this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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Nothing the Democrats did mattered because the truth didn't matter. Propaganda, lies, and foreign interference lost the election.
I'm pretty sure one major reason Trump won is that he wasn't in prison. Which is fucking weird since he tried to overthrow the country!
And Democrats lost because no one wanted to vote for them.
I have a big hunch that Trump never went to prison because the Democrats wanted to run against him again. Surely if we fucked around again, we wouldn't find out twice, right?
And why did no one want to vote for the Democrats? The lies and propaganda.
And here again jumping to conclusions that are undue. Lies are hard to keep and you over extend their effectiveness. People want to believe them if they offer no followup and the lies could be cleared by a level of direct action in the public eye.
There are ones that are malicious and meant to eat at the more readily willing broken people, but that's also a difference in who each party is searching for and cultivating.
The centrists and liberals have absolutely stretched so far thin their generosity and miracles of modern society that people don't feel them anymore and yet the baggage is still felt.
No one wanted to vote for the Democrats cause people are tired of the weight and want to feel free of it even if it's falling to their doom from the floor dropping out. Now it's a game of chicken for which party actually starts pushing real change first. And if the people stuck in the middle will freak out before getting pancakes by both.
Also the facts.
The Democrats lost. And deserved to
So you think the Republicans deserved to win. Got it.
They didn’t deserve to win; nobody deserved to win. They did for a myriad of reasons. The democrats did deserve to lose because they don’t run a candidate they support. They run a candidate that’s the lesser of two evils
Are you familiar with the rule of excluded middle?
More so than a convicted felon, rapist, and conman? Bullshit.
Because this election was about the need for change, as every one since 2008 has been. As the need has gone unaddressed, voters have grown increasingly willing to embrace more extreme platforms. That Trump is a huge piece of shit that definitely won't help anyone is beside the point- he promises dramatic, systems-level changes while Democrats are offering tweaks and adjustments and generally run like it's 1996. I would say they're asleep at the wheel, but that would suggest that they're not being willfully ignorant, which I think they are. That's why they deserve the L, and why they will continue to deserve the L as long as they think that just being the lesser of two evils is a good enough platform.
I don't know if there has ever been a US election that wasn't about change. It's an easy thing to promise because the voter can self-insert whatever they themselves think needs to be different. The candidate doesn't actually have to have a plan beyond that.
The problem with systems-level change is that it usually comes with unexpected consequences and that can cost lives. Small changes may be less satisfying but they can gradually get you the same changes in a slower but safer way.
I think maybe a more helpful descriptor than big or little, as it concerns change, would be 'meaningful'. People have been yearning for meaningful change. Meaningful changes can be big, but they don't have to be. Obamacare didn't bring about socialized medicine, but still brought some meaningful change. That said, it was just one step in the right direction, but failed to be followed with more meaningful changes to a system that we've been trying to fix since Eisenhower. The more meaningful change is put off, the more desperate people become and the more urgent the problem becomes, the more people are willing to accept dramatic and unconventional changes as meaningful changes. The Democrats, to their credit, are occasionally capable of small, meaningful changes, such as investment in rail infrastructure. There's also unfortunately a lot of parading of meaningless change as meaningful, or apologetics as to why meaningful change isn't convenient just now. Repeat that for twenty years and you've basically got the post-2000s DNC platform; a few scattered, meaningful steps on disparate items, couched with a whoooooooole lot of high-octane mediocrity.
Look at the Build Back Better act. It was to be the largest investment in infrastructure, social, and environmental programs since the 1930s. It was big and meaningful.
The first part, the American Rescue Plan was enacted putting $1.9 billion in public stimulus. Republicans chiseled down the rest to a fraction of what it was supposed to be. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is $1.2 trillion. The Inflation Reduction Act spent $891 billion on energy, climate change, and a few other things.
The problem isn't that it wasn't big or meaningful. It was. It was too big to easily understand and necessarily slow to implement. Real change takes time. More than a 4 year presidency. Real change doesn't fit in a campaign slogan. Trump lied about making change and that is easy to fit into a slogan.
They all deserved to lose
At least Trump had people wanting to vote for him whereas Biden/Harris was relying on people to vote against Trump instead of for them
A hard truth is always less popular than pleasant lies.
I'm truly baffled by the small but vocal set of people on Lemmy who seem unable to grasp that if the Ds lose a US election, the Rs win it. This has been going on for some time and I am no closer to understanding how they reconcile this internally
Maybe because we don’t see the Ds being any better overall. On a lot yeah, but definitely it everything
It seems this one did matter:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/08/harris-biden-the-view-00182883
And they still can’t figure out why they lost its incredible!
JFC That's a real quote? She really steered full force into the ground on purpose.
Even if she said she was going to have all Republicans in her cabinet, she would still have been a better option than Trump and the lunatics he is hiring. Nothing the Democrats did mattered. They would have lost regardless.
Better option than this mess? Sure.
But beyond that, if you need to wallow in doomerism, suit yourself. But I roundly disagree with this fatalism. The Democrats could have actually campaigned on the left. A few years ago Joe Rogan was hosting and supporting Bernie. This cycle, he was lost to the fascists. It is very clear that the Democratic party tried a strategy based around enticing moderate Republicans. They have been doing this for years. You as a voter, need to face this reality: the Democratic party strategy ...failed. They need a different one. But suit yourself with self-defeating fatalism if you want.
They really are taking to this idea that if they beat themselves up as the idea of the voter it will somehow lessen the pain or something? It's weird cause it's just wallow without action to take. I'm saddened that people are still there when actions need to start happening.
It's easy to say that moving to the left would be more successful, but I doubt it would. 75 million Americans voted for blatant fascism and millions more didn't care enough to bother voting one way or another. People have lost hope that things will ever get better.
Maybe the wouldn't or maybe they would. The only think we know for sure is they didn't vote for the center-right version. That failed. Time to try the other one.
So what we saw was what Democrats did when nothing mattered? When there were no boundaries? They supported genocide. They adopted Republican border policy. They ran anti-trans hate in their own ads. They cozied up to Dick Cheney. They showed us what they really are.
They showed us who WE really are. They simply played to the middle to try to motivate swing voters and never-Trumpers.
No, they fucked up. Exit polling showed that democrat and left leaning voters stayed home, and less than 1% of registered Republicans went for Kamala. Trying to rely on the moderate Republican vote is almost as insane a strategy as relying on the Sasquatch vote.
They underestimated the degree to which the public had been impacted by propaganda and lies. They thought the public understood the threat Trump poses but they did not.
From a millennial perspective, it honestly reminds me of the terror threat level. After 9/11, the DHS would set a daily terror threat level in one of several threatening colors and the 24/7 news channels always had it just chilling in the bottom of their broadcast for years (of course it was always at nearly maximum leading up to invading Iraq, go figure). After a few years, nobody paid any attention to it anymore.
If the only thing you've got to offer is fear, eventually people get numb to that message, even if they should be scared. Imo, it's hardly surprising that the democrats lost whe coming to the table with conservatism lite, small business tax credits, and "OMG TRUMP IS SCARY WOW" while Merrick Garland slow walked the case against him. I had a feeling we were cooked when Kamala started doing appearances with A-listers; it reminded me a lot of the tone-deaf gilded campaign run by the Hillary team.
What does Trump offer but fear? The illegals are coming to steal your jobs! Muslim terrorists! Dems are DESTROYING the economy!
Yeah, but it's a new fear or a new spin on some old one every other week. Conservative media tries out a new panic pretty regularly to see what gets bites. The democrats have basically been on "Trump is our Hitler" for more or less eight years. At least, that's what they say with their mouths, though not with their actions. It might have had a little more sticking power of they'd showed that they took at serious as they want us to, but as it stands, that car is pretty much out of gas.
So the problem is that Democrats have had a consistent message? Right...
What do you want from me, exactly? You just can't keep people afraid of the same thing forever. People stopped paying attention to the terror threat level just three years after 9/11, which the entire country agreed was bad. That's why their secret sauce is to keep rotating in new panics.
I would like it if you acknowledged that Republicans are the root of the problem and not Democrats. Sure, the Dems have a lot of room to improve, but there is no comparison! Republicans are fucking insane!
The root of what problem, exactly? Yes, republicans are insane, I hate everything about their entire platform and I hate that they're in power. I want a real left party that will kick these stupid Nazis' asses, which is why I'm not afraid of being critical of the democrats. Now's the time. We've just been punched in the head and it's time to decide how to proceed. Do we get our shit together and start swinging for the fences, or do we pout and blame the voters because we really deserved this win and they just didn't understand that?
Okay, we agree that Republicans are insane Nazis. Good.
What could the Democrats have done that is so bad that insane Nazis sound like the better option? What makes that a rational choice?
I don't think there is one. I don't think anything the Democrats did mattered because voters weren't voting based on reality.
There is no democracy without an educated populace. We have something worse than that: a miseducated populace. The apathy towards voting and the hatred of the current administration are intentionally engineered by bad actors.
I think that it's pretty simple. Tl;Dr, Trump campaigns 1, 2, and 3 were each the democrats' race to lose, and they rose to the occasion. The data shows that most Trump voters don't sincerely believe his most insane promises, and they're desperate for big changes (thus, the Obama-Bernie-Trump voter). Where the democrats are falling on their face is thinking that just showing up and putting a body in a seat is good enough to beat Trump. It's obvious to them (and us) that he's bad, and they're betting that a policy plank of "not Trump" and a bunch of pretty meh proposals otherwise will be enough to get voters to turn out. Twice, they've been wrong. A lot of people feel like they/we never really emerged from the great recession, and the order of the day is big dramatic changes. Trump promises that, regardless of whether he can deliver or whether it will actually help. In this last election, I distinctly remember that the Democratic messaging was that everything is fine, actually, and the economy has really never been better. If you're drowning, you'll take what you can get, and someone patting you on the head and telling you everything is fine, actually, doesn't help.
Joe Biden, is that you? The public didn't love genocide.
It's propaganda that Trump is the anti-genocide option. It's propaganda that not voting for the Democrats will somehow stop the war. It won't. It will make it worse.
They played to the RIGHT. It's all they have always been and always will be.
Ah so self flagellation in hopes it shows you repentant enough to not get punished or to feel like you will accept it better when you are damned.
A bold strategy and one that normally didn't work for the weird hyper religious pious of the day either.
Don't mistake the cries of flagellation for anything more than whimpers of pain. It does nothing to make it stop and people would say anything to make it stop if they thought it would work.