I voted for Kamala…
It’s the Democrats fault.
The left: Infighting is why Kamala lost!
Also the left: In this essay I will detail every faction of the left that is guilty of infighting, and why they are wrong…
I’m actually getting a bit upset at these idealists. They have this childish notion that democracy works in this tit for tat way where politicians “earn” your vote by instating policies that benefit you and that you believe in. Like grow the fuck up already.
No, it’s the democrats fault!
This meme makes me so mad. It completely misses the point that the government is supposed to be working for us. They are here to make our lives better from our collective power. The right to rule is derived from the will of the people. You are misunderstanding how government is supposed to function on an essential level.
Making it out to be the voters fault because we didn’t like the shit sandwich that the were serving us is absolutely incorrect. Harris had zero progressive ideas in her platform. She ran on basically the same platform as the GOP.
As soon as you start putting the onus on the voter, you are putting our politicians up as the aristocracy. You make them into our ruling class. This is incorrect. They are supposed to execute the will of the people.
I’m just absolutely shocked that so many people are acting like the voters failed, when the DNC has done this to us so many times lately.
“Permanently installed”?
Voters voted a fascist ‘as a punishment’ knowing full well what was going to happen?
That’s akin to blaming your significant other for your decision to cheat on them.
Dear voters who pulled this shit: Go get some big pants on and wear some blame. While you’re at it grow the fuck up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsAVupx6gOI
The democrats are now throwing trans people under the bus!
Yeah, it’s advised to vote for the lesser evil, unless you’re literally choosing between Mussolini and Hitler, but you need to provide even more than being better on social issues than Trump. I cannot vote in the US, but saw many of those who could begging the democrats to put a weapons trade embargo on Israel. They were already being called “too antisemitic” even by dumping all the weapons into Israel anyways.
It is both.
A LOT of the US voters want exactly what Trump is saying. 77 million adults heard all of his fascist rants, and said “That’s my guy!” Also the majority of people who voted Biden, then sat out this one, are older, white, men.
The DNC also aren’t messaging to the people who don’t like the GOP, they are messaging towards those who are statistically most likely to have voted for them in the past, and are most likely to vote in general. They also are watching what the GOP is saying, seeing the rabid fervor their bigotry elicits, and work elements of that into their messaging, because it’s working for the GOP, thus it’s working.
“A jewish black trans woman would have won Alabama in a landslide, but only if she was a really outspoken socialist” - Half of Lemmy users
I think a lot of left-oriented people are in denial that Trump made no secret of who he was the past eight years, and Americans got exactly what a majority of them legitimately wanted. Trump voters know he is a bigot and that is why they chose him. There is no degree of populist social welfare rhetoric Kamala or the Democrats could have said that would have moved the needle when for most voters, electing a bigot was the priority over all other issues.
You’re in this picture whether you like it or not.
you’re going to be in this photo, you just don’t know it yet.
Don’t worry, as an actual lefty I already know. You’re the one who’d push me into the cart.
How can I push you when I’m in the cart with you?
“Get out of the way! Truck! Truck behind you! Run, it’s not slowing down!! For the love of god, move!”
“I think this guy wants to hit me with a truck” *wet crunching*
What a reasonable and not at all unhinged reply!
I voted for her. The Democrats are still at fault.
Yep, fuck the non voters for their ignorance, fuck the Dems for being a lesser evil in the first place.
Absolutely. It’s a two way street here.
People need to stop turning on each other though. What’s done is done. The left has always been divided but right now we really need to start pulling ourselves together.
The lesser evil is literally the better candidate.
The trump voters and the people who sat out the vote have that on their consciences.
They are still evil though, why it always a choice of “evil vs evil”? We don’t have to have this electoral system, we don’t have to have these candidates, humanity can do so much better. The only way anyone against genocide or the corporatist status quo could show disagreement is by not voting. If democrats always have the lefts vote no matter what, then they wouldn’t even have to be lesser evil.
This thinking got you a Donald Trump presidency again.
I’ve been a proud American my whole life and now I’m in the middle of a move to another country to protect my family so I’m pretty bitter about this topic right now.
This thinking is a small minority of thought among voters. Thank you for believing us leftists are such a powerful bloc though. I can’t move to protect myself and many others can’t, I’m glad you are privileged enough to escape. If the democrat establishment actually believed Trump was such a major threat to democracy and life why wouldn’t they do more to stop it? They can use the national security state to kill whoever worldwide, couldn’t they have said Trump was a threat to national security?
I’ve lost faith in this American experiment.
Too many people voted for Trump and too many people sat out a vote to keep him out of power again.
If you think the answer is to have the government kill him then I’ve lost faith in you too.
I don’t think they should do that but if they really believed he was Hitler 2.0 why wouldn’t they? They have no problem killing people everyday.
I don’t think we should lose faith in people, that’s what all those in power want. The American people are constantly propagandized, most people can’t trust what information is true or false especially when it comes to politics. I just think all the blaming of average progressive voters I’ve seen is misplaced.
Not voting does nothing. Now you have trump. And who ever else is next. If the left don’t vote nobody well care about them and they can sit in their house winning about nobody represents me.
Are we, the Democratic party out of touch?
No, it’s the electorate’s fault!
Nobody is arguing the DNC isn’t out of touch.
however the electorate isn’t much better. Cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Nice try on the strawman though, better than some.
I am not here to argue. I will not engage beyond this post no matter what is said in response because I don’t want to fight.
What matters is policy. Real hard on the ground policy that real normal people can feel and see where they live.
When some wonk gets on MSNBC with a spreadsheet hooting about how much better things are with grocery prices or housing costs, that doesn’t mean anything to someone who’s begging for extra shifts at work so they can make rent. Those are aggregates and averages. If the 200k-500k bracket is doing better while the 13k-45k bracket isnt, the numbers still went up. That looks better in the data. But the people at the bottom are still suffering just as much as ever. They don’t feel or see any improvement because there wasn’t any. Not for them.
The health and performance of the stock market only matters to those on the bottom when it crashes and suddenly they’re paying more for everything. At no other point does it impact them in the slightest. Those record profits aren’t reinvested, they’re not used to reduce the strain on consumers. Its gobbled up by a few dozen shareholders. It benefits nobody else. And if an executive or CEO has the slightest semblance of a soul and wants to help consumers they’re voted out because the only responsibility is to those few dozen shareholders.
Healthcare. The ACA was a grand achievement. They took Romneycare national. Round of applause for all involved. But its still cheaper to do some form of Universal Healthcare. That would be the easiest win in history. And everyone would feel it immediately. It would help 100,000,000 people immediately. People who have been putting off medical treatment for half their lives because of the extortionist expense would immediately seek treatment. They would seek preventative treatment and raise the overall health across the country. Obesity rates drop, drug use plummets, etc.
Marijuana. Literally every person I know and interact with in my daily life uses it. Do you know the number one reason I’ve heard from all of them? Pain management. Again, another easy win that is supported by everyone except the ghouls who were alive when it was called “The Devil’s Lettuce” and propagandized into believing its this terrible thing.
Hard Policy that people can feel and see in their daily lives. You can still court the comfortable liberals who care about the stock market and all that. They’ll be fine no matter who is in office. If they need an abortion it’s a weekend vacay to Zurich or somewhere. But you’re never going to hold any meaningful power again without hard policy. Because for decades now the republicans have cornered the market on grievance politics and reaction. To break through that you need something real. No more vibes based nonsense. It will not work.
I am not here to argue. I will not engage beyond this post no matter what is said in response because I don’t want to fight.
tldr
edit: for the downvoters, how can I take anyone seriously if they’re not going to sit and defend their opinion.
Why would I even waste my time reading their wall of text? They might as well be screaming into the void.
They’re right. They put together a well constructed argument for his position and you simply ignored all of it.
Harris ran a failed strategy of moving to the right and ‘business as usual’ when people want actual progressive policies that will address their material needs.
Neoliberalism will always move to the right and normalize fascist ideology over improving the livelyhood of the working class. Progressive policies are popular with Republican voters too, that’s the correct way to fracture the Republican base into voting Democrat.
Conceding to right-wing policies and disinformation, like on immigration, only alienates more of the Democratic base while bolstering Republican voters support for the Republican party.
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
I voted for Harris and told others to do so too. Doesn’t change the fact that it was her campaign strategy that was responsible for the loss of millions in voter turnout. All the evidence and polling show that running on popular progressive policies that represent a change and improve the material conditions of the American public was the right way to boost voter turnout, the fact that she instead went to the right was a calculated decision that completely failed.
Edit: pronouns
At the risk of being a pedant, no reason to think that person is a man. They did articulate the argument tho, for sure. And you did too.
But the left doesn’t seem to care or are not motivated. The right has their shit together and people are voting even if they don’t agree or think everything trump has said. Where the left just seem to say oh I don’t agree with x I’m not voting. Roy vs wade is a great example they kept on pecking at it till they got it and the left bever got it into law thinking this is good enough.
If by left you mean the Democratic Party I agree. It’s important to recognize that the Democratic Party is for the most part running on the platform of neoliberalism. That’s been the case since Third Way Politics. The issue is that, while the Democratic Base is progressive, the Democratic Party is instead still centered on neoliberalism.
That’s an important distinction because neoliberalism is fundamentally at odds with progressive legislation that improves the material conditions of the American public, at the expense of capital accumulation of corporations.
There are only a small amount of progressive Democrats within the Democratic Party, which include Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of The Squad. As a whole, even the Democratic Party works against progressive policy which is exactly why we’ve been seeing this disconnect between the Party and the Base.
Progressive policies and change can only be created and mobilized through grassroots movements. Republican policies, on the other hand, are entirely funded by corporate profits. That includes the entire manosphere, from think tanks like the Heritage Foundation to Fix News to individual conservative content creators like Ben Shapiro.
That’s precisely why we need to organize more. Neither of the two parties have the interest of the working class at heart. Only by creating our own organization like through groups like the DSA and Unions do we have any kind of power to demand progressive policies that will improve our livelyhood and communities
edit: for the downvoters, how can I take anyone seriously if they’re not going to sit and defend their opinion.
You’re mocking someone for posting their reasoning in detail, and then getting upset when people downvote you without giving reasons. What do you want?
after this I won’t respond to you because your opinion is meaningless and doesn’t deserve my attention.
I’m mocking them because the message they introduced their opinion with is the same one above.
I’m sorry that reading long posts is hard for you. But don’t take it out on others. You can say that it was too long without the added abrasiveness.
And here, you’re telling me that my opinion is meaningless. Why do you do that? Almost everyone here has similar values and goals; and yet you’re lashing out at everyone, creating conflict and division. Isn’t that the opposite of what you want?
What strawman? When is it appropriate to hold DNC leadership accountable for losing the election, again?
The DNC will have its come to jesus moment and maybe come to the wrong conclusions again, but it’s still patently obvious that a massive number of people will vote against their own interests regardless of the arguments anyone made.
Yeah it’s hard to vote in an informed manner with so many obstacles to education. I suspect this problem is about to get a whole lot worse unfortunately.
Why would they? They’ve just shown their complete inability to pivot an iota, for THREE elections. That’s 12 years of nothing learned by the DNC, minimum.
Unless you consider that they don’t care to win. Unless they benefit from losing equally, or more as losers. Does Biden or Harris look particularly pained by this outcome, at all? They look pleased as punch.
Yes, the number of people on here who claim that withholding their vote to ‘punish the DNC’ and make them learn a lesson is helpful is too high. If the Democrats were going to learn their lesson, they would have done so after 2016. Believing that by not voting, they’ll affect the Democrats’ strategy doesn’t make them leftist, it makes them another flavour of liberal, who thinks establishment electoralism is a pathway to socialism.
A much more effective solution is to organize locally, educating people on real solutions and pushing for change that way, not by blindly assuming the Democrats will reflect on their loss and run a communist candidate next time.
The electorate picked the racist rapist trump, that’s what represents America.
To say that a political party should stray further from what the majority of Americans that stepped up to vote for is what is out of touch.
It represents a large portion, but progressive policies are widely popular. Even in states Trump won there were votes passed to protect abortion access and increase minimum wage.
Most people vote based on vibes, and there were no progressive or positive vibes put forward by the dems this campaign. They signaled a ‘lethal military’, tighter borders, and sought endorsements from prominent Republicans, trying to win votes that would never go to their party anyway, alienating anyone who might have believed in the genuineness of the dems as ‘progressives’.
Eh if the left are not going to bother to vote then who cares and they shouldn’t cater to them. Go more right split the vote at least those people vote. The ones who don’t don’t matter.
Honestly, if they do the same things next cycle, I’ll be more inclined to vote green.
15 million Democrats, progressives, and independents condoned racism are at fault.
Democratic leadership blind and dismissive of the common worker suck and are at fault.
Both can and are true at the same damn time and Democrats and progressives all over the nation fucked us all.
Wow, that is some spectacular thinking.
This, this was the real problem. Something like 5% of registered Republicans voted for her. Dems usually win the popular vote. There are enough of them to win this, but they choose to alienate them.
Ah yes, a perfect example of what OP was talking about. Good work finding it so we can point and laugh at the people that keep looking for someone to blame for their own choices.
Yeah, and your comment is a great example of the Democrats 2024 outreach strategy: a smug, self-righteous attitude that failed to get you any votes.
This is voting for your own best interests as a part of a country.
What kind of fool believes that is supposed to require outreach? Would you rather visit an inept doctor because they make you feel more like a big boy by courting your feelings?
If voters must have outreach to not show up, that means they see no difference in their own life between the candidates.
I don’t know what to tell you man, you need to get people excited to go vote for you, otherwise they don’t show up. It’s election 101. Harris didn’t do that for her base, so she fucking lost. You can bitch about voters all you want, but it’s not gonna change reality, so maybe that time would be better spent figuring out why they didn’t show up. Again, I’d start with the fact that she ignored her base for the fucking Cheneys.
I understand where you’re coming from but I think there is an atmosphere tinging the conversation (and there are a lot of threads happening so maybe I’m the one doing that, not trying to be perfect here)
I’m not bitching about voters. I’m saying people are blaming Democrats, or Harris, or whoever they want to, but one side showed up with more people. I see you are continuing that as well by saying she ignored her own base.
More people showed up for what Trump was selling. Harris was certainly not ignoring her base in favor of the Cheneys but I think you mean they relatively to your expectations (?).
If she were leaning more right, then I guess that was the correct choice because that’s who showed up to vote.
I think she did ignore her base, mainly the working class. It’s not just that she campaigned with Cheney and stuck to hard-right positions on Gaza and the border, but her economic message was entirely about opportunity for the middle-class class. Her working-class message had a few good features, like grocery price controls, but they were small measures shunted to the sidelines. It wasn’t a broad economic message like BBB.
The campaign was predicated on a series of incorrect assumptions on who would vote for her. Women? They’ll vote for me because of abortion. Muslims? They’ll vote for me because Trump is worse. Working class? They always go Democrat, I don’t need a strong economic message. PoC? C’mon, like they’ll flip for Trump. Wow, we’ve got so many demographics on lockdown, we should try and flip some conservatives! It’s not like my constituents will be so unenthused by my campaign that they won’t bother to come out.
Doesn’t make that person wrong. If you need to be properly reached to keep yourself from voting for sweet potato Hitler, I’m sorry but you only have yourself to blame
Did the commenter say they voted for Trump?
The people who voted for Trump over Kamala are not the leftists on lemmy. I’ve actually only seen one or two people say that they’re going to vote for Trump for some leftist reason. The majority of people said they would vote for her anyway, and a minority of people said they were abstaining.
You sound really foolish mischaracterizing your opponents. The democratic party failed. Kamala Harris failed. There was no sabotage. She campaigned a conservative platform of military, border control, unwavering support for Israel and said she was going to maintain the status quo. When asked what she would do differently from Biden her gut response was “nothing”. It was a spectacular failure and highlights every single way that the democratic party has entirely lost touch with reality.
Cost of living has tripled in the last 4 years. Now try telling white working class straight people who weren’t living paycheck to paycheck 4 years ago that you’re going to do everything the same as the guy that came before you. The same guy who broke up the rail workers strikes. No, us trying to explain fascism or project 2025 to them did literally nothing. They don’t understand it and don’t care. They know that their financial situation got worse and that the democratic candidate said they wouldn’t change anything. That’s all they understood. They don’t know what’s fact or what’s fiction, and they think Trump is a brilliant businessman. It doesn’t matter that he’s not if they all think he is.
The DNC failed. Stop trying to defend them for God’s sake. How are they ever going to actually pose a challenge to far right populism or fascism if you relentlessly defend them from all criticism?
Woah chief, I’m not defending anybody and I didn’t ask who anybody voted for. If you can read then you see what I said is exactly what I meant: if you voted for sweet potato Hitler you only have urself to blame, not the democrats. And if you need someone to “reach you” properly in order to not vote for sweet potato Hitler you only have yourself to blame
The democrats fucked this up big time, but I’m not going to blame them for the fact that people are too stupid to not vote for the end of our way of life. That’s a personal responsibility that 70 million Americans failed at
It sounds like you just don’t understand how politics works.
If you cannot persuade the low information voters, you are failing as a politician. The Democrats, if you believe they wanted to win this, spectacularly failed at the most intrinsic of requirements as a politician: to win over the dullest spoons in the drawer. Society is largely dull spoons. This is the job.
I have seen nothing in the lead up, nor since their catastrophic loss that indicates that Biden, or Harris actually wanted to win. To the contrary, they look happier than they have been in months.
I read that sweet potato line as implying that the commenter themselves had voted for him, my bad.
I do agree that every human being has a duty to not vote for Hitler. I mean, that was supposed to be the point of the post world War 2 Western education system. Didn’t work out for a lot of reasons.
But I also believe that many people don’t understand what “voting for Hitler” even means or that Trump poses a threat to them. They don’t understand politics. They don’t understand the way the capitalist economic system functions. They think of it as some ethereal force that gets worse when you control it and gets better when you don’t. They think rich people are brilliant geniuses who have divine knowledge of the economy that allowed them to become so rich. They don’t get it. The political strategy of progressives has to account for that. The democratic party isn’t a party of progressives. It’s a party with a minority of progressives in it, but beyond them, it is the party of the status quo. The status quo has gotten worse, that much people do understand. And they chose the guy who said he was going to change it. He said he’ll fix it and they believed him.
And if you’re a politician and people don’t vote for you, you have no one but yourself to blame. I wish Harris hadn’t run a dogshit campaign, but she did, and I’m not gonna blame voters because she was bad at her job.
You’re entitled to your opinion but I’ll readily blame people who vote for a wannabe facist dictator
People are responsible for their own votes
There’s nothing wrong with blaming them, but we still need to figure out how to get their lazy asses into the booths in 2026, 2028, and beyond.
You can go ahead and blame them, but apparently they heavily outnumber you so I’d get the fuck out of the way if I were you.
Oh, you mean you’ll blame them on lemmy and never associate yourself with one of them in the real world because you live in a nation split into echo chambers. Cool. Cool cool cool. I’m sure that helps.
It’s funny how when she losses it’s a dog shit campaign but nobody was saying that before the election.
Just because you’re not aware of something, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There wetr plenty of people in the media who said the same thing. Hell, you can go through my post history and see how many times I said, “seems like she needs to shift her stance on Gaza,” or, “why the fuck is she campaigning with Liz Cheney?” before the election.
Harris ran a perfect campaign. If she was running as a (pre-Trump) republican. However, we know that:
- She isn’t a Republican
- She banked on pulling in republican voters, instead of rallying her base
- Republicans will almost always vote for the R instead of policy
- She backed off of every single progressive idea she started with
- She trotted out establishment Democrats to lecture the electorate instead of inspire them
- Tlaib pulled twice the numbers as Harris as the only anti-genocide Palestinian in Congress
It’s Harris and the Democrats. Should people have voted? Yes. Is it understandable why people didn’t want to vote for the person telling them that she’ll be a good republican and support a genocide? Also yes.
I didn’t realize a wealth tax, 25k credit for first time home buyers, support for legalized cannabis, support for trans people, etc were Republican policies.
Are there more things on my progressive checklist? Yes, definitely. Universal healthcare, for one.
Part of being an adult is not being able to get everything you want when you want it.
Part of politics in the US is understanding that some of those things that Harris supported which resulted in a candidate that was not far left enough to get progressives off the couch, are too far left for other voters.
I don’t envy whoever is picking up the pieces at the DNC and trying to determine what the precise amount of leftism is that will get those 10-15 million leftists off the couch without alienating the 60-70 million that did show up.
This is especially true for the Palestine issue. How many of those 10-15 million watching from the sidelines would have shown up for a pro-Palestine candidate? Even if it was 10 million, there would still have been more who would sit this one out or vote Trump, because they’d believe the bullshit that the Palestinians are all terrorists. I truly wish it wasn’t the case, but I fear the post-911 Islamophobia and the imperialist attitudes about support for Israel would have cost a pro-Palestine candidate more votes than they would have gained.
a wealth tax
Did she actually campaign on this, or was it just some white paper she had on her website? There’s a difference between having a policy that you are campaigning on and actually intend to carry out and some vague policy paper a staffer wrote.
25k credit for first time home buyers This was an absolute embarrassment of a policy. Did you see the requirements on it? They presented it as a typical neoliberal bullshit policy. It was filled with so many specific requirements that almost no one would qualify for it. And it was bad economic policy too, as it would simply serve to further inflate the overheated housing bubble.
support for legalized cannabis
You cannot run on something that is one of your severe policy failures. Democrats have been running on the cannabis issue for multiple cycles at this point. They’ve all dragged their feet and slow-walked it for cheap political points.
support for trans people
She’s objectively better on this than Trump, but trying to Third Way it, she screwed herself over. Democrats were vocally supportive of trans rights before any kind of major backlash emerged, but their support was only ever skin-deep. Trans issues were largely absent from the recent DNC.
The Republicans latched onto anti-trans bigotry as one of their major campaign planks, and the Democrats responded by just trying to ignore trans people entirely. They avoided discussing trans people whenever possible, and they never came up with effective responses to Republicans’ main attack points. If you actually believe in trans rights, the correct response to the charge of “you want men in women sports!” is to say, “well trans women aren’t men, and you shouldn’t moronically assume trans women have the same athletic advantages as cis men.” If you actually believe in trans rights and equality, you would say, “the differences between men and women sports performance is almost entirely due to testosterone. Any minor differences that remain are not worth discriminating against people over.” Etc. You know, actually RESPONDING TO and REBUTTING the attacks Republicans make against trans people.
Centrist democrats showed conclusively that their support for trans people was nothing more than shallow political pandering. The Biden administration hasn’t been using all the levers of federal power to protect trans kids from their state governments.
This kind of mealy-mouthed centrism is what cost Kamala the election. She isn’t an enemy of trans people, but she’s also not a real ally. She doesn’t want to actively harm trans people, but she doesn’t have some fundamental belief in the worth of trans rights. It’s just another political football to her. It was beneficial to seem extremely pro-trans in 2020, and now that the conservatives have rallied against trans people, now she’s not so eager to defend trans people. It seems disingenuous and it made her look like someone who would say anything just to win the election.
How many of those 10-15 million watching from the sidelines would have shown up for a pro-Palestine candidate?
No one was expecting her to become a rabidly pro-Palestinian protester. No one expected her to get up at the podium and say, “actually, Hamas did nothing wrong, and the Israelis should be relocated out of Palestine.” People wanted her to make US military aid contingent on Israel meeting human rights guidelines. Israel, despite all the precision weaponry we give them, has a worse civilian:military kill ratio than Hamas. They kill more civilians for every soldier they kill than radical terrorists. Despite all their high-tech weaponry, THAT is how unconcerned Israel has been about civilian casualties. Hamas has done a better job of avoiding civilian casualties than Israel.
Anyway, the polling showed that calling for a cease-fire and other measures would have been immensely popular. This was a completely unforced error on her part. She threw away votes for nothing.
I’m not saying that she didn’t have any liberal centrist ideas like what you listed, but that doesn’t mean she was progressive either. A lot of the policy ideas that were actually good were once on the Republican platform before Reagan.
Don’t forget about how popular Bernie was in 2016 before he was forcibly removed from the democratic nomination by the party establishment or how popular Tlaib, AOC, and Omar have been. Don’t forget about how down-ballot races in this cycle, while brutal to Democrats, didn’t push out many progressives. Progressivism is far more popular than the democratic party is willing to admit or fight on, because the party is owned and controlled by the same class currently oppressing us; the billionaires. If a candidate like Bernie presents a real path, they will force the person out. It’s not strictly an issue with the Overton window.
Here’s the thing about the choice facing people in the election: it doesn’t matter anymore as a matter of the current political reality, because Harris gambled hard on the “good cop, bad cop” aspect of “he’s worse” and lost hard. That statement is 110% true, but it’s horribly ineffective as we saw in 2016 and again in this election. Islamophobia will absolutely increase, and Trump will fund the genocide until all of Palestine is settled by colonists. But once again, don’t forget about how successful Tlaib was in comparison to Harris. We no longer have the opportunity to find out if it would or wouldn’t have affected the campaign, but the indication is there that at least 1 swing state would have gone to Harris with an anti-genocide stance.
You’re only providing half of the argument. The other half of the argument is the fact that if you didn’t support her, then you supported a fascist dictatorship.
And what happened? We got a fascist dictatorship!
Let’s preface with the fact I voted for Harris, and understand where you’re coming from with lesser evil voting.
But the other half of your argument is that with the way that Harris was tacking to the right to try to gain moderate voters, the choice was between voting between fascism now and fascism later down the line.
But if we vote for fascism later then we have time to distance ourselves from fascism.
By sitting at home happy that you did your job and ‘defeated’ fascism, until the next election where your choice is again fascism now and fascism a little less later down the line?
As the Dems keep drifting further and further right. At what point do you put your foot down and demand actual progressive policies? And how do you get those demands to actually be listened to when the party knows you’ll vote for them because “at least we’re not as bad as the other guys. What choice do you have?” Supporting her is a message to the Democratic party that their strategy of slowly becoming more conservative wins elections. And this is the reason that I was very conflicted about voting for her, but just held my nose and did it for the greater good.
I think you’re wrong about how the party sees non voters. When you don’t vote, the party treats you like a non voter and moves their platform to the right to appeal to the voters. When you sit home in an election the party doesn’t go “how do we get these votes of people that only vote when the stars align perfectly”, they go, “how do we get these votes of people that always vote”. Every far left person mad about the country moving right can blame themselves just as much as the party. People who consistently participate shape the future.
Source: I’ve worked for the Democratic party and have a pretty good idea how they interpret voter turnout data.
Out of curiosity, how do they interpret 3rd party left-leaning votes, particularly in swing states? Obviously those wouldn’t have decided this election, just curious since you seem to be in the know.
If I understand their outlook, first job is getting people who consistently vote for Dems to be reminded and motivated to go to the polls. 2nd is convincing consistent voters to vote for you (that includes Republicans and third party), a distant last is convincing non-voters or occasional voters. I think the problem with trying to get 3rd party voters to vote for Dems is that the type of person that votes 3rd party is very difficult to convince that you’re an ally.
They could completely realign the party platform to fit with 3rd party and non voters biggest issues and most won’t shift their vote for many reasons. Disgust for the 2 party system, distrust that the party will follow a more left wing agenda, conspiracy theories, the needs to be contrarian or protect their sense of moral purity, etc.
While I’m not sure I agree with the parties approach to disaffected voters. I do think the amount of investment needed to get those voters is possibly outweighed by the amount of voters you may lose in the process. And that sense of inherent risk is stopping the party from taking a chance. Maybe we get lucky and they no longer see an alternative, but I doubt it.
That’s because fascism has never and will never be beaten at the ballot box.
