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I can't stop thinking about how in 2016, my conservative grandmother watched the primary debates and told me she actually thought Bernie made a lot of good points.
And then she went on to vote for Donald Trump in November.
This, I think, is the disconnect the DNC keeps failing to recognize.
We just keep nominating milquetoast centrists whose message is little more than "maintain the status quo", when nobody is happy with the status quo.
But we have to run centrist candidates, they say, or else we'll lose all the voters in the center!
If that's how it works, then why is the GOP winning by doing the exact opposite?
In a world where rent keeps going up but wages stay the same, people are scared and frustrated, and they don't feel like their frustrations are heard.
Along comes a smooth-talking con man who tells them, "I know you're angry at the world, and I'm going to give you a scapegoat to blame it on. It's the immigrants' fault. It's trans people's fault. It's the woke left's fault. It's whatever target I tell you to hate next's fault. And if you elect me, I will stick it to these people in order to Make America Great Again!"
Meanwhile, the best we can do is "Vote for me because everything that other guy said is horrifying." That's it. That's the only real sales pitch we have for Harris. But no matter how terrible the other guy is, it reflects horribly on us that we can't even talk about our own candidate's merits at all.
We need to run a candidate who can say, "I too know you're angry at the world. And I'm here to offer real solutions, not snake oil, and more importantly, not the status quo either."
The difference between the right and left here is that the right actually likes their guy. And if not even we like our candidates, why should voters?
Alas, we learned nothing in 2016 and I suspect the DNC will continue to learn nothing now.
Every Republican family member except one that I've asked about Bernie has said more or less the following:
I like him, I like that he's not Dem/Repub, he's got the country's best interest at heart, etc.
Then it's usually followed by how he'd never get a chance, and then it revolves back to why Dems suck and repubs rule, or at best, "they're both the same."
You are 100% right: people want change, they want progress, and regardless of how shitty he is, Trump got things done that his base wanted.
Clinton, then Biden, and now Harris, promise marginal improvements to the status quo while dismissing large swaths of their electorate that don't fall in line.
If they ran progressive candidates with progressive policies, they'd pull voters from all over. But they wont, hence, fascism.
I know a ton of republicans and people sympathetic to republicans. All of them thought bernie was a decent guy and they would of preferred him over Hillary.
Then after the primary he increasingly took up democrat talking points and would occasionally finger wag at them while not materially doing anything other than get angry in a speech. His embrace of democrats on gun control was a mistake, if he just maintained his view that he had most of his political career he’d court a lot of crossover voters. But now he’s far too old and the damage is done.
I voted for him multiple times, in primaries and eventually as my senator, but his milquetoast stance on Gaza made me for the first time vote against him for an independent. He’s really disappointed me over the past almost decade - I went from raising money and canvassing for him to finding him to be a has been and sell out. I still think he’s the best elected official on the national scale that we’ve got but I’m so disappointed in him.