Who should have been the democratic party nominee for president?

[Ken Burch]

83. Repetition of the message matters. The way we appeal to voters matters.

Whatever our pitch is needs to be said again and again and again.

And validating the younger Sanders supporters and what they care about matters because this election was their introduction to politics and we needed(and failed to some degree) to keep them in the game after the convention. You would have preferred that those people went to the polls, right? Well, it's as much our responsibility as it is theirs to get them to do that. A strategy based on demanding that people vote only alienates people. We had good things to offer. Why NOT keep reminding people what those good things were?

And if it gets people to vote, what's the harm in validating them? What is so intolerable about reinforcing the message that what they did made a difference, that it wasn't wasted effort, that it's worth their effort to work with us for the long-term? It's not as though we have anything to gain from driving them away and treating them as failures and a nuisance.

We've never prospered as a party by telling new people to "shut up and get in the back of the line". When we treat them like that, it sounds to them as if we don't WANT them to be part of what we're doing and that we don't think we need them. And then they give up on politics and we lose the new blood and the new votes we need.

All I'm doing here is arguing for approaches that would bring out more voters, and do so without disrespecting any of our existing voters at all. What do you think we have to lose from encouraging people to vote rather than simply demanding that they do so?