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Bernie.
Bernie was what got us to vote for Biden. Biden formed a comittee with Bernie and actually adopted a bunch of his ideas. That’s what got the left to vote for Biden.
That and all of us were reeling from the economy after coronavirus.
Meanwhile Harris told the left to fuck off with your Palestinians are human nonsense and tried to get the Liz Cheney constituency (that doesn’t exist).
Ten Million commies in the US - lol - if only.
Flaunting your Dick Cheney endorsement isn't being insufficiently left. Its political suicide.
Covid is the reason democrats won in 2020, but they assumed they won because they're geniuses. Instead of trying to appeal to voters, they just tried to tell people to vote against trump. Turns out that isn't enough to motivate people when there isn't a pandemic raging on that is making people's lives miserable. Democrats really need to get their act together because 2028 won't be against trump, so the "anyone but trump" strategy will be even more useless and all that time spent kissing the asses of ghouls like dick cheney just tells people that republicans are okay to vote for.
Biden won by a really thin margin in swing states, the book Lucky went into detail about how close of a call it was, but he interpreted it as some huge popular win because of the high vote totals.
He flipped a couple of historically red states - Arizona and Georgia - for the first time in decades.
Should be noted that Dems still did reasonably well in these states and in downballot races. Same with the Midwest. Dem senators and governors won seats in states Harris lost.
Really makes you think.
Oh dang I didn't know that about Dem seats in states that Harris lost. Here in PA the people may have voted out a LONG standing Democratic Senator because people showed up for Trump and then went right down the ballot.
Gallego won Arizona against Trump-favorite Kari Lake. He took 90k more votes than Harris.
Josh Stein picked up nearly 400k more votes than Harris in NC, to clinch the governor's race.
House races were even more tilted. Probably the most glaring case was Rashida Tlalib, who won twice as many votes as Harris in her Deerborn Michigan district
What got people to vote for Biden but not Harris? A dire need. Not voting for Biden meant that Trump stayed in office. Even though the stakes were the same, too many people sat on the couch thinking it was going to happen again and they didn't have to go.
Biden would not have won if we weren't also in the middle of the greatest global pandemic in a century that the incumbent Trump administration was handling terribly.
Look, the Democrats have to own this loss, for once, like they should have last time. It is clearly insufficient to try and frighten democratic supporters with a probability of fascism which we've never experienced before. It is clearly insufficient to abandon the working class as they have for so long. We should never fund or promote far right candidates in primaries. The media should not provide free coverage for outrage candidates to drive viewershop. It is clearly a mistake to try and court conservative voters, because hardly any have ever crossed over. It was certainly a mistake for Biden to run again, and then to drop out so late, far too late to have a primary.
Maybe the fact she is a minority woman turned people off. I don't know. It's a stupid reason not to run women, but that possibility exists.
But it damn sure isn't the only reason we lost.
Mean is no one going to call out the strategy for like the last month to possibly 3 months was her pandering as hard as she could to Republicans moderate and isolating the leftist Democratic base?
Of course not. Then they would have to learn that they can't out Republican a Republican.
What about Joe Biden made him sufficiently left while Kamala Harris wasn't?
-Joe Biden wasn't campaigning to finish building Trump's wall. Or saying that actually it was a good idea to build the wall and the only problems were just that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for it and that he didn't finish the job.
-Joe Biden wasn't campaigning on being pro-fracking. And bragging about how he was the tie breaking vote for the IRA, which leased new land for fracking. (I understand there was more to this act, but Harris points to it as a way to show she supports fracking)
-At the time the genocide in Gaza hadn't ramped up and gotten as much publicity as has now, so we didn't get to hear Joe Biden's stance on it.
-Joe Biden wasn't calling to ensure America has the "strongest most lethal fighting force in the world".
-Joe Biden didn't align himself with the Cheneys.
You see that 10 million more Democrats voted for Biden, but stayed home for Harris and you believe the problem is with the people and not the candidate? Now granted, racism and sexism played a role in this for sure. But to attribute that much of a difference just to that? Most of the people that are deeply racist and sexist are already voting for Trump because he supports those ideas. And from what I've seen, the Republican voters stayed pretty consistent from last election. It was mainly a dip in Democratic voters. If the problem is with the voters and not just that Harris was an incredibly weak candidate, then why do you believe that many more people voted last election?
Because Biden was to the left of Harris, and Gaza wasn't a big issue? Like yeah, the people who didn't vote did so because of Harris' move to the right
I've heard the following arguments, I'm ordering them in the way I think they effect an election.
Elon musk buyout and the AI lockdown of social media, and banning of tiktok have all had the effect to fracture democratic/leftist messaging (fault: dems, biden, musk, reddit, people who stayed on x. Affected groups: young people, people who are hard to reach with ads)
The primary election is basically undivertable campaign time for democrats. The lack of primary campaigns and debates means harris had less time to build support and a base (fault biden, affected groups: everyone).
Lack of economic excitement around policies and a shutdown of effective messaging on price gouging in favor of saying a former president will surely destroy the country this time. (fault Harris, donors effect, likely low turnout on younger people)
Lack of demographic excitement around key policies. Latinos: Immigration. Muslims: Israel. (fault biden/harris, effect low turnout in key groups)
Wasteful campaign spending on republicans: Courting Liz Cheney and buying ads to woo republicans at best wasted money and at worst is a giveaway to telecoms who immediately donated it to republicans(fault Harris, effect waste)
Covid provided a boost in 2020 that no longer exists
Mail in voting helped some people vote in 2020. I would say this a tossup however because I do think republicans are able to abuse flaws in mail in systems.
Harris is a woman. I don't buy this one because nonvoters seem disengaged rather than hostile.
Biden followed Trump so it was fresh in everyone's minds how awful he was
Obviously, the main reason for record turnout in 2020 was COVID.
Biden actually has decent political instincts and has actually won elections before. Kamala didn't even have to pass a primary and bombed out of the one she did participate in in 2020. She was "untested" to put it mildly.
The economic situation was different.
Regardless of to what degree he was responsible, under Biden the US got entangled in foreign conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine.
It's not that there are 10 million commies that liked Biden but not Harris, it's that us commies believe that you can win over the working class by appealing to material interests.
Biden didn't campaign with fucking Dick Cheney
Are you fucking kidding? Because Biden 2020 was a progressive platform and Harris 2024 was a centrist one. They weren't even remotely similar. Biden may be a centrist, but he's very pro-labor, and he could see how important the progressive base was that election, so he literally sat down with Sanders and hammered out a platform that they could get behind. And while I've got a lot of problems with Joe Biden, he actually was very committed to that platform. He really wanted BBB to get through and he kept trying to find ways to abolish student debt.
Harris, on the other hand, had a handful of disparate, vaguely left policy positions, like the first-time homebuyer's credit and legalizing pot, but her campaign was mainly centered on economic opportunity for the middle class. She also committed wholeheartedly to the most right-wing polices of the Biden administration, like arming Israel and cracking down on the border. But worst of all, she made bipartisanship and Republican consensus a huge part of her campaign, promising to add Republicans to her cabinet , campaigning with Liz Cheney, and even praising Dick Fucking Cheney.
TL;DR, Biden campaigned like Obama in 2008, Harris Campaigned like Hillary in 2016. And the results were the same.
Do you even remember 2020? Nobody fucking wanted Biden. He was never progressive. He was literally mocked for telling donors "Nothing will fundamentally change." People turned out because of how much they hated Trump.
Ok. First. Those votes were not, like, commies or something. Communists broadly (but not universally ) have no faith in electoral politics beyond the ability to demonstrate how useless electoral politics are for the kinds of change they see as required. The missing votes are likely non-explicitly-ideological Americans, and the disenfranchised left wing of the Democrat coalition, who are not revolutionary socialists - they are better described as social democrats. And why so many of them voted for Biden was, at least in significant part three things that you're pretending don't exist with this meme.
Tremendous dislike of Trump.. which is actually still true, but he was not currently the president during this election. Trump had just spent the last few months massively fucking up the pandemic response very publicly and got covid immediately prior to the election, which made him look stupid and incompetent.
Because of COVID policies, voting had literally never been easier. Shit loads of people voted early because it was universally available. Led to highest turnout ever.
A competitive democratic primary process meant that we had a candidate selection process people could believe in to some degree. Brenie and Biden ran, and Biden won. Bernie voters saw that, looked at the situation and said "This is tolerable because we had a real process, and we can accept Biden as a stop gap under the conditions of Trump needing to be removed, and Biden being a 1 term President". It wasn't 2016, where a significant portion of potential Democrat voters saw the DNC's treatment of Bernie as unfair, and it wasn't 2024 where Biden decided to run with no true Primary after the deal was "single term president", then abruptly dropped out (good idea, shoulda done it 2 years earlier) and effectively appointed his successor by decree.
2020 was an anomaly, and as is true of 2020 in most data sets, using it as a comparison point requires many many qualifications, but Trump gained 40000 votes, Harris lost 10 million. Trump did not perform better, Harris lost voter enthusiasm, which hasn't actually been on the Democrat's side in presidential elections (which have more non-explicitly-ideological voters) since, like, Obama. It's not even necessarily that she needed to be "more left". It's that she needed to reflect the public's distrust of the political status quo and promise material gain for working people explicitly at the expense of someone else (Trump chose , for instance, immigrants and the democrats as the bad guys, but Harris could have chosen, say, rich fuckers like Musk) . She needed to be ready to rip up the floor boards, and she wasn't even ready to say she'd break from fucking Biden (who is broadly unpopular) on policy.
I really, really wish y'all democrats would stop trying to purge your own party of any dissent, because y'all coming out of this with the right lesson will be the difference between a brief period of Republican control, or several elections cycles of Democrats being unviable as a party.
True. Thank you. It's frustrating seeing the DNC shoot itself in the fucking foot to watch people on Lemmy start swinging on anyone but the people who made and executed the failure of a campaign strategy.
I didn't want Biden either.
I don't know if y'all remember this, but the DNC decided to forgo a primary and forced Harris on us. When she ran in 2020 during the primary, she was so unpopular that she dropped out before any votes were cast.
Why did anyone ever think she would win? It's almost identical to when the DNC put Hilary up against Trump.
You can only fool me with this "lesser evil" bullshit so many times.
It was the promise that he could be negotiated to the left.
Instead Joe gave us a country producing the most oil and gas in world history, no movement on healthcare, etc.
The weather is going crazy because of the increase in fossil fuels Biden presided over.
He broke the deal that he could be brought left on economic/environmental/medical issues.
Kamala promised more of the same.
How can you expect anyone to trust the same deal from the VP that the P didn't make good on?
Joe didn't deliver, and Kamala didn't promise anything new.
Four more years of wildfire.
Joe didn’t deliver, and Kamala didn’t promise anything new.
Joe delivered the Inflation Reduction Act. It invests hundreds of billions of dollars into various climate initiatives over 10 years. That includes renewable generation, grid storage, EV, and nuclear generation. Then there's infrastructure investment, which included much needed investments in transit and intercity rail.
I mean, Harris and the Dems didn't even try, like seriously. Getting Beyonce and all the other celebrities our fellow moronic Americans already see as members of the illuminati is not trying, it's literally the opposite
I mean, they spent $50m+ in fuckin Ohio! We lost fuckin Georgia while they were jerking off Cheney's and trying to convince white folks in the suburbs not to be who they are
It's legit insane to see the party straightup abandon working class demographics. Then again, this is the same party that now literally spends millions of dollars each primary on getting votes for Republican politicians
I was excited when Biden dropped out and Harris got this huge surge as the new young, not actively deteriorating candidate, then more excited when she announced Tim Walz and got a mid western, blue collar surge, and cautiously optimistic when everyone was briefly focusing on how anti-democratic and un-American Project 2025 was, but then started getting worried when all I saw running up to the election was stories about abortion rights and women voting against their husbands and celebrity endorsements.
It feels like Obama successfully ran a campaign of Hope and Change, and since then Democrats repeatedly campaign on maintaining the status quo and just not letting it slide too much further. And while it's possible to win an election on the basis of 'I'm at least somewhat competent', it might not be in the US when so much of the population sees how fundamentally broken wealth inequality is at baseline.
Lmao what?
This discussion would be entirely irrelevant if we had a more representative electoral system.
People could be free to vote how they wish, secure in the knowledge their vote would still be counted against the republicans.
The people not voting are disenfranchised by the two party system. Change how we vote and allow competition into the electoral process. Multiple political parties should be free to compete.
More people represented and involved in the political process
More people voting means more votes for democrats
More chances to defeat the republicans
More people on the debate stage calling out bullshit (and you could have still hold one even if one party decides to not participate)
And last but not least, shouldn't we want the most representative voting system possible? Shouldn't we be concerned when our working class brothers/sisters/so on are under represented to the point that they dont vote?
Still not convinced First-past-the-post voting is the problem? Republicans in Florida passed legislation protecting it. Republicans in alaska are trying to repeal Ranked choice voting because voters used it to pick a more moderate conservative (the alternative was Sarah palin).
Isn't the republicans liking and wanting something not the most ultragigagigantic red flag that ever existed?
Democrats have proven they can no longer go it alone. They had their chance. Time to swallow your pride and arrogance and let others participate. This fight isn't about the democratic party. It's about survival.
The United States of America is more important then the Democratic Party.
The lesson for Democrats is surely that after years and years of telling anyone they could find that had concerns about society "oh you must be a literal Nazi, cope harder la la la la whoop whoop air high fives and fist bumps that's roiiight ma BOI!" at some point these people are going to turn around and say "well ok then, I just won't vote for you because you have nothing to offer me".
I'm not saying the Republican party has done this any better, but surely insulting potential voters en masse and refusing to understand their concerns isn't a sensible way to win elections. I didn't work for Hilary either, and it hasn't worked for Harris.