Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Elections (Page 5 of 18)

These are posts on elections from the blog Base and Superstructure. Topics include international elections, American elections, and local Iowa elections. There’s a particular focus on describing and explaining leftist electoral results.

Tío Bernie: Interests or Relationships?

October 10, 2022 /

Tío Bernie

I want to start with two competing visions for how to put together a leftist electoral coalition. The first one says you put together a multiracial working-class coalition by laying out policies in people’s interest and then advertising those policies. The second says you start by connecting with people on their own terms and by using prior relationships to build personal ties with the candidate and campaign.

The second works better than the first. Or at least Chuck Rocha argues as much in his book, Tío Bernie, about his work with Latinx and immigrant voters on the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign.

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Can Democrats Win Iowa in 2022?

August 1, 2022 /

iowa democrats win 2020

Here’s the short answer to the title of this post: No.

But for a slightly longer answer, I’ll point out that many things could happen. Kim Reynolds could get caught driving drunk while cheating on her husband. Chuck Grassley could die from old age. And so on. But assuming nothing outrageous happens, Democrats won’t win the major federal or statewide races this fall. They will lose Iowa in 2022. Normal campaigning and GOTV efforts won’t be enough to win.

Incidentally, wealthier Democratic donors and party officials already know this. It’s a big part of why donors haven’t given as much money as usual by this point. A few progressives in the state have even criticized Democrats for ‘throwing in the towel.’

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Winning a Democratic Presidential Nomination

July 25, 2022 /

democratic presidential nomination

The left leaning candidate almost always loses the Democratic nomination. Why?

Among their major electoral problems, progressives and left leaning electoralists can’t count. In other words, they don’t know what a majority of the Democratic Party consists in and how to get there. Nor is this merely a problem of electoral organizing. It’s also one of the key problems Jane McAlevey sees in many unions in her book No Shortcuts, among other works.

In order to get to some ways to solve all this, I’d like to take a look at the Democratic Party and its presidential nomination. Who does win? And how do they do it? What kind of coalition of voters do they build?

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Jamaal Bowman DSA

DSA’s Issue Is Deeper Than Jamaal Bowman

December 1, 2021 /

Within the Democratic Socialists of America – especially the very online parts of DSA – there’s been a hot debate lately over whether to expel Jamaal Bowman from the org. Bowman recently won an election to Congress, joined The Squad, and formed a big part of the DSA’s strategy of building membership through electoral engagement.

I won’t recap all the details. Readers can check out coverage from the DSA Observer. But the basic story: Bowman voted for Iron Dome funding for Israel. He took a lobbyist-paid trip to Israel and posed with Israel’s right-wing prime minister, among other things. In response to a rebuff from Bowman and his supporters, the DSA’s Palestine Solidarity Working Group called on him to fix these issues or face expulsion. Some on the online left sided with the WG, while other parts sided against expulsion.

But I think the whole expulsion question arrives far too late. The DSA should look into how it got into this mess in the first place.
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left electorate

The Left’s Vision of the Electorate

September 27, 2021 /

In a review of the 2020 Thomas Frank book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, Erik Baker lays out a basic progressive theory of the electorate. I’ll set aside, for the moment, the tension between that and the title of this post. Many leftists, after all, still identify as progressives.

It so happens I recently wrote a post that touched on this idea, in part. Here I’ll briefly sketch out Baker’s critique of Frank and why it’s so important for leftist electoral projects.

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