I’ll be taking next week off, so the next Sift after today won’t be until the day before the midterm elections. That’s too late to try to persuade anybody, so today’s Sift will focus on the closing arguments I think Democrats should be making.
My original vision was of a series of short, punchy posts on single issues, with an umbrella post to list and link to them. And I’ve mostly done that, but the short-and-punchy resolution has been hard to keep. So instead I have a series of not-incredibly-verbose posts lined up. I hope you will find them useful in convincing friends who are undecided about who to vote for or about voting at all. There actually is a lot on the line in this election.
Anyway, the closing arguments are broken into Democracy, Abortion, and Biden’s Achievements posts. They should come out in that order between now and about 11 EDT. I’m still deciding whether the umbrella post is necessary.
I had hoped that moving so much material into those posts would shrink the weekly summary, but then the week happened. The UK government fell; the week’s developments in the various Trump legal battles is a story in itself; John Durham lost his final case, capping a long, expensive, and unproductive investigation into the allegedly nefarious origins of the Russia “hoax”; and I just couldn’t resist telling the story of the would-be conservative movie-maker who lost his investors’ money to a grifter. (Conservatives have a hard time spotting grifters, don’t they? It’s almost like the movement seeks out gullible people and grooms them to be conned.)
So the summary may not show up until 1 or so.
See you in two weeks.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Being that polls show that somewhat more people trust Republicans on the economy, it’s worth mentioning that Republicans have promised to cut social programs if they get the power. Would that calm inflation? Probably. Would it inflict pretty massive social pain? Certainly. Would it help the deficit? No, because the Republicans real priority is cutting taxes for rich people, and they don’t care about the deficit (neither should you). Would it address any real problems, like continued erosion of the middle class, climate change, or systemic racism? No, it would make them worse.
To the extent that more people trust Republicans on the economy, it’s because Democrats continue to allow the GQP to champion the narrative that Democrats hand out the public treasury to the undeserving.
Take, for instance, student loan forgiveness, a policy that transcends even the basic anti-minority, anti-immigrant bigotry that generally drives who is “undeserving”. There are a number of reasons why this is good policy, but once again, Democrats have fumbled the messaging and allowed the Party of No to put them on the defensive.
The problem is really pretty simple: Democrats absolutely suck at messaging. They’re too polite, they’re too complicated, and they’re too rational. As long as they continue to be inept in the game of messaging, they’re going to continue to lose close elections.
How do they get better?
Gave me a moment of shock when I noticed that three posts in a row were titled “closing argument.” Glad it’s only the final arguments before the election and not of this blog!