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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every time
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.
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.
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
Everyone needs to let them know how strongly this article is nailing it.
Done. And threatened to not vote for them next time
Based on them already attacking Bernie, who sucked up to them so hard this last year, I doubt they’re going to listen to anyone’s opinion if it doesn’t also come with millions of dollars
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Me whispering this to high school gun club members in PA
Also explains their fundraising campaigns
I’m on my knees begging you to just give us money
Michael Scott
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why didn’t you quote the part where they are discussing restricting it?
Too much effort to go look for it. Keep an eye out and you will frequently come across an article where they discuss the need for “more control over social media because of foreign interference”.
“I’m not lying, I’m lazy”
Dope
You don’t remember the TikTok fiasco from a few months ago? It is basically the same thing but for Twitter.
Ding ding ding! Trump went further right and got more support. DNC should go further left. People want radical change in 2024
checks calendar
Both her and Clinton should have been braver with VP choice.
They both chose VP milquetoast when the time called for people wanting change.
Walz was great. They put him on a leash, though. Remember when he was going around calling the Republicans “weird” and they were freaking out about it?
(Edit: They’re STILL not over this btw, Benny-boy “dry wife” Shapiro made a tweet after the election that went something like “We proved we’re the normal ones after all”.)
Walz was a great choice. The best moments in the campaign came from him.
They lost because they were pandering to republicans, not because of Walz
I don’t even remember who Clinton chose for her vp
Tim Kaine. A pro-Wall Street centrist.
Tim ‘theres room in the Democratic party for pro lifers’ Kaine.
Man, maybe the Dems lost because the VPs are named Tim … They should really look into people with other names maybe.
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.
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”.
If there’s one lesson the DNC should learn it’s this.
They won’t. But they should.
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.
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.
They only learn what they want to hear.
the party can’t fail it can only be failed
It literally doesn’t matter if all you have to do is lie and promise everything.
Stupid article.
Talk about not learning anything… 🤦
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.
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?
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.
The Republicans had their little tea party a few years ago. The Democrats need a Guillotine Party to properly represent us.
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.
:(
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.
The guillotine party knows how to deal with the second estate.
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.
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.
Don’t tempt centrists.
In a really morbid way that would’ve been funny to see, if only to witness the confusion of conservatives.
I mean, they would rather do that than move one Planck length to the left.
