Fight for the Issues, and the Elections Will Follow

Of course you should support genuinely liberal candidates, but if they're not thick on the ground where you live, turn your efforts to the issues you want your dream candidate to run on.

Steve M:

But more to the point, what's the end result Stoller seeks? To get people talking seriously again about issues like labor? Why not try to accomplish that by ... talking seriously again about issues like labor? Why build a movement to support candidates who'll focus on issues -- why not just cut out the candidate part and try building a movement directly focused on those issues?

I know I say this all the time, but here I go again: movements don't have to be focused on who wins elections and who doesn't. The civil rights movement wasn't. In recent years, the gay rights movement wasn't. The tea party wasn't about elections in its early days in 2009. There were no candidates; there was just anger.

Elsewhere in the piece, Stoller complains that the financial realities of our electoral system mean that anti-liberal insiders dominate the process of nominating Democrats. So why look to that corrupt process as liberalism's salvation? The fat cats control the parties. They still don't (fully) the streets.

We can't make more liberals by putting the candidate cart before the issue horse. We can't make more liberals by waiting for Big Daddy to do it for us. We have to make more liberals by working the issues. One voter, one precinct, one election at a time.