All the people who said I was helping the orange man by asking for a better candidate can tell me they’re sorry. Yeah right. They’re the same ones telling us to shut up about Gaza.
“We need a better candidate” is a different cry altogether.
I still feel they’re taking a huge risk and they could still fail miserably like every other time before, but we have no comparative data for a differential anyway.
I still worry they made the wrong choice but they did so the best way possible, and I hope it works out for them. I still have my fears but I sure hope they’re just that.
Feels a wee bit early for the “I told you so” stuff. She’s currently losing in the betting odds.
Edit: it’s good to be wrong
For one thing, it’s an even worse metric than polls. For another:
Interesting, I’ve heard the opposite in terms of betting odds v. traditional polling. Good to know it changed though as Trump was like +5 as recently as like 2 days ago. Thanks for posting.
https://www.realclearpolling.com/betting-odds/2024/president
Yo I don’t think we spoke but I was someone saying Biden would be the nominee. I even said things like it’s unlikely or impossible there will be another D candidate.
I acknowledge I was wrong on that part. I also acknowledge as the season wore on Biden clearly displayed himself as not fit to run, and a replacement was a good idea.
In general I focused and continue to focus on those who say “stay home or vote 3rd party” as that is an issue in the face of project 2025 and other obvious trump stuff.
So my argument wasn’t “omg vote for grandpa Biden he’s the best” it was “let’s keep trump out of the Whitehouse, a Democratic candidate is the only option, and Biden is currently the likely nominee.”
Also, keep talking about Gaza, it’s important.
I don’t know if I ever talked to YOU about it, but I definitely said a few times that it was too risky to change candidates, even though Biden was polling terribly. I’m very happy to eat my hat now!
Yeah, in the same boat. I thought they needed to stick with him because of advantage incumbents have, and I didn’t think we had time to promote a new candidate. Very happy to be wrong about that! I don’t care about the change, I’m just happy to go with whoever has the best chance at winning
I had no confidence that the Democrats could coalesce around another candidate, in time for the convention.
100%
It was so obvious that Biden dropping out would be beneficial and so many of you had your head up your ass about it. Same people that call anyone who brings up the genocide in Palestine Tankies. Gross people.
Doing an “I told you so” on people who are happy to be wrong is pretty silly.
It needs to be said. If we can’t acknowledge how contradicting narratives were fed to us within the same month, then it shows an alarming lack of cognitive dissonance on our part.
There are people on Lemmy who argued that Biden is not our best bet against Trump; they were told that Biden was the best that the party can do and that there was not enough time to replace Biden. Now, we’re all supposed to move on like that didn’t just happen.
That said, I am pleasantly surprised to see the community admitting the mistake. I assumed this post would be downvoted heavily but the post felt necessary for the reasons above.
that’s why i gave kudos to those people instead last month https://lemmy.world/comment/11376547
the fears were wrong but understandable. if AOC wasn’t sure there was enough support behind Harris you’re allowed to be wrong too.
now there’s great and unified energy behind the democratic party for the first time since Obama. just enjoy it and try your best to keep it up. going for an “i told you so” right now is petty.
Yeah, the “I told you so”s feel like infighting just to fight your own side
i mean there was some infighting at the time, and i participated in it saying he should drop out. other people were saying he shouldn’t. that’s infighting and it makes sense. people were in disagreement about what should be done next.
but now it’s over. there’s pretty much unanimous consensus that it was the right thing to do. now that there’s no disagreement, bringing up the time where there was, just to feel better about yourself is silly and pointless.
Surely you can link some of those comments on Lemmy?
I don’t feel like digging through my own comment history for examples, but I can assure you I made MANY such comments, and I was not alone in making them.
I don’t think I made such comments but I sure as hell voted that way.
It’s good to be proven wrong when the outcome is this positive.
Hopefully you can take a second, if not a couple hours, to reflect on what you can learn about the experience. A lot of other people didn’t make the same mistake, for lack of a better word, and were communicating their ideas the whole time.
For example, I try to pay attention to which pundits or networks are wrong and then never fully trust them again, or at least treat them with a high amount of skepticism. In contrast, people that are right on big, important issues I try to pay more attention to
Edit: I think I should’ve said we, as I’m absolutely doing this myself
I personally didn’t think it was a great idea to attack him a la Bernie v Hilary, since we have to ultimately vote for him, which is where I think most of his defense comes from, but I also didn’t agree with denying reality and pretending we were going to win by just ignoring reality harder than the other side.
I mainly want to try and understand why I was hesitant at all and not fully onboard with the brave people that convinced enough people in power to force him to step down. It at least makes me wonder what else I’m believing that isn’t true
I did as well, and am very happy to be wrong.
And it seems like Harris’ campaign saw those kinds of comments and chose to address them with energy and humor.
They’ve done a great job so far. Hoping they can keep this amazing momentum and prove me thoroughly wrong on election day.
To be fair this was kind of a new phenomenon, and nobody knew what would happen if Biden dropped out like that. I’m sure you were hoping to avoid a power struggle that just didn’t materialize. Plus a lot of the suggestions were kind of out there and not well known, so I can see why it would make sense to stick with Biden.
Though I’m really glad you were wrong.
Yeah, honestly, I was dreading a whole avalanche of consequences that just… didn’t materialize. Even when I finally came around to Biden dropping out, I was certain that we were going to end up with a very brutal “DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY” narrative from the media in addition to whatever ugliness emerged from figuring out who the candidate was without a new primary. And yet when it happened, it was almost… subdued. And the Trump campaign absolutely floundered on it.
Wasn’t hyped for Harris either, but Walz was a damn good VP pick, so I’m actually feeling almost positive. Almost. I mean, at the end of the day we shouldn’t be dealing with fighting this fascist shite in a fair and just world, but we deal with the hand we have, not the one we want.
I can’t find specific comments I’ve made in the past, but I know I made them. I admit I believed there was no way there could be such a rapid acceptance of Kamala as the candidate with how late in the election cycle we were.
My main priority then (as it is now) was just keeping Trump out of the white house, and I thought dropping the incumbent from the ticket after primaries were already done would jeopardize that. Happy to be wrong.
What a time to be alive. As it seems now, I was entirely wrong, as was ‘conventional’ political wisdom. May I continue to be wrong. It’s a welcome failure, as far as I’m concerned.
What’s to be learned? What is weak logic about the mainline, presumptive nominee, who is a sitting president, who one way or another was the only human being to beat trump in an election, would become the actual nominee and democratic candidate?
That is not a bad bet, or bad logic, if we are sitting in March or April.
Idk, I asked someone else in this thread that and they had a great answer. They mentioned how the way we predict elections has changed since 2016 (or something) and I thought that was super interesting and worth reflecting on. If I answered your question right now it might be something simple like age or someone with a better understanding of history might mention how the current level of wealth inequality compares to previous moments in history
That said, I’m not sure why this similar comment was seen as more offensive. This is literally something I try to do myself when someone I trust is wrong about something. I might not cancel em or whatever but I’ll try to understand what went wrong or maybe just stop listening to them about certain topics they’re consistently wrong on
For example, you could note that “only human being to beat Trump in an election” is a really small sample size. It’s equally true to note that so far, Hillary is the only Democrat to lose to Trump in an election. The performance post-switch would indicate Trump is not a uniquely dangerous and persuasive candidate, but that his opposition was uniquely weak so far.
That conventional political wisdom is getting less applicable with every year since the hell-date of 2016?
That’s actually really great! 1000 kudos to you
Why do you think political wisdom wasn’t applicable in 2016 and hasn’t been since?
I think that’s is really one of the most important things we need to try and understand and I don’t think it’s mainly due to the Internet being a factor.
My guess is it’s moreso due to the influence of money on political campaigns, the influence of mega-corporations on the job market, and all the offshoring of jobs in the last few decades. The terrible state of our education system really doesn’t help either
Yeah, unprecedented event after unprecedented event. Still you could’ve been vindicated if anything mildly unfortunate had happened before the DNC. Like if Harris picked a different VP, if Vance was actually in any way adept, etc. And hey, knock on wood, but you could still be right in the end – we probably shouldn’t count our chickens before they hatch.
Good on you though for being a good sport about your previous comments. I was on the “drop out” side (not that Biden would drop out, but I thought pretty much anyone else would have a better chance), but at the end of the day I kinda think we’re all talking out of our asses to a certain degree, because political science isn’t actually a science at all.
Yep, I was wearing that clown makeup too. Dems have not impressed me much lately with being able to deliver a coherent and effective message, so I was fully prepared for a shitshow of disarray if/when Biden dropped out.
It was very surprising to me how effectively they were able to leave Trump stumbling just as he seemed to be on the upswing. The utter lack of disorder around it almost feels like Biden was planning to drop out of the race all along, just waiting for the right moment… but that’s probably giving him too much credit.
What clown makeup? Biden was the presumptive nominee. I wasn’t pro Biden, I was pro Democrat in the Whitehouse. Trump in prison.
I still am, though I acknowledge I was wrong about who the nominee was gonna be.
I personally underestimated the support Harris would get. I remember lots of progressives being unhappy with her back in 2020, due to her background as a prosecutor.
Between that and the obvious reasons Republicans would go after her, I figured it would be an uphill battle.
Very happy to have been wrong!
I figured there was a 1% chance of Biden dropping out, but also thought that Kamala would be a better candidate than him, but was also skeptical that Kamala would be able to beat Trump.
So…basically wrong on the first, correct on the second… yet to be determined on the third.
I did not expect the Democrats to actually do anything that would actually help themselves, figuring that they are far too ossified and out of touch.
Currently the Trump and the Republicans seem to stun locked by the ‘they’re just weird’ angle… which is amazing to me in two ways:
One, that after basically 3 decades of spewing lies and hate and insults against their opponents in the form of coordinated talking points to respond to basically every political development, they cannot handle the mildest possible form of this being used against them.
Two, that the Democrats finally actually collectively did something ‘aggressive’ rhetorically. Years and years of ‘taking the high road’ and acting morally superior to their opponents… they finally actually did something (collectively) that makes them not seem like hoity toity cloistered intellectual snobs.
That, and Mike Tim Walz is actually surprisingly relatable and charismatic.
