The reality is even worse. They’re going to “learn” all the wrong lessons. They will shift further to the right, like they always do.
Yep, every time Dems can’t get enough votes from the left to win, because they aren’t “left/pure enough” for them, what they learn is to shift to the right to find votes.
Whereas since voters on the right will always vote for the one with the R by their name even if they don’t think the candidate is “right enough”, their party learns that it doesn’t have to move to the left to find enough votes and stays to the right or moves even further to the right.
…you don’t win over conservatives by offering light-conservatism, but the democratic party have run the same playbook since 1992…
I don’t think you understand their point. Republicans always turn out to vote for their candidate. Then they win (at least a good portion of the time) and they vote in primaries and move the party further right. For any evidence just look at the past 2 decades.
Whereas the left just decides to sit out and therefore Dems lose (or only win at odd times.) They can’t count on leftist/apathetic voters, so they go towards where they think they can get votes (ie. people who always vote and if they do convert enough they are profiting by gaining one vote for them and removing one from Republicans.)
Now everyone here is saying it’s soooo obvious that it’s a poor strategy but is there any introspection on behalf of the left/apathetic? How has withholding your vote or not voting in primaries gone? It’s been done for years and society has moved so, so far away from leftist goals no?
So their point is that it probably is a mix- surely the Dems need to actually run on popular policy and leftists/apathetic need to suck it up, vote in all elections, and vote for the best candidate. Pick your preferred candidate in the primary and then vote for the Democratic candidate in the general, no matter what (well- barring something egregious like…being anything like Trump.) Once Dems actually have power, you can keep pushing left. But if people just sit out, you’re not gonna be counted. Decades of that is proof.
Edit- maybe you mean you can’t win the center over with conservatism-lite. Maybe that’s true, maybe not. But someone mentioned Bernie finished behind Harris in Vermont so I don’t know that it’s a maxim.
Republicans always turn out to vote for their candidate
Ever wonder why that’s the case?
Mindless sheep sycophant party that abuses the system to stay relivent VS super-diverse big tent party than “takes the high road” and it is still almost 50/50…tells you where the people actually stand and how badly the broken system empowers the shitty minority. Oh, before “huurrrrddduuuurrrrr but popular vote dduuurrrrrrr”…that is how many people of each ideology VOTED not how many there are. Glad I could clarify the obvious for you smooth brain twits that think you have a point.
The popular vote that trump won in addition to the electoral college? That popular vote? Democrats (the party apparatus) need to come to term with themselves and look in the mirror for answers as to why there’s a second trump term on the horizon.
Read, comprehend, then speak.
Yep, every time Dems can’t get enough votes from the left to win, because they aren’t “left/pure enough” for them, what they learn is to shift to the right to find votes.
And can you blame them? Who do you think is more efficient catering to, the right-wing idiot who went to vote for a rapist felon or the self-proclaimed leftist that didn’t vote to stop fascism because they didn’t like the alternative enough?
These last elections were already “right vs far right”, following ones are 100% going to be even worse. When the right wins, shifting left makes no logical sense.
No of course I can’t blame them because it’s the only thing that makes sense to do. That’s what I saying. I blame the people who won’t vote for Dems if they don’t perfectly align with everything they want or don’t pass their purity test.
Magats took over the Republican party because they consistently voted for whichever R won the primary, even if it wasn’t the one they wanted to win the primary. R’s have always done this, but Magats especially have been turning out to do this since 2008 when gasp! the Black guy won (they started out as the Tea party). On top of that they did a lot of activism. Parading around with their guns was the part they liked best about that. They took a name for their movement; the TEA (taxed enough already) party was a stupid name and they looked like idiots with their teabags, but it worked for them and they eventually got their demagogue.
The Democratic party can be moved to the left with this same strategy. Vote for the more left-leaning or whoever you like best in the primary, then vote for whoever has the D by their name in the general. When they learn that they can actually count on getting enough votes from their base, they’ll stop futilely chasing votes from the right. At the same time you have to do activism and keep the movement growing, which makes sure they clearly know what you want and creates pressure to influence their policies. You don’t give up after one election cycle because it takes time and work…
Ceding your power by not voting doesn’t make politicians care about you–it’s not like boycotting a business that wants to sell you something. Politicians want to please those who vote for them, not those who don’t. Learn from the magats. First you put the politicians closer to your views into power, then keep pressuring them to enact the policies you want. Not sit around and wait for them to enact the agenda you want first and after that you’ll vote for them. Think about how training a dog works.
h
However, I’ve been doing this forever- and the Dems just keep moving further right.
I mean, you have but clearly a ton haven’t. Witness the millions of missing votes this election.
Not sit around and wait for them to enact the agenda you want first and after that you’ll vote for them. Think about how training a dog works.
You deserve kudos for this. Very well put.
At this point you might as well start a third party.
Some kind of Democratic Socialist Party of America maybe.
This way Gore can lose all over again!
Imagine thinking the DNC will ever push another Gore. If they were willing to do that we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
You missed the point.
And this is one of the reasons why people shifted Republican in this last election.
If the Democratic party won’t represent Democratic ideals, then out of either anger or apathy, their base will vote for the party that can do it better, Republicans, or not vote at all.
I agree with a lot of people on Lemmy that the average American is an idiot, and our shortening attention spans coupled with our changing media diets isn’t helping with that, but I see these as features not bugs.
Americans in general like their shiny toys, and one of the best ways to capture their attention is by politicians giving concessions and offering things that will benefit their lives. Think carrots on sticks more than sticks themselves.
I will never stop hanging most of the blame on the Democratic party for leading us to today conclusion after Tuesday.
People didn’t shift Republican in this election. Trump got about the same number of votes as he did against Biden.
no, but everyone wants to pretend that everyone became ultra-super racist idiot trump voters over the course of 4 years because they listened to a lot of joe rogan, rather than listening to a bunch of CNN like good little vote piggies. see one infographic of a bunch of red arrows everywhere and then everyone loses their fucking minds and decides that the only way to win the next election is to become more racist. if only they tack to the right harder, then they’ll win, they just need to be more racist, see, and then it’ll work!
and the problem is that this is exactly the lesson they want to learn. it’s the lesson they have an interest in learning because they are also a right wing party. maybe it’s because there’s just gonna be more posters running around two days after the election because this is the top drama and it’s eating up time they otherwise would’ve spent talking about celebrity drama or whatever, but we can talk for years about how the democrats, anywhere else, would be a center-right party of neoliberal warmongers that are fundamentally unwilling to give positive material concessions to basically any of their voters. as soon as the election gets called, that all vanishes, suddenly they’ve run the most perfect campaign of all time, and really, it was the voters that were at fault, and if anything, they should be more racist. it’s not that the economy sucked, that they didn’t present an enthusiastic, optimistic, or hell, coherent, vision of the future. no, it’s because they just weren’t racist enough.
it’s 2016 all over again. the punishments will continue until morale improves, time is a flat circle, and I keep falling down the stairs.
do’h
Wait, you think the republicans represent democratic ideals better…?
They pretend better
There is no way to read or infer that from their comment without some serious preconceived notions. That person made a statement of fact. They did not say anything about their opinion on the goodness or badness of that statement of fact.
If the Democratic party won’t represent Democratic ideals, then out of either anger or apathy, their base will vote for the party that can do it better, Republicans
That’s where I’m getting that exact sentiment
And you’ll be the bad guy for not wanting to vote for a right wing party.
The only ones that need to learn are the vile pieces of shit that chose to throw their vote away or not even vote. A politician doesnt give them all they want so they sacrifice the planet. Lowest of the low. Same kind of trash as maga
Every single third party protest vote could have gone to Harris and she still would have heavily lost. She managed to even lose the damn popular vote by five million votes, despite Trump having a lower turnout than 2020.
This wasn’t because people voted third party, this was because at a time when incumbents have seen massive pushback across the globe from Covid inflation and Biden was unpopular across the board she ran as completely the same as Biden but even more Right on the border.
At a time when the politically disconnected working class families that make up the record trunout in 2020 were struggling with wage stagnation, erosion of Covid gains, and greedflation eroding their savings and pensions, four more years of the same but we’ll adopt even more Republican policies and look how many rich Republicans like us was never going to get the everperson off the damn couch.
More of the same is not a good platform for ‘progressives’ during economic hardship, even if it was out of their control and less hardship than most peer nations.
Even though Trump is a disaster for many of us, most people got though his first four years just fine, and don’t understand just how much damage he did or how much more he could do if the guardrails failed.
Getting the general public out to vote requires giving them something they want to vote for, and when the biggest thing you can point to doing or wanting to do more of is some clean energy related tax breaks that is a major problem.
Had the Dems impeached Clarence Thomas for his and his wife’s role in Jan 6, had Biden improved the immigration system like promised, had he provided free National Guard abortion clinics on federal land, had he made the FDA make puberty blockers and abortion medicine available by teleheath and mail, or indeed had any major victories in the last half of his term to show, we would not be here. Had they run AOC, Bernie, Waltz, or anyone at all who could articulate a platform beyond four more years of the same, we would not be here. Had Harris focused on how she could use left wing policy to fight the effects of late stage capitalism, we would not be here.
This election was an unforced error of the highest consequences, and one brought about by a political party that was so confident that until he dies of old age every politically disinterested Amarican would be so scared by the threat of Trump that they would maintain an unprecedented level of voter turnout without them having to actually do or promise anything.
Well said. As soon as Harris started parading Biden around on campaign events and talking about “we love you Joe” I knew it was over. It doesn’t matter that a lot of the circumstances were out of his control, to many people Biden’s term is associated with hardship. The Dems had a unique opportunity to sidestep the issue by having Harris position herself as a separate candidate, distancing herself from the Biden administration and pushing a narrative of her having different and new ideas for the country. Instead they tried themselves to the status quo in a moment where the everyman is suffering and it pulled them down like a boat anchor.
It’s a damn embarrassment, and the whole world is left weeping. Fucking hell.
I blame third party AND non voters. They and MAGA are all the same kind of scum who sacrificed your democracy.
Then, you’ll deal with this over and over until America becomes a completely fascist nation. That’ll teach those third party and non-voters. At least you’ll have your moral high ground, right?
America already will be a completely fascist nation thanks to the fascist enabling non voters
Not yet, it’s not completely fascist yet, but with the way you’re acting, there’s not going to be any significant resistance towards the US becoming a completely fascist country since you’re more interested in blaming each other instead of learning from your mistakes and work together to be better. What a defeatist mindset you have.
It will be completely fascist in January. And its thanks to non voters. They deserve all that is coming.
They don’t care so yes it is on them also. Wasn’t it 10million plus less voters then last time.
20 million. And yes they all deserve it.
…i’m not sure that’s how one builds a coalition…
There wont be a coalition with fascists. You had the vote between fascism and no fascism. If you choose that you dont want to vote for either you support fascism.
Enjoy the unfettered fascism, then, since you refuse to even find allies to fight against it.
Luckily I dont live in the US. But I have family there so I think its terrible people who didnt vote ruin their lifes and future like that. Non voters are no allies. They chose fascism. They are the enemies and there wont be another free election thanks to them and all the Maga garbage who are both on the same level
Which do you think is better? Dems giving people what they want to earn their vote or trump winning?
Dems cant give people what they want because everyone wants different things.
What do you think is better? Preventing fascism or doing nothing and watching a fascist get into power?
Medicare for all or universal healthcare is incredibly popular. Peace is also popular.
Spectacular example of avoiding the question but answering it with it. You want to watch the fascism
We know that Biden’s/Harris’ 2024 Campaign failed to produce enough turnout to win against Fascism. What could they have campaigned on to improve turnout? Universal healthcare is one of the many popular progressive policies, popular for both Democratic and Republican voters, that they could have ran on but decided not to.
How to Win a Swing Voter in Seven Days
“The View” Alternate Universe: Break From Biden in Interviews, Play the Hits in Ads
How Trump and Harris Voters See America’s Role in the World
Majority of Americans support progressive policies such as higher minimum wage, free college
Democrats should run on the popular progressive ideas, but not the unpopular ones
Here Are 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind
Finding common ground: 109 national policy proposals with bipartisan support
Progressive Policies Are Popular Policies
Tim Walz’s Progressive Policies Popular With Republicans in Swing States
What do you think is better? Preventing fascism or doing nothing and watching a fascist get into power?
I think preventing fascism is better which is why I want a popular candidate because that’s the best way to prevent fascism
Would you prefer they DID vote for Trump? I voted for Harris because she was the only real option but after what the DNC keeps doing (see: fucking Bernie in the primaries and then not even having a primary this year) I really can’t blame anyone for not voting. The Dems need to have their come to Jesus and remember that the people don’t owe them anything.
I dont make a difference whether they voted for Trump or not. They both picked fascism. Primaries dont mean shit especially if they already have a president a power. It was a mistake to have Biden run again but that doesnt excuse not voting for democracy
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Oh c’mon, Kamala was pretty far from Jesus, and Trump and co. are no political masterminds. This was the dems race to lose and they brilliantly pulled it off by exhibiting what can only be described as an active disdain for anything that even smelled like progressive politics. Turns out you can’t win on “the other guy is worse.” They fucked up and lost fair and square.
Look, the Democrats are not good at running campaigns, but I will never let that obscure the fact that OVER 75 MILLION Americans were ready, willing, and able to vote for a proven rapist, convicted criminal, openly racist, riot-starting adult crybaby. Not grudgingly – they went to the polls with a song in their hearts and blood in their eyes! The fucking Democrats didn’t cause that – 12 years of Fox News telling people that DJT was God, and four years of blaming COVID and inflation on desperate economic migrants did that.
Even IF the Democrats have enough of a base to overwhelm those +75m hateboner-stroking bigots, well they knew what’s at stake and STILL stayed home. (No doubt smirking at how cleverly they avoided any moral contagion via the brilliant gambit of continuing to pay taxes but not casting a vote 🙄 .) Regardless of all that, I don’t blame them for Trump’s win either, because there shouldn’t have been +75 million Trump-lovers to overwhelm in the first fucking place.
Yeah, but that’s democracy. Those 75+ million people wanted something, and they voted for it, and they got it. Anything else is irrelevant. There’s no asterisk in the Constitution with a footnote that says the election is invalid if one side consists of hateboner-stroking bigots. If Democrats want something different, then they have to convince enough people to show up and vote for something different. They have to get good at public messaging and at running campaigns. Righteous indignation changes nothing whatsoever.
Democrats would have benefitted greatly from reining in the corporate profiteering that happened from the pandemic onwards.
They needed to be the anti greed party or the wealth redistribution party or something. Something different, not more of the same.
It was hard to hear everytime they said “Actually, the economy is doing marvelous.”
Democrats would have benefited greatly from telling the public that they were going to do anything at all about 30+y of neoliberal policy that benefits Wall St at the expense of the bottom 80%. This election (and every election since Obama left office) was a referendum on business as usual neoliberal policy at the working class’s expense. You could get away with that in the 90s, but when the working class can’t earn enough to rent their own apartment or start a life they’ll vote for literally anything else, including a convicted rapist and con man.
What people miss about Fascism is that it actually does, at least in the short term, help working-class people. If Trump manages to actually deport 20 million illegal immigrants? That will, in the short term, actually lower the cost of rent. Longer term, you have to start having conversations about the supply of housing and the labor to build and maintain that housing. But in the short term, kicking 5-10% of the population out of the country will actually improve the budgets of millions of rent-burdened households. As long as you personally aren’t on the right’s current extermination list, you actually benefit from conservative crimes against humanity.
People are hurting. The amounts of people rent-burdened and accessing food banks are at levels not seen in generations. And the Democrats offered NOTHING of substance to help these people. Kamala offered grants to help cities amend their zoning codes…which might bear fruit 20 years from now. Kamala offered first-time homeowner assistance, but it was a neo-liberals wet dream of a policy, filled with provisos and qualifiers to make sure only just the most-deserving people qualify. She should have been out there campaigning for a huge social housing project - direct federal construction of millions of homes, coupled with a jobs-training program to quickly train thousands of new high school graduates how to be framers, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.
She should have also come down like the wrath of god upon landlords. She was literally running against a slimy and corrupt landlord, yet she never once made that a center focus of her campaign. She should have been promising to lock up and throw away the key of any landlord, big or small, that used software like realpage. She shouldn’t have had a stump speech where she didn’t call for the complete breakup of Walmart and Amazon.
Those were things she actually could have done to tell people she was actually going to do something about just one issue, the cost of housing. But of course that didn’t happen.
Her performance on The View was absolutely, hilariously, abysmal. They asked her something like “what would you have done differently from Biden to grow the economy?” and she replied with a canned “We’re very proud of Bidenomics” and no further elaboration 🤷♂️
Like, yeah, sure, Bidenomics has been great for the top 20%, but what about everyone else who’s had to move back in with their parents? She demonstrated absolutely zero understanding of the economic reality for 4/5 of the population.
But Trumpnisnt going to do any of this either.
He rambled at great length about making America great again and bringing back jobs and Kamala told folks that nothing will change. If you’re struggling to understand why things went this way I’m not sure I can help.
At the very least Democrats probably should have told people they’d do something to help them instead of just assuming that people would intuit that over the long term Democrat economic policy would be more stable and provide better net growth.
People in the US are dumb as shit, you have to explain things to them and make them feel like you’re paying attention. This is something Democrats have utterly failed to do reliably since Clinton 1 or Obama and it’s why they lose elections. They’re quite literally out of touch and don’t realize it’s not the 70s or 90s when blue collar workers would reliably back them because they’d (relatively recently) supported the labor movement and life was, overall, pretty good for everyone. You can’t run on a policy of inclusion and civil rights for marginalized groups when the main voting group is struggling to make their own lives work.
Tim Walz could have afforded the campaign this rhetoric.
But they locked my boy up to where he couldn’t show his true colors.
Agreed, just a little left-wing populism would’ve gone a long way. I’m cynical, so I see it as that the Democrats can’t be or do those things, because the need for campaign donations has turned them into a fundamentally neo-liberal party that stands for wealth and corporate greed. Like the GOP used to be, before it departed for Crazy Town in a lifted pickup truck.
See also: Joe Biden breaking the rail strike. (Before somebody points he followed up by getting some of the unions some of what they wanted, eroding union power generally was the headline news.) Can we imagine him nationalizing the rails and forcing the companies to strike a deal with the unions in exchange for using them? It would have been a stunning political sensation, but would’ve crossed Democrats’ corporate benefactors.
I’m cynical, so I see it as that the Democrats can’t be or do those things, because the need for campaign donations has turned them into a fundamentally neo-liberal party that stands for wealth and corporate greed.
finally somebody’s fucking saying it. party of controlled opposition. everyone has liked to pretend since the 90’s and even before that this generational streak of incompetence in policy time and time again is the product of some sort of infernal curse, some sort of streak of bad luck, some sort of unrelated descent of the american populace’s IQ points that just naturally predisposes them towards fascism. it’s not. it’s an intentional befouling. they are fine with losing, it will not be them that suffers. what they’re not fine with, is populist policy actually getting passed. you can even do the obama thing and then lie about it, and then just face the occupy protests later on and tell them all to fuck off. they are even too afraid of that, so entrenched in their own ideology are they. it’s insane and ridiculous to believe that this is just due to some sort of incompetence. if it is, then it’s structural in nature, needs to be pulled out by the root, and is probably not really reformable or recoverable at the highest levels, because we’ve had this problem even since the hundred year old jimmy carter in hospice was in office.
Well of course the election was still valid. Brainwashed Fox News/X misinformation junkies’ votes count just as much as a good person’s does. More actually, thanks to the high concentration of fools in low-population states and with too many electoral votes. My issue is that a massive propaganda machine is permitted to exist, such that +75 million walking dildos are now convinced that Biden created greedflation and gave all their tax money to dog-eating immigrants, and Fauci should be executed for treason because he forced children to get vaxxed(?).
Dismantling that machine should be job #1 – it should have been since Al Franken wrote Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. But I guess it’s fucking impossible to shut off the machine that keeps stamping out Republican and IINO voters. And with at least a hundred years of MAGA rule ahead of us, I suppose it always will be.
Yes, totally agreed, and I feel this discussion circling straight back to the OP point: Whose job is it to dismantle the machine, and counter the misinformation? It’s us; there’s no global referee that we can appeal to. How do we do it? Through the political process, because we don’t want violence and civil war. Since the winner-take-all voting system mathematically leads to two parties, our agent in the political process is the Democratic Party.
So, it’s not the DNC’s fault that the misinformation machine exists, but it is their responsibility to fix it, and we can certainly blame them because they’re really bad at it.
weren’t we as well vilifying anyone who criticised her stance on genocide and the brutal genocide in gaza rates much higher than anything you said about trump. add that to her history of being cosy with lobbyists, her controversial career as prosecutor and she will be the classic pro-war neocon we all hate. but majority of us still voted her in name of lesser evil.
in the same way i think a significant chunk of those 75 million think they are voting for lesser evil in name of god, increased crime and inflation.
plus the absolute cringe and elitist approach of dnc to label anyone not unconditionally supporting them as super racist sexist nazi.even now every left sub on .world and reddit is making fun of working class by mocking egg prices and even wishing for trump to deport the muslims and nuke gaza.
i think a significant chunk of those 75 million think they are voting for lesser evil
Oh no. I can assure you they were very deliberately voting for the largest evil they could find.
sigh, if dnc sees this then they will try to hire you as campaign advisor.
this is exactly what the cronies of both parties want, for us to think that other side is pure evil so that they can continue exploiting us while doing all the evil they want.
does this look humane to you ? https://youtu.be/jRQGMJZKjAU
are we really the saint we pretend to be ?
That’s exactly it. It’s hard to admit that almost half the voting population is totally on board with trump–his “flaws” are not a bug, they’re a feature. He increased the size of his base, bringing in millions of Latinos, Gen Z men, and men of all races. It’s not that they simply hate the Dems, it’s that they love what trump is offering. In spite of that it there did exist enough more voters that don’t like trump (it would have taken 5 million more) to stop him, but they either didn’t give a shit or they wanted it to happen (to “punish” the dems). That’s the reality.
And now the Democrats will remain powerless forever. I guess single issue voters can take solace in that little victory. Sadly, they will probably not be replaced by a more progressive party rising up from their ashes, but rather by an emergent faction formed via Republican in-fighting. They will still be conservative, but they’ll wear different colored ties.
So everything will be exactly the same as it is now except libs might be slightly less charitable to the new party?
Yes they well once the supreme court is stacked 7 to 2 they well never have the power to do anything even if elected.
The supreme court is already stacked! Biden could have added more justices and pushed for impeachment of the obviously corrupt ones. He chose to not even try or so much as get out the message that it needs to happen, so as to not appear “partisan”, as if any of their voters actually care about partisanship at this point when it comes at the cost of getting shit done.
That’s not new information. We learned that the first time Trump was elected. We learned it again when Biden was elected, even if Biden managed to narrowly outperform Trump. We’ve known what we were up against. Stop pearl clutching and acting surprised and start being more pragmatic. The Democrats are the one with a platform at the national level, it’s on them to get out their vote and they utterly failed to do that.
And that is why the right always wins. The left are lazy and take the high ground and think themselves above it. And the right just does shit. And keeps at it till they get it.
those 75 million americans have done exactly the same shit they’ve been doing since like, the year 2000. or beyond. every guy the republicans have ever run has been some variety of racist, scam artist, rapist, or straight dumbass rich guy failson. the next election, if there is one, which there probably will be, they will do the same thing again. the election after that, and after that, and after that. it’s not rocket science. it’s the basic functioning of the system. to get mad at them is sort of like trying to piss into the wind in order to spite it. you just get piss all over yourself. either that, or you face the other direction and break the record in the meaningless pissing contest.
if you don’t offer a material reality to people, a vision of the future, if you don’t offer people anything, they will not come out to vote for you. kamala actually did worse, instead, she decided, hey, we’ll campaign with liz cheney, we’ll say that building the wall is a good idea, we’ll say that we need to be tougher on immigration, have a more lethal military, continue the genocide that’s currently going on, and then change nothing from biden’s famously extremely unpopular administration other than appoint more conservatives to the cabinet in the name of being bipartisan. oh, and small business tax exemptions, and tax cuts for first time homebuyers that haven’t missed a rent payment in the last 2,000 years. the only good thing she campaigned on was price controls for groceries, but then she dropped that like a hot potato as soon as she could.
really inspiring stuff. then, as always, every sensible person on the planet says, hey, this is maybe not a great idea, instead maybe we should’ve had a primary so they could’ve pushed through a candidate that didn’t get less votes than ANDREW FUCKING YANG, noted bipartisan techbro-appealing dumbshit idiot, maybe we should campaign on medicare for all, funding for housing, free college, student debt relief, a stronger FTC, or perhaps she could’ve said hey, we’ll pack the court, we’ll reverse the roe v. wade decision, and then we’ll try to codify roe v. wade and the million other legal decisions that we need to codify in order to guarantee american citizens some basic amount of rights. All of those would be incredibly popular decisions that would present a vision of the future.
she didn’t do any of that, and then she lost, and then somehow the focus is on the people who voted, 2 million less from last time, for trump. it’s insane shit.
Its not even the dems. Its the dnc. Who actually voted for biden or kamala as the person, of all democrats, to be the representative? The two party system has literally led to the death of America.
If it was just the fact of a two party system, why did it take over 200 years to do it?
Every system breaks down, given sufficient time
I protested in front of the DNC this year with the Palestinian supporters.
The DNC is definitely part of the problem. There are establishment Democrats there too that help decide who gets to run the big ticket. We saw it in 2016 between Hillary and Bernie.
Still, as a progressive, I believe the only path forward is to still work within the system we have else we risk fracturing and ceasing organization. We need to lead a new platform within the Democratic party, and that will be much harder given the sentiment Americans have of them as was shown in this year’s election results.
2022 wasn’t half bad though. So there’s still hope.
the system is broken, and continuing to work within it will only lead to more losses. there is no salvaging the democratic party, it is fully co-opted by neoconservatives and billionaire donors who only care about fundraising off of losses. if there is a single lesson you should take from this dogshit election, it’s that. they do not care about you, or your rights, or your life. they care about donations. their dedication is to the bag, first and foremost, above everything else.
Amen
I think the only thing to learn from this is that [vehemently ignores everything the Dems did wrong]
This article is about and for you, fool.
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Fair enough, I ate your onion 😄
In my defense, though, I’ve seen plenty of people make the exact same argument earnestly many times, especially in the last couple of days…
We also want to congratulate our friends in the Republican party, they played a great game and we can’t wait to work with them more.
Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley is excited to see his colleagues at the DNC make the same mistakes over and over.
This is amazing.
“I saw how the DNC ignored voters, I saw how they talked down to people, and that just made my job easy. I go in and say ‘Democrats think you’re dumb, but Republicans think you’re a genius’ and these dopes eat it up like the slop they feed their pigs.
Holy fuck is this even satire anymore? I can literally see a GOP campaign official say that in private.
In private? I can see them saying it on TV and the rubes still voting for them since all they watch is Fox News and they’d never run it.
Trump won Michigan by doing the absolute bare minimum of pretending to care about the core issues Harris actively ignored (cough genocide).
And also paying probably like 50 bucks to spam send this image for two weeks.
“To all those growing skeptical of this party’s strategies and overall agenda, let me just say we hear you loud and clear. Rest assured we will be doing everything short of interpreting that sound into words and responding to those words in any way shape or form.”
This is an all-timer.
I literally see voters saying the Democrats were too left leaning, jfc.
With parties like this, painful collapse is the only way to avoid multigenerational destitution.
There is no saving the United States as a framework. It is far too compromised, with too many methods installed to keep the people willfully ignorant and infighting as the owners suck their life forces dry for profit.
We can limp along and pretend that isn’t the case, but climate change, aka the reality that doesn’t give a shit about our self-delusion and greed worship, will force that collapse sooner rather than later. Reality can’t be bribed, deluded, disappeared, or discredited.
Enjoy living in delusion that a society can function in capitalist competition against itself, the ability to do so is coming to an end.
Local opinion piece:
https://www.startribune.com/brehm-democrats-have-themselves-to-blame-for-trumps-election/601176736
I read it because of the title, but it’s just some shithead that wants them to move further right:
This red wave wasn’t as much about embracing Donald Trump as it was repudiating far-left progressivism.
[…], and then foisted upon us an equally unqualified and unpalatable hard left alternative.
They are already creating the groundwork for sucking more corporate dick.
Oh they learned their lessons:
- blame minorities
- shift further right
Have they tried committing multiple felonies ? Are they even watching and learning ?
They just vowed not to!
Vowed? Wow.
Oh they know how to win. They just don’t want to. The policy decisions that would lock in Dem control for generations to come run counter to the goals of DNC Services Corp. Because they’re a corp.
Theyre not the ones that need to learn. Voters need to learn DNC is a bunch of wealthy moderates grifting voters.
What if the DNC privately wins by making sure their candidate loses?
nah pelosi is crying her eyes out as she will have to pay less taxes on all those millions she earns from insider trading & lobbying for big tech.
its a win win for them.
https://media1.tenor.com/m/TY8ysOD2GWwAAAAd/crying-crying-meme.gif
They ran Harris thinking she would win based on her demographics. The DNC needs to learn that not everyone wants a black/LGBTQ/woman/etc candidate that just runs on their race/gender/sexuality.
They want someone that’s competent that will campaign on policies that will make their lives better. The DNC has moved so far away from the working class that the RNC, the party of wealthy creeps, has them.
They ran Harris because she was the only candidate they could justify shoehorning in without a primary, since she’s VP.
Why they didn’t want to run a primary is a great question. Probably cost and time, and name recognition. Studies show that often the candidate with the most name recognition wins. There’s wasn’t enough time to tell every person in America a brand new person’s name.
But usually VPs don’t do well when they run as president. Imo Dems are just trying to avoid another Bernie Sanders situation - a leftist with an authentic campaign and people who genuinely like them. More than anything, they gotta stop real progress in this country.
Imo Dems are just trying to avoid another Bernie Sanders situation - a leftist with an authentic campaign and people who genuinely like them
100% this is why. They didn’t want any internal pressure for progressive policies or a public platform to voice them.
They lost the general because they refused to hold a legitimate primary. This wouldn’t of happened. They haven’t run a real primary since 2008 and look at how hard Obama won in a landslide after competing in a deep field of qualified and competent candidates.
Even in 2008, it was obvious Clinton was the DNC’s preferred candidate and DNC still had their thumb on the scale. Despite this, Obama still managed to come out ahead. And with a base that was actually excited about their chosen candidate, they turned out to vote and Obama won.
The only lesson the DNC learned from this is that they needed to push their thumb harder on the scales the next time around.
They learned two things: identity politics and weigh the scale down as hard as possible.
They obsessed over identity, to their long term detriment as some of the minority identities they fawned over are shifting their support towards trump.
They had no platform other than fear mongering about Trump.
The difference between Harris and Obama was that while Obama was biracial that wasn’t the focus of his campaign, his platform was, and he articulated it well. That’s the real lesson to take away from Obama’s success at the polls not let’s run a black person and hope we win.
Obama also competed against a deep field of qualified candidates in 2008. He went into the general with momentum of a popular mandate and then won in a landslide.
He would of done nearly as good if he was a white man.
On the flip side, when the republicans lost with Romney in 2012 they did a whole lot of soul searching (rather than blaming the electorate and moving closer to the center to court mythical ‘moderates’ which is the ongoing failed strategy of the democrats), and in 2016 they had an extremely competitive primary where trump came out on top with a mandate as popular with the base as Obama in 2008.
Primaries also benefit from the same effect that makes every movie and TV show a reboot: Name recognition. The long primary cycle keeps their name in the news so people get familiar with it so they’re more likely to vote for them.
Normally I’d agree with you because you’re not wrong, but who at this point doesn’t know who trump or Harris are? And where can I find that rock they are hiding under so I can get some quiet time?
IKR I’d kill to not know who that asshole is
I can’t wait for trump to drop dead of natural causes only so I don’t have to hear his voice ever again
Bigly mood
rather than … moving closer to the center to court mythical ‘moderate
Looking back at 2016 I think Trump won exactly because he went for the middle: middle working class. I know we all thought he was going hard right (and he did appeal to them for certain reasons), but he campaigned to the middle class and won them.
That’s bot the middle we’re talking about. Trump ran on right policy (and "policy) both elections and won.
Do you meant that’s not the middle?
Trump ran on right policy (and "policy) both elections and won
That’s what I thought for a long time. But when I look back at 2016 and I look at this one, I think he appealed to the center voter with promises of jobs and income. They liked that so much they keep saying/thinking/hoping that Trump won’t do all the nutso right wing stuff he says he will. Go listen to voter interviews, they all say “nah he won’t do mass deportation, it’s all bluster.”, or “He only means the criminals.” It’s unreal but that’s what they think.
Do you meant that’s not the middle?
Oh yeah.
That’s what I thought for a long time. But when I look back at 2016 and I look at this one, I think he appealed to the center voter with promises of jobs and income.
I mean everyone, no matter their political views, cares about jobs and income. Being left or right wing is more about the way you believe that should be achieved (and how much you hate minorities). Trump didn’t appeal to center voters with promises of jobs and income; he appealed to right wing voters with their version of jobs and income and other policies right wing voters support. Obama promised left wing voters their version of jobs and income. Hillary and Harris promised nobody’s version of jobs and income.
You know there is this big fat juicy, undecided, independent, center, whatever you want to call it, group that yes Trump did appeal to. You say, right wing version, left wing version, well those are eclipsed by the humongous center of the bell curve.
I don’t think we’re going to agree. I say center, you say right, I say center, you say right.
that’s more accurate, yeah. definitely in 2016 he ran as a moderate, and with this more recent campaign, it’s not so much that he ran a great campaign (lost 2 million voters), but more that I think he just had enough raw momentum and low information, working class voters wanted to manifest him into being the “make the economy good” guy, that they really didn’t give a shit about whatever he was doing up in the news cycle. At the most, they can just dismiss that as something he’s saying to get elected because “he’s smart”, or something he’s doing to make the democrats mad, which is funny. beyond that, it doesn’t matter so much for them what his specific platform is.
They ran Harris because she was the only viable option when it was clear that Biden was not. They did not run Harris thinking she would win at all, they ran her out of desperation because the incumbent was flatlining. It was not a choice, and it certainly was not one based on demographics. It was a “Hail Mary” and it failed as it was likely to do from the outset, and everyone who was paying attention knew that, yet had no choice but to hope for the best.
lol, you believe this? I don’t find it hard to believe that they put Biden though a primary, just to have him drop out…
IMO running Harris was the plan from the beginning. You know, which was kind of the problem, hijacking the primary.
To use your own words, you believe that?
This was not a grand conspiracy geez. Biden’s “primary” was perfunctory because we learned you never primary the incumbent. If he didn’t perform badly at the debate he probably wouldn’t have dropped out.
lol, you believe this?
Do I believe that about four months ago the Democratic Party made a desperate move to replace the incumbent candidate and there were very few viable options at the time? Yes, I believe that, because we just went through it about four months ago. It’s pretty much political suicide to withdraw an incumbent candidate. You don’t plan that from the beginning, because that would be a stupid plan. It was very likely “planned” as in “plan B,” but it’s kind of idiotic to think that it was plan A. The primary was not hijacked, the incumbent is always the candidate. Primaries are always a formality for the incumbent party.
lol. And the DNC didn’t shill for Hilary Clinton in 2016 over Bernie Sanders
Nope, that DID happen. But you are ignoring the obvious reality in this case.
Please, you’re ignoring that the very obvious deduction that DNC didn’t want an open primary.
And you’re ignoring history and the way the parties have always worked when they have the incumbent
She quite specifically DIDNT run on those things, like Hillary did…so…
So every racist and misogynist will say she did anyways.
Including the ones on Lemmy.
I think she, and to a greater extent the policies of the Democratic Party since Carter just cost America the Republic but there is literally nothing a black woman could do to convince some people she’s competent in her own right.
Competent at neoliberal corporate cronyism, mind you. But Harris’s qualifications by herself are rock solid.
If this election cost America the Republic then I would argue the voters cost it.
If you can’t be bothered to vote to save the Republic then it was lost already anyhow.
running token candidates beholden to them is very shady but brilliant strategy by the superpacs :
if they loose: blame it on sexism, racism bigotry to divert the attention from reforms in dnc for progressive leadership. and even if they pretend to be sad about it, the megarich elites and donors get taxcuts and endless price gouging from republicans.
if they win: token candidate passes some token laws which gets either blocked in senate or so poorly implemented that they actually end up giving billions to megacorps for no visible benefit to people. case in point: https://www.atr.org/kamalas-broadband-bust-42-billion-996-days-zero-homes-connected/
She quite specifically DIDNT run on those things, like Hillary did…so…
Bernie has it right. The DNC represents the rich left leaning right.
The funniest part of this is the idea that there will be an opposition party in anything but a token way after this.
…was there one before?..
Was there a party that did not install SCOTUS justices that were so ideologically conservative that they did things like end national legal abortion and gut the ability of government regulation agencies to regulate?
Yes there was. But that party is not coming back except as a token now because people just didn’t think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to vote.
But that party is not coming back except as a token now because people just didn’t think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to vote
“The party didn’t think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to listen to their voters”
FTFY
Nope. They can’t force anyone to vote for them. People thought not voting was a better plan than stopping the rapist fascist dictator when they only had two possible choices.
There was an absolute mountain of evidence that Trump would be a disaster. They didn’t vote anyway because they knew they weren’t going to get a pony.
Voting for people in a two-party system is the stupidest thing you can do because you will never get your way with any one politician. So you vote against and keep voting against until you get closer and closer to what you want.
Just not voting or voting for third party candidates that will clearly lose against someone who has an automatic 30% of the vote doesn’t stop the worst possible thing from happening and it never will.
If you didn’t vote to stop Trump from getting into office, I blame you. You had warning after warning and your idealism was more important to you.
They can’t force anyone to vote for them.
Yup, which is why you need to give them reason to vote.
Democrats have been parading around “most important election of our lifetime” for fucking years - don’t be surprised that it didn’t work yet again.
The reason why Trump is popular is because there is legitimate pain and struggle in the working class, and he affirmed that pain and struggle (even if he was misidentifying the source of that pain). Telling voters “things are good, actually, and the other guy is gonna ruin it” is just dumb.
Democrats didn’t run on popular policy and they got destroyed because of it.
Who said “things are good actually”?? Seems to me that Harris had plenty of policy proposals that would have resulted in a meaningful improvement to the bottom line of the average American.
Biden has also been better for the average American than trump was. For fucks sake, Trump actually got away with raising taxes on all of us to support his tax cut for the rich, simply because the average person is too low information to grasp the idea of a tax cut that expires!
So yeah, plenty of actual reasons to say that one candidate is better than the other, without needing to be wowed by an actual messiah who can dismantle our fucked up system and solve everybody’s problems.
They repeatedly touted our economic recovery was ‘the best in the G6’.
Even when our economy is ‘good’ it’s shit for most people. That’s the problem with being a neoliberal status quo party: it doesn’t help most of the people they need to vote for them
Regardless of what Biden has done for the average American, his approval rating has been really bad for a while now. It may not be right or fair, but that’s what it is.
Despite Harris not actually being the incumbent, the Republicans managed to associate her with Biden and she more or less embraced it. Then the Republicans were able to frame themselves as the challenger to an unpopular incumbent president and it’s not surprising they did well.
Of course, it didn’t help either that Harris is the VP either. Perhaps if we had a primary and managed to pick another candidate that could distance themselves a bit better from Biden things would be different.
Biden did very early and then learned to not say that again.
Your post is CLASSIC misdirection and misrepresenting what the Dems actually did. IF these elections were fair, and I’ve reason to think they were not, then they got lost on higher gas prices. Which is A PRETTY STUPID AND SELFISH reason to vote for/not care about mass deportations. And they lost it on not attacking trump on the border and on the economy.
So we are now in MAGA election rigging conspiracies? JFC. Trump even won the popular vote.
Look at the 2020 popular vote. Trump got 74 Mio. votes back then and 72 Mio. Now
The Dems went from 81 Mio. to 67 Mio.
The Dems succesfully fucked this up with uninspiring candidates and lack of vision to rally their voters.
They had a reason to vote.
Their reason was that a rapist fascist who quoted Hitler and clearly has dementia that promised to deport millions of people and be a dictator on day one only had a 50/50 chance of being president.
And they didn’t care because they didn’t like Kamala Harris much. Was she any of those things? No. But her boss is funding the same genocide in Israel that Trump said to Netanyahu “finish the job” about on national television, so no one better vote for her either!
Sorry, not a good enough reason to not stop Trump. Not a good enough reason to refuse to vote. Not a good enough reason to vote third party.
For fuck’s sake, do you think people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 because they thought he would be a terrific president?
do you think people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 because they thought he would be a terrific president?
they voted for Biden because he made meaningful concessions to the progressive caucus. He gave Bernie a prominent roll in his campaign and made promises about student loan forgiveness and raising the minimum wage, on top of affirming people’s anxiety about covid and a pledge to address it.
Harris had none of that. She didn’t primary against progressive candidates, didn’t have to address progressive concerns, and when there was vocal opposition to any of her policies she said “excuse me, i’m speaking”. She was more right-moderate than Biden was, even if only because she didn’t face the progressive primary he did.
There was an absolute mountain of evidence that Trump would be a disaster.
nobody gives a fuck about that. most people aren’t clocked into online politics. they just live under one admin where trump benefits from obama’s policy, things are squeaky clean for the most part, and then they’re chilling, and then they move to living under joe biden where a once in a lifetime (hopefully, haha) pandemic decides to fuck shit up during the transition from one admin to the other, on top of inheriting a much worse economy, and then they attribute that to biden. it’s not a super complicated figure, there, and that’s all on top of biden just not being a very popular candidate to begin with.
if you actually look at the numbers, then the third party candidates had less of an effect for kamala than the third party candidates for trump did. which makes sense, because RFK, at the least, was campaigning on some sort of dystopian vision of the future that his deluded q-anon supporters actually liked, and he had money. jill stein is just grifting like always, basically, no change there, and no change with the lesser known candidates either, really. the bigger story is that a shit ton of the voters stayed home.
everyone wants to shift blame from the democratic party, which has obviously either mishandled this campaign or intentionally lost as a party of controlled opposition, and shift the blame onto the voters. ah, well, it was latino men’s fault for being too socially conservative! ah, it was the third party voters and the leftists! it was the arab americans, who should’ve voted after we funded the bombs that killed their whole entire family! it was trans people, for just being too weird! those are all legitimate explanations I’ve heard people bring up, and I’d classify them all as basically the same, because they all equally have no evidence behind them. the real story is that she had low voter turnout. probably because she was associated with the least popular administration in decades, and refused to distinguish herself from that, and on top of that, campaigned with like, liz cheney. the most she did was offer like, tax exemptions for people starting small businesses, and tax exemptions for people who haven’t missed their rent a single time in the last kajillion years. it’s not rocket science, that’s just not really an inspiring campaign. if they had low voter turnout, that’s probably why, it’s probably not because america is just too racist to vote for a black woman or whatever shit everyone’s bloviating about so they can justify the democratic party turning to the right even more.
I keep seeing this “people let the fascist genocidal dictator get in because they weren’t excited about Harris” excuse as if it is a good one. It isn’t.
it’s not an excuse, we’re just telling you the reality. how do you think hitler got elected?
I agree with Flying Squid. It’s bizarre to think any sane person would now decide that the right strategy is to hate on minorities, or ditch all pretty normal behaviour such as adhere to the FUCKING LAW, NOT LIE (and spare me the #FalseEquivalence, it’s jaywalking Dems vs serial rapist Trump) and listen to effing EXPERTS. Dems should stick to their principles and await the serious shit show which is gonna happen with mass deportations, tariffs and even MORE INFLATION.
The only “The Onion” rather than “Not The Onion” part of this is the idea that they would announce it.
So far what I have learned about what Kamala has learned is:
It is now the darkest night in America.
But…
There are billions of stars you can only see at night!
…
You know, faint, distant glimmers from long, long ago, that you can squint at and imagine they form coherent, stable, meaningful structures… which are not, and never really were there at all.
…
I do not know if she was intentionally attempting to invert/reference Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ and HW’s ‘Thousand points of light’, or if she somehow thought this was an original, meaningful metaphor.
Either would be pathetic and disgusting.
…
Anyway, quite literally that may have been how democracy in America died, to another speech of meaningless platitudes, ending with thunderous applause, congratulating that a failed struggle was worth it, because even though it failed, it played by the rules and was gracious in defeat.
End scene! Bravo!
did she wrote “rings of power” or payne&mckay wrote her speeches ?
