Quote Originally Posted by ElNono
I don't dispute that there's more infighting there. It's just, different. One thing Trump did was completely neuter the Republican party, with the exception being people like DeathSantis, who really is a Trump wannabe. Very few exceptions to this, like the GA people.
As much as you claim AOC hates Pelosi, she's been voting with the party on pretty much everything, and the House has never really been a problem for Dems. I suppose she hates Republicans more.

But I agree the Dems can be incredibly inept managing their position of power and stated so many times. Unlike the GOP who has a kingmaker now, there's a very shady process on who gets ahead in the party as well. Lots of new faces, but who gets a prominent role seems very calculated.
There's no way terrible candidates like Shillary and Old Joe win the nomination without all sorts of political backroom deals.
The Obamas essentially retiring from politics was definitely a huge negative for the establishment Democratic party. Barack Obama's endorsement used to be king back in my high school and college days. If Obama was out touring around the country like Trump doing "Progress" rallies (i.e. the Democrat version of Trump's "Save America" rallies), the Democrats would have a better shot in 2022 and 2024. Because people still like Obama. Sure you had people that disliked him (racists, theories that he was a Muslim, birthers etc) but there wasn't this enormous "FJB / Let's Go Brandon" type energy against Obama the way that there has been against Biden, especially in the past 9-10 months or so. Obama was actually competent on some economic issues like sequestration to fight inflation and finally getting gas prices down from late 2014 until the Biden admin. People say Trump was the one who "finally lowered gas prices" but nope, fact check says that it actually occurred 2 years before Obama left office.

Bill Clinton actually left office the most popular president since (I believe) JFK.... it's unfortunate, particularly for the Dems that he married someone totally awful who's basically a conniving, manipulative, war hawking, power hungry witch. He'd had been better off being a single president like Grover Cleveland was and then marrying Monica Lewinsky deep into his second term, tbh. Because the Clinton brand was another really strong one when Bill Clinton and not Hillary was the name associated with it.

DeSantis is a fantastic governor and Florida is a permanently red state now. We're never going back to 2012 because the Cubano and pro-Trump and DeSantis trends are just too strong there. Georgia is a different case. They are much more the "soft GOP vote" like you see in a few other places like Delaware County, Ohio (one county north of Columbus). There are still far more registered Republicans than Democrats in Georgia, but a lot of what has made Georgia purple is the huge influx of blacks to the Atlanta metro area, from the rust belt, northeast and other parts of the South... that have not necessarily all registered as Democrats (less than half of them have, actually), but still vote Democrat in droves when they feel the urge to vote. When the urge to vote isn't really there, Republicans win Georgia by comfortable margins.

In a midterm like 2022, Kemp and Walker are going to win the state by around 6-9% each. In a non-pandemic general election like 2024, there should still be enough Republicans to win at the presidential level (albeit, by slim margins) for at least one or two more cycles; but Trump or DeSantis needs to adopt a different strategy in Georgia than "America First" because as you said, the movement is pro union and WWC which isn't really a big voter bloc in GA. Sure you have the far northern and NW parts in the Appalachians but that's a tiny sliver. Most of the state is either rural, with a rural black belt (i.e. rot belt) running through about the halfway point of the state, and the rest mostly white rural counties that will always be red... but the Atlanta Metro has gotten enormous and in order to win Georgia at some point for the Republicans you will need some suburban reversion which means winning back a large share of the white upper and upper middle class, white collar voters who generally have a bachelor's degree or higher.