A trick to leadership is to under promise and over deliver. Don’t promise something and then fall through, that’s when people become disappointed. Promise something you know you can and will accomplish, just enough to get elected, and then do more than you promised.
Another important part of leadership is to try to fire up your base more than you upset the people who didn’t vote for you.
There will always be some voters who are either significantly uninformed or ideologically opposed to you who will never vote for you. Don’t specifically work on bringing people over to your side, you will not succeed.
If you can push for policies which will positively impact your supporters without impacting people who won’t support you, you should pass those policies quickly to encourage your base and gain your political capital.
This does not mean that a leader was ethical.
Examples of leaders who did this include
- At the end of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency the Federalist Party was extremely weak, and his Democratic-Republican Party dominated politics until the split between Jackson and Adams.
- Abraham Lincoln. He embraced the values of the Republican Party (of the time), and didn’t alienate the abolitionists. Through this action the south seceded. The emancipation proclamation strengthened his support among Republicans, and it was the right thing to do. The most controversial president of his lifetime (the only one who had to face a rebellion) he is now seen as one of America’s greatest presidents. Republicans dominated the Presidency for the next two decades.
- Theodore Roosevelt expanded American power, his party dominated government during his time in office, and he expanded American power. His successor abandoned Roosevelt’s policies which l
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched the New Deal and won almost every state in 1940. He didn’t try to keep the more radical Republican elements happy, and was put on our money because of his success.
In the United States presidents have two goals in office, first is to pass the policies which they were elected to do, and also to keep and grow power while in office, ideally to leave office with their policy more powerful than when they entered. Very few presidents succeed in this.
There have only been two times in American history where a party has maintained control of both houses of congress for more than 10 elections in a row.
I believe it is possible to have the Democrats dominate politics for the next twenty years, the reasons are numerous. First of all, while values on issues have swung strongly liberal on major issues, the Republican party platform is still stuck in the past on LGBT, gender, and other issues regarding different groups. There is no major social value where the majority of Americans agree with the Republican Party. Even when it comes to economic values, even Republicans voters balk at the idea of ending social security because they see those programs as that they have “earned them”. A majority of voters support ending student loans, and the majority support a more progressive tax code.
Which brings us to where American politics needs to go in the future. The politics of moderating Democratic policies to improve voter turnout is not going to work anymore. Millennials are adults now, and we got really excited about the candidacy of Sanders over the last two Presidential elections. In the 2020 Presidential primaries, Biden won only 3% of voters between 17 and 29, and only 5% of voters between 30 and 44. If more Millennials had voted, there is a high probability Sanders would have won the election. As long as more of us vote, eventually we will be the key demographic politicians need to win in order to carry the Presidency.
The key to successful leadership over the next twenty years will be to get as many millennials out to vote as possible. The Democratic party needs to endorse ranked voting, which is key to electing politicians who the majority of Americans will support. We need to elect our candidates using ranked voting who can then encourage as many voters as possible to vote in the general election.
If the Democratic Party does this we can succeed on a large number of issues the majority of Americans care about, and then voters will turn out, and we will continuously win elections until the Republicans stop being so extreme in the future.
We cannot afford future Republican governments. They are bad for civil rights, they are bad for economic growth, they have killed jobs, and they are bad for the stock market. There is no good reason to vote for the Republican Party in this era. There are only two reasons to vote Republican nowadays, either you are brainwashed, or you are racist. There’s no other reason.
Democrats need to play hard ball, fight to win, and then pass the legislation our country needs to deal with the major issues which our nation is dealing with.
References:
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/primaries-caucuses/entrance-and-exit-polls/iowa/democratic