The leaders of the Democratic National Committee announced they plan to learn absolutely nothing from their embarrassing loss to President-elect Donald Trump.
Was there a party that did not install SCOTUS justices that were so ideologically conservative that they did things like end national legal abortion and gut the ability of government regulation agencies to regulate?
Yes there was. But that party is not coming back except as a token now because people just didn’t think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to vote.
But that party is not coming back except as a token now because people just didn’t think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to vote
“The party didn’t think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to listen to their voters”
Nope. They can’t force anyone to vote for them. People thought not voting was a better plan than stopping the rapist fascist dictator when they only had two possible choices.
There was an absolute mountain of evidence that Trump would be a disaster. They didn’t vote anyway because they knew they weren’t going to get a pony.
Voting for people in a two-party system is the stupidest thing you can do because you will never get your way with any one politician. So you vote against and keep voting against until you get closer and closer to what you want.
Just not voting or voting for third party candidates that will clearly lose against someone who has an automatic 30% of the vote doesn’t stop the worst possible thing from happening and it never will.
If you didn’t vote to stop Trump from getting into office, I blame you. You had warning after warning and your idealism was more important to you.
Yup, which is why you need to give them reason to vote.
Democrats have been parading around “most important election of our lifetime” for fucking years - don’t be surprised that it didn’t work yet again.
The reason why Trump is popular is because there is legitimate pain and struggle in the working class, and he affirmed that pain and struggle (even if he was misidentifying the source of that pain). Telling voters “things are good, actually, and the other guy is gonna ruin it” is just dumb.
Democrats didn’t run on popular policy and they got destroyed because of it.
Who said “things are good actually”?? Seems to me that Harris had plenty of policy proposals that would have resulted in a meaningful improvement to the bottom line of the average American.
Biden has also been better for the average American than trump was. For fucks sake, Trump actually got away with raising taxes on all of us to support his tax cut for the rich, simply because the average person is too low information to grasp the idea of a tax cut that expires!
So yeah, plenty of actual reasons to say that one candidate is better than the other, without needing to be wowed by an actual messiah who can dismantle our fucked up system and solve everybody’s problems.
They repeatedly touted our economic recovery was ‘the best in the G6’.
Even when our economy is ‘good’ it’s shit for most people. That’s the problem with being a neoliberal status quo party: it doesn’t help most of the people they need to vote for them
Regardless of what Biden has done for the average American, his approval rating has been really bad for a while now. It may not be right or fair, but that’s what it is.
Despite Harris not actually being the incumbent, the Republicans managed to associate her with Biden and she more or less embraced it. Then the Republicans were able to frame themselves as the challenger to an unpopular incumbent president and it’s not surprising they did well.
Of course, it didn’t help either that Harris is the VP either. Perhaps if we had a primary and managed to pick another candidate that could distance themselves a bit better from Biden things would be different.
Your post is CLASSIC misdirection and misrepresenting what the Dems actually did. IF these elections were fair, and I’ve reason to think they were not, then they got lost on higher gas prices. Which is A PRETTY STUPID AND SELFISH reason to vote for/not care about mass deportations.
And they lost it on not attacking trump on the border and on the economy.
blue maga and blueanon wasn’t just a sort of tongue in cheek name, it was also an accurate description. we’ve seen this shit burgeoning up, to me, most notably with the people who were adamant that trump didn’t actually get shot and it was all a PR stunt. been lost in the sauce for a while.
Their reason was that a rapist fascist who quoted Hitler and clearly has dementia that promised to deport millions of people and be a dictator on day one only had a 50/50 chance of being president.
And they didn’t care because they didn’t like Kamala Harris much. Was she any of those things? No. But her boss is funding the same genocide in Israel that Trump said to Netanyahu “finish the job” about on national television, so no one better vote for her either!
Sorry, not a good enough reason to not stop Trump. Not a good enough reason to refuse to vote. Not a good enough reason to vote third party.
For fuck’s sake, do you think people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 because they thought he would be a terrific president?
do you think people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 because they thought he would be a terrific president?
they voted for Biden because he made meaningful concessions to the progressive caucus. He gave Bernie a prominent roll in his campaign and made promises about student loan forgiveness and raising the minimum wage, on top of affirming people’s anxiety about covid and a pledge to address it.
Harris had none of that. She didn’t primary against progressive candidates, didn’t have to address progressive concerns, and when there was vocal opposition to any of her policies she said “excuse me, i’m speaking”. She was more right-moderate than Biden was, even if only because she didn’t face the progressive primary he did.
You can give me all sorts of reasons why Harris wasn’t an appealing candidate. It’s not relevant. Trump was a clear and present danger.
I don’t give a shit about whether or not people liked her or whatever their idealistic reasons not to vote for her were. None of them justify allowing Trump to take office by refusing stop him from doing it. That is on people who refused to vote or vote third party. You were not going to get the candidate you wanted this year. You were a fool if you didn’t know that.
You’re talking to me as if I’m one of those non-voters.
Most Americans are not the terminally-online type - they didn’t see your impassioned warnings about Trump. All they heard was that there was an election, and the choice was between Trump and Harris, and neither one really had anything material to offer them. To them, democrats screaming about how bad Trump is is just par for the course. They needed more than to not be Trump, and they didn’t deliver.
Go ahead and scream into the void if you want. None of it will change the fact that Harris lost because she ran a bad campaign and turned her back on meaningful progress.
I voted for Harris. But in the first-past-the-post system, all that matters for a party is victory. That is how you judge the success of party officials. There is a whole class of extremely well-paid Democratic party officials whose ENTIRE JOB is to figure out how to select a candidate and sell them to the American people. That is literally their entire job.
The average voters is low-information, doesn’t pay attention, and assumes both sides frequently lie. (And they’re not wrong about the lying.) You can truthfully call the other side fascist, but the other side will simply say you’re the fascist, and low-information voters can’t tell the difference.
Voters have always been low-information. This isn’t anything new. The entire reason we have primaries is that it forces candidates to actually try their hand at mass appeal and to take the temperature of the electorate. Democratic leaders kept Biden in far too long, til it was too late to hold a proper primary.
You can blame it on those who don’t vote, but the truth is that most people pay attention to politics only tangentially. If you, as a political operator, didn’t find a way to reach these voters, you have failed.
Does the blame ultimately fall on those who didn’t vote for Biden? Sure. But the same is true of those who didn’t vote for Walter Mondale. It doesn’t mean Harris isn’t just as big a failure as Mondale.
I’m going to suggest this book as some personal reading on this issue. But the point I would more broadly make is that running exclusively oppositional candidates does not work, and I would say that’s probably because they don’t really present a clear vision of the future, they only present opposition to something rhetorically. By opposing something in that way, you sort of, only serve to reinforce that thing. Only define yourself in relation to it.
That’s also not really to speak about how she legitimately presented an incredibly conservative face to her campaign, and if that’s the case, people would just vote for the guy who’s actually just conservative.
There was an absolute mountain of evidence that Trump would be a disaster.
nobody gives a fuck about that. most people aren’t clocked into online politics. they just live under one admin where trump benefits from obama’s policy, things are squeaky clean for the most part, and then they’re chilling, and then they move to living under joe biden where a once in a lifetime (hopefully, haha) pandemic decides to fuck shit up during the transition from one admin to the other, on top of inheriting a much worse economy, and then they attribute that to biden. it’s not a super complicated figure, there, and that’s all on top of biden just not being a very popular candidate to begin with.
if you actually look at the numbers, then the third party candidates had less of an effect for kamala than the third party candidates for trump did. which makes sense, because RFK, at the least, was campaigning on some sort of dystopian vision of the future that his deluded q-anon supporters actually liked, and he had money. jill stein is just grifting like always, basically, no change there, and no change with the lesser known candidates either, really. the bigger story is that a shit ton of the voters stayed home.
everyone wants to shift blame from the democratic party, which has obviously either mishandled this campaign or intentionally lost as a party of controlled opposition, and shift the blame onto the voters. ah, well, it was latino men’s fault for being too socially conservative! ah, it was the third party voters and the leftists! it was the arab americans, who should’ve voted after we funded the bombs that killed their whole entire family! it was trans people, for just being too weird! those are all legitimate explanations I’ve heard people bring up, and I’d classify them all as basically the same, because they all equally have no evidence behind them. the real story is that she had low voter turnout. probably because she was associated with the least popular administration in decades, and refused to distinguish herself from that, and on top of that, campaigned with like, liz cheney. the most she did was offer like, tax exemptions for people starting small businesses, and tax exemptions for people who haven’t missed their rent a single time in the last kajillion years. it’s not rocket science, that’s just not really an inspiring campaign. if they had low voter turnout, that’s probably why, it’s probably not because america is just too racist to vote for a black woman or whatever shit everyone’s bloviating about so they can justify the democratic party turning to the right even more.
I keep seeing this “people let the fascist genocidal dictator get in because they weren’t excited about Harris” excuse as if it is a good one. It isn’t.
I agree with Flying Squid. It’s bizarre to think any sane person would now decide that the right strategy is to hate on minorities, or ditch all pretty normal behaviour such as adhere to the FUCKING LAW, NOT LIE (and spare me the #FalseEquivalence, it’s jaywalking Dems vs serial rapist Trump) and listen to effing EXPERTS. Dems should stick to their principles and await the serious shit show which is gonna happen with mass deportations, tariffs and even MORE INFLATION.
…was there one before?..
Was there a party that did not install SCOTUS justices that were so ideologically conservative that they did things like end national legal abortion and gut the ability of government regulation agencies to regulate?
Yes there was. But that party is not coming back except as a token now because people just didn’t think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to vote.
“The party didn’t think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to listen to their voters”
FTFY
Nope. They can’t force anyone to vote for them. People thought not voting was a better plan than stopping the rapist fascist dictator when they only had two possible choices.
There was an absolute mountain of evidence that Trump would be a disaster. They didn’t vote anyway because they knew they weren’t going to get a pony.
Voting for people in a two-party system is the stupidest thing you can do because you will never get your way with any one politician. So you vote against and keep voting against until you get closer and closer to what you want.
Just not voting or voting for third party candidates that will clearly lose against someone who has an automatic 30% of the vote doesn’t stop the worst possible thing from happening and it never will.
If you didn’t vote to stop Trump from getting into office, I blame you. You had warning after warning and your idealism was more important to you.
Yup, which is why you need to give them reason to vote.
Democrats have been parading around “most important election of our lifetime” for fucking years - don’t be surprised that it didn’t work yet again.
The reason why Trump is popular is because there is legitimate pain and struggle in the working class, and he affirmed that pain and struggle (even if he was misidentifying the source of that pain). Telling voters “things are good, actually, and the other guy is gonna ruin it” is just dumb.
Democrats didn’t run on popular policy and they got destroyed because of it.
Who said “things are good actually”?? Seems to me that Harris had plenty of policy proposals that would have resulted in a meaningful improvement to the bottom line of the average American.
Biden has also been better for the average American than trump was. For fucks sake, Trump actually got away with raising taxes on all of us to support his tax cut for the rich, simply because the average person is too low information to grasp the idea of a tax cut that expires!
So yeah, plenty of actual reasons to say that one candidate is better than the other, without needing to be wowed by an actual messiah who can dismantle our fucked up system and solve everybody’s problems.
They repeatedly touted our economic recovery was ‘the best in the G6’.
Even when our economy is ‘good’ it’s shit for most people. That’s the problem with being a neoliberal status quo party: it doesn’t help most of the people they need to vote for them
Regardless of what Biden has done for the average American, his approval rating has been really bad for a while now. It may not be right or fair, but that’s what it is.
Despite Harris not actually being the incumbent, the Republicans managed to associate her with Biden and she more or less embraced it. Then the Republicans were able to frame themselves as the challenger to an unpopular incumbent president and it’s not surprising they did well.
Of course, it didn’t help either that Harris is the VP either. Perhaps if we had a primary and managed to pick another candidate that could distance themselves a bit better from Biden things would be different.
Biden did very early and then learned to not say that again.
Your post is CLASSIC misdirection and misrepresenting what the Dems actually did. IF these elections were fair, and I’ve reason to think they were not, then they got lost on higher gas prices. Which is A PRETTY STUPID AND SELFISH reason to vote for/not care about mass deportations. And they lost it on not attacking trump on the border and on the economy.
So we are now in MAGA election rigging conspiracies? JFC. Trump even won the popular vote.
Look at the 2020 popular vote. Trump got 74 Mio. votes back then and 72 Mio. Now
The Dems went from 81 Mio. to 67 Mio.
The Dems succesfully fucked this up with uninspiring candidates and lack of vision to rally their voters.
blue maga and blueanon wasn’t just a sort of tongue in cheek name, it was also an accurate description. we’ve seen this shit burgeoning up, to me, most notably with the people who were adamant that trump didn’t actually get shot and it was all a PR stunt. been lost in the sauce for a while.
They had a reason to vote.
Their reason was that a rapist fascist who quoted Hitler and clearly has dementia that promised to deport millions of people and be a dictator on day one only had a 50/50 chance of being president.
And they didn’t care because they didn’t like Kamala Harris much. Was she any of those things? No. But her boss is funding the same genocide in Israel that Trump said to Netanyahu “finish the job” about on national television, so no one better vote for her either!
Sorry, not a good enough reason to not stop Trump. Not a good enough reason to refuse to vote. Not a good enough reason to vote third party.
For fuck’s sake, do you think people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 because they thought he would be a terrific president?
they voted for Biden because he made meaningful concessions to the progressive caucus. He gave Bernie a prominent roll in his campaign and made promises about student loan forgiveness and raising the minimum wage, on top of affirming people’s anxiety about covid and a pledge to address it.
Harris had none of that. She didn’t primary against progressive candidates, didn’t have to address progressive concerns, and when there was vocal opposition to any of her policies she said “excuse me, i’m speaking”. She was more right-moderate than Biden was, even if only because she didn’t face the progressive primary he did.
Biden may have had (relatively minor) details around the side but his campaign message was straight center.
Right, and Harris didn’t even have those relatively minor details. She was as center-right as they come
And the appetite for change is so great that even those minor details are enough for people, but this campaign couldn’t even do that.
You still don’t get it.
It isn’t about voting for Harris.
It’s about voting against Trump.
You can give me all sorts of reasons why Harris wasn’t an appealing candidate. It’s not relevant. Trump was a clear and present danger.
I don’t give a shit about whether or not people liked her or whatever their idealistic reasons not to vote for her were. None of them justify allowing Trump to take office by refusing stop him from doing it. That is on people who refused to vote or vote third party. You were not going to get the candidate you wanted this year. You were a fool if you didn’t know that.
You’re talking to me as if I’m one of those non-voters.
Most Americans are not the terminally-online type - they didn’t see your impassioned warnings about Trump. All they heard was that there was an election, and the choice was between Trump and Harris, and neither one really had anything material to offer them. To them, democrats screaming about how bad Trump is is just par for the course. They needed more than to not be Trump, and they didn’t deliver.
Go ahead and scream into the void if you want. None of it will change the fact that Harris lost because she ran a bad campaign and turned her back on meaningful progress.
I voted for Harris. But in the first-past-the-post system, all that matters for a party is victory. That is how you judge the success of party officials. There is a whole class of extremely well-paid Democratic party officials whose ENTIRE JOB is to figure out how to select a candidate and sell them to the American people. That is literally their entire job.
The average voters is low-information, doesn’t pay attention, and assumes both sides frequently lie. (And they’re not wrong about the lying.) You can truthfully call the other side fascist, but the other side will simply say you’re the fascist, and low-information voters can’t tell the difference.
Voters have always been low-information. This isn’t anything new. The entire reason we have primaries is that it forces candidates to actually try their hand at mass appeal and to take the temperature of the electorate. Democratic leaders kept Biden in far too long, til it was too late to hold a proper primary.
You can blame it on those who don’t vote, but the truth is that most people pay attention to politics only tangentially. If you, as a political operator, didn’t find a way to reach these voters, you have failed.
Does the blame ultimately fall on those who didn’t vote for Biden? Sure. But the same is true of those who didn’t vote for Walter Mondale. It doesn’t mean Harris isn’t just as big a failure as Mondale.
I’m going to suggest this book as some personal reading on this issue. But the point I would more broadly make is that running exclusively oppositional candidates does not work, and I would say that’s probably because they don’t really present a clear vision of the future, they only present opposition to something rhetorically. By opposing something in that way, you sort of, only serve to reinforce that thing. Only define yourself in relation to it.
That’s also not really to speak about how she legitimately presented an incredibly conservative face to her campaign, and if that’s the case, people would just vote for the guy who’s actually just conservative.
These guys are so entrenched in “left policy will surely win” that they can’t let it go. Keep telling them but I don’t know if it’ll ever get through.
nobody gives a fuck about that. most people aren’t clocked into online politics. they just live under one admin where trump benefits from obama’s policy, things are squeaky clean for the most part, and then they’re chilling, and then they move to living under joe biden where a once in a lifetime (hopefully, haha) pandemic decides to fuck shit up during the transition from one admin to the other, on top of inheriting a much worse economy, and then they attribute that to biden. it’s not a super complicated figure, there, and that’s all on top of biden just not being a very popular candidate to begin with.
if you actually look at the numbers, then the third party candidates had less of an effect for kamala than the third party candidates for trump did. which makes sense, because RFK, at the least, was campaigning on some sort of dystopian vision of the future that his deluded q-anon supporters actually liked, and he had money. jill stein is just grifting like always, basically, no change there, and no change with the lesser known candidates either, really. the bigger story is that a shit ton of the voters stayed home.
everyone wants to shift blame from the democratic party, which has obviously either mishandled this campaign or intentionally lost as a party of controlled opposition, and shift the blame onto the voters. ah, well, it was latino men’s fault for being too socially conservative! ah, it was the third party voters and the leftists! it was the arab americans, who should’ve voted after we funded the bombs that killed their whole entire family! it was trans people, for just being too weird! those are all legitimate explanations I’ve heard people bring up, and I’d classify them all as basically the same, because they all equally have no evidence behind them. the real story is that she had low voter turnout. probably because she was associated with the least popular administration in decades, and refused to distinguish herself from that, and on top of that, campaigned with like, liz cheney. the most she did was offer like, tax exemptions for people starting small businesses, and tax exemptions for people who haven’t missed their rent a single time in the last kajillion years. it’s not rocket science, that’s just not really an inspiring campaign. if they had low voter turnout, that’s probably why, it’s probably not because america is just too racist to vote for a black woman or whatever shit everyone’s bloviating about so they can justify the democratic party turning to the right even more.
I keep seeing this “people let the fascist genocidal dictator get in because they weren’t excited about Harris” excuse as if it is a good one. It isn’t.
it’s not an excuse, we’re just telling you the reality. how do you think hitler got elected?
He didn’t win the popular vote and it wasn’t about people not voting.
Maybe you should look this up before asking a question like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_election
I agree with Flying Squid. It’s bizarre to think any sane person would now decide that the right strategy is to hate on minorities, or ditch all pretty normal behaviour such as adhere to the FUCKING LAW, NOT LIE (and spare me the #FalseEquivalence, it’s jaywalking Dems vs serial rapist Trump) and listen to effing EXPERTS. Dems should stick to their principles and await the serious shit show which is gonna happen with mass deportations, tariffs and even MORE INFLATION.