“If the purges [of potential voters], challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.”
"[…] Democracy can win* despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.
And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK."
So the new campaign is that the DNC did nothing wrong, they were just thwarted by voter suppression?
Couldn’t be they completely fucked up by campaigning to a center that doesn’t exist any more. The DLC’s triangulation bullshit is dead and needs to stay dead. Every Dem from the Clinton era needs to get that through their damn heads, they should have retired a decade ago anyway.
You are wrong, there’s a heavy center, i happen to be one and so I half of PA. Kamala was my choice but the dems made key mistakes by 1. Running a black woman - waaaaay too many middle of the line hicks can accept a white dude dem, but after Obama there’s a seriously sore spot for blacks and the push for equality. 2. Women as presidents - we have entire boomer sleepytime cities here like Johnstown that is all old people and they do not want a woman let alone a black woman as president. That was made very clear with the dem party and Hilary so running another woman against Trump was bound to fail. 3. Lgbtq+ and Trans - The amount of ads bombarding us with lgbtq+ shit, the news, the internet, turned off what used to be an extremely homophobic state. We are talking Pennsylvania being Salem for gays in the 90s. We have a ton of old country Slavic people and Italians here, they do NOT want to hear that shit.
There were other mistakes such as the last minute rope-a-dope and even people in the Dem party hating Schumer and Pelosi (guilty) the whole base needs a refresh. If they don’t make centrist changes and keep running on far left policies, we won’t have a chance in the future. I’m not saying, don’t fix infrastructure, but major handouts are going to hurt us in the long run. I’m not saying gays and Trans don’t deserve rights, everyone does, just shut the fuck about it, run on things that the people all have in common, not just a small sect that people don’t want shoved in their face.
If you are an atheist, it’s the same as having God shit shoved in your face. Do you, but shut the fuck up about it and move on like a normal person, don’t come knocking on my door and throwing you bible in my face. Keep shit respectable and people will respect you, but the whole last 8 years of “well if you don’t love gay and Trans people, you are homophobic/transphobic…” no I’m not, I just don’t want to hear about it every day, I’m not out here promoting pussy and how great it is and if you don’t love it, you are pussyphobic. It’s just been too much of the things I listed above and everyone got tired of hearing about it. That’s from my POV anyways. I still voted Democrat but I will be moving my party to independent after the next presidential race if there are still geezers in the Dem party leadership or of they they try running a woman again. I’m sick of having to side with a bunch of shit I don’t care about because it’s the party of less evil. I served my country in the military, I’m over our politics, it’s time for a new generation to give a fuck or it will get worse for you. I’m good. Godspeed weirdos. Edit phone rant and I agree with the person above me just not on the dead centrist theory.
Nonsense, Kamala had 0 left leaning policy and also never mentioned trans people in her entire campaign. She tacked to the centre further than Biden on every single issue, not disputing your other anecdotes but you are seriously misled if you think the Democrats are anything except centre-right.
Republicans who want to round up minorities, prevent women from having the ability to abort fetuses that result from rape, and prevent any and all lgbtq people from existing in public.
Calling them the lesser of two evils shows you have no fucking clue.
That or you are lying like most right wingers and centrists.
‘Oh I have to be a nazi now because you called me one 😭’
You are aware that the T in LGBTQ+ stands for Trans right? Cuz it seems like you dont
https://glaad.org/harris-accountability-tracker/
Here, educate yourself
I just looked through all of that and there’s nothing as you describe from her campaign itself. Even outside of her campaign there is only lip service and commemoration for the victims of the pulse terror attack.
Unless you count saying trans people should receive medically necessary treatment as supportive? It’s a literal non-statement, words that mean very little, her support here is aesthetic at best.
I beg of the Dems to please stop the cope and start making moves.
I really hate that this is the top comment. Two things can be true at the same time. Dems messed up in the previous election and narrowly lost against the worst candidate to ever run for president,AND voter suppression is real and will become a much larger problem going forward. Under Trump, nothing is stopping Republicans from enacting voter suppression laws the likes of which you have never seen before. Trump won’t need to steal the election for his third term (yes he will run if he’s still alive!), because the states will do it for him by suppressing the votes.
Now you may think that you are protected from a third term by the constitution. You may think you are protected against things like poll taxes, tests etc. But do you honestly believe the SC is on your side?
The Dems messed up this election. Voter suppression will ensure that there will no longer be fair elections in the future.
You’re still worried about fair elections? The concept of elections is on the line right now. Setting up the fights on Panama, Greenland, and Canada, is about making sure the US won’t stand against Russia/China, and no one else is capable. At that point, there won’t be any more elections by the people. Just the oligarchs that agree with dear leader.
My only protection is that prevailing winds tend to put me upwind of likely nuclear targets for most of the year.
It’s a combination of everything, DNC has been spineless and bought out by corps, voter suppression techniques from Republicans skewed votes in their favor, white rural voters came out in droves to vote for trump, the Harris campaign failure to meaningfully address the genocide or get enough messaging out to address people’s financial troubles.
The genocide voters are idiots. Harris spent too much time trying to court “moderate” republicans.
Congrats, the dems passively let a decades old tradition of passively supporting Israel go mildly unchanged and the idiots let a genocide accelerationist into power. Not stopping a genocide is not the same as accelerating it.
For being a supposed liberal, you seem to have a hard problem accepting the validity of other people’s beliefs.
Voting is a cultural thing. People have different beliefs about voting. Your way is not the only way. Your way is not the “right” way simply because it is your way.
Some people, like yourself, vote looking forward. They pick which candidate they believe would be the best. They view voting as a job interview. Others vote looking backwards. They seek to hold their leaders accountable. They view voting as a performance review.
Which way is “correct?” Neither. There is no “correct” way to vote. And it’s extremely chauvinistic and close-minded to assume that your way is the only way.
In truth, any system or movement needs both types of voters. You need a balance of both types of voters, otherwise a political party is lost. You need forward-looking voters to win elections. You need backward-looking voters to ensure that winning elections actually does your party any good. If you only have backward-looking voters, you’ll never win an election. If you only have forward-looking voters, you’ll end up with leaders so ineffectual that they don’t accomplish anything even if they do win.
Stop shaming your brothers and sisters simply because they have a different voting culture than yourself. Your beliefs are just one side of a coin. Try to keep an open mind. Try to actually earn the title “liberal.”
Your whole argument here reads like a middle-school debate kid trying to apply moral relativism for the first time.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how you vote. But sometimes, like now, it does. People have a moral responsibility for their actions, including how they vote. Those who vote for fascists are responsible for empowering those same fascists. There’s no way to weasel out of that.
It all sounds a bit like saying that the Civil War was just a difference in opinion about cultures. But politics has real consequences for real people’s lives. Sometimes you have to make choices, and the idea that they’re all somehow morally equivalent is a load of nonsense.
What the fuck are you on about? I’m talking about voter suppression and progressive masquerading astroturf dissuading people from voting, not talking about how people should vote. Pay the fuck attention to the conversation in the thread.
The end result of progressives being dissuaded from voting because “Genocide Joe is not stopping Israel’s genocide” and other voter suppression tactics has resulted “make the genocide even worse Don” getting into office.
The voter suppression problem is a symptom of the spineless and bought out DNC problem. Dems should be talking about nationwide voting laws and how red states aren’t democratic and don’t have legitimate rule of law constantly, but that would be too radical and unpredictable for the corps to feel comfortable with, so instead they focus their legislative efforts on just cutting checks to all the state governments for this infrastructure initiative or that climate bill or whatever, which helps assholes like Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp run the systems of patronage and oppression that keep them in power (also, those checks are eventually ending up in the corps’ accounts, so they’re happy too).
They don’t talk about voting laws during the campaign because it loses.
Contrary to popular belief, they’re not idiots.
If you get all the corporations to turn against you, especially the media companies, you lose. Ask Bernie.
They’re not doing everything right, certainly, but it’s also not a simple problem to solve. There are some very fine lines to walk for Dems. Kamala tried to walk those lines and failed.
She offered a $50k credit towards buying your first house. Does Gen Z remember that?
Meanwhile Trump could shout “hail Hitler” tomorrow and all the corporate media (and then 50% of the voters) would make excuses for him.
We need voters to seek out primary sources. We need them to be more resistant to manipulation. The problem isn’t getting the information out there; it’s getting people to hear it. How many people who didn’t vote for Kamala went to KamalaHarris.com? And how many of those seriously considered what she had to say?
The problem is that saying nothing is more of a winning strategy than saying something. People always want to tear you down, and more words give them more ammo. So every politician’s website is filled with fluff and platitudes.
The problem is Fox News telling people what to think 24/7 in a way that they actually listen.
Honestly, The Daily Show and Colbert Report of around 2000-2015 were one of the best things this country had going for it, and we were hardly aware of it.
Because no Gen Z sees 50$k towards a house and is impressed. That offer alone shows such a ridiculous disconnect between the dems and the populace. Yes that would be beneficial for a very select minority of Gen Z, but for the vast majority.
Not close to helpful, radical or on level to Trump’s promises (lies).
They want sweeping change, they expect politicians to lie and embellish. If the politician offers something so minor when they are expected to embellish then the avg voter probably expects even less or nothing at all.
At least significant promises can get people excited. Even if they are obvious lies to those paying attention. Sad reality is vast majority of people of any generation pay almost no attention whatsoever.
I think people seeing her message might have helped. But the difference maker would have been a message people actually want to get behind. That would have spread organically.
Now whether the DNC was cooked either way following the publics perception of Bidens term is another thing. But a strong message will always prevail - even if it is a lie.
You’re right, the DNC should be working to expand voter protections and ensure that freedom is protected and it sucks they’re bought out by corps.
My hypothesis is that voter suppression had a lot to do with it. Harris was no more of a crap candidate than Biden was in 2020. It’d be nice to see some solid research one way or the other.
I’m also with you on getting rid of triangulation, since the lack of principles it requires is almost as corrosive as fascism, and you end up with a party 1 mm to the left of whoever the fascist-du-jour might be. It’s a morally bankrout strategy that delivers next to nothing.
Biden was able to get away with it in 2020 coming off Trump’s first term and the shitshow that was COVID’s handling under his leadership. Harris didn’t have this benefit, being second in command in the incumbent regime, was unable to capitalize on any of the points the Biden administration could claim as wins, while stubbornly refusing to put any distance between him and herself on his unpopular stances. Add in that this was occurring while popular sentiment was clamoring for an inspiring campaign that wasn’t the usual DNC paint-by-numbers, march to the right campaign of, “Well, actually, while I can appreciate Hitler’s passion for the arts, animal welfare and the health risks of smoking, you’ll find that we, uh… disagree about the best way to deal with the Jewish question. Thank you, you’re seen and heard, even you Jews out there. Vote for me, 'cause the other guy’s Hitler, and I’m not entirely Hitler.”
The entire Democrat effort (or lack thereof) was a massive unforced error on their part. Instead, they keep sidelining any candidate who seems to actually excite people and inspire them with hope for the sort of systemic change they want, unless they find they can eventually drag them into their usual shenanigans.
Personally, I think they’d also do best to drop their tokenism with candidates that trot out the same means-tested policy drivel. Rather than go harder on the adjectives next time and hope people show up to vote for, “The candidate who would be the country’s first female, Chinese, Navajo, amputee, Leprauchan president in history,” have policies that don’t include the means-testing and would broadly lift up the working class and poor voters, while also addressing historic inequalities for the many groups that have been disadvantaged and/or excluded from US society for its history. You can tick all the diversity boxes you want with the candidates, but it’s patronizing to think people will blindly fall in line for such a candidate assuming they’ll represent them, when we’ve seen that it’s mere lip-service paid to very real issues impacting the lives of millions of Americans, which will be promptly forgotten upon taking office, if it lasts that long.
I’m never gonna stop sharing this
There’s this, and then there’s Sideshow Bob’s lines on the matter:
This has been in my head since 2016. I firmly believe that there really are people out there that find this kind of authoritarian rule comforting.
Conservatives have a heightened fear response so that tracks
The Democrats have plenty of problems, but none of that compares to Republicans who are worse in every conceivable way. Propaganda, foreign interference, and domestic voter suppression won this for Trump and his goons.
I get the argument, but at this point, nobody is contemplating whether to vote Democrat or Republican. It’s between Democrat and apathy.
Comments like these sound as if during WWII the French were saying “well, the French army has plenty of problems, but Nazi German occupation is worse in every conceivable way, so there is no point criticising the French army”.
Everyone knows the Reps are Nazis. The problem with the Dems is not that they are not less bad than the literal Nazi party, but that they are unable to effectively fight the Nazi party. The problem is that Democrats fail to demonstrate that voting for them is better than not voting at all to a large part of the electorate.
A more concise way of putting it is that, if we’re going to resist and reject Trump, don’t expect meaningful help from the Democratic Party. That’s not what it is. Meet your neighbors. Organize at that level. If need be, form cells.
99% of the times Democrats fail to effect change, it’s for losing a vote that comes close to 50/50 - be it for presidents, senate representatives, etc.
People do not understand that their only quote-unquote “failing” is that we literally don’t give them power in any usable, reliable form, and that they don’t represent a hive mind.
I’m not criticising them for not having the votes, I’m criticising them for not writing and standing behind the bills in the first place.
There are three insane third Trump term bills already in Congress, where were the three Medicare for All or police reform, or anti-price gouging or tax reform bills in Congress days after Biden’s win? Or Obama’s win?
The Trump bills won’t pass, sure, but we are here and talking about them. Where were the Dems doing this?
And compounding that problem is people being angry at the Dems for this failure instead of trying to help.
“Clearly you’re not worth voting for because you can’t convince people to vote for you.” Great.
We should be as happy as you are that the only thing Democrats actually stood for in the past 4 years was Netanyahu.
But it’s not that. It’s “please do something because you’re abandoning wide swathes of people and are going to lose, and lose our best chance against the fascists this way”.
The problem is that Dems don’t like progressives’ help, they would rather get help from Cheney than Sanders.
Because forgiving college debt and giving you $50k towards your first house and bringing prescription drug prices down is abandoning you? Fixing our rail system is abandoning you? Repeatedly saying they’re going to tax billionaires is abandoning progressives?
It’s not like we give them enough to have the power to actually get big things done. When we do give them a little, they have to bring in the vice president to break ties in the Senate.
In this regard, it’s not like Republicans wield power any better. They couldn’t even repeal the ACA. It’s just that they get more credit. First, they get credit for every Dem initiative they stop (even if it’s not real). The reverse isn’t true. Second, everything the Republicans do get done tends to be negative and stings more than the positives.
I know you want to abandon billionaire money. You want Dems saying the right things to you, in a closet where nobody hears them. Because if you don’t have money, you lose elections. Period. That’s a big problem that needs to be solved, but it can’t be solved by people who lose elections.
The Dems absolutely could have tried to appeal to the progressives more instead of moderates. Clearly, in hindsight, it’d be worth trying something different. But I doubt it would have worked. People weren’t happy, and they were going to take it out on the incumbent party. And right now they’d be hearing “why didn’t they appeal to moderates?”
My point is that it’s more complicated than just “appeal to progressives instead of moderates”. The Dems have more realities to deal with than we give them credit for.
Tax billionaires how? Any concrete plans? Any proposed laws that were brought to the floor as much as repealing Obamacare was by the ghouls?
And trying to win by forgiving student debt that they themselves made undischargeable as recently as 2005 is good, but it’s just trying to clean up after themselves. Unsuccessfully.
And giving $50k towards a first house, when houses are nearing a million is not going to do anything other than drive housing prices even further up. How much public housing have they built? Have they even proposed putting a tax on large-scale corporate homeownership or price gouging, houses sitting empty?
I’m not even going to mention Gaza.
But the elephant in the room, Joe Biden could have nominated anyone, literally anyone for AG. He nominated known conservative Merrick Garland, who then proceeded to let Trump go after 34 felony convictions and who knows how many hundreds of actual felonies, to become US president.
At least they tried. How many times have Democrats brought a vote to tax billionaires or megacorps, even if it failed, just to keep it on the table?
If money is more important than getting votes in order to win an election, then the US is not and has not been a democracy. That said, the Dems got all the money ever this election. Where is the win then?
Has that ever happened? Once? Or has it been dozens of elections in a row, always appealing to “moderates” - actually wealthy donors - and leaving progressives to rot. And then blaming progressives for the election loss. Damn, Lina Khan, the one woman who was arguably doing her job well was possibly on the chopping block. How do you get people to vote for this?
The Dems have been the perfect Weimar to Trump’s Hitler. May they be remembered as “fondly” as them.
Thank you for this, it’s speaking exactly the unending frustration I have with these lines of “thought”.
Why are you blatantly lying about this? Any chump can look at the wall of CEOs Trump has next to him for his victory speeches and see where the money was backing.
https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-fundraising-democrat-president-biden-trump-434a55ea1eb29e5da92cc9b1f9cb401f
I was only repeating what Dems were saying.
Exactly. Democrats ran on “vote for a Democrat to save Democracy!” Millions of voters shrugged and asked, “what good has democracy done for me?”
The problem is that a lot of people, also on here equate people saying that “this is going to alienate voters” with saying “this is going to alienate me”, and then go into personal attacks of “are Republicans better then?” or “you’re the problem because you don’t vote”.
No, the problem is and was that large swathes of the population that you don’t interact with won’t vote if you don’t give them something to vote for, as they don’t see Trump as the threat he is, since people’s opinions are saturated with the 24 hour news cycle. Point is “Trump bad”, while true, doesn’t win elections. You have to do something more, and the DNC is very much tending to do the bare minimum besides fundraising.
Centrists only did that because in all cases, they supported the behavior that was alienating voters and didn’t want it to change. Even if that meant trump again.
I wouldn’t even say that, it’s just there really were a lot of trolls going “whatabout?”, especially here, as some people want the US to fall, and honestly Trump is the best candidate for that. Mix in a bunch of other trolls screaming “bluemaga” for the heck of it, and you couldn’t have a decent conversation anymore.
I’m just saying we shouldn’t fall into the trap of going into a circlejerk again, it’s past the election, it would be great to have the conversations that are needed but we couldn’t have before the election. There are some great people in the Dem party as well, again, Lina Khan’s work was inspiring, and despite recent events, it did make a huge difference. We need more people like her.
And on the other hand, Luigi has shown that there is a broad societal base wanting this constant madness to end. People just want to live, all people, even Republicans.
The “we can’t have this conversation right now” thing was a fucking excuse to continue enabling the genocide. Centrists will never admit they were horribly, monstrously wrong to support genocide.
It’s all they ever were, and all they will ever be.
That is it though, where are all those “we can’t have this conversation right now” people now? This is the time to have the conversation. Hello?
That’s where the propaganda and foreign influence come in. Their entire effort centered around muddying the waters so people couldn’t be sure what the reality was. And voter suppression certainly makes it easier for people to say fuck it.
Yes, there was foreign propaganda, influence, psyops, etc.
Look at Luigi. All of that propaganda failed to contain a very wide, bipartisan swathe of the population who was elated at the CEO’s death. Even more moderate people agreed that healthcare sucks even if they don’t like people, even murderers, gunned down in the street.
And Democrats still refuse to run on a platform of complete healthcare reform. And before you say “but Republicans would vote it down”, make them! Put it forward every week, every session, make a presidential run on it, make overreaching executive orders that fuck with insurance companies, forcing them to sue, every week. Have random low ranking Democrats make speeches about “well Luigi was in the wrong, but such things are inevitable in this system” to get in the papers with controversy. Just like Reps did it with the wall and other stupid stuff. Make it every week’s topic who exactly is standing in the way of establishing a proper healthcare system.
And there are other issues like that. Cost of living for example.
Fight, damnit, do something, or you will lose your country.
Do you remember Obamacare and Republicans voting to repeal it literally hundreds of times? Where did that get us?
And now we have less control of the government. We can’t even force a vote. The speaker can just refuse to allow it. There is no fight we can win. The best we can hope for is slowing the destruction.
You are looking at solutions within the system. Those are not the only solutions. When the system is rotten, go around it.
There is no fight we can win if we acquiesce to the rules imposed on us by the oppressors. That has always been true throughout history. And yet progress is often made.
Until Trump won a second time, there was still a possibility of fixing this within the system. You may be right that there is no solution within the system now. Finding a solution outside the system will bring violence and suffering beyond anything most living people have experienced, so I’m not exactly eager to give up on other methods.
That’s my point. Instead of the Republicans voting hundreds of times to repeal it, Democrats should have been voting to expand it, anchoring the debate away from Reps. They should have thrown in a massive expansion, and forced a vote around that, again, hundreds of times.
This is not even going low, just fighting.
73 days. That’s how long the Dems held the filibuster-proof trifecta that allowed Obamacare in the first place. They haven’t had the power to force anything through since. It took everything they could do just to defend what little progress they made. The tactic you are talking about can’t work if the other side can just filibuster everything.
You’re exactly right. Instead of going on the offense the Dems just think “well this won’t pass so why bother?”
Meanwhile the Republicans are out here writing bills to give Trump a third term. Do you think the fact that it won’t pass matters one iota to them?
The third-term bullshit is just performative ass-licking.
This is the attitude whether we give Democrats a majority to squander or not.
They didn’t campaign to the center, they campaigned to the right. It was incredible obtuse and stupid.
Biden barely squeaked into office on promises it became clear he was never going to even try to keep, and then Democrats proceeded to alienate a bunch of groups that voted for him. Groups that only voted for him reluctantly the last time.