Even though Harris is running as a moderate, progressives are likely to get blamed for her defeat.

Given the state of the GOP, and who would be beating the “liberal” candidate, this makes a lot of sense. Probably some decent reading for anyone still thinking they just won’t vote because Harris isn’t progressive enough. She might not be your cup of tea, but I’m betting the other guy is way less so.

  • Sundial@lemm.ee
    39·
    1 month ago

    They’re already moving right. I don’t think a lot of Americans fully understand how radicalized their politics have become over the past 20 years or so. Even your most radical leftists, like Bernie, is pretty moderate when compared to politicians in other developed democratic countries. Harris isn’t very progressive to begin with, she’s just infinitely better than Trump which makes her look like the best candidate in history.

  • BertramDitore@lemm.eeEnglish
    18·
    1 month ago

    Harris is doing multiple campaign events with Liz. Fucking. Cheney. A warmongering, anti-LGBT, anti-choice neocon. Remember when she threw her own gay sister under the bus to try to win an election (which she lost anyway)? I do. Now I personally haven’t decided if Harris is right to use Cheney like this, but it doesn’t feel great to a base voter like me who remembers 9/11 and her family’s Iraq hawkery. The Cheney family used to be universally reviled on the left, and this effort is doing a fair amount to rehabilitate her reputation with some dems, and I’m not thrilled about that.

    I’m voting for Harris, without a doubt, but she is already moving to the right, at least as a political strategy. FFS she has already promised to put a Republican in her cabinet!! If she goes any further in that direction she’ll be at a serious risk of losing some dependable progressive base voters. But as some other comments have mentioned, if she wins there’s no reason to believe she won’t continue rightward.

    • Carrolade@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 month ago

      Let’s not ignore the Tim Walz pick when she could have gone with the Pennsylvania guy. If she’s going to run as a coalition president, she has to offer every part of the coalition something they will like.

      But yes, I do hope it is mostly campaign rhetoric. We’ll see.

    • eldavi@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 month ago

      Harris is doing multiple campaign events with Liz. Fucking. Cheney. A warmongering, anti-LGBT, anti-choice neocon. Remember when she threw her own gay sister under the bus to try to win an election (which she lost anyway)? I do. Now I personally haven’t decided if Harris is right to use Cheney like this, but it doesn’t feel great to a base voter like me who remembers 9/11 and her family’s Iraq hawkery. The Cheney family used to be universally reviled on the left, and this effort is doing a fair amount to rehabilitate her reputation with some dems, and I’m not thrilled about that.

      i have similar memories & thoughts pertaining to biden & clinton with 10450; doma; don’t ask, don’t tell; ICE & immigration reform; etc. experiencing first hand how our collective memories about biden stop working before 2008 shows that reality of the past doesn’t matter at all. every time we’re in this situation we collectively agree that there’s a problem; but then we opt to do the same things over and over again (eg democrat or republican) instead of trying something new.

      no one knows what the right answer is; but we know what the wrong ones are because we keep doing them and here we are; each time squabbling all over again and thinking that the next time will be different despite doing nothing different to make it happen.

      I’m voting for Harris, without a doubt, but she is already moving to the right, at least as a political strategy. FFS she has already promised to put a Republican in her cabinet!! If she goes any further in that direction she’ll be at a serious risk of losing some dependable progressive base voters. But as some other comments have mentioned, if she wins there’s no reason to believe she won’t continue rightward.

      here’s one of the clearest examples: we know democrats are moving rightward and we know that they’re usually the lesser evil. so we support them more often in the hopes that they don’t fully embrace a rightward movement and they move rightwards anyways and we have no leverage to get them to change because we’re going to vote for them anyways.

      • BertramDitore@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        1 month ago

        100%. It’s tragic that we’re so incapable of remembering the lessons we convinced ourselves we’d learned from all your examples and more. Biden’s chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee still gives me nightmares…

        • anticolonialist@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          1 month ago

          Biden’s chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee

          Which we are still feeling the impact from, like much of his legislation as a Senator

  • anticolonialist@lemmy.world
    11·
    1 month ago

    Democrats have filled the void left by Republicans shifting further to the right. This is the end result of Clinton’s triangulation of the 1990s

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    1 month ago

    If Harris loses, I don’t expect the Democratic Party to exists as a meaningful political presence in a couple years, because I anticipate aggressive and violent persecution of any and all people who don’t vociferously support Trump in any and all regards.

    • ericatty@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 month ago

      I feel like your comment is the real reason. Why wouldn’t we believe the maga people even they say they want to arrest and execute? The left may not literally exist if certain people follow through on their rhetoric.

  • d00phy@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    Adding to this: All politicians will always go where they think the votes are. Of course there’s some nuance to this. Trump doesn’t think he has a chance in Hell of winning a state like NY or CA. Sure, he’ll do some appearances, but everyone knows it’s a lost cause. Same w/ Harris and the red flyover states. But if polling shows there are votes to be had and the campaign is willing to “shift” their stance, they will go after it. Every. Time.

    I keep seeing people post and/or suggest on Lemmy that the US is overall more liberal than our national representation would suggest. If that’s the case, why is the national polling still so damn close!? If I’m not mistaken, national polling reflects the hypothetical popular vote - i.e., no Electoral College bullshit. I even got into a pretty good discussion not too long ago over how voters can pull the Democratic party back to the left - by holding their collective nose and voting for the “left” candidate and holding the party’s feet to the fire if they keep sliding right. At this point, any vote that isn’t for Harris helps Trump get reelected. Regardless of what anyone thinks will happen in a Harris administration, we all pretty much know what will happen in a second Trump term.

    Yes, the Dems have been pulled to the right by the GOP and the nature of the Electoral College, but an argument can be made that they’ve been pushed as well by apathetic, otherwise liberal, voters not voting. I get it. Every time I walk in the ballot box, there’s a growing part of my brain that wants to vote for the craziest MF’er on the ballot in the hopes that all this nonsense will just burn down so we can start over. So far, the other side of my brain is still winning that argument. I did not enjoy voting for Biden. I won’t enjoy voting for Harris. I didn’t really enjoy voting for Obama the second time. But I’ll still do it because the alternatives (including the “burn-it-down” one, for now) are worse.

    • anticolonialist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 month ago

      Dems have been pulled to the right by the GOP

      Bill Clinton’s triangulation did that to us, not the GOP. As dems kept shifting right to get more votes, the GOP kept shifting even further to the right.