When Wall Street came after Franklin Roosevelt-- snd did they ever!-- he laughed in their faces and the American people gave him 4 terms. In fact, when he was reelected in 2036, when the banksters and Republicans were screaming "Socialism!" FDR beat Republican Alf Landon 27,747,636 (60.8%) to 16,679,543 (36.5%). FDR took every state but Maine and Vermont and won the electoral college 523 to 8. The Republicans were left with just 88 members in the House and 17 in the Senate. As for turnout... first let me run the turnout by you in the last 10 elections.
• 1980- Reagan v Carter- 52.6%• 1984- Reagan v Mondale- 53.3%• 1988- Bush v Dukakis- 50.2%• 1992- Clinton v Bush- 55.2%• 1996- Clinton v Dole- 49.0%• 2000- Bush v Gore- 51.2%• 2004- Bush v Kerry- 56.7%• 2008- Obama v McCain- 58.2%• 2012- Obama v Romney- 54.9%• 2016- Trumpanzee v Hillary- 55.7%
So FDR is 1936? His massive win was powered by an absolutely eye-popping 61.0% turnout. And that grew even further to a 62.5% turnout in 1940. People really do come out when Democrats give them a reason to-- and not just a choice between a lesser and greater evil. Listen to how Franklin Roosevelt handled the screams of "Socialism!" from the banksters and the Republican Party in 1936:During a 2015 primary debate, the moderator asked Bernie if corporate America will love a President Sanders. Bernie's response: "No, I think they won't... The CEOs if large multinationals may like Hillary; they ain't going to like me. And Wall Street is going to like me even less! And the reasons for that, is we've got to deal with the elephant in the room, which is the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street... We have got to break the large financial institutions up. I don't think I'm going to get a whole lot of campaign contributions from Wall Street... I don't want campaign contributions from corporate America... The greed of the billionaire class, the greed of Wall Street is destroying this economy and is destroying the lives of millions of Americans. We need an economy that works for the middle class and not just a handful of billionaires and I will fight and lead to make that happen."And today Bernie still welcomes their contempt. Wall Street executives and corporate PACs are pouring contributions into the campaign coffers of Status Quo Joe, Kamala Harris and McKinsey Pete.
Biden made explicit at a fund-raiser last Monday in Washington that he does not plan to demonize the financial industry like some rivals have, saying that “Wall Street and significant bankers” can “be positive influences in the country.” (As a senator for Delaware, Mr. Biden was regarded as an ally of financial institutions in the state, such as the credit card industry.)Donors described various doubts about even their favored candidates: Mr. Biden’s age, say, or Mr. Buttigieg’s inexperience, or whether Ms. Harris’s political skills will play on the biggest stage.“If you could roll all three of them into a single candidate,” Ms. Smoot said, “you’d have the perfect candidate.”One of the most surprising developments of the 2020 race is how quickly Mr. Buttigieg, a virtual unknown only a few months ago, has vaulted into competition with Mr. Biden and other leading candidates for top party donors in New York and elsewhere.
One common message from the banksters though is that they're back anyone but Bernie. Creepy multimillionaire MSNBC anchor Donnie Deutsch-- a Wall Street fruit fly-- has said he'll vote for any Democrat over Trump except... "a socialist."I'm going to quote very briefly from an excellent New York Magazine Wednesday piece by Eric Levitz, America’s Political System Is Rigged Against the Left (and Always Has Been). "[T]he left has been predominantly urban since (at least) the dawn of industrialization. Early in the 20th century, socialist and labor parties arose to represent the burgeoning proletariat. This was an enviable social base in numerical terms. But since such workers were densely packed into company towns, or the manufacturing districts of major cities, left-wing parties inevitably punched below their weight in winner-take-all legislative elections. Labor parties would 'waste' votes by running up the score in a few districts, while their rivals secured narrow plurality victories in many districts. Between 1890 and 1907, Germany’s Social Democrats won the most votes of any party in every single election but never won the most seats; some years, their main conservative rival claimed twice as many votes in parliament, despite winning a million fewer ballots.
Democrats have drawn disproportionate support from urban voters since the New Deal. But the party’s overreliance on underrepresented urbanites has grown more severe and problematic in recent decades. Before the civil-rights movement’s triumphs, the Democrats’ grip on the segregationist South blotted out the electoral disadvantages that came with being the party of northern cities. And even after Republicans began painting the South red, “blue dog” Democrats succeeded in distancing themselves from their party’s urban Establishment, crafting regional identities that enabled them to compete in low-density areas. But over the past three decades, as American politics grew ever-more nationalized-- and social issues (which divide city and country more sharply than fiscal ones) grew in salience-- conservative voters stopped splitting their tickets and the right secured an overwhelming structural advantage in U.S. politics.This development is an underappreciated cause of the mounting tensions in Nancy Pelosi’s caucus. The concentration of left-wing voters in urban districts bifurcates the Democrats’ House majority between lawmakers with overwhelmingly progressive, urban constituencies, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and those who represent Republican-leaning areas, like Oklahoma’s Kendra Horn. The progressives believe-- quite rightly-- that much of their agenda commands majority support. But moderates can reply, with equal accuracy, that their party can’t retain power by pleasing a mere majority of the voting public...[S]ince social identity tends to influence voter behavior more profoundly than policy details, the Democratic Party’s association with left-wing city dwellers can undermine its candidates in low-density areas, where many voters feel alienated from urban liberals (and/or nonwhite communities). This is why GOP ad-makers worked so incessantly to tie Democratic candidates to “San Francisco liberal” Nancy Pelosi ahead of the 2018 midterms, and why Fox News has proved so eager to make Ocasio-Cortez the face of Team Blue in the election’s aftermath, and why many (though not all) swing-district Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the AOCs of the world. It is also, likely, one reason why Pelosi is currently going out of her way to marginalize her caucus’s most progressive freshmen (the nefarious influence of Reagan’s ghost may be another)....There is a less-improbable path to modest structural reform: If Democrats can leverage Trump’s unpopularity (and/or a declining economy) into a 2020 landslide large enough to deliver them a slim Senate majority, then they could theoretically abolish the filibuster and grant statehood to Washington, D.C., and various other U.S. territories on a party-line vote. This would do little to correct the underrepresentation of urban voters in the upper chamber but it would mitigate that of nonwhite Americans. Then again, this would require a level of political courage and party discipline that Chuck Schumer’s caucus shows no signs of possessing.More plausibly, Democrats in deep-blue states could mitigate their party’s disadvantage in the House by gerrymandering more aggressively. If the party disavowed the notion that districts should be compact or contiguous, then Empire State Democrats could chop New York City into pieces and put at least one hefty chunk of urban voters into each and every one of their state’s congressional districts. Then again, this would cost Democratic incumbents a modicum of job security and could inspire popular backlash.If urban America’s structural disadvantages can’t be mitigated, perhaps urban-rural polarization can be. Democrats could try to increase the salience of bread-and-butter issues to residents of low-density areas by formulating an agenda that addresses rural America’s very real economic problems. Or the party could tolerate (even) more triangulation from aspiring “blue dogs” in light-red territory (although such a strategy would risk alienating the party’s core supporters and further inflaming intra-Democratic tensions).Or perhaps, demography will solve Democrats’ problem for them. In recent years, the Republican Party has grown more reliant on its rural, socially reactionary base-- while America’s suburbs have grown more racially diverse and ideologically progressive. Liberal cities’ passion for exclusionary zoning seems to be expediting the latter process by forcing would-be urban leftists to settle for suburban sprawl. Which is awful for the environment and the economy, but good for the left’s political representation (go NIMBYs, go?). Meanwhile, the sprawling geography of America’s fast-growing Sun Belt cities is also dispersing cosmopolitans more widely across space, thereby reducing their underrepresentation. For these reasons, among others, it’s possible that the Democrats’ success in traditionally Republican suburbs last fall was not a one-off reaction to Donald Trump but the beginning of a realignment. And if America’s suburbs do turn durably blue, then the tables could turn: Support for Republicans could become so heavily concentrated in rural areas that winner-take-all districting starts hurting the right more than the left. Demography isn’t destiny. But if demographic change (or some kind of political revolution) does not radically reshape America’s electoral terrain, perpetual disempowerment may be the left’s fate.
And this is what they want for president instead. Please, let's not be fooled again!
