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I’m Absolutely Sure America Is About to Get Exactly What It Wants
(www.esquire.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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politics
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Something to keep in mind.
Trump didn't win a significant number of new voters. He kept his base, which is roughly the size of what it was in 2020.
The problem was that Harris lost voters. In droves. Nationwide. And she took a lot of winnable downballot candidates with her. And I'm not even saying that to blame her. She ran a magnificent campaign while Trump was most noted for saying "They're eating the dogs!". So why did she still lose, and lose so hard? Because Democrats stayed home. Roughly about 10% of them overall, nationwide. Sure, some of them stayed home or voted 3rd party to protest Gaza, especially in Michigan. But the real story is that she underperformed so badly nationwide. I mean, for the love of God, New Jersey was competitive. That call about Iowa possibly going blue is going to be up there with "Dewey defeats Truman" in terms of political misfires. She severely underperformed with men and Latinos, especially Latino men. Which means this: 8-10 million people couldn't stomach voting for Trump, but they'd rather passively hand over the country to Trump vs. voting for a black woman. Whether the problem they have is the fact that she's black, female, or both is irrelevant. But the message they sent was clear. "We don't want Trump, but we'd rather step back and just let Trump take the country rather than vote for her."
The problems with bigotry in this country go much deeper than some people are willing to admit, and Harris just found that out the hard way. As far as the voting base is concerned, voting for Obama was a mistake that they will not repeat again, and they just proved that by handing Trump everything he wanted on a silver platter instead.
We can't even say that it's an outsized minority any more. A majority of the people in this country just spoke up and said that they either want the racism and bigotry or are at least willing to put up with it.
Trump won the election not because Democrat voters said "Trump!", but because they said "Not Harris."
This honestly cements my view that America is a racist nation, no question.
You don't get 15 million missing votes without a solid chunk of those being Democrats, bog standard Democrats, that didn't want to vote for a black woman.
If you ignore the multitude of policy issues she was to the right of the Dem voter base on, I guess you could blame it on that...
But that would just mean we'd repeat the mistake again...
Can we just stop running candidates who are to the right of the voter base?
We tried your strategy the last three elections and Trump has won 2 of them. It doesn't seem to be working
Oh please. You all, and let's face it at 15 million, it's not progressives that didn't vote here, but honestly if you didn't vote because of some pithy bullshit about having not progressive policies vs policies farther than the far right and into fascist policies, well you're definitely part of that problem and thanks for condoning racism you racist.
Edit: replied to wrong post
We absolutely can stop running candidates. As a matter of fact, I don’t think we’ll be running candidates ever again.
The large turnout in 2020 was more driven by the will to remove Trump than to elect Biden. This time it seems they forgot how bad it was and decided to stay home.
The entire point of a campaign is to attract voters...
So I don't see how both statement can be true...
Her campaign did a shit job at getting people to vote for her, how do you consider it magnificent?
It proved to not be enough. The people who were coming to her rallies were apparently all people who were going to vote for her anyway; the size of the rallies only gave the illusion that her campaign was attracting more voters. And with so many Democrats actively choosing to stay home rather than vote at all, it seems like nothing she did would have mattered anyway. But given the crap she had to work with, she ran a near-flawless campaign. She had no way of knowing that it just didn't matter.
There's still a lot of analysis still to be done, but the Pod Save America guys pointed out that the Harris campaign saw less slippage in states where they were actively competing on the ground than in solidly red states where they didn't fight as hard. This indicates that the campaign did make a positive difference, just not enough to overcome the negatives.
You listed things they tried, but didn't work
Literally the only metric that matters for how good a campaign was, is how many votes they got.
And Kamala drastically underperformed.
So her campaign wasn't "magnificent" it was a spectacular disaster that couldn't beat trump with everything you listed and a billion dollars
Yup. If she ran a magnificent campaign she would have won.
I was arguing with my buddy about this last night. He kept saying that she had to pivot right to have any chance of winning the election. Me pointing out that she performed terribly in the election didn't matter to him. In his eyes shes did everything right and the voters are to blame I guess?
They can never give any logic behind it, and they'll never learn it doesn't work.
But moderates will repeat that line as often as Charlie Brown will attempt a field goal, with the same results over and over again.
If the argument is that Harris should’ve run a more progressive campaign, is there any guarantee that she would get more progressive votes than she would have lost from the center/independents?
Is there any evidence she gained any voters from the right/center?
Because Republican numbers went up, and Dem numbers went down...
But as I've said elsewhere, it's not that more progressive campaign would have gotten more progressivesnto vote for her. It's that nonvoters turn out to vote for progressive campaigns.
Too often people ignore history and say those votes can only be gained from the right. It ignores that one of the biggest reasons people give for not voting for decades is "both parties are the same" and never "the parties are too different".
Downvotes on this comment are delusional.
The only candidate in this election with a positive approval rating was the progressive guy (Tim Walz). Bernie Sanders and AOC are two of the most popular politicians around right now and both of them are very progressive. Obama won a historic election by running a progressive campaign. Andy Beshear won the gubernatorial election in fucking Kentucky with a pro-trans progressive message and is an extremely popular governor.
Liberals refuse to even pay lip service to the idea that regular people support progressive policy.
They're paid an insane amount of money to pretend Dem voters actually want the same thing billionaires and corporations want.
For voters supporting the current democratic party requires a certain level of delusional thinking.
You have to have really worked yourself into a position where given the choice between the bare minimum progress to prevent societal collapse and running full steam towards it, that you legitimately believe a light jog towards complete destruction is the best path forward.
You can't logically get into that position. You need to be brainwashed to the point where literally anyone who is to the right or left of you gets labeled an extremist who's equally as bad and should be ignored.
It's what the billionaire on WBs board was talking about when they bought CNN. They said the goal was to repeat Faux News but for "moderate" Dems.
I just never thought they'd fall for it.
It makes sense. The campaign thought the fear of Trump alone would be enough to bring in the progressive voters and she would have to work on persuading the center. They were clearly wrong in hindsight.
Why do you keep saying she didn't get progressives?
It's like if you repeat it enough it'll come try.
Every current indication is that the votes she lost were from the least likely voters. Election after election progressives have shown they'll show up and vote for the least terrible candidate.
The problem is with people who aren't politically engaged.
Despite the dangers of teump, Kamala was too conservative to excite them enough to get them to the polls.
Moving to the right costs more votes than it gains, there's no evidence it gains any votes in fact.
It just keeps wealthy donors happy
Yeah but if you start to poke fingers at the Democratic Party, you might start to realize that most of their corporate donors are fine with a Trump presidency. Almost like they were fine with Harris campaigning on keeping the status quo, because they'd win either way. Better to start blaming voters now!
Considering where Biden's polling was this summer, the fact that the Dems held onto New York is impressive.
This is the danger of lowering our bar to Trump's level as "good enough"
Biden could be better than trump.
Kamala could be better than Biden.
But if Kamala isn't good enough, trump would win.
Because as multiple people have been shouting for 8 years:
All of this could be avoided by running decent candidates who won a fair primary. But the DNC won't give that as an option because they want to use the threat of trump to push thru as "moderate" of a Dem as they can to maximize corporate donations.
Beating trump wasn't the DNC's goal, it was raising as much money as possible
I agree with you, but you should know that the media is already blaming “the small sliver of the Democratic Party who call themselves progressives.”
Pundits are talking about how Democrats need to shift even further to the right next time. So that’s not going to be fixed any time soon unless voters show up to primaries in a way that can’t be ignored.
The ones owned by billionaires who bought them to control a narrative?
They're always going to say the party has to move right. The entire reasons billions are buying them is to convince people both parties need to move right.
Yes - the ones who tell the majority of the party what to think and do.
Trump won because the DNC underestimated the sexists, racists and the idiot woke who think they somehow did something with this for palestine.
Editorial note:
i know woke is a poisoned word but I like to use to describe idiots who think they are so smart and better than others that they would rather let trump elected than admit that voting for the lesser evil is the right thing to do
Nailed it. People are still mad that Obama made it into the White House and we’re forever going to pay for it. And a black woman running for president? Americans all saw Trump’s serious cognitive decline — I don’t doubt that any outside of a hardcore few didn’t — but America made for damn sure it wouldn’t be Kamala.
Please consider that it could be neither.
The way I look at it is that Democrat initiatives did well on the ballots. She didn't. When her initiatives are doing well but states like California, New York, and New Jersey are voting 40+% for Trump, that's a tell-tale sign that people liked what she was selling. They just didn't want her to be the one to sell it.
Magnificent campaign 🤣🤣🤣
How did we lose Latino votes? I don’t see how they can possibly relate to Trump for all his rhetoric.
I don't mean to sound stereotypical and I know not all Latinos feel this way, but Latino men tend to have a very strong sense of male dominance and a very strong mistrust of the police. For a lot of them, there was never a chance you were going to get them to vote for a black, female former prosecutor.
I haven't read the whole article so I can't say I agree with anything it says, but I just found this:
After listening to video after video, podcast after podcast, I think America wants to be racist. They want to be homophobic, and they want to see their fellow citizen suffer. It's sad.
You made the point yourself: the majority did not speak up. The majority of voters spoke up, and they're a minority of Americans.