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Mike Carmody's avatar

Fully support this crossover content, great job with this one Brian!

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David Muccigrosso's avatar

While I support your offensive approach, I think you underestimate the amount of sheer resolve and organization it takes. These sorts of strategies are rarely sustainable in the long run precisely because they take so much effort to keep up with, and tend to risk breakdowns of your own coalition.

For instance, maybe it's easy enough to have a series of votes on some abortion bill or whatever, and keep everyone in your conference on board with the plan of sticking it to the other party despite their personal disagreements with whatever that bill says. But after the umpteenth time of being told to swallow something for the good of the party, maybe some back-bencher finally breaks on, I dunno, gun control. Maybe they figure they can make a name for themselves. Maybe they are just so genuinely moved by the issue that they can't treat it like a game. The point is, the cohesion eventually breaks down, leading to splits.

I think that's why leadership is always so leery of such strategies: the splits. To use a military analogy, it's one thing to rally your troops to cross the Alps with elephants *once*. It's another thing to ask them to do it again and again, no matter how effective it'd be in theory. You can say you're fine with defections and AWOLs all you want, but at some point you simply don't have an army left*.

* Simon Bolivar learned this the hard way. Sorry for history-nerding out on you.

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