Democrats continuing to insist they need to get more racist instead of appealing to their base.
Is that your takeaway, genius? Was that how Biden won over Trump FOUR SHORT YEARS AGO, by appealing to the democratic base?
Funny, I don’t remember the base being pleased with Biden’s record AT ALL. But… he was a white male, wasn’t he, hm?
You seem to have a very foggy memory of Biden’s campaign because he did make numerous concessions to the Bernie wing. His failure to deliver on those promises didn’t mean he didn’t make them.
On the other hand Harris openly flaunted her conservative endorsements and campaigned with Liz Cheney. Her strategy was explicitly to court moderate republicans who voted Trump anyways. Perhaps she would’ve peeled off more moderate republicans if she was a white man but that was my point. You want the democrats to appeal to more racists and you’re insisting that they do that by being more racist.
Harris’ messaging problem is the same problem Hilary Clinton had in 2016. Instead of appealing to the base, she went after Republicans and just assumed the left would be on board. The Democratic establishment does this every time, move closer to the center and right and tell the leftists shut up and go away.
The average Democrat is a well off person living in the suburbs who doesn’t want higher taxes but doesn’t want to appear racist.
Great. Glad to see that we’re learning nothing here. If I wasn’t pushed into despair by the election results, seeing progressives respond this way to the loss might push me over the edge.
We are a bigoted country, no doubt. But, our working class is struggling. People are inherently good, inherently bad, brilliant, dumb, and all sorts of combinations of those. Material conditions, messaging, and framing all work together in bringing out these different sides of ourselves both at the societal and individual level.
Responding to this loss with “the only way to win is to be racist” is basically just giving up and saying the fascists are right. If we decide to roll over and die because we’re too chickenshit to fight, too cynical to have any imagination, and too self-pitying to even lift a finger, the most vulnerable of us (which includes me) will perish.
We HAVE to be better than this.
These aren’t progressives. These are liberals. These are the same people who, when they were told 8 years ago that economic anxiety made voters turn to Trump, mocked them, saying, “Oh, I guess the economy made them racist!”
Yeah, racism and misogyny played a huge role in this election, but people don’t vote for a guy who promises to burn everything down when they’re doing well. I’d have thought this time, given that the Democrats lost ground with both black and Latino voters, they might finally have to acknowledge that their failures are due to more than just bigotry. I’m starting to doubt that, though…
I’m can only follow this logic so far though. The problem is they are better off, the economy is better, but how do you get people to see it, believe it?
The obvious example is inflation, not that President really has much control over it. We’ve gone through a wave of inflation, triggered by causes during the previous president’s term. It generally trended down during Biden’s term and is now close to what we’d normally expect.
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many people see the accumulated inflation of four years during Biden term and are frustrated by how much more expensive everything is
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another perspective is inflation was triggered in Trump’s term, it took four years to get under control, now people voted to do it all over again rather than stay the course that got it under control. Staying the course is boring
Analyzing the economy is a measure of how well the capitalist engine is running. Is the supply being met by demand (perpetually rising GDP)? Is everyone contributing to growth (low unemployment, growing market caps)? To focus on these points is capitalism, what the corporations want. This is necessarily paired with trickle-down economics to explain why you should give a shit about stocks you don’t own going up.
You won’t ever see measures of the economy focusing on people. Are the workers able to pay rent and bills and contribute to savings? Are workers going hungry? Does the minimum wage provide an acceptable minimum standard of living? Are wages keeping up with inflation? Are workers accumulating their own wealth? To focus on these points is populism, what the people want.
The economy is doing great! Corporations are posting record profits every quarter. But workers are getting fucked harder every year. People are mad because their life isn’t easy and they can’t afford a stable existence. When lots of people are unhappy, they want drastic action. 20k on a 500k house and a child care credit ain’t it. Deporting 20,000,000 people and “draining the swamp” is drastic. It’s objectively stupid, but at least it’s action and people are thirsty for anything because what we’re currently doing isn’t working.
If anyone wants to win the next election, all they need is a populist platform. For Dems, that’s progressivism and an infatuation with unions. It’s us (the people) against them (the corporations). For Rs, it’s a straightforward culture war. It’s us (the true patriots) against them (the social outgroups).
The problem is they are better off, the economy is better, but how do you get people to see it, believe it?
The thing is they’re not. Yes, inflation is down, but that doesn’t mean that prices are going down. It means that the rate increase goes down. So if you were living paycheck to paycheck in 2019, you are doing objectively worse in 2024.
This isn’t new either. Over the last 30 years, the middle class has collapsed, the cost of living has gone up, the bottom of the manufacturing industry has fallen out, and wages have remained stagnant. Sometimes when Democrats have power, things get marginally better, but it’s more accurate to say that things get worse more slowly. Donald Trump promises radical change, and the Democrats don’t. They can no longer survive on this impotent half-measures like subsidies for small business loans. They need something radical, like a New Deal, if they ever want to win again.
Responding to this loss with “the only way to win is to be racist” is basically just giving up and saying the fascists are right.
And the joke is that Dems will still lose on these terms, because they are already branded the Woke party. Might as well try and out-racist the KKK as the GOP. It’s not a race Dems are in a position to win. All they can do is shed even more of their base to Jill Stein and Uncommitted.
What’s hilarious is the Dems are branded as woke not because of their politicians but because of their average voters are. You can convince a conservative voter that a (D) politician is not woke but they still won’t vote for him because only woke people vote (D). Dems would have to purge some of their most fanatical supporters to win those conservative votes.
Imagine suggesting the Democrats tell people with the “In this house we believe…” signs to take those signs down. For some reason people are taking this suggestion seriously instead of immediately dismissing it as either inane babbling or deliberate sabotage.
The response by so many people has been pathetic. Liberals are learning nothing.
If you look at the voters who voted for the dem in 2020 and sat out this time it was almost all older white men
Older white men were the demographic that stayed home because they didn’t want to vote for a woman who had identical policies to the man they previously voted for.
Pretending like white men sat out exclusively because of “inflation” while no other demographic did is probably not the takeaway
That being said we absolutely need to kill the Duopoly, hopefully a third progressive party can exist with the Dems sucking corporate cock
I keep telling myself I won’t comment on political posts, and yet here I go again.
If we stop looking at non-voters, and start actually looking at voters, you’ll see that Trump gained support among both women and non-white voters. Why is nobody asking about that? I would rather they have stayed home than given Trump the extra vote, but all you hear about now is low turn out in white men. She lost in almost every bloc because she didn’t inspire any of the dem base. High turnout skews dem and she was just not an inspiring candidate.
Kamala had no time to campaign, was an unknown to voters despite being the VP, made no strides to distance herself from Biden, and failed to run a cohesive strategy. People just were not excited to vote for her. Do I think a popularity contest is the best way to elect the president, no, but that doesn’t change the system that we have.
The race was extremely close, and the fact that Trump GAINED in POC and women blocs probably speaks more to the campaign that was run rather than America’s inherent sexism or racism. Just to be clear, America is sexist and racist, and people can be self hating or whatever, but she GAINED points in the white male category and lost in the black male category. Sure, white men should have shown up, but it’s very easy to cry “racism/sexism” if you ignore all the other people who didn’t show up or the people who DID show up and voted trump. She might’ve run as well as she could have, but it was a bad campaign.
There was a 5% loss in young voters. I wonder how energized they would have been not just to vote but to donate and volunteer had she run a different campaign. It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback, but Joe ruined the chances of a dem winning this year.
If dems still want to blame racism/sexism, then I don’t want to see any dems support POC/women in primaries. Dems should only run white males and if I see a POC/woman being pushed again I will assume they want to sabotage that year. I expect “I’m not voting for a POC/woman candidate” to be a well regarded and widespread dem opinion for practicality sake. Either stop running them ever, or admit they can win with better campaign strategies. You can’t have it both ways.
Going off these numbers: https://www.nbcwashington.com/decision-2024/2024-voter-turnout-election-demographics-trump-harris/3762138/
There was also a significant portion of black men who voted Trump because they were misogynists. It’s just a fact.
But that’s still not discounting the fact that someone with Bernie’s message and goals would have won in a landslide.
If you look at the voters who voted for the dem in 2020 and sat out this time it was almost all older white men
Kamala Harris won 28%, while Donald Trump won 47%, according to unofficial results from the city clerk, reported by the network.
Metro Detroit is home to the nation’s largest concentration of Arab Americans, with a large proportion of them living in Dearborn. The city—which Democrat Joe Biden won by a 3-to-1 margin in 2020—has been roiled by political turmoil, with many upset with the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
Third party canidates did not receive enough votes to sway anything this election.
If every third party voter voted dem nothing would be different
If you look at the voters who voted for the dem in 2020 and sat out this time it was almost all older white men
Sorry, can I have a source for this? How could they determine the gender of non-voters?
Who you voted for is secret but that you voted is public information. I haven’t heard if it was predominantly white men who sat it out, but that wouldn’t be hard data to gather.
Older white man here. I stayed home because of Gaza. I have 3 progressive friends who say the exact same thing. None of us are Muslim, and we’re all white and older.
By the way:
Democrats had bet on women showing up in force. They didn’t https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3e8z53qyd5o
Responding to this loss with “the only way to win is to be racist” is basically just giving up and saying the fascists are right.
Nobody is saying that.
I mean… it’s hard to interpret “the problem is her messaging is she didnt come across as a white man with grievances…” as anything but claiming sexism and racism. There’s hyperbole there, but blaming the loss on those factors assumes that people couldn’t have possibly abstained from voting, or voted against her without those factors. I don’t believe that’s the case.
Too frequently we call people these things and basically lock them out of discussion. For example, if you called me a racist, I’d no longer trust anything else you said to me because I know myself and clearly you like telling people things you know nothing about. I think that exchange happened with a bunch of people, which is why there were so many people who just assumed many of the things said about Trump were just political lies made to discredit him. After they experienced the same hyperbole themselves.
That said… theres alot of bigots out there too.
Keep pushing this message. Keep doubling down. I’m looking forward to the fact that most of you learn nothing, you insist the other side is just dumb, and you’ll scream so from your lungs as 2028 is an even bigger bloodbath for the Dems.
California just voted to raise gas prices in CA by a full dollar in response to trump winning. Can’t make this shit up.
How do you explain Biden winning over Trump just 4 years earlier, genius? How does that fit your data points, smart guy?
Well, have you been watching the AZ senate ballot counts? So weird, they’ve started counting hundreds of ballots that only had votes for the Senate race, and not filled in for the house or the president.
The idea that votes can be printed and harvested is not a conspiracy theory. I think in 2020, 20k votes for Biden were printed and counted at 3 in the morning, and anyone who tried to point out how sus that was, was immediately branded a voter denier and a conspiracy theorist.
And I’m a smart gal, not a smart guy. :)
Republicans have a vision. Democrats have a list of policy proposals. Average people can grok the vision but since they read at a 6th grade level they don’t grok the policy proposals.
Democrats need to stop acting like nerds if they want more people to like them.
But I was told it was just that our policy proposals weren’t left enough?
Unironically, you’re right. Most voters don’t vote based on any kind of coherent ideology. They vote on feels.
God help us all.
If the policy proposals were far left enough they’d start to look a helluva lot more like a vision.
I want a country where everyone pays less for healthcare. If it can be done for seniors, why not everyone else?
I want a country where everyone’s private medical decisions remain between them and their doctor, without being cleared by your local, state, or federal representative or by a judge.
I want a country where everyone who works, pays taxes, and does not commit violent crime or property theft can stay and keep working without having to look over their shoulder.
I want a country where if you work full time, you can afford your rent/mortgage, put food on the table, start a family, and still be able to retire.
There’s a vision. Apparently all of these things have become radically progressive leftist positions and are attacked as such by the media and conservatives alike.
See, the problem with all of these ideas is that they’re at odds with the billionaires’ vision that you slave away in servitude to them, while their imaginary worth line goes up to infinity.
It’s really nothing more complex than that. And, as soon as the non-billionaire conservatives—your neighbors, your coworkers, the people you pass by every day—wake up and understand that they’re covered by that vision, too, the sooner things get better for all of us.
With capitalism, a middle class does not occur organically, it is created by the governing body through subsidies. If you do not subsidize a middle class there can be no middle class. This is fundamental. We really started to feel it in 2015 or so. I called it the squeeze. This tightening grip of not subsidies but further attempts to squeeze more and more blood from rocks.
Why? Our government has been subsidizing the wrong class for a while now. Trump did kick that up a notch the first time. The data is in. Trickle down economics doesn’t work.
As with a middle class, health care has to be subsidized. The governing body won’t allow richer people to pay the same taxes as the poorest of us so that will never happen.
And now Elon Musk is promising “hardship” going forward, as opposed to whatever this is the last 4 yrs, on us, the poorest, rather than paying mor taxes himself. Like that would impact his alien ass at all (he’s weirdly shaped, looks like a slightly melted wax museum figure, and was born into so much money he has no idea how humans live, that’s what I mean by alien). So don’t count on it ever happening going forward.
If you have preexisting conditions expect loss of coverage. And as a fallout from that expect the healthcare system to get slammed with much sicker people trying to find loopholes and other diagnoses so they can actually keep living and working.
How the fuck do democrats win here then? After the Harris/Dump debate i feel like there was a lot of conjecture about how Harris didnt talk about policy enough. How do you get away with talking about policy but not “sounding like a nerd” to uneducated voters? See I think this is more about the average voter not being educated enough to understand the issues and the policies potential nominees have pertaining to them, or how their lives would be affected depending who/what they vote for.
Start offering policies that help average people. Run on medicare for all. Run on forcing pharmaceutical companies lowering drug prices. Run on building new factories to create solar panels, geothermal equipment, and wind turbines. Run on creating affordable housing and ending corporate landlords. Run on campaign finance reform with a promise of ending political ads that everyone hates.
The Democrats problem is tha they won’t do any of that because their donors dont want it. But as long as the DNC values their donorsore than their voters, they will continue to lose elections.
The Democrats problem is tha they won’t do any of that because their donors dont want it. But as long as the DNC values their donorsore than their voters, they will continue to lose elections.
The entire American political system we have is dependent on big money donors since citizens united. America has been an oligarchy since at least the early 2000s. You will not get a Democratic party with policies that vary wildly from what industrial heads and CEOs want simply by voting (or not) every 2-4 years. And even small deviations from what they want aren’t tolerated by many of the oligarchs (e.g. Elon Musk).
How about do basic stuff that people understand …
… like tax the hell out of billionaires and use the money on people in the country.
… stop financing overseas wars and use that free money on people in the country
… then just keep repeating and blasting everyone that all the money the government is collecting from rich idiots and not spending on war is being spent on everyone … rinse, repeat 10,000 times.
Yep. And there’s precedent for this. (Even though with this Supreme Court precedent counts for jack shit…)
Every time Bernie got asked a question he’d turn it around to mentioning the top 1% and how they’re fucking us over. And people liked him for it. I had MAGA hat folks tell me they liked him because of it back in 2016.
There was an era where the nerds placed up a facade to give the illusion of meritocracy and measured governance. Unfortunately that just drove a wedge between people and the “ruling class.” When it came out that bill was getting blowies in the oval office people’s brains broke and the facade was forever tarnished. Today, democrats still hide behind it and pretend like we don’t know they piss and shit like everyone else. The Republicans decided to erect a monument to trump their lord and savior, the only thing keeping them from being a foot note in the history books.
We need to look to our founders. Flawed in every way possible they did have one idea that we should still cherish. They believed in an america they could make by their own hands. They did, it sucked, it was also amazing somehow. We should be like them but be just as kind to our future as we are to the present.
Do they have a vision? The scary thing about Trump that it’s uncertain what he will do the next 4 years. Will he undo democracy or keep it? Will he continue to support Ukraine or not? Will he leave NATO or not? Will he impose those tariffs or not? Will he apply project 2025 or not? Will he impose a federal abortion ban or not?
Kamala had a clear but boring vision: 4 more years of the current status quo. Nothing new will happen.
It’s right there on the hat: Make America Great Again.
And the neat part is it’s so vague that people can project whatever they want onto it.
Well that part I’m aware of, but that’s more of a slogan rather than a vision. It doesn’t tell what has gone wrong with America and how to fix it. Trump says a lot of things that sometimes contradict each other or may or may not be taken seriously, so it’s difficult to piece together a concrete vision.
They have a concept of a vision so to say.
you are incorrect.
Republicans are scared of brown people, and they cried about it.
democrats closed the border, reformed border control, and have set up a rational immigration system to allow as many legal immigrants into the country as the system can provide for and integrate into the US economy.
Republicans are scared of vaccines, and they cried about it.
democrats got vulnerable populations vaccinated.
Republicans are afraid of other countries exports, and they cried about it.
democrats increased employment, supported domestic businesses and funded domestic production.
Republicans quake in their boots, democrats take action.
Democrats have a list of milquetoast, bottom of the barrel obvious stuff that they hope could show bipartisanship, and even then they half-ass it. There is real fixing that needs to get done, but the side they isn’t actively making things worse has no will to actually do it.
Democrat: *pushes up glasses, adjusts pocket protector* “Um, we propose to implement a 2-10% excise tax on health insurance plans which will allow us to increase access to Medicare by 16% according to these models.”
Voters: “I just want health care.”
