I think it’s worth remembering that crafting duplicitous rhetoric to gain popular support for their regressive unpopular policies has been one of the main focuses on the right since the Civil War. They have had literally generations to work on messaging and have built literal institutions devoted to the project that have had essentially unlimited funding from various hyper-wealthy people virtually the whole time. All those institutions have contributed to pushing Trump to victory.
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100% I agree. Whose fault is it that there is no effective messaging like this on the left? That’s a huge part of the problem. The GOP moved on from more traditional ways of drumming up support 40 years ago. When are the Dems going to wake up and find their footing somewhere relevant in 2024? It aint MSNBC or The Daily Show I can tell you that.
Bernie got over 13m votes in 2016. Coming from being an unknown with no funding. People were STARVED for more authentic leftism. What did the Dems do? Welcome this new crop of voters into the tent? Nope. Demonized them as Bernie Bros and communists. Now I’m not so sure a lot of those 13m voters haven’t moved on for good.
I don’t think it can work like that for the Dems. I
Mentioned this in another post, but the right’s core constituency is ok with their leadership talking out of both sides of their mouths, and being pragmatic to achieve long-term goals, the left is clearly not so the Dems have to constantly be messaging to the liberal most members of their constituency and any deviation is met with full throated opposition.
The thing is the Dems have been talking out of both sides of their mouth anyways. Which I agree doesn’t work. That’s where I think they have gone wrong. So I guess we agree to some extent.
I don’t know how you fix the messaging problem but I would start with giving Dem voters a better and more open primary system and stop putting their thumb on the scale during these processes. There was a big part of the party in all of 2016, 2020 and 2024 that felt screwed by the way the party handled it.
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In 2004, I voted for Bush. When it was clear he lied about WMD and all that, I told myself I would never vote Republican again. In 2008 and 2012, I voted for Obama because I wanted to vote for him. But the last 3 elections have been pretty much voting to keep Trump out of the White House. But it was not because I was excited or had confidence in the Democratic Party. I imagine there are tons of people that felt the same way.
Also, I wonder if sending out 20 texts a day asking for money and not talking about policies or how they were going to help people hurt voter turnout. I was still getting texts Tues AM asking for money.
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This is a good point. We knew Kamala had a hugr fundraising advantage, yet every youtube video I queued for the last few weeks was her begging for money? Why? Just stop at some point. There is no way thwy used everything in the coffers so why is my entertainment product being bombarded with begging for weeks at a time?
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This isn’t rocket science. There are people in this country that will never vote for a woman to be President. It’s really that simple. The geniuses of the Democratic Party deciding to run women against Trump in 2 of his 3 elections is just straight up incompetence.
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I think that account for some small percentage of the shift but totally misses the bigger issues.
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Trump is obviously a master of keeping his finger on the pulse and parroting it back in a way that gets a lot of attention. Heard an interview with some right wing dipshit that worked on Trump’s first campaign say that Trump knew exactly what he was doing in saying McCain was not a war hero.
Lot of conservative families had members stupidly sent off to Iraq/Afghanistan at McCain’s behest so even in a R primary, lot of them were happy to see a draft dodger gut the core of who McCain was as a person.
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Begging is an interesting choice of word.
I guess if she had spent it at the French Laundry you’d be alright with it.
Yggy, just tell the left you want them to give up, fuck off, and go away, this is taking forever. “The environment is not a hard limit to obey”, gl with that shit.
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To make one last point on this for now, campaigning with the Cheneys was a super braindead move if my theory on general disillusionment with the Dems from their base is accurate. If anything it would signal to the people deciding whether to trust Kamala and vote or distrust the Dems and stay home that they should do the latter. Gleefully parading endorsements from literal neo-con mass murderers was pretty gross. It could have been the final straw for single issue Palestine voters as well.
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I peeked at fb, which I rarely go on anymore. It’s littered with ‘shut up about women’s rights, Trump said he wouldn’t ban abortion, and he had 4 years to do it and didn’t…’
You have to do it but also with populist rhetoric and tactics. Like if Biden had just ignored the SCOTUS ruling on student debt forgiveness.
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I get the point, but I think you overestimate how “populist” the student debt issue is wrt young people without a college degree.
Pretty much, also unfortunately it’s pretty popular.
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Climate change just doesn’t galvanize people, so that’s going to have to be done on the down low once Dems take power. Things like the green new deal that are primarily focused on growth, but a growth that’s amenable to greening the economy seems a viable path
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Large amounts of people support banning trans people from sports because of issues of fairness. I think luckily that’s as far as the support goes. Positive support for generalized support of trans people aka trans people bathroom issues, marriage licenses, etc.
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Sounds like a knock against progressive DAs. I don’t know, he just glosses over the real problems have huge prison population, people staying in jail forever, etc. I get the overall idea that the victims of crime should come first. How to balance those issues though I don’t know
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Is fine, as long as it has the “some people didn’t get the same opportunities so we’ll help them be on the same playing field” is in there as well.
Yeah, I think I agree with this. Part of the reason the right has broken free was because of Citizens united, I think. Their base has a lot more concentrated wealth to allow people like Ted Cruz to break free of the moderate party power-brokers and run as a professional troll for his hardcore base. Once broken free, the right basically had to go along with the whims of their more extreme constituents. Unfortunately there arebt any magic sources of money that the left can tap into to fund candidates to primary moderates from the left.
They’re trying to prevent brown people from taking over their country.
As I’ve said before, there are two completely separate and incompatible ideas of what “America” means. To you and me, “America” means representative democracy, checks and balances, all [people] are created equal, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, etc. The other idea of America is that this land belongs to white Christian men, who have the right to subjugate, enslave, kill, ethnically cleanse, and legally relegate to lower class status all others who might threaten their rule. We’ve already fought one war over this, and the white side won, at least post-reconstruction, the right to have their states free from federal interference in their idea of America. There was some upheaval to this in the latter half of the 20th century, culminating in a Black president, and the white side has been hopping mad ever since. Now they have secured total victory.
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Yeah, don’t think it was close to dispositive but agree that campaigning with Cheney was dumb. This is why I don’t blame W for not endorsing Kamala, pointless at best.
One problem I think Dems have that’s on the their voting block is they aren’t allowed to play both sides.
*Harris was trying to be against the Gaza war without being too against Israel which means she’s getting protested and losing support when her opponent is using Palestinian as a slur and wants Isreal to finish the job and he apparently won the arab vote.
*Harris has to try and balance compassion for immigrants with the law, while Trump is getting votes from Latinos for saying he’s deporting 20 million, with naturalized citizens being somewhere on that list. Hell, he’s getting illegal immigrants saying they’d vote for him if they could cause Trump only means the bad ones.
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