Anyone who didn't vote for Harris is either evil or too stupid to be let outside.
How in the fuck do you look at the GOP and say "That's what I want"?
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Anyone who didn't vote for Harris is either evil or too stupid to be let outside.
How in the fuck do you look at the GOP and say "That's what I want"?
How is dismissing a genocide working out for you?
I don't think it's exactly a matter of appealing to progressives, but an inherent difficulty in trying to appeal to a wide variety of people with a wide variety of interests. You end up having to make vague promises in order not to offend anyone, which comes across as being boring or disingenuous, like you are only saying stuff in order to get elected and not because you actually belive in it. Conservatives can have much simpler and more straightforward messaging because their base is much more homogeneous.
Progressives carry the campaign. They are the enthousiam. They recruit others. They are the mouth to mouth advertisement. They drive people to the polls.
Democrats do not need them though. They can win without.
I disagree. Championing progressive policies in most instances actually appeals universally to a majority of the electorate.
I'm not suggesting they'd be able to follow through because I think a significant number of Democrat representatives can't stomach actually progressive policies... but I think they'd win more elections.
Actually, the American people have done that to themselves.
Every American eligible to vote had access to all the info about both candidates. And the majority of voters chose to vote for Trump.
More than 70% of eligible voters chose not to vote against Trump.
There's no reason to believe the election was rigged.
Americans, you've made your bed. Now lie in it.
I just hope that my country's government will finally find their backbone and realize we can't rely on or trust yours any longer, and draw the necessary consequences.
Your mistake is thinking the Democratic Party is trying to get members elected. Their primary goal is to keep the top brass in positions of power and then to keep their donors making money.
That second one is true of every political party, they just have different ways of going about it.
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.
The dnc is absolutely not gonna learn a god damn thing except to once again give a tongue lashing to the left while making out with corporate America and the military industrial complex.
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.
Interesting. Every Republican family member that I have talked to has said Sanders is a Marxist.
I mostly agree. I do think that a lot of folks on the left liked our candidate, though, and that a lot in the right disliked Trump but sucked it up and voted for him because they thought they "had" to. Harris' likeability rating is way higher than Trump's in the polls.
I don't think any of this would have been an issue if Bernie was the Dem candidate in 2016.
I think the problem is that plenty of people might like Harris, but not so much that turnout for her matched Biden. The people who like Trump love him, and they turned out in the same numbers as 2020 basically. He didn't need to meaningfully grow his base if people weren't motivated to show up for his opponent.
It's definitely a demonstration that having the most palatable candidate doesn't matter. It might if voting were compulsory, but it isn't.
That's a good point about like vs love. Trump supporters are basically cultists. People who liked Bernie loved Bernie (not cultists).
Indeed. I think it's why cults of personality are so dangerous. You don't need to convince that many people if you can get a large enough, dedicated number to consistently do what the leader says and push others around.
I'm not sure that love is the word for Bernie, but I was certainly much more enthusiastic about him. Some people did get weird about it which made me uncomfortable, though. The policy should always come before the politician.
The 14th amendment should have been the end of Trump, period. But Democrats don't want to look partisan and now look where we are.
I seen to remember a bunch of 14th amendment lawsuits that got shut down by SCOTUS a few days before primaries started.
Yeah, that's why Obama should have packed SCOTUS, fuck the optics and just do what's right. We saw this coming and still Democrats assumed terrible people won't be terrible given the chance
I hate Obama but nobody not even my cynical self saw things going this blatantly corrupt.
If he packed the court back then it could of sparked a civil war.
My view: yes, the Dems could have some better, but they still put up a legitimately good candidate. The GOP put up a pile of orange dog shit... And the dog shit won. How is it the Dems fault that more than half the population enjoys dog shit?
For the Dems to win, they need to run a fucking perfect campaign and the GOP doesn't. Why? Because media fragmentation and propaganda. The bulk of the population doesn't want to be informed. How is that the Dems fault? How did the Democratic party reach those voters that don't give a shit about truth?
This isn't a failure of the Democratic party, this is a failure of our society.
I think Harris and Walz were good candidates but their pitch was simply unappealing. The average american has been hurting bad the last 4 years. Harris' pitch was to maintain the degrading status-quo while trump promised to do SOMETHING. Whether or not that something is successful doesn't matter, people are sick of slowly getting crushed by costs of living.
And so they chose to vote for the candidate who will only make COL worse. Pathetic.
The left needs to stop making the perfect be the enemy of the good, or we will never get anywhere.
Is what we're doing right now getting anywhere?
The billionaires, who already owned the whole thing, did not want it. We got what we got. This downfall started long before 2008.
Dems are the greatest ally the GOP could ask for. Lost to Trump at his weakest, literally doing a Nazi rally. Being spineless doesn't get you wins. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar won re-election by comfortable margins and the rest of the party are fighting for their lives in these states. Some Red States still voted to protect abortion rights and just choose not to vote for Harris.
Even if Jill Stein voters had picked Harris she still would have lost. There is no-one to blame but Harris and embracing people like Dick Cheney anrd The Blue No Matter who crowd themselves. You let Republicans unapologetically be themselves but your're whole brand of politics makes any group who works with you expendable and centers a chance for that 1-2 GOP voters joining. I hope it was worth it.
It's past time everyone realized the people running the DNC just don't really care if a republican wins.
The only danger to their careers or quality of life is if a progressive wave takes over the party, because they won't keep pro-corporate people in leadership positions.
And they legally control the primary, so they never have to give up power.
The electorate swung solidly right, giving Trump the popular vote. Much as I'd like a more left-wing administration in the US, the evidence does not support the theory that a left leaning campaign would have helped. The US apparently wants an authoritarian government, and it got it.
This is not just the US either - globally we are shifting rapidly to authoritarian regimes. In my own UK where the center left (at best) Labour won the election, but only because the right wing parties were split by FPTP. The Tories elected a far right leader last week and got derided for it, but for them, it's absolutely the right move, and the next election will likely deliver a far right Tory or Tory/Reform coalition. For reference, Labour got less votes than the previous election that they lost in a land slide.
Same where I currently live, Germany, and my fiancé's France.
Dark times are ahead. Prepare for the worst.
Trump got about a million less votes than 4 years ago. Harris got about 15 million less. So the population didn't swing right 15 million Biden voters said fuck it and stayed home.
Everyone said this was going to be a close race. So we can't even use the Clinton excuse that nobody thought Trump would win.
She was a bad candidate with no message beyond Trump bad. That was enough for me but not 15 million other people.
I don't know if sentiment swung or if Dems just didn't show up.
Biden had over 80 million votes in '20. Trump had like 74. Trump got less total votes this year than in '20. Only problem was like 15 million Dems didn't show up.
If there is one thing you can count on from a Democrat "voter", it's for them to not actually vote.
Weird you didn't post this before the election results came in, since it was so obvious.
I’m banned from most popular social media for being anti fascist. This is my very first post on lemmy, after IRL friends are losing their goddamn minds over this when I’ve been saying it since biden nominated himself. The day he announced he was running for reelection. Then in the last hour he drops out and Harris is nominated without a single vote… how could anyone not seen this coming?! I’ve ranted and raved about this to anyone who would listen IRL for months and I was told I was crazy.
Fuck no, the republicans shouldn’t even be close. The fact that they're tolerating Nazis and other similar views is why they felt comfortable voting for Trump. I will NEVER forgive them.