“This is a collapse of the Democratic Party.” Consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader comments on the reelection of Donald Trump and the failures of the Democratic challenge against him. Despite attempts by left-wing segments of the Democratic base to shift ...
“This is a collapse of the Democratic Party.” Consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader comments on the reelection of Donald Trump and the failures of the Democratic challenge against him.
Despite attempts by left-wing segments of the Democratic base to shift the party’s messaging toward populist, anti-corporate and progressive policies, says Nader, Democrats “didn’t listen.” Under Trump, continues Nader, “We’re in for huge turmoil.”
Looking purely at vote counts, he isn't wrong. Trump lost about 3 million votes compared to 2020, whereas the Dems lost 15 million. There's certainly a lot of blame to lay at the feet of "both sides bad" people who didn't vote, but either way that's catastrophically bad turnout for the Dems.
There’s certainly a lot of blame to lay at the feet of “both sides bad” people who didn’t vote
No. Absolutely not.
The Democrats and Republicans have spent 40 years, but more importantly, the last six months making it very clear that losing a badly-needed day's pay for a worker isn't worth the time it takes to vote. (Unless you were in Missouri with the $15 minimum wage on the ballot.)
The Dems knew from day one that the economy was the most important issue to voters, because the vast majority of them are working 2-3 jobs just to barely make ends meet.
So what did they do? They ran a clearly brain-damaged candidate, and when he imploded on live national TV, they subbed in Harris, who spent two months just telling people suffering to be joyful, as if it weren't only condescending, but terribly bad policy and campaign strategy. Here in Missouri the $15 minimum wage passed overwhelmingly, but Harris decided to cosplay as a moderate Republican and talk about tax cuts that no one actually thought she'd follow through with anyway, because they've spent the last four years being ignored by Joe Biden.
And they kept harping on Trump's weirdness, as if they haven't already observed that voters do not care how weird he is.
Jill Stein and Ralph Nader didn't make these crappy political decisions.
Gore lost because George Bush's brother, Jeb, invalidated a bunch of ballots and stopped a recount as governor of Florida.
Besides that, this argument is absurd as it would be just as valid to say that Gore spoiled the election for Nader and if Gore hadn't run, Nader would have been elected president instead of George W.
Quit trying to externalize the blame for the actions of the party leadership. These faults should have been clear to you in 2016 when they handed the White House to Trump, and again in 2020 when their candidate only narrowly defeated Trump (especially at a time when Trump had already wrecked the economy and COVID was skyrocketing and this was fresh on everyone's mind).
You seem to keep insisting that everyone else needs to adjust to meet you in backing candidates that keep losing when maybe you should be the one adjusting to meet others. Sliding further and further right isn't a winning strategy for Dems and that should be quite obvious by now.
Gore lost by few enough votes that there are a multitude of people who could have acted differently to produce a win. You can pick and choose who you want to blame and everyone is right.
No one has a right to media attention just because they have a good idea. I assume if a serial killer had a good idea, you wouldn't want it on all the front pages. Maybe let them tell someone else and have that person bring it up if it's such a good idea.
Okay, well then I stand by my point. Ralph Nader doesn't deserve attention on election issues no matter what good ideas he has. If they're good enough ideas, he has plenty of media connections he can tell them to.
You do not get to dictate how or why I post until you become a mod. If you don't like what I have to say, you can either block me or not respond. Ordering me to do what you want isn't going to work.
I think that if you're looking at the Presidential race in particular, you probably want to look specifically at turnout in swing states, where the vote could have been realistically shifted.
Probably a lot of post-mortems happening. I want to see some material from Five Thirty Eight on what shifts happened from 2020. In the runup to the election, for example, I remember reading that young non-college-educated male blacks polled had swung dramatically more Republican between 2020 and 2024. That suggests that division around education is becoming more-important along party lines. A majority was still voting Democrat, but the shift was large, something crazy, like twenty percentage points. I remember reading another article in the runup that Trump had gained slightly among females, also kind of a surprise to me. Now that we've got voting data, though, we can look at county level stuff and try to get an idea of which demographics actually shifted their votes and how.