THBT the Democratic Party should prioritize/welcome the nomination of candidates at all levels of government who favor more radical changes to existing policies and structures over those who are seen as more “electable”.
“The first thing you need to identify in this motion is what the goal of the Democratic National Committee is and how they can best achieve that.”
-Gillian Hope Tiley (University of Vermont, Semi-Finals Judge)
In this motion, the general arguments from the rounds came down to which side gets the best electability of candidates and most participation from citizens. On the round Gillian sat in, the focus ultimately became more so about electability rather than involvement and government bench swept the debate.
Here is what happened and what went wrong:
To start, Opening Government argued that the DNC needed to progress and to get more young voters, leftist and passionate individuals involved, radical candidacy was the way to go. The warrant for this argument sat on the premise that the DNC is largely made up of moderate support and if it decided to back a radical candidate, the current backing would not drop off and switch parties due to lack of alternative. They further explained how radicals needed a voice in politics as well as a passionate leader and that the change in leadership would cast a wider voting net and lead to gains from undecided individuals. In addition to this point, Gov. asserted that radical leaders better appeal to change opposed to conservative leadership. Practical and intrinsically good impacts of this assertion (i.e. universal healthcare, maternity leave, redistribution…) further gave mechanism in the back-half which lead Closing Gov. to concluding that hard policies and direct change speak best to people and make them more likely to participate in the democratic process.
On Opposition bench, too much time spent on theory and baseless assertions lead to the panel giving Gov. the win. The primary errors, according to Buzz Kinger, were that Opposition needed a better analysis of who will vote and why, a more robust defense of the Hillary school of candidates and centrism. Furthermore, a lot of the impacts that came out of Opposition seemed to align with Government, except under a different name.
“Opposition really needed to display more argumentative imagination. Democrats. have been more centrist. More examples where democrats aren’t centrist and why that fails or where centrism works. Then on top of that, there should have been more hypothetical analysis on why radicals fail.”
-Buzz Klinger (Independent Adjudicator)
Even though Government bench took first and second in the debate, judges still felt that an area where the Government was still left underdeveloped was not spending enough time explaining why losing seats in the short-term is ok in order for long-term change to happen. Yet because they provided more practical material with unique and justified impacts, they took the round over the Opp. teams. On a final note, Zach Merson (University of Vermont, Judge) added that to do well in a motion like this, debaters need to know what the voting population looks like and where party numbers are coming from.