Democrats tend to spend all their time thinking about strategy, which might be summarized as “what do we need people to think we believe in each of this list of battlefield locations?”
I got to this pondering the Kentucky election. 5 of the 6 Republicans won easily. It was clearly a partisan election. Why, then, did the Democrat barely squeak by the Republican governor? Bevin is not the monster the Left paints him to be. I think they say “he is wildly unpopular” in exactly the way they say Trump is wildly unpopular, even while he is filling up stadiums all around the country.
I think they cheated. Then I got to thinking: it would be helpful to have spies working in their campaign, to report any whispers around the coffee pot, or back rooms. Cheating is not a one person effort. It takes a team, coordination, and planning.
Then it occurred to me the Democrats are almost certainly ALREADY doing this, which is to say planting their people in Republican campaigns, where they listen not for policy ideas (BORING!!!) but for strategy, if there is any.
It’s an obvious move. It’s part of strategy, where winning is everything, where everything is a battle–not for principle or policy or result–but for votes and elected sinecures from which rain manna from heaven. It’s back scratching all around.
Why would they care if their ideas work, when their whole focus is just on winning elections? How would they even notice, unless they took time off from their primary focus?
Me, personally, if you put me in charge of something like this: I would come up with TRICKS that would work, I think most of them.
Democrats run their campaigns like military campaigns. They are disciplined, organized, and focused only on victory.
In theory, nobody is supposed to be a “professional” politician. We are supposed to be electing not just bankers and lawyers, but tradesmen and farmers.
In theory, the electorate is offered two competing sets of ideas in every election, and the set which best conforms to their own beliefs wins. But in reality, one side is grooming the electorate in a thousand ways to vote for them, regardless of the value of their ideas, or to put it more clearly, how damaging they always are.
Professionalizing politics is a lot like making a trade out of lying. It is image management, where the image is whatever the image needs to be at any given time and location. This is a truism, but no less valid for it.
Republicans are much less professional in this respect. I remember some noted Democrat strategist saying that our ideas were better, but he could never vote for a Republican because we are so stupid. And by stupid, he meant letting Democrats pull off amoral stunts election after election, and never getting the wiser, never fighting fire with fire, and never doing anything but learn how to lose to inferior people and ideas, all while pretending the fight had been fair, when it was anything but.