Harris Tried to Win Over Republicans. Democratic Support Collapsed Instead.
Harris Tried to Win Over Republicans. Democratic Support Collapsed Instead.
Kamala Harris did not pull Republicans from Trump, and the percentage of voters identifying as Democrat declined, according to exit polls.
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.
To be honest Harris wasted time and effort sucking up to the infinitesimally small number of non-MAGA GOPers. Time that would have been better spent emphasizing her pro worker policies.
Bipartisanship is dead.
No one wants to work with people that they view as inherently evil, corrupt, and a threat to democracy.
The way political cooperation, negotiation and compromise are viewed as acts of unforgivable weakness in the US sets up a climate where functional democracy appears impossible. The US seems destined to lurch from one impulse to another with half the country thinking each is a colossal mistake and an affront to their way of life.
No, I do not mean this as any kind of "both sides" argument. The fact there are only sides to determining how a society governs itself, the winners and the losers, is the point.
Honestly when was the last time we even had it. Clinton's first term?
Well at least when it wasn't just dems caving to republicans
Yea courting Republicans was a bad move IMHO. But she's a establishment dem. So go figure.
According to conservatives on reddit, she is "far left, even more extreme than Bernie" and that's why she lost.
How so... she is a far right democrat. Pro big oil and corporations and heavy handed on many issues from her time as DA.
If anything she is to far right for most dems.
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.
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.
Which is really weird because her professed policies WOULD have changed things. https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/kamala-harris-2024-campaign-promises-here-are-her/
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
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.
The funny thing is that Harris had a lot of progressive policies. She didn't tout them for some reason. Which I suspect was to get GOPers on board. Have a look here and wonder why she didn't talk more about them: https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/kamala-harris-2024-campaign-promises-here-are-her/
Because most of them were worth less than the bits than they were stored on. She never would have gotten them through congress. She just put them there. 🤷 You'll note the things she could have done unilaterally like end shipments to israel and commit to keeping kahn she flat out refused to do/support.
This is similar to how someone will slowly abandon their old friends to be relevant with the “cool” kids who will never see you as part of their group no matter what, and your old friends end up making new friends leaving you alone. If this doesn’t work in real life, I don’t get how this could work in politics.
The Democratic party has to stop treating us like the old friend they visit every so often just to get something out of us while forming closer relationships with others who have no business being their friend.
This is so true and I'm saying this a white guy who has only felt the economic impact of their failures. I was a radical leftist when I was 15, now I'm 40. The only thing democrats have ever offered is damage control, they can't blame the voters for being apathetic.
The new friends in this instance are very rich and they entice the Democrats to leave their old friends with lots of money. But the old friends is where they get their power. The Democrat party loves money.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Lmao, for real though, FDR was the last President that prioritized the working class over the capital class. And in turn capitalists tried to overthrow the government or have him killed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
It was the stupidest of ideas. Republicans were never going to vote for her in any numbers
It is what the donor (capital) class wanted. Liberals are capitalists which means they serve the capital class first and foremost.
I think the real problem is that we live amongst a sea of imbeciles.
Dang, how did that work out? Oh? Alot like 2016 you say?
Everyone needs to let them know how strongly this article is nailing it.
they dont read that shit, they pay people to come to read here, on reddit, and twitter.
Then surely your message has been received.
Done. And threatened to not vote for them next time
Are you telling me enthusiastically embracing the support of the Cheney's lowered democratic turnout!?! Whoda thunk?!?! Hopefully that's the end of the neoliberals
she tried to win over moderates, not republicans.
I'd say it worked judging by the 70 million votes or so she got.
The real problem seems to be dem voter turnout instead, for whatever collection of reasons that is. I would argue it's mostly voters being stupid, but that's just me lol.
I’d say it worked
The election results say otherwise.
losing sure, but biden had historically high voter turnout, probably as a result of the mail in voting over covid.
This turn out is pretty high as well we're looking at about 71 million votes right now. For an "unpopular candidate" this is pretty clearly, good turnout.
Today we learned, there are no moderates
there are moderates, politically, the problem is that the political environment is so heavily galvanized they don't really show up clearly.
Most conservative moderates are either going to vote trump (in which case they aren't that much of a moderate) or they're not, and they're going to vote for dems, (which is more moderate)
The problem at hand is that moderates just don't get any political attention, even though they're like 30-40% of the voter base, if not more.
In 2016, Democrats didn't vote for Hillary because she just didn't "do it" for them. We got Trump thanks to their adorable little protest vote.
2024 14 million registered Democrats didn't vote in this election because Harris just didn't "do it" for them. But since they HAD registered, they were prepared to vote.
I'm starting to detect a really stupid, petty pattern, here.
Or, maybe it's the fault of the campaign for doing nothing to appeal to those people. Like, I wish that we could of voted to not have trump today. But we didn't and have shown historically that it won't happen. At that point it's on the campaign. Spent the whole time trying to become the new Republican party and it backfired. Fucking stupid DNC don't learn shit and still bitch at the end.
You keep blaming the voters for deciding the Democrats aren't representative of them.
Have you thought about blaming the Democrats for not being representative of the voters they want?
You can blame both, honestly. The US has always had the same political game as ever, people should be wise enough to understand how to play it. If you ever want to get to a more stable democracy that no longer has the stupid two party system that prevents any form of real representative democracy where you can actually have a selection of parties that represent you perfectly, the choice should be obvious.
At least with Harris they could try to work with her and convince them to change their views for the future as they ruled. Trump will call you a left wing lunatic and slam the door in your face. Zero influence and no chance for progress (and even regression) vs some influence and some chance to progress.
2024 14 million registered Democrats didn’t vote in this election because Harris just didn’t “do it” for them. But since they HAD registered, they were prepared to vote.
As an outsider, if the democratic candidate has to do anything to "appeal to you" for your vote, to prevent a fascist party from taking over, then democracy is obviously not for you. That's just being a fucking dumb moron. "You didn't ask nicely enough, so let's hand over the country to the Nazis"
This mentality is what the Dems keep applying and it doesn't work. Trying to shame people into voting isn't an effective message. You can argue that it should be, but what matters is how things actually are and how a party can act most effectively based on that. It's either adapt or keep railing against reality and lose.
If you're a politician who doesn't appeal to your base then democracy is not for you. That's just how democracy works.
Democracy is "not for" a lot of people. They're lazy. They don't think it impacts their lives. They don't want to put in the mental effort to follow politics and make a good decision, so they just leave it to other people. You certainly know someone in your extended social circle who is just "not political".
But that doesn't change anything. The conservatives find a way to motivate their morons, they don't complain about non-voters and then just wish it were better. Some of your "not political" friends probably went out to vote for Obama.
I don't think it's just because they didn't like her, she had a lifetime of intense concentrated hate from the GOP political machine. She stepped down from Secretary of State amid health problems many assumed she would need to retire from, she had a slow leak politically modivated investigation aimed at her, and the lifelong republican head of the FBI decided to do a press conference announcing that they were reopening the investigation due to ''new evidence'' (an exact copy of an email account they already knew was only duplicates that would yield no evidence) which was all reaped from a sex scandal that ended three peoples careers. Further than that Russia had multiple proven spies embedded into the GOP, NRA, and more, and they were targeting Hillary as strongly as they could because destabilizing the US is their main lever to power in their backyard. The odds stacked against Clinton were immense, and the average US voter was still very likely to associate 'Clinton' with 'scandal' from Bill's presidency alone.
gotta love the democratic voter base, utterly useless and bafflingly confusing.
I highly suspect this is because there was no Democratic Primary. I've heard the old tired excuse "they typically run the incumbent as the democratic candidate". But this is simply asinine, it's crazy. They waited until less than 6 months from election day to randomly put Harris in the running. This is one of the most insane things I've ever seen happen. There was no chance for Democrats to vote at all!
Les than 6mo? I don't even want the election cycle THAT long.
For some stupid reason the presidential election cycle is about 18 months, so 6 months is fast even if it should be plenty.
How much of it was due to voter-roll purges, bomb threats at polling stations and other voter-suppression fuckery?
Not enough to justify a 20% reduction in democratic turnout.
The Dems ran as the Republican alternative. That's what killed the campaign
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 a great choice. The best moments in the campaign came from him.
They lost because they were pandering to republicans, not because of Walz
Waltz was great until the DNC told him to stop calling Vance weird even though it worked and to stop talking major shifts in his elections would work.
And then he was mute except for playing games on twitch.
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".)
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.
We need to go through them or around them. They wont change and they wont be convinced. That sort of sniveling triangulating intellectual cowardice cant be cured.
The two parties have a lock on power. There is no going around them as you'll just be ineffectual and corrupt distractions like Stein and RFK jr.
Body knows the problem. Everywhere you see they went to far left not left enough. Everyone has their opinion and nobody knows why this happened. I just know if single issue voters on gaze didn’t vote then they get what they deserve.
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.
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 mean, the article clearly says that she won moderates.
The Republicans had their little tea party a few years ago. The Democrats need a Guillotine Party to properly represent us.
Actually, the Guillotine Party sounds like a great idea.
Literally with that name. 😍
The Tea Party forced the GOP to rebrand and restructure itself around the most extreme right wing ideas possible
Occupy Wallstreet tried to do the same thing, and... were savagely beaten by the police over it.
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.
:(
The guillotine party knows how to deal with the second estate.
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.
Here's a fun little tip if you're ever able to try this again.
MLK Jr. never appealed to the white man, he never tried to win over whitey nor tone down his message so that he didn't alienate his opressors, and he never tried to get the Klan on his side.
Notice how we don't have segregation anymore? It's because if Dr. King did these things, he'd have been luaghed at.
And instead he was shot at, not for the race stuff, but when he started talking about the class divide in general.
The same with RFK. Both he and MLK were murdered ONLY after they started to militate against economic injustice.
It was both. The fbi really hated the race stuff.
The militancy of Malcolm X's message played a big part in that. Powerful whites were scared of Malcolm so they decided to work with MLK
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.
She said repeatedly toward the end that she would keep people she disagrees with close to her in the white house because she's open minded or something
I know every early on she was talking about possibly having a Republican Vice President before she wised up and went with Tim Walz and ran on his progressive ideas for about... three seconds till Nancy and the DNC told her to just do what Hillary did, as that worked for her and Kamela is obviously the second female president right now. /s
Seeing Walz as her VP pick was such a win and then everything started slipping away. If you listened to her speeches you'd start to notice she was slowly leaning more conservative, slowly backpedaling on a lot of Biden admin policies even. And for some reason she was absolutely obsessed with going on right wing media outlets.
I genuinely think she's rather well spoken but what a waste of potential.
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.
Ding ding ding! Trump went further right and got more support. DNC should go further left. People want radical change in 2024
checks calendar
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.
I can wait for the book about how Kamala and Walz felt about the Democrat machine and the turn they did to Republicans weeks after the strong start they had.
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.
Democrats called those Twitter users Russian trolls. They are now advocating to restrict social media so this cannot happen again.
Any social-media platform that serves as a propaganda outlet for a hostile foreign power should be shut down, and its entire C-suite imprisoned for a long stretch.
If you are consistently seeing the same messages on X as on RT, that's a problem similar to that of broadcasters of hostile propaganda in wartime. You say First Amendment; I say Lord Haw Haw. They're giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Well the actual numbers in the article above are misleading, as they talk in percentages of self-identified/registered voters. And what we have seen in this election is that there has been a big move of people who used to be (r) to moderates (according to NBC on their election coverage). So it's not making sense to compare percentage numbers.
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.
That’s why the DNC chair is calling Bernie Sander’s critique of the party’s platform bullshit right now
Holy crap. I read your link--the hubris of these DNC chairperson idiots to call names after losing so thoroughly. Its like they havent gotten the election results yet.
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.
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.
So left wing Democrats responded by sitting on their hands instead of voting, knowingly allowing the country to slide into whatever authoritarian hellhole that awaits us? Now that’s the definition of pettiness.
This election was lost in every measurable way. She did not lose because of leftists who didn't vote on principal. She lost because the working class overwhelmingly chose not to vote for her. Many of them voted for Trump instead. Many first-time voters voted for Trump. She thoroughly lost to him in every possible way.
running a far right war and risking losing the election and ending the republic all so you can take some far right wing bribes is a lot more petty.
We kept trying to warn you.
And every time - every last fucking time - anyone told you that moving to the right was going to cause people to stay home, you lot shot the messenger. Every time someone screamed the writing on the wall out loud, centrists who were so happy that the party was finally embracing genocide and Cheney were like "Russian! Tankie! Trumpist!"
I voted for Harris. You'll blame me anyway. Democrats will always shoot the messenger and double down on their simping for fascists.
Hear fucking hear 👏🏻 💯
The liberal tries to become an arbitrator, but he is incapable of solving the problems.
I said basically the same the article says a couple of days ago and was pelted with a gazillion negative votes. Centrists are averse to learning from mistakes, otherwise they wouldn't be centrists.
Yes, my friend was one of them. I was shocked when 2 weeks before election he told me he was planning on not voting.
I asked why and he cited holding the same position Isreal as Biden, and courting republicans like Cheney, saying that was not a good look for the party at all.
I told him it’s not ideal, but we need to vote to keep Trump out…. Sometimes we just have to be pragmatic.
He responded saying it’s the Dem establishment that keeps allowing a boogey man like Trump to rise so they can shove center right corporatists down our throats. He said he was abstaining from voting to send a message to the DNC, and followed it up with, “we survived a first Trump term, I’m sure we can survive a second.”
I asked why and he cited holding the same position Isreal as Biden, and courting republicans like Cheney, saying that was not a good look for the party at all.
I told him it’s not ideal
And this is what you don't get. There's a huge fucking gap between "not ideal" and "supporting genocide to the point that Dick Cheney likes you." And you didn't acknowledge it. You just belittled it with "not ideal." Because you couldn't admit that what Democrats were doing was monstrous and unconscionable.
Anyone who pulls this "you didn't get 100% of everything you want, but..." shit? They got 100% of everything they wanted. Especially the genocide support. And especially Cheney.
He responded saying it’s the Dem establishment that keeps allowing a boogey man like Trump to rise so they can shove center right corporatists down our throats. He said he was abstaining from voting to send a message to the DNC, and followed it up with, “we survived a first Trump term, I’m sure we can survive a second.”
I remember when I was 14.
Funny thing is your friends opinions are popular on lemmy.ml which makes it seem like foreign actors are pushing these talking points. They definitely worked in Trumps favor.
Sorry dude, the problem is well beyond "leftists" and sooner or later you'll need to confront that.
The average voter mindset is "which president will get me cheaper food?"
My parents get fed propaganda from Wechat (yes that Chinese app) saying democrats are letting too much illegal immigrants in, taking up too much resources.
We are legal immigrants, but shes doesn't see "illegal immigrant" is a dogwhistle about all immigrants that they dont like like black or brown people, or anyone they deem inferior.
Doesnt help the fact that Eric Adams and NYC democrats are building homeless shelters near Chinese American population.
My parents told me some of our relatives in NYC voted Trump, Asian Americans voting trump.
They say some Asian American co-workers at their workplace are supporting Trump.
My parent say "Its fine, we survived one term under trump"
Everyone who's a US Citizen in our household voted Kamala Harris. We tried. Our state PA still went red.
My US Citizen mom once said, "maybe we shouldn't vote for democrats, look at what they did in NYC (refering to homeless shelters)", and I reminded her about the Chinese Exclusion Act. So she vote Harris because I told her to. Like she didnt have a mind of her own. If her children turned out to be conservatives, she'd vote trump. Some people just dont care about politics. Similarly, some people have apolitical children but political parents, those children then vote for who their parents vote for.
We need to fix this voter apathy. Democracy is just broken.
(oh wow didnt mean to type a paragraph, sorry for the wall of text, election results still enraging me...)
Don't be sorry, everything you said is correct.
Blue state examples are often particularly confusing for the politically uninvolved, as Eric Adams is pretty close to a Republican. Once a state gets blue enough, anyone with ambition will just say they're Democrats and then do center-right stuff. Often the state parties are not ideological enough to deny the brand when it's just easier to make a bigger and bigger tent of insiders.
Honestly unfortunately mostly unrealistic: a systemic chage towards deliberative democracy (not just USAs broken electoral democracy) would be the best according to most political science. It's (way to) slowly happening in some European states (so the right shift may reverse that trend again). This indirection vie simple voting tends to lean towards populism and manipulation. Which got unfortunately incredibly obvious in the presidential election...
I’m not one of them, I voted a month or so in advance by mail.
But I wonder if some people are tired of the lack of change with Democrats in charge and believe that things need to get worse before they can get better.
They do, and they are fucking stupid for it.
Pretty much, although it's probably an exaggeration to call them Democrats. In reality most of them are likely unaffiliated with any party. But it was literally Harris's job to convince them to come out and vote for her and she failed at it. When a candidate loses an election, barring election interference, it's their fault. Harris fucked us all by running as a diet Republican. Odds are anyone in here reading this did everything we could to hand her the win, but she pissed it all away by trying to steal votes from the Republicans instead of convincing people that they needed to get off their asses and come vote for her.
For many, actively supporting Israeli genocide is something they simply can't support.
If there's anything that this election has proven, it's that there are A LOT of one issue voters in this country, across the board. They'll ignore everything else for the one issue they care about above all else. And when you only have two viable parties, that forced a black and white decision.
The fundamental solution is eradicating First Past the Post and getting ranked choice voting so we have a multitude of parties that are all more nuanced instead.
But that won't happen unless we abandon both of the major parties we have now, and they can't let that happen because that means they lose power.
What is Trump’s stated opinion on Israel and its war in Gaza? What is Trump’s stated opinion -and first term actions- on Muslims? Seriously, the Biden & Harris = “genocide” horseshit was 100% designed to disenfranchise Democrats. Congress votes on foreign aid. Congress is largely Republican. Protesters NEVER went after Republicans.
So now they get genocide and child rape. NICE
They all campaigned for Harris and mostly held their criticism to themselves. Harris is the one who decided to go campaign with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban.
“That’ll show ‘em!”
I seriously doubt left wingers were the difference in this election. I doubt there are significant enough numbers of far left people in Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin for it to have made any real difference.
I seriously doubt left wingers were the difference in this election
You'd be seriously wrong then. Even as of 2021 progressives were 8% of all voters. It will be even higher now.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-left/
Thats 15-20% of the democratic party. The dems cant win any election without them, and have no hope of replacing them with republicans or independents-- regardless of how much funding AIPAC tries to bribe you with.
Looks like you agree with the announcement 🤦
Harris relied on the left showing up for their rights and for democracy. But they will literally never show up. This is why the Dems will never, ever rely on the left showing up ever again. Dems will go hard center next election.
I don't think there's enough center left for them to go any harder center without going further left. They were already running on a bunch of right wing Republican policies. They've only got three options. Go harder right and actually become diet Republicans (all the oligarchy, but only half the fascism!). Stay exactly where they are. Or go left and return to being mildly progressive. They've shown that where they are currently is a losing proposition, so realistically their option is to try to appeal to the middle of the Republican base, or walk back some of their right shift of the last few decades. I don't think they're going to be able to successfully out Republican the Republicans so they've really only got one viable play.
They did, but it isn’t great knowing how much better they are than you? We can at least take comfort in their “moral high ground” even though they let a guy who explicitly stated he wanted to be a dictator become president.
It's not like they could've made their voices heard after she became President, you know?
It's not so much as that it collapsed as it was artificially inflated in 2020.
The drive for covid-safe vote by mail turned out far more people in 2020 than 2024 and that helped Biden.
Trump seems to have turned out just as many as before. Plus, I don't think any of the blue wall states changed their vote by mail policies.
Trump was pushing for in person voting in 2020 as well, that didn't change.
When you consider that left leaning folk are more likely to lean into voting apathy that the right-wing, the DNC were fools to assume they had all the left-wing votes in the bag without actually doing anything to appeal to them.
For Christ's sake, Harris got in because people wanted change over Biden, her campaign was for change, yet the first thing she says is she doesn't plan to do anything different to Biden - and if that's not a momentum killer, I don't know what is.
Why do people keep saying Democrats. These were not Democrats. They were political apathetics who were so dumb they didn't see a difference between an existential threat to America, convicted felon, and pathological liar... And a woman with a clean record.
No actual Democrat gave up voting for Harris because of the obvious reach to Republicans who saw that existential threat.
They gave up because of disinformation silos and the economy, stupid
Is this intended to be a parody of a No True Scotsman?
Voting Democrat temporarily does not make you a Democrat no differently than Liz Cheney voting for Harris or the first-time low-propensity voter who thinks "they're all the same, but since covid impacted me I'm getting rid of the current guy." People just voted against Trump more than they were voting for Biden or his policies. They just wanted him out and to try something different purely because of covid.
This time around, those people just said, "Both Sides." And sat out. Presumably because they drank the Russian Kool-Aid and live in media silos.
That said, I misread the title and paragraph not referencing Democrat, but Democratic support, so my mistake.
a woman with a clean record
People died in her prisons and she kept some after their term so she could use them as slave labor to put out wildfires
and she supported genocide while promising it would continue under her, not for nothing
Lmfao.
Talk about pure bullshit. People die in every prison everywhere. Maybe you should take a step back in time and look who drafted those laws in the first place.
Well have fun with the 100% support of genocide with Trump, buddy. I'm sure they'll treat your little protests with kid gloves lol. While she was seeking a permanent ceasefire, Trump was undermining it and telling Bibi to finish the job hahah.
That's not to mention what blood is on one's hands for Ukraine, too.
Poor form, but fuck the abstained for letting the rapist become president. Genocide bad. But genocide with a child rape seasoning is fine. Yeah fuck you guys
Imagine still not getting it.
We didn't vote for Trump. Harris knew (or should have known) we wouldn't support her genocide. Now she lost.
Yes, a Trump win is bad. But I would rather a Trump win than to let Democrats think I will vote for them no matter what.
Third party until they completely reform their shenanigans.
I'm not sure that the problem was going too far towards Republicans rather than not going far enough, because I expect that the leftists staying home stayed home in solidly blue states. I think that the political positions that many people here on Lemmy wanted Harris to take would have been extremely unpopular with the electorate.
With that said, it might have been impossible for Harris to move to the right convincingly, because she couldn't plausibly distance herself from Biden's unpopular policies. I wish the Democrats nominated someone who could have criticized Biden in a way that Harris could not.
Progressive left leaning policies are very popular
These problems are well beyond petty "leftists", but centrists will never engage in introspection about their failures.
Petty leftists weren't even a significant part of the problem, IMO. Biden is very unpopular, people didn't want more of the same, and Biden's vice president looked like more of the same. However, the Democratic party was too hierarchical to nominate the sort of candidate that they needed to nominate.
Hell, they nominated Biden himself even though his age could have given them a perfect excuse not to nominate a sitting president. He was only forced to step aside once his inadequacies were undeniably obvious to all, and even then he was like a child throwing a tantrum. History is going to remember him as the emperor with no clothes.
