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I mean, Harris and the Dems didn't even try, like seriously. Getting Beyonce and all the other celebrities our fellow moronic Americans already see as members of the illuminati is not trying, it's literally the opposite
I mean, they spent $50m+ in fuckin Ohio! We lost fuckin Georgia while they were jerking off Cheney's and trying to convince white folks in the suburbs not to be who they are
It's legit insane to see the party straightup abandon working class demographics. Then again, this is the same party that now literally spends millions of dollars each primary on getting votes for Republican politicians
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I was excited when Biden dropped out and Harris got this huge surge as the new young, not actively deteriorating candidate, then more excited when she announced Tim Walz and got a mid western, blue collar surge, and cautiously optimistic when everyone was briefly focusing on how anti-democratic and un-American Project 2025 was, but then started getting worried when all I saw running up to the election was stories about abortion rights and women voting against their husbands and celebrity endorsements.
It feels like Obama successfully ran a campaign of Hope and Change, and since then Democrats repeatedly campaign on maintaining the status quo and just not letting it slide too much further. And while it's possible to win an election on the basis of 'I'm at least somewhat competent', it might not be in the US when so much of the population sees how fundamentally broken wealth inequality is at baseline.
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started getting worried when all I saw running up to the election was stories about abortion rights and women voting against their husbands and celebrity endorsements.
That surge when she started was all her campaign. The news and dis/info sources were all caught flat-footed.
They cast around for a few weeks testing what stories would “drive engagement”. Scandals? No. VP pick, like - Who’s it gonna be? No. Did she take any of the demented rapist’s baiting? Nope. Dang.
At the end, they settled on those, and that’s why it seemed different. They (corporate news, mostly) had finally wrested a narrative out of the campaign the campaign didn’t disagree with.
It was thin, a little schlocky, but either true or based on the campaigns ads, so - that got stamped on the campaign, and that’s why you remember that specific set of themes.
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Maintaining the status quo is conservatism.
By definition that’s not what the left wants.
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Are you fucking kidding? Because Biden 2020 was a progressive platform and Harris 2024 was a centrist one. They weren't even remotely similar. Biden may be a centrist, but he's very pro-labor, and he could see how important the progressive base was that election, so he literally sat down with Sanders and hammered out a platform that they could get behind. And while I've got a lot of problems with Joe Biden, he actually was very committed to that platform. He really wanted BBB to get through and he kept trying to find ways to abolish student debt.
Harris, on the other hand, had a handful of disparate, vaguely left policy positions, like the first-time homebuyer's credit and legalizing pot, but her campaign was mainly centered on economic opportunity for the middle class. She also committed wholeheartedly to the most right-wing polices of the Biden administration, like arming Israel and cracking down on the border. But worst of all, she made bipartisanship and Republican consensus a huge part of her campaign, promising to add Republicans to her cabinet , campaigning with Liz Cheney, and even praising Dick Fucking Cheney.
TL;DR, Biden campaigned like Obama in 2008, Harris Campaigned like Hillary in 2016. And the results were the same.
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Do you even remember 2020? Nobody fucking wanted Biden. He was never progressive. He was literally mocked for telling donors "Nothing will fundamentally change." People turned out because of how much they hated Trump.
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That actually occurred in 2019, not 2020. After Bernie nearly stomped him in the primary, he made a hard pivot to the left in 2020. As I said, he's a centrist, but he actually does have a strong history of pro-union activism, which made him a fairly credible (though imperfect) messenger for a populous platform.
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I bet a lot of people saw this as Hillary all over again
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I sure did. I was genuinely hopeful when Biden stepped down, and when they announced Walz, I actually got excited. Then they started to try and reach moderate Republicans more and more, and I slowly realized they were doing it again. I felt like I was going insane watching them repeat the strategy that caused them to lose to the same guy in 2016.
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The meme demanded, pjwestin delivered.
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I do what I can. If the question had been asked in good faith, I might have even been nice about it.
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Don't forget that Biden was the first president to walk a picket line. No other president had ever done that in America's history. That single action won over the UAW.
Then, Biden fought back against the railroad corporations and won a contract for workers that includes PTO and other basic labor necessities.
Then, Biden reduced fentanyl overdoses, something that no president has done in like 30-40 years.
Couple this with BBB and IRA, you have a much more progressive president than what people give water to it.
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Well, I don't want to give him too much credit. Biden is and always has been a centrist. He has a mixed history on Civil Rights (cause he's 120 years old), he has a pretty pro-bank history, he's supported some anti-consumer stuff (like the anti-bankruptcy laws), and he even helped put Clarence Thomas on the bench. And that's not even touching on his administration, where Gaza and the border will probably be his lasting legacy. But, two things that he's always been pretty consistent on were unions and infrastructure, and he read the room in 2020 and leaned heavily into those things.
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remember earlier this year when leftists were saying biden never did anything and that he was too old, and started refusing to vote for him and calling for him to drop out, and he did?
remember the six months following that when leftists were complaining that the person they got biden to drop out for wasn't good enough and how they weren't going to vote for her?
and now that trump won suddenly leftists are singing biden's praises and blaming trump's win on the DNC picking a shit candidate?
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Everyone is still pissed about inflation, and her answer to what she would do better was 'nothing'.
Everything else is just noise around the edges.
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Because people pissed at inflation are fucking stupid. Inflation is down. They aren't pissed at greedy corporations, which have been the problem the entire fucking time.
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We live in a nation of people that are a mix of uneducated and propagandized. If the party messaging doesn’t take that into account, that fault lies with them in addition to the voters.
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It's not enough that the rate of inflation is slowing. The problem is that wages aren't going up to match inflation. When people are working two jobs and still living paycheck to paycheck, do you think it means anything to them to tell them that "um ackshually, inflation is down 0.4% from last year!"?
This kind of disconnect is exactly why we aren't reaching voters.
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People who rent got hit twice as hard by inflation, I know I'm paying a significantly higher portion of my paycheck in rent vs 4 years ago.
The raw material cost increases which provide the cover/excuse for price gouging are the result of two different things the Harris/Biden admin participated in and had no real path towards solving.
One is the fact that the vast majority of ocean shipping is going around Africa rather than the red sea, due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza that the Biden admin has been bypassing Congress to continue arming.
Two is the cutting off of Russian oil, which resulted in ballooning costs in Europe.
Like it or not, Harris did not provide any answers on these two fronts that looked anything like a change in policy.
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Because fixing inflation means jacking up interest rates and cutting government spending. And no-one wants that.
People are too stupid to understand inflation and too stupid to understand how it's combated.
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Literally Covid. People thoght they were going to die.
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I actually don't think so. Like I speak with Republicans that are very dismissive of covid still, despite having family members die to it. If people were bothered by his covid response, they would continue to be bothered by the fact Trump shit the covid response. Instead it seems voters think everything was fine during his term (completely uninformed or unaware of the fact that he was impeached twice, raped women, a good friend and neighbor of Epstein, and tried to overthrow the government)
The apathy maybe comes from how Harris was hand picked (because it was so last minute that Biden dropped off) vs us having an actual primary with several democrats.
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And BLM was already out on the streets.
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Bernie.
Bernie was what got us to vote for Biden. Biden formed a comittee with Bernie and actually adopted a bunch of his ideas. That’s what got the left to vote for Biden.
That and all of us were reeling from the economy after coronavirus.
Meanwhile Harris told the left to fuck off with your Palestinians are human nonsense and tried to get the Liz Cheney constituency (that doesn’t exist).
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Because we did vote for Biden and he was useless at preventing the spread of fascism in states, and then Harris's responses to how she would handle any of it, which was effectively "I will do nothing." The Democrats made the left apathetic to the electoral system by refusing to appeal to them and instead the democrats focused on trying to sway republicans and moved further right. The Democrats did the worst thing they could have done and made people apathetic and hopeless.
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Useless at preventing fascism... So decided to sit it out and give DT another go. Bold strategy. Let's see how it works out.
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Like playing Russian roulette with five live rounds.
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You can keep bitching about how its everyone else's fault why we are in the situation we are in. You aren't the people I see at the antifascist rallies, or out on the street trying to organize grassroots systems to protect our queer community, or doing anything. Yall are the type of people who start and stop at the voting booth. Too busy shilling politicians who refuse to do what the people want to do anything that actually helps people. Don't accuse people who voted third party or didn't vote for the situation we are in, cause you don't know that they do nothing. They very well could be doing more than you to make a difference.
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Da, comrade
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The elections over dipshit, and putins dog won. Why would they still pay their troll farms when the deal has been sealed?
Ever think people looked online and saw behavior such as yours and felt they didn't want to be involved with people like you?
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It ain't "the commies".
And he won by an incredibly tiny margin in a handful of states to win, literally no one was "set on fire" for Biden
Progressive policy is popular with the politically disengaged as well as others who are politically engaged
When the ones who are engaged try to warn people someone is a bad candidate and isn't left enough to motivate the politically disengaged, we magically go back to Salem and you all start blaming us for being able to see the logical conclusion of your dumbass plans.
Run another candidate in 2028 that's significantly to the right of the Dem voter base and the same shit will happen again.
That's not a threat, it's basic logic.
It might not be the candidate you want, but isn't stopping republican more important than you getting exactly what you want?
Obama ran a progressive campaign and was charismatic...
Why not try that again since moderates over retirement age keeps failing?
Kamala might be like three years younger than Obama now, but he entered the White house 16 years ago
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Obviously, the main reason for record turnout in 2020 was COVID.
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Biden actually has decent political instincts and has actually won elections before. Kamala didn't even have to pass a primary and bombed out of the one she did participate in in 2020. She was "untested" to put it mildly.
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The economic situation was different.
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Regardless of to what degree he was responsible, under Biden the US got entangled in foreign conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine.
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It's not that there are 10 million commies that liked Biden but not Harris, it's that us commies believe that you can win over the working class by appealing to material interests.
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Biden didn't campaign with fucking Dick Cheney
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Biden actually has decent political instincts and has actually won elections before. Kamala didn’t even have to pass a primary and bombed out of the one she did participate in in 2020. She was “untested” to put it mildly
I believe democrats called bernie Sanders "unelectable" so I feel it's fair to use that term in this circumstance.
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Relevant user name
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- Trump was a bigot, which is what a majority of Americans wanted.
Weird how so many of you demonize the largest most powerful organization of antifascists in America instead of those who voted to give Trump power. It's almost like you are trying to sow division in the anti-trump electorate 🤔
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This sort of thinking is why Democrats keep repeating the same mistakes. Any sort of criticism, even if it's constructive, is treasonous. It's always someone else's fault.
Organizations either adapt or die. Rejection of criticism is a suicidal, accelerationist position. When people are so concerned with deflecting blame that they're incapable of performing an honest, frank assessment of which strategies work and which don't, then you are destined to fail no matter whether its a political party or anything else. If you'd prefer the Democrats keep doing things that don't work because you're afraid of them losing face, then your perspective is worthless.
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largest most powerful organization of antifascists in America
Please do not insinuate that the Democratic Party is Anti-Fascist. They have have adopted Trump's 2016 border policy, are unconditionally funding a genocide, and will peacefully transfer power to those they acknowledge are fascists. They are not antifascists, they are merely the lesser fascists.
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Covid and Trumps handling of it.
But energy was high in the anti Trump camp anyway with BLM protests.So saying the Dems need to move more right is the opposite of the right lesson. Just look at political donations to Bernie.. from across the US. There are no moderate republicans, they all stayed with trump, there is a huge untapped electorate in the US that wants something else, and I'd argue it is more left social democrats and what they bring.... But the capital class will never allow it in the US. The moment you talk wealth distribution, even MSNBC and such call you communist.
Edit: oh and Biden should have taken action on Trumps fascism on day 1. Chuck him in jail pending trial and get it over with. Everyone except a small part of his base distanced themselves from him, the time was in the first 100 days of taking office, but they did NOTHING.. they might as well have stormed the capitol themselves by now.
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I honestly expected him to just pardon Trump to "Let the nation heal"
And if it had been a magical third Obama term, I'm sure that's exactly what would have happened.
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Biden was running on massive infrastructure investment, student loan forgiveness, ending the war in Afghanistan, child tax credit and a $2000 cheque in the mail . Harris may have had those in her platform as well but she wasn't mentioning it or Bidens wins on these at all, her campaign was "I'm not trump" and we learned from Hillary that's not enough.
Biden campaign was "build back better" a motto for change much like another democrat who actually won. Harris' campaign was "were not going back" which implies no change and relies on you thinking the trump years were horrible enough to justify the current status quo, and apparently the only thing Americans remember about the trump years was the economy was "better" and wanted to go back.
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Ten Million commies in the US - lol - if only.
Flaunting your Dick Cheney endorsement isn't being insufficiently left. Its political suicide. -
Have you seen the numbers of people who think they were better off 4 years ago?
People think they were better off during the height of COVID deaths. Our attention span is 27 seconds. We're idiots
Also, Harris doesn't have a penis and somehow that's supposed to matter
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A lot of folks actually were better off back then due to the stimulus checks...
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A California lawyer trying to win a centrist campaign is like Tiger Woods trying to win a World Series ring. Harris wasn't the right person to run a centrist campaign. But, if she had run a progressive campaign from July, she would have won the popular vote and still lost the election. She wouldn't have gotten past a primary.
Elizabeth Warren would have been a better progressive choice. Mark Kelly could have run a progressive or a centrist campaign.
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Gods, I'd have loved seeing an astronaut in the big chair.
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You cannot put a woman or a minority on the ticket and expect Right Wingers to care.
Back in 2015 when it was either Trump or Ben Carson for nomination, I knew it would be Trump. Simply because I knew once the debates started and Boomers were actually looking at Ben Carson instead of just reading newspaper articles about him, they'd abandon him for being the wrong color...
And I was right
Too many people will simply never submit to Female Rule.
It's why I knew Nikki Hailey wasn't going to get the 2024 nomination despite Trump being the most idiotic and easily beatable choice (and if Kamela ran a progressive campaign and actually had time to make her campaign)
American Men simply do not respect women.
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The funny thing is I have been aware of this lack of memory for awhile but it has just gotten worse. I used to be amazed at the number of folks who could not seem to remember what things were like a decade ago but now thats been cut to about a year or so.
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The cycle of political crisis generation and complacency has gone down from 8 years to 4 in the last forty years. People grew complacent over Clinton's two terms and then allowed GWB to happen, same with Obama and Trump, now we're putting Democrats in there to clean up after even worse crises than before, and putting Republicans back there after the last mess isn't even fully cleaned up.
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The man staged a coup when he lost then we voted him in 4 years later. He called my state and tried to overgrow our results and 4 years later Georgia voted him in.
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Indeed. We elected someone who shits all over democracy. Idiots abound
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Old white man, old white man, if he can't do it, no one can!
Yeah I wouldn't discount sexism, or racism - I do think it's hard for Democrats to win elections here unless people are in the middle of a conservative administration, they just don't remember how bad it is, it's like people who remember their time in school fondly once it's over.
But in general, it's also true that women have to be near perfect, to be promoted over a man. And same thing with race. Like they can't just be the better choice it has to be a blowout. Now to a sensible person, she met that bar and flew past it, but we aren't all sensible and people are stupidly nostalgic for times that were objectively worse.
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You'd love for it to be about sex or race. Then the voters have.to change, not the democrats.
Sorry buddy... the democrats have to change. Alot. And they have to do away with First-past-the-post voting in the blue states they control. Get more people represented, more political parties on solving this problem. The democrats have demonstrated multiple times they are incapable of doing this by themselves.
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A lot of people probably were better off. Not working or working remotely. Possibly getting 600/week in unemployment, it may even have been an effective raise. We now know the panic around covid was largely just that.
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No. No we don't.
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The lesson for Democrats is surely that after years and years of telling anyone they could find that had concerns about society "oh you must be a literal Nazi, cope harder la la la la whoop whoop air high fives and fist bumps that's roiiight ma BOI!" at some point these people are going to turn around and say "well ok then, I just won't vote for you because you have nothing to offer me".
I'm not saying the Republican party has done this any better, but surely insulting potential voters en masse and refusing to understand their concerns isn't a sensible way to win elections. I didn't work for Hilary either, and it hasn't worked for Harris.
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Yeah, the disconnect you also felt here when you said that Biden is clearly suffering dementia was crazy. People just deluded themselves and gaslit like crazy instead of acknowledging that Bidens mental health was not up for another 4 years of presidency. And this topic alone dragged on for months, until Biden failed the candidate debate so badly, even the billionaire donors got cold feet. But again it was the billionaire donors who pushed for Biden to drop out, not the concerns of the normal people. The DNC has effectively immunized against the voices of the people. And with all the talk about Trump bringing the end to Democracy, the Reps held proper primaries every cycle.
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Covid is the reason democrats won in 2020, but they assumed they won because they're geniuses. Instead of trying to appeal to voters, they just tried to tell people to vote against trump. Turns out that isn't enough to motivate people when there isn't a pandemic raging on that is making people's lives miserable. Democrats really need to get their act together because 2028 won't be against trump, so the "anyone but trump" strategy will be even more useless and all that time spent kissing the asses of ghouls like dick cheney just tells people that republicans are okay to vote for.
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Biden won by a really thin margin in swing states, the book Lucky went into detail about how close of a call it was, but he interpreted it as some huge popular win because of the high vote totals.
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He flipped a couple of historically red states - Arizona and Georgia - for the first time in decades.
Should be noted that Dems still did reasonably well in these states and in downballot races. Same with the Midwest. Dem senators and governors won seats in states Harris lost.
Really makes you think.
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The pandemic of 2024 is corporate profiteering. A great example is Kroger admitting they raised prices higher than inflation for profit.
People generally blame the current administration for that. They are the one that kept trotting out stock market numbers and unemployment numbers, and acting like things are fine.
If they wouldnt even acknowledge the problem, how are they going to attract voters?
Thats not even bringing up gaza, but I dont think either candidate will change that situation in any way. The current administration is signaling they think this is a great opportunity to shake up the middle east for the benefit of western countries, cause colonialism can't ever die I guess.
All trump ever said was end it, that it should be over already. Thats just as vague as kamala saying she will do everything in her power to end the war. They both could be implying to carpet bomb gaza, but we won't know until we know right?
Neither candidate talked about why we should allow israel to lobby in our politics either.
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True, but also the republicans won't have a trump to vote for.
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He really would be the God-Emperor then, a withered corpse figurehead.
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Well be lucky if there are elections any more after this term. He already said if he's elected there won't be another election. You think he's joking? This mf isn't giving up power willingly. And with his sycophantic base, you'd be surprised what he can accomplish.
I'm in literal fear for our country.
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Look, the Democrats have to own this loss, for once, like they should have last time. It is clearly insufficient to try and frighten democratic supporters with a probability of fascism which we've never experienced before. It is clearly insufficient to abandon the working class as they have for so long. We should never fund or promote far right candidates in primaries. The media should not provide free coverage for outrage candidates to drive viewershop. It is clearly a mistake to try and court conservative voters, because hardly any have ever crossed over. It was certainly a mistake for Biden to run again, and then to drop out so late, far too late to have a primary.
Maybe the fact she is a minority woman turned people off. I don't know. It's a stupid reason not to run women, but that possibility exists.
But it damn sure isn't the only reason we lost.
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From talking to people who sat this out, it seems Biden ending the rail union strike was a huge factor, and the cost of groceries was a close second. They wanted to vote against him in the primaries and were denied that opportunity.
Kamala was guilty by association.
Well, that and the fact she did not address these issues in her messaging. Or if she did the message didn't reach them. "She said things aren't so bad, but I can't afford groceries. She won't fix anything."
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He made sure the strike succeeded, and ended the strike as well. It’s a pure optics fail, which does not contradict your point at all, but does make it more poignant.
As for the groceries: that’s a genuine failure of Biden’s administration. He kept going for student loans but he should have gone for the grocers raising egg and dairy prices - no Republican court in the world would have survived the fallout from blocking that.
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Crazy because Biden actually came back after that and won a contract for railworkers, including paid sick leave that was so influential around the time Congress passed the contact the first time around.
Other than that though, I agree. Too little too late for Democrats. There were so many wins under Biden's administration, and none of it was ever messaged to the American people.
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The right move was to do nothing. The rail corporation would have folded within hours. If the railways shutting down is a national emergency, then nationalize the company. Our nation's critical infrastructure should not be held hostage by a for profit corporation.
Oh and can someone explain to me why the rail bill was split into two convenient parts so one could not pass? Fuck that. Most pro labor union president ever? Fuck off with your gaslighting.
Same for all the dickriding people did over biden stepping down, hailing him as a hero who did a huge sacrifice. As though he didn't fight to keep in the race every step of the way. So long that we conveniently couldn't hold a real democratic primary.
Fuck that. No amount of correcting the record will change what we all saw with our eyes.
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Ok. First. Those votes were not, like, commies or something. Communists broadly (but not universally ) have no faith in electoral politics beyond the ability to demonstrate how useless electoral politics are for the kinds of change they see as required. The missing votes are likely non-explicitly-ideological Americans, and the disenfranchised left wing of the Democrat coalition, who are not revolutionary socialists - they are better described as social democrats. And why so many of them voted for Biden was, at least in significant part three things that you're pretending don't exist with this meme.
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Tremendous dislike of Trump.. which is actually still true, but he was not currently the president during this election. Trump had just spent the last few months massively fucking up the pandemic response very publicly and got covid immediately prior to the election, which made him look stupid and incompetent.
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Because of COVID policies, voting had literally never been easier. Shit loads of people voted early because it was universally available. Led to highest turnout ever.
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A competitive democratic primary process meant that we had a candidate selection process people could believe in to some degree. Brenie and Biden ran, and Biden won. Bernie voters saw that, looked at the situation and said "This is tolerable because we had a real process, and we can accept Biden as a stop gap under the conditions of Trump needing to be removed, and Biden being a 1 term President". It wasn't 2016, where a significant portion of potential Democrat voters saw the DNC's treatment of Bernie as unfair, and it wasn't 2024 where Biden decided to run with no true Primary after the deal was "single term president", then abruptly dropped out (good idea, shoulda done it 2 years earlier) and effectively appointed his successor by decree.
2020 was an anomaly, and as is true of 2020 in most data sets, using it as a comparison point requires many many qualifications, but Trump gained 40000 votes, Harris lost 10 million. Trump did not perform better, Harris lost voter enthusiasm, which hasn't actually been on the Democrat's side in presidential elections (which have more non-explicitly-ideological voters) since, like, Obama. It's not even necessarily that she needed to be "more left". It's that she needed to reflect the public's distrust of the political status quo and promise material gain for working people explicitly at the expense of someone else (Trump chose , for instance, immigrants and the democrats as the bad guys, but Harris could have chosen, say, rich fuckers like Musk) . She needed to be ready to rip up the floor boards, and she wasn't even ready to say she'd break from fucking Biden (who is broadly unpopular) on policy.
I really, really wish y'all democrats would stop trying to purge your own party of any dissent, because y'all coming out of this with the right lesson will be the difference between a brief period of Republican control, or several elections cycles of Democrats being unviable as a party.
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True. Thank you. It's frustrating seeing the DNC shoot itself in the fucking foot to watch people on Lemmy start swinging on anyone but the people who made and executed the failure of a campaign strategy.
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Hey everyone, when you see comments like this from a ""Leftist"" who only ever criticizes "The Dems" for right-wing victories, and never puts the responsibility on the actual, y'know, Trump supporters, that user is a MAGA supporter trying to divide the left and prevent the formulation of a broad antifascist coalition capable of changing the course the GOP has set.
These "non voters" did not actually sit out the election, they are trying to convince you to sit out the next one (or vote third party etc etc). Don't fall for it! We are in this together.
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I really, really wish y'all democrats would stop trying to purge your own party of any dissent, because y'all coming out of this with the right lesson will be the difference between a brief period of Republican control, or several elections cycles of Democrats being unviable as a party.
a brief period of Republican control, or several elections cycles of Democrats being unviable as a party.
a brief period of Republican control
y'all don't get it do you. It hasn't sunk in yet.
Don't worry, you'll get there. Probably in about six months.
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y’all don’t get it do you. It hasn’t sunk in yet.
Don’t worry, you’ll get there. Probably in about six months
Blue conservatives jerking themselves off over what trump will do to the people they dislike is so fucking god damn cringe.
Fuck First-past-the-post voting for making me have to be "allies" with you.
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Say it then. We're in the period of time where we must critically evaluate the failures of the political machine that delivered this. I'm trying my level best to provide detailed, informative assessment of what I'm seeing without resorting to vitriol or anger, both online and in real life. If you have additional details, provide them. This is the time for vigorous debate, and reassessment, and I see the Democrats as much more of allies than the Republicans, so if you, or any other liberal can get past the phase where you're upset with the leftists who have broadly provided critical support for the Democratic coalliton, I welcome your input.
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Oh I get it now. You're saying that "there won't be a next election". Careful with the self fufulling prophecies. If you don't want to succumb to that, I recommend getting involved locally. Whoever you trust electorally will need your help now to build a bulwark for 2026, and getting your hands dirty will help you get over the pessimism.
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Step into a campaign to take over for a failing candidate who is unpopular and too old to realistically run, then make sure that everyone is certain that your policies will be exactly the same as the unpopular guy, then surprised pikachu
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What got people to vote for Biden but not Harris? A dire need. Not voting for Biden meant that Trump stayed in office. Even though the stakes were the same, too many people sat on the couch thinking it was going to happen again and they didn't have to go.
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Negative. That the democratic candidate had a vagina and breasts is why ten million people sat home.
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I think it's a result of the "divide and conquer" game the republicans played. Stichwort Israel and Palestine.
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The turnout was really high, the democrats main plan for this election was catering to the "moderate republicans" which backfired spectacularly (a smaller % of registered republicans voted for democrats than in 2020), left-wing was pretty much abandoned in the campaign... It's a horror all around, and the democratic party only have themselves to blame for this blunder instead of trying to point fingers at literally everything (so far I've seen blame thrown on LGBTQ+, Biden, Kamala's aides, left wing voters, etc).
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Liberals are the best at pretending that nothing is their fault, ever. It's always the fault of the leftists, a coincidence, or bad luck. Being liberal is like the art of being the most irresponsible you can be.
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It wasnt commies, it was the working class cope harder.
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Mean is no one going to call out the strategy for like the last month to possibly 3 months was her pandering as hard as she could to Republicans moderate and isolating the leftist Democratic base?
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Of course not. Then they would have to learn that they can't out Republican a Republican.
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People posting this type of stuff have to know that we have a an electoral college where swing states have a disproportionate influence on the outcome. Voter turnout was up in all of those states.
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But didn't he also win the popular vote this time?
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Yes, it was extremely Trump’s win. His first legitimate full win. There’s no EC shenanigans. Simply a majority of the votes and in a majority of the states.
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Who cares, right? The meme suggests that people sat home this time. If they would have only come out, Harris would have won. But that's simply not true. Harris got more votes than Biden in 4 of the 7 swing states, about the same in 2 snd one is still being counted. Voter turnout out there was up as well. People didn't stay home where it mattered. Just more voted for Trump.
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This discussion would be entirely irrelevant if we had a more representative electoral system.
People could be free to vote how they wish, secure in the knowledge their vote would still be counted against the republicans.
The people not voting are disenfranchised by the two party system. Change how we vote and allow competition into the electoral process. Multiple political parties should be free to compete.
More people represented and involved in the political process
More people voting means more votes for democrats
More chances to defeat the republicans
More people on the debate stage calling out bullshit (and you could have still hold one even if one party decides to not participate)
And last but not least, shouldn't we want the most representative voting system possible? Shouldn't we be concerned when our working class brothers/sisters/so on are under represented to the point that they dont vote?
Still not convinced First-past-the-post voting is the problem? Republicans in Florida passed legislation protecting it. Republicans in alaska are trying to repeal Ranked choice voting because voters used it to pick a more moderate conservative (the alternative was Sarah palin).
Isn't the republicans liking and wanting something not the most ultragigagigantic red flag that ever existed?
Democrats have proven they can no longer go it alone. They had their chance. Time to swallow your pride and arrogance and let others participate. This fight isn't about the democratic party. It's about survival.
The United States of America is more important then the Democratic Party.
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Great theory, except Trump won the popular vote too.
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And how effective was the Liz/Dick Cheney appeal to the suburbs, in the end? Given the growing demographics since 2020 Trump should not have effectively flatlined given a growing electorate - until there was depressed turnout he’s never actually had the popular vote.
2016:
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Trump - 62,984,828 / 46.1%
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Clinton - 65,853,514 / 48.2%
2020 Cycle with heightened turnout for all parties
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Biden - 81,283,501 / 51.3% [+ 15,429,987 vs 2016]
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Trump - 74,223,975 / 46.8% [+ 11,239,147 vs 2016]
2024:
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Trump - 74,644,300 / 50.5% [+ 420,325 vs 2020]
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Harris - 70,910,573 / 47.9% [- 10,372,928 vs 2020]
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Alternative major candidate not left enough? I'ma let the extreme right win in that case, it is for everyone's benefit!
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It's interesting that you think "Leftists" comprise tens of millions of votes. I'm flattered, but I don't think enough people came to the last DSA meeting to make that the most likely possibility.
Most all of the terminally online voted. Nonvoters aren't here arguing about politics on Lemmy. Leftists have been screaming for months that if the Dems don't make improving the lives of the working class their main focus, people aren't going to come out. I wish we had more political engagement too, but sarcastic comments about how people should be more strategic doesn't seem to be a viable get out the vote strategy. Maybe we should try making people's lives materially better.
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And Americans don't get it. As a Canadian it's insane watching these people who helped Trump by not voting, jump through hoops to try and justify and blame others for their lack of sense and duty
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Don't worry, Canada is next. Fascists are making inroads worldwide because neoliberals would rather let the fascists win than have the rich make any less money.
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The vast majority of internet ""leftists"" are MAGA trolls trying to divide.
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A McCarthyist says what?
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I didn't want Biden either.
I don't know if y'all remember this, but the DNC decided to forgo a primary and forced Harris on us. When she ran in 2020 during the primary, she was so unpopular that she dropped out before any votes were cast.
Why did anyone ever think she would win? It's almost identical to when the DNC put Hilary up against Trump.
You can only fool me with this "lesser evil" bullshit so many times.
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And if they will spend the last minutes they had on primaries, first of all you wouldn't participate in them anyway because you think they all rigged or whatever, and then you would not vote anyway because whoever won on primaries didn't have enough time to campaign and you just feel like you don't know enough about them to make a decision.
The levels of bullshit you have to come up with to avoid admitting you just collectively wanted Trump to win is astonishing really.-
You're doing a whole lot of assuming there. I absolutely vote in the primaries.
Accusing me of wanting Trump in office is just dead wrong.
This is why the DNC fails. Y'all instantly attack anyone that doesn't "fall in line" and immediately alienate them.
It's honestly a bit pathetic that you can't even hear any criticism of the party.
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Any criticism of The Party immediately means they want Trump, “no it’s the voters who are wrong”
I vote in all the primaries - and it’s a sobering assessment that pulling “Uncommitted” in 2024 was my most enthusiastic electoral participation since 2008. I still voted for Dem harm reduction for the general - in a swing state thankyouverymuch - but look at where we are. 100% unified neo-fash/nativist government with Trump at the helm.
Why is the Democratic National Committee so afraid of either listening to, or allowing the electorate to participate?
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Like 9-10 million votes are yet to be counted.
In every swing state except PA. There was record breaking ballots cast. In PA it was close to the record. She lost the election because bad policies not people not showing up. People changed their mind in the 6 swings states. Idk why or what for but this election wasn't lost because of 10 million people not voting it was lost by my calculations 275,092 votes in 4 states.
I'll wait until the count is over to check if she earned more votes in the 6 swing states than biden in 2020. But lots more votes to count again like 10 million yet to be counted almost all in states that are pretty much decided so they didn't make a difference anyway
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These people would rather just bitch about leftists than face the reality that they haven't had a serious, competitive primary in almost two decades and have fully committed to elite control of the primary process. It's peak moderate head-in-sand burying: "we don't need to reform anything, we just need to vote harder and yell even more about anyone criticizing us." I voted for Harris and think it was dumb not to, but at this point anyone insisting that the main problem was people not voting hard enough is a fucking idiot and shouldn't be taken seriously.
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The problem as I see it and right now we need to wait for more information is they went to the right and thought they could pick up Republicans there is a report that says all the registered Republicans voted republican (don't know accuracy) except 6% in 2020 and 5%2024. So they picked up no one when they should have went full leftists revolutionary change. They didn't when despite having the most amount of money so they don't even need to court the gazillionaires if they are just going to lose.
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Second highest voter turnout in any US presidential election on record. Both by numbers and percentage of eligible voters.
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Yep. Appears America is just that stupid.
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It was the promise that he could be negotiated to the left.
Instead Joe gave us a country producing the most oil and gas in world history, no movement on healthcare, etc.
The weather is going crazy because of the increase in fossil fuels Biden presided over.
He broke the deal that he could be brought left on economic/environmental/medical issues.
Kamala promised more of the same.
How can you expect anyone to trust the same deal from the VP that the P didn't make good on?
Joe didn't deliver, and Kamala didn't promise anything new.
Four more years of wildfire.
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Yeah, best to go with the guy who says he thinks climate change is a liberal hoax
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Joe didn’t deliver, and Kamala didn’t promise anything new.
Joe delivered the Inflation Reduction Act. It invests hundreds of billions of dollars into various climate initiatives over 10 years. That includes renewable generation, grid storage, EV, and nuclear generation. Then there's infrastructure investment, which included much needed investments in transit and intercity rail.
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Biden saying he'll bring more of what Obama brought.
Vs Harris saying she'll bring more of what Biden brought.
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more of what Obama brought.
Well drone strikes and bank bailouts are popular in this country
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Lmao what?
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I've heard the following arguments, I'm ordering them in the way I think they effect an election.
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Elon musk buyout and the AI lockdown of social media, and banning of tiktok have all had the effect to fracture democratic/leftist messaging (fault: dems, biden, musk, reddit, people who stayed on x. Affected groups: young people, people who are hard to reach with ads)
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The primary election is basically undivertable campaign time for democrats. The lack of primary campaigns and debates means harris had less time to build support and a base (fault biden, affected groups: everyone).
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Lack of economic excitement around policies and a shutdown of effective messaging on price gouging in favor of saying a former president will surely destroy the country this time. (fault Harris, donors effect, likely low turnout on younger people)
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Lack of demographic excitement around key policies. Latinos: Immigration. Muslims: Israel. (fault biden/harris, effect low turnout in key groups)
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Wasteful campaign spending on republicans: Courting Liz Cheney and buying ads to woo republicans at best wasted money and at worst is a giveaway to telecoms who immediately donated it to republicans(fault Harris, effect waste)
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Covid provided a boost in 2020 that no longer exists
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Mail in voting helped some people vote in 2020. I would say this a tossup however because I do think republicans are able to abuse flaws in mail in systems.
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Harris is a woman. I don't buy this one because nonvoters seem disengaged rather than hostile.
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8 should be way higher. You can be sexist and not like Trump, and not vote because of it. I'd also add high on that list: rampant and nonstop right wing propoganda in all media formats (news, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc.) with no equivalent left leaning alternative. It should come as no surprise that young men are leaning right when casual mysogony and racism flood the content they watch, even when the content itself isn't strictly political.
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People got a clue after 40+ years of Lucy yanking the football away at the last moment.
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This
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I don't think anything about Biden set "the commies on fire", but he was elected long before 7 October 2023, so he didn't have to contend with all the well-deserved outrage over US support for Israel's genocide in Gaza. And yes, I'm well aware it'll likely get worse under Trump. But not being as bad as the next guy simply doesn't seem to inspire voter turnout for some reason.
It's kind of like selling a new brand of chocolate, and advertising it as being "not quite as bad as Hershey's" (yes, I know, it's a low bar), then blaming customers for "sitting on the couch" and not buying it. Oh, and lets not forget that both chocolate bars advertise a policy of "10% of profits goes to genocide".
Democrats are up in arms about people not buying their shitty chocolate bar, when any decent person would just stop eating chocolate if those were the only two options available. But the Democrats refuse to change the recipe or the packaging because it's their position that nothing needs changing - it's the voters who are wrong. Does that sound like an argument that's likely to win over any voters?
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feelin cute, gonna repost this, might delete later k love you bi
Kamala Harris lost every swing state AND the Senate. We live in the same country we did 4 years ago, we live in the same country that elected Barrack Obama twice.
People are paying 50% more for bread, eggs, and rent, with no relief given, no corporate greed stiffled BEFORE it hit average Americans in the face, and just kept hitting them. The average American doesn't care about economic numbers, they care about whether or not they can pay the rent.
Trump isn't going to make any of this better, he's going to make it ordinates worse. People vote for change, when faced with the inevitability of suffering they'll vote for different, come what may.
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Lack of an active genocide?
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Crazy how mail in voting was universal in 2020. Then we had states pass a slew of laws to make it increasingly difficult, and turnout slumped.
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Biden would not have won if we weren't also in the middle of the greatest global pandemic in a century that the incumbent Trump administration was handling terribly.
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Permanently Deleted
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Not right enough?
Harris represented a “return to normal” which for the working poor pinched by inflation and rising cost of living, meant more slow misery. Abandoning the supposed foundation of the party whilst running against a supposed anti-establishment/disruptive candidate via an appeal to neocon decency was foolish. “Banking” on voting blocs they actively rejected was foolish.
The party needs to do better, and that starts with us holding them to account for dropping the bag and critically misreading/ignoring the situation, and demanding change.
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Permanently Deleted
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The missing votes are idiots who saw the bad lady talked about on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter. Money buys opinions.
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The mad thing about the result is that the Dems spent so much more money and still lost. Not that you can easily quantify the financial value of changing the algorithm on twitter to favour Trump.
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He's talking about the money Russia spent paying for tiktokers and youtubers to send corrupted ,messaging to the addicts.
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Except money evidently doesn't buy it by itself. If it did Harris would have won. Effective messaging (Where is the Dem Joe Rogan? They kicked the closest thing they have out of the DNC for expressing broadly popular opinions) and playing to the base of people willing to vote for you (Dems will never get those Republican voters no matter how many immigrants they promise to stop at the border) wins elections.
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Right but if George Soros or the Disney Heiress owned Twitter it probably would be a lot closer.
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Nah. I actually listened to what Harris said in the debate and I read what little of her policy was available.
She was basically running on the same platform as Trump. She offered stronger crackdowns on immigration than Trump, she said was more pro fracking than Trump, she said she supports Israel (genocide) more than Trump. She completely dropped universal healthcare from her platform, she she completely abandoned anything that would help climate change.
That's why I didn't vote for her.
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Her platform was literally to tax the rich, make a ceasefire in gaza, and decriminalize Marijuana.
Trump's platform was to have his opponents put in front of a firing squad, force Ukraine to surrender to Russia, cut taxes for the rich (again), and put in place Tariffs which will absolutely destroy USA commerce.
That's not remotely the fucking same.
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Because Biden was to the left of Harris, and Gaza wasn't a big issue? Like yeah, the people who didn't vote did so because of Harris' move to the right
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you, sir, were divided an conquered.
This whole Election is a perfect case study of divide and conquer.
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Your super-wealthy decided who won. Trump offered them the most tax breaks and government contracts. As such, he had the most money to spend on his campaign and all the social media bosses on-side. Republican or Democrat, the biggest spender always wins.
Thats literally all there is to it.
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Republican or Democrat, the biggest spender always wins.
Derp.
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That gives a false picture since it only counts legal declared spending.
For instance, what's the effective value to Trump's campaign of Elon Musk buying Twitter and using it to explicitly promote right wing views? How much did Russia spend this time to promote Trump? What about Israel, cause I'll wager Netanyahu prefers having Trump in office, since Kamala might've demanded at least some holding back.
Actual spending to promote Republican and right wingers was way higher.
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Shameful in every sense of the word.
Some will mark this trump presidency as the end, but it really should be Citizen's United.
No wonder so much effort was made to keep bernie Sanders at bay.
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Where did you get that screenshot from? I mean, traditionally, you would provide and link and not just a screenshot. You know, in case its wildly misleading or something.
Also, don't only count the amount spent after Harris joined the race or presume musk is going to self report accurately.
If this really is the first time in modern American history that the smallest spender won then thats huge. Although, it'll only be due to the increased power of social media owners which I mentioned above.
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This undercounts it. Musk’s “million dollar a day giveaway” is a notable example that wasn’t included in the stats. The shadowy $40 mil crypto ad buy in Ohio are some examples of adjacent spending that didn’t carry over in Trump’s column.
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Little known thing called COVID-19
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No you don't have to explain that. Biden has to explain that. Biden has to explain why he did so little, and even when he did good things, he and his colleagues did such a bad job of bragging about it that a lot of people didn't see.
Of course it's not just Biden, but you don't get to start off by blaming voters for being ignorant when in fact the president himself did a s***** job advertising.
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What about Joe Biden made him sufficiently left while Kamala Harris wasn't?
-Joe Biden wasn't campaigning to finish building Trump's wall. Or saying that actually it was a good idea to build the wall and the only problems were just that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for it and that he didn't finish the job.
-Joe Biden wasn't campaigning on being pro-fracking. And bragging about how he was the tie breaking vote for the IRA, which leased new land for fracking. (I understand there was more to this act, but Harris points to it as a way to show she supports fracking)
-At the time the genocide in Gaza hadn't ramped up and gotten as much publicity as has now, so we didn't get to hear Joe Biden's stance on it.
-Joe Biden wasn't calling to ensure America has the "strongest most lethal fighting force in the world".
-Joe Biden didn't align himself with the Cheneys.
You see that 10 million more Democrats voted for Biden, but stayed home for Harris and you believe the problem is with the people and not the candidate? Now granted, racism and sexism played a role in this for sure. But to attribute that much of a difference just to that? Most of the people that are deeply racist and sexist are already voting for Trump because he supports those ideas. And from what I've seen, the Republican voters stayed pretty consistent from last election. It was mainly a dip in Democratic voters. If the problem is with the voters and not just that Harris was an incredibly weak candidate, then why do you believe that many more people voted last election?
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How do we know this when we haven’t finished counting the votes?
Edit: I realize this might have accidentally come across as a “gotcha” question, but I really mean it. So many people are speaking with confidence about voter demographics when only like 60% of the vote is counted. What am I missing?
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Didn't she gain votes in the swing states and mainly lost votes in states she won nevertheless?
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No
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She out performed Buden in WI, GA, NV, and NC. She underperformed in PA and MI. AZ wasn't done counting when I got these numbers. Trump gained in all the rest.
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Kamala Harris lost every swing state and Democrats lost The Senate
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Sure, but you can gain votes and still lose. That is not a contradiction
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That's what they were aiming for. It didn't work.
A California lawyer is not the candidate you want when you run to the right. Harris would have won the popular vote if she ran left, but she still would have lost the swing states, and thus the election.
If you want to win the swing states, you need to pick a Democrat from a swing state or a red state. Mark Kelly would have won with Harris's campaign.
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Biden followed Trump so it was fresh in everyone's minds how awful he was
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Real answer: Biden has a penis and white skin.
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I reject this beggar mentality that we can’t do better because of how the chessboard stands today - as if it has sat forever unchanged and immutable - Obama stands in stark contrast to that. Clinton (awful politicaly and personally toxic as she was) still won the popular vote against Trump. In 2016 when he lied and ran as an outsider, promising to “drain the swamp”.
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Facts. Pollsters ran into this nonstop. 'I don't like trump but I JUST CAN'T vote for a woman. They're tOo eMoTiOnAl!!'
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Seriously, fucking racist as fuck 'left'.
We're going to have a genocide of brown people right here, but they don't give the slightest shit.
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Americans have been force feeding one another the most vulgar anti-poc propaganda decade after decade for my entire life.
It's so crazy to hear the handful of college Leftists who picked up a copy of Zinn or ran a union drive at their local Starbucks get blamed for billions of dollars and millions of hours of hate jammed into peoples' eyeballs and ear holes.
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Seriously what did you expect after 4 years of genocide joe?
More importantly I can't believe libs are still vote shaming (about "commies" lmao) a week after their garbage candidate got blown out.
Never going to learn.
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I don't mean to offend you, but you were divided and conquered.
The Republicans found a topic to divide you on. The left-wing coalition collapsed (while the right wing consolidated) and you were conquered.
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I'm toying with the idea that we're all wrong, and it was actually widespread fraud that "won" the election for Trump.
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Willing to consider anything and everything to ensure the democratic party gets no blame are we?
Democrats must change. Democrats need to open our electoral process to third parties. No more keeping things fundamentally the same. That era is over. Get over it.
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It’s not that the Democratic Party needs defending for their lackluster ideas, it’s more that the candidate who is far more unpopular won by a landslide. It’s so counterintuitive.
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Because of targeted social networks circles. The candidate to prop got a radicalized base, the candidate to lose got messaging that either indicated people should disengage ("Genocide Kamala!") or were given the same sort of messaging in 2016 that made Hillary such a surefire win you didn't even have to go to vote, because what's one more vote (appeal to laziness). Cambridge Analytica's successors were also armed with LLM AI as well as Big Data personal data identification this time around.
They clearly prepped up in case the votes didn't go their way, but the post- truth politics paired with people who consider their social network fueled emotions more credible than the facts and merits of lifetime experts was more effective than they could have ever predicted, and this will mark the tendency for all future elections in our "democracies" were education clearly has had no long term impact.
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bad post, the flaw is OP’s assertion that Biden “set commies on fire”
COVID brought universal early voting and Biden didn’t go mask off conservative and communicated at least a modicum of support for young people facing alienation and low income. that alone is enough to set normies working two jobs on fire. commies have so little to do with it it’s laughable.
(in my opinion) Biden-Harris probably had the opportunity to win over normies again despite Harris’ gender and race (normies are racist and sexist) but instead they spent the last year courting conservatives and nazis. they even forced Walz to silence his normally empathetic and empirically based positions on the border.
if mcdonalds runs an ad for the all new mcburger, and no one buys it? we generally will blame the advertising strategy or the product concept itself. but for some reason when we order a mcburger from the DNC and they deliver a fucking cold tortilla with runny egg on it, it’s “the people’s fault” there wasn’t a lot of buyers.
i voted for harris. she is by far the best candidate of the race. but i will not play pretend and hold her and biden blameless for their abject inattention to the communicated values of their constituents.
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The pandemic, pendejo.
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The fact that he had a penis
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Goddamn y’all lefties or whatever are OUT for these recrimination threads.
Well I suppose it’s the last bid for attention for another 3.5 years.
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“Now is not the time for criticism, it’s not election season - save that for the primaries”
“Now is not the time for criticism, the primaries are soon”
“Now is not the time for criticism, there’s only 100 days to go before the general”
“Now is not the time for criticism, we just had a huge, crushing loss”
So are liberals/democrat faithful/etc really committed to never learning, or never listening? When am I allowed to criticize half of the political duopoly that is increasing out of touch not just with my concerns, but openly snubs voting blocs and demands fealty in return for the status quo?
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