This is the thing mainstream democratic voters struggle so much with.

If the Democratic Party cant translate electoral victory into positive action, then they won’t get votes next time.

They win an election on making things better and then tell you “oh well shoot, we couldn’t quite get there, we were so surprised to get power we didn’t know what to do with it, we passed a CHIPS act to give money to Intel though, is that what you wanted?”

Even the ACA, the hallmark 21st century legislation for the neoliberal democrats has approximately 2 thingss people like, young people can stay on their parents plan until 25 and pre-existing conditions cant be used to deny coverage. Everything else about it sucks though, we still have for profit insurance companies, whose power and profits are now enmeshed into the system even deeper and enshrined in law. Insurers so popular with the common man that when one of their CEOs gets gunned down the media has to give up on trying to make him a sympathetic character because of how much everyone fucking hates health insurance.

The democrats are constantly telling us how glacially slow any positive change has to be, that’s just the rules man. But the republicans get the slimmest majority and a flood of project 2025 / heritage foundation / ALEC bills are ready to go getting passed making sweeping changes to tax codes, environmental regulations, the social safety net.

And every election the people that say the Dems are a garbage party that cant win because of their garbage candidates that go on to twiddle their fucking thumbs get yelled at for depressing voter turnout.

You know what really depresses voter turnout, failing to deliver every time you win an election. There is some great chunk of this nation that will only go out and vote if they get angry enough or like what the current administration is doing enough to show up. The Dems only seem to be able to scratch together a victory on the angry enough side of the coin, because they’ve given up on giving the voters something to vote for. Why? Because those policies will almost certainly upset the donors, and they need those donors to run a bunch of tv ads that won’t convince a single Republican to cross over, but still need to be aired 24/7.

That’s the most frustrating part, all this money spent for the Dems to attempt to court a handful of theoretical republicans instead of actually energizing their base.

I’ll hold my nose and vote for these feckless cowards, but they could have a blue wave, a blue tsunami, a blue Armageddon, and I don’t expect them to do a damn thing. They’ll have some investigations, they will release some reports, they will probably impeach again. And none of that will change a damn thing.

Every time someone ignores a congressional subpoena they will tell the sergeant at arms to take a nap, not go arrest them. They will rubber stamp the next huge pile of money for ICE for fear of being labeled soft on crime or immigration. They won’t enshrine abortion rights it trans protections into law because it will be too controversial and there will always be just enough Dems in “tough districts” that turn tail.

Then they will act indignant when those voters that got nothing dont show up next time.