From the Article:
For weeks following Joe Biden’s disastrous performance, his campaign publicly maintained the illusion that he was still well-positioned to defeat Donald Trump. Privately, they knew otherwise. As Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau revealed days after the election:
After the debate, the Biden people told us that the polls were fine, and Biden was still the strongest candidate. They were privately telling reporters, at the time, that Kamala Harris couldn’t win. […] Then we find out, when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling, at the time when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes.
The implications of this are staggering, and it should be treated as a massive scandal.
The campaign was fine. Americans are the problem. They’re too ignorant.
If we’re going to blame this ignorance on anyone we might consider blaming the media. Odd how we aren’t seeing a lot of articles from the media saying the media failing to give information to people about how bad Trump is. But linked above is something from the media blaming a political campaign for not doing their jobs for them.
Still not doing any introspection about waiting until after the election to explain why Trump’s “economic plan” will be a disaster, huh? Didn’t bother to explain anything about what causes inflation. Wouldn’t want people to think it’s something to do with it being a free market, and not caused by the government. Nope, it’s up to the campaigns to explain economics to people in 30 second TV spots.
So the media will continue blame the Democrats for all the problems, while wondering “why couldn’t the democrats win the election”? Must be the democrats fault! It’s like we’ve always been saying, it’s always their fault! We should never think about what the effect of us blaming one party for everything might be.
But mostly it was just Americans taking democracy for granted. Don’t know what you got until you’ve lost it I guess.
The campaign was complete garbage, though. In a Rolling Stone article, it details on how many advisors and Democratic party operatives were begging her campaign to not bring in Liz Cheney because any gains would essentially be eclipsed by other Democratic voters that otherwise stayed home.
A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney […] was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020
I also understand that your main points are on how political commentators and news anchors on TV chose not to encourage Harris to tackle issues on the economy, but an Atlantic article essentially tells us that Harris torpedoed her anti-big business rhetoric when she brought in her brother-in-law into the campaign itself.
While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer
Honestly, how big of a role does media have in swaying her campaign into talking about important issues (such as the economy, like you pointed out) if she willingly chose to ignore the easiest slam dunks her campaign had?
The democrats that stayed home are most certainly in the group I called ignorant Americans. People couldn’t see the difference between Harris and Trump, “ignorant” is being generous.
If people understood how the economy worked at all, then it would have been a strength and she wouldn’t have been on the defensive about it. And do you think the majority of Americans who voted for Trump would have changed their mind if she was running on an “anti-business” platform? Trump who was proposing tariffs would solve inflation?
We literally had a candidate for President telling people to watch her opponents rallies. Why was that? Because the media only wanted to show pundits arguing over something because ratings. Everyone seeing him as the bat-shit lunatic he is doesn’t give them anything to debate. So they had to sane wash what he was saying to give the pundits something to talk about. Harris has to have an economic plan. Trump, well his plan is batshit so don’t talk about it. Why isn’t Harris doing more interviews? Trump… well he’s not doing interviews because he’s too batshit, nothing to discuss there.
But sure believe the media when they blame the democrats for not doing the media’s job. If I were more conspiracy minded I might say they didn’t want to explain anything so the dems would have to explain things via ad spots the media made money from. But never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
The media is failing to explain anything because they’ve been too distracted by Trump for a fucking decade. But as long as they can blame their failures on the democrats (which does have an impact on the dems getting elected ya know) they aren’t going to change.
This ain’t new either. I had to learn about how vaccines from a youtuber that plays Mario Maker. Despite the covid vaccine being one of the biggest stories of the decade, they didn’t bother to cover anything about it’s development and testing. It was just Trump Trump Trump Vaccine Trump Trump Trump… Why don’t people trust the vaccine? Why oh why don’t people know that the vaccine is safe?
Same fucking thing this year. Trump Trump Trump TRUMP ELECTED! Trump Trump… why don’t people understand that inflation has been handled and tariffs will only bring it back?
I have a hard time believing that anyone was engaged enough to actually understand who Cheney was (to the point that they have an opinion of her) AND they were so upset by the gesture of welcoming her on on the Jan 6th Committee as a bridge that they completely refused their civic duty to vote? Something doesn’t square there…
That said, Cheney is human garbage who was still spewing that ridiculous “dems want to abort babies after they are already born” bullshit, as of very recently.
Yep, Snapz > Harris’ aids and reputable sources. You’re clearly smarter than the helpers and all papers that document it well.
What kind of Trump supporter “How did he lose 2020? Rigged!” thinking is this? Running a bad campaign of copying Romney/Trump points that Trump supporters won’t like, and the people Trump’s policies hurt don’t think you care about them in any way beyond tokenism, loses you that election.
The alternative was Trump. Harris posing for some photo ops to try to pick up some GOP moderate votes doesn’t change the fact her opponent was Trump.
If some people wouldn’t vote for Harris because of some photo ops with Cheney, those would be people in the ignorant group I’m talking about.
