Great. Glad to see that we're learning nothing here. If I wasn't pushed into despair by the election results, seeing progressives respond this way to the loss might push me over the edge.
We are a bigoted country, no doubt. But, our working class is struggling. People are inherently good, inherently bad, brilliant, dumb, and all sorts of combinations of those. Material conditions, messaging, and framing all work together in bringing out these different sides of ourselves both at the societal and individual level.
Responding to this loss with "the only way to win is to be racist" is basically just giving up and saying the fascists are right. If we decide to roll over and die because we're too chickenshit to fight, too cynical to have any imagination, and too self-pitying to even lift a finger, the most vulnerable of us (which includes me) will perish.
We HAVE to be better than this.
These aren't progressives. These are liberals. These are the same people who, when they were told 8 years ago that economic anxiety made voters turn to Trump, mocked them, saying, "Oh, I guess the economy made them racist!"
Yeah, racism and misogyny played a huge role in this election, but people don't vote for a guy who promises to burn everything down when they're doing well. I'd have thought this time, given that the Democrats lost ground with both black and Latino voters, they might finally have to acknowledge that their failures are due to more than just bigotry. I'm starting to doubt that, though...
I’m can only follow this logic so far though. The problem is they are better off, the economy is better, but how do you get people to see it, believe it?
The obvious example is inflation, not that President really has much control over it. We’ve gone through a wave of inflation, triggered by causes during the previous president’s term. It generally trended down during Biden’s term and is now close to what we’d normally expect.
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many people see the accumulated inflation of four years during Biden term and are frustrated by how much more expensive everything is
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another perspective is inflation was triggered in Trump’s term, it took four years to get under control, now people voted to do it all over again rather than stay the course that got it under control. Staying the course is boring
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Responding to this loss with “the only way to win is to be racist” is basically just giving up and saying the fascists are right.
And the joke is that Dems will still lose on these terms, because they are already branded the Woke party. Might as well try and out-racist the KKK as the GOP. It's not a race Dems are in a position to win. All they can do is shed even more of their base to Jill Stein and Uncommitted.
What's hilarious is the Dems are branded as woke not because of their politicians but because of their average voters are. You can convince a conservative voter that a (D) politician is not woke but they still won't vote for him because only woke people vote (D). Dems would have to purge some of their most fanatical supporters to win those conservative votes.
Imagine suggesting the Democrats tell people with the "In this house we believe..." signs to take those signs down. For some reason people are taking this suggestion seriously instead of immediately dismissing it as either inane babbling or deliberate sabotage.
If you look at the voters who voted for the dem in 2020 and sat out this time it was almost all older white men
Older white men were the demographic that stayed home because they didn't want to vote for a woman who had identical policies to the man they previously voted for.
Pretending like white men sat out exclusively because of "inflation" while no other demographic did is probably not the takeaway
That being said we absolutely need to kill the Duopoly, hopefully a third progressive party can exist with the Dems sucking corporate cock
I keep telling myself I won't comment on political posts, and yet here I go again.
If we stop looking at non-voters, and start actually looking at voters, you'll see that Trump gained support among both women and non-white voters. Why is nobody asking about that? I would rather they have stayed home than given Trump the extra vote, but all you hear about now is low turn out in white men. She lost in almost every bloc because she didn't inspire any of the dem base. High turnout skews dem and she was just not an inspiring candidate.
Kamala had no time to campaign, was an unknown to voters despite being the VP, made no strides to distance herself from Biden, and failed to run a cohesive strategy. People just were not excited to vote for her. Do I think a popularity contest is the best way to elect the president, no, but that doesn't change the system that we have.
The race was extremely close, and the fact that Trump GAINED in POC and women blocs probably speaks more to the campaign that was run rather than America's inherent sexism or racism. Just to be clear, America is sexist and racist, and people can be self hating or whatever, but she GAINED points in the white male category and lost in the black male category. Sure, white men should have shown up, but it's very easy to cry "racism/sexism" if you ignore all the other people who didn't show up or the people who DID show up and voted trump. She might've run as well as she could have, but it was a bad campaign.
There was a 5% loss in young voters. I wonder how energized they would have been not just to vote but to donate and volunteer had she run a different campaign. It's easy to Monday morning quarterback, but Joe ruined the chances of a dem winning this year.
If dems still want to blame racism/sexism, then I don't want to see any dems support POC/women in primaries. Dems should only run white males and if I see a POC/woman being pushed again I will assume they want to sabotage that year. I expect "I'm not voting for a POC/woman candidate" to be a well regarded and widespread dem opinion for practicality sake. Either stop running them ever, or admit they can win with better campaign strategies. You can't have it both ways.
Going off these numbers: https://www.nbcwashington.com/decision-2024/2024-voter-turnout-election-demographics-trump-harris/3762138/
If you look at the voters who voted for the dem in 2020 and sat out this time it was almost all older white men
Kamala Harris won 28%, while Donald Trump won 47%, according to unofficial results from the city clerk, reported by the network.
Metro Detroit is home to the nation's largest concentration of Arab Americans, with a large proportion of them living in Dearborn. The city—which Democrat Joe Biden won by a 3-to-1 margin in 2020—has been roiled by political turmoil, with many upset with the Biden-Harris administration's handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
Older white man here. I stayed home because of Gaza. I have 3 progressive friends who say the exact same thing. None of us are Muslim, and we're all white and older.
By the way:Democrats had bet on women showing up in force. They didn’t https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3e8z53qyd5o
It is clearly a joke aimed at the futility of trying to capitulate to reactionaries by becoming reactionary
Responding to this loss with "the only way to win is to be racist" is basically just giving up and saying the fascists are right.
Nobody is saying that.
I mean... it's hard to interpret "the problem is her messaging is she didnt come across as a white man with grievances..." as anything but claiming sexism and racism. There's hyperbole there, but blaming the loss on those factors assumes that people couldn't have possibly abstained from voting, or voted against her without those factors. I don't believe that's the case.
Too frequently we call people these things and basically lock them out of discussion. For example, if you called me a racist, I'd no longer trust anything else you said to me because I know myself and clearly you like telling people things you know nothing about. I think that exchange happened with a bunch of people, which is why there were so many people who just assumed many of the things said about Trump were just political lies made to discredit him. After they experienced the same hyperbole themselves.
That said... theres alot of bigots out there too.
To be fair, you and the other commenter just did.
Democrats continuing to insist they need to get more racist instead of appealing to their base.
Is that your takeaway, genius? Was that how Biden won over Trump FOUR SHORT YEARS AGO, by appealing to the democratic base?
Funny, I don't remember the base being pleased with Biden's record AT ALL. But.. he was a white male, wasn't he, hm?
You seem to have a very foggy memory of Biden's campaign because he did make numerous concessions to the Bernie wing. His failure to deliver on those promises didn't mean he didn't make them.
On the other hand Harris openly flaunted her conservative endorsements and campaigned with Liz Cheney. Her strategy was explicitly to court moderate republicans who voted Trump anyways. Perhaps she would've peeled off more moderate republicans if she was a white man but that was my point. You want the democrats to appeal to more racists and you're insisting that they do that by being more racist.
They had a damn cop run for president and then took the black vote as a given. Fucking dumb.
Harris' messaging problem is the same problem Hilary Clinton had in 2016. Instead of appealing to the base, she went after Republicans and just assumed the left would be on board. The Democratic establishment does this every time, move closer to the center and right and tell the leftists shut up and go away.
The average Democrat is a well off person living in the suburbs who doesn't want higher taxes but doesn't want to appear racist.
I wouldn't call that the average general democrat voter but that for sure is the average democrat primary voter by like 90%.
I understand the poster may be very emotional because of the election. Yet, This strikes me as incredibly reductive.
I think she lost because, she represents the continuation of the current administration. People want to break from the status quo, even if that means harming society to do it.
The dems need a left wing populist, asap.
Only right wing socialists are electable. Billions of dollars in propaganda told me so.
Liberals would much rather turn to fascism than let a leftist win
A populist isn't gonna save you from the toxicity of your society and the stupidity of your people. You guys deserve what you get
Keep pushing this message. Keep doubling down. I'm looking forward to the fact that most of you learn nothing, you insist the other side is just dumb, and you'll scream so from your lungs as 2028 is an even bigger bloodbath for the Dems.
California just voted to raise gas prices in CA by a full dollar in response to trump winning. Can't make this shit up.
How do you explain Biden winning over Trump just 4 years earlier, genius? How does that fit your data points, smart guy?
Well, have you been watching the AZ senate ballot counts? So weird, they've started counting hundreds of ballots that only had votes for the Senate race, and not filled in for the house or the president.
The idea that votes can be printed and harvested is not a conspiracy theory. I think in 2020, 20k votes for Biden were printed and counted at 3 in the morning, and anyone who tried to point out how sus that was, was immediately branded a voter denier and a conspiracy theorist.
And I'm a smart gal, not a smart guy. :)
Yeah let's blame white supremacy and ignore the fact that the democratic candidate lost FOURTEEN MILLION voters this election cycle.
It was more like 11mil, and were almost exclusively white men who just didn't vote this time after they chose to vote in 2020
11mil, and were almost exclusively white men
Got any proof of that? From what i heard she lost 15% of the hispanic vote, women didnt turn out as well as expected, lost 7% of the 18-29 vote, and she even lost some on the black vote. She lost in every demographc but you are trying hard to pin it on one group. So lets see you back your data up.
You know we can Google the vote totals from 2020 right?
Again, source?
Maybe it’s as simple as: outrage is memorable, policy is boring. For all too many voters, all they remember is the last thing that outraged them.
I don’t know how you work with that though, since people on the left seem to care more about policy, character, platform.
But maybe it tracks back to the “shift yo center” right before the election. I know it’s an attempt to attract any remaining undecideds and avoid last minute mistakes but that clearly didn’t work.
I don’t know if it’s just my echo chamber, but Harris, and waltz, both came out in the stage in a flood of emotion. They were live, genuine, caring. I know Trump tried to belittle Harris’ smile and laugh but she pulled it off. She seemed genuine and alive, in contrast to that ancient senile tyrant. Her rise was emotional, and in a good way. Then as the election approached, they became too cautious and lost that emotional jet engine that had them zooming into the sky
policy is boring
Means testing everything to the Nth disagree is enervating.
Yesterday I announced that, as president, I’ll establish a student loan debt forgiveness program for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities.
Is bad policy. Not in the same way that mass deportation is bad. But when you ask where the 15M voters went between Biden parroting Warren/Sanders on universal student debt relief and this, go ahead and ask how many people you know who will qualify.
Harris, and waltz, both came out in the stage in a flood of emotion. They were live, genuine, caring.
Maybe Walz was different. Idk. He didn't get nearly as much limelight as Liz Cheney, so it was harder to tell.
But Harris wasn't caring in the slightest. Between going to Guatemala and telling refugees "Do Not Come", dismissing student debtors as entitled, downplaying the damage caused by inflation, and cheering on the police raids of college campuses over student protests, what we got was a woman whose deep genuine affections were exclusive to her in-group.
Gore and Kerry and Hilary all had the same problems. It was Republican versus Republican-Lite time after time.
going to Guatemala and telling refugees “Do Not Come”
And yet that may be the best course. All too many undocumented immigrants are refugees in some way, desperate to escape their circumstances or find better circumstances. Tiffany were not going to welcome them and help them build their version of the American Dream, there is no humane or just way to stop them. Do you want human trafficking? immigrant camps that are essentially prisons? build a wall? Military patrols at the border? Mass deportation? There is no good answer, but the current ones aren’t working. Staying in a safe-ish spot closer to where you are and doing it legally may be most humane, may come closest to serving both their needs and US needs.
The problem with Harris is the problem of all liberals: they don't understand the problems liberalism is causing. Fascism offers terrible solutions to those problems, and thus it wins.
The only messaging problem was taking the momentum of the debate and shitting on it with the right-wing heelturn the moment the Cheneys said "never Trump".
The problem with Kamala Harris's messaging was that she didn't have millions of Xitter bots scaring people into voting for her.
She had like triple the money trump had in his campaign and still got her ass kicked. She might have just sucked shit as a candidate ya know
I do know, but I don't think "sucking shit" is a specific or useful analysis.
I defer to JD Vance immediately threatening Europe if they make any move against Xitter... and Bernie Sanders speech covered much of the rest.
And she also had noone using millions of dollars to bribe voters to go vote, but only voters of a specific flavor. Somehow that was deemed legal, the usa has basically become a banana republic.
She didn't? I believe that's exactly what she came across as when she said she wouldn't do anything different if she were to call the shots instead of Biden and also reminded everyone she signed off on most of his decisions. Sure, she lost votes because of sexism as well, but instead of fresh air she chose to bring stale coffin smell to the fart battle and lost to the stink Trump was all too happy to discharge. And that coffin did smell of a old white dude, let me tell you.
That being said, for such a gigantic loss against someone as obnoxious as Trump, there had to be a lot of factors in play. Sexism and stagnation of the party being just a tip of the iceberg.
She did try her darnedest too, though.
It's funny how people try to rationalize why Trump won, as if has any rationality behind it whatsoever.
You had me at white man
The fundamental issue is that people don’t think the system works.
The Democrats have been padding themselves on the back all this time that they follow the rules. So, their message is more like the system does work and is in fact fair if you just follow the rules.
People are tired of that.
The main problem is that Democrats do not have a propaganda machine like the Republicans do. It does not matter what the message is if it constantly gets drowned out by the unceasing flood of propaganda coming from the right.
The right isn't the problem. Our problem is a lack of a left. The Tea Party managed to resuscitate the GOP about 4 terms ago. We need a Guillotine Party to drag the Democrats away from corporate American and back to the electorate.
What?? MSNBC and CBS and CNN are full on propaganda machines for Dems. NY times, watpo, every major paper outlet, all either endorsed or threw a fit when they were blocked from endorsing Kamala.
Nobody under the age of 60 watches tv news or reads newspapers, never mind that most of those are owned by right-wing billionaires and are managed opposition at best. They also have a paywall around them that keep out most people.
Compare that to the right-wing propaganda machine that infects absolutely every type of media. There are dozens of bullshit "news" sites with no paywall that get top billing in news aggregators, they've gamed the YouTube, Facebook, etc algorithms to promote their propaganda, right wing podcasts like Joe Rogan get promoted front and center on Spotify and so on
The more I think about it the more I'm convinced her problem was Biden. The Democratic senators that are winning in the swing states spent an entire year separating themselves from Biden.
Harris didn't get that chance. She took over Biden's campaign, his advisors, his ground network, his convention, 4 months before the election. If he had just recognized his time was over we could have had a real primary, with different campaigns to find the one that resonates with the people.
Biden absolutely fumbled this by even bothering to run. If there had been an open primary there would be some actual momentum behind the winner (which I doubt would've been Harris).
I don't care to speculate her chances in a primary. If she had won it then she'd have a campaign far more likely to energize the Democratic base. If someone else had won it then they would have a similar advantage. Not having it, and finding out in the worst way that we should have used the fucking 25th amendment is the original sin of this campaign.
Another one of her messaging issues was that she has a vagina.
A big part of the election was Republicans screaming at Democrats for being too feminine and Democrats retorting "That's good aktuly".
But compared to Biden's promise of college debt relief, climate change relief, child care and reduction of health care costs, that didn't motivate people who weren't heavily invested in the fight. Also, plus, too, we rolled back all the universal mail in voting from 2020. As Dems were the most likely to mail in their ballots, they suffered disproportionately
Also, plus, too, we rolled back all the universal mail in voting from 2020. As Dems were the most likely to mail in their ballots, they suffered disproportionately
I have no idea why I haven't seen this point made before. I've thought it several times myself. There's absolutely no way that didn't play a role in this election cycle.
I'm fairly certain that a transwoman would have done even worse in polls. It does make me wonder how a transman would fare, though.
I"m convinced that if she ran the same campaign, but had a dick, she'd be the president
It's a lot more complicated. They didn't even really tried to ratify Roe v. Wade after it got repelled. They just tried to play the moral high ground.
If the democrats had any bravery, they would have at least tried to put it out to vote, then if failed, smear any republican in their way as a "creepy pedophile that wants little girls pregnant", and "killers of mothers, whose pregnancy went wrong". That sways moderates way easier than moving to the right, step-by-step. My mother is actually a moderate Fidesz voter, and she's having second thoughts about her support every time she sees people posting "cry lib"-style gloat, or that the only children the "child protection" laws are protecting are manchildren having meltdowns from seeing "gay" series on the sidebar of Netflix. The common people are swayed by emotions way more than reason. Even I'm more emotional than reasonable. They want to hear a story, not a nerd-talk how your new tax system will improve the economy.
This, it'd be very easy to sway the public... Fuck just have Stephen Colbert write your campaign speech, you'd win in a fucking landslide.
This is a big problem and you've identified it correctly: When Trump says "They're coming for ya, but I'm in the way. We'll make America Great Again and defeat Sleepy Joe before Kamela eats your dogs!" people say "He's a friend of the common man, standing up to the elite.", when Kamela talks about how her comprehensive new debt plan is working actually and the chart says...... Well no one gives a shit what the chart says because they're falling asleep.
Talk to the voting public like they're children, Democratic Policies are literally too smart for anyone dumber than me to pay attention... and I'm pretty fucking dumb.
The Democrats do some "Appeal to feels", but they do it the wrong way. They talk about how they're going to take all the bad stuff sitting down because they're the "Bigger man", and they'll "Maybe look into thinking about doing something about it I reckon!"
No one's fooled by that, it's surrender at worst and apathy at best.
When Trump says he's gonna kick some ass, he's both acknowledged the problem and at least pretended to give a shit about it.
This is what people are talking about when they say Trump "sympathizes with the suffering of the common man."
Certainly. That doesn't make it a decent campaign tho
The problem with Kamala Harris' messaging was that white males still control 60% of the vote in America, either directly or by influencing their wives and kids.
And if you tell that demographic that they don't matter, then you aren't going to win.Republicans have a vision. Democrats have a list of policy proposals. Average people can grok the vision but since they read at a 6th grade level they don't grok the policy proposals.
Democrats need to stop acting like nerds if they want more people to like them.
How the fuck do democrats win here then? After the Harris/Dump debate i feel like there was a lot of conjecture about how Harris didnt talk about policy enough. How do you get away with talking about policy but not "sounding like a nerd" to uneducated voters? See I think this is more about the average voter not being educated enough to understand the issues and the policies potential nominees have pertaining to them, or how their lives would be affected depending who/what they vote for.
Start offering policies that help average people. Run on medicare for all. Run on forcing pharmaceutical companies lowering drug prices. Run on building new factories to create solar panels, geothermal equipment, and wind turbines. Run on creating affordable housing and ending corporate landlords. Run on campaign finance reform with a promise of ending political ads that everyone hates.
The Democrats problem is tha they won't do any of that because their donors dont want it. But as long as the DNC values their donorsore than their voters, they will continue to lose elections.
i feel like there was a lot of conjecture about how Harris didnt talk about policy enough
Yeah, from other nerds
The Democrats don't win here.
Just like the Tea Party transformed the GOP, we need a Guillotine Party to drag the Democratic party to the electorate.
Democrats need to stop acting like nerds if they want more people to like them.
If you told me this was a quote from Ideocracy I would not have doubted you for a second.
There was an era where the nerds placed up a facade to give the illusion of meritocracy and measured governance. Unfortunately that just drove a wedge between people and the "ruling class." When it came out that bill was getting blowies in the oval office people's brains broke and the facade was forever tarnished. Today, democrats still hide behind it and pretend like we don't know they piss and shit like everyone else. The Republicans decided to erect a monument to trump their lord and savior, the only thing keeping them from being a foot note in the history books.
We need to look to our founders. Flawed in every way possible they did have one idea that we should still cherish. They believed in an america they could make by their own hands. They did, it sucked, it was also amazing somehow. We should be like them but be just as kind to our future as we are to the present.
"You talk like a f*g" vibes
EDIT: Idiocracy.
But I was told it was just that our policy proposals weren't left enough?
Unironically, you're right. Most voters don't vote based on any kind of coherent ideology. They vote on feels.
God help us all.
I want a country where everyone pays less for healthcare. If it can be done for seniors, why not everyone else?
I want a country where everyone's private medical decisions remain between them and their doctor, without being cleared by your local, state, or federal representative or by a judge.
I want a country where everyone who works, pays taxes, and does not commit violent crime or property theft can stay and keep working without having to look over their shoulder.
I want a country where if you work full time, you can afford your rent/mortgage, put food on the table, start a family, and still be able to retire.
There's a vision. Apparently all of these things have become radically progressive leftist positions and are attacked as such by the media and conservatives alike.
Republicans also like to defund public schools and or encourage people to go to religious private schools. That way they’re either too dumb to vote for policies, or too indoctrinated to vote for the candidate that isn’t promising Christian nationalism.
How about do basic stuff that people understand ...
... like tax the hell out of billionaires and use the money on people in the country.
... stop financing overseas wars and use that free money on people in the country
.... then just keep repeating and blasting everyone that all the money the government is collecting from rich idiots and not spending on war is being spent on everyone ...... rinse, repeat 10,000 times.
Yep. And there's precedent for this. (Even though with this Supreme Court precedent counts for jack shit...)
Every time Bernie got asked a question he'd turn it around to mentioning the top 1% and how they're fucking us over. And people liked him for it. I had MAGA hat folks tell me they liked him because of it back in 2016.
Do they have a vision? The scary thing about Trump that it’s uncertain what he will do the next 4 years. Will he undo democracy or keep it? Will he continue to support Ukraine or not? Will he leave NATO or not? Will he impose those tariffs or not? Will he apply project 2025 or not? Will he impose a federal abortion ban or not?
Kamala had a clear but boring vision: 4 more years of the current status quo. Nothing new will happen.
you are incorrect.
Republicans are scared of brown people, and they cried about it.
democrats closed the border, reformed border control, and have set up a rational immigration system to allow as many legal immigrants into the country as the system can provide for and integrate into the US economy.
Republicans are scared of vaccines, and they cried about it.
democrats got vulnerable populations vaccinated.
Republicans are afraid of other countries exports, and they cried about it.
democrats increased employment, supported domestic businesses and funded domestic production.
Republicans quake in their boots, democrats take action.
Democrats have a list of milquetoast, bottom of the barrel obvious stuff that they hope could show bipartisanship, and even then they half-ass it. There is real fixing that needs to get done, but the side they isn't actively making things worse has no will to actually do it.
The problem is the Democrats are scared to push back hard, they try to move to the right to capture moderate voters, and then lose 10x as many voters to the left who don't care enough to vote because the Democrats are trying to make concessions with absolute lunatics.
The DNC seems like it just doesn't have a spine. Doesn't matter now, it's all fucked and it's too late.
She literally called him a fascist. It's that not enough pushback?
Honestly it's fucking not. Call him a rapist pedophile, call him Jeffery Epsteins other woman, say some shit that will piss him off and once he's mad he crumbles on stage and has a melt down.
Like seriously, they try hard to be polite and I get she was a prosecutor but that doesn't mean she has to talk like a lawyer when calling out a child raping, tax evading, democracy overthrowing felon.
She literally allowed him to walk the streets for 4 years after an insurrection, accepted endorsements from war criminals, and snubbed her nose to millions of people who were aghast at a genocide being committed on the other side of the world by a government that supported her opponent with every tool it had.
This defeat was not guaranteed, it was earned.
Not if she promotes similar fascist ideas like deporting immigrants and funding genocide.
Harris is missing 10 million votes that Biden got in 2020. It looks like many of those 10 million were suburban men who didn't vote Trump, just sat on the couch. misogyny is a viable explanation for this because otherwise you'll have to explain why Biden set the left on fire, or why Biden was so inspirational to men.
She lost the scrote vote, simple as that.
Some of it is 100% misogyny, I think some of it is also that 4 years ago the country was literally on fire in a lot of places and Trump was obviously to blame for a lot of it, so it didn't matter so much to apathetic voters if Biden's messaging was weak. Kamala may have won then too, though misogyny would have made it closer. Now the country is much more stable but still not great, but Democrats are in charge and therefore obviously to blame, so people who largely haven't been affected negatively by the Republicans (e.g. men, especially non-desperately-poor white men), are apathetic again
White Dudes For Harris musta been like 300 dudes.
Okay but this post would imply Trump is white.
I'd need to crank up the color temperature on his photos quite a bit to achieve that.
This is the only take I'm gonna let in. The rest of these "hot takes" can fuck right off.
No shit I’m tired of the post-mortem quarterbacking. There’s always one weird trick that you can point to, everyone wants an easy reason why this happened.
Well, I have one. america is a fascist country. Apparently we just decided to forgo the plausible deniability.
bullllseye
You forgot about the part where she supported genocide.
You forgot the part where you said you didn't but actually did in a harder manner than most people who claim to be on the left
Hasan said it better than I ever could:
