This is a good article calling out the true problems with the campaign.
I keep seeing people blame voters, but the only group to blame is the Democratic Party. Parties exist to serve and represent voters, not the other way round.
The Dems failed to address the genuine concerns of their traditional base - primarily the economy - and that left the race open for the Repulicans.
The Democrat message on the economy seemed to basically be “things are not as bad as you think and we’ve already done what was needed”. Instead they focused on abortion and a threat to democracy as the main issues of the election.
Yet for many lower income households, they rent and have been hit doubly hard by inflation. Home owners have been shielded from the rent portion of the cost of living crisis, and experienced less hardship. The dems did not seem to understand that and effectively left the field open for the republicans.
Looking at the numbers, Trump hasn’t significantly grown the Republican vote or if so, it’s a relatively small increase. Yet the Democrat vote is way down on where it was in 2020.
There are lots of other failures on the part of the Dems - allowing Biden to run essentially unchallenged, the leadership aggressively pushing back against concerns about his suitability, Biden waiting until very late to step back and Harris being coronated and having to use Bidens existing campaign. Harris was a decent enough candidate but she was given an impossible task thanks to an out of touch and poorly led party.
The Dems lost this election, rather than Trump winning it.
No, Trump won it. He got votes and those votes were from people who cast them. Yes, democratic party has problems, but the far bigger problem is that enough people voted for Trump when given other options.
Trump won the election because he won the election is a tautological argument. It’s not false, but it elucidates nothing.
It’s wild to me how many excuses people are willing to make for the tens of millions of Americans that actively choose Trump.
About 16 million more people voted for Biden in 2020 than voted for Harris in 2024. The Democrats found a way to take 16 million people who cared enough to vote last time and get them not to vote this time.
Shit, Trump lost 2 million voters from 2020, too. This should have been a layup.
If you choose not to decide (or vote) you still have made a choice. Biden voters who refused to vote Harris chose to let the rest of the country decide for them. They will be worse off for it. Hopefully they learn from this but I doubt it.
They weighed their experience under trump, and under Biden, and realized at worse they were the same. Trump objectively wasn’t as bad as your cult implied for a lot of Americans, and Biden was far worse than the Harris campaign acknowledged for a lot of Americans.
Between these two facts lies the failure of democrats, Harris offered nothing different, at all, during her campaign, where as Trump at least acknowledged the problems people are facing and offered different.
Lots of salty non-voters in this thread from the looks of it
Perhaps people are just tired of the Democratic party deflecting blame for all their failures.
Dispose of First Past The Post voting, open the field for multiple political parties to compete to defeat the republicans. Democrats will put the country first right?
“The Democratic Party cannot fail, it can only be failed”
-Smart people who are interested in winning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnJp0oyOxs
Well we’re living here in Allentown
And they’re closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem, they’re killing time
Filling out forms, standing in lineWell we’re waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard, if we behavedEvery child had a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got
But something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our faceWell I’m living here in Allentown
And it’s hard to keep a good man down
But I won’t be getting up todayThat was over forty years ago, and ever since Bill Clinton’s triangulation, the Democratic party has only further abandoned the working class. Gore, Obama, Hillary Clinton, Biden, and Harris are all of this unbroken neoliberal Clintonian dynasty.
Have you seen this clip? Michael Moore on the Democratic party: https://youtu.be/MVnIatb7iVI
Remember when people said they’d take “Any functional adult” over Trump? Well… That’s why I still blame the voters here. They had their functional adult and didn’t seize the opportunity
This is what you get when “any functional adult” is the standard you hold your leaders to.
If that was the standard Kamala would’ve won
Well it turns out that isn’t a good enough standard to get enough people up to vote, but I did hear it a lot from a lot of active posters online.
Anyone who didn’t vote for her doesn’t want a functional adult in office… So they got what they wanted I guess. I 100% blame those voters
Good luck with that. The election was hers to lose and she lost it.
A racist wine Karen that has personally, purposefully, ruined thousands of innocent lives isn’t really a functional adult, it’s a functional alcoholic.
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I’m not convinced Kamala is a “functional adult” she never won a primary. -In fact she got less than 1% of votes in the two primaries (AK, and NH) she did run in respectively, in 2020..
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Get ahold of yourself. The people who “allowed” Trump to win were the DNC in general and Biden & Harris in particular. It was their campaign to lose, and they lost to a complete clown. Stop blaming anyone & everyone but the Democratic party itself.
Voters do the voting
this u: “You let Trump win?” So which is it, did “we” “let” Trump win, or did the voters do the voting?
If we let him win, then who is the “we,“ and how did we “let” him?
If the “voters do the voting,” then I don’t think you appreciate that,
- The voters had no say in the Democratic primary.
- The US has never been and will never be a democracy, because it was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
Cringe
No thanks
I completely understand your frustration. It sucks knowing that things are going to get worse and it could have been much better if those who didn’t vote, voted for Kamala. And we’re all definitely going to need time to fully process this.
In my opinion though, and I’m not saying that I’m definitely correct - but the feeling I get the reason that the democrats lost is because lots of people felt completely disillusioned with the democratic party. I want to be really clear: Fuck Trump, he’s a fascist in a party of fascists doing fascist things. they will undoubtedly cause death and harm. If there was any justice in this world they’d be on trial for crimes again humanity. But the democrats did not offer enough hope for people to get out and vote. They basically ran on a campaign of “vote for us because you have no better option, the other guy is the worst”, and that is just not an inspiring campaign. Their ongoing support for the genocide in palestine, their lack of interest in fighting for the rights of trans people, all of these things and more left many people, myself included, feeling absolutely abandoned by the democratic party.
I still think that leftists should vote, and they should vote with their heart and with thoughtfulness and think about harm mitigation. But I also cannot blame anyone who just couldn’t muster the energy to go out and queue for hours to express their support for a candidate that they felt very little love for.
I really hope that my love and compassion comes through. It’s hard to express over the internet, and it sometimes feels a little silly, but it’s what we have left. Our love for each other and our hope that the future can be better, even if we may not live to experience that better future.
I really appreciate your thoughtful response, and no question everyone could have done better here. And the country absolutely needs to heal from the division Trump has caused the last 8 or 9 years. The thing that blows my mind though, is when people who didn’t vote have the audacity to blame someone else for Trump being elected. The votes are the smoking gun here no matter what else was at play. We had a normal person, more than happy to step in and prevent the further spread of this national cancer and she gets blamed somehow when things go south. Run a better campaign, sure, that’s a fair critique. But ultimately the voters did shit the bed here
I don’t buy this. In Nebraska there was an election between an independent union leader and a career politician. The union leader lost.
The consensus seems to be that people that voted democrat in 2020 voted republican this time because they experienced inflation under Biden that think it was his fault.
People don’t vote for numbers they vote for stories. They vote for their feelings. Do they feel like they’re in a better place today and they were the four years ago. Do they feel like they’re better off financially. Do they feel like the economy is stronger. And the answer for most of us is no of course not. So regardless of the reasons for that they’re going to vote that way. That’s just a harsh reality of elections and economics.
I agree. Which is why I don’t believe the narrative that Harris lost because she didn’t go far enough left. Even though I wish our politicians would. I think too many voters don’t feel the same way.
They were unwilling to go hard attack on the people setting prices.
Biden was calling out price gouging throughout his presidency.
Harris said she would make billionaires pay their fair share and they literally bought votes for Trump.
Scapegoating democrats for going up against the billionaire class seems like exactly what the billionaires would want.
I hear you, but I think they didn’t go hard enough. They needed to make noise about how they are going to XYZ to fix prices. I know they said it, I’m saying they needed to say it more, louder, and drop some of the other stuff.
Meanwhile the billionaires convinced the voters that democrats were responsible for inflation and spun “tax increases for billionaires” into “tax increases for everyone”.
And polls show that voters were most motivated by inflation.
I don’t know if it’s that she didn’t go far enough left in so much as she didn’t go and far enough left on certain issues. As odd as it might seem there is a populist movement in the Republican Party. They do appeal to the working class for some odd reason. Their policy decisions don’t always reflect it but their rhetoric oftentimes does. After all a number of Republican states passed fairly economically Progressive ballot measures.
It seems to me that she had a hard fight to win by saying she would tax billionaire their fair share. I’m sure they were all working together to pull strings against her.
Frankly I didn’t see nearly as much of that as I expected. I don’t think she was pushing all that hard to be honest with you. However I was speaking more to labor issues. To healthcare. She was certainly to the right of Joe Biden on all three of those issues I’d say. Lord knows she was far to the right on him when it comes to Consumer Protections issues. Her cow-towing to her billionaire donors and preparing to push Lena Khan out show that pretty strongly I think. Most voters heard her and smelled a rat.
She laid out a plan to handle price gouging and tax billionaires. She didnt seem left or right of Biden.
Four years ago you couldn’t buy toilet paper. Are some people worse off than under Trump 1.0? Of course. Is more than half the country worse off? Fuck no. People have goldfish memories and Dems did a terrible job touting their wins that did make Americans better off under Biden.
Just as an aside I never actually had problems buying toilet paper. I don’t actually know anyone who did. I know that’s not really pertinent I just always find it funny people say that.
That’s exactly what I’m saying though. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves and the stories the parties are able to sell to us. Reality doesn’t matter the stories that we buy matter.
people that voted democrat in 2020 voted republican this time
Both parties lost millions of voters since 2020. Trump lost about 2 million, Harris lost about 16 million.
It wasn’t people switching parties, it was people not voting because Biden didn’t make a difference in their lives and Harris promised more of the same.
no no, I think it’s really that she wasn’t horribly racist enough. really, it’s that she didn’t tack hard enough to the right. she should’ve promised to build two walls, one on canada too. she should’ve promised to kill the palestinians even faster, actually, she should’ve resurrected the corpse of kissinger and then sent him to michigan to explain why they needed to die. THAT will solve things.
johnny didn’t sweep daniels leg, daniel let his leg be swept. johnny is the real victim.
In this analogy it’s against the rules for someone to run against you and win?
not really. its more about honorable methods.
Honor doesn’t exist as a universal idea, and the Dems version of honor is very strange.
How many hoops are we going to jump through to avoid admitting complete and total defete??? Word it how you want but trump won, trump won big. Let’s move the fuck on already and keep sone dignity unlike them
This is like gameplay analysis mode atm, the lessons need to be learned and strategies need to be changed.
I’m actually thinking we might need to be throwing dignity out the window. It’s just being used as traditionalism to keep the status quo much like we’ve seen with feudalism. A progressive movement should’ve been continued after the DNC chicanery in 2016, dignity be damned. I’ve watched Bernie bend the knee to a left-wing party that’s been completely overtaken by big interests, if they didn’t play fair he shouldn’t have endorsed and went back independent immediately (it’s all speculative though).
I do fear that jumping through too many hoops will land the democrats back to square one and they’ll just continue the same path (Desi Lydic did a good bit on the daily show about the media’s many conflicting critiques).
Bruh. You just Jumped through like 6 hoops to explain what exactly??
Is there something I said that’s confusing to you? Do I need to repeat it in different words for you to be able to carry on a conversation? Are you legitimately confused and can’t follow along or just trolling? You definitely have a different conversation style (I’m guessing young and haven’t engaged in long-form discussion before, maybe even strictly on mobile so it’s hard for you to type at length).
If you really don’t understand and you aren’t just being a dick I’ll actually reply but you just seem hostile as fuck.
Fuck outta here.
