Ideas for moving forward. This is my current thinking, and I reserve the right to change it, completely, as I learn more.
I got this from a mass email to Bernie supporters:
These people are not showing up because I am running for something. There is no presidential campaign happening.
These are people attending in huge numbers who are not just saying NO to oligarchy, but they are saying YES to raising the minimum wage, YES to expanding Social Security, YES to guaranteeing health care as a human right, YES, to cutting the cost of prescription drugs, YES to paid family and medical leave, YES to equal pay for equal work, YES to more affordable housing, YES to making childcare and higher education affordable to all, YES to taking on the existential threat of climate change.
I think Bernie does a pretty good job creating an ideology for the Democrats. Ideology is where the party is weak; organizing is where it’s pretty strong.
Political speakers at the event:
| Eunisses Hernandez | Los Angeles City Council, Berniecrat, rode in with the Bernie wave. Member of and endorsed by DSA. Prison reform/abolition background. |
| Rep. Jimmy Gomez | D-Los Angeles district 34, did not endorse Sanders, but has coauthored bills with him. |
| Rep. Pramila Jayapal | D-Washington, early endorser of Sanders, wrote Medicare for All bill with Sanders. |
| Rep. Ro Khanna | D-San Francisco, early endorser of Sanders |
| Ysabel Jurado | Los Angeles City Council, DSA endorsed. Tenant rights attorney. |
| Ada Briceno | UNITE HERE 11, early labor union to break from labor mainstream to support Sanders |
| Rep. Maxwell Frost | D-Central Florida |
| Alex Aguilar | Laborers 742 Production Assistant union |
| Brandi Good | ILWU 13, not sure if 13 endorsed Sanders, but other locals have |
| Pair and Care (org) | Fire disaster mutual aid org. |
| Sandy Reding | Cal Nurses Association, NNU, early endorser of Sanders to break from labor mainstream, main organization pushing Medicare for All in California, CalCare. |
| NUHW Speakers | NUHW, early endorser of Sanders. |
| UTLA Speakers | UTLA 2020 endorser of Sanders. |
| Lorena Gonzalez | California Labor Federation |
| April Verrett | SEIU, late endorser of a Sanders bill to stop funding Israel. SEIU has generally not endorsed Sanders, but specific locals have. |
Notably missing was the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor (LA County Fed), the local central labor council. Most of the unions represented at the event are members of the LA County Fed. Historically, they have endorsed the same as the LA County Democratic Party.
The Cal Labor Fed is a member organization of AFL-CIO unions in California.
A few notable absences. Not speaking was Kenneth Mejia, the LA City Controller, who was a Berniecrat and Bernie volunteer. Also not speaking were DSA City Council members Hugo Soto-Martinez and Nithya Raman. These are all considered to be the left of the Democrats.
April 5 Hands Off
The Hands Off protests were regarded by the left and Berniecrats as the more mainline Democratic Party protests. They were organized by Indivisible and MeToo and had more participation by the local Democratic clubs.
The participants on April 5 appeared to be mainly to the left of the organizations, from the few stories I’ve read.
This article at Wikipedia helps to explain the factions within the Democratic Party.
I would say both events were liberal, and the Bernie event was for the progressive wing. The Hands Off protests were a big tent event that, maybe, excluded only the more conservative of the moderate wing.
On the whole, Los Angeles is a progressive Democrat city. Los Angeles County is a mix of mostly Progressive Democrat districts, with some centrist Third Way Democrats, with some Republican precincts, but no Republican congressional districts. (Based on the maps on factional caucuses linked from Wikipedia’s article above.) There are no LA Dems in the Blue Dog and Problem Solvers – though, at one time, Adam Schiff was a Blue Dog.
Orange County used to be solidly Republican, but is now flipping Democratic. Notably, the centrist/business Problem Solver’s Caucus includes Republican Young Kim of Anaheim Hills. The local Indivisible is seeking to replace her.
Comment on a Bernie Thread
Apr 13, 2025
… First off, both parties are bourgeois parties, and have always been. There have been moments of populism, but it’s always incomplete, because universal suffrage wasn’t really a thing until the 1960s. My basic thesis is that the past was shit, and to think otherwise is delusional.
The collapse of the Whigs was caused by the split over slavery. It was a conflict between two forms of capitalism – the more advanced northern industrialists, and the less advanced southern plantation system. The southern system was producing more wealth, but the northern system was the future of industry.
Perhaps there’s a split right now, between the techlords of social media, and older forms of capitalism, like trade in goods, or landlording (Trump’s thing). So, right now, there is an alliance between the social media techlords and a mentally ill landlord. They’re pushing wild tariffs that threaten trade in goods, manufacture, farming, anything that exports or imports. They threaten that kind of neoliberalism, too.
Perhaps, if this split is real, it will tear the parties apart, and there can be an opportunity.
For example, the Abolitionists were a small movement when they joined up in the Republican Party. I read that maybe they were 5%. They had elected, I think, a single Representative to Congress. (They were far smaller than the Free Soilers, who elected more than a dozen.) But, through the conflict of the Civil War, their influence grew to where they are now part of “American History”.
I always imagined that there were many Abolitionists, but, no. There were few. Once the war was over, a lot of people who fancied themselves abolitionists turned back into racists, capitalists, and flies upon a mountain of shit that would become Jim Crow and America.
FD Signifier on Kamala’s Loss
This is a better take than mine below.
Why Kamala Lost
Nov. 26, 2024
I have no clear idea, because I didn’t keep up on the campaign, but I am reading some long-winded arguments that don’t always hold water.
There’s the “class” argument, the “POC/Woman” argument, the “shift to the right” argument, the “uncommitted Gaza-supporter spoiler” argument, the “misogyny” argument, the “Latinos” argument, and even the “Asians” argument.
The one I like the best was pushed in a video by Unai Montes-Irueste, which is the “time” argument. She simply didn’t have enough time to contact enough voters to make the votes.
How do you win a Presidential election?
Get the most votes in the places that matter the most.
How is that done? I’ve only been a peon volunteer, but my impression is this:
- Establish a strategy to target states, and districts. Dems target cities, mainly.
- Establish a messaging strategy. Generally, positive for most of the campaign, with some negative campaigning that ramps up at the end.
- Execute:
- Get the local Dem Party clubs and county parties to activate their members and base (which includes politicians).
- Do voter registration drives, because new registrants vote for you.
- Have big rallies for these clubs. Celeb appearances matter – but WTF with paying for them?
- Open offices and hire staff:
- Run phone banks
- Run canvassing door to door to help boost enthusiasm from the clubs
- Run phone banks for volunteers
- Run phone banks with targeted outreach, using targeted paid staff
- Run phone banks with your best persuaders (usually good talkers who are elders)
- Run texting campaigns to raise money
- Run local rallies where local electeds build enthusiasm for voting
- Buy a ton of media, mailers, and social media targeted ads.
The Harris campaign was something like 4 months long.
The Trump campaign started before he even announced, when people were spreading rumors something like two years before election day.
I recall people saying, well over a year ago, that Dems needed to really get behind Biden and boost his reputation against Trump’s attacks. Hindsight is 20/20, and I think they were correct.
The point of a campaign isn’t to have the best endorsements or rallies. It’s to reach the most supporters, and get out the vote. This requires work: education, phone calls, house visits, and lots of door hangers. All this takes time.
What about the issues?
This is going to sound mean, but people mostly don’t care that much. The pundits are, socially, around the top 2% of society, and around the top 25% intellectually. They’re writers. They’re readers. They’re somewhat unusual people.
The LA Times has an online circulation of 500,000 people. This is a paper that covers a county of 11,000,000 people. This is around 5% of that population (and the 500k includes many people outside LA Co). Most voters don’t care that deeply about all these issues. They are watching their news on social media or television, in video form. We are an unserious people.
Gaza? Exit polls said around 5% of voters cared about international issues. That’s all international issues, including Israel’s bombing of Gaza.
Race and Gender? White people claim not to care, as do many POC, but this is a straight up lie. These are two huge issues, but, their impact should be known, and accounted for. I don’t know what value race has, but it seems like a good ethnic candidate inspires people of that race in the opposing party to move around 10% to 20% of their votes to that candidate. I don’t know what gender does, but I suspect it moves a smaller amount, mainly because women are so used to voting for men, and have internalized misogyny. The social construction of gender identity operates differently than race.
Class and the Economy? Hell yes, but this is all twisted, because it’s mainly about white Rust Belt voters, and that’s not as typical of the working class. The working class in America is composed, mainly, by people of color and women, working in all the cities, not white people facing Rust Belt turmoil. “Working class” is sometimes code for “working class white people”, and sometimes, it’s not. Working class white people actually shifted a little bit away from Trump.
Latinos? Yeah, they contributed to the loss. Insert mean joke about deportations here. So did some of the Uncommitted who went “full Idiocracy” and voted for Trump instead of being uncommitted. Same for Asians, who used to shift left to support Black politicians, but have been drifting rightward ever since, and barely went for Kamala, I think in the mid 50%s. (There’s some racism happening in these groups as well.)
All these things matter, and had an effect, of course, but I think that the argument about not being able to scale up the operations in such a short time holds the most water.
My thinking is also influenced by the outsider candidate Kenneth Mejia’s campaign for Controller of the City of LA. It took two years, but a relatively small spend of something like 100k. He was up against establishment veteran Paul Koretz, who was backed by the local party, local machines, and so forth. With that much time, Mejia bent the odds in his direction, and garnered more votes than even the victorious mayor Karen Bass.