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If there’s one lesson the DNC should learn it’s this.
They won’t. But they should.
Why learn anything, the policies they want will be implemented anyway 🧠
If we wanted to be Republicans we'd be Republicans for fucks sake...
We can't have 2 parties fighting to be the most hateful party of the billionaires. I mean I guess we can but only one gets to win.
The Democrats have been chasing the mythical moderate conservative at the expense of the progressive left forever and have learned nothing. I want a fire and brimstone progressive who is belligerent and aggressive
I'd even be happy to settle for someone in the middle of the party willing to fight for the party's supposed ideals. Remember when one of her slogans was "when we fight, we win"? Not "when we bipartisan, we win" or "when we coopt conservative issues, we win".
The Republicans had their little tea party a few years ago. The Democrats need a Guillotine Party to properly represent us.
The Tea Party forced the GOP to rebrand and restructure itself around the most extreme right wing ideas possible
Occupy Wallstreet tried to do the same thing, and... were savagely beaten by the police over it.
They had the billionaire Koch's to fund that. We're never getting a billionaire to fund the leopard party that will eat their faces.
:(
My take on this is that the DNC has never understood that to win the presidency in the last 20 years you need to be a fire brand.
I think this stared in 2008 with Obama who won I believe because he fired up the base with great speeches about hope and change. It didn't really happen, BUT the man knew how to give a speech. That got people inspired to do something and they voted.
Bernie was another fire brand - told it like it was and it appealed to a large population.
trump won using the same idea, but just the opposite of hope and change yet it worked. It tapped into a visceral and deep frustration that this country has left them behind.
The modern view of the American president to the population is less of a wonky politician and more of a cheerleader for big ideas, even if those ideas are abhorrent and exceedingly horrifying.
Harris just wasn't the person to pull this off, she was too wonky and it felt like the entire campaign was playing the old card of "we are not trump" Instead if they really wanted to win they would have found ( 2 years ago) a feisty out spoken progressive leaning firebrand that would have inspired people to vote for something better.
The only reason that (bland) Biden won was because of how badly trump fucked up the Covid response.
I think when she was announced as the candidate, she fired up the base just fine. She was different.
Then she spent the rest of the campaign reassuring people that nothing would change, pissing away that enthusiasm.
One of the frustrations I had was her solution to the housing problem was to just build more houses and give out some money. Sure great, but what I wanted to hear, and I think many other also wanted to hear, was her talking about corporate hording of housing and what she would do about that situation. But she just ignored it completely and so did Biden.
I think instead if she came out swinging against corporate greed, even if she actually did nothing about it, would have given her more votes.
My one hope out of this is that the massive swing to the right will be countered with more vocal progressives.
Here's a fun little tip if you're ever able to try this again.
MLK Jr. never appealed to the white man, he never tried to win over whitey nor tone down his message so that he didn't alienate his opressors, and he never tried to get the Klan on his side.
Notice how we don't have segregation anymore? It's because if Dr. King did these things, he'd have been luaghed at.
And instead he was shot at, not for the race stuff, but when he started talking about the class divide in general.
Yes. When you abandon the left, they don't vote for you. This is what Clinton did too
They have clearly internalized the pervasive trope that leftists will vote for them, because they have no other choice, so the only thing that matters to convince is the right. Looks like they calculated wrong.
Obama got people excited about healthcare reform. Biden got people excited about student debt relief. Clinton tried to get people excited about a female president and Harris centered her campaign around running against Trump.
Social programs get people excited.
Yeah, the notion that she was going to put a Republican in her cabinet.....did anyone think that was a good idea? I mean, outside the beltway media?
I know every early on she was talking about possibly having a Republican Vice President before she wised up and went with Tim Walz and ran on his progressive ideas for about... three seconds till Nancy and the DNC told her to just do what Hillary did, as that worked for her and Kamela is obviously the second female president right now. /s
NO! Harris just needed to go further right. Forced goose-stepping marches at rallies. Pledges to eradicate all minorities. Promise global wars of conquest.
Outflank Trump on the right, and the republicans AND democrats will vote for you.
I don't get why it's hard to comprehend. By becoming (even) more conservative, more "R", they betrayed (even more of) their base. Why would timid Republicans want to vote for traitors pandering to them?
Shit I was saying when Biden was still running and I got crucified for it.
As you shift to the right you leave your base behind, ignoring a growing, left swinging faction within the party is going to lead to outcomes like this. Working class people all have the same problems, and one party says they'll do something about it. They're lying, people who are generally smarter and paying attention know they're lying, but that's not most people.
The other party has had a chance, and failed to do anything to alleviate the concerns of the working class. Regardless of the circumstances, or their actual ability to affect change. And they spent the entire election cycle trying to curry votes from a dedicated base instead of getting voters excited about something.
Swing left, swing hard. Become the unhinged leftist the other side is already accusing you of being.
Its a two party system, why would anyone think being a bit more like the other guy be a good idea?
Why would someone pick knockoff awful when the name brand is right there?
Not only that, if she's not targeting Democrats they won't feel motivated to vote for her. Yes, yes, fascism was the other option. But people are not smart, and I say that as a people.
Ding ding ding! Trump went further right and got more support. DNC should go further left. People want radical change in 2024
Bipartisanship is dead.
No one wants to work with people that they view as inherently evil, corrupt, and a threat to democracy.
Kamalas campaign thought they could win without offending any megadonors, despite seeing what a bit of honesty did for them right after biden was replaced.
Ive never seen such obvious virtue signaling, I'm not sure kamala even believed her own words.
It was the stupidest of ideas. Republicans were never going to vote for her in any numbers. She was all about gun control, she personally owned the 12 million border crossings, she had all those defund the police sound bites from her earlier years, and she couldn't effectively separate herself from the difficult economy for middle and low earners - while failing to communicate that she even cared about the common man's plight or would try to help it. Even her proposed tax plan raised taxes on lower middle class, at least the charts I saw (including here on Lemmy). And Republicans have seen four years of Trump and think all the Nazi and "all Republicans are racist" talk is literally the stupidest thing on the earth. Abortion was all Dems really had, and although lots of Republicans are pro-choice, Trump had promised to veto a national abortion ban (for whatever that's worth).
I remember when Democrats were for the working people. They need to stop being "We're not the Nazis"and start telling us who they are. But I don't think they want to tell us who they are. They're no longer the party of the working man, they're the party of corporate interest and global governance, and they're also almost as authoritarian as the right. Maybe the collapse of the Democrat party will result in the birth of an actual socialist party in the US. We've seen major party changes in the past. Will it happen again, soon?
"I remember when Democrats were for the working people?"
What was the Great Depression like?
yeah this was a really fucking stupid idea and I think any Dingus on Twitter could have told you the same. The Trump voter base does not move. everyone's been saying this. I don't understand the Democrat strategy at all
I don't know what the actual numbers are on this, but I have to imagine the number of progressive voters who want more progressive policies far exceeds the number of Republicans that will vote Democrat. if anyone has a source to this data, I am interested in it.
I don’t understand the Democrat strategy at all
Someone else summed it up better than I can. The democratic party is doing exactly what it set out to do.
They have no interest in furthering progressive policies so they don't. That's why the DNC chair is calling Bernie Sander's critique of the party's platform bullshit right now, instead of admitting he's right.
The system is as it does.
So left wing Democrats responded by sitting on their hands instead of voting, knowingly allowing the country to slide into whatever authoritarian hellhole that awaits us? Now that’s the definition of pettiness.
We kept trying to warn you.
And every time - every last fucking time - anyone told you that moving to the right was going to cause people to stay home, you lot shot the messenger. Every time someone screamed the writing on the wall out loud, centrists who were so happy that the party was finally embracing genocide and Cheney were like "Russian! Tankie! Trumpist!"
I voted for Harris. You'll blame me anyway. Democrats will always shoot the messenger and double down on their simping for fascists.
Yes, my friend was one of them. I was shocked when 2 weeks before election he told me he was planning on not voting.
I asked why and he cited holding the same position Isreal as Biden, and courting republicans like Cheney, saying that was not a good look for the party at all.
I told him it’s not ideal, but we need to vote to keep Trump out…. Sometimes we just have to be pragmatic.
He responded saying it’s the Dem establishment that keeps allowing a boogey man like Trump to rise so they can shove center right corporatists down our throats. He said he was abstaining from voting to send a message to the DNC, and followed it up with, “we survived a first Trump term, I’m sure we can survive a second.”
we survived a first Trump term
As long as you weren't one of the million Americans who died of COVID thanks to his misadministration.
Or the Capitol police who died as a result from his attempted insurrection.
I mean, he’s an ex-pat who was living in Hong Kong, S Korea, and Vietnam for most of Trumps first term… so I’m sure he didn’t feel it as hard as most of us who were here for it.
"Thousands of my countrymen will perish, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
Sorry dude, the problem is well beyond "leftists" and sooner or later you'll need to confront that.
I’m not one of them, I voted a month or so in advance by mail.
But I wonder if some people are tired of the lack of change with Democrats in charge and believe that things need to get worse before they can get better.
Pretty much, although it's probably an exaggeration to call them Democrats. In reality most of them are likely unaffiliated with any party. But it was literally Harris's job to convince them to come out and vote for her and she failed at it. When a candidate loses an election, barring election interference, it's their fault. Harris fucked us all by running as a diet Republican. Odds are anyone in here reading this did everything we could to hand her the win, but she pissed it all away by trying to steal votes from the Republicans instead of convincing people that they needed to get off their asses and come vote for her.
This is similar to how someone will slowly abandon their old friends to be relevant with the “cool” kids who will never see you as part of their group no matter what, and your old friends end up making new friends leaving you alone. If this doesn’t work in real life, I don’t get how this could work in politics.
The Democratic party has to stop treating us like the old friend they visit every so often just to get something out of us while forming closer relationships with others who have no business being their friend.
Everyone needs to let them know how strongly this article is nailing it.
Based on them already attacking Bernie, who sucked up to them so hard this last year, I doubt they're going to listen to anyone's opinion if it doesn't also come with millions of dollars