I mean, Harris and the Dems didn't even try, like seriously. Getting Beyonce and all the other celebrities our fellow moronic Americans already see as members of the illuminati is not trying, it's literally the opposite
I mean, they spent $50m+ in fuckin Ohio! We lost fuckin Georgia while they were jerking off Cheney's and trying to convince white folks in the suburbs not to be who they are
It's legit insane to see the party straightup abandon working class demographics. Then again, this is the same party that now literally spends millions of dollars each primary on getting votes for Republican politicians
I was excited when Biden dropped out and Harris got this huge surge as the new young, not actively deteriorating candidate, then more excited when she announced Tim Walz and got a mid western, blue collar surge, and cautiously optimistic when everyone was briefly focusing on how anti-democratic and un-American Project 2025 was, but then started getting worried when all I saw running up to the election was stories about abortion rights and women voting against their husbands and celebrity endorsements.
It feels like Obama successfully ran a campaign of Hope and Change, and since then Democrats repeatedly campaign on maintaining the status quo and just not letting it slide too much further. And while it's possible to win an election on the basis of 'I'm at least somewhat competent', it might not be in the US when so much of the population sees how fundamentally broken wealth inequality is at baseline.
Black don't crack, she genuinely looks youthful and it really helps that she can speak full sentences and thoughts without issues and/or changing topic like Biden or Trump
started getting worried when all I saw running up to the election was stories about abortion rights and women voting against their husbands and celebrity endorsements.
That surge when she started was all her campaign. The news and dis/info sources were all caught flat-footed.
They cast around for a few weeks testing what stories would “drive engagement”. Scandals? No. VP pick, like - Who’s it gonna be? No. Did she take any of the demented rapist’s baiting? Nope. Dang.
At the end, they settled on those, and that’s why it seemed different. They (corporate news, mostly) had finally wrested a narrative out of the campaign the campaign didn’t disagree with.
It was thin, a little schlocky, but either true or based on the campaigns ads, so - that got stamped on the campaign, and that’s why you remember that specific set of themes.
How about some actual progressive policy? Not sure how people like you manage to play ignorance for this long.
You're being hard headed if you want everyone you argue with in the comments to list exactly what they were looking for. How about you go into chat gpt and ask "what are some progressive policies that Democratic voters want that aren't being reflected by the DNC and you'll get exactly what you're facetiously asking us
Let me be more clear: the votes aren’t there. You would like to believe that you as a progressive who is frustrated with Dems for not being progressive enough is a large enough constituency. I would like that to be the case as well. Unfortunately, almost all progressives voted on Kamala (and on HRC before that), and it’s just not enough.
Are you fucking kidding? Because Biden 2020 was a progressive platform and Harris 2024 was a centrist one. They weren't even remotely similar. Biden may be a centrist, but he's very pro-labor, and he could see how important the progressive base was that election, so he literally sat down with Sanders and hammered out a platform that they could get behind. And while I've got a lot of problems with Joe Biden, he actually was very committed to that platform. He really wanted BBB to get through and he kept trying to find ways to abolish student debt.
Harris, on the other hand, had a handful of disparate, vaguely left policy positions, like the first-time homebuyer's credit and legalizing pot, but her campaign was mainly centered on economic opportunity for the middle class. She also committed wholeheartedly to the most right-wing polices of the Biden administration, like arming Israel and cracking down on the border. But worst of all, she made bipartisanship and Republican consensus a huge part of her campaign, promising to add Republicans to her cabinet , campaigning with Liz Cheney, and even praising Dick Fucking Cheney.
TL;DR, Biden campaigned like Obama in 2008, Harris Campaigned like Hillary in 2016. And the results were the same.
Do you even remember 2020? Nobody fucking wanted Biden. He was never progressive. He was literally mocked for telling donors "Nothing will fundamentally change." People turned out because of how much they hated Trump.
That actually occurred in 2019, not 2020. After Bernie nearly stomped him in the primary, he made a hard pivot to the left in 2020. As I said, he's a centrist, but he actually does have a strong history of pro-union activism, which made him a fairly credible (though imperfect) messenger for a populous platform.
It's almost unfathomable how many people failed to show up to vote, if they disliked Trump that much in 2020. What has Trump done to gather support or apathy about this in so many people?
It was more that Kamala did nothing to get them off the couch.
Biden at least promised student loan forgiveness and did try. It was a shit attempt but credit where it’s due he tried and ended up being able to at least forgive a bunch of public service loans. Kamala promised, what? Help to buy a house? Ok sure. Because we can totally afford that with the cost of groceries today.
Maybe we underestimated how much Covid forced/gave everyone time to pay attention to politics. Or perhaps people saw Trump dodge accountability at every turn and disillusionment in the system bred apathy. It could also be online manipulation pushing Gaza as making Harris/Biden just as bad as Trump. Probably all of the above.
Agreed. There's a tiny paranoid voice in the back of my head saying that with Trump every accusation is a confession and he made a lot of election fraud accusations.
I sure did. I was genuinely hopeful when Biden stepped down, and when they announced Walz, I actually got excited. Then they started to try and reach moderate Republicans more and more, and I slowly realized they were doing it again. I felt like I was going insane watching them repeat the strategy that caused them to lose to the same guy in 2016.
So did Hillary sabotage Kamela so she wouldn't have to see the coveted title of "First Female President" go to someone else, or is she a god damn moron who thought the same tactic of fucking over the left to appeal to die-hard Republicans ignoring that Republicans vote for Republicans
Don't forget that Biden was the first president to walk a picket line. No other president had ever done that in America's history. That single action won over the UAW.
Then, Biden fought back against the railroad corporations and won a contract for workers that includes PTO and other basic labor necessities.
Then, Biden reduced fentanyl overdoses, something that no president has done in like 30-40 years.
Couple this with BBB and IRA, you have a much more progressive president than what people give water to it.
Well, I don't want to give him too much credit. Biden is and always has been a centrist. He has a mixed history on Civil Rights (cause he's 120 years old), he has a pretty pro-bank history, he's supported some anti-consumer stuff (like the anti-bankruptcy laws), and he even helped put Clarence Thomas on the bench. And that's not even touching on his administration, where Gaza and the border will probably be his lasting legacy. But, two things that he's always been pretty consistent on were unions and infrastructure, and he read the room in 2020 and leaned heavily into those things.
Oh I agree. He likely made all of those concessions because 1) he wanted to rally the base following the 2020 primaries, and 2) to stick it to the establishment Dems. Seems like Biden has grown to be quite the grumpy old man to those in the party.
I agree with you in Gaza and the border. Biden has shown no backbone to Netanyahu, and his administration introduced a border bill that echoed a lot of Trump's sentiments.
On the whole, it's hard to make the call on whether Biden or Harris would have been better to run against Trump, but all that matters now is that we continue the message that establishment Democrats got us here by chasing centrism instead of progress. We need to root out a lot of people who actually do the politicking in the party because if those people aren't out, we're doomed to make the same mistakes.
Hasan Piker put it well the other day. If this were a game of sports, underperformers would be benched pretty aggressively. If this were a job, underperformers would be put on a performance plan (hopefully) or fired straight up.
There are people consulting Democrats that have failed time and again since 2016, hell even 2008. They need OUT.
all that matters now is that we continue the message that establishment Democrats got us here by chasing centrism instead of progress. We need to root out a lot of people who actually do the politicking in the party because if those people aren't out, we're doomed to make the same mistakes.
100% this. On Monday, I'm calling my state and federal representatives and telling them DNC chair Jamie Harrison needs to go. Then I'm gonna start looking for movements that will primary anyone who still thinks incrementalism and centrism are a path forward. From now on, Medicare for All and UBI need to be the bare minimum standard for anyone that wants a D in front of their name.
remember earlier this year when leftists were saying biden never did anything and that he was too old, and started refusing to vote for him and calling for him to drop out, and he did?
remember the six months following that when leftists were complaining that the person they got biden to drop out for wasn't good enough and how they weren't going to vote for her?
and now that trump won suddenly leftists are singing biden's praises and blaming trump's win on the DNC picking a shit candidate?
I honestly have no clue how you constructed your conception of "leftists".
Leftists != Tankies != Blue MAGA/Anon != Progressives
Biden did great things while in office. However, the Left has the liberty to continue pushing the current administration to go farther and implement more policies in line with their ideals. This is a force that counters the Right.
Biden did not go far enough on Gaza, and neither did Kamala. The same goes for corporations like those in the Oil & Gas sector that raised their prices following oil demobilization during COVID, as well as those that kept their prices high even years after like those producing consumer goods. Could have gone farther.
When the existing administration makes no concessions to those in the base that voted for that administration but not as their first choice, they have the right to criticize and call out the administration's failure to represent them.
All of this would be fixed, or at least alleviated if we abandoned our political duopoly in favor of an electoral and congressional system that allowed for more diversity in government. Ranked choice seems to be taking off in many states.
Oh, and Kamala was great at the beginning. She took over for Biden, then chose Tim Walz. But then her administration attached itself to Biden, the person that spawned her campaign since the Democratic base utterly rejected him following the debate, and then went after the Right in hope of gaining more votes, taking their own base for granted.
Now that we have the full scope of Kamala's campaign, she ran on much more conservative values than Biden did in his campaign leading up to the 2020 election.
This nuance is not something you'll see in the mainstream media, perhaps not even on Lemmy. But this is the realm that hopefully progressives like me and some Leftists operate in.
Your mindset is honestly the same that many ignorant people share regarding science and the scientific method. Things can be true for different reasons and at different times.
Because people pissed at inflation are fucking stupid. Inflation is down. They aren't pissed at greedy corporations, which have been the problem the entire fucking time.
You know you've heard people say inflation hasn't stopped because prices are still high. Like they're going to magically get better prices when inflation stops.
The perception of course, is that everything is worse. Because prices did go up, and they're staying there. Which just means the economy didn't collapse and cause mass unemployment.
I think the problem is that inflation does not impact the poorest population the same:
The CPI weighting is based on an average consumer, the poorest people will have more sensibility to price change for things like food or rent.
Rent and food prices increase in total by 20-25% in 4 years. If you were already tight at the beginning of the Biden presidency, you're now have a high chance of being homeless.
The sad thing is that there are a thousand ways to attack prices, or even just give sound bites that the public can run with. But almost all of them would upset neoliberal billionaires, so they can never be spoken.
They think it'll be like gas prices. They go up, but the "right guy" will make them come back down, ignoring the fact that that only happens with commodities like oil. Once a company raises prices, they rarely bring them back down. Tha6s called deflation, and it's not good.
We need to do what Harris had stated, and go after all these companies price gouging like we are still in the middle of the COVID pandemic. And that is now only going to get worse with a con man in office set on making himself, his companies, and his friends (which is anyone that says nice things to him) as rich as possible by extracting what remains of the working class. They are going to weaken/dismantle unions, and likely start mass death/slave labor camps for the poor.
He is also going to use his new position of power to pass laws to shield crypto scammers, and use his new crypto platform to undermine the US dollar and try and force more people to his crypto grift run by some of the worse humans around. And use his NFT/crypto stuff to openly except bribes to sell off the US to the highest bidder so when his dementia gets bad enough they put JD in charge he can live out the rest of his days being fed liquid cheese burgers on a golden spoon.
Not sure JD would get any additional terms, the cult might want to install either Jr. or Eric and start a "royalty" line of succession. And hope that Ivanka enjoys the hellscape she helped usher in for her daughter, and women everywhere.
Deflation just means everyone is already starving. Deflation isn't the start of a process, it's the result of massive failure. Just like inflation doesn't happen the second money is printed, it has to circulate before price inflation is a thing.
What we need are labor groups, and taxes on companies who use government benefits as part of their wage calculation.
In short, never try to make prices go down, instead make wages go up, and make competition control prices.
Deflation isn’t the start of a process, it’s the result of massive failure
We've already had a massive failure. The economy doing great and yet everyone's broke? Such a blatant lie! Time to acknowledge and lower prices to end food waste.
Everyone is broke, but still buying everything in the economy? Sorry, time to acknowledge the reality that life is just hard. Deflation happens after it gets really bad.
We live in a nation of people that are a mix of uneducated and propagandized. If the party messaging doesn’t take that into account, that fault lies with them in addition to the voters.
It's not enough that the rate of inflation is slowing. The problem is that wages aren't going up to match inflation. When people are working two jobs and still living paycheck to paycheck, do you think it means anything to them to tell them that "um ackshually, inflation is down 0.4% from last year!"?
This kind of disconnect is exactly why we aren't reaching voters.
Come on now don't bring up that in one of the "left most" and most populous state in the union that people are actually pretty non leftist, it might contradict some of their feel based arguments.
America is not full of progressives. I don't know why people here can never be convinced otherwise.
America is a country that lies to itself. It claims we need to make female super heroes flat chested to combat sexism, but then turn around and laugh at the idea of a female president so hard they're willing to give Hitler a second chance.
No it is not and I'll toss another example on there -
Gay marriage was only legalized nation wide by a bunch of unelected judges, and the second most-recent Democratic president "evolved" on the issue less than a decade ago.
US postures as the world's defender of LGBT rights when it's "bringing democracy" places, but it's not great at doing that internally.
Wages have outpaced inflation recently. Things have generally been heading in the right direction since the pandemic but it came too late and the masses are mostly ignorant or misinformed so the data is irrelevant to them. Its about how people feel as you point out, there's not a rational argument against feelings, people feel how they feel. One side has become very good at taping into those feelings, the other side is talking about data and no one gives a shit unless the data validates what they feel.
I voted for Kamala, I'm under no illusion that Trump will motherfuck the economy just like he did in his previous administration. But the idiots that voted for him have the memory of a goldfish. They will still find a way to blame democrats and minorities...that's when the real fun will begin.
People who rent got hit twice as hard by inflation, I know I'm paying a significantly higher portion of my paycheck in rent vs 4 years ago.
The raw material cost increases which provide the cover/excuse for price gouging are the result of two different things the Harris/Biden admin participated in and had no real path towards solving.
One is the fact that the vast majority of ocean shipping is going around Africa rather than the red sea, due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza that the Biden admin has been bypassing Congress to continue arming.
Two is the cutting off of Russian oil, which resulted in ballooning costs in Europe.
Like it or not, Harris did not provide any answers on these two fronts that looked anything like a change in policy.
I actually don't think so. Like I speak with Republicans that are very dismissive of covid still, despite having family members die to it. If people were bothered by his covid response, they would continue to be bothered by the fact Trump shit the covid response. Instead it seems voters think everything was fine during his term (completely uninformed or unaware of the fact that he was impeached twice, raped women, a good friend and neighbor of Epstein, and tried to overthrow the government)
The apathy maybe comes from how Harris was hand picked (because it was so last minute that Biden dropped off) vs us having an actual primary with several democrats.
Republicans aren't the ones who didn't turn out, idk what this has to do with what they think about Trumps covid response. If you want to know why 10 million more democratic voters turned out last time covids gonna play a large factor.
Bernie was what got us to vote for Biden. Biden formed a comittee with Bernie and actually adopted a bunch of his ideas. That’s what got the left to vote for Biden.
That and all of us were reeling from the economy after coronavirus.
Meanwhile Harris told the left to fuck off with your Palestinians are human nonsense and tried to get the Liz Cheney constituency (that doesn’t exist).
Because we did vote for Biden and he was useless at preventing the spread of fascism in states, and then Harris's responses to how she would handle any of it, which was effectively "I will do nothing." The Democrats made the left apathetic to the electoral system by refusing to appeal to them and instead the democrats focused on trying to sway republicans and moved further right. The Democrats did the worst thing they could have done and made people apathetic and hopeless.
You can keep bitching about how its everyone else's fault why we are in the situation we are in. You aren't the people I see at the antifascist rallies, or out on the street trying to organize grassroots systems to protect our queer community, or doing anything. Yall are the type of people who start and stop at the voting booth. Too busy shilling politicians who refuse to do what the people want to do anything that actually helps people. Don't accuse people who voted third party or didn't vote for the situation we are in, cause you don't know that they do nothing. They very well could be doing more than you to make a difference.
And he won by an incredibly tiny margin in a handful of states to win, literally no one was "set on fire" for Biden
Progressive policy is popular with the politically disengaged as well as others who are politically engaged
When the ones who are engaged try to warn people someone is a bad candidate and isn't left enough to motivate the politically disengaged, we magically go back to Salem and you all start blaming us for being able to see the logical conclusion of your dumbass plans.
Run another candidate in 2028 that's significantly to the right of the Dem voter base and the same shit will happen again.
That's not a threat, it's basic logic.
It might not be the candidate you want, but isn't stopping republican more important than you getting exactly what you want?
Obama ran a progressive campaign and was charismatic...
Why not try that again since moderates over retirement age keeps failing?
Kamala might be like three years younger than Obama now, but he entered the White house 16 years ago
Obviously, the main reason for record turnout in 2020 was COVID.
Biden actually has decent political instincts and has actually won elections before. Kamala didn't even have to pass a primary and bombed out of the one she did participate in in 2020. She was "untested" to put it mildly.
The economic situation was different.
Regardless of to what degree he was responsible, under Biden the US got entangled in foreign conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine.
It's not that there are 10 million commies that liked Biden but not Harris, it's that us commies believe that you can win over the working class by appealing to material interests.
Biden actually has decent political instincts and has actually won elections before. Kamala didn’t even have to pass a primary and bombed out of the one she did participate in in 2020. She was “untested” to put it mildly
I believe democrats called bernie Sanders "unelectable" so I feel it's fair to use that term in this circumstance.
Trump was a bigot, which is what a majority of Americans wanted.
Weird how so many of you demonize the largest most powerful organization of antifascists in America instead of those who voted to give Trump power. It's almost like you are trying to sow division in the anti-trump electorate 🤔
largest most powerful organization of antifascists in America
Please do not insinuate that the Democratic Party is Anti-Fascist. They have have adopted Trump's 2016 border policy, are unconditionally funding a genocide, and will peacefully transfer power to those they acknowledge are fascists. They are not antifascists, they are merely the lesser fascists.
"The Democrats are fascists" is exactly the narrative MAGA espouses. When someone ostensibly anti-MAGA attacks the largest coalition of anti-MAGA forces, that person is pro-MAGA.
So in your mind no one can criticize the DNC's failure to stop fascism or its concessions to said fascist movemet? Our glorious leadership must be blindly followed no matter how many times they fail or give ground to fascists?
This sort of thinking is why Democrats keep repeating the same mistakes. Any sort of criticism, even if it's constructive, is treasonous. It's always someone else's fault.
Organizations either adapt or die. Rejection of criticism is a suicidal, accelerationist position. When people are so concerned with deflecting blame that they're incapable of performing an honest, frank assessment of which strategies work and which don't, then you are destined to fail no matter whether its a political party or anything else. If you'd prefer the Democrats keep doing things that don't work because you're afraid of them losing face, then your perspective is worthless.
Twisting of words and arguing against a point someone didn't make is a common alt-right "debate" strategy. Readers please note that I did not say that members of the Democratic party are above criticism. The person I am replying to continues to blame antifascists for the rise of fascism.
The car just slammed into a wall and it's backing up and preparing to slam in into the same wall for the third time, and I'm yelling at the driver to turn left so it doesn't hit the wall again, and your response is like, "Why are you criticizing the driver? You must be trying to distract them so the car crashes!"
Since you're totally not saying that the democrats are above criticism, since that's only me "twisting your words," why don't you tell me what the democrats did wrong that they could've done differently or could do differently in the future to avoid an outcome like this?
Covid and Trumps handling of it.
But energy was high in the anti Trump camp anyway with BLM protests.
So saying the Dems need to move more right is the opposite of the right lesson. Just look at political donations to Bernie.. from across the US. There are no moderate republicans, they all stayed with trump, there is a huge untapped electorate in the US that wants something else, and I'd argue it is more left social democrats and what they bring.... But the capital class will never allow it in the US. The moment you talk wealth distribution, even MSNBC and such call you communist.
Edit: oh and Biden should have taken action on Trumps fascism on day 1. Chuck him in jail pending trial and get it over with. Everyone except a small part of his base distanced themselves from him, the time was in the first 100 days of taking office, but they did NOTHING.. they might as well have stormed the capitol themselves by now.
I honestly expected him to just pardon Trump to “Let the nation heal”
Sure as shit would have happened if trump ever sat down and shut the fuck up. That's why the ball started rolling so late. They wanted trump to go away on his own so they didn't have to do their jobs.
Why can I too easily imagine an alternate universe where Trump stays quiet, gets pardoned by Biden, a Trump-Wannabe shows up on the 2024 ticket, and Harris campaigns with Trump the same way Hillary rehabilitated Bush?
They learn every wrong lesson from history. Republicans see history and go "Let's do it again, but even worse for the average person!" and Democrats see history and go "Let's try it again, it didn't work last time, but surely 3rd time is the charm."
Biden was running on massive infrastructure investment, student loan forgiveness, ending the war in Afghanistan, child tax credit and a $2000 cheque in the mail . Harris may have had those in her platform as well but she wasn't mentioning it or Bidens wins on these at all, her campaign was "I'm not trump" and we learned from Hillary that's not enough.
Biden campaign was "build back better" a motto for change much like another democrat who actually won. Harris' campaign was "were not going back" which implies no change and relies on you thinking the trump years were horrible enough to justify the current status quo, and apparently the only thing Americans remember about the trump years was the economy was "better" and wanted to go back.
I'm not discounting that, but if you were disabled or on a fixed income then that one month's living expenses might be the biggest windfall you've had in decades.
A California lawyer trying to win a centrist campaign is like Tiger Woods trying to win a World Series ring. Harris wasn't the right person to run a centrist campaign. But, if she had run a progressive campaign from July, she would have won the popular vote and still lost the election. She wouldn't have gotten past a primary.
Elizabeth Warren would have been a better progressive choice. Mark Kelly could have run a progressive or a centrist campaign.
You cannot put a woman or a minority on the ticket and expect Right Wingers to care.
Back in 2015 when it was either Trump or Ben Carson for nomination, I knew it would be Trump. Simply because I knew once the debates started and Boomers were actually looking at Ben Carson instead of just reading newspaper articles about him, they'd abandon him for being the wrong color...
And I was right
Too many people will simply never submit to Female Rule.
It's why I knew Nikki Hailey wasn't going to get the 2024 nomination despite Trump being the most idiotic and easily beatable choice (and if Kamela ran a progressive campaign and actually had time to make her campaign)
The funny thing is I have been aware of this lack of memory for awhile but it has just gotten worse. I used to be amazed at the number of folks who could not seem to remember what things were like a decade ago but now thats been cut to about a year or so.
The cycle of political crisis generation and complacency has gone down from 8 years to 4 in the last forty years. People grew complacent over Clinton's two terms and then allowed GWB to happen, same with Obama and Trump, now we're putting Democrats in there to clean up after even worse crises than before, and putting Republicans back there after the last mess isn't even fully cleaned up.
The man staged a coup when he lost then we voted him in 4 years later. He called my state and tried to overgrow our results and 4 years later Georgia voted him in.
Old white man, old white man, if he can't do it, no one can!
Yeah I wouldn't discount sexism, or racism - I do think it's hard for Democrats to win elections here unless people are in the middle of a conservative administration, they just don't remember how bad it is, it's like people who remember their time in school fondly once it's over.
But in general, it's also true that women have to be near perfect, to be promoted over a man. And same thing with race. Like they can't just be the better choice it has to be a blowout. Now to a sensible person, she met that bar and flew past it, but we aren't all sensible and people are stupidly nostalgic for times that were objectively worse.
You'd love for it to be about sex or race. Then the voters have.to change, not the democrats.
Sorry buddy... the democrats have to change. Alot. And they have to do away with First-past-the-post voting in the blue states they control. Get more people represented, more political parties on solving this problem. The democrats have demonstrated multiple times they are incapable of doing this by themselves.
I'm not a Democrat. Yes I'd like them to be progressive instead of drifting ever rightward. It sucks to have two totalitarian parties here. But if you think racism and sexism is dead in America you are blind.
A lot of people probably were better off. Not working or working remotely. Possibly getting 600/week in unemployment, it may even have been an effective raise. We now know the panic around covid was largely just that.
The lesson for Democrats is surely that after years and years of telling anyone they could find that had concerns about society "oh you must be a literal Nazi, cope harder la la la la whoop whoop air high fives and fist bumps that's roiiight ma BOI!" at some point these people are going to turn around and say "well ok then, I just won't vote for you because you have nothing to offer me".
I'm not saying the Republican party has done this any better, but surely insulting potential voters en masse and refusing to understand their concerns isn't a sensible way to win elections. I didn't work for Hilary either, and it hasn't worked for Harris.
Yeah, the disconnect you also felt here when you said that Biden is clearly suffering dementia was crazy. People just deluded themselves and gaslit like crazy instead of acknowledging that Bidens mental health was not up for another 4 years of presidency. And this topic alone dragged on for months, until Biden failed the candidate debate so badly, even the billionaire donors got cold feet. But again it was the billionaire donors who pushed for Biden to drop out, not the concerns of the normal people. The DNC has effectively immunized against the voices of the people. And with all the talk about Trump bringing the end to Democracy, the Reps held proper primaries every cycle.
Covid is the reason democrats won in 2020, but they assumed they won because they're geniuses. Instead of trying to appeal to voters, they just tried to tell people to vote against trump. Turns out that isn't enough to motivate people when there isn't a pandemic raging on that is making people's lives miserable. Democrats really need to get their act together because 2028 won't be against trump, so the "anyone but trump" strategy will be even more useless and all that time spent kissing the asses of ghouls like dick cheney just tells people that republicans are okay to vote for.
Biden won by a really thin margin in swing states, the book Lucky went into detail about how close of a call it was, but he interpreted it as some huge popular win because of the high vote totals.
The pandemic of 2024 is corporate profiteering. A great example is Kroger admitting they raised prices higher than inflation for profit.
People generally blame the current administration for that. They are the one that kept trotting out stock market numbers and unemployment numbers, and acting like things are fine.
If they wouldnt even acknowledge the problem, how are they going to attract voters?
Thats not even bringing up gaza, but I dont think either candidate will change that situation in any way. The current administration is signaling they think this is a great opportunity to shake up the middle east for the benefit of western countries, cause colonialism can't ever die I guess.
All trump ever said was end it, that it should be over already. Thats just as vague as kamala saying she will do everything in her power to end the war. They both could be implying to carpet bomb gaza, but we won't know until we know right?
Neither candidate talked about why we should allow israel to lobby in our politics either.
Well be lucky if there are elections any more after this term. He already said if he's elected there won't be another election. You think he's joking? This mf isn't giving up power willingly. And with his sycophantic base, you'd be surprised what he can accomplish.
Look, the Democrats have to own this loss, for once, like they should have last time. It is clearly insufficient to try and frighten democratic supporters with a probability of fascism which we've never experienced before. It is clearly insufficient to abandon the working class as they have for so long. We should never fund or promote far right candidates in primaries. The media should not provide free coverage for outrage candidates to drive viewershop. It is clearly a mistake to try and court conservative voters, because hardly any have ever crossed over. It was certainly a mistake for Biden to run again, and then to drop out so late, far too late to have a primary.
Maybe the fact she is a minority woman turned people off. I don't know. It's a stupid reason not to run women, but that possibility exists.
From talking to people who sat this out, it seems Biden ending the rail union strike was a huge factor, and the cost of groceries was a close second. They wanted to vote against him in the primaries and were denied that opportunity.
Kamala was guilty by association.
Well, that and the fact she did not address these issues in her messaging. Or if she did the message didn't reach them. "She said things aren't so bad, but I can't afford groceries. She won't fix anything."
He made sure the strike succeeded, and ended the strike as well. It’s a pure optics fail, which does not contradict your point at all, but does make it more poignant.
As for the groceries: that’s a genuine failure of Biden’s administration. He kept going for student loans but he should have gone for the grocers raising egg and dairy prices - no Republican court in the world would have survived the fallout from blocking that.
Crazy because Biden actually came back after that and won a contract for railworkers, including paid sick leave that was so influential around the time Congress passed the contact the first time around.
Other than that though, I agree. Too little too late for Democrats. There were so many wins under Biden's administration, and none of it was ever messaged to the American people.
The right move was to do nothing. The rail corporation would have folded within hours. If the railways shutting down is a national emergency, then nationalize the company. Our nation's critical infrastructure should not be held hostage by a for profit corporation.
Oh and can someone explain to me why the rail bill was split into two convenient parts so one could not pass? Fuck that. Most pro labor union president ever? Fuck off with your gaslighting.
Same for all the dickriding people did over biden stepping down, hailing him as a hero who did a huge sacrifice. As though he didn't fight to keep in the race every step of the way. So long that we conveniently couldn't hold a real democratic primary.
Fuck that. No amount of correcting the record will change what we all saw with our eyes.
I agree with pretty much all of this. You have to weight it all.
Corporations should not own and operate such critical infrastructure like the railroads I agree. Same as the grid, water systems, natural gas/district heating (ha if that'll ever happen), parking spaces, telco, etc. There are just some things that should be owned by the masses because they're used by the masses.
I think the bill was weaker the first time around so that Dems could get Reps on board, and then I'd like to say that it wasn't even a bill to get the sick leave. The article I posted points to Biden's administration specifically and the Transportation and Labor departments. Likely pressure on the backend to get railroads to cave.
Oh I didn't hail Biden as a hero at all for him stepping down. He waited until the last fucking moment. And it was so fucking cringe when Kamala and the DNC would thank Biden for his service... Like wtf his own ego got us there in the first place???? Why couldn't he have stepped down earlier and given us an actual primary???
But then when he did step down, the timing was so critical that in order to not lose more of the base, Dems had to go full Kamala. I think holding a primary at the DNC probably would have angered donors a lot more since the primary would have been stolen from the American people, and who knows where that would have gone given the sentiment people had towards Biden.
I didn't agree with the Biden dickriders at the time either. Many of them would use the comparison of voting for a ham sandwich over Trump, but that sentiment, vote for me because I'm not them, is so lame and doesn't really inspire any motivation in the Democratic party's base. It's the same rhetoric that Kamala used, and imo that rhetoric is what contributed to her campaign failing. You need a carrot as much as a stick to persuade your base.
This whole past election cycle was botched absolutely. But I want to get to the bottom of why we got here in the first place, and my focus has been to blame and scold the political careerists in the Democratic Party proper who have taken up power and who don't want to let it go, even if it means breaking from the centrist establishment to court pro-labor and progressive values and supporters.
Biden is to blame, Kamala is to blame, Hillary is to blame, Obama is to blame for why we're here now. People are tired of their party not giving the concessions they said they would, and not fighting the fight against rising fascism and extremism. We need a strong counter weight to what Trump represents, and centrism is not the answer.
Step into a campaign to take over for a failing candidate who is unpopular and too old to realistically run, then make sure that everyone is certain that your policies will be exactly the same as the unpopular guy, then surprised pikachu
Ok. First. Those votes were not, like, commies or something. Communists broadly (but not universally ) have no faith in electoral politics beyond the ability to demonstrate how useless electoral politics are for the kinds of change they see as required. The missing votes are likely non-explicitly-ideological Americans, and the disenfranchised left wing of the Democrat coalition, who are not revolutionary socialists - they are better described as social democrats. And why so many of them voted for Biden was, at least in significant part three things that you're pretending don't exist with this meme.
Tremendous dislike of Trump.. which is actually still true, but he was not currently the president during this election. Trump had just spent the last few months massively fucking up the pandemic response very publicly and got covid immediately prior to the election, which made him look stupid and incompetent.
Because of COVID policies, voting had literally never been easier. Shit loads of people voted early because it was universally available. Led to highest turnout ever.
A competitive democratic primary process meant that we had a candidate selection process people could believe in to some degree. Brenie and Biden ran, and Biden won. Bernie voters saw that, looked at the situation and said "This is tolerable because we had a real process, and we can accept Biden as a stop gap under the conditions of Trump needing to be removed, and Biden being a 1 term President". It wasn't 2016, where a significant portion of potential Democrat voters saw the DNC's treatment of Bernie as unfair, and it wasn't 2024 where Biden decided to run with no true Primary after the deal was "single term president", then abruptly dropped out (good idea, shoulda done it 2 years earlier) and effectively appointed his successor by decree.
2020 was an anomaly, and as is true of 2020 in most data sets, using it as a comparison point requires many many qualifications, but Trump gained 40000 votes, Harris lost 10 million. Trump did not perform better, Harris lost voter enthusiasm, which hasn't actually been on the Democrat's side in presidential elections (which have more non-explicitly-ideological voters) since, like, Obama. It's not even necessarily that she needed to be "more left". It's that she needed to reflect the public's distrust of the political status quo and promise material gain for working people explicitly at the expense of someone else (Trump chose , for instance, immigrants and the democrats as the bad guys, but Harris could have chosen, say, rich fuckers like Musk) . She needed to be ready to rip up the floor boards, and she wasn't even ready to say she'd break from fucking Biden (who is broadly unpopular) on policy.
I really, really wish y'all democrats would stop trying to purge your own party of any dissent, because y'all coming out of this with the right lesson will be the difference between a brief period of Republican control, or several elections cycles of Democrats being unviable as a party.
True. Thank you. It's frustrating seeing the DNC shoot itself in the fucking foot to watch people on Lemmy start swinging on anyone but the people who made and executed the failure of a campaign strategy.
Hey everyone, when you see comments like this from a ""Leftist"" who only ever criticizes "The Dems" for right-wing victories, and never puts the responsibility on the actual, y'know, Trump supporters, that user is a MAGA supporter trying to divide the left and prevent the formulation of a broad antifascist coalition capable of changing the course the GOP has set.
These "non voters" did not actually sit out the election, they are trying to convince you to sit out the next one (or vote third party etc etc). Don't fall for it! We are in this together.
But blaming the party and sitting out, or voting 3rd party, everyone knew would lead to Trump winning, just like it did. Not voting for Harris was a vote for Trump, and makes those people just as complicity in his being elected as the people that voted for him. Trying to rationalize it as "Dems need to run a better candidate/campaign/etc" is just cover for not wanting to take responsibility for allowing the man everyone left of the GOP knew was a bad idea, back into power (and with numbers that are going to feed his ego into fascist wet dreams).
Moral of my rant is this - criticism of the party is fine and should be allowed/encouraged, but trying to blame the party for millions of people handing Trump the presidency is a bad faith argument and should be called out as such each and every time. We are all adults, everyone knew the consequences, and we all made a choice. And people need to start owning that instead of blaming the DNC for not being their unicorn party able to 100% represent a **WAY ** more diverse set of ideals than Trumps singular ideology of hate/fear.
I'm very sick and tired of being punished by the DNC for not falling in line.
Like why did they not make Ruth Bader Ginsberg retire before Trump got into office? How could they have not seen that one coming? Everyone saw that happening apparently except for the DNC.
Same with codifying Roe v Wade. They had many opportunities to codify it and then they supply did not. Now it's gone.
Same thing with running the oldest presidential candidate of all time. When people started calling for him to step down, the DNC acted like there was so contingency plan for an 80 candidate.
And then it was the same shit when they ran Harris. She was so unpopular in the last primary that she had to drop out before any votes were cast. Then they just skipped the primary and ran her as the candidate anyways. Then she lost.
I think a great deal of the issue on the "left" is that being such a large coalition, with takes all over the place on many topics, is that we have a very hard time getting everyone to fall lockstep behind many things.
The right has no real platform, and thus can just use their wide propaganda network to just spread their new deflection of the day 24/7, and everyone in that network of lies does their part without question.
I watched a good video last night talking about how we need to build a network like the right has to spread the lefts talking points, our victories, and our goals. Because the current media landscape constantly bends themselves in knots to not offend the right instead of calling out their lies and bullshit for what it is. We need to stop giving the disinformation a platform outside of the Rights network.
You could, possibly, potentially, consider that criticism is coming from a direction that outflanks you on leftism? And that it’s frustrated at the constant party/DC Beltway elitism clutching to neoliberalism during democratic apathy and distrust, and not you?
That's the narrative they espouse, but if you think about it for more than a second, no rational antifascist would attack another antifascist when there are fascists around. It's all about trying to divide a meaningful antifascist coalition.
Division only occurs as people follow their rational self interest - enforcing orthodoxy and silencing dissent to protect the party that failed us all, will only perpetuate their poor performance electorally. People who cannot afford the luxury of blind fealty will go somewhere else - even if that person is a charlatan grifter who never delivers. You cannot defeat populism with more elitism.
If you interpret an ally trying to help as an attack? Clearly I can’t help you brother
It's funny that even with this much of a massive loss, you diehard democrats find a way to blame leftists. If such a massive margin of loss is the result of leftists, then that would mean leftists are too big of a group to ignore, but ignore is all you and the rest of the democratic party strategists did during the election so that you could instead curry favor with war criminals like dick cheney and telling people that their concerns of genocide don't matter. Turns out democrats are more scared of leftists gaining any power than they are of project 2025.
I voted for Harris but if "you guys" were really responsible for loosing then we should have given "them" more representation. But hey, at least this way we don't have to blame Zionists, transphobies, xenophobes, or misogynists. Right?
Say it then. We're in the period of time where we must critically evaluate the failures of the political machine that delivered this. I'm trying my level best to provide detailed, informative assessment of what I'm seeing without resorting to vitriol or anger, both online and in real life. If you have additional details, provide them. This is the time for vigorous debate, and reassessment, and I see the Democrats as much more of allies than the Republicans, so if you, or any other liberal can get past the phase where you're upset with the leftists who have broadly provided critical support for the Democratic coalliton, I welcome your input.
Oh I get it now. You're saying that "there won't be a next election". Careful with the self fufulling prophecies. If you don't want to succumb to that, I recommend getting involved locally. Whoever you trust electorally will need your help now to build a bulwark for 2026, and getting your hands dirty will help you get over the pessimism.
What got people to vote for Biden but not Harris? A dire need. Not voting for Biden meant that Trump stayed in office. Even though the stakes were the same, too many people sat on the couch thinking it was going to happen again and they didn't have to go.
The turnout was really high, the democrats main plan for this election was catering to the "moderate republicans" which backfired spectacularly (a smaller % of registered republicans voted for democrats than in 2020), left-wing was pretty much abandoned in the campaign... It's a horror all around, and the democratic party only have themselves to blame for this blunder instead of trying to point fingers at literally everything (so far I've seen blame thrown on LGBTQ+, Biden, Kamala's aides, left wing voters, etc).
Liberals are the best at pretending that nothing is their fault, ever. It's always the fault of the leftists, a coincidence, or bad luck. Being liberal is like the art of being the most irresponsible you can be.
Mean is no one going to call out the strategy for like the last month to possibly 3 months was her pandering as hard as she could to Republicans moderate and isolating the leftist Democratic base?
People posting this type of stuff have to know that we have a an electoral college where swing states have a disproportionate influence on the outcome. Voter turnout was up in all of those states.
Yes, it was extremely Trump’s win. His first legitimate full win. There’s no EC shenanigans. Simply a majority of the votes and in a majority of the states.
Who cares, right? The meme suggests that people sat home this time. If they would have only come out, Harris would have won. But that's simply not true. Harris got more votes than Biden in 4 of the 7 swing states, about the same in 2 snd one is still being counted. Voter turnout out there was up as well. People didn't stay home where it mattered. Just more voted for Trump.
This discussion would be entirely irrelevant if we had a more representative electoral system.
People could be free to vote how they wish, secure in the knowledge their vote would still be counted against the republicans.
The people not voting are disenfranchised by the two party system. Change how we vote and allow competition into the electoral process. Multiple political parties should be free to compete.
More people represented and involved in the political process
More people voting means more votes for democrats
More chances to defeat the republicans
More people on the debate stage calling out bullshit (and you could have still hold one even if one party decides to not participate)
And last but not least, shouldn't we want the most representative voting system possible? Shouldn't we be concerned when our working class brothers/sisters/so on are under represented to the point that they dont vote?
Still not convinced First-past-the-post voting is the problem? Republicans in Florida passed legislation protecting it. Republicans in alaska are trying to repeal Ranked choice voting because voters used it to pick a more moderate conservative (the alternative was Sarah palin).
Isn't the republicans liking and wanting something not the most ultragigagigantic red flag that ever existed?
Democrats have proven they can no longer go it alone. They had their chance. Time to swallow your pride and arrogance and let others participate. This fight isn't about the democratic party. It's about survival.
The United States of America is more important then the Democratic Party.
And how effective was the Liz/Dick Cheney appeal to the suburbs, in the end?
Given the growing demographics since 2020
Trump should not have effectively flatlined given a growing electorate - until there was depressed turnout he’s never actually had the popular vote.
2016:
Trump - 62,984,828 / 46.1%
Clinton - 65,853,514 / 48.2%
2020Cycle with heightened turnout for all parties
Biden - 81,283,501 / 51.3% [+ 15,429,987 vs 2016]
Trump - 74,223,975 / 46.8% [+ 11,239,147 vs 2016]
2024:
Trump - 74,644,300 / 50.5% [+ 420,325 vs 2020]
Harris - 70,910,573 / 47.9% [- 10,372,928 vs 2020]
All that means is that the Dems ran on the terrible platform of trying to court Republicans instead of trying to court progressives. It has nothing to do with voting systems.
It's interesting that you think "Leftists" comprise tens of millions of votes. I'm flattered, but I don't think enough people came to the last DSA meeting to make that the most likely possibility.
Most all of the terminally online voted. Nonvoters aren't here arguing about politics on Lemmy. Leftists have been screaming for months that if the Dems don't make improving the lives of the working class their main focus, people aren't going to come out. I wish we had more political engagement too, but sarcastic comments about how people should be more strategic doesn't seem to be a viable get out the vote strategy. Maybe we should try making people's lives materially better.
I don't understand the "we were to small to matter" argument I've been seeing. If that's true, why on Earth would you expect to matter enough to move the Democratic platform, or to shape society after leftists "burn it all down" (whatever that means)?
I'm not sure I said "we're too small to matter". But exit polls said that 10% of the electorate cared about Gaza. If everyone who abstained from voting due to Gaza had voted for Harris, she still would have lost.
But what I'm trying to tell you is that the issue is not communists, socialist, and anarchists. Agree with us or not but we are deeply involved in politics and extremely tuned in. (Compared to the average American. I think everyone on a political memes channel on Lemmy is at least paying attention. Everyone reading this is an outlier.)
Leftists tend to conflate leftist policies with "policies that help the working class". I tend to think the latter is a subset of the former. Democrats need to get out and fight for the working class enough to excite people to come to the polls. It's not leftists that you need to convince to vote, but the people working three jobs and still having trouble with rent who think that politics doesn't really affect them. By the time you get that person out, Leftists will be over the moon for you.
I don't believe I am talking about two different numbers when I'm talking about the same voting bloc for both.
The "we" I used was probably misplaced, since I think you are making a distinction between your position and "leftists", who are the people I've seen on Lemmy advocating for destroying the system.
I'm not sure I follow your point about political engagement, I don't think I mentioned anything about that. I was commenting on the size of the group of third-party and non- voters. If that group wasn't big enough to change the outcome, I just don't see how they could be relevant at all.
I think we must be in agreement, though, since you suggest that Democrats need to better engage with the working class. Maybe we need a dedicated labor party, though without a more parliamentary system, the parties can't really be single-issue in the US.
Sorry if I was unclear. I am a leftist. I care about Gaza. I understand that Gaza was not a winning issue.
I am making a distinction between people who vote third party or don't vote to send a message and people who don't vote out of apathy. The former group is small. I don't think a foreign policy issue will usually swing an election.
I, for one, don't believe that electoralism will solve our problems. I vote for harm reduction and on the off chance I'm wrong, and because our voices matter a bit more in down ballot races. I'd guess this is the most common position amongst people left of the Dems.
And Americans don't get it. As a Canadian it's insane watching these people who helped Trump by not voting, jump through hoops to try and justify and blame others for their lack of sense and duty
Don't worry, Canada is next. Fascists are making inroads worldwide because neoliberals would rather let the fascists win than have the rich make any less money.
I don't know if y'all remember this, but the DNC decided to forgo a primary and forced Harris on us. When she ran in 2020 during the primary, she was so unpopular that she dropped out before any votes were cast.
Why did anyone ever think she would win? It's almost identical to when the DNC put Hilary up against Trump.
You can only fool me with this "lesser evil" bullshit so many times.
And if they will spend the last minutes they had on primaries, first of all you wouldn't participate in them anyway because you think they all rigged or whatever, and then you would not vote anyway because whoever won on primaries didn't have enough time to campaign and you just feel like you don't know enough about them to make a decision.
The levels of bullshit you have to come up with to avoid admitting you just collectively wanted Trump to win is astonishing really.
Hey, good for you, you voted. Most people didn't.
They wanted Trump to win, or didn't care who does. They are at fault. They had the ability to change the course of election and chose this way. Even trump supporters are less at fault, they're in a cult, their brain fell off, they don't have a choice.
Democratic party cares about opinions of people who vote for them, it's that simple.
Any criticism of The Party immediately means they want Trump, “no it’s the voters who are wrong”
I vote in all the primaries - and it’s a sobering assessment that pulling “Uncommitted” in 2024 was my most enthusiastic electoral participation since 2008. I still voted for Dem harm reduction for the general - in a swing state thankyouverymuch - but look at where we are. 100% unified neo-fash/nativist government with Trump at the helm.
Why is the Democratic National Committee so afraid of either listening to, or allowing the electorate to participate?
In every swing state except PA. There was record breaking ballots cast. In PA it was close to the record. She lost the election because bad policies not people not showing up. People changed their mind in the 6 swings states. Idk why or what for but this election wasn't lost because of 10 million people not voting it was lost by my calculations 275,092 votes in 4 states.
I'll wait until the count is over to check if she earned more votes in the 6 swing states than biden in 2020. But lots more votes to count again like 10 million yet to be counted almost all in states that are pretty much decided so they didn't make a difference anyway
These people would rather just bitch about leftists than face the reality that they haven't had a serious, competitive primary in almost two decades and have fully committed to elite control of the primary process. It's peak moderate head-in-sand burying: "we don't need to reform anything, we just need to vote harder and yell even more about anyone criticizing us." I voted for Harris and think it was dumb not to, but at this point anyone insisting that the main problem was people not voting hard enough is a fucking idiot and shouldn't be taken seriously.
The problem as I see it and right now we need to wait for more information is they went to the right and thought they could pick up Republicans there is a report that says all the registered Republicans voted republican (don't know accuracy) except 6% in 2020 and 5%2024. So they picked up no one when they should have went full leftists revolutionary change. They didn't when despite having the most amount of money so they don't even need to court the gazillionaires if they are just going to lose.
Joe didn’t deliver, and Kamala didn’t promise anything new.
Joe delivered the Inflation Reduction Act. It invests hundreds of billions of dollars into various climate initiatives over 10 years. That includes renewable generation, grid storage, EV, and nuclear generation. Then there's infrastructure investment, which included much needed investments in transit and intercity rail.
But we all know you don't give a shit, you probably didn't even bother to register to vote. Joking about how few extra palestinians would die under trump in that other thread is kind of a giveaway you're not interested in actually doing anything.
Yeah, given the choice between racism, mass deportations, mass incarcerations of trans people, and abuse of the office to punish his political opponents, and none of those things, I can definitely understand staying home too. They were really the same on all the other issues, and those are the ones that matter.
I hope the next time I'm trapped in a bus with ten other people, and we have a choice between driving the bus off a cliff and turning around and going back into town to get ice cream, I hope it's a better flavor of ice cream. I voted ice cream this time, even though I hate rocky road. But the next time it better not be.
"But the dems say that every year!" You saw what Trump did the first time he was in office. You've seen how directly he can control all three branches of the federal government. You've heard what he promised to do this time around. How can anyone with more than six brain cells possibly justify staying home?
If you talk to anyone affected by the proposed policies you'd know there's a fucking lightyear of distance between the two. Its not sugar coating. You can measure the difference in gallons of human blood.
Gay and trans people are fucked by this.
The supreme court is fucked by this.
Ukraine is fucked by this.
The climate is fucked by this.
Immagrants are fucked by this. There's now a real risk of entire cities in the US having the military used on them if they defy police. I'm sure you saw the people in portland being disappeared in vans during the riots there in 2020.
Every extra person that dies or suffers because of this shit is on the bloody hands of assholes that sat this election out because picking a lesser evil was too hard of a choice for their delicate constitutions.
You are doing all these people a disservice by trying to console them for being cowards and sitting things out. And they are cowards. The only sugar coating going on is to say they are not.
And now we need to toughen them up. Because they chose a more difficult path for everyone.
You realize the person you replied to already said they voted D...
Right?
But even if they didn't explicitly state it, the ones who didn't hold their nose aren't going to be hanging out on political forums.
Why would they?
They're politically disengaged because "both parties are the same".
The way to get them involved is moving the party to the left, not the right like we have been. It's always a great time to start, and the job is never over.
The billionaires won't stop buying off both parties, we gotta try to save at least one party.
You caea about the genocide of brown people elsewhere, just not here.
What was Biden doing to stop the killing in his own country?
You've got states lawlessly executing innocent men. You've got women bleeding out on hospital floors because doctors don't want to be convicted of doing an illegal abortion. Over a million COVID deaths and counting. The rollback of post-COVID economic relief combined with the spike in inflation has driven up national poverty and thrown thousands more Americans out on the street despite millions of vacant units. Storms are killing Americans. Power failures are killing Americans. Lack of pharmaceuticals are killing Americans. Police violence. Vigilantism. The oppressive heat.
Biden's been in charge though it all.
Just be honest with your words, your actions already spoke the truth.
Seriously, as a brown person, shut the fucking fuck up! You have no idea what living in this country under republicans is like, you can't begin to imagine it and you need to take your privileged dick out of your overprivileged ass and realize what many of us are going to have to face now.
Literally have the KKK reforming in anticipation of his inauguration, it's "good people on both sides" all over again.
Seriously, as a brown person, shut the fucking fuck up! You have no idea what living in this country under republicans is like
Tell it to Eric Adams, a man who took office under the Democratic flag and threw our people directly under the bus. Tell it to Lori Lightfoot, London Breed, John Whitmire - it seems like every Dem mayor has made it open season on the homeless and the vulnerable.
But you don't want to see this, because you think politics is a spectator sport.
Literally have the KKK reforming in anticipation of his inauguration,
With the blessing of every law enforcement agency in the country, it seems.
I could not dream of better evidence of a Lemming being a troll than replying to someone saying they're scared for their life under the current political administration with "you think politics is a spectator sport".
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Its utilitaritarian philosophy. Its saying if you stand by and do nothing an even worse person will do things in your name. The result of nonvoters here was trump. its rather explicit. By not voting "your guy" is whoever wins, aka Trump. That is the essence of the statement.
critics of acts of utilitarianism raise three strong objections against it. According to these critics, utilitarianism
a) approves of actions that are clearly wrong,
b) undermines trust among people,
and c) is too demanding because it requires people to make excessive levels of sacrifice.
I agree with all that. I'm just asking you to stop coddling people who have made all our lives worse because they the prospect of voting vexes them. Do you think democrats will come up with better policies because they lost?
We're now further from a better deal for america than we have been in a while.
I've heard the following arguments, I'm ordering them in the way I think they effect an election.
Elon musk buyout and the AI lockdown of social media, and banning of tiktok have all had the effect to fracture democratic/leftist messaging (fault: dems, biden, musk, reddit, people who stayed on x. Affected groups: young people, people who are hard to reach with ads)
The primary election is basically undivertable campaign time for democrats. The lack of primary campaigns and debates means harris had less time to build support and a base (fault biden, affected groups: everyone).
Lack of economic excitement around policies and a shutdown of effective messaging on price gouging in favor of saying a former president will surely destroy the country this time. (fault Harris, donors effect, likely low turnout on younger people)
Lack of demographic excitement around key policies. Latinos: Immigration. Muslims: Israel. (fault biden/harris, effect low turnout in key groups)
Wasteful campaign spending on republicans: Courting Liz Cheney and buying ads to woo republicans at best wasted money and at worst is a giveaway to telecoms who immediately donated it to republicans(fault Harris, effect waste)
Covid provided a boost in 2020 that no longer exists
Mail in voting helped some people vote in 2020. I would say this a tossup however because I do think republicans are able to abuse flaws in mail in systems.
Harris is a woman. I don't buy this one because nonvoters seem disengaged rather than hostile.
feelin cute, gonna repost this, might delete later k love you bi
Kamala Harris lost every swing state AND the Senate. We live in the same country we did 4 years ago, we live in the same country that elected Barrack Obama twice.
People are paying 50% more for bread, eggs, and rent, with no relief given, no corporate greed stiffled BEFORE it hit average Americans in the face, and just kept hitting them. The average American doesn't care about economic numbers, they care about whether or not they can pay the rent.
Trump isn't going to make any of this better, he's going to make it ordinates worse. People vote for change, when faced with the inevitability of suffering they'll vote for different, come what may.
I don't think anything about Biden set "the commies on fire", but he was elected long before 7 October 2023, so he didn't have to contend with all the well-deserved outrage over US support for Israel's genocide in Gaza. And yes, I'm well aware it'll likely get worse under Trump. But not being as bad as the next guy simply doesn't seem to inspire voter turnout for some reason.
It's kind of like selling a new brand of chocolate, and advertising it as being "not quite as bad as Hershey's" (yes, I know, it's a low bar), then blaming customers for "sitting on the couch" and not buying it. Oh, and lets not forget that both chocolate bars advertise a policy of "10% of profits goes to genocide".
Democrats are up in arms about people not buying their shitty chocolate bar, when any decent person would just stop eating chocolate if those were the only two options available. But the Democrats refuse to change the recipe or the packaging because it's their position that nothing needs changing - it's the voters who are wrong. Does that sound like an argument that's likely to win over any voters?
Biden would not have won if we weren't also in the middle of the greatest global pandemic in a century that the incumbent Trump administration was handling terribly.
Harris represented a “return to normal” which for the working poor pinched by inflation and rising cost of living, meant more slow misery. Abandoning the supposed foundation of the party whilst running against a supposed anti-establishment/disruptive candidate via an appeal to neocon decency was foolish. “Banking” on voting blocs they actively rejected was foolish.
The party needs to do better, and that starts with us holding them to account for dropping the bag and critically misreading/ignoring the situation, and demanding change.
Your super-wealthy decided who won. Trump offered them the most tax breaks and government contracts. As such, he had the most money to spend on his campaign and all the social media bosses on-side. Republican or Democrat, the biggest spender always wins.
That gives a false picture since it only counts legal declared spending.
For instance, what's the effective value to Trump's campaign of Elon Musk buying Twitter and using it to explicitly promote right wing views? How much did Russia spend this time to promote Trump? What about Israel, cause I'll wager Netanyahu prefers having Trump in office, since Kamala might've demanded at least some holding back.
Actual spending to promote Republican and right wingers was way higher.
Where did you get that screenshot from? I mean, traditionally, you would provide and link and not just a screenshot. You know, in case its wildly misleading or something.
Also, don't only count the amount spent after Harris joined the race or presume musk is going to self report accurately.
If this really is the first time in modern American history that the smallest spender won then thats huge. Although, it'll only be due to the increased power of social media owners which I mentioned above.
This undercounts it. Musk’s “million dollar a day giveaway” is a notable example that wasn’t included in the stats. The shadowy $40 mil crypto ad buy in Ohio are some examples of adjacent spending that didn’t carry over in Trump’s column.
Because Biden was to the left of Harris, and Gaza wasn't a big issue?
Like yeah, the people who didn't vote did so because of Harris' move to the right
The mad thing about the result is that the Dems spent so much more money and still lost. Not that you can easily quantify the financial value of changing the algorithm on twitter to favour Trump.
Twitter, Washington Post, FaceBook, TikTok, YouTube: they all favored Trump. But YouTube may have just been unintentional as they are grossly incompetent and dont understand how their own algorithm leans into extremes.
YouTube definitely know they have an issue and don't care, or they would do something about it. Radicalising people with extreme content increases engagement which makes them money, the only thing that will make them change it is regulation (with teeth).
That is fair that a person becoming radicalized does engage more, but it also turns a lot of people away from the platform and the loss of advertisers and users on Twitter is proof of that.
Except money evidently doesn't buy it by itself. If it did Harris would have won. Effective messaging (Where is the Dem Joe Rogan? They kicked the closest thing they have out of the DNC for expressing broadly popular opinions) and playing to the base of people willing to vote for you (Dems will never get those Republican voters no matter how many immigrants they promise to stop at the border) wins elections.
Is it that absurd? Sure Trump's campaign is dripping with much more overt hate and racism, but if you think that the party that welcome DICK CHENEY with open arms and paraded him around isn't doing something wrong then I can't help you.
Also the mods removed my comment, so how wrong can I really be?
Her platform was literally to tax the rich, make a ceasefire in gaza, and decriminalize Marijuana.
Trump's platform was to have his opponents put in front of a firing squad, force Ukraine to surrender to Russia, cut taxes for the rich (again), and put in place Tariffs which will absolutely destroy USA commerce.
Are you forgetting that she was in office when she said she was going to make a ceasefire? Why didn't she do it then? Where was that?
And show me her plan to tax the rich. She is a blatantly pro corporate candidate.
And they just threw the weed thing in there at the end because it was becoming very obvious that her platform was massively unpopular. She famously was super hard on people being arrested for marijuana charges when she was a prosecutor.
She is still Vice President, not President, but they have on multiple occasions attempted to coerce a ceasefire, sometimes escalating to Biden swearing at Netanyahu over the phone.
Compared to the Trump Plan of writing Israel a Blank Check. Hell, they've literally already supported a single state solution under his previous admin when he put his son in law Jared Kushner in charge of the situation.
You can read more about Kamala Harris' tax plans HERE
Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe that working families deserve a break. That’s why under their plan more than 100 million working and middle-class Americans will get a tax cut. They will do this by restoring two tax cuts designed to help middle class and working Americans: the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Through these two programs, millions of Americans get to keep more of their hard-earned income. They will also expand the Child Tax Credit to provide a $6,000 tax cut to families with newborn children. They believe no child in America should live in poverty, and these actions would have a historic impact.
Unlike Donald Trump, Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are committed to ensuring no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes. They believe that we need to chart a New Way Forward by both making our tax system fairer and prioritizing investment and innovation. They will ensure the wealthiest Americans and the largest corporations pay their fair share, so we can take action to build up the middle class while reducing the deficit. This includes rolling back Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, enacting a billionaire minimum tax, quadrupling the tax on stock buybacks, and other reforms to ensure the very wealthy are playing by the same rules as the middle class. Under her plan, the tax rate on long-term capital gains for those earning a million dollars a year or more will be 28 percent, because when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad-based economic growth and creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.
She has also floated uncapping social security taxes so top earners would pay more, and also introducing a unrealized capital gains tax on large amounts.
Thinking that Kamala was the Corporate Candidate is absolutely asinine, but it's also got some truth to it as literally everyone except the richest Americans will suffer as a result of the Trump Admin. The fact that you can even compare the two means you knew absolutely nothing about how Trump cut taxes for the rich in 2017 and raised it on the lowest earning brackets.
Are you familiar with the term "political theater"?
It's where a politician says one thing and makes a big show about something, and then does the opposite.
Why would anyone be scared of the geriatric lame duck president yelling at them?
And why didn't this administration reverse Trump's tax cuts for the rich or actually do a damn thing about it?
You're being lied to and you're believing it.
And Kamala is so pro corporate that she is one of the biggest and most effective proponents of California's prisoner slave labor.
Who do you think it's using this prison labor? Who is the beneficiary of not having to pay their workers?? Could it possibly be the giant corporations that run American???
Are you familiar with the fact that Trump literally cut taxes for the rich, raised the federal deficit, and raised taxes on the lowest earners? Thats not theatre, that literally happened. You have a party that at least promises to make lives better and a party that literally will make lives worse with a proven record, and you helped elect the latter like a fuckin moron.
You want to talk about benefiting off of Criminal Labor? Biden pardoned hundreds of Marijuana convictions one at a time and made it so that future nonviolent possession convictions of the same nature don't happen.
Removing a tax plan that hasn't expired would take a 2/3rds vote from the senate, DNC never had more than 48.
What about Joe Biden made him sufficiently left while Kamala Harris wasn't?
-Joe Biden wasn't campaigning to finish building Trump's wall. Or saying that actually it was a good idea to build the wall and the only problems were just that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for it and that he didn't finish the job.
-Joe Biden wasn't campaigning on being pro-fracking. And bragging about how he was the tie breaking vote for the IRA, which leased new land for fracking. (I understand there was more to this act, but Harris points to it as a way to show she supports fracking)
-At the time the genocide in Gaza hadn't ramped up and gotten as much publicity as has now, so we didn't get to hear Joe Biden's stance on it.
-Joe Biden wasn't calling to ensure America has the "strongest most lethal fighting force in the world".
-Joe Biden didn't align himself with the Cheneys.
You see that 10 million more Democrats voted for Biden, but stayed home for Harris and you believe the problem is with the people and not the candidate? Now granted, racism and sexism played a role in this for sure. But to attribute that much of a difference just to that? Most of the people that are deeply racist and sexist are already voting for Trump because he supports those ideas. And from what I've seen, the Republican voters stayed pretty consistent from last election. It was mainly a dip in Democratic voters. If the problem is with the voters and not just that Harris was an incredibly weak candidate, then why do you believe that many more people voted last election?
She out performed Buden in WI, GA, NV, and NC. She underperformed in PA and MI. AZ wasn't done counting when I got these numbers. Trump gained in all the rest.
A California lawyer is not the candidate you want when you run to the right. Harris would have won the popular vote if she ran left, but she still would have lost the swing states, and thus the election.
If you want to win the swing states, you need to pick a Democrat from a swing state or a red state. Mark Kelly would have won with Harris's campaign.
How do we know this when we haven’t finished counting the votes?
Edit: I realize this might have accidentally come across as a “gotcha” question, but I really mean it. So many people are speaking with confidence about voter demographics when only like 60% of the vote is counted. What am I missing?
Willing to consider anything and everything to ensure the democratic party gets no blame are we?
Democrats must change. Democrats need to open our electoral process to third parties. No more keeping things fundamentally the same. That era is over. Get over it.
It’s not that the Democratic Party needs defending for their lackluster ideas, it’s more that the candidate who is far more unpopular won by a landslide. It’s so counterintuitive.
Because of targeted social networks circles. The candidate to prop got a radicalized base, the candidate to lose got messaging that either indicated people should disengage ("Genocide Kamala!") or were given the same sort of messaging in 2016 that made Hillary such a surefire win you didn't even have to go to vote, because what's one more vote (appeal to laziness). Cambridge Analytica's successors were also armed with LLM AI as well as Big Data personal data identification this time around.
They clearly prepped up in case the votes didn't go their way, but the post- truth politics paired with people who consider their social network fueled emotions more credible than the facts and merits of lifetime experts was more effective than they could have ever predicted, and this will mark the tendency for all future elections in our "democracies" were education clearly has had no long term impact.
I reject this beggar mentality that we can’t do better because of how the chessboard stands today - as if it has sat forever unchanged and immutable - Obama stands in stark contrast to that. Clinton (awful politicaly and personally toxic as she was) still won the popular vote against Trump. In 2016 when he lied and ran as an outsider, promising to “drain the swamp”.
Americans have been force feeding one another the most vulgar anti-poc propaganda decade after decade for my entire life.
It's so crazy to hear the handful of college Leftists who picked up a copy of Zinn or ran a union drive at their local Starbucks get blamed for billions of dollars and millions of hours of hate jammed into peoples' eyeballs and ear holes.
bad post, the flaw is OP’s assertion that Biden “set commies on fire”
COVID brought universal early voting and Biden didn’t go mask off conservative and communicated at least a modicum of support for young people facing alienation and low income. that alone is enough to set normies working two jobs on fire. commies have so little to do with it it’s laughable.
(in my opinion) Biden-Harris probably had the opportunity to win over normies again despite Harris’ gender and race (normies are racist and sexist) but instead they spent the last year courting conservatives and nazis. they even forced Walz to silence his normally empathetic and empirically based positions on the border.
if mcdonalds runs an ad for the all new mcburger, and no one buys it? we generally will blame the advertising strategy or the product concept itself. but for some reason when we order a mcburger from the DNC and they deliver a fucking cold tortilla with runny egg on it, it’s “the people’s fault” there wasn’t a lot of buyers.
i voted for harris. she is by far the best candidate of the race. but i will not play pretend and hold her and biden blameless for their abject inattention to the communicated values of their constituents.
“Now is not the time for criticism, it’s not election season - save that for the primaries”
“Now is not the time for criticism, the primaries are soon”
“Now is not the time for criticism, there’s only 100 days to go before the general”
“Now is not the time for criticism, we just had a huge, crushing loss”
So are liberals/democrat faithful/etc really committed to never learning, or never listening? When am I allowed to criticize half of the political duopoly that is increasing out of touch not just with my concerns, but openly snubs voting blocs and demands fealty in return for the status quo?
A popular mandate. That’s literally the bar we’re talking about here, and I’m amazed to see people upset that others are pointing out how low it is.
But when they fake a primary, you don’t get a genuinely popular candidate. When they don’t even hold a primary, you never hear the other opinions in the electorate. Biden owns a lot of responsibility for this loss, but the leadership has their share too for trying to walk this over the line on diet republicanism in a quest to scrape by 270.
Well, okay, that's not a policy proposal, but I see you've got the beginnings of . . . . party. . policy? Maybe?
Can you be a little more - y'know, government policy proposal-y? What you'd want the candidate to advocate for?
Or were you just saying people weren't allowed to crap on the DNC before the election and now that it's lost people aren't being allowed to crap on the DNC because instead of being insufferable assholes with nothing of value to add, actually, colonialist imperialist genocider corporate whores are preventing them from changing the world for good?
Bruh if you wanna argue with yourself, go ahead and build the straw man already
The argument I’m making in reply to your “stop complaining” post (and that you seem to deliberately be ignoring) is that the DNC and/or establishment Democrats routinely silence internal dissent at any and all times. And that right now they still aren’t listening internally, and have demonstrated a commitment to gaslight voters that inflation isn’t real, and that voters shouldn’t be trusted/allowed to pick who they get to vote for.
Voters have told us in exit poll after exit poll, that their primary issues are economic uncertainty and cost of living, loss of faith in governance, and then immigration.
32% of voters nationwide said the economy mattered most in deciding how to vote in the presidential election. 11% said immigration, 14% abortion, 34% the state of democracy, 4% foreign policy.
Okay, so let's just take as a given that, yes, the Democratic candidates should have focused on the economy, immigration, abortion, and the state of democracy, with apparently 4% of foreign policy thrown in.
That is what you're arguing they should have done, correct?
If so, what do you think they did NOT say about those issues. You can focus on Kamala if you prefer, or the entirety of all Democratic candidates if you want to assert that.
Economy/ Cost of living:
Beyond pithy “I feel your pain” statements and a late-election focus on price gouging and new homebuyer credits, there was not much for the working poor.
Nothing about corporate tax dodging or enforcing consumer’s rights - Lina Kahn at the FTC would have been an easy layup and she’s gotten results already
Very shy on pro-union messaging
Silent about healthcare costs (beyond in-home carers)
For someone pinched by inflation and/or predatory corporate pricing, being told “more of the last four year’s policy is coming, sorry we have no money - except for Israel” is a huge turnoff.
State of Democracy:
I think the DNC/establishment Dems massively misread this issue as purely J6/dictator Trump - because ignoring the massive democratic disengagement and apathy means they don’t have to address why voters are unenthusiastic about electoral participation at most levels, and instead “it’s all the MAGAs fault” without questioning why the MAGA movement exists beyond “they’re deplorable”.
Trump’s vote total basically flatlined from 2020, two different assassination attempts barely moved polling, he isn’t an unknown figure and voters at large do not like him. What he is however, is a break from “more of the same” no matter how damaging or foolish that may be for the world/country.
In no order, here’s what Dems should target/message on:
Actually running a primary
Not cheating in those primaries
Alternative voting like ranked choice
Not platforming billionaires
Evidence of the party coming down on the side of the worker, instead of corporate/moneyed interests during tough choices. The rail strike is a perfect example, but also the East Palestine spill
Evidence of the party listening to voters concerns, like not running Biden again or heeding the ‘uncommitted’ movement.
Not surrendering to the Republican narrative on the outrage of the day, and being the adults in the room that deliver results for voters instead of distractions. Clap back with “It’s weird to focus on that - we have an economy to solve.” instead of allowing them to controls the narrative
You are more then welcome to visit my ask lemmy post about replacing First-past-the-post voting with a more representative electoral system. No more party worship, no more two party system, no more handcuffs on our wrists.
I mean, Harris and the Dems didn't even try, like seriously. Getting Beyonce and all the other celebrities our fellow moronic Americans already see as members of the illuminati is not trying, it's literally the opposite
I mean, they spent $50m+ in fuckin Ohio! We lost fuckin Georgia while they were jerking off Cheney's and trying to convince white folks in the suburbs not to be who they are
It's legit insane to see the party straightup abandon working class demographics. Then again, this is the same party that now literally spends millions of dollars each primary on getting votes for Republican politicians
I was excited when Biden dropped out and Harris got this huge surge as the new young, not actively deteriorating candidate, then more excited when she announced Tim Walz and got a mid western, blue collar surge, and cautiously optimistic when everyone was briefly focusing on how anti-democratic and un-American Project 2025 was, but then started getting worried when all I saw running up to the election was stories about abortion rights and women voting against their husbands and celebrity endorsements.
It feels like Obama successfully ran a campaign of Hope and Change, and since then Democrats repeatedly campaign on maintaining the status quo and just not letting it slide too much further. And while it's possible to win an election on the basis of 'I'm at least somewhat competent', it might not be in the US when so much of the population sees how fundamentally broken wealth inequality is at baseline.
Not discounting anything you wrote here, but it still entertains me when people call the 60 year old Kamala Harris young.
Fuck I would not have guessed that. She looks 10-20 years younger than that
Especially when next to Walz who is, I think, a year younger.
Black don't crack, she genuinely looks youthful and it really helps that she can speak full sentences and thoughts without issues and/or changing topic like Biden or Trump
In contrast to Biden and Trump she looks 40.
I genuinely thought she was Gen X like my parents. She was a spring chicken compared to the other side.
Compared to Trump and Biden she’s a baby.
That surge when she started was all her campaign. The news and dis/info sources were all caught flat-footed.
They cast around for a few weeks testing what stories would “drive engagement”. Scandals? No. VP pick, like - Who’s it gonna be? No. Did she take any of the demented rapist’s baiting? Nope. Dang.
At the end, they settled on those, and that’s why it seemed different. They (corporate news, mostly) had finally wrested a narrative out of the campaign the campaign didn’t disagree with.
It was thin, a little schlocky, but either true or based on the campaigns ads, so - that got stamped on the campaign, and that’s why you remember that specific set of themes.
Maintaining the status quo is conservatism.
By definition that’s not what the left wants.
They tried everything except giving Dem voters what they want...
Which is what exactly? So many captain hindsights here.
How about some actual progressive policy? Not sure how people like you manage to play ignorance for this long.
You're being hard headed if you want everyone you argue with in the comments to list exactly what they were looking for. How about you go into chat gpt and ask "what are some progressive policies that Democratic voters want that aren't being reflected by the DNC and you'll get exactly what you're facetiously asking us
Let me be more clear: the votes aren’t there. You would like to believe that you as a progressive who is frustrated with Dems for not being progressive enough is a large enough constituency. I would like that to be the case as well. Unfortunately, almost all progressives voted on Kamala (and on HRC before that), and it’s just not enough.
Are you fucking kidding? Because Biden 2020 was a progressive platform and Harris 2024 was a centrist one. They weren't even remotely similar. Biden may be a centrist, but he's very pro-labor, and he could see how important the progressive base was that election, so he literally sat down with Sanders and hammered out a platform that they could get behind. And while I've got a lot of problems with Joe Biden, he actually was very committed to that platform. He really wanted BBB to get through and he kept trying to find ways to abolish student debt.
Harris, on the other hand, had a handful of disparate, vaguely left policy positions, like the first-time homebuyer's credit and legalizing pot, but her campaign was mainly centered on economic opportunity for the middle class. She also committed wholeheartedly to the most right-wing polices of the Biden administration, like arming Israel and cracking down on the border. But worst of all, she made bipartisanship and Republican consensus a huge part of her campaign, promising to add Republicans to her cabinet , campaigning with Liz Cheney, and even praising Dick Fucking Cheney.
TL;DR, Biden campaigned like Obama in 2008, Harris Campaigned like Hillary in 2016. And the results were the same.
Do you even remember 2020? Nobody fucking wanted Biden. He was never progressive. He was literally mocked for telling donors "Nothing will fundamentally change." People turned out because of how much they hated Trump.
That actually occurred in 2019, not 2020. After Bernie nearly stomped him in the primary, he made a hard pivot to the left in 2020. As I said, he's a centrist, but he actually does have a strong history of pro-union activism, which made him a fairly credible (though imperfect) messenger for a populous platform.
It's almost unfathomable how many people failed to show up to vote, if they disliked Trump that much in 2020. What has Trump done to gather support or apathy about this in so many people?
It was more that Kamala did nothing to get them off the couch.
Biden at least promised student loan forgiveness and did try. It was a shit attempt but credit where it’s due he tried and ended up being able to at least forgive a bunch of public service loans. Kamala promised, what? Help to buy a house? Ok sure. Because we can totally afford that with the cost of groceries today.
Maybe we underestimated how much Covid forced/gave everyone time to pay attention to politics. Or perhaps people saw Trump dodge accountability at every turn and disillusionment in the system bred apathy. It could also be online manipulation pushing Gaza as making Harris/Biden just as bad as Trump. Probably all of the above.
I get that but 15 mil people is a lot. Needs looking into imho.
Agreed. There's a tiny paranoid voice in the back of my head saying that with Trump every accusation is a confession and he made a lot of election fraud accusations.
Trump didn't do that, Putin did.
So why didn't he in 2020?
I bet a lot of people saw this as Hillary all over again
I sure did. I was genuinely hopeful when Biden stepped down, and when they announced Walz, I actually got excited. Then they started to try and reach moderate Republicans more and more, and I slowly realized they were doing it again. I felt like I was going insane watching them repeat the strategy that caused them to lose to the same guy in 2016.
Harris hired a lot of Clinton’s advisors.
We really need to purge the democratic advisors of their jobs if the dems ever wanna win again. They suck.
Silver lining, Trump may actually lock them up.
From what I understand, Hillary basically took over this campaign from behind the scenes.
Wait, seriously? She's a fucking disease
I remember seeing that picture and thinking to myself "what the fuck is Hillary doing there"
So did Hillary sabotage Kamela so she wouldn't have to see the coveted title of "First Female President" go to someone else, or is she a god damn moron who thought the same tactic of fucking over the left to appeal to die-hard Republicans ignoring that Republicans vote for Republicans
I would probably guess mostly column B
The meme demanded, pjwestin delivered.
I do what I can. If the question had been asked in good faith, I might have even been nice about it.
Don't forget that Biden was the first president to walk a picket line. No other president had ever done that in America's history. That single action won over the UAW.
Then, Biden fought back against the railroad corporations and won a contract for workers that includes PTO and other basic labor necessities.
Then, Biden reduced fentanyl overdoses, something that no president has done in like 30-40 years.
Couple this with BBB and IRA, you have a much more progressive president than what people give water to it.
Well, I don't want to give him too much credit. Biden is and always has been a centrist. He has a mixed history on Civil Rights (cause he's 120 years old), he has a pretty pro-bank history, he's supported some anti-consumer stuff (like the anti-bankruptcy laws), and he even helped put Clarence Thomas on the bench. And that's not even touching on his administration, where Gaza and the border will probably be his lasting legacy. But, two things that he's always been pretty consistent on were unions and infrastructure, and he read the room in 2020 and leaned heavily into those things.
Oh I agree. He likely made all of those concessions because 1) he wanted to rally the base following the 2020 primaries, and 2) to stick it to the establishment Dems. Seems like Biden has grown to be quite the grumpy old man to those in the party.
I agree with you in Gaza and the border. Biden has shown no backbone to Netanyahu, and his administration introduced a border bill that echoed a lot of Trump's sentiments.
On the whole, it's hard to make the call on whether Biden or Harris would have been better to run against Trump, but all that matters now is that we continue the message that establishment Democrats got us here by chasing centrism instead of progress. We need to root out a lot of people who actually do the politicking in the party because if those people aren't out, we're doomed to make the same mistakes.
Hasan Piker put it well the other day. If this were a game of sports, underperformers would be benched pretty aggressively. If this were a job, underperformers would be put on a performance plan (hopefully) or fired straight up.
There are people consulting Democrats that have failed time and again since 2016, hell even 2008. They need OUT.
100% this. On Monday, I'm calling my state and federal representatives and telling them DNC chair Jamie Harrison needs to go. Then I'm gonna start looking for movements that will primary anyone who still thinks incrementalism and centrism are a path forward. From now on, Medicare for All and UBI need to be the bare minimum standard for anyone that wants a D in front of their name.
remember earlier this year when leftists were saying biden never did anything and that he was too old, and started refusing to vote for him and calling for him to drop out, and he did?
remember the six months following that when leftists were complaining that the person they got biden to drop out for wasn't good enough and how they weren't going to vote for her?
and now that trump won suddenly leftists are singing biden's praises and blaming trump's win on the DNC picking a shit candidate?
I honestly have no clue how you constructed your conception of "leftists".
Leftists != Tankies != Blue MAGA/Anon != Progressives
Biden did great things while in office. However, the Left has the liberty to continue pushing the current administration to go farther and implement more policies in line with their ideals. This is a force that counters the Right.
Biden did not go far enough on Gaza, and neither did Kamala. The same goes for corporations like those in the Oil & Gas sector that raised their prices following oil demobilization during COVID, as well as those that kept their prices high even years after like those producing consumer goods. Could have gone farther.
When the existing administration makes no concessions to those in the base that voted for that administration but not as their first choice, they have the right to criticize and call out the administration's failure to represent them.
All of this would be fixed, or at least alleviated if we abandoned our political duopoly in favor of an electoral and congressional system that allowed for more diversity in government. Ranked choice seems to be taking off in many states.
Oh, and Kamala was great at the beginning. She took over for Biden, then chose Tim Walz. But then her administration attached itself to Biden, the person that spawned her campaign since the Democratic base utterly rejected him following the debate, and then went after the Right in hope of gaining more votes, taking their own base for granted.
Now that we have the full scope of Kamala's campaign, she ran on much more conservative values than Biden did in his campaign leading up to the 2020 election.
This nuance is not something you'll see in the mainstream media, perhaps not even on Lemmy. But this is the realm that hopefully progressives like me and some Leftists operate in.
Your mindset is honestly the same that many ignorant people share regarding science and the scientific method. Things can be true for different reasons and at different times.
i'm not debating any of that. i'm just kind of mad at leftists for being mad at the DNC for doing exactly what they told them to do.
Everyone is still pissed about inflation, and her answer to what she would do better was 'nothing'.
Everything else is just noise around the edges.
Because people pissed at inflation are fucking stupid. Inflation is down. They aren't pissed at greedy corporations, which have been the problem the entire fucking time.
You know you've heard people say inflation hasn't stopped because prices are still high. Like they're going to magically get better prices when inflation stops.
Yeah it's stupid, welcome to America.
Actually they're not wrong, wages were not increased to keep up with inflation so stopping it alone wasn't enough.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q#0 Real wages are up since Covid was dealt with. That's simple factual reality.
The perception of course, is that everything is worse. Because prices did go up, and they're staying there. Which just means the economy didn't collapse and cause mass unemployment.
I think the problem is that inflation does not impact the poorest population the same:
The CPI weighting is based on an average consumer, the poorest people will have more sensibility to price change for things like food or rent.
Rent and food prices increase in total by 20-25% in 4 years. If you were already tight at the beginning of the Biden presidency, you're now have a high chance of being homeless.
Seen hundreds of lemmy comments arguing exactly that.
The sad thing is that there are a thousand ways to attack prices, or even just give sound bites that the public can run with. But almost all of them would upset neoliberal billionaires, so they can never be spoken.
They think it'll be like gas prices. They go up, but the "right guy" will make them come back down, ignoring the fact that that only happens with commodities like oil. Once a company raises prices, they rarely bring them back down. Tha6s called deflation, and it's not good.
Well, we kind of need deflation to happen because the alternative is rising wages and that's not fucking happening.
We need to do what Harris had stated, and go after all these companies price gouging like we are still in the middle of the COVID pandemic. And that is now only going to get worse with a con man in office set on making himself, his companies, and his friends (which is anyone that says nice things to him) as rich as possible by extracting what remains of the working class. They are going to weaken/dismantle unions, and likely start mass death/slave labor camps for the poor.
He is also going to use his new position of power to pass laws to shield crypto scammers, and use his new crypto platform to undermine the US dollar and try and force more people to his crypto grift run by some of the worse humans around. And use his NFT/crypto stuff to openly except bribes to sell off the US to the highest bidder so when his dementia gets bad enough they put JD in charge he can live out the rest of his days being fed liquid cheese burgers on a golden spoon.
I imagine Vance goes in around the two year mark so he can have three terms.
Not sure JD would get any additional terms, the cult might want to install either Jr. or Eric and start a "royalty" line of succession. And hope that Ivanka enjoys the hellscape she helped usher in for her daughter, and women everywhere.
Deflation just means everyone is already starving. Deflation isn't the start of a process, it's the result of massive failure. Just like inflation doesn't happen the second money is printed, it has to circulate before price inflation is a thing.
What we need are labor groups, and taxes on companies who use government benefits as part of their wage calculation.
In short, never try to make prices go down, instead make wages go up, and make competition control prices.
We've already had a massive failure. The economy doing great and yet everyone's broke? Such a blatant lie! Time to acknowledge and lower prices to end food waste.
Everyone is broke, but still buying everything in the economy? Sorry, time to acknowledge the reality that life is just hard. Deflation happens after it gets really bad.
We live in a nation of people that are a mix of uneducated and propagandized. If the party messaging doesn’t take that into account, that fault lies with them in addition to the voters.
It's not enough that the rate of inflation is slowing. The problem is that wages aren't going up to match inflation. When people are working two jobs and still living paycheck to paycheck, do you think it means anything to them to tell them that "um ackshually, inflation is down 0.4% from last year!"?
This kind of disconnect is exactly why we aren't reaching voters.
California voted to not raise minimum wage, too.
Also they kept prison slave labor.
Come on now don't bring up that in one of the "left most" and most populous state in the union that people are actually pretty non leftist, it might contradict some of their feel based arguments.
America is not full of progressives. I don't know why people here can never be convinced otherwise.
America is a country that lies to itself. It claims we need to make female super heroes flat chested to combat sexism, but then turn around and laugh at the idea of a female president so hard they're willing to give Hitler a second chance.
No it is not and I'll toss another example on there -
Gay marriage was only legalized nation wide by a bunch of unelected judges, and the second most-recent Democratic president "evolved" on the issue less than a decade ago.
US postures as the world's defender of LGBT rights when it's "bringing democracy" places, but it's not great at doing that internally.
Wages have outpaced inflation recently. Things have generally been heading in the right direction since the pandemic but it came too late and the masses are mostly ignorant or misinformed so the data is irrelevant to them. Its about how people feel as you point out, there's not a rational argument against feelings, people feel how they feel. One side has become very good at taping into those feelings, the other side is talking about data and no one gives a shit unless the data validates what they feel.
Don't lie to me.
Easy to say inflation is down while others are feeling it with their wallet. Biden did nothing to fight price gouging
He made an attempt. If you expect overnight results, make sure you do a shit ton of shrooms so you can live in a different reality.
Enjoy Trump's tariffs because that is somehow his answer to inflation.
I voted for Kamala, I'm under no illusion that Trump will motherfuck the economy just like he did in his previous administration. But the idiots that voted for him have the memory of a goldfish. They will still find a way to blame democrats and minorities...that's when the real fun will begin.
People who rent got hit twice as hard by inflation, I know I'm paying a significantly higher portion of my paycheck in rent vs 4 years ago.
The raw material cost increases which provide the cover/excuse for price gouging are the result of two different things the Harris/Biden admin participated in and had no real path towards solving.
One is the fact that the vast majority of ocean shipping is going around Africa rather than the red sea, due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza that the Biden admin has been bypassing Congress to continue arming.
Two is the cutting off of Russian oil, which resulted in ballooning costs in Europe.
Like it or not, Harris did not provide any answers on these two fronts that looked anything like a change in policy.
Because fixing inflation means jacking up interest rates and cutting government spending. And no-one wants that.
People are too stupid to understand inflation and too stupid to understand how it's combated.
Literally Covid. People thoght they were going to die.
I actually don't think so. Like I speak with Republicans that are very dismissive of covid still, despite having family members die to it. If people were bothered by his covid response, they would continue to be bothered by the fact Trump shit the covid response. Instead it seems voters think everything was fine during his term (completely uninformed or unaware of the fact that he was impeached twice, raped women, a good friend and neighbor of Epstein, and tried to overthrow the government)
The apathy maybe comes from how Harris was hand picked (because it was so last minute that Biden dropped off) vs us having an actual primary with several democrats.
Republicans aren't the ones who didn't turn out, idk what this has to do with what they think about Trumps covid response. If you want to know why 10 million more democratic voters turned out last time covids gonna play a large factor.
So covid but not fascist plundering and terrorism. Huh.
Stupid fuckers.
And BLM was already out on the streets.
Bernie.
Bernie was what got us to vote for Biden. Biden formed a comittee with Bernie and actually adopted a bunch of his ideas. That’s what got the left to vote for Biden.
That and all of us were reeling from the economy after coronavirus.
Meanwhile Harris told the left to fuck off with your Palestinians are human nonsense and tried to get the Liz Cheney constituency (that doesn’t exist).
Because we did vote for Biden and he was useless at preventing the spread of fascism in states, and then Harris's responses to how she would handle any of it, which was effectively "I will do nothing." The Democrats made the left apathetic to the electoral system by refusing to appeal to them and instead the democrats focused on trying to sway republicans and moved further right. The Democrats did the worst thing they could have done and made people apathetic and hopeless.
Useless at preventing fascism... So decided to sit it out and give DT another go. Bold strategy. Let's see how it works out.
You can keep bitching about how its everyone else's fault why we are in the situation we are in. You aren't the people I see at the antifascist rallies, or out on the street trying to organize grassroots systems to protect our queer community, or doing anything. Yall are the type of people who start and stop at the voting booth. Too busy shilling politicians who refuse to do what the people want to do anything that actually helps people. Don't accuse people who voted third party or didn't vote for the situation we are in, cause you don't know that they do nothing. They very well could be doing more than you to make a difference.
Lol
Like playing Russian roulette with five live rounds.
Da, comrade
The elections over dipshit, and putins dog won. Why would they still pay their troll farms when the deal has been sealed?
Ever think people looked online and saw behavior such as yours and felt they didn't want to be involved with people like you?
It ain't "the commies".
And he won by an incredibly tiny margin in a handful of states to win, literally no one was "set on fire" for Biden
Progressive policy is popular with the politically disengaged as well as others who are politically engaged
When the ones who are engaged try to warn people someone is a bad candidate and isn't left enough to motivate the politically disengaged, we magically go back to Salem and you all start blaming us for being able to see the logical conclusion of your dumbass plans.
Run another candidate in 2028 that's significantly to the right of the Dem voter base and the same shit will happen again.
That's not a threat, it's basic logic.
It might not be the candidate you want, but isn't stopping republican more important than you getting exactly what you want?
Obama ran a progressive campaign and was charismatic...
Why not try that again since moderates over retirement age keeps failing?
Kamala might be like three years younger than Obama now, but he entered the White house 16 years ago
Obviously, the main reason for record turnout in 2020 was COVID.
Biden actually has decent political instincts and has actually won elections before. Kamala didn't even have to pass a primary and bombed out of the one she did participate in in 2020. She was "untested" to put it mildly.
The economic situation was different.
Regardless of to what degree he was responsible, under Biden the US got entangled in foreign conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine.
It's not that there are 10 million commies that liked Biden but not Harris, it's that us commies believe that you can win over the working class by appealing to material interests.
Biden didn't campaign with fucking Dick Cheney
Relevant user name
I believe democrats called bernie Sanders "unelectable" so I feel it's fair to use that term in this circumstance.
Weird how so many of you demonize the largest most powerful organization of antifascists in America instead of those who voted to give Trump power. It's almost like you are trying to sow division in the anti-trump electorate 🤔
Please do not insinuate that the Democratic Party is Anti-Fascist. They have have adopted Trump's 2016 border policy, are unconditionally funding a genocide, and will peacefully transfer power to those they acknowledge are fascists. They are not antifascists, they are merely the lesser fascists.
"The Democrats are fascists" is exactly the narrative MAGA espouses. When someone ostensibly anti-MAGA attacks the largest coalition of anti-MAGA forces, that person is pro-MAGA.
So in your mind no one can criticize the DNC's failure to stop fascism or its concessions to said fascist movemet? Our glorious leadership must be blindly followed no matter how many times they fail or give ground to fascists?
This sort of thinking is why Democrats keep repeating the same mistakes. Any sort of criticism, even if it's constructive, is treasonous. It's always someone else's fault.
Organizations either adapt or die. Rejection of criticism is a suicidal, accelerationist position. When people are so concerned with deflecting blame that they're incapable of performing an honest, frank assessment of which strategies work and which don't, then you are destined to fail no matter whether its a political party or anything else. If you'd prefer the Democrats keep doing things that don't work because you're afraid of them losing face, then your perspective is worthless.
Twisting of words and arguing against a point someone didn't make is a common alt-right "debate" strategy. Readers please note that I did not say that members of the Democratic party are above criticism. The person I am replying to continues to blame antifascists for the rise of fascism.
The car just slammed into a wall and it's backing up and preparing to slam in into the same wall for the third time, and I'm yelling at the driver to turn left so it doesn't hit the wall again, and your response is like, "Why are you criticizing the driver? You must be trying to distract them so the car crashes!"
Since you're totally not saying that the democrats are above criticism, since that's only me "twisting your words," why don't you tell me what the democrats did wrong that they could've done differently or could do differently in the future to avoid an outcome like this?
Covid and Trumps handling of it.
But energy was high in the anti Trump camp anyway with BLM protests.
So saying the Dems need to move more right is the opposite of the right lesson. Just look at political donations to Bernie.. from across the US. There are no moderate republicans, they all stayed with trump, there is a huge untapped electorate in the US that wants something else, and I'd argue it is more left social democrats and what they bring.... But the capital class will never allow it in the US. The moment you talk wealth distribution, even MSNBC and such call you communist.
Edit: oh and Biden should have taken action on Trumps fascism on day 1. Chuck him in jail pending trial and get it over with. Everyone except a small part of his base distanced themselves from him, the time was in the first 100 days of taking office, but they did NOTHING.. they might as well have stormed the capitol themselves by now.
I honestly expected him to just pardon Trump to "Let the nation heal"
And if it had been a magical third Obama term, I'm sure that's exactly what would have happened.
Sure as shit would have happened if trump ever sat down and shut the fuck up. That's why the ball started rolling so late. They wanted trump to go away on his own so they didn't have to do their jobs.
Why can I too easily imagine an alternate universe where Trump stays quiet, gets pardoned by Biden, a Trump-Wannabe shows up on the 2024 ticket, and Harris campaigns with Trump the same way Hillary rehabilitated Bush?
That would have been the wrong lesson from Watergate.
They learn every wrong lesson from history. Republicans see history and go "Let's do it again, but even worse for the average person!" and Democrats see history and go "Let's try it again, it didn't work last time, but surely 3rd time is the charm."
Biden was running on massive infrastructure investment, student loan forgiveness, ending the war in Afghanistan, child tax credit and a $2000 cheque in the mail . Harris may have had those in her platform as well but she wasn't mentioning it or Bidens wins on these at all, her campaign was "I'm not trump" and we learned from Hillary that's not enough.
Biden campaign was "build back better" a motto for change much like another democrat who actually won. Harris' campaign was "were not going back" which implies no change and relies on you thinking the trump years were horrible enough to justify the current status quo, and apparently the only thing Americans remember about the trump years was the economy was "better" and wanted to go back.
Ten Million commies in the US - lol - if only.
Flaunting your Dick Cheney endorsement isn't being insufficiently left. Its political suicide.
Have you seen the numbers of people who think they were better off 4 years ago?
People think they were better off during the height of COVID deaths. Our attention span is 27 seconds. We're idiots
Also, Harris doesn't have a penis and somehow that's supposed to matter
A lot of folks actually were better off back then due to the stimulus checks...
Yeah, getting less than one month's living expenses over a period of 18 months of un or underemployment really had me living large!
I'm not discounting that, but if you were disabled or on a fixed income then that one month's living expenses might be the biggest windfall you've had in decades.
Biden's years were the best of my life, I had stability for once....
That was nice, can't wait to fucking get laid off.
A California lawyer trying to win a centrist campaign is like Tiger Woods trying to win a World Series ring. Harris wasn't the right person to run a centrist campaign. But, if she had run a progressive campaign from July, she would have won the popular vote and still lost the election. She wouldn't have gotten past a primary.
Elizabeth Warren would have been a better progressive choice. Mark Kelly could have run a progressive or a centrist campaign.
Gods, I'd have loved seeing an astronaut in the big chair.
You cannot put a woman or a minority on the ticket and expect Right Wingers to care.
Back in 2015 when it was either Trump or Ben Carson for nomination, I knew it would be Trump. Simply because I knew once the debates started and Boomers were actually looking at Ben Carson instead of just reading newspaper articles about him, they'd abandon him for being the wrong color...
And I was right
Too many people will simply never submit to Female Rule.
It's why I knew Nikki Hailey wasn't going to get the 2024 nomination despite Trump being the most idiotic and easily beatable choice (and if Kamela ran a progressive campaign and actually had time to make her campaign)
American Men simply do not respect women.
The funny thing is I have been aware of this lack of memory for awhile but it has just gotten worse. I used to be amazed at the number of folks who could not seem to remember what things were like a decade ago but now thats been cut to about a year or so.
The cycle of political crisis generation and complacency has gone down from 8 years to 4 in the last forty years. People grew complacent over Clinton's two terms and then allowed GWB to happen, same with Obama and Trump, now we're putting Democrats in there to clean up after even worse crises than before, and putting Republicans back there after the last mess isn't even fully cleaned up.
The man staged a coup when he lost then we voted him in 4 years later. He called my state and tried to overgrow our results and 4 years later Georgia voted him in.
Indeed. We elected someone who shits all over democracy. Idiots abound
Old white man, old white man, if he can't do it, no one can!
Yeah I wouldn't discount sexism, or racism - I do think it's hard for Democrats to win elections here unless people are in the middle of a conservative administration, they just don't remember how bad it is, it's like people who remember their time in school fondly once it's over.
But in general, it's also true that women have to be near perfect, to be promoted over a man. And same thing with race. Like they can't just be the better choice it has to be a blowout. Now to a sensible person, she met that bar and flew past it, but we aren't all sensible and people are stupidly nostalgic for times that were objectively worse.
You'd love for it to be about sex or race. Then the voters have.to change, not the democrats.
Sorry buddy... the democrats have to change. Alot. And they have to do away with First-past-the-post voting in the blue states they control. Get more people represented, more political parties on solving this problem. The democrats have demonstrated multiple times they are incapable of doing this by themselves.
I'm not a Democrat. Yes I'd like them to be progressive instead of drifting ever rightward. It sucks to have two totalitarian parties here. But if you think racism and sexism is dead in America you are blind.
The government isn't a machine, it's us. People.
A lot of people probably were better off. Not working or working remotely. Possibly getting 600/week in unemployment, it may even have been an effective raise. We now know the panic around covid was largely just that.
No. No we don't.
The lesson for Democrats is surely that after years and years of telling anyone they could find that had concerns about society "oh you must be a literal Nazi, cope harder la la la la whoop whoop air high fives and fist bumps that's roiiight ma BOI!" at some point these people are going to turn around and say "well ok then, I just won't vote for you because you have nothing to offer me".
I'm not saying the Republican party has done this any better, but surely insulting potential voters en masse and refusing to understand their concerns isn't a sensible way to win elections. I didn't work for Hilary either, and it hasn't worked for Harris.
Yeah, the disconnect you also felt here when you said that Biden is clearly suffering dementia was crazy. People just deluded themselves and gaslit like crazy instead of acknowledging that Bidens mental health was not up for another 4 years of presidency. And this topic alone dragged on for months, until Biden failed the candidate debate so badly, even the billionaire donors got cold feet. But again it was the billionaire donors who pushed for Biden to drop out, not the concerns of the normal people. The DNC has effectively immunized against the voices of the people. And with all the talk about Trump bringing the end to Democracy, the Reps held proper primaries every cycle.
Covid is the reason democrats won in 2020, but they assumed they won because they're geniuses. Instead of trying to appeal to voters, they just tried to tell people to vote against trump. Turns out that isn't enough to motivate people when there isn't a pandemic raging on that is making people's lives miserable. Democrats really need to get their act together because 2028 won't be against trump, so the "anyone but trump" strategy will be even more useless and all that time spent kissing the asses of ghouls like dick cheney just tells people that republicans are okay to vote for.
Biden won by a really thin margin in swing states, the book Lucky went into detail about how close of a call it was, but he interpreted it as some huge popular win because of the high vote totals.
The pandemic of 2024 is corporate profiteering. A great example is Kroger admitting they raised prices higher than inflation for profit.
People generally blame the current administration for that. They are the one that kept trotting out stock market numbers and unemployment numbers, and acting like things are fine.
If they wouldnt even acknowledge the problem, how are they going to attract voters?
Thats not even bringing up gaza, but I dont think either candidate will change that situation in any way. The current administration is signaling they think this is a great opportunity to shake up the middle east for the benefit of western countries, cause colonialism can't ever die I guess.
All trump ever said was end it, that it should be over already. Thats just as vague as kamala saying she will do everything in her power to end the war. They both could be implying to carpet bomb gaza, but we won't know until we know right?
Neither candidate talked about why we should allow israel to lobby in our politics either.
Well be lucky if there are elections any more after this term. He already said if he's elected there won't be another election. You think he's joking? This mf isn't giving up power willingly. And with his sycophantic base, you'd be surprised what he can accomplish.
I'm in literal fear for our country.
True, but also the republicans won't have a trump to vote for.
Look, the Democrats have to own this loss, for once, like they should have last time. It is clearly insufficient to try and frighten democratic supporters with a probability of fascism which we've never experienced before. It is clearly insufficient to abandon the working class as they have for so long. We should never fund or promote far right candidates in primaries. The media should not provide free coverage for outrage candidates to drive viewershop. It is clearly a mistake to try and court conservative voters, because hardly any have ever crossed over. It was certainly a mistake for Biden to run again, and then to drop out so late, far too late to have a primary.
Maybe the fact she is a minority woman turned people off. I don't know. It's a stupid reason not to run women, but that possibility exists.
But it damn sure isn't the only reason we lost.
From talking to people who sat this out, it seems Biden ending the rail union strike was a huge factor, and the cost of groceries was a close second. They wanted to vote against him in the primaries and were denied that opportunity.
Kamala was guilty by association.
Well, that and the fact she did not address these issues in her messaging. Or if she did the message didn't reach them. "She said things aren't so bad, but I can't afford groceries. She won't fix anything."
He made sure the strike succeeded, and ended the strike as well. It’s a pure optics fail, which does not contradict your point at all, but does make it more poignant.
As for the groceries: that’s a genuine failure of Biden’s administration. He kept going for student loans but he should have gone for the grocers raising egg and dairy prices - no Republican court in the world would have survived the fallout from blocking that.
Crazy because Biden actually came back after that and won a contract for railworkers, including paid sick leave that was so influential around the time Congress passed the contact the first time around.
Other than that though, I agree. Too little too late for Democrats. There were so many wins under Biden's administration, and none of it was ever messaged to the American people.
The right move was to do nothing. The rail corporation would have folded within hours. If the railways shutting down is a national emergency, then nationalize the company. Our nation's critical infrastructure should not be held hostage by a for profit corporation.
Oh and can someone explain to me why the rail bill was split into two convenient parts so one could not pass? Fuck that. Most pro labor union president ever? Fuck off with your gaslighting.
Same for all the dickriding people did over biden stepping down, hailing him as a hero who did a huge sacrifice. As though he didn't fight to keep in the race every step of the way. So long that we conveniently couldn't hold a real democratic primary.
Fuck that. No amount of correcting the record will change what we all saw with our eyes.
I agree with pretty much all of this. You have to weight it all.
Corporations should not own and operate such critical infrastructure like the railroads I agree. Same as the grid, water systems, natural gas/district heating (ha if that'll ever happen), parking spaces, telco, etc. There are just some things that should be owned by the masses because they're used by the masses.
I think the bill was weaker the first time around so that Dems could get Reps on board, and then I'd like to say that it wasn't even a bill to get the sick leave. The article I posted points to Biden's administration specifically and the Transportation and Labor departments. Likely pressure on the backend to get railroads to cave.
Oh I didn't hail Biden as a hero at all for him stepping down. He waited until the last fucking moment. And it was so fucking cringe when Kamala and the DNC would thank Biden for his service... Like wtf his own ego got us there in the first place???? Why couldn't he have stepped down earlier and given us an actual primary???
But then when he did step down, the timing was so critical that in order to not lose more of the base, Dems had to go full Kamala. I think holding a primary at the DNC probably would have angered donors a lot more since the primary would have been stolen from the American people, and who knows where that would have gone given the sentiment people had towards Biden.
I didn't agree with the Biden dickriders at the time either. Many of them would use the comparison of voting for a ham sandwich over Trump, but that sentiment, vote for me because I'm not them, is so lame and doesn't really inspire any motivation in the Democratic party's base. It's the same rhetoric that Kamala used, and imo that rhetoric is what contributed to her campaign failing. You need a carrot as much as a stick to persuade your base.
This whole past election cycle was botched absolutely. But I want to get to the bottom of why we got here in the first place, and my focus has been to blame and scold the political careerists in the Democratic Party proper who have taken up power and who don't want to let it go, even if it means breaking from the centrist establishment to court pro-labor and progressive values and supporters.
Biden is to blame, Kamala is to blame, Hillary is to blame, Obama is to blame for why we're here now. People are tired of their party not giving the concessions they said they would, and not fighting the fight against rising fascism and extremism. We need a strong counter weight to what Trump represents, and centrism is not the answer.
Step into a campaign to take over for a failing candidate who is unpopular and too old to realistically run, then make sure that everyone is certain that your policies will be exactly the same as the unpopular guy, then surprised pikachu
Ok. First. Those votes were not, like, commies or something. Communists broadly (but not universally ) have no faith in electoral politics beyond the ability to demonstrate how useless electoral politics are for the kinds of change they see as required. The missing votes are likely non-explicitly-ideological Americans, and the disenfranchised left wing of the Democrat coalition, who are not revolutionary socialists - they are better described as social democrats. And why so many of them voted for Biden was, at least in significant part three things that you're pretending don't exist with this meme.
Tremendous dislike of Trump.. which is actually still true, but he was not currently the president during this election. Trump had just spent the last few months massively fucking up the pandemic response very publicly and got covid immediately prior to the election, which made him look stupid and incompetent.
Because of COVID policies, voting had literally never been easier. Shit loads of people voted early because it was universally available. Led to highest turnout ever.
A competitive democratic primary process meant that we had a candidate selection process people could believe in to some degree. Brenie and Biden ran, and Biden won. Bernie voters saw that, looked at the situation and said "This is tolerable because we had a real process, and we can accept Biden as a stop gap under the conditions of Trump needing to be removed, and Biden being a 1 term President". It wasn't 2016, where a significant portion of potential Democrat voters saw the DNC's treatment of Bernie as unfair, and it wasn't 2024 where Biden decided to run with no true Primary after the deal was "single term president", then abruptly dropped out (good idea, shoulda done it 2 years earlier) and effectively appointed his successor by decree.
2020 was an anomaly, and as is true of 2020 in most data sets, using it as a comparison point requires many many qualifications, but Trump gained 40000 votes, Harris lost 10 million. Trump did not perform better, Harris lost voter enthusiasm, which hasn't actually been on the Democrat's side in presidential elections (which have more non-explicitly-ideological voters) since, like, Obama. It's not even necessarily that she needed to be "more left". It's that she needed to reflect the public's distrust of the political status quo and promise material gain for working people explicitly at the expense of someone else (Trump chose , for instance, immigrants and the democrats as the bad guys, but Harris could have chosen, say, rich fuckers like Musk) . She needed to be ready to rip up the floor boards, and she wasn't even ready to say she'd break from fucking Biden (who is broadly unpopular) on policy.
I really, really wish y'all democrats would stop trying to purge your own party of any dissent, because y'all coming out of this with the right lesson will be the difference between a brief period of Republican control, or several elections cycles of Democrats being unviable as a party.
True. Thank you. It's frustrating seeing the DNC shoot itself in the fucking foot to watch people on Lemmy start swinging on anyone but the people who made and executed the failure of a campaign strategy.
Hey everyone, when you see comments like this from a ""Leftist"" who only ever criticizes "The Dems" for right-wing victories, and never puts the responsibility on the actual, y'know, Trump supporters, that user is a MAGA supporter trying to divide the left and prevent the formulation of a broad antifascist coalition capable of changing the course the GOP has set.
These "non voters" did not actually sit out the election, they are trying to convince you to sit out the next one (or vote third party etc etc). Don't fall for it! We are in this together.
Ugh. This is such a toxic attitude.
Dissent is a good thing. Criticizing yourself is necessary to prevent rot.
Claiming that anyone that disagrees with the party lines is a Russian or a Trump supporter is insane and smacks of McCarthyism.
But blaming the party and sitting out, or voting 3rd party, everyone knew would lead to Trump winning, just like it did. Not voting for Harris was a vote for Trump, and makes those people just as complicity in his being elected as the people that voted for him. Trying to rationalize it as "Dems need to run a better candidate/campaign/etc" is just cover for not wanting to take responsibility for allowing the man everyone left of the GOP knew was a bad idea, back into power (and with numbers that are going to feed his ego into fascist wet dreams).
Moral of my rant is this - criticism of the party is fine and should be allowed/encouraged, but trying to blame the party for millions of people handing Trump the presidency is a bad faith argument and should be called out as such each and every time. We are all adults, everyone knew the consequences, and we all made a choice. And people need to start owning that instead of blaming the DNC for not being their unicorn party able to 100% represent a **WAY ** more diverse set of ideals than Trumps singular ideology of hate/fear.
/rant
I'm very sick and tired of being punished by the DNC for not falling in line.
Like why did they not make Ruth Bader Ginsberg retire before Trump got into office? How could they have not seen that one coming? Everyone saw that happening apparently except for the DNC.
Same with codifying Roe v Wade. They had many opportunities to codify it and then they supply did not. Now it's gone.
Same thing with running the oldest presidential candidate of all time. When people started calling for him to step down, the DNC acted like there was so contingency plan for an 80 candidate.
And then it was the same shit when they ran Harris. She was so unpopular in the last primary that she had to drop out before any votes were cast. Then they just skipped the primary and ran her as the candidate anyways. Then she lost.
The DNC acts absolutely hapless.
I think a great deal of the issue on the "left" is that being such a large coalition, with takes all over the place on many topics, is that we have a very hard time getting everyone to fall lockstep behind many things.
The right has no real platform, and thus can just use their wide propaganda network to just spread their new deflection of the day 24/7, and everyone in that network of lies does their part without question.
I watched a good video last night talking about how we need to build a network like the right has to spread the lefts talking points, our victories, and our goals. Because the current media landscape constantly bends themselves in knots to not offend the right instead of calling out their lies and bullshit for what it is. We need to stop giving the disinformation a platform outside of the Rights network.
This comment is arguing against points I did not make, and continuing to blame the antifascist coalition for the rise of fascism.
I wonder, what was the Democratic party wearing when they lost the election?
You could, possibly, potentially, consider that criticism is coming from a direction that outflanks you on leftism? And that it’s frustrated at the constant party/DC Beltway elitism clutching to neoliberalism during democratic apathy and distrust, and not you?
That's the narrative they espouse, but if you think about it for more than a second, no rational antifascist would attack another antifascist when there are fascists around. It's all about trying to divide a meaningful antifascist coalition.
Where have I heard that before? 🤔
Division only occurs as people follow their rational self interest - enforcing orthodoxy and silencing dissent to protect the party that failed us all, will only perpetuate their poor performance electorally. People who cannot afford the luxury of blind fealty will go somewhere else - even if that person is a charlatan grifter who never delivers. You cannot defeat populism with more elitism.
If you interpret an ally trying to help as an attack? Clearly I can’t help you brother
Blue conservatives jerking themselves off over what trump will do to the people they dislike is so fucking god damn cringe.
Fuck First-past-the-post voting for making me have to be "allies" with you.
It's funny that even with this much of a massive loss, you diehard democrats find a way to blame leftists. If such a massive margin of loss is the result of leftists, then that would mean leftists are too big of a group to ignore, but ignore is all you and the rest of the democratic party strategists did during the election so that you could instead curry favor with war criminals like dick cheney and telling people that their concerns of genocide don't matter. Turns out democrats are more scared of leftists gaining any power than they are of project 2025.
I voted for Harris but if "you guys" were really responsible for loosing then we should have given "them" more representation. But hey, at least this way we don't have to blame Zionists, transphobies, xenophobes, or misogynists. Right?
Say it then. We're in the period of time where we must critically evaluate the failures of the political machine that delivered this. I'm trying my level best to provide detailed, informative assessment of what I'm seeing without resorting to vitriol or anger, both online and in real life. If you have additional details, provide them. This is the time for vigorous debate, and reassessment, and I see the Democrats as much more of allies than the Republicans, so if you, or any other liberal can get past the phase where you're upset with the leftists who have broadly provided critical support for the Democratic coalliton, I welcome your input.
have you not been on lemmy the last six months or are you just blind?
Oh I get it now. You're saying that "there won't be a next election". Careful with the self fufulling prophecies. If you don't want to succumb to that, I recommend getting involved locally. Whoever you trust electorally will need your help now to build a bulwark for 2026, and getting your hands dirty will help you get over the pessimism.
What got people to vote for Biden but not Harris? A dire need. Not voting for Biden meant that Trump stayed in office. Even though the stakes were the same, too many people sat on the couch thinking it was going to happen again and they didn't have to go.
The turnout was really high, the democrats main plan for this election was catering to the "moderate republicans" which backfired spectacularly (a smaller % of registered republicans voted for democrats than in 2020), left-wing was pretty much abandoned in the campaign... It's a horror all around, and the democratic party only have themselves to blame for this blunder instead of trying to point fingers at literally everything (so far I've seen blame thrown on LGBTQ+, Biden, Kamala's aides, left wing voters, etc).
Liberals are the best at pretending that nothing is their fault, ever. It's always the fault of the leftists, a coincidence, or bad luck. Being liberal is like the art of being the most irresponsible you can be.
It wasnt commies, it was the working class cope harder.
Mean is no one going to call out the strategy for like the last month to possibly 3 months was her pandering as hard as she could to Republicans moderate and isolating the leftist Democratic base?
Of course not. Then they would have to learn that they can't out Republican a Republican.
People posting this type of stuff have to know that we have a an electoral college where swing states have a disproportionate influence on the outcome. Voter turnout was up in all of those states.
But didn't he also win the popular vote this time?
Yes, it was extremely Trump’s win. His first legitimate full win. There’s no EC shenanigans. Simply a majority of the votes and in a majority of the states.
Who cares, right? The meme suggests that people sat home this time. If they would have only come out, Harris would have won. But that's simply not true. Harris got more votes than Biden in 4 of the 7 swing states, about the same in 2 snd one is still being counted. Voter turnout out there was up as well. People didn't stay home where it mattered. Just more voted for Trump.
This discussion would be entirely irrelevant if we had a more representative electoral system.
People could be free to vote how they wish, secure in the knowledge their vote would still be counted against the republicans.
The people not voting are disenfranchised by the two party system. Change how we vote and allow competition into the electoral process. Multiple political parties should be free to compete.
More people represented and involved in the political process
More people voting means more votes for democrats
More chances to defeat the republicans
More people on the debate stage calling out bullshit (and you could have still hold one even if one party decides to not participate)
And last but not least, shouldn't we want the most representative voting system possible? Shouldn't we be concerned when our working class brothers/sisters/so on are under represented to the point that they dont vote?
Still not convinced First-past-the-post voting is the problem? Republicans in Florida passed legislation protecting it. Republicans in alaska are trying to repeal Ranked choice voting because voters used it to pick a more moderate conservative (the alternative was Sarah palin).
Isn't the republicans liking and wanting something not the most ultragigagigantic red flag that ever existed?
Democrats have proven they can no longer go it alone. They had their chance. Time to swallow your pride and arrogance and let others participate. This fight isn't about the democratic party. It's about survival.
The United States of America is more important then the Democratic Party.
Great theory, except Trump won the popular vote too.
And how effective was the Liz/Dick Cheney appeal to the suburbs, in the end? Given the growing demographics since 2020 Trump should not have effectively flatlined given a growing electorate - until there was depressed turnout he’s never actually had the popular vote.
2016:
Trump - 62,984,828 / 46.1%
Clinton - 65,853,514 / 48.2%
2020 Cycle with heightened turnout for all parties
Biden - 81,283,501 / 51.3% [+ 15,429,987 vs 2016]
Trump - 74,223,975 / 46.8% [+ 11,239,147 vs 2016]
2024:
Trump - 74,644,300 / 50.5% [+ 420,325 vs 2020]
Harris - 70,910,573 / 47.9% [- 10,372,928 vs 2020]
All that means is that the Dems ran on the terrible platform of trying to court Republicans instead of trying to court progressives. It has nothing to do with voting systems.
Alternative major candidate not left enough? I'ma let the extreme right win in that case, it is for everyone's benefit!
It's interesting that you think "Leftists" comprise tens of millions of votes. I'm flattered, but I don't think enough people came to the last DSA meeting to make that the most likely possibility.
Most all of the terminally online voted. Nonvoters aren't here arguing about politics on Lemmy. Leftists have been screaming for months that if the Dems don't make improving the lives of the working class their main focus, people aren't going to come out. I wish we had more political engagement too, but sarcastic comments about how people should be more strategic doesn't seem to be a viable get out the vote strategy. Maybe we should try making people's lives materially better.
I don't understand the "we were to small to matter" argument I've been seeing. If that's true, why on Earth would you expect to matter enough to move the Democratic platform, or to shape society after leftists "burn it all down" (whatever that means)?
You're talking about two different numbers.
I'm not sure I said "we're too small to matter". But exit polls said that 10% of the electorate cared about Gaza. If everyone who abstained from voting due to Gaza had voted for Harris, she still would have lost.
But what I'm trying to tell you is that the issue is not communists, socialist, and anarchists. Agree with us or not but we are deeply involved in politics and extremely tuned in. (Compared to the average American. I think everyone on a political memes channel on Lemmy is at least paying attention. Everyone reading this is an outlier.)
Leftists tend to conflate leftist policies with "policies that help the working class". I tend to think the latter is a subset of the former. Democrats need to get out and fight for the working class enough to excite people to come to the polls. It's not leftists that you need to convince to vote, but the people working three jobs and still having trouble with rent who think that politics doesn't really affect them. By the time you get that person out, Leftists will be over the moon for you.
I did not say anything about burning anything.
I don't believe I am talking about two different numbers when I'm talking about the same voting bloc for both.
The "we" I used was probably misplaced, since I think you are making a distinction between your position and "leftists", who are the people I've seen on Lemmy advocating for destroying the system.
I'm not sure I follow your point about political engagement, I don't think I mentioned anything about that. I was commenting on the size of the group of third-party and non- voters. If that group wasn't big enough to change the outcome, I just don't see how they could be relevant at all.
I think we must be in agreement, though, since you suggest that Democrats need to better engage with the working class. Maybe we need a dedicated labor party, though without a more parliamentary system, the parties can't really be single-issue in the US.
Sorry if I was unclear. I am a leftist. I care about Gaza. I understand that Gaza was not a winning issue.
I am making a distinction between people who vote third party or don't vote to send a message and people who don't vote out of apathy. The former group is small. I don't think a foreign policy issue will usually swing an election.
I, for one, don't believe that electoralism will solve our problems. I vote for harm reduction and on the off chance I'm wrong, and because our voices matter a bit more in down ballot races. I'd guess this is the most common position amongst people left of the Dems.
And Americans don't get it. As a Canadian it's insane watching these people who helped Trump by not voting, jump through hoops to try and justify and blame others for their lack of sense and duty
Don't worry, Canada is next. Fascists are making inroads worldwide because neoliberals would rather let the fascists win than have the rich make any less money.
The vast majority of internet ""leftists"" are MAGA trolls trying to divide.
A McCarthyist says what?
I didn't want Biden either.
I don't know if y'all remember this, but the DNC decided to forgo a primary and forced Harris on us. When she ran in 2020 during the primary, she was so unpopular that she dropped out before any votes were cast.
Why did anyone ever think she would win? It's almost identical to when the DNC put Hilary up against Trump.
You can only fool me with this "lesser evil" bullshit so many times.
And if they will spend the last minutes they had on primaries, first of all you wouldn't participate in them anyway because you think they all rigged or whatever, and then you would not vote anyway because whoever won on primaries didn't have enough time to campaign and you just feel like you don't know enough about them to make a decision.
The levels of bullshit you have to come up with to avoid admitting you just collectively wanted Trump to win is astonishing really.
You're doing a whole lot of assuming there. I absolutely vote in the primaries.
Accusing me of wanting Trump in office is just dead wrong.
This is why the DNC fails. Y'all instantly attack anyone that doesn't "fall in line" and immediately alienate them.
It's honestly a bit pathetic that you can't even hear any criticism of the party.
Hey, good for you, you voted. Most people didn't.
They wanted Trump to win, or didn't care who does. They are at fault. They had the ability to change the course of election and chose this way. Even trump supporters are less at fault, they're in a cult, their brain fell off, they don't have a choice.
Democratic party cares about opinions of people who vote for them, it's that simple.
I vote in all the primaries - and it’s a sobering assessment that pulling “Uncommitted” in 2024 was my most enthusiastic electoral participation since 2008. I still voted for Dem harm reduction for the general - in a swing state thankyouverymuch - but look at where we are. 100% unified neo-fash/nativist government with Trump at the helm.
Why is the Democratic National Committee so afraid of either listening to, or allowing the electorate to participate?
Like 9-10 million votes are yet to be counted.
In every swing state except PA. There was record breaking ballots cast. In PA it was close to the record. She lost the election because bad policies not people not showing up. People changed their mind in the 6 swings states. Idk why or what for but this election wasn't lost because of 10 million people not voting it was lost by my calculations 275,092 votes in 4 states.
I'll wait until the count is over to check if she earned more votes in the 6 swing states than biden in 2020. But lots more votes to count again like 10 million yet to be counted almost all in states that are pretty much decided so they didn't make a difference anyway
These people would rather just bitch about leftists than face the reality that they haven't had a serious, competitive primary in almost two decades and have fully committed to elite control of the primary process. It's peak moderate head-in-sand burying: "we don't need to reform anything, we just need to vote harder and yell even more about anyone criticizing us." I voted for Harris and think it was dumb not to, but at this point anyone insisting that the main problem was people not voting hard enough is a fucking idiot and shouldn't be taken seriously.
The problem as I see it and right now we need to wait for more information is they went to the right and thought they could pick up Republicans there is a report that says all the registered Republicans voted republican (don't know accuracy) except 6% in 2020 and 5%2024. So they picked up no one when they should have went full leftists revolutionary change. They didn't when despite having the most amount of money so they don't even need to court the gazillionaires if they are just going to lose.
Joe delivered the Inflation Reduction Act. It invests hundreds of billions of dollars into various climate initiatives over 10 years. That includes renewable generation, grid storage, EV, and nuclear generation. Then there's infrastructure investment, which included much needed investments in transit and intercity rail.
Yeah, best to go with the guy who says he thinks climate change is a liberal hoax
Believe Climate Change is real, but insist we can't do anything to stop it as your base is driven insane by the loaming crisis.
Or deny climate change is happening and use your state agents to suppress dissenting views, so that people aren't terrified all the time.
These are your only two choices.
Thats how our shitty elections work, yes.
But we all know you don't give a shit, you probably didn't even bother to register to vote. Joking about how few extra palestinians would die under trump in that other thread is kind of a giveaway you're not interested in actually doing anything.
Every accusation is a confession
Yeah, given the choice between racism, mass deportations, mass incarcerations of trans people, and abuse of the office to punish his political opponents, and none of those things, I can definitely understand staying home too. They were really the same on all the other issues, and those are the ones that matter.
I hope the next time I'm trapped in a bus with ten other people, and we have a choice between driving the bus off a cliff and turning around and going back into town to get ice cream, I hope it's a better flavor of ice cream. I voted ice cream this time, even though I hate rocky road. But the next time it better not be.
"But the dems say that every year!" You saw what Trump did the first time he was in office. You've seen how directly he can control all three branches of the federal government. You've heard what he promised to do this time around. How can anyone with more than six brain cells possibly justify staying home?
If you talk to anyone affected by the proposed policies you'd know there's a fucking lightyear of distance between the two. Its not sugar coating. You can measure the difference in gallons of human blood.
Gay and trans people are fucked by this. The supreme court is fucked by this. Ukraine is fucked by this. The climate is fucked by this. Immagrants are fucked by this. There's now a real risk of entire cities in the US having the military used on them if they defy police. I'm sure you saw the people in portland being disappeared in vans during the riots there in 2020.
Every extra person that dies or suffers because of this shit is on the bloody hands of assholes that sat this election out because picking a lesser evil was too hard of a choice for their delicate constitutions.
You are doing all these people a disservice by trying to console them for being cowards and sitting things out. And they are cowards. The only sugar coating going on is to say they are not.
And now we need to toughen them up. Because they chose a more difficult path for everyone.
[citation needed]
No one does. But putting Kamala in office would have at least given us an easier conduit towards getting out of it.
Listen, as a brown person in America, just be honest.
You caea about the genocide of brown people elsewhere, just not here.
It's OK, the vote is over, you don't have to deny it anymore, we get it, it's not like we're surprised or anything, it's basically America's legacy.
The shocking part?
We thought you at least cared about women, but you're literally no better than the racist sexist fascist neoconfederates that are proud to vote Trump.
Just be honest with your words, your actions already spoke the truth.
You realize the person you replied to already said they voted D...
Right?
But even if they didn't explicitly state it, the ones who didn't hold their nose aren't going to be hanging out on political forums.
Why would they?
They're politically disengaged because "both parties are the same".
The way to get them involved is moving the party to the left, not the right like we have been. It's always a great time to start, and the job is never over.
The billionaires won't stop buying off both parties, we gotta try to save at least one party.
What was Biden doing to stop the killing in his own country?
You've got states lawlessly executing innocent men. You've got women bleeding out on hospital floors because doctors don't want to be convicted of doing an illegal abortion. Over a million COVID deaths and counting. The rollback of post-COVID economic relief combined with the spike in inflation has driven up national poverty and thrown thousands more Americans out on the street despite millions of vacant units. Storms are killing Americans. Power failures are killing Americans. Lack of pharmaceuticals are killing Americans. Police violence. Vigilantism. The oppressive heat.
Biden's been in charge though it all.
Right back atcha.
Ignorant moron.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/02/us/alabama-hanging-death-dennoriss-richardson/index.html
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/fbi-civil-rights-investigation-nc-police-shooting-1.6004160
There are hundreds of these investigations, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Chauvin was in 2021
Seriously, as a brown person, shut the fucking fuck up! You have no idea what living in this country under republicans is like, you can't begin to imagine it and you need to take your privileged dick out of your overprivileged ass and realize what many of us are going to have to face now.
Literally have the KKK reforming in anticipation of his inauguration, it's "good people on both sides" all over again.
Tell it to Eric Adams, a man who took office under the Democratic flag and threw our people directly under the bus. Tell it to Lori Lightfoot, London Breed, John Whitmire - it seems like every Dem mayor has made it open season on the homeless and the vulnerable.
But you don't want to see this, because you think politics is a spectator sport.
With the blessing of every law enforcement agency in the country, it seems.
Blue Lives Dems don't seem to mind.
I could not dream of better evidence of a Lemming being a troll than replying to someone saying they're scared for their life under the current political administration with "you think politics is a spectator sport".
Dude you have problems.
Trump literally told the proud boys to stand by, called neo-nazis "good people" and I just don't even get where you're going.
Politics isn't a sport, and the fuckers who didn't vote deserve the blame because people will be hurt.
You're the one who seems to be trying to make it a game.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
You missed the second part: good men to do nothing, and your candidate to make a bunch of shitty shitty decisions.
Its utilitaritarian philosophy. Its saying if you stand by and do nothing an even worse person will do things in your name. The result of nonvoters here was trump. its rather explicit. By not voting "your guy" is whoever wins, aka Trump. That is the essence of the statement.
critics of acts of utilitarianism raise three strong objections against it. According to these critics, utilitarianism a) approves of actions that are clearly wrong, b) undermines trust among people, and c) is too demanding because it requires people to make excessive levels of sacrifice.
https://iep.utm.edu/util-a-r/#:~:text=As%20discussed%20earlier%2C%20critics%20of,make%20excessive%20levels%20of%20sacrifice.
I agree with all that. I'm just asking you to stop coddling people who have made all our lives worse because they the prospect of voting vexes them. Do you think democrats will come up with better policies because they lost?
We're now further from a better deal for america than we have been in a while.
Second highest voter turnout in any US presidential election on record. Both by numbers and percentage of eligible voters.
Yep. Appears America is just that stupid.
Lmao what?
Biden saying he'll bring more of what Obama brought.
Vs Harris saying she'll bring more of what Biden brought.
Well drone strikes and bank bailouts are popular in this country
People got a clue after 40+ years of Lucy yanking the football away at the last moment.
This
I've heard the following arguments, I'm ordering them in the way I think they effect an election.
Elon musk buyout and the AI lockdown of social media, and banning of tiktok have all had the effect to fracture democratic/leftist messaging (fault: dems, biden, musk, reddit, people who stayed on x. Affected groups: young people, people who are hard to reach with ads)
The primary election is basically undivertable campaign time for democrats. The lack of primary campaigns and debates means harris had less time to build support and a base (fault biden, affected groups: everyone).
Lack of economic excitement around policies and a shutdown of effective messaging on price gouging in favor of saying a former president will surely destroy the country this time. (fault Harris, donors effect, likely low turnout on younger people)
Lack of demographic excitement around key policies. Latinos: Immigration. Muslims: Israel. (fault biden/harris, effect low turnout in key groups)
Wasteful campaign spending on republicans: Courting Liz Cheney and buying ads to woo republicans at best wasted money and at worst is a giveaway to telecoms who immediately donated it to republicans(fault Harris, effect waste)
Covid provided a boost in 2020 that no longer exists
Mail in voting helped some people vote in 2020. I would say this a tossup however because I do think republicans are able to abuse flaws in mail in systems.
Harris is a woman. I don't buy this one because nonvoters seem disengaged rather than hostile.
feelin cute, gonna repost this, might delete later k love you bi
Kamala Harris lost every swing state AND the Senate. We live in the same country we did 4 years ago, we live in the same country that elected Barrack Obama twice.
People are paying 50% more for bread, eggs, and rent, with no relief given, no corporate greed stiffled BEFORE it hit average Americans in the face, and just kept hitting them. The average American doesn't care about economic numbers, they care about whether or not they can pay the rent.
Trump isn't going to make any of this better, he's going to make it ordinates worse. People vote for change, when faced with the inevitability of suffering they'll vote for different, come what may.
I don't think anything about Biden set "the commies on fire", but he was elected long before 7 October 2023, so he didn't have to contend with all the well-deserved outrage over US support for Israel's genocide in Gaza. And yes, I'm well aware it'll likely get worse under Trump. But not being as bad as the next guy simply doesn't seem to inspire voter turnout for some reason.
It's kind of like selling a new brand of chocolate, and advertising it as being "not quite as bad as Hershey's" (yes, I know, it's a low bar), then blaming customers for "sitting on the couch" and not buying it. Oh, and lets not forget that both chocolate bars advertise a policy of "10% of profits goes to genocide".
Democrats are up in arms about people not buying their shitty chocolate bar, when any decent person would just stop eating chocolate if those were the only two options available. But the Democrats refuse to change the recipe or the packaging because it's their position that nothing needs changing - it's the voters who are wrong. Does that sound like an argument that's likely to win over any voters?
Lack of an active genocide?
Crazy how mail in voting was universal in 2020. Then we had states pass a slew of laws to make it increasingly difficult, and turnout slumped.
Biden would not have won if we weren't also in the middle of the greatest global pandemic in a century that the incumbent Trump administration was handling terribly.
Not right enough?
Harris represented a “return to normal” which for the working poor pinched by inflation and rising cost of living, meant more slow misery. Abandoning the supposed foundation of the party whilst running against a supposed anti-establishment/disruptive candidate via an appeal to neocon decency was foolish. “Banking” on voting blocs they actively rejected was foolish.
The party needs to do better, and that starts with us holding them to account for dropping the bag and critically misreading/ignoring the situation, and demanding change.
Your super-wealthy decided who won. Trump offered them the most tax breaks and government contracts. As such, he had the most money to spend on his campaign and all the social media bosses on-side. Republican or Democrat, the biggest spender always wins.
Thats literally all there is to it.
Derp.
That gives a false picture since it only counts legal declared spending.
For instance, what's the effective value to Trump's campaign of Elon Musk buying Twitter and using it to explicitly promote right wing views? How much did Russia spend this time to promote Trump? What about Israel, cause I'll wager Netanyahu prefers having Trump in office, since Kamala might've demanded at least some holding back.
Actual spending to promote Republican and right wingers was way higher.
Where did you get that screenshot from? I mean, traditionally, you would provide and link and not just a screenshot. You know, in case its wildly misleading or something.
Also, don't only count the amount spent after Harris joined the race or presume musk is going to self report accurately.
If this really is the first time in modern American history that the smallest spender won then thats huge. Although, it'll only be due to the increased power of social media owners which I mentioned above.
Shameful in every sense of the word.
Some will mark this trump presidency as the end, but it really should be Citizen's United.
No wonder so much effort was made to keep bernie Sanders at bay.
This undercounts it. Musk’s “million dollar a day giveaway” is a notable example that wasn’t included in the stats. The shadowy $40 mil crypto ad buy in Ohio are some examples of adjacent spending that didn’t carry over in Trump’s column.
Because Biden was to the left of Harris, and Gaza wasn't a big issue? Like yeah, the people who didn't vote did so because of Harris' move to the right
The missing votes are idiots who saw the bad lady talked about on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter. Money buys opinions.
The mad thing about the result is that the Dems spent so much more money and still lost. Not that you can easily quantify the financial value of changing the algorithm on twitter to favour Trump.
He's talking about the money Russia spent paying for tiktokers and youtubers to send corrupted ,messaging to the addicts.
Twitter, Washington Post, FaceBook, TikTok, YouTube: they all favored Trump. But YouTube may have just been unintentional as they are grossly incompetent and dont understand how their own algorithm leans into extremes.
Yeah good point, it was more than just twitter.
YouTube definitely know they have an issue and don't care, or they would do something about it. Radicalising people with extreme content increases engagement which makes them money, the only thing that will make them change it is regulation (with teeth).
That is fair that a person becoming radicalized does engage more, but it also turns a lot of people away from the platform and the loss of advertisers and users on Twitter is proof of that.
Except money evidently doesn't buy it by itself. If it did Harris would have won. Effective messaging (Where is the Dem Joe Rogan? They kicked the closest thing they have out of the DNC for expressing broadly popular opinions) and playing to the base of people willing to vote for you (Dems will never get those Republican voters no matter how many immigrants they promise to stop at the border) wins elections.
Right but if George Soros or the Disney Heiress owned Twitter it probably would be a lot closer.
Fucking absurd.
Is it that absurd? Sure Trump's campaign is dripping with much more overt hate and racism, but if you think that the party that welcome DICK CHENEY with open arms and paraded him around isn't doing something wrong then I can't help you.
Also the mods removed my comment, so how wrong can I really be?
Her platform was literally to tax the rich, make a ceasefire in gaza, and decriminalize Marijuana.
Trump's platform was to have his opponents put in front of a firing squad, force Ukraine to surrender to Russia, cut taxes for the rich (again), and put in place Tariffs which will absolutely destroy USA commerce.
That's not remotely the fucking same.
Are you forgetting that she was in office when she said she was going to make a ceasefire? Why didn't she do it then? Where was that?
And show me her plan to tax the rich. She is a blatantly pro corporate candidate.
And they just threw the weed thing in there at the end because it was becoming very obvious that her platform was massively unpopular. She famously was super hard on people being arrested for marijuana charges when she was a prosecutor.
She is still Vice President, not President, but they have on multiple occasions attempted to coerce a ceasefire, sometimes escalating to Biden swearing at Netanyahu over the phone.
Compared to the Trump Plan of writing Israel a Blank Check. Hell, they've literally already supported a single state solution under his previous admin when he put his son in law Jared Kushner in charge of the situation.
You can read more about Kamala Harris' tax plans HERE
She has also floated uncapping social security taxes so top earners would pay more, and also introducing a unrealized capital gains tax on large amounts.
Thinking that Kamala was the Corporate Candidate is absolutely asinine, but it's also got some truth to it as literally everyone except the richest Americans will suffer as a result of the Trump Admin. The fact that you can even compare the two means you knew absolutely nothing about how Trump cut taxes for the rich in 2017 and raised it on the lowest earning brackets.
Are you familiar with the term "political theater"?
It's where a politician says one thing and makes a big show about something, and then does the opposite.
Why would anyone be scared of the geriatric lame duck president yelling at them?
And why didn't this administration reverse Trump's tax cuts for the rich or actually do a damn thing about it?
You're being lied to and you're believing it.
And Kamala is so pro corporate that she is one of the biggest and most effective proponents of California's prisoner slave labor.
Who do you think it's using this prison labor? Who is the beneficiary of not having to pay their workers?? Could it possibly be the giant corporations that run American???
Are you familiar with the fact that Trump literally cut taxes for the rich, raised the federal deficit, and raised taxes on the lowest earners? Thats not theatre, that literally happened. You have a party that at least promises to make lives better and a party that literally will make lives worse with a proven record, and you helped elect the latter like a fuckin moron.
You want to talk about benefiting off of Criminal Labor? Biden pardoned hundreds of Marijuana convictions one at a time and made it so that future nonviolent possession convictions of the same nature don't happen.
Removing a tax plan that hasn't expired would take a 2/3rds vote from the senate, DNC never had more than 48.
Little known thing called COVID-19
What about Joe Biden made him sufficiently left while Kamala Harris wasn't?
-Joe Biden wasn't campaigning to finish building Trump's wall. Or saying that actually it was a good idea to build the wall and the only problems were just that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for it and that he didn't finish the job.
-Joe Biden wasn't campaigning on being pro-fracking. And bragging about how he was the tie breaking vote for the IRA, which leased new land for fracking. (I understand there was more to this act, but Harris points to it as a way to show she supports fracking)
-At the time the genocide in Gaza hadn't ramped up and gotten as much publicity as has now, so we didn't get to hear Joe Biden's stance on it.
-Joe Biden wasn't calling to ensure America has the "strongest most lethal fighting force in the world".
-Joe Biden didn't align himself with the Cheneys.
You see that 10 million more Democrats voted for Biden, but stayed home for Harris and you believe the problem is with the people and not the candidate? Now granted, racism and sexism played a role in this for sure. But to attribute that much of a difference just to that? Most of the people that are deeply racist and sexist are already voting for Trump because he supports those ideas. And from what I've seen, the Republican voters stayed pretty consistent from last election. It was mainly a dip in Democratic voters. If the problem is with the voters and not just that Harris was an incredibly weak candidate, then why do you believe that many more people voted last election?
Didn't she gain votes in the swing states and mainly lost votes in states she won nevertheless?
No
She out performed Buden in WI, GA, NV, and NC. She underperformed in PA and MI. AZ wasn't done counting when I got these numbers. Trump gained in all the rest.
Kamala Harris lost every swing state and Democrats lost The Senate
Sure, but you can gain votes and still lose. That is not a contradiction
That's what they were aiming for. It didn't work.
A California lawyer is not the candidate you want when you run to the right. Harris would have won the popular vote if she ran left, but she still would have lost the swing states, and thus the election.
If you want to win the swing states, you need to pick a Democrat from a swing state or a red state. Mark Kelly would have won with Harris's campaign.
How do we know this when we haven’t finished counting the votes?
Edit: I realize this might have accidentally come across as a “gotcha” question, but I really mean it. So many people are speaking with confidence about voter demographics when only like 60% of the vote is counted. What am I missing?
Seriously what did you expect after 4 years of genocide joe?
More importantly I can't believe libs are still vote shaming (about "commies" lmao) a week after their garbage candidate got blown out.
Never going to learn.
Biden followed Trump so it was fresh in everyone's minds how awful he was
I'm toying with the idea that we're all wrong, and it was actually widespread fraud that "won" the election for Trump.
Highly, highly doubtful
Does that matter?
I don't know, you're toying with the idea of mass fraud with no real basis. Seems counterproductive at best.
Counterpoint: toying with the idea of widespread fraud won more presidential election than Kamala Harris.
Willing to consider anything and everything to ensure the democratic party gets no blame are we?
Democrats must change. Democrats need to open our electoral process to third parties. No more keeping things fundamentally the same. That era is over. Get over it.
It’s not that the Democratic Party needs defending for their lackluster ideas, it’s more that the candidate who is far more unpopular won by a landslide. It’s so counterintuitive.
Because of targeted social networks circles. The candidate to prop got a radicalized base, the candidate to lose got messaging that either indicated people should disengage ("Genocide Kamala!") or were given the same sort of messaging in 2016 that made Hillary such a surefire win you didn't even have to go to vote, because what's one more vote (appeal to laziness). Cambridge Analytica's successors were also armed with LLM AI as well as Big Data personal data identification this time around.
They clearly prepped up in case the votes didn't go their way, but the post- truth politics paired with people who consider their social network fueled emotions more credible than the facts and merits of lifetime experts was more effective than they could have ever predicted, and this will mark the tendency for all future elections in our "democracies" were education clearly has had no long term impact.
Real answer: Biden has a penis and white skin.
I reject this beggar mentality that we can’t do better because of how the chessboard stands today - as if it has sat forever unchanged and immutable - Obama stands in stark contrast to that. Clinton (awful politicaly and personally toxic as she was) still won the popular vote against Trump. In 2016 when he lied and ran as an outsider, promising to “drain the swamp”.
Facts. Pollsters ran into this nonstop. 'I don't like trump but I JUST CAN'T vote for a woman. They're tOo eMoTiOnAl!!'
Seriously, fucking racist as fuck 'left'.
We're going to have a genocide of brown people right here, but they don't give the slightest shit.
Americans have been force feeding one another the most vulgar anti-poc propaganda decade after decade for my entire life.
It's so crazy to hear the handful of college Leftists who picked up a copy of Zinn or ran a union drive at their local Starbucks get blamed for billions of dollars and millions of hours of hate jammed into peoples' eyeballs and ear holes.
How did you come to this conclusion?
You'll never outrun the propaganda, particularly when you're as much a vector for it as a victim of it.
Mother-fucker, I outran literal rednecks with bats, I lived there, what the fucking fuck?!
Are you serious? You genuinely believe it isn't that bad?
What do you think it's like?!!?!
bad post, the flaw is OP’s assertion that Biden “set commies on fire”
COVID brought universal early voting and Biden didn’t go mask off conservative and communicated at least a modicum of support for young people facing alienation and low income. that alone is enough to set normies working two jobs on fire. commies have so little to do with it it’s laughable.
(in my opinion) Biden-Harris probably had the opportunity to win over normies again despite Harris’ gender and race (normies are racist and sexist) but instead they spent the last year courting conservatives and nazis. they even forced Walz to silence his normally empathetic and empirically based positions on the border.
if mcdonalds runs an ad for the all new mcburger, and no one buys it? we generally will blame the advertising strategy or the product concept itself. but for some reason when we order a mcburger from the DNC and they deliver a fucking cold tortilla with runny egg on it, it’s “the people’s fault” there wasn’t a lot of buyers.
i voted for harris. she is by far the best candidate of the race. but i will not play pretend and hold her and biden blameless for their abject inattention to the communicated values of their constituents.
The fact that he had a penis
Goddamn y’all lefties or whatever are OUT for these recrimination threads.
Well I suppose it’s the last bid for attention for another 3.5 years.
“Now is not the time for criticism, it’s not election season - save that for the primaries”
“Now is not the time for criticism, the primaries are soon”
“Now is not the time for criticism, there’s only 100 days to go before the general”
“Now is not the time for criticism, we just had a huge, crushing loss”
So are liberals/democrat faithful/etc really committed to never learning, or never listening? When am I allowed to criticize half of the political duopoly that is increasing out of touch not just with my concerns, but openly snubs voting blocs and demands fealty in return for the status quo?
Oh absolutely. Let’s get down and discuss all of the policy proposals we want the next presidential candidate to have RIGHT NOW.
Go.
A popular mandate. That’s literally the bar we’re talking about here, and I’m amazed to see people upset that others are pointing out how low it is.
But when they fake a primary, you don’t get a genuinely popular candidate. When they don’t even hold a primary, you never hear the other opinions in the electorate. Biden owns a lot of responsibility for this loss, but the leadership has their share too for trying to walk this over the line on diet republicanism in a quest to scrape by 270.
Well, okay, that's not a policy proposal, but I see you've got the beginnings of . . . . party. . policy? Maybe?
Can you be a little more - y'know, government policy proposal-y? What you'd want the candidate to advocate for?
Or were you just saying people weren't allowed to crap on the DNC before the election and now that it's lost people aren't being allowed to crap on the DNC because instead of being insufferable assholes with nothing of value to add, actually, colonialist imperialist genocider corporate whores are preventing them from changing the world for good?
Bruh if you wanna argue with yourself, go ahead and build the straw man already
The argument I’m making in reply to your “stop complaining” post (and that you seem to deliberately be ignoring) is that the DNC and/or establishment Democrats routinely silence internal dissent at any and all times. And that right now they still aren’t listening internally, and have demonstrated a commitment to gaslight voters that inflation isn’t real, and that voters shouldn’t be trusted/allowed to pick who they get to vote for.
Voters have told us in exit poll after exit poll, that their primary issues are economic uncertainty and cost of living, loss of faith in governance, and then immigration.
Okay, so let's just take as a given that, yes, the Democratic candidates should have focused on the economy, immigration, abortion, and the state of democracy, with apparently 4% of foreign policy thrown in.
That is what you're arguing they should have done, correct?
If so, what do you think they did NOT say about those issues. You can focus on Kamala if you prefer, or the entirety of all Democratic candidates if you want to assert that.
Correct, that’s my argument.
Economy/ Cost of living: Beyond pithy “I feel your pain” statements and a late-election focus on price gouging and new homebuyer credits, there was not much for the working poor.
For someone pinched by inflation and/or predatory corporate pricing, being told “more of the last four year’s policy is coming, sorry we have no money - except for Israel” is a huge turnoff.
State of Democracy: I think the DNC/establishment Dems massively misread this issue as purely J6/dictator Trump - because ignoring the massive democratic disengagement and apathy means they don’t have to address why voters are unenthusiastic about electoral participation at most levels, and instead “it’s all the MAGAs fault” without questioning why the MAGA movement exists beyond “they’re deplorable”. Trump’s vote total basically flatlined from 2020, two different assassination attempts barely moved polling, he isn’t an unknown figure and voters at large do not like him. What he is however, is a break from “more of the same” no matter how damaging or foolish that may be for the world/country. In no order, here’s what Dems should target/message on:
You are more then welcome to visit my ask lemmy post about replacing First-past-the-post voting with a more representative electoral system. No more party worship, no more two party system, no more handcuffs on our wrists.
We can be free.