Yes, their platform was weak. But you seriously thought a fascist dictatorship was an acceptable alternative?
Yes, their platform was weak. But you seriously thought a fascist dictatorship was an acceptable alternative?
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Too complicated for 90% of voters to comprehend.
They saw: Democrat president made my groceries more expensive
They heard: Democrat replacement will do things around the same as they used to be. Republican guy is going to do things VERY differently.
And the herd mentality took over past that point
You can’t honestly think this is true. People didn’t switch—at least not any significant percentage. I think it was a 1% swing. People stayed home.
The democrats don’t own the votes of people. They swung for the neocons. Leaving the people who’d been arrested for sitting in their schools for not liking a fuckin genocide to sacrifice their values. Again. It’s always on those of us that want better to sacrifice our values to keep the wolves from the door. While the Democratic Party opens the back door for them when they hold the keys anyway.
They are doing the same thing over and over, shutting out even a middle of the road progressive like sanders. And then they expect to hold onto voters who want real change? They can’t promise more and more of the same and then expect people to get excited. This is 100% on them.
You voted a blank check to BeBe. How is that helping the Palestinians?
Think of voting like signing your name to a candidate/party and what they’ve done/signaled they will do.
A lot of people can’t stomach a candidate who has been courting the neocons and softening their previous mildly progressive stances she took the last time dems had a primary and the progressives were showing up in numbers. Everyone got in line and the debates were all about M4A, erasing federally held student debt, raising the minimum wage, etc. Sanders single handedly dragged the party to the center (technically more “left” than they were) in 2016/2020 and the dems responded by po’mouthing like they cared about those issues, but then circled the wagons and kicked those voters to the curb.
The party has shown over and over again that they don’t give a shit about working class people, those of us that want real change. They want to maintain the status quo. Which is progressively more hostile capitalism.
Signing your name to that constant move rightward is unthinkable for some. And understandably so.
And that’s before we even discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza funded and armed by the US. While this administrations representatives in the UN and in any official capacity constantly run defense for the genocide. For literal war criminals.
Plenty of people could not fathom putting their name on that tragedy.
We all get that trump is much worse. But everyone else needs to understand how sickening that shitty choice was for anyone with a conscience about what’s going on in Gaza, what’s going on with their neighbors. Signing on for more of the same was completely unthinkable for some. That has to be understandable if we are ever going to change things.
We’ve been on the road we’re being forced down now as long as I’ve been alive. And the road just keeps going forward. The dems’ proposal is “maintain the course.” The republicans’ was “mash the gas.”
Some people couldn’t stomach going any further down this road. That’s not making a choice to mash the gas. Because the world is not binary.
So the choice may have been one or the other, and you see it as “you basically voted for trump” because people couldn’t bring themselves vote for Kamala. To sign their name to a genocide. You’re boiling everything down to the two party mentality, which is exactly what has let us continue down this same fucking road. None of us want to continue this way. Telling us all to hold our noses to vote for Kamala while the entire party gave everyone left of them the finger…is not on us.
You’re not wrong, we all hate the fascist party. But you have to understand that a lot of people couldn’t bring themselves to vote for someone who was going to keep the regular ol’ genocide going while courting fuckin neocons. They looked to their left, said “fuck those people,” and tried to court republicans. And you’re blaming the people to the left who’ve been repeatedly told to go fuck themselves?
People stayed home.
Abstaining is a vote unto itself, and partisans of both flavors are wont to ignore that voting doesn't materially affect the lives of the poor and middle class. No matter who they elect things get worse, so when faced with the choice of missing a badly-needed day's pay and voting, they choose to get paid.
I mean, this is true, but in most states you have the option to vote early, vote by mail. We can’t ignore the middle part of your statement: capitalism is getting more and more hostile and no one is offering us a solution. Just giving us differently colored badges to pin to our lapel while telling us the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Give us someone who is actually speaking to us and our needs and we’d have turnout like they wouldn’t believe. But both parties actively suppress anyone trying to do so. Which has been on display my entire life, but has definitely come into much sharper focus in the past 12 years.
No matter who they elect things get worse
"Whether I get a minor laceration or I lose my arm, I'm still going to bleed"
If you're working 2-3 jobs and upwards of 100 hours a week, none of it will matter to you. All you know is you have to struggle to live and no one we elect will change it.
And this sense of superiority and refusal to understand or empathize is why hundreds of millions don't listen to you.
Lol, you don't know me, or that I've literally been there.
And this sense of superiority and refusal to understand or empathize is why hundreds of millions don't listen to you.
Pot and kettle friend.
Do you even know what that life is like? Working yourself to the bone to feed your family and still staring down the barrel of an election that you tangentially know will harm you in some way?
I've done 80hr weeks for years, and it fucking sucks. Check your assumptions, because this sense of superiority is why I ignore people like you. I've been there, but I still made the time when I had to with shit like absentee voting. Not everyone has that ability, but don't pretend like that takes away their agency, even if they have little energy to put to it
I'm not judging you. (And I should have made that more clear. I apologize.)
I'm judging the sentiment, and until Democrats learn to actually speak to workers, they're going to lose elections.
Sorry, no. 15 million+ people that voted in '20 did not stay home because of Palestine. Jill Stein was the candidate I heard of most from the "Genocide Joe" crowd, and I don't think she reach 1% in any battleground state. America does not care about the plight of Palestine. Sad truth.
Yeah, the people I know and spoke to all just said “I didn’t even vote, I couldn’t stomach it.” And the people who didn’t vote because they were put off by the choices don’t really get reliably surveyed—if anything we might find out a small sample size’s opinions months down the road, but more leftist circles are so disillusioned from being asked to plug their ears, hold their nose and vote for neoliberalism with a heavy splash of neocon garnish thrown in that they don’t engage. We can’t keep ignoring that segment of people. Some of them went to vote third party, but when you’re talking about a 4% difference, a lot desperately needs to be said of anyone left of Bernie madoff being written off as “extreme left.”
Yeah. Any party that gets desperate enough to court actual progressives will get a big boost.
That said, courting racists also seems to be pretty effective.
I choose to believe in a world where the second option is getting less viable while the first is becoming more viable, with time. But that's just a matter of faith (with at least a little bit of evidence from history).
Courting racists is effective because disillusioned leftists DO TEND to metamorphose into racists and fascists over the long term. They get upset their party and politics are stagnating, get upset at the lack of political traction, and wind up eventually blaming other people. You see it more often in young people, but it definitely happens.
The MAGA Alt-media and then add Fox is super prolific if not mainstream at this point. They've gaslighted so effective that both Black males and Hispanics is shifting toward the GOP. The left would need to equal that push.
And that republican guy told them he's going to ramp up inflation. (tariffs, mass deportation) and raise their income taxes (the vast majority of his voters are not 1%). And they still voted for him.
But they won't understand that. It's all about feeling instead of logic. Honestly think the deck was stacked against the incumbent this year, just as it was in '20 because of COVID and '08 because of the financial crisis. As the saying goes "It's the economy, stupid!"
There was no incumbent in 2008 unless you are aggregating to the party level.
It's exactly why there is nothing but fear and hate blasting across every digital and analog service known to humankind. The United States has literally saturated itself, through it's own volition, in whatever the peddlers were selling. They became the ultimate consumer. When you are literally breathing in the propaganda, cortisol cranked to 11 and the only option on the menu is all or nothing politics this is what ya get.
~75 million chose the devil they don't know and the DNC needs to reflect on that. Or die. Their choice. The rest of us probably won't even get that choice.
They chose the devil they very much know.
??? It is literally impossible for any voter to not know the devil they chose. No, over 70 million voters actively chose to elect perhaps the most incompetent and transparently stupid president in history back into office, but with a well known and well documented playbook this time around on how literally entry metric of American life, from domestic policy to foreign policy, will be made worse to the sole benefit of big corporate actors and 1%ers. A whole bunch of others were too apathetic to be concerned by this.
Voters ultimately made their choice. A lot of folks are going to die as a result, but unfortunately it won't be limited to just the idiots that actually chose this.
His first term was a bungle. They had two years of a majority and couldn't even finish the blueprints for a wall. I really don't think the GOP was prepared. They are now.
And obviously the unengaged 50% of the country didn't care or pay attention.
I hated reading this, because it sure seems like it's the truth.
The simple fact is a LOT of Americans don't have the time to do real research. They are entirely reliant on media to break down the complex issues into small chunks. And we know that no longer exists.
Do we expect someone that has to work 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet now and an hour or two helping their children with homework, to also spend hours researching current events and political stances beyond what they can get in 30 or 60 minutes from the TV before they have to go to bed and do it all over tomorrow?
Worse than that, millions don’t even rely on media. They just hear about it from some barely-informed coworker, friend, or family member. Everyone is blaming the democrats’ messaging and policies, when huge numbers of people are just going by vibes, tribalism, and whatever they hear at church.
The uphill battle here was to fight the pervasive lie that it’s Biden’s fault that everything is expensive and trump knows how to fix it, but you can’t use explanations longer than five words and you can only reach the information-seeking population who mostly already agree with you.
Republicans spent the last 50 years or more pushing religious participation and conflating their ideologies with religious beliefs. They can’t be defeated without a similarly insidious strategy. We are truly post-information, and the merits of the candidate are virtually irrelevant.
It's even worse than that. They consume media that actively misinforms and lies about the democrats.
I was helping my uncle with his computer a few years ago and got a glimpse of his email inbox with emails about how Hillary Clinton is so evil. And my aunt gets all her news from a website hosted by the same company that hosts trump's social media website.
Things can not get better as long as we allow these propagandists to operate.
Don't forget immigrants and black cities are scary.