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.
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.
We have a two party system which is inherently hyper polarizing as it paints everything as being black and white. It is an unbelievably stupid and undemocratic system, and unfortunately, nothing will ever improve until we replace our broken two party system with a modern multiparty democracy
The best way to do that is with some sort of ranked preference voting system. The sooner first past the post is replaced with a ranked choice system, the better.
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.
There are plenty of houses. Repossess then from Blackrock and sell them at normal rates
Building houses and giving out money WOULD have helped the housing problem. WTF?
I didn’t say it wouldn’t have helped. That wasn’t the point of the comment.
What I was getting at was that if she wanted to motivate voters, especially more progressive voters, then she needed to go bigger than “build some houses and hand out some money.”
What they wanted to hear from their candidate was a bolder and stronger solution like outlawing corporations from owning thousands of homes. Take a firm stand on corporate greed and corporate inflation. But she never talked about that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
everyone left of center demanded change.
I think you mean “everyone left of FASCISM” because liberals are center-right at best. Center left is Social Democracy (Bernie Sanders and AOC)
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.
agreed. Biden won because people voted against Trump. Every other time Biden ran, and there were many, he couldnt even win his home state. He was and is a joke of a politician, and his legacy is a Trump win becaus he was so unpopular.
“Never underestimate Joe Bidens ability to fuck everything up” –Barrack Obama.
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.
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.
Every time
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.
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
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.
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.
I was called a Russian asset in 2020 for saying this and even more in 2024.
It sucks so much to be so right about something so horrible.
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.
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.
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
FDR was the last President that prioritized the working class over the capital class
And he only did all that to head off a socialist revolution.
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.
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.
Ding ding ding! Trump went further right and got more support. DNC should go further left. People want radical change in 2024
checks calendar
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.
And in 2020. I think I can count on one hand the policies he ran on getting put into place, and I lost track of how many some Boogeyman kept it from happening.
But we always gave more weapons to Israel without question or congressional approval.
Yes, and to be fair, i think his failure wasn’t due to a lack of desire. Biden is an institutionalist, past the point of logic and reason. My understanding is that they can procedurally remove the filibuster without a super majority at the beginning of each session, but he failed to consider eliminating it until late in his presidency. He also still refuses to entertain expanding the court; I know he couldn’t do it, but if they had any sense at all, they’d be running on it. He has to much, “respect,” for these institutions to do anything to change them, even as they crumble in the face of fascism.
without question or congressional approval
Do you think Congress wouldn’t have approved it? The Democrats are mostly in AIPAC’s pockets, and the Republican would send them even more arms if they could, since they are openly, vocally pro-genocide.
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.
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.
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.
And normal media does not? The propaganda storm from newspapers in favor of Israel is beyond obvious. It is easy to explain why boomers love Israel and zoomers do not. One of them watches CNN or Fox.
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?
Why don’t you, if it’s so important to you? Be the change.
It’s important to me that when someone makes a big claim they back it up. The challenge is that the article doesn’t say what was claimed.
I didn’t make the claim therefore nothing for me to back up.
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.
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 ® to moderates (according to NBC on their election coverage). So it’s not making sense to compare percentage numbers.
Yea courting Republicans was a bad move IMHO. But she’s a establishment dem. So go figure.
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.
Everyone needs to let them know how strongly this article is nailing it.
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.
Also explains their fundraising campaigns
I’m on my knees begging you to just give us money
Me whispering this to high school gun club members in PA
Michael Scott
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
Dang, how did that work out? Oh? Alot like 2016 you say?
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.
Dems said to the left. “We offer you nothing and you owe us everything”.
Why are they surprised their entitled demand failed?
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”
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.
Saying the other guy’s bad and expecting that to be enough to get votes has failed a couple of times now. Those 14 million voters sent a message but I expect it to land on deaf ears.
Ah yes, you must vote for the one party every time in order to save democracy. Democracy is the thing where you only vote for them Dems right?
Trump said he’d be dictator on day one and Harris didn’t. It’s like choosing a surgeon who said they would only rape your unconscious body for only the first ten minutes of the surgery over one who would just perform the operation as usual. The first surgeon my have just claimed to be joking but the statement in itself is disqualifying. In this case voting Dem was literally a vote for democracy while previous elections were cruelty vs the status quo and voting was harm reduction.
Oh I agree. But you can not call the mess of a two party system in the states a democracy anymore.
