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.
Literally Covid. People thoght they were going to die.
And BLM was already out on the streets.
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.
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
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’, but it might not be in the US when so much of the population sees how fundamentally broken wealth inequality is at baseline.
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.
Not discounting anything you wrote here, but it still entertains me when people call the 60 year old Kamala Harris young.
Compared to Trump and Biden she’s a baby.
In contrast to Biden and Trump she looks 40.
Fuck I would not have guessed that. She looks 10-20 years younger than that
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
Especially when next to Walz who is, I think, a year younger.
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
Didn’t she gain votes in the swing states and mainly lost votes in states she won nevertheless?
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.
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
No
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
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?
Little known thing called COVID-19
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.
Easy to say inflation is down while others are feeling it with their wallet. Biden did nothing to fight price gouging
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
America is not full of progressives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How do we know this when we haven’t finished counting the votes?
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 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.
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?
Useless and 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
We can be free.
