this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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"The party didn't think stopping the rapist fascist dictator was a good enough reason to listen to their voters"
FTFY
Nope. They can't force anyone to vote for them. People thought not voting was a better plan than stopping the rapist fascist dictator when they only had two possible choices.
There was an absolute mountain of evidence that Trump would be a disaster. They didn't vote anyway because they knew they weren't going to get a pony.
Voting for people in a two-party system is the stupidest thing you can do because you will never get your way with any one politician. So you vote against and keep voting against until you get closer and closer to what you want.
Just not voting or voting for third party candidates that will clearly lose against someone who has an automatic 30% of the vote doesn't stop the worst possible thing from happening and it never will.
If you didn't vote to stop Trump from getting into office, I blame you. You had warning after warning and your idealism was more important to you.
Yup, which is why you need to give them reason to vote.
Democrats have been parading around "most important election of our lifetime" for fucking years - don't be surprised that it didn't work yet again.
The reason why Trump is popular is because there is legitimate pain and struggle in the working class, and he affirmed that pain and struggle (even if he was misidentifying the source of that pain). Telling voters "things are good, actually, and the other guy is gonna ruin it" is just dumb.
Democrats didn't run on popular policy and they got destroyed because of it.
Who said “things are good actually”?? Seems to me that Harris had plenty of policy proposals that would have resulted in a meaningful improvement to the bottom line of the average American.
Biden has also been better for the average American than trump was. For fucks sake, Trump actually got away with raising taxes on all of us to support his tax cut for the rich, simply because the average person is too low information to grasp the idea of a tax cut that expires!
So yeah, plenty of actual reasons to say that one candidate is better than the other, without needing to be wowed by an actual messiah who can dismantle our fucked up system and solve everybody’s problems.
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.
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
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.
They had a reason to vote.
Their reason was that a rapist fascist who quoted Hitler and clearly has dementia that promised to deport millions of people and be a dictator on day one only had a 50/50 chance of being president.
And they didn't care because they didn't like Kamala Harris much. Was she any of those things? No. But her boss is funding the same genocide in Israel that Trump said to Netanyahu "finish the job" about on national television, so no one better vote for her either!
Sorry, not a good enough reason to not stop Trump. Not a good enough reason to refuse to vote. Not a good enough reason to vote third party.
For fuck's sake, do you think people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 because they thought he would be a terrific president?
they voted for Biden because he made meaningful concessions to the progressive caucus. He gave Bernie a prominent roll in his campaign and made promises about student loan forgiveness and raising the minimum wage, on top of affirming people's anxiety about covid and a pledge to address it.
Harris had none of that. She didn't primary against progressive candidates, didn't have to address progressive concerns, and when there was vocal opposition to any of her policies she said "excuse me, i'm speaking". She was more right-moderate than Biden was, even if only because she didn't face the progressive primary he did.
Biden may have had (relatively minor) details around the side but his campaign message was straight center.
Right, and Harris didn't even have those relatively minor details. She was as center-right as they come
We can say her campaign was bad because she had no time to figure out what policy was the winner (take polls and normally it's tested in primaries). BUT she ran on abortion rights and fucking democracy. If that doesn't get the left out to vote, literally nothing will. We won't see a left platform for fucking decades, because literally nothing gets the left out to vote.
I don't even think you know who you're referring to as 'the left'
Well that's a pretty good non sequitur. How am I supposed to even respond, I say I do and then you say nuhuh. Well that's the point of a non sequitur huh.
You still don't get it.
It isn't about voting for Harris.
It's about voting against Trump.
You can give me all sorts of reasons why Harris wasn't an appealing candidate. It's not relevant. Trump was a clear and present danger.
I don't give a shit about whether or not people liked her or whatever their idealistic reasons not to vote for her were. None of them justify allowing Trump to take office by refusing stop him from doing it. That is on people who refused to vote or vote third party. You were not going to get the candidate you wanted this year. You were a fool if you didn't know that.
You're talking to me as if I'm one of those non-voters.
Most Americans are not the terminally-online type - they didn't see your impassioned warnings about Trump. All they heard was that there was an election, and the choice was between Trump and Harris, and neither one really had anything material to offer them. To them, democrats screaming about how bad Trump is is just par for the course. They needed more than to not be Trump, and they didn't deliver.
Go ahead and scream into the void if you want. None of it will change the fact that Harris lost because she ran a bad campaign and turned her back on meaningful progress.
One of her key points was human fucking rights (abortion if you need). That left people can't even show up for their own fucking rights... Well they won't show up for anything. Running a left platform is dead for decades.
Left policy is hugely popular - it isn't just the 'left people' you're referring to, it's also a majority of dis-affected voters who don't think they have anything to vote for
It's popular in blind surveys. Once they say it's a Dem idea, support craters. Chalk that up to whatever you want, it won't win Dems an election.
Disaffected center will go for center policy. While we see through Trump, this is what I think won Trump both elections.
No part of Harris's campaign can be thought of as 'left'. She ran on right-of-center foreign policy and center neo-liberal economic policy.
People are hurting from inflation and decades of wage stagnation and wealth disparity, and the democrats have no answer for that except means-tested bullshit.
She didn't run a left platform exactly, BUT she relied on the left coming out to support their own fucking human rights and mfing democracy. She was very clear on that and it was a big part of her time. That they can't even do that, well that means they will never show up for literally anything. That means the Dems will never, never, never rely on the left coming out ever again. Kiss any left policy goodbye. Dems will run on "it's the economy, stupid" because yes we agree this was won on inflation and housing.
Lmao, who do you think 'the left' is?
The 14million democrats who voted in 2020 but didn't in 2024?
Lol wow I had no idea 'the left' was that big
Hey this looks familar! Yup it's you again with your non sequitur.
Lmao
"It's the left's fault!"
"Who do you mean by 'the left'?"
"That's not relevant!!"
OK bud
Well you're defending them.
And it's has nothing to do with my warnings. It has to do with the literal words he said out loud repeatedly.
Now all you're saying is American voters are ignorant and that's somehow Kamala Harris' fault. If they didn't know what Trump had to say, they didn't know what Harris had to say.
Again not a good excuse.
Here's the thing man: It doesn't matter one bit if you and I think they were terrible people for not voting Harris despite all the very valid reasons you have listed why they should have. (All of which I agree with.)
Bottom line: Dems didn't sell themselves to those voters in a way that worked. We can be outraged that it didn't work, but it didn't work.
So, we can wring our hands about how awful our fellow man is for not seeing the clear moral imperative that we do (exactly like the Genocide-Joe folks have been doing for months), or we can recognize that Dems need to start doing things differently.
Personally I'm of the opinion that unless they truly are just there to put up a token show of resistance against R while serving the same goals (and I'm not yet cynical enough to really believe that), they need to stop with this "let's move to the right and try for some R votes" crap. It's not getting them any R votes, and it's clearly pissing off a lot of D. Edit: And it's ratcheting the entire country rightward.
In my 50+ years they have never really moved to the left for more than a brief teaser. Let's see them seriously push for some Bernie or AOC crafted policies, etc. Some actual progressive fire. Stop treating the left like political suicide, and stop treating Republicans like they can be reasoned with.
I'm not defending them, I'm just explaining why that message didn't land the way you think it should have.
Most people think democrats are alarmist (and they often are), and even if they thought the threat was credible, they don't think it would affect them.
Call them dumb if you want, I don't care, democrats didn't do enough to turn them out either way.
I voted for Harris. But in the first-past-the-post system, all that matters for a party is victory. That is how you judge the success of party officials. There is a whole class of extremely well-paid Democratic party officials whose ENTIRE JOB is to figure out how to select a candidate and sell them to the American people. That is literally their entire job.
The average voters is low-information, doesn't pay attention, and assumes both sides frequently lie. (And they're not wrong about the lying.) You can truthfully call the other side fascist, but the other side will simply say you're the fascist, and low-information voters can't tell the difference.
Voters have always been low-information. This isn't anything new. The entire reason we have primaries is that it forces candidates to actually try their hand at mass appeal and to take the temperature of the electorate. Democratic leaders kept Biden in far too long, til it was too late to hold a proper primary.
You can blame it on those who don't vote, but the truth is that most people pay attention to politics only tangentially. If you, as a political operator, didn't find a way to reach these voters, you have failed.
Does the blame ultimately fall on those who didn't vote for Biden? Sure. But the same is true of those who didn't vote for Walter Mondale. It doesn't mean Harris isn't just as big a failure as Mondale.
Then it isn't the fault of the Harris campaign.
That would not make a difference if voters have always been low-information.
You mean like have multiple TV channels and foreign governments pump out endless propaganda? You're right, the real issue in America is that there's no Democrat version of Fox News, Newsmax, etc. and they haven't reached out to Putin for help.
Also, this is nothing like Reagan/Mondale. Reagan never said he would be a dictator. Reagan never quoted Hitler.
This is the denial that I've been seeing everywhere. People keep thinking that "oh, the dems might learn something and do better in 4 years." Nope. It's done. The courts have been irreparably compromised and left of center policy will probably never again be allowed.
These guys are so entrenched in "left policy will surely win" that they can't let it go. Keep telling them but I don't know if it'll ever get through.
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.