Absurdly, the latest NYT poll shows that only 2/3s of DEMOCRATS want to hold Barrett’s vote until after the election.

It’s truly hard to imagine how the Dem Senate caucus could have botched this worse. Their political instincts are shockingly bad. https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/us101520-crosstabs1/016bc5d8ae03038c/full.pdf
Remember the incredible groundswell of fear and outrage after RBG’s death? How it produced over 100,000,000 in donations in record time? Senate Dems have wasted that groundswell, and now, mere weeks later, the GOP is much more unified on the issue than we are.
The ideas that ruined Senate Dems here: conflict is always bad, it’s always best to lower the volume of disputes, that avoiding disruption or anger is a win for US and not for THEM, and of course, the cursed idea that “health care” is a magic key phrase for winning public support
When you refuse to take a stand, you don’t rally the public to your side with your reasonableness - you confuse your own base, while the rest of the public tunes out and assumes everything isn’t so bad.
There were countless AXIOS-type takes on the Dems’ strategy to avoid the partisan conflict of the Kavanaugh hearings. But those hearings were a SUCCESS: the public widely opposed his confirmation. Barrett’s low-volume, conflict free hearings predictably produced support for her.
That’s what’s amazing about this: Senate Dems got EXACTLY the hearings they wanted. It just turned out to be the exact wrong strategy - a way to take their own base, in a state of frenetic terror over a 6-3 court, and placate it into irrelevance. Historic stupidity
One other thing - Dems have not only failed to prevent the GOP from building support for confirming Barrett the week before the election, they somehow failed IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT BARRETT’S NOMINATION CELEBRATION WAS A SUPERSPREADER EVENT! They never even brought it up!
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