I don’t think it’s that difficult. Trump had a rather focused message: anti-immigration and pro-tariffs. He hammered just two issues and it brought out his biggest demographics, uneducated whites and business owners. The big surprise to Democrats is that this also won over many Latino voters.
Democrats need to be similarly focused on their biggest demographics, with two or three major initiatives to differentiate them from the GOP.
Codifying Roe worked to bring out college educated voters. They should probably keep that.
Now add a major new program aimed at blue collar voters (Harris lacked this) and a major new program aimed at Latino and/or Black voters (Harris lacked this too).
Now add a major new program aimed at blue collar voters (Harris lacked this) and a major new program aimed at Latino and/or Black voters (Harris lacked this too).
This is it right here, Dems didn’t have a big economic plan to get folks back to where they were before the pandemic and so blue collar voters just didn’t turn out for them.
We’ve had 32y of the neoliberal Democrat party and the bulk of the wealth created during that time has funnelled to the top 10%. Voters want to hear about the plan to give them a share of prosperity too and until that’s on the menu they’re not going to show up unless a previous Republican administration makes some sort of catastrophic fuck up.
Bush walked into the 2008 crash with his face and Obama ran on change and opportunity for all. He won, then passed healthcare reform and won again. Hillary pushed neoliberal business as usual and her foreign policy expertise and failed. Biden won because Trump catastrophically fucked up the government’s COVID response and voters didn’t trust him to steer the country out of it. Harris ran on neoliberal business as usual at a time shortly after record setting inflation (and corporate profits) without spending any time talking about how she’d address these things or how they were going to make new opportunity for the working class. It shouldn’t be a surprise that her campaign failed, neoliberalism isn’t particularly popular with anyone except the wealthy and the educated who see the long term benefit of democrats other policies.
It’s pretty easy to see the pattern, Democrats don’t represent the change voters want to see unless we’re coming out of a catastrophic economic fuck-up during the prior administration.
What does that buy you, an unpredictable win every 8-12y followed by 4 more years of business as usual?
That’s hard to disagree with. Kerry couldn’t beat Bush even though he was a respectable Senator who also was a drafted Purple Heart war hero in Vietnam. A “Standard Democrat” can’t win in a time of aggravation. You need someone on the verge of Fire Brand to rally the troops.
You need someone who’s very obviously pushing a “change and prosperity for all” message at this point. A standard neoliberal has very little chance of winning at a time when we’ve suffered 2? 3? once in a lifetime economic crises in the last 25y.
There needs to be some plan to include everyone in the economic prosperity that we’ve funnelled to the top 10% and the candidate needs to beat that drum over and over until there’s no space left to talk about anything else. We already know Democrats are for women’s issues, we already know Democrats are for equal racial opportunity, we already know Democrats are (generally) more sane than the other guy - now we need to tell folks that we’ve got the better plan to uplift everyone that’s fallen behind over the last 30y.
When the other side has candidates willing to say “I’ll break the law to change things” you really have to step up your game beyond “we’re better for long term growth and stability, and by the way we’re not the other guy and we ❤️ PoC.”
(Honestly it’s exhausting that this needs to be spelled out, it’s like national Democrats don’t know a single person who’s been left behind over the last 30y.)
The big surprise to Democrats is that this also won over many Latino voters.
It blows my mind that anyone continues to be surprised by this. Republicans have been gaining ground with Latino voters since Bush. How much longer do we have to wait before the DNC stops scratching their heads and actually tries to do something about it?
Definitely. Democrats were too slow to realize how big the problem at the border was and just how much they were getting punished for it.
Look here now, we can’t say there are any issues at the border! It’s all just GOP talking points, nothing to see here. And for god’s sake, don’t point out the humanitarian issues. Liberals (rightly) hate humanitarian issues, but they can’t talk about this one because they would have to admit there’s a problem to begin with.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters
Yes, crossing are clearly down this year! But we’re looking at a major city worth of people, even for a “slow” year. The logistics of absorbing that many people are staggering. We would have to build my entire metro area 4 times over just to cover 2024.
Should probably point out that Congress, under Biden, tried to pass bills relating to border control. But republicans tanked it because there being a problem is good for their election chances (and it worked)
