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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.
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?
They had a damn cop run for president and then took the black vote as a given. Fucking dumb.
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.
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?
The more I think about it the more I’m convinced her problem was Biden. The Democratic senators that are winning in the swing states spent an entire year separating themselves from Biden.
Harris didn’t get that chance. She took over Biden’s campaign, his advisors, his ground network, his convention, 4 months before the election. If he had just recognized his time was over we could have had a real primary, with different campaigns to find the one that resonates with the people.
Biden absolutely fumbled this by even bothering to run. If there had been an open primary there would be some actual momentum behind the winner (which I doubt would’ve been Harris).
I don’t care to speculate her chances in a primary. If she had won it then she’d have a campaign far more likely to energize the Democratic base. If someone else had won it then they would have a similar advantage. Not having it, and finding out in the worst way that we should have used the fucking 25th amendment is the original sin of this campaign.
Absolutely agreed, Biden will be remembered with William Henry Harrison because of it.
Maybe it’s as simple as: outrage is memorable, policy is boring. For all too many voters, all they remember is the last thing that outraged them.
I don’t know how you work with that though, since people on the left seem to care more about policy, character, platform.
But maybe it tracks back to the “shift yo center” right before the election. I know it’s an attempt to attract any remaining undecideds and avoid last minute mistakes but that clearly didn’t work.
I don’t know if it’s just my echo chamber, but Harris, and waltz, both came out in the stage in a flood of emotion. They were live, genuine, caring. I know Trump tried to belittle Harris’ smile and laugh but she pulled it off. She seemed genuine and alive, in contrast to that ancient senile tyrant. Her rise was emotional, and in a good way. Then as the election approached, they became too cautious and lost that emotional jet engine that had them zooming into the sky
policy is boring
Means testing everything to the Nth disagree is enervating.
Yesterday I announced that, as president, I’ll establish a student loan debt forgiveness program for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities.
Is bad policy. Not in the same way that mass deportation is bad. But when you ask where the 15M voters went between Biden parroting Warren/Sanders on universal student debt relief and this, go ahead and ask how many people you know who will qualify.
Harris, and waltz, both came out in the stage in a flood of emotion. They were live, genuine, caring.
Maybe Walz was different. Idk. He didn’t get nearly as much limelight as Liz Cheney, so it was harder to tell.
But Harris wasn’t caring in the slightest. Between going to Guatemala and telling refugees “Do Not Come”, dismissing student debtors as entitled, downplaying the damage caused by inflation, and cheering on the police raids of college campuses over student protests, what we got was a woman whose deep genuine affections were exclusive to her in-group.
Gore and Kerry and Hilary all had the same problems. It was Republican versus Republican-Lite time after time.
going to Guatemala and telling refugees “Do Not Come”
And yet that may be the best course. All too many undocumented immigrants are refugees in some way, desperate to escape their circumstances or find better circumstances. Tiffany were not going to welcome them and help them build their version of the American Dream, there is no humane or just way to stop them. Do you want human trafficking? immigrant camps that are essentially prisons? build a wall? Military patrols at the border? Mass deportation? There is no good answer, but the current ones aren’t working. Staying in a safe-ish spot closer to where you are and doing it legally may be most humane, may come closest to serving both their needs and US needs.
The problem with Harris is the problem of all liberals: they don’t understand the problems liberalism is causing. Fascism offers terrible solutions to those problems, and thus it wins.
It’s funny how people try to rationalize why Trump won, as if has any rationality behind it whatsoever.
The problem with Kamala Harris’s messaging was that she didn’t have millions of Xitter bots scaring people into voting for her.
She had like triple the money trump had in his campaign and still got her ass kicked. She might have just sucked shit as a candidate ya know
And she also had noone using millions of dollars to bribe voters to go vote, but only voters of a specific flavor. Somehow that was deemed legal, the usa has basically become a banana republic.
I"m convinced that if she ran the same campaign, but had a dick, she’d be the president
This is just misogyny but with more steps
Not really, it’s an admission that America is a deeply sexist country that will never allow a situation where the majority of people stand up and say “We want the qualified woman over an unqualified male”
A man would have lost too, with the campaign she ran. We all saw this coming. You’re just looking for a morally superior reason to doubt the political capability of a woman, simply based on the fact that she is a woman, and to be just as hateful and presumptuous as MAGA towards fellow Americans whom you disagree with.
Just look at Michigan, they swung for Trump but elected Elissa Slotkin for the Senate. There are plenty of women in politics who ran against men. It’s about the campaign, not the sex of the person running it.
Stop playing politics like team sports, stop avoiding even the smallest bit of reflection on the Democrats’ campaign, and start pressuring the Democrats to vocally support popular policies that get people out to vote. Writing this off as racism, sexism, or “a voter problem” in general, is not going to solve the problems in your party that made this the most predictable and overwhelming loss in recent history.
Doesn’t change the fact that America is a deeply sexist country.
Doesn’t negate literally anything that I said.
It’s a lot more complicated. They didn’t even really tried to ratify Roe v. Wade after it got repelled. They just tried to play the moral high ground.
If the democrats had any bravery, they would have at least tried to put it out to vote, then if failed, smear any republican in their way as a “creepy pedophile that wants little girls pregnant”, and “killers of mothers, whose pregnancy went wrong”. That sways moderates way easier than moving to the right, step-by-step. My mother is actually a moderate Fidesz voter, and she’s having second thoughts about her support every time she sees people posting “cry lib”-style gloat, or that the only children the “child protection” laws are protecting are manchildren having meltdowns from seeing “gay” series on the sidebar of Netflix. The common people are swayed by emotions way more than reason. Even I’m more emotional than reasonable. They want to hear a story, not a nerd-talk how your new tax system will improve the economy.
This, it’d be very easy to sway the public… Fuck just have Stephen Colbert write your campaign speech, you’d win in a fucking landslide.
This is a big problem and you’ve identified it correctly: When Trump says “They’re coming for ya, but I’m in the way. We’ll make America Great Again and defeat Sleepy Joe before Kamela eats your dogs!” people say “He’s a friend of the common man, standing up to the elite.”, when Kamela talks about how her comprehensive new debt plan is working actually and the chart says… Well no one gives a shit what the chart says because they’re falling asleep.
Talk to the voting public like they’re children, Democratic Policies are literally too smart for anyone dumber than me to pay attention… and I’m pretty fucking dumb.
The Democrats do some “Appeal to feels”, but they do it the wrong way. They talk about how they’re going to take all the bad stuff sitting down because they’re the “Bigger man”, and they’ll “Maybe look into thinking about doing something about it I reckon!”
No one’s fooled by that, it’s surrender at worst and apathy at best.
When Trump says he’s gonna kick some ass, he’s both acknowledged the problem and at least pretended to give a shit about it.
This is what people are talking about when they say Trump “sympathizes with the suffering of the common man.”
Certainly. That doesn’t make it a decent campaign tho
The only messaging problem was taking the momentum of the debate and shitting on it with the right-wing heelturn the moment the Cheneys said “never Trump”.
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.
It is clearly a joke aimed at the futility of trying to capitulate to reactionaries by becoming reactionary
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.
I think you’re right.
To be fair, you and the other commenter just did.
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.
Dems would have to purge some of their most fanatical supporters to win those conservative votes.
That appears to be exactly what they did, as of last week
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, they said 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 finally 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
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.
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.
I understand simmering frustration, but yes: we had gradual change happening, but fell for the emotional outrage, the promise of radical change. And this is despite all evidence of how much is false or inconsistent, how much will be completely ignored, and above all else how much will make things worse for most of us. Potentially much worse
Yeah, to be absolutely clear, Trump’s change is a lie and he will be objectively worse for everyone on everything (unless you are very, very wealthy). I also think things would start to improve for the working class gradually if the voters had given Harris another four years. But the losses to the working class have been huge, and the recovery is always anemic, so things are usually a net loss for people.
Look at the Obama administration; he decided to bail out banks instead of homeowners after the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. People argue over whether or not that was the right move (and for the record, I think that was a really fucking bad move), but pretty much everyone agrees that the recovery that he created was pretty slow. The economy did recover though, and by the end of his term, it was actually very strong. Now, if you were someone who weathered the crisis alright, great, you’re 401K got better! But if you lost your home in the mortgage, got laid off, lost your life savings…that slow recovery killed you, and when Democrats start telling you that the economy is good, you’re gonna wonder what the fuck they’re talking about.
By making sure they can buy groceries.
The economy is not better off in the lower half.
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).
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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.
I can’t speak to the misogyny, but to your second point, I try so hard to not mention him because your opinion gets disregarded in dem spaces as soon as you bring him up. He did everything right and dems would rather lose than actually be progressive.
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
Well all the Palestinians are dead for sure now
Good job idiot
I disagree with your sides talking point that Biden and Harris were doing anything for Palestinians or were about to. And Harris could have stopped the weapons shipments in the last few days of the election and gotten the progressive votes she needed. She opted not to and chose defeat.
Whatever you need to tell yourself.
They’re all dead now
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.
I’ve been searching, and can only find that non-voters are racially diverse.
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
Third party canidates did not receive enough votes to sway anything this election.
The biggest spike was in non-voters. Around 16M - overwhelmingly Dems - stayed home between 2020 and 2024.
Dems were successful in scaring voters off the Green Party. Greens got 1.4M voters in 2016 and a mere 636k voters in 2024.
But that was just a tiny slice of the overall atrophy of progressive support.
Socialism or Barbarism… We’re making a choice
The response by so many people has been pathetic. Liberals are learning nothing.
The liberals in control are paid not too.
But they picked up the coveted Cheney bloc!
They actually performed worse with republicans than in 2020 lol.
Yeah let’s blame white supremacy and ignore the fact that the democratic candidate lost FOURTEEN MILLION voters this election cycle.
It was more like 11mil, and were almost exclusively white men who just didn’t vote this time after they chose to vote in 2020
You know we can Google the vote totals from 2020 right?
Again, source?
11mil, and were almost exclusively white men
Got any proof of that? From what i heard she lost 15% of the hispanic vote, women didnt turn out as well as expected, lost 7% of the 18-29 vote, and she even lost some on the black vote. She lost in every demographc but you are trying hard to pin it on one group. So lets see you back your data up.
Well white men are a majority in this country period so any aggregate population is probably going to be mostly white men and of course the only possible reason a white man might sit out is because he’s sexist and racist. I’m a liberal looking for anything to blame but my candidate’s feckless campaign and to me that’s just math. 🤷🏾
So I guess it’s finally our turn to get out the pitchforks and start going after our fellow americans while somehow retaining the moral high ground over MAGA.
/s
I mean yeah,
If they voted for the man who had the exact same policy but not the woman then the only difference is the sex
Oh I’m sorry, only 11 million, my bad. That suddenly decided to become white supremacists out of nowhere when they had rejected trump the first time. It’s always someone else’s fault, isn’t it?
11mil who were too insecure to vote for a woman
You had me at white man
Another one of her messaging issues was that she has a vagina.
A big part of the election was Republicans screaming at Democrats for being too feminine and Democrats retorting “That’s good aktuly”.
But compared to Biden’s promise of college debt relief, climate change relief, child care and reduction of health care costs, that didn’t motivate people who weren’t heavily invested in the fight. Also, plus, too, we rolled back all the universal mail in voting from 2020. As Dems were the most likely to mail in their ballots, they suffered disproportionately
Also, plus, too, we rolled back all the universal mail in voting from 2020. As Dems were the most likely to mail in their ballots, they suffered disproportionately
I have no idea why I haven’t seen this point made before. I’ve thought it several times myself. There’s absolutely no way that didn’t play a role in this election cycle.
I’m fairly certain that a transwoman would have done even worse in polls. It does make me wonder how a transman would fare, though.
She did try her darnedest too, though.
