I was gonna title this “And here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice” and then write “Stuck inside of America with the fascism blues again” here, but I’m not sure if that comes off like gloating and that’s honestly the last thing I want to do this morning.
It absolutely would have. Progressive policy is insanely popular and easy to campaign on by virtue of being designed to help everyone. Do you think Bernie had such high favorably ratings because they have a thing for 80 year old white dudes?
Tell people “healthcare will be free” or “We will cap rent and build housing that won’t cost more than 3x local median income” and then people can’t afford not to vote for you.
Biden could have cut off arms to Israel, and hundreds of thousands of students so politically activated they’re willing to risk their degrees to protest would be doing everything in their power to keep Trump out.
Instead they sent the police to kick the shit out of those kids, at great expense to the colleges, and called them antisemitic.
Why then do countries with existing left parties and proportional representation elect further and further right-wing parties in Europe?
It’s simple: They promise easy solutions for complicated problems. Banning immigration will fix all crime and the economy, opposing LGBTQ+ rights will ensure a return of the better olden days, climate change is nothing to be worried about etc etc
And even people depending on social support will gladly shoot themselves in their feet if it means someone else will have it worse.
I’m afraid exit polls say otherwise. Kamala’s economic policies were the most left wing we’ve seen in decades (a wealth tax?). If people cared about actual economic issues, such as inequality, they’d have elected her.
This election was lost because Latino men voted for Trump (for starters). We needed populism, not progressivism, to appeal to the small minded American voter. Don’t you see that? Most American men are misogynistic, racist psychos. And they’re unhappy. You appeal to them with populism full stop.
Wealth tax to collect more money to give to Israel and the most lethal military and killing immigrants is what she ran on, she ran as a right wing populist and lost because Trump is a better right wing populist
Small minded voters are told what to think, Harris refused to tell them to want free healthcare because that shit pisses off donors
Delusional
Yes, Democrats don’t know how politics works, they ask Republicans to decide which issues are important, and then argue a slightly more moderate response to those issues is best. Sometimes they accidentally win doing that, if the economy is good and people are happy with moderation, but that’s probably not going to be true any time soon.
I love this. They are so reactionary and seem almost incapable of counter messaging. I say almost because they managed it once with the tarrifs are sales tax response.
I’m not going to say that the Latino shift isn’t huge, but this really feels like a strawman (to a certain extent). Even without the full 2024 turnout numbers, we know less people turned out to vote than 2020. I think NBC last night said Harris was projected to have 15 million less votes than Biden, and Trump voter numbers were steady, so I don’t think it all went to Trump.
There are multiple factors that went into the outcome we have today, and only mentioning the Latino men or the pro-Palestine constituents and ignoring the failures of the DNC (starting with not having a convention) feels really weird.
The Latino men are one example. My point is that Democrats focused on policy and policy is ineffective when the electorate is a bunch of barely sentient macho dipshits angry about economic issues they can’t understand (not to mention most young men are broke and can’t get laid). You use populism. You blame the rich. You blame the wealthy elites. You channel Bernie Sanders.
Every other sentence out of Harris’s mouth should have been about the billionaires stealing from the working class. Instead we saw a bunch of well reasoned economic policy that went completely over everyone’s head.
Ok, I see your point. You’re not wrong here. But I’m always surprised at how averse US politicians are to anything perceived as left wing populism, while they tolerate (or even eat up) the right wing version.
Maybe it’s a remnant of McCarthyism.
The policies are extremely popular and universal. Doesn’t really matter in a politicalcampaign if you struggle to achieve those ends. Trying is important and failing gives you ammunition against those who oppose extremely popular policies for next campaign.
The bottom line is that the average person isn’t listening for anything besides “how is the candidate going to help me because I feel like I’m drowning”. The right scapegoats something and promises to fix your problems by hurting the scapegoat (immigrants, minorities, socialists, whatever). This is a lie, but it’s just as, if not more, direct of a solution so some voters will support them.
Harris had attention when she said things like stopping price gouging and providing in-home elder care. Those were extremely popular ideas that she didn’t focus on. Instead, she pivoted right.
The US president is probably the single most powerful position in the world between explicit powers and people who serve at his pleasure and can be replaced at will, and undefined powers that that extend as far as anyone is able to stop them, as we saw under Trump. If they just flagrantly broke the law and kept doing it until the SCOTUS and others actually stopped them, the dems would be far more popular than just throwing their hands up and saying "better things aren’t possible.
There’s a lot of indirect ways they can get what they want done, whether it means appointing an AG and other department heads who will punish people who don’t go along or using the military’s vast legal protections and resources.
That’s not saying how you’ll improve people’s immediate conditions, just that trump will make them worse
You can’t credibly say that when Biden deported more people than Trump.
This is basically what FDR did with a lot of his social and work programs during his presidency. He’d establish an agency or authority or whatever, regardless of the legality, and by the time the court’s or whoever made the decision to close it, they’d have 5 others going simultaneously, and/or they’d make another one. And the process would start all over again.
Yup. The nice thing about policy that helps everyone is that it’s incredibly unpopular to kill. Biden could have burned student debt in the most visible way possible, and then dared the SCOTUS to create new debt. If they took the bait, you’d have 46.2 million people ready to vote for anyone who promises to expand the SCOTUS.
This was also a congressional election you know.
It’s easy to get students to protest. They’re young, it’s exciting.
Voting isn’t loud or angry, so it doesn’t feel effective. It feels like actual work. And so they skip it.