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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gods, I’d have loved seeing an astronaut in the big chair.
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.
Indeed. We elected someone who shits all over democracy. Idiots abound
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.
No. No we don’t.
A lot of folks actually were better off back then due to the stimulus checks…
Biden’s years were the best of my life, I had stability for once…
That was nice, can’t wait to fucking get laid off.
Yeah, getting less than one month’s living expenses over a period of 18 months of un or underemployment really had me living large!
I’m not discounting that, but if you were disabled or on a fixed income then that one month’s living expenses might be the biggest windfall you’ve had in decades.
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.
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.
Lmao what?
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.
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?
Second highest voter turnout in any US presidential election on record. Both by numbers and percentage of eligible voters.
Yep. Appears America is just that stupid.
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.
True, but also the republicans won’t have a trump to vote for.
He really would be the God-Emperor then, a withered corpse figurehead.
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.
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.
There’s no doubt that trump will be bad for the country, but he also says a lot of things like how he’d lock up hillary clinton. At this point all we can do is buckle up and hope for the best.
Yeah well what worries me is how badly he took giving up power last time. The only reason he even SOMEWHAT chilled the fuck out is because he knew he had a chance in 2024 to get it back.
If he gives it up this time it’s gone for good.
You don’t think he’s thought of nothing else this entire time? He’s definitely got plans to turn this bitch into a dictatorship. “I need more generals like Hitler had.”
The signs are all there.
It’s a possibility, but I wouldn’t say it’s guaranteed. Presidents enjoy an immunity that is not afforded to most others. He got impeached twice and has had a bunch of court cases against him but what has that meant? There is no chance in hell that democrats would actually pursue putting him in jail so basically he has no consequences to face. He’ll carry out his second term as president, do all sorts of awful things, and then he’ll leave without democrats pursuing any punishments. If george w bush can escape without being arrested as the war criminal that he is, then trump doesn’t stand a chance at punishment either, so he has no reason to install a dictatorship to save himself.
Speaking of george w bush: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHVmJlMF_Lg
So yeah, I wouldn’t sweat an explicit dictatorship when the rich already completely control the system. It’s much easier to horde wealth while pretending we have a democracy and the pretense of legitimacy that brings than it is with an overt dictatorship. You can see this with people online making all sorts of excuses for this “democracy” of ours.
He doesn’t want a dictatorship to save himself. He wants a dictatorship because he wants to be the fuckin dictator.
He won’t be allowed. I would be willing to bet on it.
I would normally agree. Four years ago I would have laughed if someone had said it.
Now, I just don’t know. So much has happened that I thought for sure couldn’t possibly happen. Not much would surprise anymore.
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.
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.
Oh dang I didn’t know that about Dem seats in states that Harris lost. Here in PA the people may have voted out a LONG standing Democratic Senator because people showed up for Trump and then went right down the ballot.
Biden followed Trump so it was fresh in everyone’s minds how awful he was
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
They tried everything except giving Dem voters what they want…
Which is what exactly? So many captain hindsights here.
How about some actual progressive policy? Not sure how people like you manage to play ignorance for this long.
You’re being hard headed if you want everyone you argue with in the comments to list exactly what they were looking for. How about you go into chat gpt and ask "what are some progressive policies that Democratic voters want that aren’t being reflected by the DNC and you’ll get exactly what you’re facetiously asking us
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.
Maintaining the status quo is conservatism.
By definition that’s not what the left wants.
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.
Not discounting anything you wrote here, but it still entertains me when people call the 60 year old Kamala Harris young.
In contrast to Biden and Trump she looks 40.
Compared to Trump and Biden she’s a baby.
Fuck I would not have guessed that. She looks 10-20 years younger than that
Black don’t crack, she genuinely looks youthful and it really helps that she can speak full sentences and thoughts without issues and/or changing topic like Biden or Trump
Especially when next to Walz who is, I think, a year younger.
Literally Covid. People thoght they were going to die.
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.
Republicans aren’t the ones who didn’t turn out, idk what this has to do with what they think about Trumps covid response. If you want to know why 10 million more democratic voters turned out last time covids gonna play a large factor.
So covid but not fascist plundering and terrorism. Huh.
Stupid fuckers.
And BLM was already out on the streets.
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
Didn’t she gain votes in the swing states and mainly lost votes in states she won nevertheless?
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.
No
Kamala Harris lost every swing state and Democrats lost The Senate
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.
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
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?
Little known thing called COVID-19
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.
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.
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.
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.
Easy to say inflation is down while others are feeling it with their wallet. Biden did nothing to fight price gouging
Enjoy Trump’s tariffs because that is somehow his answer to inflation.
I voted for Kamala, I’m under no illusion that Trump will motherfuck the economy just like he did in his previous administration. But the idiots that voted for him have the memory of a goldfish. They will still find a way to blame democrats and minorities…that’s when the real fun will begin.
He made an attempt. If you expect overnight results, make sure you do a shit ton of shrooms so you can live in a different reality.
You know you’ve heard people say inflation hasn’t stopped because prices are still high. Like they’re going to magically get better prices when inflation stops.
Yeah it’s stupid, welcome to America.
Seen hundreds of lemmy comments arguing exactly that.
The sad thing is that there are a thousand ways to attack prices, or even just give sound bites that the public can run with. But almost all of them would upset neoliberal billionaires, so they can never be spoken.
They think it’ll be like gas prices. They go up, but the “right guy” will make them come back down, ignoring the fact that that only happens with commodities like oil. Once a company raises prices, they rarely bring them back down. Tha6s called deflation, and it’s not good.
Well, we kind of need deflation to happen because the alternative is rising wages and that’s not fucking happening.
We need to do what Harris had stated, and go after all these companies price gouging like we are still in the middle of the COVID pandemic. And that is now only going to get worse with a con man in office set on making himself, his companies, and his friends (which is anyone that says nice things to him) as rich as possible by extracting what remains of the working class. They are going to weaken/dismantle unions, and likely start mass death/slave labor camps for the poor.
He is also going to use his new position of power to pass laws to shield crypto scammers, and use his new crypto platform to undermine the US dollar and try and force more people to his crypto grift run by some of the worse humans around. And use his NFT/crypto stuff to openly except bribes to sell off the US to the highest bidder so when his dementia gets bad enough they put JD in charge he can live out the rest of his days being fed liquid cheese burgers on a golden spoon.
I imagine Vance goes in around the two year mark so he can have three terms.
Not sure JD would get any additional terms, the cult might want to install either Jr. or Eric and start a “royalty” line of succession. And hope that Ivanka enjoys the hellscape she helped usher in for her daughter, and women everywhere.
Deflation just means everyone is already starving. Deflation isn’t the start of a process, it’s the result of massive failure. Just like inflation doesn’t happen the second money is printed, it has to circulate before price inflation is a thing.
What we need are labor groups, and taxes on companies who use government benefits as part of their wage calculation.
In short, never try to make prices go down, instead make wages go up, and make competition control prices.
Deflation isn’t the start of a process, it’s the result of massive failure
We’ve already had a massive failure. The economy doing great and yet everyone’s broke? Such a blatant lie! Time to acknowledge and lower prices to end food waste.
Everyone is broke, but still buying everything in the economy? Sorry, time to acknowledge the reality that life is just hard. Deflation happens after it gets really bad.
Actually they’re not wrong, wages were not increased to keep up with inflation so stopping it alone wasn’t enough.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q#0 Real wages are up since Covid was dealt with. That’s simple factual reality.
The perception of course, is that everything is worse. Because prices did go up, and they’re staying there. Which just means the economy didn’t collapse and cause mass unemployment.
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.
Wages have outpaced inflation recently. Things have generally been heading in the right direction since the pandemic but it came too late and the masses are mostly ignorant or misinformed so the data is irrelevant to them. Its about how people feel as you point out, there’s not a rational argument against feelings, people feel how they feel. One side has become very good at taping into those feelings, the other side is talking about data and no one gives a shit unless the data validates what they feel.
Don’t lie to me.
California voted to not raise minimum wage, too.
Also they kept prison slave labor.
Come on now don’t bring up that in one of the “left most” and most populous state in the union that people are actually pretty non leftist, it might contradict some of their feel based arguments.
America is not full of progressives. I don’t know why people here can never be convinced otherwise.
America is a country that lies to itself. It claims we need to make female super heroes flat chested to combat sexism, but then turn around and laugh at the idea of a female president so hard they’re willing to give Hitler a second chance.
America is not full of progressives.
No it is not and I’ll toss another example on there -
Gay marriage was only legalized nation wide by a bunch of unelected judges, and the second most-recent Democratic president “evolved” on the issue less than a decade ago.
US postures as the world’s defender of LGBT rights when it’s “bringing democracy” places, but it’s not great at doing that internally.
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.
