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Leftists talk about it all the time because we're forced to defend ourselves against disingenuous "electability" concerns from a political faction that lost twice to a rapist and pedophile with the mental acuity of a 6-year-old. The typical centrist Democrat is historically unelectable and yet they still feel like they're in a position to lecture progressives on electability, when it should be the other way around.
Democrats get the presidency roughly fifty percent of the time.
What’s the leftist percentage?
This logic suggests that women need not apply for presidential elections, after all, men have won them 100% of the time.
Is that really the rationale you want to lean on?
I think we can do better than that, myself.
But women have gotten many, many more votes than leftists in presidential elections so far so the average voter is definitely more interested in voting for a woman than a leftist.
I know that the amount of sexism with democrats and leftists (just look at the reactions here to the Graham Platner scandal) definitely played a part in Clinton and Harris losing but Biden winning.
But there was a point where women had no votes for president, was that a reason for them not to run? Do you really not see the error?
The women also had a lot of people in lower offices so they had put in the ground work too.
Let's keep those goalposts where they are for a little longer: are you still saying that because any given subset of people haven't been in past presidential elections, they shouldn't run for president? I think it's important to grasp what that does to the pool of people that are considered suitable for the presidency.
Actually what I originally asked was:
But you keep dodging that question.
It kind of sounds like you're setting up to try to equate leftists and the struggles of black americans.
You didn't ask me the question, but it's not a useful question to ask.
I'm trying to help you understand the flaw in your reasoning; to see that this exact reason would have only straight white Christian male landowners ever be president. I am fairly confident that's not what you want, so I'm hoping you'll be open to acknowledging the flaw in what you're implying.
You responded directly after that question and still you are dodging it.
There's nothing to dodge; the answer is obvious. It's exactly why I asked about women in the same framing.
I'm beginning to think you're not interested in understanding your mistake.
I'm just pointing out that in the sixty presidential elections so far leftists have never gotten the presidency or even second place.
Yes, I am well aware of what you are saying.
Maybe I should try a different angle: So what? What should I do with this information?
I'd say you can just jump in an argue for a while but you've already done that.
So you don't know what point you were trying to make? Weird.
I responded to this:
With this before you jumped in:
I'm not sure why you're so confused by the point I feel I laid it out pretty clearly there.
That statistic implies nothing except a confirmation of our deeply entrenched two-party system.
Unfortunately it is our reality for the foreseeable future and it would be for the best of everyone to be able to recognize that fact.
The most electable Democrat in US history was FDR, who ran on a platform with far more in common with the DSA platform than the modern Democratic party. The DSA is employing an entryist strategy to restore the Democratic party to its former glory during the rollout of the New Deal. The recent wave of DSA-backed candidates are fully cognizant of the fact we have an entrenched two-party system and are acting accordingly.
FDR was president almost a hundred years ago.
Enough time for the Democratic party to completely abandon the economic populism that once made it so popular they had to create term limits to put a stop to it.
Biden got the most votes of any presidential candidate ever and you're telling me about democratic electability vs leftists who have gotten a maximum of like two percent of the popular vote?
If you were arguing in good faith you wouldn't use a statistic that is deliberately misleading due to not being adjusted for population growth. You're also moving the goalposts; we were talking about progressives running on the Democratic party ticket and you're bringing up vote percentages for third parties, after we've already established that we have an entrenched two-party system that makes third parties unviable.
FYI they never do
It means that Biden got more votes than Trump did for his second term even though population increased in those four years so it is not a misleading statistic.
I'm talking about current events not presidents from a hundred years ago.
Trump winning in 2024 with fewer votes than Biden got in 2020 does not support the argument that moderate Dems are more electable. In fact, it demonstrates a considerable dysfunction in the electability of moderate Democrats because it means that voters abandoned the party en masse in favor of not voting at all. Trump didn't gain voters, the moderate Democrats lost them. If you want to be electable from now onwards you would be beyond foolish to emulate Biden or Harris.
Trump gained votes:
2020: 74,223,975 votes.
2024: 77,302,580 votes.
Cool, thank you for the correction. He gained some votes, but not as many as the Democrats lost. Dem voters largely didn't switch parties, they stayed home. Do you disagree?
Unfortunately a lot of democrats and leftists still can't get past the idea of a women especially a woman of color being president.
If Biden had not stepped back he probably would have lost some votes but still would have won.
We'll move on to discussing why millions who voted in 2020 didn't in 2024 only after you concede the electability argument. It just wouldn't make sense to talk about what exactly made moderate dems unelectable if you're unwilling to accept that that's the case.
The moderate dems barely lost in 2024 but progressives haven't even been a rounding error in an election in the last sixty presidential cycles.
Moderate dems aren't unelectable and Biden showed that.
FDR (a progressive and the most re-elected and longest serving US president) was first elected 23 presidential cycles ago, and there have only been 59 presidential cycles since the country's founding. He was far from perfect, but his progressive economic policy and creation of the New Deal coalition to combat the great depression made him the most popular president in US history. You're welcome to dismiss it as a fluke or insist again that it was too long ago to be relevant but denying that it even happened doesn't help your position.