Yeah the fact that the most "moderate challengers" in 2020 will be Booker and Cuomo (look at the policies he's implemented in New York recently) really goes to show how much the progressives are winning out in the Party.
The party has been steadily moving left right since 2001968. It is one reason why I get annoyed when some liberals conservatives still bitch about the nonexistent DLC "Eastern Establishment". I mean go and compare the Democratic GOP platform in 2004 1956 to what they had in 2012 1972 and 2016 1976, it is night and day.
Even Hillary Ford is alot closer to Sanders Reagan than say her husband[/s Eisenhower in 1956.
Hillary was a DLC member. I'm so sick of hearing how she was supposedly progressive.
I know you were a staunch Bernie Reagan supporter. I love Bernie Ronnie too. But a true progressive conservative wouldn't throw away a chance to get 70%+ of what they wanted just to make a point. You voted against Hillary Gerry. You're not getting a federal expansion of Obamacare shutdown of debates concerning the Panama Canal. We get Betsy DeVos Hamilton Jordan overseeing DOE as a bad staffer instead of passing free tuition. tax cuts. You didn't win by voting against Hillary Clinton Gerald Ford. Donald Trump Jimmy Carter and the Republican Democratic Party did. There is no spinning the facts as they are.
I have little doubt some Nixonian Republicans said the similar things too once, then Carter failed. Look where we are now.
Now there's all sorts of liberals wishing they could've voted for Ford just to stop it.
He lost a primary by double digits, so his way of doing things doesn't lead to winning.
That was before Trump won. Also he was slated to do as well as Bill Bradley and got one big name endorsement. The only other primaries where a secondary candidate did this well were: 1980 and...1976, aka the other election where Wisconsin flipped out of nowhere, a YUGE slate of establishment candidates took each other out, the rigid ideologue of the in-party made a showing, and the dark horse outsider beat the mocked incumbent. So yeah, 12-shmelve.
His kind of candidates made single-digit races out of previously double digit losses in turf where Trump's popular and the winners were of mediocre quality rather.
Whereas Ossoff is struggling to make it to the finish line even with all the money thrown his way and a terrible quality candidate.
Try again.
So what if it was before Trump won? Sanders' failures are completely independent of any issues that Trump has. Sanders failed hard because he didn't receive enough minority support and dismissed his losses in heavily minority electorates as being due to conservatism.
And what does Ossoff have to do with this? Ossoff has gained an edge in a traditionally Republican district and has done it without ignoring key parts of the Democratic base.
Reagan's "failures" were independent of Carter in '76 too. He was waaay too far right despite coming from a mere Lean R state at the time.
And then Ford lost and proved the point he was trying to make, which would've been discredited if he won nomination and lost to Carter. The same thing would've happened to Bernie if he had won the nomination, it just would've been Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada that the pundits are B*&ching about.
The whole fact that Trump won as you said, and based on the populist platform, changes the dynamic entirely, so yeah "before" or "after" does matter.
As for Ossoff, you said Bernie's positions aren't working compared to Hillary's because he lost by 12 points last year, which as I established, was before Trump could win and prove the point and Bernie was long dismissed anyway. Ossoff's rhetoric is much like that of Hillary, and by that logic, he shouldn't merely have an edge, he should be running away with it given all the funds he's got, the awful candidate with a dumpster fire campaign, Trump's unpopularity in the area, and charisma.
Meanwhile Quist, even with a fairly greenhorn performance still moved the needle well past most expectations of the area and might well have won if more opposition money got dumped to counter that late surge.
And in Kansas the situation wasn't that different either to Montana.
