Harris spent like the last 6 weeks of the campaign slowly losing ground and Trump spent it slowly gaining. It's just as likely Harris would have lost by more if she'd had more time.
Like it or not, the more time Harris spent doing interviews and getting out on the campaign trail, the less people liked her.
A primary might have helped insofar as she would have lost it like last time.
I think the dems have been losing for decades in essentially every political arena because the repubs have cartoon villain mastermind Mitch McConnell pulling the strings and the dems have fucking Nancy Pelosi behind the curtain fixing races against Bernie, etc.
A lot of people are playing the blame game right now. I haven't seen much planning for how to do better going forward. Maybe that's part of the problem.
DNC ran right wing wedge issues, not trusted on economy. A vote for Trump gets a new try at the economy and the wedge issues for a moderate. like it seems pretty fucking obvious to me but maybe I'm just some peon sycophant I dunno.
Democrats have to get a hold on the immigration issue. The only countries in this world where progressive policies actually thrive is where leftwing parties have adopted stricter immigration stances (e.g. Denmark).
it's funny how here in Sweden the left has historically always been against immigration because of fear of breaking labour balance. the right won the race under the "new right" slogan among young voters; immediately invited millions of immigrants - there are literal interviews where the left still says they are against immigration while the right says they are pro immigration, as well as the right-wing economist saying in an interview that immigration will help higher competition among workers which will let employers lower wages and strain the welfare system so it can be dismabtled. immigration in turn had all the effects expected plus a huge upswing in crime, and the right then went out in media saying it's the left who brought all the immigrants here while the left is defending themselves by saying the immigrants are here now and we have to take care of them; which just reinforces the lie that the left invited all immigrants - and all this has accumulated to the nazi party getting a shit ton of votes and are now kicking out essential workers en masse who are all the immigrants they can touch (aka. non-problem immigrants, because the problematic immigrants can't be touched), and just talking statistics about their success of booting people out of the country while our healthcare and service field collapses. which i no doubt they will somehow blame on the left even if the left currently has no power.
it's just funny how the left is always to blame for rightwing shenanigans.
Isn't the right-wing Sweden Democratic party continuing its ascension and partially through its hard-line anti-immigrant stance? It seems they've held that stance for some time.
Sweden strikes me as sitting at the top of a long slide looking down.
With all due respect to her history and career, I don’t give a fuck what Nancy Pelosi thinks about any of this. I don’t want to see her or hear about her or any other 80+ year old establishment liberal for the rest of their lives. They did their time. Now it’s time to retire from public service and live a cushy life with the grandkids and let the next generation take over.
Bernie has been registered Independent until 2015 when he started his campaign for pres. He's not part of the Democrat establishment (as evidenced by the way they deliberately dismanted his campaign to favor Hillary).
Now Nancy wants open primaries at the DNC? Unlike the last 20 years when she was one of the kingmakers in the party?
This fucking party needs to push these fuckers into their graves and get on with preparing for the nightmare they will be contending with over the next 4+ years.
Nancy can fuck right off until she can't fuck off anymore. She got hers.
She only says this because she's probably going to die in office from old age or some dipshit republican trying to harm her.
She had no intentions of saying/advocating any of this before 2024. 2016 would have been the time to restructure it fully to get more opinions on how to beat Trump, but the DNC argued in court "We have the right to ratfuck our primaries, we're not under any legal obligation to let the public decide."
I think she’s partly right, but also, if she was the one who ultimately succeeded in getting Biden to drop out when he did, then isn’t it reasonable to expect that he would have dropped out earlier if she had pushed him out earlier? Which would make it her fault. Fuck, I don’t even know anymore. I don’t have a lot of confidence that the Democratic party will learn the right lessons from this loss.
if she was the one who ultimately succeeded in getting Biden to drop out when he did, then isn’t it reasonable to expect that he would have dropped out earlier if she had pushed him out earlier?
No. His debate performance is what pushed it over the edge. That's when a concerted effort began to get him out.
October 7th spilled a bunch of gasoline on the ground. (Almost immediately after that day his polling trailed Trump's.)
His debate performance dropped a lit cigarette.
In my opinion, you really needed both of those things for him to drop out. A physically struggling Biden that's polling at 60% would've stayed in the race. A Biden with an excellent debate performance that was polling at 45% would've stayed in the race.
Whatever they think they need to do, they need to do it or get the fuck out of the way and let someone else in there. Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden were not exciting candidates. Too many Democrats didn't like Hilary Clinton from the get-go. Joe Biden won because he wasn't the previous buffoon. Then was repeatedly slandered for 4 years by said buffoon over the economy, which was/is mainly suffering because of the way it was handled previously by said buffoon. When corporations can buy candidates and blatant lies are okay to broadcast because of "free speech" this was always going to be the inevitable outcome.
Pelosi pushed Biden out of office, and now believes he didn't submit fast enough. She takes no responsibility for anything. If Harris only had a few more weeks...right Nancy?
She's not saying Harris needed a few more weeks. She's saying Biden never should have gone for a second term, and they should have had a real primary process to choose a better candate. Which was a mistake I pointed out when Biden announced his second run.
Any Democrat can run in a primary. Hell, Democrats even let Independants run. There was nothing stopping Pelosi or her chosen candidate to begin a run. What did she want Biden to do? Write speeches for them? These campaign runs start years in advance, does Nancy expect Joe to know what she's thinking in the future?
They are all complicit. There could have easily been a primary. They could have easily not backed him as the candidate. But they allowed him to wait and they approved no democratic process for electing the next candidate. Zero accountability from the democrats as usual.
Perfect summary. Harris did a superb job of instantly uniting them under her banner the second it became obvious Biden was fucked. This navel gazing from Pelosi is utter nonsense.
North of 10M voters who turned out for Biden didn't show up for Harris. She was a great candidate but the democrats message didn't resonate after the years of inflation.
My eggs are more expensive too. So are everyone elses in the world. I just blame Putin for destabilising and the stores for blatant price gouging the second they felt they could.
My eggs are more expensive too. So are everyone elses in the world. I just blame Putin for destabilising and the stores for blatant price gouging the second they felt they could.
Exactly this. Harris probably would have overseen the shift of the prices going back down and the "muh economy and inflation" Republicans wouldn't have had as big of an argument for 2028.
Ukraine winning, Trump dies from health issues/arrested for his crimes (long shot on the last one), and doing her best to secure abortion and queer protections, she would have been great for her second term.
And now we get nothing but the worst of both worlds.
The Times reported Pelosi also took issue with Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders saying, after Harris' loss, that "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
"Bernie Sanders has not won," she said. "With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don't respect him saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working-class families."
She's right, Bernie Sanders has not won, but neither did the liberal technocrats. American voters don't want social democracy, but they don't want liberal technocracy, either. They want populism, or at least the appearance of populism. She can piss and moan all she wants, but it doesn't change the fact that liberalism/neoliberalism is not popular, at least not popular enough.
The liberals will do what they always do: blame the American people. They love America, at least technically. They love the theory of America, the concept of America, the mechanisms, but they hate Americans. They can't stand the troglodytic unwashed, uncouth, irreverent, ignorant masses.
Sanders is a populist, though -- frankly, a much more genuine one than Trump. Populism isn't always right-wing, nor is it always demagoguery.
Sanders' problem is that (again, being an actual populist instead of a fake one), his platform is very unprofitable for the corporate elite, including the media, and so they sabotage and character-assassinate him in every way they can.
That's true, but he's not the right kind of populist for America.
I remember going to a Bernie rally in Salt Lake City in 2016, during the Democratic primaries. The line to get into the rally was so long it took us an hour and to get in. He got a lot of people excited, and I was one of them. To this day it was the only political rally I've ever been to.
But as popular as Bernie was, and still is, among a certain segment of America, he is equally hated and despised by other segments. Trump is the (faux) populist America chose. It's because he's an unapologetic capitalist. Americans would never vote for a socialist, even a populist one.
The liberals will do what they always do: blame the American people. They love America, at least technically. They love the theory of America, the concept of America, the mechanisms, but they hate Americans. They can't stand the troglodytic unwashed, uncouth, irreverent, ignorant masses.
I think it's more accurate to say that they love American profits, personally.
If they loved America or the American people they would have done more than the bare minimum for the middle and lower classes over the last 25y.
Seeing as he won the popular vote with increased numbers of POC votes, I'm not sure racism played a part, but keep smoking that copium and never demand the DNC self-reflect