this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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Focus on actually helping out the working class and you'll get all the votes you need. Until then, throwing out a few progressive scraps has stopped working because people are sick of the bullshit rainbow capitalism.
This podcast is very relevant:
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-elite-media-dems-blame-woke-headwindseveryone-but-themselvesfor-trump-win
To be entirely honest, I don't think that would work. I wish it were true she lost because all the real leftists stayed home or voted for trump in protest, but that's obviously not true. She lost because this country is racist and sexist.
Actual leftists have no power over anything and are very small in number, that's why she ran a more conservative campaign in the first place. But, it didn't work. Despite doing everything in her power to not look like a leftist, everyone still labeled her as a radical leftist because she's a black woman. That is why she lost.
Left policy isn't for the leftists, it's for everyone except the capitalists. Left policy polls incredibly well when it's divorced from democrats that have shown over and over will not do what their base wants.
Republicans fear their base, democrats despise their base.
Do you think Biden would have done better?
She told her base to fuck off, the genocide will continue, the wall will be built, we will have the most lethal military in history, all so that republicans would vote for her.
And then 5% of her vote came from registered republicans, down from 6% in 2020.
America does not even remotely understand this, so they will not vote as such.
Not this time with how unpopular he is now, but any other white male option would have worked or at least had a better shot.
Because she's a black woman.
She already had the vote of every leftist, because leftists hate trump more then they dislike her. The voters she needed were suburban white men, which is who she tried to appeal to. It didn't work because of racism and sexism.
Polling and history say otherwise.
Obama won by such a blowout because he campaigned on policies that helped everyone, such as free healthcare. And then instead he did what republicans wanted, means-testing every policy and giving them half the discretionary budget, and the dems got blown the fuck out in 2010.
In 2020, like a quarter of voters I spoke to thought they were voting for free healthcare, college, freeing the immigrant concentration camps, legalizing cannabis, abolishing police, and every other good policy the republicans falsely accused the democrats of wanting. It was always awkward to explain that the election for any of that had been the primary but they should still vote dem.
I agree in the importance of real progressive policy and messaging to match, but I very much disagree with your assessment of Obama's 2008 campaign. Obama ran as a Rorschach candidate, allowing voters to imprint whatever they wanted to see. (Not unlike Trump in some ways.) It was a good strategy for a Democrat in 2008, but that ship has sailed. Potential Democratic voters are past believing in empty rhetoric.
No, there was a ton of progressive actions he promised during the primary, from withdrawing from Iraq earlier than Bush's plan to prison reform and cannabis legalization to healthcare.
The ACA was based on a right wing healthcare plan from the Heritage Foundation, the same think tank that just brought us Project 2025. It was hardly a progressive plan, yet it was perfectly compatible with what he ran on. I don't see anything about cannabis legalization in the 2008 platform.
Iraq is all over the place, but that was an obvious thing to campaign on given how unpopular it was. Even so, the only real promise made was to withdraw from Iraq to free up resources to send into Afghanistan, so it was more of a strategic plan than a progressive shift.
Obama's campaign gestured in a lot of directions to give everyone something to be happy about, but it carefully avoided real commitments to anything. That's what allowed voters to imprint their own ideas onto his campaign. It really was masterfully done.
In any case, even if he was vague about specifics, most people voting Obama believed they were voting for progressive policies that would help them.
By failing to deliver material improvements to the conditions of their constituents, they decreased turnout in 2010 and 2016. People reelect politicians that help them.
We can definitely agree on the reasons his presidency faltered. Even 2012 was pretty sad given his blowout in 2008.
Yeah, I'm not sure you need to be talking about what voters do or don't understand. Quit repeating establishment bullshit.
I seriously doubt this was the factor so many people think it is. Republicans have the racist/sexist vote locked up no matter who is running.
Where this can come into play is that women and minorities (especially blacks) have to avoid a lot of behaviors that would never hurt a white male candidate. They can't show a hint of outrage,weakness, or indecision, or they just become a stereotype. For all the mistakes Harris made, I don't think I ever saw her fall into that trap.
That is an extremely reductive narrative that ignores how prejudice actually works in this country. Racist and sexist biases conscious or not shaped perception of Harris on the left, right, and everywhere inbetween. Prejudice is not a binary thing. It is a cultural force that is more than capable of impacting the decision making of people who are not outwardly racist/sexist.
I'm pretty sure that's how prejudice works everywhere. It's kind of weird how you zeroed in on that and then ignored the entire next paragraph where I talked about how it does sometimes matter.
Generalizations are generalizations, and it should be understood that they aren't intended to be true in every case. I'm well aware that prejudice can be subtle. I'm also aware that a lot of people voted for Kamala specifically because they like the idea of a woman president. I don't think either of those was a significant enough factor to change the outcome.
I ignored the next paragraph because it doesn't sometimes matter, it always matters. Racism doesn't suddenly start working because a person made a mistake. It might latch on to a mistake, but it can and will work without it. That is what I believe happened this election.
And you base that on what?
Even if you are correct, that just means that the Democrats failed to create a movement capable of motivating voters to override innate bigotry. If voters honestly believed that Democrats would make their lives better, gender wouldn't matter.
How many people would have ever believed we would elect a black president with a vaguely Muslim sounding name in 2008 before it happened? Not that I'm a fan of Obama, but his 2008 campaign demonstrates that bigotry can be overcome.
Here's the polling that says otherwise. Progressive policies are popular.
Polls on campaign messaging
How to Win a Swing Voter in Seven Days
“The View” Alternate Universe: Break From Biden in Interviews, Play the Hits in Ads
Polls on policy
How Trump and Harris Voters See America’s Role in the World
Majority of Americans support progressive policies such as higher minimum wage, free college
Democrats should run on the popular progressive ideas, but not the unpopular ones
Here Are 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind
Finding common ground: 109 national policy proposals with bipartisan support
Progressive Policies Are Popular Policies
Tim Walz's Progressive Policies Popular With Republicans in Swing States
So you're telling me that most of the country agrees with her policy more than trump's, yet the majority still voted for trump? I wonder if this might have something to do with racism and sexism.
It's not about actual leftists; leftist policy is where you naturally get when you do things for the people. And both people like politicians who do things for them and hate politicians who don't. Democrats think they can get people to show up by doing nothing and they simply can't. I can't find it now but I saw an article around here that shows how as the election came closer Harris dropped anti-establishment rhetoric such as taxing wealth and combating price gouging and defined her platform by being a conservative, not being Trump and that idiotic border wall. Coincidentally, as she did that support for her dropped.
Unless you have some evidence, please don't go blaming it on leftists. That's just establishment bullshit. Leftists have been shown to be the most consistently reliable voters in the country with more engagement than even Bible thumping nationalists. Engagement (including voting) is lowest at the middle of the political spectrum, which is exactly where anyone who thought about it for two seconds would expect it to be.
The establishment always bitched about leftists going third party (Although the Libertarians hurt Republicans far more than the Greens hurt Democrats) but that was clearly not a real factor this time, so now they insist that leftists went to Trump. No matter what, it always must be the fault of the left, not the precious "centrists" they love so much.
Step one in fixing this broken down wreck of a party is to stop buying their bullshit excuses. They lost because they didn't do enough for the American people, and because they weren't loud enough about what they did do. If they bragged about helping unions then they might piss off their corporate sponsors and they won't get to go on tour after leaving office and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for 45 minute speeches.
My initial reaction to reading this was visceral, but in rereading I think you need to expound a bit about who you mean. I do not agree, but I can see why you think that.
What I find more useful and interesting is trying to figure out who it is that didn't vote and how we can move them from the disenfranchised existence they are in. There are a lot of them, many are urban which means they likely lean left. So a GOTV that actually got even 75% voter turnout out would give the right a stomping.
Why that failed is worth understanding.
Compared with 2020, about 20 million prior Dem voters stayed home. Care to try again l