Vincent Oriedo, a biotechnology scientist, had just such a question. What lessons have been learned, he asked, from Harris’s defeat in this vital swing county in a crucial battleground state that voted for Joe Biden four years ago, and how are the Democrats applying them?
“They did not answer the question,” he said.
“It tells me that they haven’t learned the lessons and they have their inner state of denial. I’ve been paying careful attention to the influencers within the Democratic party. Their discussions have centred around, ‘If only we messaged better, if only we had a better candidate, if only we did all these superficial things.’ There is really a lack of understanding that they are losing their base, losing constituencies they are taking for granted.”
“We have set ourselves up for generational loss because we keep promoting from within leaders that that do not criticise the moneyed interests. They refuse to take a hard look at what Americans actually believe and meet those needs.”
Trump pretty much won on optics alone and positioning himself once again as looking out for people despite not being true at all. Dems didn’t want to address people’s issues with the economy and did the weird thing of tap dancing for right Dick Cheney voters who don’t exist.
Just stand for something, even if the risk of loss is high. It pays off in the end.
I am convinced that the assassination attempt secured him the win. I’m not American so maybe I’m way off, but over here that felt like the pivotal moment. It’s still annoying how GOOD that picture is.
Every breakdown and postmortem i see make it pretty clear:
If you paid close attention and were well-informed, you voted for Kamala.
If you believe things aren’t true or didn’t pay close attention, you voted for Trump as a sort of totem for wealth and success, not because of a specific policy of his you like. He just represents making lots of money to you.
Any grappling with what went wrong or improvements needed within the DNC first needs to reckon with the reality that people aren’t seeing left-wing messaging and are instead exposed to a fake version of leftism pushed constantly by right-wing actors on social media.
Everyone complains about poor Democratic messaging but when are we going to admit that as long as Republicans own all major media platforms, any messaging by Democrats is going to be distorted into nonsense by the media?
I think a lot of people have problems with the Democratic Party being bought by the billionaires as well …and supporting genocidal regimes.
I voted for Harris but you boiled it down to a few lines and missed a lot of reasons why I think a significant amount of Americans didn’t vote at all.
The problem is that to get things done in the system you need money to compete with their money. Especially when one side owns the media and apps.
One person now can donate more money than all the grassroots combined. To change that you need to be in control of the Supreme Court, and to appoint them you need president and senate for a number of years.
Basically everything needs a complete reform because the system is designed to hold onto their power if you play by their rules.
I voted for Harris, but I think that they’re missing the point. They needed to win over more people with their candidate. You still have to be popular and you don’t have a divine mandate because your opposition is intolerable.
I am a demographic Dems claim to champion, but I haven’t ever seen that support materialize. Somehow they never help me. I vote Dem because I like Rep less. I get not liking Dem as a party. I don’t like them either. This is very prevalent within my communities. It drives voter apathy and pushes moderates to the right. They’re viewed as incompetent in addition to being just bought and paid for as Reps.
They haven’t had a genuine primary in decades. They haven’t tried to connect with small-midsize cities in decades. They’ve completely failed to communicate with their average voters and that is THEIR job to do that. The last minimum wage increase was signed into law by Bush and then Dems sat on their thumbs for three terms. I do not accept “I tried.” I need a party that can win those battles. I’ve tried engaging with my local Democrats, but I get boilerplate responses. I’m fairly sure they’re all chatbots at this point.
And most importantly, it’s hard to root for a perpetual loser. Even when they win they still lose and can’t do anything. It’s never their fault. They just never do anything. I need someone intelligent enough to win. Dems don’t provide that.
They’ll get my vote until anyone else who isn’t a Rep/Fascist has a chance of winning and not a moment longer. It’s so wholly undemocratic that I have to choice between a Kleptocrat or a Fascist.
The only lesson to be learnt from this is that forgiving debts, pardoning marijuana offences, wanting fair elections, etc don’t work.
The only lesson they could learn from this is that they weren’t conservative enough.
Fuck that lesson.
The only lesson they could learn from this is that they weren’t conservative enough.
I don’t think this is even remotely the lesson.
The right wingers already go on social media spouting that “the libs” are socialist, sure, but that’s just because it’s what their media tells them.
The lesson should be that propaganda wins elections, not logical answers. You have to appeal to quick witty replies with even more quick witty replies. You have to use loads of smoke and mirrors to promise outcomes without any tangible methodologies.
The democrats should promise to fund the military… and then use the military funding for humanitarian ends like we did with covid vaccines. The line item looks great to dummy middle america voters to say “wow the democrats want a strong military” even though the spending really is to build homes for the poor or provide subsidized healthcare through federal military pop up hospitals (with contracted civilian doctors.)
You have to literally provide handouts about a year out from election time to subsidize a topic like gas prices leading up to the election. The day the elections are over you can remove all of those things and start replenishing it… so release that strategic reserve big time. Focus on extra subsidies in places where you can actually win the vote, so fuck deep red and deep blue. Hate to say it… the battleground is all that matters.
If you want to appeal to the common voter it can’t be by pushing for educational values or refunds for people with degrees. It has to be refunds for people with high grocery bills, high utility costs. Hell, remove the SALT deduction entirely in the name of “small government” because that’s one thing even lower class republicans think would be a bad move to raise… but this is still way too detailed for the ignorant voting masses to grasp… so you should probably say you are going to lower taxes rather than say you’re upping it for billionaires. The latter is always assumed even though it never actually happens.
Bring out all the news about how republicans are actually raising taxes. How they actually result in higher gas costs, higher housing costs, higher grocery costs. Why the fuck “Tariffs” weren’t brought out as MASSIVE tax increases for the common working person is bewildering to me! Dumpy loves tariffs but describe it in simple terms as a tax - IMPORT TAX - and suddenly it will be very unpopular. “Dumpy says tariffs are good!!!” but the news is plastered with “import taxes called tariffs”… why are they raising taxes again? for common hard working people? “You mean i’m gonna have to pay more money at the grocery store AND the pump???”
Campaigning on city values isn’t working because the battleground states aren’t uber dense. You have to appeal to the rural people with promises that can be delivered in the short term and that will cost them in the long term, because they are HORRIBLE at gauging long term impact. They can only remember what just happened and what is happening now. Dumpy is promising that the future will be great, why are you promising that things are gonna be tough? Things are tough right now for most people, why are you saying that the economy is great? I know by many metrics we are succeeding but the complexity of economics goes over almost everyone’s head. Instead you should have been campaigning on the fact that dumpy lowered taxes on the rich and that the rich didn’t fulfill their end of the bargain and are stealing all the money from the hard working middle americans.
No die hard blue state is going to vote red so it’s time to abandon intelligent values for dummy propaganda. Let’s fucking go.
Oh and on the sidelines talk about the real policy you want to implement akin to project2025 which actually has the real DNC agenda, just like how P2025 is the GOP agenda.
They don’t learn the lesson, because they don’t want to. And your examples imo show the problem.
forgiving debts, pardoning marinuana offences
These are not solutions, they are bandaids that like a drug keep you dependent on politicians repeating them again and again. Which of course is nice when your only goal is to get relected, but longterm that magic wears off.
The majority of the US voting population ignores the long term.
They have also been legalizing marijuana and pressured the DEA to reschedule it, those are lasting solutions.
Democrats also support tuition free college, but haven’t been able to get the bill passed yet. Student loan forgiveness can be passed with executive orders, but tuition free college would require a bill passed by Congress.
Biden rescheduled marijuna and Kamala promised to completely legalize it. Making medicine free requires 60 senate votes.
People turned down the solutions even after receiving the bandaids.
The people who aren’t learning are voters.
Biden promised it on his first campaign trail… and did almost nothing to that end.
The Parsons for cannabis that actually mattered happened after the election. And the “starting to consider maybe pushing the fda to maybe consider it” came 3.5 years after election.
Cannabis was rescheduled under Biden and he pardoned thousands of offenders, Idk if anybody has crunched the numbers yet but he’s probably pardoned the most people of any potus LINK.
Cannabis is NOT rescheduled. It is still a schedule I drug.
The consideration, to maybe reschedule started about 8 months ago.
The pardons before the election only impacted about 50 people, and didn’t include expungement.
In a capitalist society, the role of government should be to protect citizens from corporations.
If nobody is willing to do that, what use are they?
That’s not how capitalism works… capitalists uses the state to secure, and concentrate power in their hands…
Yeah well fuck all came because of that action.
Sound like You’re telling me CEOs aren’t taking any actions to make themselves safer…
How does CEOs making themselves safer help the rest of us?
Three things are needed for this to work: labor, capital, and
governmentauthorized violence.The first got destroyed, and the second used the third to get bigger than ever.
So we went from a tricycle to a penny farthing and now we’re falling over.
The government is a tool of the capitalist class in a capitalist society. Democracy was originally for the capitalists and their allies and now is a hedge against revolution.
Democracy means “rule by the people as equals”.
It doesn’t mean " western power".
To be against democracy as an ideology or concept is to be against having humans rights: to be able to decide how you will live and die and for what purpose the fruits of your labor is used.
I don’t know how anything you wrote is relevant to what I wrote.
You said:
Democracy was originally for the capitalists and their allies and now is a hedge against revolution.
Democracy isn’t a compromise with the rich. It is complete ownership by the people.
Democracy in its idealized form, of which I am a proponent of, is that, assuming you mean ownership of the means of production. In popular use, what many countries have is considered a democracy. To be pedantic, we elect representatives to the government by democratic means in most capitalist countries. We call this democracy. I think we should have the former, but I’m not interested in wasting my little social good will on pedantry and definitions with the average person.
There are Democratic Party people and aligned people who are realistic about why they lost and who they lost. They have contacts within the Party. Hopefully they’ll be listened to.
We’ll probably get a sense of what if any changes we will see in the upcoming special elections to fill House seats Trump is looting for his Cabinet. Then I believe Florida law requires an election pretty soon to replace Rubio, so that will be a national race we can watch.
Presumably whoever DeSantis appoints will have a pretty big advantage, but we should watch the message and the votes. It will be too early to be a full reaction against Trump, so we can learn a lot about what resonates with voters.
Neoliberalism is done, it’s fucked. The liberals wanted and thought they could pull another Bernie and people would just go with it, fuck that.
The left is fucked overall, they have splintered and hate each other more than they hate trump. Meanwhile the right is united.
This election in particular, the American left has become toxic. If you’re even slightly left or right of any other leftist and you may as well be a nazi to them. No leftist was left enough for the other leftists. “No, I’m the true left, and fuck the rest of you, you’re fascists!” Was basically what every leftists was yelling at each other while not voting, and allowing trump to win. If you’re left and you stood aside and didn’t vote, fuck you.
There was no leftist candidate running for POTUS…
Bullshit. Run on healthcare and ending genocide in Palestine. Those two issue alone would catapult a candidate into office. The Left has a lot of unfortunate infighting. That doesn’t mean we would reject a good candidate over small differences.
The Democrat aristocracy do not care about winning.
They only care about marketing the disaster of their losses so that they can launder billions of dollars in “vote blue” spam campaigns.
All those donations are going somewhere - to “consultancy firms”. To “ad agencies”. And then they get to enjoy kickbacks from this mutual relationship.
THEY DON’T NEED TO WIN TO RAKE IN BILLIONS.
and so they don’t even try.
Left vs right or democrat vs republican — that framing is a distraction in this political reality. The war is between the 99% and the 1%. It’s the working class vs the billionaire class. Your republican neighbor may be a MAGA religious crazy, voting against his financial interests, but he’s been successfully manipulated by a corrupt party controlled by billionaires. Your other neighbor may ‘vote blue no matter who’, ignoring or ignorant to the fact that most democrats at the state and federal level are also influenced or bought by corporate interests and the 1%. These neighbors are clearly not the same, but they are both supporting the interests and agenda of a billionaire class that is oppressing them.
That is not to say that republicans or religious extremism are not threats — they very much are — but they have been allowed to gain power due to a broken and corrupt system of government.
The system is broken because unlimited money gets funneled into politics. It’s destroyed our checks and balances, as well as the incentive structure for our judges and our representatives — most of whom no longer have a primary interest in representing the 99% of us. We are being taxed, robbed, poisoned, oppressed and enslaved by our own government, without even proper representation to show for it.
We cannot expect that our elected representatives will act in our best interests; they require our constant input and scrutiny of their actions. Either we as a people become more involved with politics at all levels of government, or we start a revolution. The problem of corruption in all levels of our government will not be solved by the corrupted. A continuation and increase of wealth inequality will destroy this country.
The corporate-backed fascist MAGA-America regime starts tomorrow, but we are not powerless. The 99% has power. We must come together, organize, educate, exercise empathy and patience with one another, and take action; we can take back control. We have to.
Nothing will happen until there is a major crisis of some kind. Life is way too easy for most people. Occupy was a failure for this reason. You need Great Depression style suffering or better yet early 20th century labor conditions in order to get any ball rolling. Great Society was nothing really.
demorats coping hard
We have set ourselves up for generational loss because we keep promoting from within leaders that that do not criticise the moneyed interests
Evergreen quote-
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
What funny is everyone knows for a fact what lesson they should’ve learned, and if you ask 3 people they will give you 5 contradicting answers, every single one of which will be the most important strategy advice that stupid dems don’t see. It will usually can be boiled into “They need to focus on this specific issue and only on it, to the detriment of all the others”.
All voters say Democrats should cut ties with big corporations and focus on economic populism. Taxing big corporations not identity politics whilst giving corporations a tax break.
Bernie Sanders is what people would have voted for. There is no confusion. The Democratic party does not “understand” this because they do not want to understand it.
In this political environment, when the corporations are the kingmakers, you can’t afford to not be a corporatist. Democrats and Republicans are both very pro-business, but big business likes the Republicans better because they are completely mask-off about letting them do whatever they like, while the Dems have to pretend they care about stuff like regulations to appease their voters.
Bernie, or someone like him, is essentially fighting an uphill battle. You can’t take money from corporations, while simultaneously having to defend yourself from far-right extremist slander and the DNC actively trying to sabotage you so they can replace you with a corporatist. Meanwhile, Trump can be the big tent and get everybody in bed with him because the right will clearly stoop to any level to win and businesses have no scruples about who sits in the chair as long as they get a return on their investment.
It’s frustrating. Maddening. We are completely screwed for the foreseeable future unless Trump manages to fuck up even worse than he did in his first term or a grassroots left wing movement really gets going in time for the next election, presuming the institution of voting isn’t completely ratfucked or dismantled by then.
If this is true then we’re well and truly an oligarchy.
Doesn’t really seem like America really wants to cut ties with big corporations, seeing how people are voting. Nor identity politics for that matter, seems more important than ever among the right wing. Just that their identity politics is of a different kind.
I’m not saying I know wether it would be a good idea to actually do what you’re proposing. But I think people are way to quick to know the solution. Because it resonates with their own beliefs.
People aren’t voting anti-corp if anti-corp isn’t even on the ballot
Well, Bernie participated in two primaries, and in both cases he demonstrably, objectively lost the popular vote, which means that people did not vote for him.
Which is exactly what I am talking about, your idea sounds good to you, but you base it on your vibes, and numbers tell the different story apparently.He lost in 2020 because of a coordinated campaign to get all the centrist candidates except Joe Biden to drop out, while Warren stayed in as a progressive candidate against Bernie.
They did this precisely because he was on track to win the popular vote among the Democratic base. No candidate was set to win a majority of the popular vote, but Bernie was looking at a clear plurality.
Bernie WAS winning the popular vote until the DNC deliberately prevented him from doing so.
It would be a nice story, in theory, but unfortunately in reality in 2020 finals there also were such bastions of leftist values like Bloomberg and Buttigieg. Which still would not matter because Biden got more votes than all the other candidates combined.
Which once again brings us to the question, where are all the Bernie voters that are suppose to bring his victory? Do they don’t know how to vote, do they too apathetic to do that or do they just not exist?
Ignore the sabotage from the DNC for this narrative to work
The whole thing about popular vote (I repeat, popular vote) is that whatever you think about the process of actually choosing candidate, and whatever trickery the DNC did, it does not affect how the popular vote went. There could be something to your words if there was a popular vote swinging one way and electoral picking swinging the other, but it wasn’t the case. All the millions people who in your mind would vote for Bernie didn’t show up to do it twice. Either that because they don’t vote and don’t know how democracy works, or because they don’t exist I don’t know, and I leave it up to you to decide which is worse.
You clearly didnt see what happened or what the DNC did.
Did they personally brake the legs of all the leftist voters so they don’t vote for their preferred candidate? Or did they just run a campaign against him and all the passionate Bernie voters just decided to believe their campaign and not vote for him?
I don’t see an explanation here that supports that “Bernie would won the election” narrative.
And I don’t think it’s a good thing, I totally agree that he would be the best president US ever saw and he absolutely, unequivocally was the best candidate with the best ideas. I just don’t believe american voting population wants what’s best for them, there is much to be done to undone centuries of capitalist propaganda. But this work doesn’t start with escaping into fantasy world, it stops there.
Unless and until we shut down the propaganda channels serving hostile foreign interests, it’s going to be a long, painful struggle.
You’re overestimating the power of foreign propaganda. Harris lost because she refused to break with Biden on Gaza, offered a middle-class economic policy instead of working-class economic populism, and spent the campaign pursuing moderate Republicans as her base abandoned her. Foreign influence campaigns certainly played a part, but they’re not magic; they didn’t force the Democrats to run an out of touch, centrist campaign, and they didn’t create the economic crises facing the working class. If the Democrats had run a campaign that credibly addressed the issues of their base, no amount of foreign propaganda would have kept them from winning.
“The things Harris said, like she was going to give $25,000 for people to buy their first home, there were a lot of people said she was giving their money away to people who didn’t deserve it. It cost her votes. We were trying to tell her that.”
What’s the answer to that? On the face of it, this says that the electorate don’t want public money spent on helping other people who need help. How do you achieve anything other than conservatism with such an electorate? The only thing I can think is that you have to promise to help more of the electorate, and that the money will be come from the very rich. In other words, the only counter to conservatism is a commitment to actual wealth redistribution, and to going up against the selfish interests of the super-rich. That’s not yet even socialism, but it’s still further to the left that the Democratic Party is willing to go. For now, its leadership would rather lose elections to fascists than challenge billionaires.
A few conservative pundits attacked it from the “undeserving” angle. The actual base didn’t give a damn. The actual base thought it was a useless and tone-deaf figleaf of a policy. It was a wonkish policy only a milquetoast centrist could love - a market subsidy that had a long litany of provisos and qualifications. And one that economists stated would just serve to bid house prices up even higher.
The voters didn’t reject progressive wealth redistribution. They rejected half-baked meaningless gestures.
Giving everyone 25K means housing prices go up by 25K. It was a very bad idea and would benefit the billionaire class.
What should have been done was capping rent and building more houses.
It wasn’t “give everyone 25k”
Be more disingenuous.
Indeed only people who use it to buy a house. If everyone has 25K more, then housing prices go up by 25K.
How did you transmute “25k for families that haven’t missed a bill payment in 2 years and who are buying their first home” into “everyone getting 25k to buy a home”?
Do you just disagree with whatever endgame you imagine she’s reaching for, and are speaking to that? Like that policy is just shorthand for something like “everyone gets free money” and that would be bad, so her policy is bad?
How do you transmute giving everyone free money into fixing a housing crisis?
The solution is extremely obvious, and has been done many times: government funded social housing.
Giving people more money to buy a house does not create houses out of thin air. It does not fix a supply shortage, it only exacerbates the crisis.
First time buyers have had bonuses across the U.S. for years. It absolutely has nothing to do with house prices being higher. Texas does it, Tennessee, Florida, California… Probably everywhere
You know, I was being facetious, I didn’t actually want you to be more disingenuous…
Capitalism doesnt work, the end. Need a new and better system, not keep contributing to said system
Are… you lost?
Capping rent makes more housing less likely. Are you suggesting government built housing?
Not allowing one or two private equity firms to own a lions share of the market would help.
That’s why you only cap rents on buildings that have existed for some time.
Businesses do not plan for 30 years or more in the future. If landlords can’t make an acceptable rate of return within 30 years, they’re not going to build a new house or apartment building.
So you can attach rent control provisions to buildings that are over a few decades old, and it will have zero impact on the financing and construction of new housing. It will only affect buildings after they’ve long since been built and paid for.
You do have to worry about rent controls discouraging landlords from keeping buildings maintained. But that’s why good rent control doesn’t cap rent, but simply limit the rate of increase. If a landlord can afford to keep a building maintained today, they will be able to keep it maintained in the future, even if rent increases are capped to the rate of inflation.
If anything, smart rent controls like this actually encourage the construction of new housing. By limiting rent increases on old buildings, you encourage landlords to knock them down and replace them with bigger and newer buildings that can be rented at any rate. In unregulated markets, landlords can increase profits by colluding to suppress the construction of new housing stock. Why invest the money in new buildings if you can just increase the rents on existing buildings by conspiring to prevent new buildings from being built? Smart rent controls mean that if landlords want to see their profits increase at any rate higher than inflation, then they will need to actually build new housing units.
Government built housing is how the UK solved the problem last time. Then Thatcher sold it off and there hasn’t been any real interest in doing it again despite all the same problems coming back.
Non profit housing, be it through companies owjed by the municipality or cooperatives who provide housing to their members are very effective means to limit rents and provide housing.
In many European countries it used to be normal for a large part of the rental market to be in the hand of such entities or even housing built to be buyed to own by lower middle class families.
Incidently rents started exploding after a lot of these got privatized in the 80s to 00s.
Well, I’m not in denial. This country is full of fucking idiots. The next Democratic presidential candidate should be a celebrity that promises to achieve world peace and full gay space communism. Apparently empty promises and celebrity are what win elections.
I think you may have missed the point a bit. It’s exactly these ‘empty promises’ which have been the democrats issue over the past 30 years.
They get elected on messages like ‘make the economy work work everyday americans’ and then once in office they prioritize the status quo and making sure that nothing major changes. This benefits the wealth and damages everyday people, many of whom voted for them in the hopes that the democrats would improve their situation.
As awful as much of their platform is, the Republicans have proven that they aren’t scared to break things and make big changes. This appeals to many voters who feel let down by empty promises.
Democrats say good things for the people. Democrats win = Republicans just block everything and embarrass Democrats for it. Republican voters also go without understanding… The main thing is against the “enemy” (i.e. against America…)
Of course the Republicans only build shit and destroy America besides blocking everything good that would benefit the American citizen (you). But it was the Democrats… who accept a democratic election and after defeat. NOT block everything from Republicans. How deluded can you be.
Name one of those empty promises and let’s review how they were voted on in congress. If the Democrats voted against it then your comment has merit, if Republicans blocked it your comment has no merit
You don’t get to just blame the opposition for making sure nothing got done. Especially when the other party manages to succeed when they have power.
What are you even talking about? I do get to blame the Congress members who vote for or against something. That is your civic duty. What do you do, check boxes for funsies?
The failure of Democrats is their own. Giving them a pass because of Republicans is lazy. There’s always opposition.
So yeah, for funsies
Next? I’m sorry, but democracy continues to be dismantled. The train has left the station. Trump already had 4 years of training and now with direct support from Musk… Hate fear and more hate mongering…and Trump is using it… So are accusations of election meddling etc… fuck why hasn’t there been that accusation even from Democrats? That’s it… Its game over.
All those highly secured nuclear secrets or files in the restroom at the golf club… anyone who steals something like that… also steals/cheats in the election. But not 1 accusation… Republicans as well as Democrats don’t want democracy anymore. A convicted highly criminal traitor to the country and enemy of the state becomes president without riots etc… The Democrats who are now just pointing at the Republicans with “I told you so” but not doing a riot or anything else are just as hostile to democracy.
What you been smoking, my friend?
We need to organize. The Democrats aren’t going to be part of it, because, with very few exceptions, they’re useless. Let’s hope at least they stay out of the way instead of doing like Fetterman and kissing the ring.
