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Cake day: October 1st, 2024

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  • Sergio@slrpnk.nettoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldSurely we can learn from this?
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    16 hours ago

    Unpopular opinion: Kamala was a solid candidate.

    Biden was headed to a humiliating defeat. Another couple debates, and maybe he loses NY and CA and we have a Dukakis- or Mondale-level annhilation. Kamala stepped in and ran a solid campaign on very short notice. Trump didn’t even have time to come up with a good nickname for her! She kicked his ass in their only debate, and he was literally too scared to do it again.

    In the end, she lost by a couple hundred thousand votes in 3 states. She was wrong about Gaza and the economy, but PA, MI, and WI are credibly winnable in future elections. Kamala was not a garbage candidate.





  • Unpopular opinion: blaming the voters is counterproductive. It’s important to understand why they voted (or abstained) the way they did.

    Yes, some percentage of voters are indeed racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. But hypothetically, another percentage are people who were unhappy because of economic reasons and felt they were presented with two bad options:

    • an unreliable candidate who acknowledged they were unhappy
    • an unknown candidate who said they were wrong and should just be happy

    Is this hypothesis correct? I don’t know, but just assuming the voters are ignorant, or just saying that leopards will eat their faces, isn’t productive.


  • Hmm… I’ve dealt with elderly relatives, and it can be hard to tell when someone’s no longer capable of doing something… so I have a bit of sympathy for him there. It’s possible that a year ago Biden was up to the job and really was the best chance at defeating Trump. And he gets credit for stepping down when he did. However I’m a little more skeptical of his sticking VP Harris with the job of solving the border crisis, which is a notoriously unsolvable problem.

    I suspect that given 3 months to jump-start a campaign, NOBODY could have won this election against Trump. Biden was headed towards Dukakis and Mondale levels of defeat, and Harris at least brought it to a couple hundred thousand in 3 states. (I wish I could post my argument to “unpopular opinion”, but apparently they prohibit political posts.)
















  • The more I think of it, I wonder if anyone could have won that election given only 3 months. If Obama had been VP, and suddenly made the candidate, could he have done it? Could Hillary have won it? John Kerry? Maybe, but it would have been a miracle.

    Kamala did a solid job. Note how people are debating how she could have fine-tuned her messaging or policy proposals; they’re not talking about gaffes or complete incompetence. She lost with a deficit of 30K in WI, 80K in MI, and 150K in PA. A definite loss, but not comparable to the landslide losses of 1988 or 1984. Biden was headed for that sort of landslide loss, but Kamala turned it into a much closer contest.