- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
“So what you’re saying is we need to move further to the right.”
- Democrats and pundits
Exactly the message I expect them to take away from this, if 2016 and 2020 are any indication. Zero introspection.
I would not be surprised if the new iteration of the DNC is the 90s, early 2000s GOP. Look how they are spamming McCain on reddit.
Such a sick cruel joke to make it so the choices in our false election be GOP or Orange Putin.
Remember Tucker Carlson fucking a loaf of bread in a Russian grocery store? Well I hope you all like bread!
The only thing that makes all of this interesting is trumps inevitable death. I know his mental decline is in there too but they’ll just weekend at bernies him for the final years.
Our constituents’ rent went up 15% and their wages stayed the same, so everything is basically ok.
I don’t know why everyone keeps insisting that courting the right was a stupid move. I personally know a lot of life long Republicans that got real tired of the MAGA stuff. In this matchup specifically, trying to scoop the conservative-but-not-MAGA vote makes sense by the numbers. Obviously it didn’t pan out, but at least in theory, there should be a sizeable bloc of voters there.
Less people voted Trump in 2024 than in 2020. It is not that Trump won, it is that Biden/Harris lost hard.
Trump: 74 Mio. in 2020, 73 Mio. in 2024
Biden/Harris: 81 Mio. in 2020, 69 Mio. in 2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election
Seems like people on the less right side of politics also got tired after the whole “we need to stop Trump or democracy ends” messaging led to an underwhelming / genocidal and dementia struck president
It’s easy to look back. I sincerely think that, based on research and subsequent speculation, appealing to non-MAGA conservatives was a rational play. It explains Liz Cheney and the whole nothing-will-fundamentally-change angle.
Again, didn’t pay off, but I’m sure research showed greater expected returns from conservatives than leftists.
Polling research has shown that many progressive policies are popular with not only republican voters but all Americans. Trying to appeal to republican voters by taking on right-wing framing on issues like Immigration, will just reinforce the lies that rhetoric is built on and push those voters further right.
Polls on campaign messaging
How to Win a Swing Voter in Seven Days
“The View” Alternate Universe: Break From Biden in Interviews, Play the Hits in Ads
Polls on policy
How Trump and Harris Voters See America’s Role in the World
Majority of Americans support progressive policies such as higher minimum wage, free college
Democrats should run on the popular progressive ideas, but not the unpopular ones
Here Are 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind
Finding common ground: 109 national policy proposals with bipartisan support
Progressive Policies Are Popular Policies
Tim Walz’s Progressive Policies Popular With Republicans in Swing States
People don’t want ‘nothing will fundamentally change’ they want real change to improve their livelyhood
But these “lets poll and analyse who to peddle to” strategy has been a failure for two of the past three elections. People are tired of getting managed messages instead of a coherent platform.
I’m not saying you’re incorrect, I’m just saying that, considering the circumstances, it wasn’t an unreasonable gamble. Leftists are notoriously stingy with their vote. As long as progressives are unreliable on election day, appealing to proven voters on well-vocalized issues is a safer strategy. It being an unsuccessful strategy doesn’t mean it’s not the most successful strategy.
I think it was obviously insane from the start. It was clear long before 2024, before 2020 even. Offering a racist a ham sandwich isn’t going to get him to vote for you when the alternative is offering him the whole pig. Campaigning that way and losing once looks like an accident. Doing it… however the fuck many times we’ve seen this play out now looks like it’s on purpose.
Not every conservative is a racist and it isn’t helpful to frame things that way. It’s not unreasonable to prefer a ham sandwich to a diseased pig, and it’s not unreasonable to think that’s a compelling offer.
They’re either racists or willing to support and vote for racists. Not sure where you think that line of reasoning is gonna go.
The gamble was that enough of them wouldn’t support racists if given a moderate alternative. Just because it didn’t work didn’t mean it wasn’t a reasonable strategy.
They were literally saying Democrats were too woke. Did you see any woke policies? None! Not even progressive. The media needs to join the rich on the pyre
To be fair, the Republicans did all these same things and won all three branches, so…
It shouldn’t have to be repeated so often that maybe Republican voters aren’t who the Democratic party needs to be gearing itself to attract.
Turns out people who want those things can vote for Republicans. Who offer more of those things!
And the people who did not want those things stayed home.
Because right wingers want that and left wingers don’t, that’s some surprising maths.
Republicans had a primary.
This point needs to be driven home over and over and over again. The democrats haven’t held a real primary where the DNC operatives weren’t interfering since 2008! which coincided with the election in a landslide of Obama after he won an extremely competitive primary.
Democrats learned the wrong lesson from that election, they thought it was identity politics that won the landslide. No idiots, it was democracy itself. Of course being the first black man to be president helped him but having an appealing platform that outcompeted everyone else’s (and a better record re Iraq war, he voted against it as senator unlike Clinton) won him the popular mandate that led to the landslide in the general. Against a formidable candidate! John McCain was no joke and I think todays democrats and even progressives would be thrilled to have him as president if he were still alive compared to our current options.
They’ve disenfranchised so many voters with their shenanigans, that it has cost them 2 out of the last 3 elections, and the person they had to beat should have been the most easily defeated candidate in the history of the United States. I would have voted for a literal dog over trump. At least a dog wouldn’t intentionally burn the country to the ground so he could rule over the ashes.
I would vote for a dog over any human let’s be real. Wouldn’t you?!
They would of lost three elections if covid never happened. Biden got in by the skin of his teeth on that one when it shouldn’t of even been close. The fact that this election is a Republican landslide is just fucking embarrassing.
most easily defeated candidate
He got 70 million votes, that’s not “easily defeated”.
idk if anyone will be as easily defeated as mondale. even his home state BARELY had majority and that was the only state he won
Actually true. The Republican politicians at the time hated Trump in 2015
There is no single group of people on the planet Earth as adept at shitting and falling back in it as the Democrats.
They turned “Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory” into an artform.
This why people think they are a psyop.
I don’t need convincing. They showed me in 2016 that they’re controlled opposition. Admitted it in court.
Wilding v. DNC Services Corp.
Google it for yourself.
I don’t think there has ever, in history, been a group capable of doing that at this scale other than the Democratic Party. They are the greatest to ever do it.
Stop it Patrick, you’re scaring the liberals. Imagine how shocking it must be for reality to prove that the leftists were correct about everything this entire time. Again.
Really weird how leftists have a 100% accuracy rate about all of history going back 150 years, but I’m sure the liberals will take some Ws eventually.
Just keep barreling towards fascism, libs! I believe in you!
“Voters voted for the choice furthest to the right because they wanted the choice on the left to be more left”
People didn’t vote. Significantly less turnout this year than 2020. Further left is more exciting than an idiot chasing endorsement from Republicans.
It’s stupid, but if people weren’t stupid Trump wouldn’t have been a candidate.
2020 had the highest voter turnout in the history of our country because of the pandemic. Without a major motivator like the pandemic, we are not going to hit those numbers again.
So naturally there will be less voter turnout this year.
Democrats and liberals will use any excuse not to consider progress
Then compare it to 2016 - it was practically the same campaign strategy, only this time it lost the popular vote on top of the electoral collage.
Trying to flip people at the margin is not a winning strategy. Obama won in '08 by campaigning to the left and promising meaningful change – it got people who normally don’t vote to engage. Why is that strategy so anathema now?
Trump won in 2016 because of Russian bot farms. That has long been common knowledge. The only part that hasn’t yet been verified is whether Trump was in on it.
Obama wasn’t any further left than Harris. To get anything done after election there needs to be compromise. You can’t get that without moderates.
It’s public knowledge that Russias strategy is to push the democrats further left and republicans further right so there is no middle ground or compromise and nothing gets done.
Oh, Obama governed as a Regan-era republican. The Affordable Healthcare Act was based on a Heratige Foundation proposal, and given the blessing of health insurance companies. But he campaigned on the left, that line of broken promises got him into office.
As for the rest… pay no attention to the declining lifespan, the increasing precarity, the rising cost of just scraping by. People aren’t voting because of real grievances, it’s all Russian Bots don’cha know?
Like, jeeze, you’d rather have a Sinister Villain to peg this on than actually examine the conditions in this country. That’s some saturday morning cartoon nonsense you’ve spun.
Oh, Obama governed as a Regan-era republican. The Affordable Healthcare Act was based on a Heratige Foundation proposal, and given the blessing of health insurance companies. But he campaigned on the left, that line of broken promises got him into office.
Obama won office for two terms and republicans won this election. If what you’re saying is true then it disproves the claim that democrats didn’t go far enough left according to voters.
As for the rest… pay no attention to the declining lifespan, the increasing precarity, the rising cost of just scraping by. People aren’t voting because of real grievances, it’s all Russian Bots don’cha know?
So you’re pretending that foreign nations don’t try to influence the elections while adding in new topics to create a straw man argument. The polls show that voters were most motivated by inflation and immigration and that is what resulted in republicans winning.
Like, jeeze, you’d rather have a Sinister Villain to peg this on than actually examine the conditions in this country. That’s some saturday morning cartoon nonsense you’ve spun.
I’m just stating the facts. I’m sorry if they don’t align with your feelings.
The polls show that voters were most motivated by inflation and immigration and that is what resulted in republicans winning
Just one comment ago, you claimed it was Russian bots. Now you’re agreeing that it’s people feeling economic pressure.
If what you’re saying is true then it disproves the claim that democrats didn’t go far enough left according to voters.
If you give people a choice between Republicans and diet-Republicans, they pick the real one. Would you have them try to outflank republicans more next election?
Yes. People want a populous movement. In the absence of left-wing populism (like socialist reforms), they will take right win populism (fascism).
Democrats campaigned on making billionaires pay their fair share and addressing health care and student loans etc so socialist reforms. But the majority of voters were still convinced that that would make them worse off unfortunately.
That might have been in the footnotes of the DNC platform, but Kamala said none of that.
Here’s a quote from Stephen Semler’s newsletter:
For example, in this video clip, Stephen Colbert asks Harris, “Under a Harris administration, what would the major changes be and what would stay the same?” Harris replies: “Sure. Well, I mean, I’m obviously not Joe Biden. So that would be one change. But also I think it’s important to say with 28 days to go, I’m not Donald Trump.”
First, that doesn’t answer the question. Second, that description applies to literally everyone except for Joe Biden and Donald Trump. This is the quality of candidate you get when the Democratic Party chooses one for you.
When it was being discussed who would replace Biden before he dropped out, many black abd female voters were pissed it was even up for discussion considering Kamala was the vice president. They saw it as her job to be next in line after Biden.
If someone else was chosen all those votes would’ve been lost and we would still have lost.
Since we lost anyways, I would have preferred to have an actual primary process, even if it was a very abbreviated one at the convention. Destroying democracy to save democracy never made sense to me.
It’s easy to say that in hindsight.
Many many many people were saying that the entire time. It has been clear to anyone not drinking the Biden kool aid that he hasn’t been as lucid as he used to be, and many people said that if we had debates and Joe Biden won, at least we would have given others a voice. Anyone who supported Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips, etc. especially was infuriated there were no debates, just a coronation. Many people were mad that certain states even canceled the democratic primaries. When Biden dropped out, it would have not been that strange for several prominent democrats to throw their hats in the ring - Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, etc. and at least have some sort of debate at the convention.
Did they? If they did, then they did a terrible job of it, since many people didn’t hear that message. The message that everyone heard over and over again is “I’m not trump”. Besides, promising to get rid of student loans as a campaign promise when you just spent 4 years proving that you can’t really deliver on that promise seems unwise.
They did and it was loud and clear and everyone I know that voted republican did so because they thought democrats were bad for the economy and polls showed that.
You’re scapegoating democrats for not doing enough when really there just wasn’t enough voters that supported them because of right wing propaganda.
Key word being, “addressing.” Medicare for All? Nope. They’re going to address healthcare costs. Student loans insanely expensive for the majority of Americans? They already tried addressing it. What are they going to do? Eliminate the filibuster to pass legislation? Stack the Supreme Court?
They’ve been a little better on taxing the wealthy, but raising taxes doesn’t mean much if you believe the revenue is going towards the military industrial complex or, “woke,” agenda, based on your political leanings.
Liberal half measures aren’t going to work anymore. They need a full-blown progressive agenda and the balls to ram it through whatever institution is in their way.
If democrats try to move left and they lose because of it and then people like yourself scapegoat them for not doing enough then they will move further right next time because that’s what the voters vote for.
Your response is an example of letting perfection become the enemy of progress.
WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? We’re two days out from a centrist campaign leading to the largest fucking bloodbath in recent memory, and you’re already trying to find excuses to not try appealing to the left? Rejoin reality, dude.
If we don’t move further right now and instead move left then we might move further right later???
Their cognitive dissonance in these threads is just astounding
Astounding but not unexpected.
Democrats moved left and there was a “blood bath”. And your take is that we should ignore the polls saying it was because of inflation and move further left. You’re the one that needs to log off lemmy for a while and rejoin reality.
The Democrats moved left? Fucking when? They’ve been moving to the right my entire life, and I’m not young. This election they campaigned with Liz Cheney on arming Isreal, a harsh border policy, and adding Republicans to their cabinet.
And yeah, it was the economy and the inflation; it’s killing the working class. So why did she tailor her message entirely to the middle class? Their economic message was, “inflation is better, the status quo is good, your wrong if you think the economy needs to change.” Then they lost, and your takeaway is, “well, changing to a left-wing economic message would obviously be bad.” Get a grip, dude.
What part of it embracing war criminals like Dick Cheney, ignoring the needs of the working class, and mirroring much of Trump’s policies is moving left?
Biden campaigned on similar promises and ideals like resolving student debt and improving the economy. Even personally relevant promises like creating a public health jobs corps (relevant to my degree and field of study). The only thing he sufficiently accomplished were the initial vaccination efforts, but it’s as if we stopped having an actual president into and after 2022: The filthy rich managed to get exponentially richer with this war-supply economy and stock market presidency. My student debt is still a burden in the back of my mind and all of my available graduate-entry jobs are either severely underpaid or shilled out to robots that also vet my applications. Until the war profiteer and stock market billionaires actually pay their fair share (which they should have been a few years ago) or provide citizens with jobs that can sustain a healthy living, any good socialist promises that are made are flat-out lies because senility and flacid mental acuity won’t even be a valid excuse anymore.
Biden tried to do things like forgive student debt and was blocked by republicans and you scapegoat him for it? That’s a good way to make sure no one tries again. But maybe that’s your true intentions.
Biden was actually fairly committed to the student debt forgiveness, but his blind institutionalism meant he couldn’t actually achieve much. He wouldn’t push to remove the filibuster until late into his presidency and refused to discuss stacking the court. He was the wrong man to meet this moment in history, and we’ll be living with his failures for decades.
Democrats never had near enough seats in Congress to actually expand the Supreme Court or remove the filibuster. He said he would support it but if he would’ve said more than that you would be blaming him for not accomplishing that also, even though it was never possible.
There were procedural methods they could have used to eliminate the filibuster, which he refused to even consider for half his term. They would have needed the House to expand the court, but if they had the balls to do it, then they could have run on it. Instead, they tried nothing and got nothing.
All it takes to eliminate the filibuster is 51 votes. They won’t remove the filibuster because that’s one of the rotating villains they love to utilized whenever they don’t want to do something.
It was blocked by the courts because Biden was trying to use measures that were not within his authority. He was advised multiple times on the proper way to go about canceling student debt. And he never did. Pelosi instructed him that he does not have the authority to use the measures that he tried to do. He talked about student debt as a pr headline.
And all of that populist talk came to a grinding halt once companies like Black Rock started drafting economic policy.
Less people voted Trump in 2024 than in 2020. It is not that Trump won, it is that Biden/Harris lost hard.
Trump: 74 Mio. in 2020, 73 Mio. in 2024
Biden/Harris: 81 Mio. in 2020, 69 Mio. in 2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election
Less people voted overall in 2024. That’s less for Trump and Harris. Because 2020 was the highest voter turnout ever. It was record breaking because of the pandemic. Without another motivator as big as the pandemic you’re going to see less voters for both Trump and Harris. You’re also going to see many different reasons claiming why. But it’s a fact that if you don’t have record breaking overall voter turnout in 2024 also, both sides will lose voters.
I know someone who didn’t vote and gave this exact logic.
What logic specifically?
He wanted an actual progressive and refused to vote for a Democrat since the Democrats aren’t embracing progressivism, despite the fact that not voting for a Democrat means there’s a greater likelihood that we end up even further from progressivism.
In short: the exact logic in your comment.
I know many people that voted democrat in 2020 and switched republican this year because they thought inflation was caused by Bidens progressive policies. The polls support my experience:
More like out of 2 right wing options people went for the more right wing option.
Democrats have been moving further left ever since progressives joined them. This “democrats aren’t left enough” talking point is in line with the Russian strategy to polarize American politics more so that we dont get anything done.
Til their platform, messaging and strategy is just Russian
You’re not making any sense
Democrats have been moving further left ever since progressives joined them. This “democrats aren’t left enough” talking point is in line with the Russian strategy to polarize American politics more so that we dont get anything done.
Please tell me how I want republican immigration policy and to build the wall at the Mexican border are left-wing.
Again you’re not making sense. Why would I tell you that you want that?
What I can tell you is that you want the non facsist political party to win and then you want your government officials to get along long enough to actually accomplish something.
This requires voters, which requires compromise. According to the polls:
Wait I thought that disappointment was just Russian disinformation? /s
So they looked at what’s unpopular and stayed with it. What an amazing strategy the dnc did
Either you are able to vote on harm reduction alone, knowing that your pick isn’t ideal…
Or you are so ideologically locked in that nothing but “your brand” is enough.
Harris sucks but the vote was to keep MORE, NEW people from being at risk.
Republicans always seem to win with shitty candidates because they understand this intrinsically. They do not care that DJT is an utter buffoon, they care that he will enact the shit they want, and now they’re getting it because they refused to stay home. As the saying goes: Democrats want to fall in love, Republicans want to fall in line.
So Republicans backed their guy, just like they did the last two elections, and there was no line that could not be crossed that would convince even a fraction of Republicans to not vote. Meanwhile, virtue signaling lefties desperately tried to convince me for months that I shouldn’t vote for Biden OR Harris because they were both equally culpable for a genocide that is happening halfway across the world, as if Trump would have been any better.
Yeah, we absolutely deserve to be punished for this. We let this happen. If Dems could actually get a solid trifecta in the government, we might have a shot at actually reversing some of the damage that has been accumulating since Reagan, but that requires people to set aside their purity tests and hold their noses at the ballot box. The real elitists are the Democratic base who feel personally slighted at the idea of compromise or harm reduction.
There were 14 Presidents since FDR. And many of the Democratic ones had ample possibility to enact progressive laws and chose not to.
You keep claiming that people like Clinton, Obama, Clinton, Biden or Harris are “left”, but they are center-right, in many aspects far right by European standards.
People don’t vote “perfect” also not on the left. They vote “this is current issues, who addresses these issues?” Trump pretending to care about working class people helped him. Biden/Harris made a point of alienating everyone that is against genocide, which should be a nobrainer for progressive politics, and also peddling racist messages with bragging about their deportation numbers.
The idea that the center to far right Democrats would actually bring any leftist solution is laughable. They haven proven time and time again, that they are the party of maintaining the neoliberal and imperial status quo.
The solution is to offer a progressive solution against the reactionary solution, so people can rally around your progressive solution. Providing no solution and denying the problems is a surefire way to demotivate and disengage people. Someone who wants genocide, deportations and neoliberal economics can always vote the Republicans. And the Republicans can succesfully further the image of the Democrats being the billionaire cultural elite party, while the Reps are the billionaire “hard working” party, peddling the lie of the American dream. But it can be peddled to Joe and Jose in the milling plant.
And all of the policies that FDR was credited for were actually drafted by Francis Perkins, his Secretary of Labor and Socialist.
Respectfully, I have to disagree.
How many democratic presidents have had control of all three branches of government? It’s easy for Republicans to get shit done because they have the courts essentially in their pocket. If the Dems win the house, senate and presidency, they still have to contend with the openly partisan SCOTUS attempting to obstruct them from passing sweeping reforms that would actually fix things. We’re fucked for another generation in that regard.
Also, immigration was the #1 issue at the polls this year, even ahead of economy. There’s no way in hell it’s a bad strategy to campaign on how good Dems actually are with immigration and border security. If anything, we should have been screaming from every mountaintop about how Trump killed the most comprehensive border security package ever penned by convincing Republican congressmen to oppose it strictly so he could run on the issue. That means the issue is not actually something that Republicans care to solve, despite what they’ve convinced the American people of.
People who were not motivated or engaged to fight against what could very well be the end of democracy itself certainly won’t be motivated by progressive promises, especially knowing that they are very unlikely to be implemented. The people who stayed home this year are the ones to blame for everything that happens next, full stop. We can’t even point to the EC as a factor this time. A majority of Americans have bought into fascism.
How many democratic presidents have had control of all three branches of government?
Just pointing out: this is an insane take.
For example, Obama had control of the House, Senate, and Presidency. He spent that whole time trying to get Republicans to vote for Obamacare and at the end of all that, none of them did. He watered everything down and they refused to vote for it anyway and then Obamacare passed without them. Who would vote for that? Only people who for whom the alternative is an actual catastrophe.
California has a bulletproof Democrat supermajority, They don’t have any of the things that the DNC campaigned on. Why would I believe the DNC could get anything accomplished with a trifecta if a bulletproof Democrat super majority in California can’t. Democrats are indebted to the same donor class, CEOs and bankers that Republicans are. They are merely controlled opposition to Republicans.
Trump won both times because he departed from GOP ideology, not his voters. Harm reduction doesn’t get voters to the polls.
This isn’t about you and me. A campaign centered around “stop this person” is just less effective than one centered around “let’s start doing this”.
Just saying this is a hypothetical reality. As you say, it doesn’t get people to the polls.
What it means is folks have to live with a FURTHER candidate because they aren’t smart enough to serve their own interests and take the NEARER candidate.
The difference is that expecting the candidate to change was a realistic expectation, while expecting the voters to change was not.
I disagree, especially on Israel. Change would mean deviation from the official position. Imo it is a weakness with running a candidate who is already in the Whitehouse. They can’t just say things, weather or not they want to, if that will have strategic/military implications. An outside candidate is free to say whatever. (To be clear, I don’t believe Harris wanted to deviate much)
Lastly, I think my whole point is I’m not expecting anything from anyone, I’m observing how voter’s inability to accept a good not great candidate results in a much worse candidate, so inaction results in a even less satisfying outcome.
This is the second time in a decade that the liberal establishment expected the US voting public to actually do something about all the fascism they themselves don’t seem to actually want or can do anything about.
The “Vote Harder!” brigade was warned about this - at one point or the other, “lesser evilism” is going to hit rock-bottom.
That’s fine, my point stands.
If more people need “their brand” then they’ll also in the bed they made: the further possible candidate from their brand
Harm reduction does not exist, that’s shit that liberals tell themselves because they know that what they are voting for is evil.
Naw dawg you bought a trump by sitting on a pedestal.
It’s all fun and games to build the perfect candidate, but it wasn’t on the ballot.
Ignoring “harm reduction” just put thousands of trans and millions of immigrants right in front of the bulldozer. Own it from your ivory perch.
I guess you didn’t hear anything about Harris throwing trans under the bus last week, did you? I guess you didn’t hear anything about Harris having draconian immigration bills as harsh as what came from Republicans. Did you? I suppose you forgot it was Bidens ICE that was chasing down Haitians on horseback.
No matter what you can say about Harris, I don’t support any of it. None of it was “as harsh” as trump. Get ready for Muslim ban 2.0, etc.etc.
What I can say is trump, and project 2025 have a whole lot more in store.
So Harris, while distasteful, was harm reduction by comparison