Making the choice

[phantom power]

I'll just say that it's not been my experience that people always take the lessons from defeat that you want them too. When politicians lose they generally attribute it to a greater desire on the part of the voters for what the the victor was promising. It's not impossible to imagine them looking at turnout numbers and deciding that the conservative Republican candidate might have been defeated if only the Democrat had been more liberal but I wouldn't hold my breath, particularly considering the desire on the part of all these people to maintain the status quo.
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There are other ways. In the current two party, winner-take-all system, primaries are useful. They're hard to mount because it's hard to find people who are willing to do it and even harder to find the money to beat the entrenched interests and the political establishment. Not impossible, but not easy.(The tea party had a little help ...)

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(I think the mistake people made with Obama was thinking that because he was opposed to the conservative regime, which they assumed was far weaker than it actually was, he had the intention of fighting it when, in fact, he was an accomodationist. Not that the other side made it easy.)

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If I could wave a magic wand I'd change our constitution and make this a more representative democracy. I've said it many times before, America's Bill of Rights has been a model for modern democracy, but there's a reason why nobody's adopted the rest of our system. It's a clunker. I'm all for changing it. Meanwhile, it's the founders world and we just live in it.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/making-choice-elections-context-and.html