NEW YORK, NY April 19 (DPI) – Sen. Elizabeth Warren weighed in yesterday with an NYT op-ed on how the Democratic Party can put its best foot forward to ward off large-scale defeat in November. And to a surprising degree, readers replied that more legislation like forgiving student debt would only further alienate independent and moderate voters.
The progressive politician, a former Harvard professor, declared that Democrats need to lean in with their spending priorities to make a better world, as the 2022 election cycle begins and there are clear signs the party of the American Left is going to lose decisively.
Her op-ed, headlined “Democrats Can Avoid Disaster in November”, attracted 3466 reader comments. The most popular comment received more than 2000 upvotes from readers:
Senator Warren is very smart, but student loan forgiveness is the beginning of the end for this country. Lower the interest rate but wholesale forgiveness, without addressing why college is so expensive will change nothing.
Other popular comments:
I know Senator Warren comes from a good place. And I agree with a lot of her positions. However, her statement in the first paragraph illustrates the biggest problem that Democrats face, and the source of their current precarious political position. She writes: “Ahead of the 2020 election, we advanced ideas and plans that we believed would, in ways big and small, make our democracy and our economy work better for all Americans. Across this country, voters agreed with us — and gave us a majority in Washington so that we could deliver on those promises.” That is a fundamental misreading of the 2020 election. The clear majority did not want to reelect the former president and that was the most important issue, but electorate was split almost down the middle. The Democrats retained the bare minimum majority in the Senate. That is not a mandate for a sweeping agenda. The Party would have been much better off fighting and passing one or two initiatives with broad support. Allowing Medicare to use its market share to negotiate lower drug prices comes to mind. If they had passed that and shown voters that they could deliver a real tangible benefit that would cut across racial and class lines, they would have something to run on this fall. Instead they acted like they had a filibuster-proof majority and tried to pass a wish list of all their priorities. And didn’t get it done.
Senator Warren makes the perennial Democratic electoral mistake: thinking policies more important than messaging. She thinks grab bag lists of policies are what motivates Americans to vote but the policy-less GOP has proven that’s not true. All they have are fear and anger-based messages yet they seem to be more than enough to propel them to a Nov victory. I fear for our democracy if the Dems don’t get their messaging act together very soon.
Democrats will lose the working class for a generation if they forgive student debt. The perception with merit will be that Democrats are the party of higher educated elites. Those who couldn’t afford college or decided classroom studies weren’t for them will want to know why such great financial benefits are going to those couldn’t properly plan for their own future. It’s far past time for the party of the working class to actually pay attention to what the working class wants.