The New York State Democratic Party voted unanimously Wednesday to make it easier for registered independent voters to re-enroll as Democrats to vote in next year’s presidential primary — three years after Bernie Sanders slammed the state’s onerous election rules. Under the new rules, a voter not affiliated with a party can re-enroll as a Democrat up to 25 days before the April 28, 2020, election instead of months before. A member of another political party could re-register up to 60 days before the primary election instead of 200 days before.
I think that's really good news for the party, as I think Democrats should be a big tent party, welcoming new voters to their party, allowing them to participate in primary elections.
"Democratic presidential hopefuls are betting on bold. The majority of the Democrats running for president want to create a national health insurance program. Several want to do away with private health insurance entirely. Candidates are engaging on questions about reparations for slavery, and most of the White House hopefuls have endorsed the goal of a carbon-neutral economy within the next decade."
"The energy in the 2020 Democratic campaign has been coming from the left. Candidates are pushing Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, a wealth tax and other ideas that are more progressive than anything a recent Democratic nominee has favored. Much of this shift — which has been focused on economic policy — is smart. Republicans may cry socialism, and affluent centrists may not love it. But the American public leans decidedly left on economics. A clear majority favors higher taxes on the rich, a higher minimum wage and expanded government health insurance. After four decades of slow-growing living standards, people want change. And yet there are also risks in the Democrats’ move to the left — risks that the sillier criticisms of the party’s new progressivism sometimes obscure."
The democrats blew it big time in 1972 against the embattled Richard Nixon and I could see that happening again in 2020. Nixon was facing Watergate but that didn't stop him from winning nearly every state - McGovern ran a devastatingly bad campaign. I think Trumps festish over the wall is stupid but I could see the democrats blowing it big time in 2020, especially if the party becomes too far to the left.
"Be advised: “Democrats are in danger of going too far left in 2018.” So warn Republicans like Mitt Romney and ex-Democrats like Joe Lieberman and public personae as diverse as James Comey and Howard Schultz. In recent months, the pundit class has determined that the party’s leftward lurch heralds the rise of a “liberal tea party”—a movement that could very well unmoor Democrats from their longstanding center-left traditions, in close imitation of the spiral of events that caused the Republican Party to turn sharply to the right in recent years."
"What’s fueling this argument? For one, more Democrats have rallied, either noisily or cautiously, around such policy innovations as “Medicare for all,” universal college and a universal basic income. That a smattering of Democratic candidates have elected to call themselves “democratic socialists” has only fueled the claim that such programs are “socialist.” “The center is Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not Eugene Debs and Michael Harrington,” warned New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens recently. (Debs and Harrington were self-identified socialists.)'
"But there’s something wrong with this historical interpretation: Truman strongly supported single-payer health care. Moynihan supported a universal basic income in the 1960s. Dating back to World War II, Democrats sought to make a government-paid education available to as many Americans as possible. If Democrats are marching to the left, that road leads directly back to platforms and politicians who, in their day, commanded wide support and existed firmly in the mainstream of political thought."