Rick Moran should be careful not to make the same mistake that the left makes by living in a bubble.
My experience in Chicago suburbs, and Downstate Illinois, and Georgia is that the word socialist has a positive connotation with most college educated people. In contrast the word Capitalist has a clearly negative connotation. For example, college educated insurance business employees and college educated IT workers at State Farm Insurance overwhelmingly have a positive opinion of Socialism and an extremely negative opinion of the word Capitalism.
The same is true at Allstate Insurance and other big private firms I have been at. In knocking door-to-door in Hanover Park and Elgin and Elburn and Sugar Grove IL the word Socialist/Socialism leans positive and Capitalism leans negative. When Hanover Park flipped from 80% for Socialist Blago to 87% Capitalist, the words Socialist and Capitalist were not used ... for good reason. The same when TeaParty candidates won in Elgin. The TeaParty candidates for city council and school board were pro-capitalist. But they did not campaign with that label.
In contrast, the mayor of Bloomington, IL did campaign with the label Socialist, although it was not the primary label.
The same is true here in Georgia. If Cagle, the likely R candidate for governor campaigns with the Capitalist label and Stacey Abrams,the likely D candidate, were to campaign with the label Socialist it would definitely favor Abrams and be a disadvantage to Cagle ... especially with the swing voters. Of course, I’m not at all certain Cagle is a Capitalist. He seems more like a Corporatist who would spend massive tax money to subsidize Savannah Harbor so it can be cheaper to bring in imports from Asia. And how much tax money and movement of social issues to the left is he willing to do to bring corporatist Bezamazon to Georgia? Cagle is trying hard to not run on the issues.
Interesting.
“In knocking door-to-door in Hanover Park and Elgin and Elburn and Sugar Grove IL the word Socialist/Socialism leans positive and Capitalism leans negative.“
When I door knocked out that way in 2016 I saw more Hillary for Prison signs on small businesses than I would have imagined. Lots of Trump signs, too.
Now get a bit East into Wheaton and Glen Ellen and the socialist infestation becomes far more apparent.
L
Yeah, but even “socialists” aren’t really socialists any more. They believe in wealth redistribution but they’ve abandoned the defining feature of true socialism, namely the collective ownership of the means of production.. In other words, modern so-called socialists want to be Denmark, not the USSR. Our side — the free market, classically liberal, liberty oriented side — has won the basic argument against textbook socialism. There are a few vulgar Marxists remaining but even on the left they’re considered an outdated fringe. At this point we’re basically in mopping up operations. All that’s left is to determine how much redistribution we’re willing to accept into to our fundamentally capitalist economic model.