I’ll never understand why people think the people running the DNC aren’t total fucking liars that will say anything for money.
Beating trump isn’t hard.
But beating him while grifting a billion dollar campaign funded by the people your voting base hates is very difficult.
Unfortunately when confronted with the choice, the DNC has shown us three elections straight that they’ll always pick money over votes.
So we either need to leave the party or replace leadership.
If we don’t do either 2028 will be exactly the same as the last three elections.
Bold to assume we will have another election
Don’t you worry, you’ll have an election. Even the Germans had elections during their darkest times. That doesn’t mean you’ll have a choice though.
I lived thru 9/11 and 2016.
For over 20 years everytime a republican became president I’ve been told we’ll never have another election.
Maybe this time the wolf is real, but it’s a basic part of human psychology that more and more people will stop having a fear response everytime they hear “wolf”.
If we really don’t have an election in 2028, we’ll have a civil war before 2032. Maybe what comes after will be better than what we have now.
It sucks to live in interesting times, but that’s what’s happening.
This is literally the day after the election, don’t fucking tell me it’s too late to plan how to fix shit for 2028
If it were like 2016 I’d be less worried but taking into account what happened with the 2020 election and now facist rhetoric has reached new heights. They want King Trump and I am worried they will get it.
Shit. I was more worried in 2016.
He didn’t leave office peacefully, but he still left.
That’s how human brains work, we avoided the worst case scenario and life moved on. So we run into the same danger, but the response is lowered.
Which is why Dem turnout was so low this time
I’ve been saying this would happen for a long time, lots of people were.
The difference is the people running the DNC are just the people who can raise the most money. And the people with psychology degrees rarely have money as a priority.
We need to start having a party run by sociologists, psychologists, hell even go back to lawyers
The current strategy of 80s go-go Reaganites who only care about money ain’t working.
Why were you more worried in 2016? He literally attempted to stage a coup and it failed. That’s why he left. Did you expect him to start an armed insurrection by himself?
I don’t remember “this may be the last election ever” being a mainstream or credible narrative for any election prior to 2020… you know… The one he tried to make the last election ever.
Your comment is exceptionally naive, and probably the same sentiment that lead to Trumps win. Americans are completely ignorant to the reality of the situation; liberals included.
He might have said that line due to his mental decay, but it’s still troubling. I wouldn’t be surprized if he either used his new found powers to make himself the king of the US, or just discontinued the elections due to some sham “emergency measures”. If any of these comes true, the worlds only hope is that allegedly the US military is more left-leaning, at least compared to the US police that is packed full of ex-KKK members and ex-skinheads.
The main reason not to worry too much about Trump staying in office after this term is that his health makes it very unlikely that he will survive significantly longer than this term based on age alone. Or in other words even as a dictator for life he wouldn’t last much longer than roughly one term. The real question is what kind of damage he can do to the system within that time.
Maybe this time the wolf is real,
Project 2025 is a thing. They know better this time. We’re probably fucked.
For over 20 years everytime a republican became president I’ve been told we’ll never have another election.
I’d love see a credible source for that, because I don’t remember that at all.
I’m from Hungary, and we were told Fidesz won’t subvert democracy, won’t have total media control, won’t have censorship of queer media, and won’t have a “foreign agents” law. Now they’re planning with Fidesz governance until 2050 (!) at least.
Beating trump isn’t hard.
He won three out of four primaries, and two out of three general elections. It seems… pretty fucking hard.
Only hard for those as incompetent as the dnc
Well, he won his own party primaries too, and by a landslide. So it’s not just the DNC that can’t beat him. People are still trying to play by the old playbook where things like qualifications, competency, and sanity matter. Trump is out there doing something that absolutely works, telling the people whatever they want to hear, regardless of how stupid, impossible, or untrue it is.
Like him or not, one thing is very clear: Trump has basically redefined the political metagame.
Trump plays dirty. He’s threaten to run as an independent and split the R vote.
people have been beating this drum for decades and i, for today only, am wondering if it’s having any impact despite it being completely true and easy to see.
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Find your local/state Dems, get involved with them, figure out who the conservatives are and replace them… It’s not hard, like 10 people vote in those elections… They are the ones who elect DNC leadership, take the local and state parties, take the DNC
Lol, you haven’t heard what the “victory fund” really is yet, have you?
The state parties have to toe the line, or they’re abandoned.
Terrible strategy if the plan is getting Dems in office, great move if you’re blocking any real progress in exchange for
bribesdonations.They’ll be abandoned by the big corporate donors, but that’s the point… They need a message so popular that real people will support them with money and votes
We just started skipping the step where we pick a candidate people want to vote for, and jump straight to fundraising and then never get around to focusing on using the money to get votes.
The modern DNC literally only cares about money and it keeps letting trump get elected
So we either need to leave the party or replace leadership.
I think at this point, leaving is the only way forward. The DNC/ the DCCC have shown that even given effectively infinite money, they don’t have the competence to win elections. They are always willing to rat-fuck popular candidates in favor of establishment candidates. There is no fixing this with Citizens United in place.
Find your local/state Dems, get involved with them, figure out who the conservatives are and replace them… It’s not hard, like 10 people vote in those elections… They are the ones who elect DNC leadership, take the local and state parties, take the DNC
Oh wise one, what would you have done different? Explain the ways to me so we can understand.
MOVE LEFT DAMMIT
Capitalism will continue shifting right until there is only fascism.
The beatings will continue until morale improves
Historically, yes. Thankfully, history is known to not repeat itself.
do you risk nominating candidates who then can’t appeal
Here’s a wild idea. Let the voters nominate their own candidates in a primary without tons of interference from the DNC and super delegates. Or you know, just allow a primary at all.
Nooooo, can’t have that. Then you guys might pick the wrong candidate, you see?
Exactly. They’d rather lose with their chosen candidate than win with ours.
They pulled Biden out of retirement to beat Bernie.
I say this as a woman who is pretty bummed to say this.
I don’t think women candidates can win over enough men to get votes on a national level. Radicalized men aren’t ever going to empathize with women and sure as hell aren’t going to vote for one anytime soon.
Obviously there is a lot more than that, but it’s a big part of it.
I still think it was policy and not gender :/
But I understand that the evidence isn’t exactly clear on this.
Exactly.
Harris was dead last on my preferred candidate list in 2020, and it had nothing to do with her gender and everything to do with how little I trusted her due to her background as a cop. And she got hammered in the primaries that year, so I’m certainly not alone. I didn’t like her performance as VP (she had a pretty poor public opinion score up until she became the candidate for Pres), and she certainly didn’t convince me that she had any interesting policies this time around.
Likewise for Hillary Clinton. She was dead last on my preferred candidate list long before she won the nomination, and she didn’t get any better after winning.
In both 2016 and 2024, I voted for a third party because neither major candidate interested me (and it didn’t matter because Trump won my state by ~20% in each election anyway). I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people who would have voted Democrat didn’t bother voting or voted for a third party because they found her uninteresting. Her policies suck, her campaign sucked, and she has pretty much no charisma. It has nothing to do with her being a woman and everything to do with her being a crappy candidate.
So my vote is on a mixture of:
- no real primary, just a candidate switch (feels very undemocratic)
- poor, vague policies, especially on the issues people seem to care about most (inflation)
- very little charisma
- weird obsession with getting celeb endorsements instead of appealing to the average person
Being female doesn’t register at all.
On one hand, I get it. On the other hand, the other choice is orders of magnitudes worse in every category.
the other choice is orders of magnitudes worse
Both can be true.
The other side being worse doesn’t necessarily motivate your base to support you, you need to actually motivate them to get out and vote. It also doesn’t necessarily motivate people on the fence either. If you aren’t an attractive candidate, you can’t rely on the unattractiveness of your competitor to win you the election.
It seemed the DNC banked on the public caring that Harris is a woman of color and popular among celebrities, and I doubt the public particularly cares about any of that. Her policies were weak and she came off as not really having a plan, or in other words, riding on Biden’s coattails. That’s not a compelling argument…
Plus Biden had many of the same issues as Harris when he ran… he didn’t even want to run. The DNC dragged him out of retirement. I think after the Hillary and Harris data it’s become pretty clear a woman is not becoming president any time soon… not even sure if one could win the primary in the next 8 years after the trauma of this election.
It would be foolish to say that gender wasn’t a factor, but I don’t think it was the deciding factor.
It’s definitely both but it’s starting to look clearer that a man can potentially overcome the potential policy issue and a woman just can’t.
Apparently the gop doesn’t need a policy to win. Harris lost to someone who just promised vague amounts of success without literally a single concrete plan in place. Maybe the dems just need to treat the voters like they’re the dumbest fucking people on the planet and promise everything will turn to rainbows and unicorn shit with nothing to back it up.
Legalize weed, provide universal health care, give a job with a million dollar salary to every single citizen, create high speed rail across the entire country, fix the ecosystem, stop every war on earth, approve an annual day where you can legally slap your boss, etc etc. Then if asked for specifics just say they have concepts of a plan.
Why should dems bother doing anything concrete? Seems like the country is dumb enough to vote for anyone who tells people what they want to hear.
Because dems are smart, and care about things, so their party has to give qt least half a chance actual policy.
And this time around, Harris ran on republican lite. Courting Liz Cheny, anti-immigration, those that cared about those things were demotivated.
Americans choosing Trump twice instead of a moderate woman candidate is all the proof I need that the country won’t have a woman become president in my lifetime.
I don’t think Hillary Clinton was rejected primarily because she was a woman but primarily because she was about as establishment as it gets in an election that was shaping up early on as an anti-establishment election.
Omar would have done better than Harris. And she’s the ‘scary communist’. And Muslim. But she has actual policy and very clearly communicates it. That’s literally the baseline for any candidate for any race, and somehow Harris fucked it up. Stop running candidates who only see regular people on TV and maybe you’ll get a win.
This election was not decided on clearly communicated policy because Trump has not clearly communicated anything in his life.
On the contrary. He told voters that ‘those people’ are they reason they’re hurting and he would fix it. That’s a very clear message, and one a lot of people responded to.
Harris didn’t even seem to realize there was a problem.
I think a lot of people just realized that. I would be surprised to see one even do well in a primary in the next decade.
Well yeah. Trump was campaigning on discrimination. I don’t know how you can measure what percent of it was racism and what percent of it was sexism plus a little bit of xenophobia and various other such b*******.
I do think there is hope for women candidates because there’s a lot of women in the country and you don’t need to get the majority of men to vote for you. If Harris or Hillary had a platform as good as Bernie Sanders, I think either of them could have won, easily. Of course that’s just my opinion, and the only way to actually find out would be to give that a go next time around.
Radicals by definition aren’t the majority.
Women don’t empathize with men, women treat men as disposable, men are blamed for everything wrong in the country. The Ds didn’t even think to try to appeal to men until the end when they realized “oh shit, we actually need to make an effort to get male votes” It’s not a surprise that Trump appealed to men, he was the candidate talking to them.
Honestly, I’m about to get downvoted and I don’t mean to be offensive but I’m going to say how I feel.
I’m sorry men are having a hard time, but I don’t care. Men have been on top of the world for all of history and now they are upset because they have to share.
Everyone else has been having a hard time for much longer and if men are having a bad time right now, I guarantee everyone else is suffering a lot more.
And factually, they don’t need male voters to win. Female voters have outnumbered men since 1964 which should tell you something. Women are willing to vote for men, but men can’t be fucking bothered to support women. I’m done walking on eggshells around male egos because men can’t handle their emotions.
Note: I’m aware not every man or woman is like this. I’m generalizing to make a point. There are a lot of great men in my life who don’t feel emasculated when women ask to be respected. And, there are plenty of women that are hurtful to each other.
What primaries?
Blow it up. The DNC is never going to get it, just blow up the party.
Sounds nice. How?
Seems halfway done to me
Why do the republicans love the RNC no matter what and the democrats hate the DNC no matter what?
For a long time, they didn’t. The RNC was legendarily attacked by the Tea Party movement, by Trump during the 2016 primaries, and continued to be slated by MAGA up to the point it was wholly taken over by Trump.
Because one delivers on its promises. They promise hate and divisiveness and deliver in kind. Democrats promise hope when what we need is action.
Maybe it’s the fact that America’s national character is to lust for domination and revenge. Compassion cannot win because America despises it.
What action do you think we should do? Real talk. The government has been taken over a long time ago by anti-democracy peeps, how do we get it back?
The DNC suppresses leftist voices and demands leftist votes.
I don’t love or hate the DNC but I do hate the RNC.
I don’t love or hate either, I’m largely disappointed by both. I’m disappointed w/ the RNC for allowing Trump to happen, and I’m disappointed with the DNC for forcing Harris to happen.
Since my vote is a lock-in for Trump (he won w/ like ~60% of the vote in each election), I vote for third party/independent candidates, because both major party candidates are completely unappealing. Since my vote won’t matter anyway, I instead choose to vote my conscience and show that throwing my vote away has more value than picking one of the two major party candidates.
Our voters constantly and consistently reject candidates and policies that only benefit billionaires and their stooges, what could that ever mean to the electability of our candidate who fawns over Reagan staffers?
That highly organized distraction in gaza really worked
Harris is more progressive than every single person who voted for Jill Stein. It’s an incredibly low bar.
In a sane world, literally anyone would have beaten trump. A rotten ham sandwich would have won a write in vote over trump.
I do not blame Democrats for running a bad campaign.
I blame the jellyfish stimulus eater organisms that insist they’re the same species as me who were “not impressed” by Harris but were dazzled by the funny orange meme man with the dick sucking dance.
At this point I don’t hate Trump supporters any more. They’re just dogs. I hate the left for allowing us to get to this stage.
I hope the apocalypse is painful for everyone. It would be the first instance of justice our species would experience.
This attitude is generally insane.
“I don’t hate racists, I hate people who hate genocide so much they can’t stomach voting for it.”
Look, I voted for Harris, but it wasn’t easy. Because that blood is on this administrations hands. The party is moving further and further away from my ideals every election. Because they keep moving right. On immigration, tax breaks, health care, foreign policy. She was courting the fuckin neocons!!!
I understand how frustrating it is, because you’re right—not allowing trump to win is better than allowing him. But it’s not so straightforward when your vote is support for something you can’t stomach. Can you understand how that is difficult for people? I sure can. But I also understand how many people stand to get hurt under an authoritarian regime, so i sacrificed my morals again to do what I can to somewhat stem the bleeding.
But that’s not an easy decision to make. Much harder than, say, blaming the racists for racism, and not the people who are anti-racist.
The dismissal and condescension towards Arab-Americans who were upset over Gaza was fucking insane. That isn’t going to be forgotten.
But it’s not so straightforward when your vote is support for something you can’t stomach. Can you understand how that is difficult for people?
No, I honestly can’t understand that. That whole mindset that doing nothing is somehow more in line with your morals than doing something even though both can have equally bad outcomes is incredibly bizarre to me and reminds me of stupid moral exercises like the trolley problem.
Here’s how I put it elsewhere in this thread:
You have two choices, one is to poison a town’s water supply without telling them.
The other choice is poisoning the town’s water supply, not telling them, and then shooting the survivors as they flee the town.
No question that slaughtering fleeing survivors is worse. But either way, you’re being asked to sign your name to poisoning innocent people.
You can only see “you’re voting for slaughtering fleeing townspeople!” But plenty of people cannot stomach voting for poisoning the townspeople in the first place.
You’re both looking at the same situation but seeing different elements.
The nuance comes in here: both are valid stances to take. If you don’t vote “against” shooting the survivors, there’s a greater chance survivors will be shot. But voting for the people poisoning the water supply is untenable for many, and not understanding why that is, is a huge problem.
But plenty of people cannot stomach voting for poisoning the townspeople in the first place.
But they are not doing anything against that by abstaining from voting. They are still giving their consent to the poisoning, just by doing nothing instead of doing something, that is literally the only difference.
My whole point is that the “inaction is better than action” bias when evaluating options is bizarre to me.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_bias seems to be the term used for the phenomenon.
But they’re not throwing support behind it. That’s exactly my point.
The option they were given was either “vote for this or do nothing.” Yes, the doing nothing option meant it was more likely a worse scenario would take root.
But no matter what, we were being asked to vote for genocide. Genocide 1.0 or genocide 2.0. That cannot be on the people who don’t want it in the first place.
I definitely get what you’re saying and I agree. The 2.0 option was best avoided. But if that means supporting the 1.0 devs…? It goes completely against peoples moral fabric to support it. Even if that means things could get “worse.” Which, let it not be forgotten that we are still talking about an ongoing genocide.
Not to mention, Kamala’s weak, ineffectual waffling on the issue was still her in campaign mode. That’s best case scenario, and still highly unlikely to be followed through on.
It was a no-win scenario. But we all lost even worse, and everyone understands that. But it was a completely hopeless, no-win quandary.
I hate the left for allowing us to get to this stage.
I’m curious what you think the left did.
Well maybe if you could fucking read…
I do not blame Democrats for running a bad campaign.
I do:
- no primary
- select the candidate who dropped out early due to terrible polling in 2020
- have pretty vague set of campaign policies
- go after celebs instead of appealing to people facing actual issues
What they should have done is:
- run a primary, with Biden choosing to retire instead of seek reelection
- select the candidate voters actually want
- have a clear set of campaign policies
- appeal to everyday people with even an ounce of charisma
The main issue people seemed to care about was inflation. The Democratic candidate really needed to attack that head on by explaining why inflation got bad, how it’s better, and what they’ll do to help wages continue to catch up. But instead, Harris made vague promises to “fight price gouging” (that’s not what’s actually going on) and give handouts to people to buy houses.
That said, there’s no way any Democrat would’ve won my state, so I voted my conscience by picking a third party instead of picking either unqualified candidates. I just wonder how many people felt completely uninspired by Harris like I was, and I can’t help but think that cost her the election.
Once they decided to skip the primary and started getting contributions to a Biden/Harris campaign, it became virtually impossible to select anyone else once Biden dropped out. Only a Harris campaign could take over the money already raised for the campaign. Any other candidate would have to start fundraising a few months before the election starting from nothing, and would have been at a massive disadvantage.
voted my conscience by picking a third party instead of picking either unqualified candidates
Are you implying there was a qualified third party candidate? Is this an oxymoron?
Once they decided to skip the primary and started getting contributions to a Biden/Harris campaign, it became virtually impossible to select anyone else once Biden dropped out.
Right, and that was the first mistake, they should have held the primary.
Are you implying there was a qualified third party candidate? Is this an oxymoron?
I thought Chase Oliver was pretty decent. I especially like his immigration policies, I like that he’s pretty young, and he seems to tick off both parties equally, so hopefully both parties would have to actually work together to get something he can sign. I highly doubt he’d get any of his policies done (except maybe ending tariffs, which would help a bit w/ prices), so the main benefit of having a third party in the White House is as a moderator between the two parties.
He had absolutely no chance to win, especially since his own party largely turned on him (I guess he wasn’t conservative enough or whatever), but I felt he was a decent protest vote.
I resent the idea that people need to be dazzled and appealed to in order to not sell the country out. Absolutely no integrity. No intelligence.
Hence why I called all of you stimulus eater organisms. Paramecium. Fucking amoebas.
The recent election and 2016 say otherwise. When Biden said he’d follow Sanders’ policies, he won the biggest margins ever in American history.
Fascism is tempting for undecideds and people scared of the future. Some dude says “hey you’re hurt, I’ll help you” you might not care what the costs are as long as you feel safer.
We could have built a policy of “Everyone is hurt, everyone needs a leader, I can be a leader for those Trump is targeting.” She could have been a silver bullet to Trump’s thick skull. She could have done so many things differently than Biden or Trump, and she played to the middle ground.
And the middle ground was still pro-border protections, fracking, not listening to the marginalized people Trump hates, and how the policies could improve America at the cost of the trolley problem of Gaza. Instead we’re getting none of her promises, but Trump is getting all of his high demands for order and fascism.
You don’t need to “dazzle” to win elections, you just need to be very clear about what you’ll actually do if elected. Existing isn’t enough to win votes.
I did quite a bit of research before the election, and I still can’t tell you anything concrete that Harris plans to do, not even in the first 100 days of being elected. Here’s the best I got:
- ban “price gouging” - what does this mean? Price caps? I don’t think she’s that crazy, this feels empty
- taxes - these are somewhat concrete, but new revenue will likely be low because wealthy people are good at avoiding taxes
- immigration - one of her major jobs as VP was border security, yet she didn’t do much, so I question how committed she actually is to her proposed changes, nor do I know if she wants to increase or decrease net immigration
So, her plans are either vague or seem ineffective, so what would she actually do in office? It’s not clear, and it seems like she’s running just because the DNC needs someone to run. I don’t want a President who is running just because their party said so, I want a President who sees actual problems and has a plan to resolve them.
That said, my vote absolutely doesn’t matter because my state has consistently gone to Republicans, and will consistently go to Republicans for the foreseeable future, so I don’t know what people in swing states think. But what I do know is that her campaign was entirely uninteresting.
I have to say that by all means, Harris’ campaign was not a failure by any means. She rocked most of the debates and her speeches were insane. Her only issue was the lack of a proper procedure for being elected at primary candidate, and she focused on ideologies that alienated her from the more centrist and slightly red leaning views.
But despite what has been being spammed in the lemmy communities for months now, her way of being elected was just the old way, that was replaced by the current primaries. I don’t agree that they didn’t hold another primary but, I also can totally see the argument of “We can’t just hold back the election process because someone dropped out”
Harris’ main campaign goals alienated a crucial part of the voters though, which was the side that had given up on Trump but had no valid alternative. I had so many friends that if they gave a reason for voting for trump it was “I don’t really want to, but I have no other choice, and there is no way I can vote for her because of what her standing is with rights are”.
I don’t personally agree with the ideology but, sadly she needed those votes the people who didn’t vote for trump, ended up doing write in instead of voting blue, because coming out super strong with that as the main argument more or less pushed them back into voting Trump.
there is no way I can vote for her because of what her standing is with rights are".
What does this mean? Do your friends actually talk like that?
some yes, granted its missing a comma but yea, they want to dodge giving an actual reason, most of the time its just a rights issue. or sometimes they just say they don’t level with her
Which rights are they talking about here?
That’s the point I was making. They never say what rights, and never clarify when asked again.
