Oh, fuck off with that. The fault ultimately lies with a party that thrust a candidate on us that primary voters flatly rejected in the 2020 primary, then ran a Republican lite campaign strategy when voters have been demanding change for decades.

There’s no way in hell either Kamala or Biden’s egos left any room for them to want to lose. They tried to win and to please their patrons at the same time and found out the hard way that it’s not always possible.

Will we be nominating better voters next election, or should we try to nominate a better candidate?

Democrats ran another perfect losing campaign. Some people might say that losing makes a campaign definitionally imperfect, but that’s only sane people.

It’s too bad she didn’t offer any soundbites of truth. Her entire campaign was built around being inoffensive to everyone which meant saying nothing that might evoke meaning. Lies thrive in that environment.

Then the next time a MAGA-esque Republican came along, which would probably be in 2028 or 32 they’d feel free to completely take the gloves off.

And you think letting treason pass with no consequences isn’t also sending a message?

The Republicans have no shame and aren’t waiting for the Democrats to strike first. Take away one rationalization and they will just manufacture another.

It’s happened before. You have to go all the way back to FDR, but it happened.

You can’t judge primary races like that. The final spread is irrelevant because of how the votes are spread out. The media calls it long before half the country has even voted, then the remaining votes always avalanche to the presumed winner.

Not sure why this applies to what I said, but my few Republican friends and family are uncomfortably aware of what I think about their politics.

Biden undermined democracy by preventing a proper primary from taking place. The voters never got to nominate a candidate, and the establishment thrust a candidate on them that had already been rejected in a previous primary. That’s the establishment’s fault, and Biden if the face of the Democratic establishment.

Dems are clearly better on economic issues as well. Not nearly good enough, but better. The problem is that they will only go so far, and they won’t talk about it, out of fear of angering their wealthy patrons.

Your right. The anti-establishment mood in this country and abroad has been building for decades. Americans have never voted based on foreign policy unless that foreign policy is directly impacting them.

Kamala had a billion dollars. Progressives have a deep ecosystem of independent media that establishment Democrats undermine at every opportunity. Democrats were hand in hand with Republicans in pushing social media “reforms” that today promote media like FOX News as trustworthy over progressive media sources. The Democrats create their own weakness.

Awareness of what? As badly informed as most people are, I’m still certain that most Americans know Trump won.

I’m all for protests, and lord knows we will be needing them, but protests should have some kind of coherent demands. The left wastes a ton of energy spinning it’s wheels.

It’s sheer lunacy in today’s world, but it also happens to be a feature for the qon/Republican agenda.

Redundant statements are redundant.

Does it though? Trump cares about his crowd sizes. He doesn’t give a fuck that people think he abuses women. He wears that shit like a badge of honor. He proclaims his corruption loudly and his fans think it makes him shrewd. I honestly can’t imagine what Putin has on him that would matter. Maybe a picture of his tiny… hands, but he’d just claim it was faked.

They don’t have the numbers to pass an ammendment. They will just use the Supreme Court to “interpret” the constitution into oblivion.

Trump has the Supreme Court, the Senate, and almost certainly the House. All three will do as they are told. If the millitary refuses illegal orders, I think those orders will be made legal. Either that, or he will be allowed to replace military leadership.

It’s certainly not obvious to many within the Democratic establishment sphere. historic_flawlessly_run_campaign

Exactly what it should look like next time is hard to say because it will to a large extent depend on the candidate and what issues have the public’s attention. There certainly should be a lot more engagement with independent media. Progressives had an early lead in that area, but that was mostly quashed by a coalition of Republicans and Democrats threatening regulation to get social media companies to dis-empower independent news in favor of corporate controlled sources. Republicans then spent a fortune promoting right wing channels while Democrats did nothing. This goes to the root issue that Republicans seek out engagement with their base, while Democrats avoid it as much as possible.

Another thing would be for Democrats to drop messaging with technocratic measures that don’t sync up with how voters feel about the economy. While the economy is technically in good shape, a lot of voters in any economy will be suffering. The message received becomes “we don’t plan to change our approach regardless of how the economy is working for you.” When interest rates skyrocket, the impact doesn’t go away once they are back under control. When inflation skyrocketed, Democrats tried to minimize the issue when they should have mirrored the outrage and focused on how Trump policies created it.

In the big picture, Democrats need to get serious about going after wealth inequality. This improved somewhat with Biden, but Biden was incapable of selling it, and Harris barely tried. She let Trump take the lead on working class economics and had to chase the “no tax on tips” and “no tax on Social Security”. Playing catch-up just made her look insincere. (Yes, ironic given Trump)

The American middle class has been under siege for decades, and they know it. It’s human nature that they need someone to blame. Republicans hand them immigrants, LGBTQ+ and DEI. Democrats step in on the defense, but they offer no competing villain. They could tell the truth and show how corporate money and Billionaires have bought legislation to give themselves an advantage over consumers, but Democrats don’t want to do that (for reasons you can speculate on). Democrats won’t even go after clear cases of Republican corruption with any level of conviction.

The town hall meeting Bernie did on Fox was a great example of how Democrats can reach a right wing audience with left wing rhetoric. Running to the center never works, but speaking to their struggles and frustration in a real way can.

It’s not like progressives haven’t been shouting the answer to this for the past 20 years, but here it is again from an apparently recent convert from within the Democratic establishment camp.

Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

What it doesn’t look like is campaigning with Liz Cheney. It doesn’t look like sending Bill Clinton to Michigan to lecture Muslims on how important it is to fund Israel’s genocide. It doesn’t look like Biden’s garbage gaff. It sure as hell doesn’t look like Harris having no answer to the question of how she would break with the Biden administration. All of these failures might have been irrelevant were it not for 50 years of Democrats looking down their nose at working Americans. A lot of it is policy, but a lot is just a failure of messaging.