It's kind of funny despite what appears to be a crushing defeat for Harris, she was 250k votes away from the presidency.
2024 U.S. Elections | Trump wins
- Thread starter Raoul
- Start date
The Democrats ran an average candidate that got into the race in the 11th hour and was tied to an unpopular administration. Then they touted the endorsement of Dick Cheney. Now they are concluding they lost because of the left.
They will continue to slide right, because they don’t stand for anything other than trying to win elections.
They will continue to slide right, because they don’t stand for anything other than trying to win elections.
Does it have to be one or the other? Losing the popular vote to Trump makes me think they've committed about 81 million mistakes. From activist to candidate.
If it had been close arguing nuances would make more sense.
(Sorry @TheGame no clue how that ended up as your quote. I hate the new quote layout).
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They seem to stand for something better than the detestable Republicans. If they stood for absolutely nothing, Harris wouldn’t have been able to run rings around Trump in the televised debate. Of course they seem to have gotten a lot wrong but these blanket statements seem off.
Harris defeated Trump in the debate, because she is a skilled former prosecutor, and he is an old dopey lunatic.
The Republicans are awful, but they are able to coalesce around something to provide a clear message - that something being Trump. The Democrats don’t have a unifying messenger like that, and they don’t have a coherent program that people understand.
If only it were so easy. As said many, many times in this thread, people for some reason hold the Democrats at a much higher standard than Republicans.
Trump is the epitome of "0 policies, just trying to win elections". All he stands for is taking a shit on everything that is in his path to power: opponents, (former) allies, even the democratic system itself. But somehow it's not the Republicans but the Dems who need more principled positions and policies.
What's also interesting, is that despite the Dems being essentially a centre/centre-right party by international standards as you imply, their rejection by the US electorate is not for being too right wing or lacking policies, as I believe you claim. If anything the masses still perceive them as "socialist" and "left-wing liberals". And a party with no policies has literally just won the elections. What this tells me is that you're perhaps using your personal grievances with the Democrats to explain their defeat, which is a form of confirmation bias. It doesn't mean that your views are shared by the wider populace or that becoming a more traditional left-wing party will get the Dems back into power. You're conveniently ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that the US electorate has shifted right by all observable metrics.
The right has won the blue-collar and the minority votes by peddling irrational fear of immigrants and engaging in culture wars over trans rights. It hasn't won them on policies. And there's no indication that Dems becoming more left-leaning in policies, will revert that loss.
Edit: For me, nowadays it's all about appearances and far more basic instincts. A white, male mid-Western candidate would have faired better than Harris even with less policies and oratory skills.
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This is a good point.
Plus it helped Trump that the media as usual held the messages to different standards.
His was basically "I hear you that your lives suck right now, but Trump'll fix it and also, don't ask for details". He even went with "I have concepts of a plan" about 8 years after promising to fix healthcare and everyone just let it slide.
Harris was just, meh. All I could remember is "I'm not a rapist (so at least I'm a decent human being) but also I'm pro-genocide (so, not that decent either)".
Yet dems did the same around Obama...
Great, they just have to get Obama to run again then.
Of the roughly 350 million people there's gotta be a 2nd decent one with some sort of charisma.
(He's the last candidate that wasn't the preferred dem leadership choice at the start of primaries)
They had it in 2016 with Bernie, but unfortunately it was “her time”.
I was going to say can’t remember writing that
You can’t just be a skilled prosecutor - you have say something of substance to come out so well on top. I watched it and she had a lot more substance on the core issues than you give her credit for.
All in all though, he’s clearly able to use misinformation, the worst human instincts of fear and bigotry, and his connect to his base better than she did. And get a big boost from republican’s superior footprint online.
Well let's face it, if you never win an election so you never get any power to do anything, what's the point in standing for anything?
Screaming until your blue in the face whilst not being able to get anything done is pointless.
America isn't anything other than centre right at the very least, it's just not the place to be left leaning, despite what I know some polls say about certain things.
The Electoral College is a stupid, stupid system and no one can convince me otherwise.
Interesting reading
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
These 2 almost makes the election into a foregone conclusion. By that, I mean, I wonder if it would’ve moved the needle at all in the blame game if the Harris campaign had just laser focused on inflation and pounded home the fact that inflation was an unavoidable consequence of what happened 2016-2020 & that we’d fared better than a supermajority of the G-30 in fighting it?
Unless by pounding home the fact you mean successfully explaining like they're five what basic economics is, I don't think it would have worked.
I do not think Harris ever stood a chance. Americans strongly dissaproved Biden and her biggest selling point was that she was Biden’s VP. Add to that, she is a bad candidate herself. But then it didn’t help that Dems message was ‘Trump is bad’, rather than focusing on giving hope to the struggling people.
That’s why that zombie should have quit/forced to quit a year earlier, Dems should have done primaries when most likely a competent governor (Newsom, Shapiro or Whitmer) would have won. That would have allowed them to bring a message or positivity while distancing themselves from Biden’s presidency, and also not diminishing the message of Trump is a threat to democracy (hard to sell it when you just did yourself the most undemocratic nomination process in forever).
Instead, their message was that of fear of what would happen if Trump wins, in calling everyone idiots, missinformed, bigots or preferably all, and not even trying to take merits of some of good Biden policies. That worked in 2020 cause covid was running havoc and Trump was President, but name calling, virtue signaling and pontificating does not work if you are in government and the country is struggling. This has been the third time in a row when Dems did not provide a positive campaign but focused everything in ‘Trump is bad’. Not surprisingly they lost two of those campaigns against an extremely flawed candidate.
Dems need an Obama moment. Someone who is a relative outsider in DC. Someone who connects with people and understands (or gives the impression) the struggles of people. Someone who spends most of the time in a positive campaign in what they will do to fix the country. Someone who promises to fix people lives, regardless of their race, gender or other identity. Not a DC creature whom no one likes and whose campaign would be ‘if JD Wins, the democracy is forever lost’.
How do you pound that message home if most people don't watch traditional media?
So desperate people voted for the person that untruthfully promises to fix everything, not a whole lot you can do to combat that.
Desperate people will also likely buy into the comforting and reductionist strawmen of migration and the deep state being responsible for their financial hardships. The ones who lack any form of critical thinking that is.
These are two very different things indeed. The Democrats absolutely stand for things, both parties do. Trump doesn't, or rather he stands for things that will get him elected.
You nailed it in the second message though, Democrats are the party of nuance and, to be frank, its why they are so popular with the highly educated and unpopular with the less educated. In the UK there is a little more room in public debate for nuance, but there is none in the US. You only have to look at the state of the media to see this. In the UK you still have programmes like newsnight, question time and PMQs gets a lot of interest etc. In the US its glitzy cable shows, tarted up anchors and people shouting their soundbites, and it has to be because their media are so commercial and profit driven. There's no viewership or money in a 2 hour deep dive into the macro-economic drivers of inflation.
The last two Democrat presidents were a generationally charasmatc politician and one who was nothing more than a middle of the road antidote to 4 years of Trump.
To quote Will AcAvoy "If Democrats are so smart how come you lose so god-damn always". The tables are stacked against the Democrats not just by the electoral college but also because the level of public debate in the US plays right into the hands of the Republicans and that, as has been mentioned, Democrats are held to a much higher standard than their counterparts.
I agree. Clearly "teaching" people was not going to work. This was about "feels". They think that they got more groceries for their buck under Trump. It seems like they needed a male candidate that was cool, not in the Biden administration, not "woke" apparently.
Someone that had Immigration right up there with Economy as the 2 main issues.
I mean that is all I can think of