Harris only received five percent of Republican votes — less than the six percent Joe Biden won in 2020 when he beat Trump, as well as the seven percent won by Hillary Clinton in 2016 when she lost to him. While Harris won independents and moderates, she did so by smaller margins than Biden did in 2020.
Meanwhile, Harris lost households earning under $100,000, while Democratic turnout collapsed. Votes are still being counted, but Harris is on pace to underperform Biden’s 2020 totals by millions of votes.
If there’s one lesson the DNC should learn it’s this.
They won’t. But they should.
Why learn anything, the policies they want will be implemented anyway 🧠
Because they are selling peace with unicorn kisses and hope just to steal your money and you pay for it with hope.
Such a fucking stupid take.
If there is one lesson we should learn, it’s that they don’t care to win. They are owned by the same corporate big wigs as Trump. They’re on the same team, capitalism.
They only learn what they want to hear.
the party can’t fail it can only be failed
We need to go through them or around them. They wont change and they wont be convinced. That sort of sniveling triangulating intellectual cowardice cant be cured.
The two parties have a lock on power. There is no going around them as you’ll just be ineffectual and corrupt distractions like Stein and RFK jr.
Body knows the problem. Everywhere you see they went to far left not left enough. Everyone has their opinion and nobody knows why this happened. I just know if single issue voters on gaze didn’t vote then they get what they deserve.
It literally doesn’t matter if all you have to do is lie and promise everything.
Stupid article.
I mean that’s basically what Obama did. It’s what Trump does. If you promise 100% and only give 30% you’ll be remembered as a good or good ish president. 60%+ and you’re the greatest president of all time. But when you promise -10% you’re just not gonna win.
Hell, just imagine if Democrats hadn’t let the parliamentarian stand in their way on the minimum wage. Just that by itself would have made it a lot harder for Republicans to claim that Democrats don’t give a shit if their voters can pay for food.
Sinema’s thumbs down remains Democrats’ last word on the subject. And it’s not like she was the lone obstructionist in the party. She was one of EIGHT Democrats who voted against raising the minimum wage.
that parliamentarian is just too darn powerful. We’ll never be able to beat them.
Clearly had a mandate from the people, what with being an appointed position that no one voted on. In a democracy, that always beats those we get to vote on.
Talk about not learning anything… 🤦
If we wanted to be Republicans we’d be Republicans for fucks sake…
We can’t have 2 parties fighting to be the most hateful party of the billionaires. I mean I guess we can but only one gets to win.
The Democrats have been chasing the mythical moderate conservative at the expense of the progressive left forever and have learned nothing. I want a fire and brimstone progressive who is belligerent and aggressive
I’d even be happy to settle for someone in the middle of the party willing to fight for the party’s supposed ideals. Remember when one of her slogans was “when we fight, we win”? Not “when we bipartisan, we win” or “when we coopt conservative issues, we win”.
Talk is cheap. She won’t learn from this. If she did she would be fighting the shit out of him taking office.
Instead they’re happily handing over the vulnerable of this country to Nazis.
I mean, the article clearly says that she won moderates.
The Republicans had their little tea party a few years ago. The Democrats need a Guillotine Party to properly represent us.
The Tea Party forced the GOP to rebrand and restructure itself around the most extreme right wing ideas possible
Occupy Wallstreet tried to do the same thing, and… were savagely beaten by the police over it.
Because the Tea Party was useful to just make the Republicans more unapologetically anti-government (something rich people like) while Occupy was demanding that Democrats become unapologetically antagonistic to rich people.
The police choose who they will protect and who they will serve.
the police have no choice. They are owned by the billionaire and exist to protect wealth and privilege.
They had the billionaire Koch’s to fund that. We’re never getting a billionaire to fund the leopard party that will eat their faces.
:(
The guillotine party knows how to deal with the second estate.
Yeah, there should have been limits set on campaign costs, lobbying, media, etc. It’s at a point where it doesn’t seem like it’s even possible to have a middle-class focused campaign that can openly say its basis is on taxing the fuck out of the top 1%.
But all I know is this: the second Trump term will make the standard of life in America far worse for most people. There will be hunger in 2028 for someone to simply say “We’ll fix the middle class, and we’ll make Musk, Bezos, etc pay for it”. Hopefully by then what’s left of twitter will not be as relevant as today, so that the message can at least have a hope of spreading through social media successfully.
I want to be hopeful but I can’t find a logical progression to that stage knowing what the Republicans plan to do and their stranglehold on popular social media. The population will continue to be brainwashed into thinking Trump gives a shit and see him helping while also being told right wing Democrats are communists…
No one else stands a chance when we have corporate media or right wing social media as our options. I know there was a socialist candidate this cycle and Lemmy was literally the only place I saw her.
2028, I’ll be campaigning on Squeeze the Billionaires Until the Pips Squeak.
Actually, the Guillotine Party sounds like a great idea.
Literally with that name. 😍
My take on this is that the DNC has never understood that to win the presidency in the last 20 years you need to be a fire brand.
I think this stared in 2008 with Obama who won I believe because he fired up the base with great speeches about hope and change. It didn’t really happen, BUT the man knew how to give a speech. That got people inspired to do something and they voted.
Bernie was another fire brand - told it like it was and it appealed to a large population.
trump won using the same idea, but just the opposite of hope and change yet it worked. It tapped into a visceral and deep frustration that this country has left them behind.
The modern view of the American president to the population is less of a wonky politician and more of a cheerleader for big ideas, even if those ideas are abhorrent and exceedingly horrifying.
Harris just wasn’t the person to pull this off, she was too wonky and it felt like the entire campaign was playing the old card of “we are not trump” Instead if they really wanted to win they would have found ( 2 years ago) a feisty out spoken progressive leaning firebrand that would have inspired people to vote for something better.
The only reason that (bland) Biden won was because of how badly trump fucked up the Covid response.
I think when she was announced as the candidate, she fired up the base just fine. She was different.
Then she spent the rest of the campaign reassuring people that nothing would change, pissing away that enthusiasm.
One of the frustrations I had was her solution to the housing problem was to just build more houses and give out some money. Sure great, but what I wanted to hear, and I think many other also wanted to hear, was her talking about corporate hording of housing and what she would do about that situation. But she just ignored it completely and so did Biden.
I think instead if she came out swinging against corporate greed, even if she actually did nothing about it, would have given her more votes.
My one hope out of this is that the massive swing to the right will be countered with more vocal progressives.
She didn’t even really have a plan to build more houses, just some subsidies that wouldn’t put a dent in the problem. She should have proposed something ambitious that people could get excited about. The crazy thing is Biden had some big ambitious policies that he actudlly enacted like the Inflation Reduction Act that dwarf anything Kamala campaigned on. It’s the opposite of a winning approach that sells the stars and delivers the moon.
There are plenty of houses. Repossess then from Blackrock and sell them at normal rates
Building houses and giving out money WOULD have helped the housing problem. WTF?
I didn’t say it wouldn’t have helped. That wasn’t the point of the comment.
What I was getting at was that if she wanted to motivate voters, especially more progressive voters, then she needed to go bigger than “build some houses and hand out some money.”
What they wanted to hear from their candidate was a bolder and stronger solution like outlawing corporations from owning thousands of homes. Take a firm stand on corporate greed and corporate inflation. But she never talked about that.
Exactly. “I’m not trump” barely got Biden in when trump was the incumbent with covid running rampant. It didn’t work for Clinton in 2016 and unsurprisingly it didn’t work for Harris in 2024. The level of incompetence at the DNC really makes me think the actual goal is to prevent our politics/country from shifting to the left at any cost.
My feeling is that once the DNC starts to acknowledge the progressive ideas then they open the flood gates to challengers to their (limited) power.
Which is really weird because her professed policies WOULD have changed things. https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/kamala-harris-2024-campaign-promises-here-are-her/
The Dems also need to get it through their skulls that it’s not just trump. The problem was present in McConnell and Gingrich. We need multiple parties willing to work together for the good of all Americans. Unfortunately the democrats are idiots with the policies of a quite reasonable right wing and the republicans are fascists who have spent 30 years rejecting their own ideas when said by democrats
Here’s a fun little tip if you’re ever able to try this again.
MLK Jr. never appealed to the white man, he never tried to win over whitey nor tone down his message so that he didn’t alienate his opressors, and he never tried to get the Klan on his side.
Notice how we don’t have segregation anymore? It’s because if Dr. King did these things, he’d have been luaghed at.
And instead he was shot at, not for the race stuff, but when he started talking about the class divide in general.
It was both. The fbi really hated the race stuff.
The same with RFK. Both he and MLK were murdered ONLY after they started to militate against economic injustice.
The militancy of Malcolm X’s message played a big part in that. Powerful whites were scared of Malcolm so they decided to work with MLK
Yes. When you abandon the left, they don’t vote for you. This is what Clinton did too
They have clearly internalized the pervasive trope that leftists will vote for them, because they have no other choice, so the only thing that matters to convince is the right. Looks like they calculated wrong.
Obama got people excited about healthcare reform. Biden got people excited about student debt relief. Clinton tried to get people excited about a female president and Harris centered her campaign around running against Trump.
Social programs get people excited.
Biden got people excited about student debt relief.
This is not why Biden got elected. Trump so badly mishandled Covid that everyone left of center demanded change.
The failure to realize Covid is the only reason Biden won cost the Democrats. In the swing states 2024 Trump beats 2020 Biden by vote count.
I don’t think you can point to one specific thing that got Biden elected. Covid mismanagement was a huge part of it, but student debt relief and other progressive proposals that Bernie pushed the campaign into played a big part as well. Even with Covid, I think there’s a good chance that Biden would have lost if he’d run the same kind of centrist campaign that Harris and Clinton ran.
agreed. Biden won because people voted against Trump. Every other time Biden ran, and there were many, he couldnt even win his home state. He was and is a joke of a politician, and his legacy is a Trump win becaus he was so unpopular.
“Never underestimate Joe Bidens ability to fuck everything up” –Barrack Obama.
everyone left of center demanded change.
I think you mean “everyone left of FASCISM” because liberals are center-right at best. Center left is Social Democracy (Bernie Sanders and AOC)
Student debt was not a campaign platform he ran on, it was something he did during his presidency.
He did run on Green New Deal and the original proposal that later became the $2 trillion Infrastructure investment/bill/plan.
But to your point, yes he ran on platforms that people got excited. Both of those platforms were new economic opportunities for people in a time when people when much of the labor class was jobless from COVID.
Every time
The funny thing is that Harris had a lot of progressive policies. She didn’t tout them for some reason. Which I suspect was to get GOPers on board. Have a look here and wonder why she didn’t talk more about them: https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/kamala-harris-2024-campaign-promises-here-are-her/
Because most of them were worth less than the bits than they were stored on. She never would have gotten them through congress. She just put them there. 🤷 You’ll note the things she could have done unilaterally like end shipments to israel and commit to keeping kahn she flat out refused to do/support.
Yeah, the notion that she was going to put a Republican in her cabinet…did anyone think that was a good idea? I mean, outside the beltway media?
I know every early on she was talking about possibly having a Republican Vice President before she wised up and went with Tim Walz and ran on his progressive ideas for about… three seconds till Nancy and the DNC told her to just do what Hillary did, as that worked for her and Kamela is obviously the second female president right now. /s
Seeing Walz as her VP pick was such a win and then everything started slipping away. If you listened to her speeches you’d start to notice she was slowly leaning more conservative, slowly backpedaling on a lot of Biden admin policies even. And for some reason she was absolutely obsessed with going on right wing media outlets.
I genuinely think she’s rather well spoken but what a waste of potential.
I was kind of Lukewarm on Walz initially, but he was super endearing. He was cooking there for a minute and then the DNC muzzled him. I remember the moment he got shut up about the electoral college I thought to myself “annnnd now all of his appeal is gone and he’s just another boring politician”. It was really startling to see how little he actually had to do to get the leash tugged.
Yep. Walz was a win and if the DNC was actually about it, they’d back him in the next primary and pair him with a firebrand Texan (or other southern native) while letting them do their thing.
Big IF though…
And to think it might have worked if she just went on Joe Rogan
No. America would never elect a woman who wasn’t a boot-licking slave to the patriarchy. Which is why I think we’ll see a GOP president, if we ever have even fake elections in the future.
That was a media lie. She said that sarcastically and both her and the reporter were laughing. Media didn’t report that fact, other than the original interview which aired like one time.
She said repeatedly toward the end that she would keep people she disagrees with close to her in the white house because she’s open minded or something
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NO! Harris just needed to go further right. Forced goose-stepping marches at rallies. Pledges to eradicate all minorities. Promise global wars of conquest.
Outflank Trump on the right, and the republicans AND democrats will vote for you.
Don’t tempt centrists.
In a really morbid way that would’ve been funny to see, if only to witness the confusion of conservatives.
Usually somewhat ironic, but:
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishhook_Theory
Fishhook Theory (or Fish Hook Theory) is an idea in left-right political science juxtaposed to Horseshoe Theory. Fishhook Theory asserts that the far-right and centrists are very similar, whereas the far-left is separate from them. Fishhook Theory takes its name from the fishhook shape it assumes the political spectrum to be, where the point of the hook is pictured to be the far-right, the eye is pictured to be the far-left, and the shank is pictured to be the centre.
When it comes down to it, when they’re forced to take a side, the centrists will always side with the fascists over the Left. We’ve seen that happen consistently.
I mean, they would rather do that than move one Planck length to the left.
I don’t get why it’s hard to comprehend. By becoming (even) more conservative, more “R”, they betrayed (even more of) their base. Why would timid Republicans want to vote for traitors pandering to them?
Shit I was saying when Biden was still running and I got crucified for it.
As you shift to the right you leave your base behind, ignoring a growing, left swinging faction within the party is going to lead to outcomes like this. Working class people all have the same problems, and one party says they’ll do something about it. They’re lying, people who are generally smarter and paying attention know they’re lying, but that’s not most people.
The other party has had a chance, and failed to do anything to alleviate the concerns of the working class. Regardless of the circumstances, or their actual ability to affect change. And they spent the entire election cycle trying to curry votes from a dedicated base instead of getting voters excited about something.
Swing left, swing hard. Become the unhinged leftist the other side is already accusing you of being.
Its a two party system, why would anyone think being a bit more like the other guy be a good idea?
Why would someone pick knockoff awful when the name brand is right there?
Monopolistic competition makes a lot of wild assumptions that can result in such ideas.
I was called a Russian asset in 2020 for saying this and even more in 2024.
It sucks so much to be so right about something so horrible.
There’s people saying anyone saying dems need to move left are just spreading Russian propaganda
Yep, surely if we get elections in 2028 (unlikely) we need to run a KKK member as a Democrat! You have to vote for him, Trump’s 3rd term will unleash a nuke on Africa.
Please ignore they both want to nuke Africa.
Not only that, if she’s not targeting Democrats they won’t feel motivated to vote for her. Yes, yes, fascism was the other option. But people are not smart, and I say that as a people.
Democrats would prefer to lose than become more progressive because the rich and powerful still benefit from Republicans winning or Democrats winning as long as Democrats are still centre-right wing.
As soon as Democrats move left the elites start to lose so Democrats don’t.
And we won’t have another election again, so these democratic voters who stayed home have denied themselves any other opportunities to right this ship.
Ding ding ding! Trump went further right and got more support. DNC should go further left. People want radical change in 2024
checks calendar
Bipartisanship is dead.
No one wants to work with people that they view as inherently evil, corrupt, and a threat to democracy.
The way political cooperation, negotiation and compromise are viewed as acts of unforgivable weakness in the US sets up a climate where functional democracy appears impossible. The US seems destined to lurch from one impulse to another with half the country thinking each is a colossal mistake and an affront to their way of life.
No, I do not mean this as any kind of “both sides” argument. The fact there are only sides to determining how a society governs itself, the winners and the losers, is the point.
We have a two party system which is inherently hyper polarizing as it paints everything as being black and white. It is an unbelievably stupid and undemocratic system, and unfortunately, nothing will ever improve until we replace our broken two party system with a modern multiparty democracy
The best way to do that is with some sort of ranked preference voting system. The sooner first past the post is replaced with a ranked choice system, the better.
and unfortunately, nothing will ever improve until we replace our broken two party system with a modern multiparty democracy
… and you’ll still have plenty of opportunities to fuck that up
Honestly when was the last time we even had it. Clinton’s first term?
Well at least when it wasn’t just dems caving to republicans
Kamalas campaign thought they could win without offending any megadonors, despite seeing what a bit of honesty did for them right after biden was replaced.
Ive never seen such obvious virtue signaling, I’m not sure kamala even believed her own words.
I can wait for the book about how Kamala and Walz felt about the Democrat machine and the turn they did to Republicans weeks after the strong start they had.
It was the stupidest of ideas. Republicans were never going to vote for her in any numbers. She was all about gun control, she personally owned the 12 million border crossings, she had all those defund the police sound bites from her earlier years, and she couldn’t effectively separate herself from the difficult economy for middle and low earners - while failing to communicate that she even cared about the common man’s plight or would try to help it. Even her proposed tax plan raised taxes on lower middle class, at least the charts I saw (including here on Lemmy). And Republicans have seen four years of Trump and think all the Nazi and “all Republicans are racist” talk is literally the stupidest thing on the earth. Abortion was all Dems really had, and although lots of Republicans are pro-choice, Trump had promised to veto a national abortion ban (for whatever that’s worth).
I remember when Democrats were for the working people. They need to stop being "We’re not the Nazis"and start telling us who they are. But I don’t think they want to tell us who they are. They’re no longer the party of the working man, they’re the party of corporate interest and global governance, and they’re also almost as authoritarian as the right. Maybe the collapse of the Democrat party will result in the birth of an actual socialist party in the US. We’ve seen major party changes in the past. Will it happen again, soon?
“I remember when Democrats were for the working people?”
What was the Great Depression like?
Lmao, for real though, FDR was the last President that prioritized the working class over the capital class. And in turn capitalists tried to overthrow the government or have him killed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
FDR was the last President that prioritized the working class over the capital class
And he only did all that to head off a socialist revolution.
It was the stupidest of ideas. Republicans were never going to vote for her in any numbers
It is what the donor (capital) class wanted. Liberals are capitalists which means they serve the capital class first and foremost.
yeah this was a really fucking stupid idea and I think any Dingus on Twitter could have told you the same. The Trump voter base does not move. everyone’s been saying this. I don’t understand the Democrat strategy at all
I don’t know what the actual numbers are on this, but I have to imagine the number of progressive voters who want more progressive policies far exceeds the number of Republicans that will vote Democrat. if anyone has a source to this data, I am interested in it.
I don’t understand the Democrat strategy at all
Someone else summed it up better than I can. The democratic party is doing exactly what it set out to do.
They have no interest in furthering progressive policies so they don’t. That’s why the DNC chair is calling Bernie Sander’s critique of the party’s platform bullshit right now, instead of admitting he’s right.
The system is as it does.
I mean, realistically, they’d adopt leftist talking points and then abandon them after they won, like they did in 2008.
And in 2020. I think I can count on one hand the policies he ran on getting put into place, and I lost track of how many some Boogeyman kept it from happening.
But we always gave more weapons to Israel without question or congressional approval.
Yes, and to be fair, i think his failure wasn’t due to a lack of desire. Biden is an institutionalist, past the point of logic and reason. My understanding is that they can procedurally remove the filibuster without a super majority at the beginning of each session, but he failed to consider eliminating it until late in his presidency. He also still refuses to entertain expanding the court; I know he couldn’t do it, but if they had any sense at all, they’d be running on it. He has to much, “respect,” for these institutions to do anything to change them, even as they crumble in the face of fascism.
without question or congressional approval
Do you think Congress wouldn’t have approved it? The Democrats are mostly in AIPAC’s pockets, and the Republican would send them even more arms if they could, since they are openly, vocally pro-genocide.
At the least, we could have had a shot at getting congress to stop sending arms. We did to Saudi Arabia based on what they were doing to Yemen, thanks to Bernie Sanders.
Would they have? 90%, both parties are in the pocket of AIPAC. But to at least try to do something is better than sitting on our hands and going "welp, brown people are gonna die anyways, next dude will do it more.*
i think some of this is true, but I don’t think that they would be implementing all of the same policies. maybe all the things that they actually care about are common between the two, and that’s what he means.
That’s why the DNC chair is calling Bernie Sander’s critique of the party’s platform bullshit right now
Holy crap. I read your link–the hubris of these DNC chairperson idiots to call names after losing so thoroughly. Its like they havent gotten the election results yet.
Democrats called those Twitter users Russian trolls. They are now advocating to restrict social media so this cannot happen again.
They are now advocating to restrict social media so this cannot happen again.
source?
Saw a brazen example yesterday about how social media is the fault of it all. It was an article like this one https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/07/10-democratic-thinkers-on-what-the-party-needs-right-now-00187993
What we’ve seen is that tens of millions have opted into a right-wing information bubble, largely online, that has grown to eclipse almost the entire traditional media infrastructure. Often, in that bubble, they’ve become the willing consumers of lies and outrage. Trump’s real misdeeds are whitewashed while audiences are encouraged to embrace cathartic rage against rotating groups of enemies — many of which seem to suspiciously mirror historically unpopular minorities. In this fractured information environment, clownish strongmen thrive, their meme-like public personas enrapturing otherwise disengaged voters — a trend we’ve seen across the globe, as social media increasingly displaces traditional media.
Democrats need to recognize that it is impossible to win votes by improving voters’ lives, when your opponent has a national rage machine it can toggle on or off at will. We will see the next iteration of this game soon enough, when the right switches to praising the precise economy they blasted for years, likely spiking economic satisfaction through the roof. This capacity — dominating media and social media, and its power to shape public opinion — has been the obsessive focus of the right for years. Democrats have almost completely ignored these questions in favor of wonky policy and kitchen-table economics. If the party continues to ignore this problem, it courts oblivion. Democrats must find a way to make headway in modern media, and wrest more control of the national information environment from Trump and his band of thugs.
My favorite line
Let’s start with where Democrats should NOT go. We should not blame Vice President Kamala Harris or her campaign.
Any social-media platform that serves as a propaganda outlet for a hostile foreign power should be shut down, and its entire C-suite imprisoned for a long stretch.
If you are consistently seeing the same messages on X as on RT, that’s a problem similar to that of broadcasters of hostile propaganda in wartime. You say First Amendment; I say Lord Haw Haw. They’re giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
And normal media does not? The propaganda storm from newspapers in favor of Israel is beyond obvious. It is easy to explain why boomers love Israel and zoomers do not. One of them watches CNN or Fox.
Well the actual numbers in the article above are misleading, as they talk in percentages of self-identified/registered voters. And what we have seen in this election is that there has been a big move of people who used to be ® to moderates (according to NBC on their election coverage). So it’s not making sense to compare percentage numbers.
This. Right. Here.
Stop the triangulation it needs to die already.
The fascist playbook has always been “meet me in the middle” and then take two steps back. Rinse, repeat. Fuck bipartisanship and fuck the corpo Dems.
