Summary
In the 2024 election, Democrats excelled with highly engaged voters but lost ground with less-engaged voters, particularly younger, working-class, and non-college-educated individuals.
Vice President Kamala Harris won among voters who closely follow politics by 5 points but trailed Donald Trump by 14 points among less-engaged voters.
Democratic strategists highlighted failures in outreach, reliance on narrow data models, and ineffective messaging.
Critics noted the party’s brand is often defined by extreme voices, while Republicans capitalized on dissatisfaction with the economy and national direction, resonating with everyday frustrations.
Highly engaged voters are invested and take the time to understand policy and nuance. Generally this is not the case. All the others are just trying to get through the day. So you cannot win them over with policy and nuances.
You need to show big, bold initiative and follow through.
The Democratic party could not even prosecute a guy who tried to murder Congress. So the thinking goes - Why the fuck would someone vote for them when they do fuck all?
Hell if someone tried to murder you and you just gave up and went about your way, no one would trust you to do anything of substance. That is the problem with the Democratic party today.
The Democratic party could not even prosecute a guy who tried to murder Congress. So the thinking goes - Why the fuck would someone vote for them when they do fuck all?
The “thinking” was instead to vote for the guy who tried to murder Congress?
The point of this article is that Trump was elected by those who did very little thinking at all.
They did focus groups this past summer about at what point people would stop voting for Trump based on his felonies. The overwhelming answer was if he received a custodial sentence. The double delay signaled to voters that these felonies weren’t actually that bad.
Similarly the non action on the Jan 6 case also signaled to voters that it wasn’t a big deal. So they didn’t feel like they were voting for the guy who tried to murder Congress.
No, it’s that voters respond more to actions than words.
Democrats doomed themselves with the pro-democracy message in 2024. They shouldn’t even have mentioned Trump’s threat to democracy. It simply made them look unhinged to low-information voters. By the time the 2024 election came around, Biden’s own actions made running on the democracy angle nonviable.
The fatal flaw in Democrats’ messaging is that they ran on Trump as an enemy of democracy in 2016, 2020, and 2024. They ran on it, and yet, they did nothing about it.
Trump should have been hauled before a military tribunal and charged with treason on day one of Biden’s presidency. Any SCOTUS justices that tried to carve out special provisions for him should have been hauled in front of the same tribunal and been charged as accomplices. Every single person remotely involved with the conspiracy, including seating members of Congress, should be rotting in Gitmo right now. They all should have been sent to jail or the gallows within 100 days of Biden taking office.
THAT is how you respond to a threat to democracy. You do what you have to do, purge who you have to purge, and let history be your judge. Damn the consequences. Do some MAGA traitors want to start a riot in protest? Fine, send in the military to put them down. Do what you need to do and cut the rot out of the body politic.
You can’t just SAY something is a threat to democracy. You need to get off your ass and actually DO something about it. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and had pro-Confederate newspapers shut down, and that was just the start of it.
When democracy is threatened, sometimes you need to run roughshod over a lot of democratic norms, lest the enemies of democracy get away with it and try again. They only need to win once, you need to win every time. Which means that when someone does actually try to overthrow democracy, you need to come down like the hammer of God upon them. You need to respond with such overwhelming force that people are lining up at the door to strike a plea deal for a mere decade in prison. Realistically, when things get this bad, you need to be prepared to sentence thousands of people to decades in prison based on rapid trials in kangaroo courts if necessary. When thousands of people become so far gone that they think overthrowing a democracy is an acceptable option, the only real way to resolve that is to start handing out life and capital sentences like candy.
What did Biden actually do? He appointed an attorney general who sat on the Trump case for two years and only started an investigation when shamed into it by the House. And then Trump just ran out the clock. Garland prosecuted a bunch of the low-level people who physically stormed the capital, but he made sure all the actual high-level ring leaders escaped unpunished.
Biden didn’t have a spine. He showed, through his actions, that he really didn’t consider Trump a serious threat to democracy. And if the sitting president of the United States doesn’t consider someone a threat, why would you expect disengaged voters to do so?
My only hope is that if Trump’s promised Reign of Terror does occur, that he starts with all the leading figures of Biden’s Justice Department. While whatever mistreatment they receive will be for things that weren’t actually wrong, at least they will be indirectly punished for their actual crimes - failing to defend this nation’s democracy. If Biden and Garland end up themselves sitting in prison on some Trumped-up charge, well I’ll have zero sympathy for them. They will simply be serving their sentence for their cowardly failure to defend American democracy. If anyone is to feel the boot of a new autocracy, let them be the first. They are the ones that created it.
Hmm yes, to save the democracy one must absolutely kill the democracy. We just have to suspend certain rights and liberties until “the enemy within” is rooted out.
Certainly not fascism.
I see you went to the Bến Tre school of saving democracy.
No thanks to hauling Supreme Court justices before a military tribunal because you don’t like the way they ruled. I wish we had expedited the cases against Trump, but I don’t want a bunch of leftists suspending democratic principles just long enough to make sure their political opponents are weakened. We’ve seen that ploy before, and it doesn’t end with freedom.
The Democratic party could not even prosecute a guy who tried to murder Congress. So the thinking goes - Why the fuck would someone vote for them when they do fuck all?
It was never the Democrats job to do that. It was congress’s. Democrats did try. And they absolutely could have done better in many areas. I’m not defending them on that. But we need to also recognize that a large portion of Congress was flattered and extremely impressed that Trump was able to sic so many people on them. That they had no choice but to eagerly and gladly defend him while sucking up for him. Conservatives love an authoritarian. And without a few conservatives. Democrats were and never did accomplish much of anything.
No, it fucking wasn’t Congress’ job – at least, not just Congress’ job. It was the DOJ’s job. And guess who appoints the motherfucking Attorney General?
Wow starting off contradicting yourself. It’s an interesting argument Style. Not sure how it’s going to work though.
All right so I’m not going to defend Merrick garland. I wish that he had done better too. Unfortunately he is kind of what you want. Someone who will try to stay out of the way and seem impartial at least. We’re going to see first hand what having a blindly ideological and engaged Department of Justice will look like and why it’s a bad thing very soon.
That said Merrick Garland did not appoint the judge that sabotaged the case. Merrick Garland and the Democrats did not appoint the Supreme Court Justices who sabotaged the case. And it’s neither the executive branch or a political party’s place to act as a balance or check to the whole f****** judicial branch of government. Even with that whole checks and balances crap is b*******. It was the congress’s job. The Congress which Democrats never solidly controlled in any meaningful sense unfortunately. Especially due to Senators Manchin and the sinema.
There are plenty of actual things to blame Democrats for. That they didn’t put on the sort of performative play that we would have liked to have seen is way at the bottom of the list.
The chief executive of the US has been a Democrat for 4 years, and it was absolutely their responsibility to prosecute (or ensure prosecution happens to) anyone that broke the law, or to at least protect the country. The norm has been for Presidents to maintain a firewall between themselves and prosecutorial decisions, but that’s not constitutionally mandated as far as I can tell.
It’s a norm because prosecution is both an executive and judicial function. It straddles both branches and you want it to be neutral in exercising prosecutorial discretion. When the chief executive steps in to direct prosecution, it has a strong tendency to become political and lead away from democracy.
The Democratic party could not even prosecute a guy who tried to murder Congress.
They could. They chose not to.
So you cannot win them over with policy and nuances.
There’s no room for nuance, but you absolutely can win them over with policy, it just has to be policy that helps them get through the day. Everyone experiences the stress of not knowing how much your healthcare will cost, and getting hit with a massive bill anyway. “Free healthcare” instead of complicated subsidies for insurance that nobody really understands.
Progressive policy tend to win even in states where the dems ate shit..
I gave you and upvote because you came to the debate. Please don’t down vote people who want to talk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People love the policy and hate the person. Call it dumb, stupid whatever you want, but that is the reality. The centrists better realise this quickly.
The centrists better realise this quickly.
Do you really think they’re just ignorant and not malicious?
When a centrist looks at a universal program like free healthcare or free college that has popular support, and then promotes a version which provides less help to fewer people and will be easily removed by the opposition, and then lies about it being more practical and popular despite receiving just as much opposition from republicans, it betrays that preventing progress is a higher priority than winning elections or helping people.
Surprise surprise. The ignorant fell for the party that excels in spreading misinformation, hate, and fear.
The real shocker here is we learned the ignorant account for the majority in America now.
Dark future.
The real shocker here is we learned the ignorant account for the majority in America now.
It was probably always this way, they just weren’t engaged with the process until one of their own usurped a major party and let them feel comfortable being openly ignorant and bigoted again.
Do you really think we can really say a majority or even half?
only approximately 1/4th eligible voters voted for him, a right goal has always been to create swarms of apathetic or single issue voters. I guess it definitely still counts as ignorance
I mean if people don’t vote, they don’t count. If the majority of voting Americans vote for something, then I’m going to say the majority of Americans. The majority of voting Americans are ignorant. The rest simply don’t count because they’ve chosen not to count.
Note: That obviously doesn’t include those not of voting age.
Okay 13 day old account created the day after the election
Like did you create the account just to spread pessimism and really believe that’s the best way forward?
Reality has more nuisances than good guys and bad guys
So Democrats won with people who were invested in keeping Trump away from Presidency and failed virtually every other demographic?
How does a political party engage with those that ARE NOT WILLING to be engaged as voters. Its a losing situation that doesnt seem to be getting better. How do we get across to the braindead masses that their attention to policies will help them vote more effectively if they dont actually care to vote more effectively. Its fucking infuriating.
It’s about having a coherent message.
What exactly were Kamala’s biggest goals? In other words, if she could accomplish just three things in office, what would those three things have been? Can anyone answer that question? Does anyone know?
Because you certainly can with Trump. He wanted to deport millions of people, raise a bunch of tariffs, and exterminate trans people. Those were the three things he ran on.
What Democrats repeatedly fail to understand is that having a policy paper on your website is NOT THE SAME THING as actually having policy positions. You can’t just point to something on your website, written by a staffer, as what you support.
I voted for Kamala, but I still to this day have not a damn idea what the woman actually stood for. Sure, she had official policies, but she never had any core issues that she hammered on again, and again, and again. She never had an effective ‘elevator pitch’ for why she should be president, other than just that she isn’t Trump.
Democrats need to pick 3-5 things for an election cycle, 3-5 major policy positions. And then they, all of them, need to repeatedly and endlessly hammer home those things.
No Dems did have messages: We love war criminals. Fuck Palestine Fuck immigrants
They’re just… all Republican messages.
Sure they had some other milquetoast ass positions on stuff, but nothing big. No stopping genocide, no health care for all, no overhaul to social security to ensure its success, no overhaul to minimum wage to ensure it’s constantly updated to be a living wage in urban and suburban areas. No getting money out of politics. No positive immigration reform to help legalize those who’ve been working here who prop up the agricultural industry. Nothing big and important that wasn’t a Republican opinion. Because they’ve decided they’d rather be centrist republicans than do anything of use, they’ve done this since after Obama got elected. Hell, if it wasn’t for Obama care and changing opinion on gay marriage idk if Obama would’ve even been re-elected because they sure did a whole lot of nothing outside of that to try and “work with republicans”.
Maybe by presenting a coherent philosophy of governing that isn’t just blowing the already powerful? The Dems could have run on what Walz did in MN. Tons of amazing policies that he implemented on narrow margins. He was vocal about defending marginalized folk. He was helping the common person.
Instead, Harris said she wouldn’t do anything different from Biden. I wasn’t even motivated by the time I voted. Voting for a person who just wanted the status quo was super unexciting.
So, really, Trump won because people simply didn’t bother to show up.
Every. Single. Fucking. Time. It’s been half a century of backsliding because of a lack of willingness to vote strategically (or at all). The reason that Dems were able to keep pushing right is because there was no pressure from my fellow leftists that would rather throw the toys out of the pram and make the world worse than dedicate the slightest amount of effort to long-term improvement.
