Don’t worry, as an actual lefty I already know. You’re the one who’d push me into the cart.

What a reasonable and not at all unhinged reply!

I am not here to argue. I will not engage beyond this post no matter what is said in response because I don’t want to fight.

What matters is policy. Real hard on the ground policy that real normal people can feel and see where they live.

When some wonk gets on MSNBC with a spreadsheet hooting about how much better things are with grocery prices or housing costs, that doesn’t mean anything to someone who’s begging for extra shifts at work so they can make rent. Those are aggregates and averages. If the 200k-500k bracket is doing better while the 13k-45k bracket isnt, the numbers still went up. That looks better in the data. But the people at the bottom are still suffering just as much as ever. They don’t feel or see any improvement because there wasn’t any. Not for them.

The health and performance of the stock market only matters to those on the bottom when it crashes and suddenly they’re paying more for everything. At no other point does it impact them in the slightest. Those record profits aren’t reinvested, they’re not used to reduce the strain on consumers. Its gobbled up by a few dozen shareholders. It benefits nobody else. And if an executive or CEO has the slightest semblance of a soul and wants to help consumers they’re voted out because the only responsibility is to those few dozen shareholders.

Healthcare. The ACA was a grand achievement. They took Romneycare national. Round of applause for all involved. But its still cheaper to do some form of Universal Healthcare. That would be the easiest win in history. And everyone would feel it immediately. It would help 100,000,000 people immediately. People who have been putting off medical treatment for half their lives because of the extortionist expense would immediately seek treatment. They would seek preventative treatment and raise the overall health across the country. Obesity rates drop, drug use plummets, etc.

Marijuana. Literally every person I know and interact with in my daily life uses it. Do you know the number one reason I’ve heard from all of them? Pain management. Again, another easy win that is supported by everyone except the ghouls who were alive when it was called “The Devil’s Lettuce” and propagandized into believing its this terrible thing.

Hard Policy that people can feel and see in their daily lives. You can still court the comfortable liberals who care about the stock market and all that. They’ll be fine no matter who is in office. If they need an abortion it’s a weekend vacay to Zurich or somewhere. But you’re never going to hold any meaningful power again without hard policy. Because for decades now the republicans have cornered the market on grievance politics and reaction. To break through that you need something real. No more vibes based nonsense. It will not work.

What strawman? When is it appropriate to hold DNC leadership accountable for losing the election, again?

Yes, the number of people on here who claim that withholding their vote to ‘punish the DNC’ and make them learn a lesson is helpful is too high. If the Democrats were going to learn their lesson, they would have done so after 2016. Believing that by not voting, they’ll affect the Democrats’ strategy doesn’t make them leftist, it makes them another flavour of liberal, who thinks establishment electoralism is a pathway to socialism.

A much more effective solution is to organize locally, educating people on real solutions and pushing for change that way, not by blindly assuming the Democrats will reflect on their loss and run a communist candidate next time.

It represents a large portion, but progressive policies are widely popular. Even in states Trump won there were votes passed to protect abortion access and increase minimum wage.

Most people vote based on vibes, and there were no progressive or positive vibes put forward by the dems this campaign. They signaled a ‘lethal military’, tighter borders, and sought endorsements from prominent Republicans, trying to win votes that would never go to their party anyway, alienating anyone who might have believed in the genuineness of the dems as ‘progressives’.

Absolutely. It’s a two way street here.

People need to stop turning on each other though. What’s done is done. The left has always been divided but right now we really need to start pulling ourselves together.

Yeah, and your comment is a great example of the Democrats 2024 outreach strategy: a smug, self-righteous attitude that failed to get you any votes.

Let’s preface with the fact I voted for Harris, and understand where you’re coming from with lesser evil voting.

But the other half of your argument is that with the way that Harris was tacking to the right to try to gain moderate voters, the choice was between voting between fascism now and fascism later down the line.

But if we vote for fascism later then we have time to distance ourselves from fascism.

By sitting at home happy that you did your job and ‘defeated’ fascism, until the next election where your choice is again fascism now and fascism a little less later down the line?

As the Dems keep drifting further and further right. At what point do you put your foot down and demand actual progressive policies? And how do you get those demands to actually be listened to when the party knows you’ll vote for them because “at least we’re not as bad as the other guys. What choice do you have?” Supporting her is a message to the Democratic party that their strategy of slowly becoming more conservative wins elections. And this is the reason that I was very conflicted about voting for her, but just held my nose and did it for the greater good.

That’s because fascism has never and will never be beaten at the ballot box.

a wealth tax

Did she actually campaign on this, or was it just some white paper she had on her website? There’s a difference between having a policy that you are campaigning on and actually intend to carry out and some vague policy paper a staffer wrote.

25k credit for first time home buyers This was an absolute embarrassment of a policy. Did you see the requirements on it? They presented it as a typical neoliberal bullshit policy. It was filled with so many specific requirements that almost no one would qualify for it. And it was bad economic policy too, as it would simply serve to further inflate the overheated housing bubble.

support for legalized cannabis

You cannot run on something that is one of your severe policy failures. Democrats have been running on the cannabis issue for multiple cycles at this point. They’ve all dragged their feet and slow-walked it for cheap political points.

support for trans people

She’s objectively better on this than Trump, but trying to Third Way it, she screwed herself over. Democrats were vocally supportive of trans rights before any kind of major backlash emerged, but their support was only ever skin-deep. Trans issues were largely absent from the recent DNC.

The Republicans latched onto anti-trans bigotry as one of their major campaign planks, and the Democrats responded by just trying to ignore trans people entirely. They avoided discussing trans people whenever possible, and they never came up with effective responses to Republicans’ main attack points. If you actually believe in trans rights, the correct response to the charge of “you want men in women sports!” is to say, “well trans women aren’t men, and you shouldn’t moronically assume trans women have the same athletic advantages as cis men.” If you actually believe in trans rights and equality, you would say, “the differences between men and women sports performance is almost entirely due to testosterone. Any minor differences that remain are not worth discriminating against people over.” Etc. You know, actually RESPONDING TO and REBUTTING the attacks Republicans make against trans people.

Centrist democrats showed conclusively that their support for trans people was nothing more than shallow political pandering. The Biden administration hasn’t been using all the levers of federal power to protect trans kids from their state governments.

This kind of mealy-mouthed centrism is what cost Kamala the election. She isn’t an enemy of trans people, but she’s also not a real ally. She doesn’t want to actively harm trans people, but she doesn’t have some fundamental belief in the worth of trans rights. It’s just another political football to her. It was beneficial to seem extremely pro-trans in 2020, and now that the conservatives have rallied against trans people, now she’s not so eager to defend trans people. It seems disingenuous and it made her look like someone who would say anything just to win the election.

How many of those 10-15 million watching from the sidelines would have shown up for a pro-Palestine candidate?

No one was expecting her to become a rabidly pro-Palestinian protester. No one expected her to get up at the podium and say, “actually, Hamas did nothing wrong, and the Israelis should be relocated out of Palestine.” People wanted her to make US military aid contingent on Israel meeting human rights guidelines. Israel, despite all the precision weaponry we give them, has a worse civilian:military kill ratio than Hamas. They kill more civilians for every soldier they kill than radical terrorists. Despite all their high-tech weaponry, THAT is how unconcerned Israel has been about civilian casualties. Hamas has done a better job of avoiding civilian casualties than Israel.

Anyway, the polling showed that calling for a cease-fire and other measures would have been immensely popular. This was a completely unforced error on her part. She threw away votes for nothing.

I’m not saying that she didn’t have any liberal centrist ideas like what you listed, but that doesn’t mean she was progressive either. A lot of the policy ideas that were actually good were once on the Republican platform before Reagan.

Don’t forget about how popular Bernie was in 2016 before he was forcibly removed from the democratic nomination by the party establishment or how popular Tlaib, AOC, and Omar have been. Don’t forget about how down-ballot races in this cycle, while brutal to Democrats, didn’t push out many progressives. Progressivism is far more popular than the democratic party is willing to admit or fight on, because the party is owned and controlled by the same class currently oppressing us; the billionaires. If a candidate like Bernie presents a real path, they will force the person out. It’s not strictly an issue with the Overton window.

Here’s the thing about the choice facing people in the election: it doesn’t matter anymore as a matter of the current political reality, because Harris gambled hard on the “good cop, bad cop” aspect of “he’s worse” and lost hard. That statement is 110% true, but it’s horribly ineffective as we saw in 2016 and again in this election. Islamophobia will absolutely increase, and Trump will fund the genocide until all of Palestine is settled by colonists. But once again, don’t forget about how successful Tlaib was in comparison to Harris. We no longer have the opportunity to find out if it would or wouldn’t have affected the campaign, but the indication is there that at least 1 swing state would have gone to Harris with an anti-genocide stance.

I keep hearing about grocery prices, but no one has any explanation of what Biden was supposed to do about it that he wasn’t already doing, or how Trump will handle it better.

Completely agree. I think it’s a “you break it you buy it” situation with voters.

And it’s not based in reason — Biden’s administration was staring down the barrel of a recession, and yet here we are, having completely avoided it. That’s a pretty successful navigation of the economic hand that Biden was dealt, if you ask me. But at the end of the day “groceries more expensive” = “we need someone else in the white house” for a lot of voters, I guess.

They’re screwed either way the Supreme Court is going to be so stacked on the republican side. They well control everything even if the dems have a president in.

Fuck.

why are y’all scared of taking responsibility for allowing a Nazi to gain power when you decided to not vote

I voted for Kamala but I still blame the DNC

the issue is two fold

a) they played games with democracy, further accelerating the erosion of whatever little faith remains in our democracy institutions. there should have been a primary, not the underhanded switcharoo we got to witness where for the first time in US history since primaries were a thing… we had a presidential candidate nominated without a single vote

b) while voters are struggling and going through a period of profound insecurity - not only financially but in a very real social sense - they offer more of the same. neoliberal status quo. people are desperate for change and the DNC offers them nothing.

you blame the voters but you do not want to put an ounce of blame on the party that would rather lose an election than offer meaningful change

How’s that tactic of browbeating and blaming voters working out for ya?

The blame falls on people in power not delivering for the working class/poor. There is no better ally for the GOP than modern spineless Dems who center their politics around them. Every third party voter could have voted for Harris and she still would have lost.

Should the DNC have put forward a candidate that was fairly selected with grass roots support among the wider voting population?

No, it’s the voters who are at fault.

Great campaign strategy buddy. Why don’t you work as an analyst?

I did what I had to do, which is vote.

The campaign’s job was to get other people to vote. They failed at their job.

Angry man is better than others because he did the right thing.

Good job angry man.

I voted for Walz.

Dems suck at winning elections because for 40 years now their strategy has been a losing one of “try being Republican-light.” They’re too corrupted by corporate bribes to right the ship, hopefully it sinks into a sea of conservative ignorance and an actual leftist party can rise from the ashes.

I keep reading all this finger pointing from people that actively spoke against voting for Harris.

I think that’s just your confirmation bias talking

Maybe those who didn’t vote shouldn’t be allowed to complain.

I’ll tell all the convicts, LGBTQ children and… every non-US citizen who’s going to suffer through another Trump term.

They don’t identify that way but most Americans are in favor of progressive policies when asked

American politicians are not progressive. America has not had a true progressive in decades. Today’s democrat policy has been overwhelmingly stagnant. Status quo plus a tiny tax cut for the working class.

The millions of Democrats who didn’t vote shows a rapidly growing apathy towards the party and their inaction

That’s kind of a difficult thing to determine, when asked almost no one says they are, but if asked about policies, they tend to go for more progressive policies, even people that identify as conservatives will agree with more progressive policies. The people they vote for however, are definitely not progressive… Mostly, there are a few.

Then again, progressive in America is pretty much basic human rights and protecting vulnerable people which should be the minimum.

Exactly this. Americans don’t care about progress, they don’t even care about human rights. They care about the economy. Clinton was right, “it’s the economy stupid”.

And the DNCs fault.

Republicans: here’s everything you’ve ever wanted and all the libertarian shit you used to jerk off to.

“But I know that he won’t really give them that, and if they’re stupid enough to believe that, we don’t need their votes anyway”

~Every Democrat I’ve argued with since Tuesday

I don’t know, at this point I’m starting to ask myself if it’s the Democrats fault if the majority of the people agree with the opposition? If she had won the popular vote and lost the electoral college I might have believed that it was simply appealing more to the Democratic base or appealing to less enfranchised liberals, but she lost the popular vote by a long shot. Not only did she lose, but she lost after the other guy has had 4 years of public attack, federal crimes, rape convictions, Project 2025, and basically promising that Palestinians and Ukrainians will get fucked. Hell, the percentage of women that voted for Trump went up in this election.

If people didn’t turn out because Democrats aren’t appealing to leftist ideals enough I fear the message heard by the DNC isn’t to appeal to even more progressive or socialist ideals, but to adopt even more moderate policies. Just facing the facts, but the political left is an unreliable voter group and it’s extremely entitled. Instead of trying to be a foil to Republican ideals Democrats are more likely to try more moderate options. Think of it as creating an alternative instead of being an opposite, Coke and Pepsi instead of Coke and Sprite. It feels like the needle of America’s social equilibrium has permanently moved to be more conservative.

The choice is obvious, we eat the sand in hopes it will quench our thirst. Thats basically what we did.

A murky pond of still water might not be a good choice no matter how thirsty you are. The bacteria in it could kill you. If you’re thirsty and lost at sea, I hope you won’t drink the salt water. That’s the issue with the insistance that people should vote for Harris “to stop trump”. It’s short sighted and does nothing to address the long-term problem of, election after election, being presented two shitty options and told it’s critical that you eat shit instead of voting for the person that will actually fight for your values. Sorry the Democrats keep refusing to learn this lesson, but they are just as much to blame for Trump’s victory as the people who voted for him.

Out of your options above, the camel might actually be the safest option. You’ll at least get some hydration out of it if you don’t cook it to shit.

You’ll jump through any hoop to say the voters should have drank more piss instead of saying the piss should have cleaned itself up

I don’t just mean Gaza, I mean democratic candidates need to find a way to excite rural voters by giving them an actual path to financial stability

Your parable doesn’t even make sense, the election wasn’t lost by educated people refusing to drink piss, it was won by republicans by getting uneducated voters to happily eat shit thinking it’ll give them super powers. (I mean educated on the issues like “what is a tarrif”)

The vote is the only thing we have control over.

You think allowing a dictator to take the reins is gonna get you what you want? Really? Explain to everyone how sitting this one out, an election that may cement Republican power and place Democrats as a token but useless party fore the remainder of the foreseeable future, will fix what you see as wrong with the Democratic party?

Any other election I might have agreed with you.

But not this one.

Own it.