Since 1893 The only time a party has lost the Oval Office after only four years was when Jimmy Carter lost it in 1981. In 1992 and 2010 the Republicans had much bigger Red Waves than our Blue Wave in 2018, and they still could not take the oval office two years later.
As of July 2019, we are doing worse in off-year elections and in polling of “Which party would you vote for in Congress?”
If we manage to stop Trump, it will be a miracle.
Perhaps the most important winning strategy is to stop the infighting. This is next to impossible because candidates see painting their opponents as incompetent or immoral as highly effective. And that’s because it is!
Since candidates will always be desperate to win, given how hard they work to win and how bad it feels to lose:
There is only one way to stop the infighting.
We must convince candidates that it doesn’t work.
That includes me and it includes you. But don’t expect the candidates to be much help with this — until we convince them it doesn’t work. So it’s up to us.
The first step is to understand what infighting is and is not.
- It’s not when a candidate claims they would make the best president,
- Or when they claim another candidate's policy would not work or not be popular.
- It’s not even when they claim their policy is better than another's.
Personal attacks attack the person, not their policies. They attack a person’s character. These are ad hominem attacks and are considered the most despicable type of arguing. Here are some examples. For example, saying a person
- Is racist
- Doesn’t tell the truth.
- Has been bought by Wall Street
- Does not care about the poor.
- Is insane, stupid, unpatriotic.
Insinuation and innuendo
Insinuation and innuendo are hard to spot and impossible to prove. They provide “plausible deniability,” a term first used by the CIA to describe their covert assassination attempts that were not directly cleared with the president. In this case, we are talking character assassination, but the deniability part is even more slimy because a supposed friend is assassinating an ally.
How to detect personal attacks by innuendo: Check your gut. If says something about a candidate and you end up feeling the candidate may not be moral, or may be racist, or is in some way a bad person, that was almost certainly an ad hominem attack by innuendo.
A comment that makes you feel another person may be immoral, stupid, or in any way a bad person (without explicitly saying this) is almost certainly an ad hominem (personal) attack by innuendo.
How to stop candidate infighting
First, we ourselves must stop the infighting. Then we must watch for it. Anytime we see a candidate make a personal attack (probably by innuendo) we should hit back — but not attack the person themselves. We must only attack what they did wrong. You can say, for example,
I know candidate X is a good, well-meaning person. But that personal attack was a bad mistake that only helps Trump and hurts Democrats. They are off my good-list till I see a change.
I will be updating this, but in the meantime, here are two good sources:
New York Magazine: Will 2020 Democrats Help Trump by Destroying Each Other?
Boston Herald: Dems’ infighting all but doom 2020 White House chances
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