• @[email protected]
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    774 months ago

    Kinda depends on how you are measuring it.

    It sounds like you are just going by elected presidents, but quite a few were multiple-term presidents, and those presidents had multiple elections with different opponents.

    And sometimes, a losing opponent would go on to win a later election.

    Also, no one ran against George Washington, twice.

    Out of 59 elections (if you include Washington), I think there have been 49 white guys and one white lady who have lost a US Presidential election at least once (and may or may not have gone on to be President in a later election).

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin

    I am exactly as fun at parties as you would imagine.

    • @[email protected]
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      344 months ago

      It’s also technically a lot more if you remember that we do in fact have several marginalized parties running in every general election.

  • @[email protected]
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    404 months ago

    I like Kamala. You have a real shot at taking Trump out with her. The stakes could not be higher. Maybe for the world. He is a truly dangerous person.

    I wonder if I can get the next statement out without venom coming back at me, but I’ll say it anyway:

    I think you guys should try hard to steer the rhetoric away from anything polarizing (race or gender), and do everything you can to create inclusion (from anyone). I’m seeing a lot of things like that, and I don’t think it plays out into more support. And there’s nothing more important now than maximizing support.

    • The Snark Urge
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      144 months ago

      I feel similarly, but my whole life Democrats keep thinking “maybe if I compromise with the right wing and move right, I’ll get more votes” and saying aw dang better luck next time when the right wing’s dwindling base votes red down the whole ticket, while party insiders actively sideline Democrats who win big on left wing messaging. So when I hear Harris striking a tone of inclusion and unity, I’m glad because I feel it’s laudable, but I’m also not thrilled because I’ve heard this song before.

    • @[email protected]
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      114 months ago

      The problem isn’t appealing to centrist moderates. The problem is getting leftists excited to vote. Polarising is good.

    • Carighan Maconar
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      54 months ago

      She’s the first candidate in a while where I feel she might genuinely be good as a president, not just “not bad”.

  • @[email protected]
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    4 months ago

    Trump has also never won the general election for POTUS against a man but is undefeated against women so far, so let’s hope that changes. For America, and the rest of the world, he better not win.

  • @[email protected]
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    244 months ago

    I have also never lost an Olympics, or lost a Formula 1 race, or lost a fight against Mike Tyson, or lost the Super Bowl.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      4 months ago

      facepalm thanks, fixed the titled

      Edit: I’m still wrong. But this was a shower thought. There’s a reason this community isn’t called “well thought out comments”

      • @Cuberoot
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        Don’t correct that. He’s wrong. It’s way more than 46, most multi-term presidents defeated several different contenders.

        Edit: I got 63 white men and 1 white woman, not counting pre 12th amendment elections, not counting minor candidates who didn’t win any states electors. There’s a lot more if you include minor candidates, but then one of them would be Cynthia McKinney who is a black woman.

    • Nomecks
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      4 months ago

      Statistically it probably wasn’t 45 men by today’s definition.

  • @[email protected]
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    174 months ago

    What really bugs me is that both sides are just attacking the other rather than talking about why they are the right choice. US elections are always about smear campaigns

      • @[email protected]
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        64 months ago

        It’s not what I’m used to in the Netherlands. There are personal attacks sometimes, but mostly by guys who don’t have the best reputation in the first place.

      • Tlaloc_Temporal
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        24 months ago

        This is most of my memory of Canadian elections too. I wish even mentioning other parties wasn’t allowed in campagin material, like how in some parts of government politicians can only refer to each other by title and not by name.

          • Tlaloc_Temporal
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            14 months ago

            Debates and actually adressing the problems.

            You can’t say “Party X just wants your money”, try “Our party will help you keep your money”, or even “Unlike some parties today, we will put your taxes to good use”.

            It’s a lot harder to make a compelling attack without a concrete focus. “Some parties are corrupt” is so trivially true that’s it embarassing, but “Party X is corrupt” is a rallying cry.

            It won’t prevent lies by any means, but since specific claims can only be nade about your own party it gives an advantage to talking about your own party instead of every ad being incredibly negative claims one step off of a flame war. Hopefully that leads to building a strong case and then defending that case during debates, but at least the ads will have less direct negativity.

            • @[email protected]
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              14 months ago

              It would be more positive, but potentially less accurate. A party that does a lot of very specific and bad stuff but has some vaguely good policies to point towards would beat a neutral party, even if they shouldn’t.

              • Tlaloc_Temporal
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                24 months ago

                Maybe if you only see the political ads of a single party. It would still be better because you would know of even a single stance of one party.

                Last election, I can’t remember a single actual stance taken by any party based on political ads. They were all attack ads. Without discussion you couldn’t separate the resonable accusations from the trash anyway.

                Basing your politocal opinions purely on ads is a terrible stance anyway, and the party best at fearmongering will win there. There aren’t any restrictions on ads that can fix people forming opinions only on ads anyway, we’d need to encourage public political debates and discourse instead.

    • @[email protected]
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      24 months ago

      There was a time, a few decades ago, when there was a real demand to get away from the negativity of most campaigns. Everyone says they wanted it, polls clearly showed it, etc.

      But then there was another study which analyzed the effectiveness of campaigns (i.e. if they won) vs how negative they went.

      Negativity was clearly proven to be the winning tactic.

    • @[email protected]
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      4 months ago

      Oh hey just remembered there was an incident like that in 1880 or so. White woman kicked off the ballot but still ran depending on definition

  • @[email protected]
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    164 months ago

    I get the feeling in OPs post, but for those unfamiliar, there are more people on the ballot other than the 2 main picks. This even varies by state, as they can have different criteria for defining who makes it to the ballot.

    So perhaps a black woman has at some point ran for president (as in, made it to the ballot at least)?

    • @[email protected]
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      4 months ago

      Not really, since in most (all?) U.S. presidential elections to date there has not been a black woman on the ballot. I think there’s an important semantic difference between losing and not winning. The equal but opposite statement to the OP would be that a black woman has never won the election, which is true.

      • @[email protected]
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        14 months ago

        Read the wiki article. If a black woman has never been on the ballot then every possible statement you make beginning with “for all black women who have ever been on the ballot…” is true.

        • @[email protected]
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          4 months ago

          Yes, because now you’ve added the critical qualifier “who have ever been on the ballot”. Without that, it doesn’t hold.

          No black woman has ever won the election or lost the election, because the set of black women who have ever been on the ballot before is empty.