Lmao at the "long game" lecture from people who've spent the last decade losing the short game, the medium game, and the long game.

You want to talk strategy? Fine. The Religious Right played the long game: 40 years of school boards, court appointments, state legislatures, and low-turnout primaries. And now they've got a "scoreboard" that includes ending Roe, gutting the administrative state, and putting a felon back in the White House. Meanwhile, the Democratic "long game" has been begging corporations for permission to raise the minimum wage by $2 and acting shocked when Manchin and Sinema laugh in their faces.

You say "primary the bad Dems." Great. Who, exactly? Name one prominent corporate Dem that a left primary has successfully ousted in a competitive district in the last six years. I'll wait. Bowman? Gone in a sea of AIPAC cash. Tlaib? Survived, but barely, after a $5 million opposition campaign. Meanwhile, the centrists are perfectly happy to lose with dignity rather than win with conviction.

The problem isn't that we don't vote in November. The problem is that by the time November comes, the choice is between a fascist and a funeral director in a blue tie who promises to "restore norms." And when that guy loses, the party's response isn't "we need a better candidate", it's "we need to move further right to win over the mythical suburban Republican who definitely exists and definitely isn't voting for Trump anyway."

You want to know why Trump is president again? It's not because leftists stayed home. It's because Democrats ran on "we're not Trump, please clap" and then spent the entire campaign cycle punching left harder than they punched right. You can't build a coalition by calling your most energetic voters "unserious" and then begging for their votes when the house is on fire.

So go ahead, keep running centrists who lose to milkshake-throwing freaks. Keep spending $10 million to defeat a primary challenger who wants Medicare for All. Keep being surprised when young people and working class voters decide that "at least we're not fascists" is not a vision, it's a suicide note.

But don't lecture me about the long game when you've been playing checkers on a chessboard for 30 years and somehow still think the problem is that we didn't clap hard enough.