segregationist policies without explicitly calling it segregation it might work.
For example, they could support a bunch of residential zoning rules that favors wealthier and thus whiter Americans at the exclusion of everyone else. This would help reverse the white flight of the 90s but such a move is at risk of failure if they support even wealthier foreign people to buy out real estate.
If they found a way to promote segregationist policies without explicitly calling it segregation it might work.
For example, they could support a bunch of residential zoning rules that favors wealthier and thus whiter Americans at the exclusion of everyone else. This would help reverse the white flight of the 90s but such a move is at risk of failure if they support even wealthier foreign people to buy out real estate.
Yup. It's why the mayorship going Republican is such an outlier.
You mean like how they successfully stole the 2018 election that's leading to Trump's impeachment?
Come on now, stop with this shit. Yes voter suppression is a massive problem, but it can very much be overcome and blue vote turnout is a much bigger problem to help overcome that.
They're going to have to eventually.
The GOP is lucky in that their viability in the Midwest improved more quickly than Democrats' in the Sun Belt, but once the realignment is complete they'll be at a disadvantage. Once Texas slips out from under them they're screwed.
Of course, this only works against them in the House and presidency. The Senate will still moderately favor them.
The GOP is lucky in that their viability in the Midwest improved more quickly than Democrats' in the Sun Belt, but once the realignment is complete they'll be at a disadvantage. Once Texas slips out from under them they're screwed.
Of course, this only works against them in the House and presidency. The Senate will still moderately favor them.
There's an answer, the problem is that it would result in lower property values for older voters and is thus really hard to implement even under left-leaning governments. The NIMBY/Lefty crossover stuff w/ development opposition is an unfortunate example of the problems you run into.
Except for the fact that cities like SF are already going to shit due to stupid zoning issues and 0% corporate tax rates and conservatives MO is to cut taxes.
And given how much of the Canadian economy is riding on the housing bubble they literally can't.
The government can't even make a decent effort cracking down on money laundering in real estate.
Kind of misreads Johnson's victory in more than a few simple ways. Labour still commanded the youth and metropolitan liberal vote in many of our major cities - so the premise that Johnson won that vote and Trump could too is fundamentally wrong.
Labour lost through a combination of over complex and misguided strategy, many years of bombardment of the party leader in the hostile press, and the perfect storm: a Brexit impasse that Johnson exploited.
The best summation of Johnson's strategy that I've seen is "Johnson made politics horrible / unbearable, and asked us to vote it away". He positioned himself as champion of the Brexit process (and therefore democracy) Vs unending "dither and delay", shifting the failings of his own Tory government to the feet of his opponents - reinforcing people's view that Brexit had become an interminable distraction and that only he could make it go away.
It didn't matter that he was serially lying and committing gaffes left, right and center, because the one issue people trusted him on was considered the ultimate issue of the day. And apparently more important than the 9 years of damage a lot of people are still actually quite angry about - despite what looks like a landslide victory. In fact this is probably the most troubling kind of victory anyone could have had, because you get the lingering feeling the people who voted for it are going to be bitterly angry if things don't improve exactly as promised.
Labour lost a lot of votes in towns that have apparently felt left behind. Decimated by the conservatives in the 80s and 90s, but not listened to, invested in or healed as much as bigger towns and cities by Labour of the late 90s and early 2000s. Burdened with cuts under the conservative lib dem coalition... I'm sure America does have places equivalent to these towns, they are probably the people that voted for trump first time around...
People are attracted to the idea that their ills are because of immigrants and overcrowding, because of the EU, because of external actors and pressures not of our own making. Crucially, although it's a brainchild of the right wing in the UK, Brexit has proponents right across the political spectrum. And although Farage is himself of the right wing, his UKIP and Brexit parties have enjoyed considerable support among working and middle class sections of the electorate who have in recent memory found the Tories completely unpalatable. They are the acceptable face of a culture that blames the "other". The moment they announced they would stand aside for Tory MPs, contesting only Remainer opposition MPs - it made Labour's position all the more difficult... But it wasn't the only factor for them to consider either...
In the local elections, some months before the election that Johnson has just won - the Liberal Democrats, who had taken the most pro European stance -enjoyed a surge in support at Labour's expense, with the popular vote still very much split between pro Brexit and pro Remain parties. Labour's strategists interpreted this as a warning, and internally the party decided to further hedge it's bets, evolving its position towards offering to seek a Brexit deal but to put it to the people in a final say. It seems this was enough for some to make the Lib Dem offer feel perhaps less democratic, their performance at this election can only be regarded as wholesale rejection - but Labours position too was deemed over complicated. "We've had a vote" people would say. How can you negotiate a deal and then potentially campaign against it? What position will the leader take? Why are they sitting on the fence? Questions. Too many for some.
And then we had people who believed the fear driven in to them by the hostile press... fear of anti semitism or historic links with the IRA (let's be real - the Queen has shaken hands with Irish Republicans too, and the Tories have a former member in their ranks - it was a smear)... For some, they couldnt read that stuff and hold their nose to vote.
I heard a Labour voter in the Midlands admit on LBC he voted for the conservatives because he couldn't back Corbyn but was still disappointed that they won. His logic was that he didn't like those IRA links, that his community have still never received closure from the IRA bombing.
That kind of typifies for me how well the conservatives convinced enough Northern voters that Labour were a bigger risk than they were. It wasn't really an economic argument, it was more about values.. and fear. Identity. He's a Marxist. He's an anti Semite. As an anti war campaigner people were able to say Corbyn stood alongside people from the IRA and Hamas. You can't trust him, can't trust the promises, can't trust the numbers, he's not the right leader... Of course, nobody can tell you who is the right leader, if they could they'd probably be smeared too, but because it's him, it's definitely not him... Given barest, even most faintly reasonable scrutiny, a lot of it doesn't really make sense - especially given the Tories conducted themselves disgracefully in the campaign - struggling themselves on matters of trust - but as I see it - Brexit and enough distrust of the other guy saw them win it.
I would say there are huge question marks over how much tolerance Johnson's policies will enjoy in many of those new seats. If Brexit goes horribly or there's even a whiff of hardship, people might start to twig the new government is a lot like the last one, they may start to twig they haven't really had that change they cried out for.
It's interesting that Farage wants his new project (replacing the Brexit party) to be a Reform party. I don't like the guy but he does seem to understand that the engine for his and the Tories victory is a desire for change. He's weaponising it for the benefit of his own beliefs rather than what might actually be best for the country but there can be no doubt - as a political operator - his impact has been huge. People should pay more attention to the reasons why he has appeal.
Now, I'm not sure how this translates for Trump. As I understand it, he came in pledging to "drain the swamp". He promised America First. Jobs coming home. Coal. I think the same thing that motivated Brexit over here motivated people to vote for him. A paradoxical will to blame the establishment or functional flaw in society for everything that is wrong in the world, embracing divisive views and putting the mega rich in power. UK politics may point to potential strategies but I think a lot rides on a few things: are people still hurting? Did their vote for him work? Has he been fulfilling his promises or failing them? Can he still be trusted? Has exposure to his rantings and ravings while in office had an effect on moderates? Is the impeachment saga going to play a role? Lots of questions. Possibly more than there are for his opponents. At least until the war chest starts getting spent on attack ads..
Labour lost through a combination of over complex and misguided strategy, many years of bombardment of the party leader in the hostile press, and the perfect storm: a Brexit impasse that Johnson exploited.
The best summation of Johnson's strategy that I've seen is "Johnson made politics horrible / unbearable, and asked us to vote it away". He positioned himself as champion of the Brexit process (and therefore democracy) Vs unending "dither and delay", shifting the failings of his own Tory government to the feet of his opponents - reinforcing people's view that Brexit had become an interminable distraction and that only he could make it go away.
It didn't matter that he was serially lying and committing gaffes left, right and center, because the one issue people trusted him on was considered the ultimate issue of the day. And apparently more important than the 9 years of damage a lot of people are still actually quite angry about - despite what looks like a landslide victory. In fact this is probably the most troubling kind of victory anyone could have had, because you get the lingering feeling the people who voted for it are going to be bitterly angry if things don't improve exactly as promised.
Labour lost a lot of votes in towns that have apparently felt left behind. Decimated by the conservatives in the 80s and 90s, but not listened to, invested in or healed as much as bigger towns and cities by Labour of the late 90s and early 2000s. Burdened with cuts under the conservative lib dem coalition... I'm sure America does have places equivalent to these towns, they are probably the people that voted for trump first time around...
People are attracted to the idea that their ills are because of immigrants and overcrowding, because of the EU, because of external actors and pressures not of our own making. Crucially, although it's a brainchild of the right wing in the UK, Brexit has proponents right across the political spectrum. And although Farage is himself of the right wing, his UKIP and Brexit parties have enjoyed considerable support among working and middle class sections of the electorate who have in recent memory found the Tories completely unpalatable. They are the acceptable face of a culture that blames the "other". The moment they announced they would stand aside for Tory MPs, contesting only Remainer opposition MPs - it made Labour's position all the more difficult... But it wasn't the only factor for them to consider either...
In the local elections, some months before the election that Johnson has just won - the Liberal Democrats, who had taken the most pro European stance -enjoyed a surge in support at Labour's expense, with the popular vote still very much split between pro Brexit and pro Remain parties. Labour's strategists interpreted this as a warning, and internally the party decided to further hedge it's bets, evolving its position towards offering to seek a Brexit deal but to put it to the people in a final say. It seems this was enough for some to make the Lib Dem offer feel perhaps less democratic, their performance at this election can only be regarded as wholesale rejection - but Labours position too was deemed over complicated. "We've had a vote" people would say. How can you negotiate a deal and then potentially campaign against it? What position will the leader take? Why are they sitting on the fence? Questions. Too many for some.
And then we had people who believed the fear driven in to them by the hostile press... fear of anti semitism or historic links with the IRA (let's be real - the Queen has shaken hands with Irish Republicans too, and the Tories have a former member in their ranks - it was a smear)... For some, they couldnt read that stuff and hold their nose to vote.
I heard a Labour voter in the Midlands admit on LBC he voted for the conservatives because he couldn't back Corbyn but was still disappointed that they won. His logic was that he didn't like those IRA links, that his community have still never received closure from the IRA bombing.
That kind of typifies for me how well the conservatives convinced enough Northern voters that Labour were a bigger risk than they were. It wasn't really an economic argument, it was more about values.. and fear. Identity. He's a Marxist. He's an anti Semite. As an anti war campaigner people were able to say Corbyn stood alongside people from the IRA and Hamas. You can't trust him, can't trust the promises, can't trust the numbers, he's not the right leader... Of course, nobody can tell you who is the right leader, if they could they'd probably be smeared too, but because it's him, it's definitely not him... Given barest, even most faintly reasonable scrutiny, a lot of it doesn't really make sense - especially given the Tories conducted themselves disgracefully in the campaign - struggling themselves on matters of trust - but as I see it - Brexit and enough distrust of the other guy saw them win it.
I would say there are huge question marks over how much tolerance Johnson's policies will enjoy in many of those new seats. If Brexit goes horribly or there's even a whiff of hardship, people might start to twig the new government is a lot like the last one, they may start to twig they haven't really had that change they cried out for.
It's interesting that Farage wants his new project (replacing the Brexit party) to be a Reform party. I don't like the guy but he does seem to understand that the engine for his and the Tories victory is a desire for change. He's weaponising it for the benefit of his own beliefs rather than what might actually be best for the country but there can be no doubt - as a political operator - his impact has been huge. People should pay more attention to the reasons why he has appeal.
Now, I'm not sure how this translates for Trump. As I understand it, he came in pledging to "drain the swamp". He promised America First. Jobs coming home. Coal. I think the same thing that motivated Brexit over here motivated people to vote for him. A paradoxical will to blame the establishment or functional flaw in society for everything that is wrong in the world, embracing divisive views and putting the mega rich in power. UK politics may point to potential strategies but I think a lot rides on a few things: are people still hurting? Did their vote for him work? Has he been fulfilling his promises or failing them? Can he still be trusted? Has exposure to his rantings and ravings while in office had an effect on moderates? Is the impeachment saga going to play a role? Lots of questions. Possibly more than there are for his opponents. At least until the war chest starts getting spent on attack ads..
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Reading up on him on Wikipedia, it says he supports a pathway to citizenship, abortion, LGBTQ rights and has put forward plans to tackle climate change.
So basically he's a Charlie Baker Republican. The only way a Republican is ever going to win in the cities.
And if Democrats aren't careful then the Yimby movement is exactly how some Republicans can go in and use dinner table issues to get some power back in cities.
A twisted form of Yimby using the free market argument has all the right messaging ingredients right now to resonate with a lot of people. This is a conversation that needs to happen but is unfortunately being drowned out by many liberals by going back to thier usual response of rent control, complaints about luxury housing etc when these same solutions are the exact reason why the situation is getting worse.
This is one of my biggest fear. Add in some lite xenophobia ('those damn foreigners buying up all our housing' as another red herring (foreign buyers are a small portion of the actual reason why housing cost is going up) and you got a nightmare scenario.
I'd be less troubled if the biggest Nimby cheerleaders weren't staunch liberals and Democrats themselves. Here in Los Angeles and California almost all of them did not support SB50. In fact most of them vehemently opposed it. Retreating back to thier old habits of screaming for rent control and giving more loca cities more power to regulate housing and zoning.
Fat chance. Democrats didn't attempt this when they had the majority during the Obama admin.
Also, I'm not in favor of DC ever getting statehood. EVER
PR, sure.
USVI, sure
Guam, sure
Samoa, sure
but Never DC as long as the capital is there.
How so?
Whether there's 10,000 people in a rural district or 100,000 people, they're still winning a seat in the House, you already see lots of States with no cities of note happily sending 2 Republican Senators and the Presidential election is determined by the Electoral College not the popular vote, so, the more liberal leaning kids moving away from rural areas to populated cities is just concentrating their vote in a handful of districts each State and has no bearing on the Senate or Presidential election.
They clearly can't lose every city in the country and be competitive but it's not like they're doomed if they don't pander to cities outright.
Yeah this whole article is fucking stupid in that vein. "Republicans can get urban voters if they can wave a magic wand and solve all the difficult problems about which which they have no clue and in which they have no interest. Because there was a fire in Vegas this week you see."
They're going to have to drop racism like they dropped homophobia. The problem, though, is that racism is a fundamental element in America's existence, right down to Brits offering slaves freedom for siding with them during the Revolutionary War.
"Christian Zealots," as you call them, exist even in progressive circles, though they tend to be less legalistic: "Pay unto Caesar what is Caesar's and what is to God, God's" and are less interested in establishing a theocracy.
Plutocrats exist even in Marxian utopia.