It is largely independent of ideology and I think if you look at the last 45 years of American elections ideology has little to do with it. Whoever the most interesting or cool candidate has won every single time in US Presidential elections. GHWB might be the one counter example but Dukakis torpedoed his campaign by looking like a doofus.
The Dems being the party of scolds is a huge problem.
Gonna have a hard time convincing anyone Biden was more cool than Harris.
I guess 20 might be an example as well although Biden is pretty likeable for normies. Biden absolutely is more ācoolā to normie American voters than Harris. Or at least he was.
Clearly his message wasnāt received that way by A LOT of the people he was talking about who still voted for him.
Now you are just being willfully obtuse. His message was received exactly as intended by the 49.9% of people that didnāt vote for him and he intends to punish us for our disobedience going forward.
Your house just got destroyed in a natural disaster and you voted D? Get down on your hands and knees and beg and maybe Iāll consider overlooking your insolence.
Yeah. Itās easy to forget now, but Joe Biden used to be know as the cool dude who wore aviators, drove muscle cars and really, really loved ice cream. If weāre talking about white guys without a college degree, that is much cooler and more aspirational than Kamala wearing chucks and hanging around with Megan Thee Stallion.
Yep, thatās definitely it.
Even with the shift it was nowhere close to what polling said, plus this has nothing to do with the current conversation whatsoever. Youāre just butthurt and lashing out per usual
Itās exactly what happened lol
Definitely being obtuse. Yes, obviously when Trump says you are bad Jew if you donāt vote for him that means you can still be a good Jew if you do vote for him.
Point is that scold the alleged scolder people like you say that Ds are elitist towards people that donāt think like them. Yet Trump very clearly and openly hates and despises those that donāt think like him, specifically anyone that doesnāt share his belief that he is the greatest human that has ever existed.
Yes, he obviously had enough charisma and persuasive abilities to get enough people to vote for him anyway but obviously we all agree that Ds should choose a more charismatic and persuasive candidate next time.
Republicans have the optimal strategy:
The only laws they want to pass are tax cuts so senate filibuster is a godsend.
The social issues they care about all get kicked down to the states (marriage/abortion/trans sports)
When out of power, it is always Chicken Little the world is ending, scary people want to kill you. Obstruct, obstruct, obstruct.
Democrats need to get better at playing this game when out of power. Specifically they need to nail Republicans on specific pony issues like:
WE SHOULD HAVE UNIVERSAL PRE-SCHOOL.
Where you just repeat it ten million times until it sticks like they do with immigration.
What was Kamalaās single defining message besides pro-choice and that is Donald bad for democracy?
If I vote for Kamala I am gettingā¦
I strongly disagree that Republicans have some sort of optimal strategy. They really didnāt do that well down ballot despite a massive advantage in the national mood.
Trump seems like heās one of one to me, which is maddening as I donāt see it at all, but seems true.
Another optimal thing Rs politically is make Ds reverse their policies once they inevitably take back the House in the midterms. So Ds do good things in the first two years and then they are taken away in the two years preceding the election. Like the expanded child tax credit.
Was especially bad this time since many of the good things Ds forced through happened during Trumpās last year as COVID stimulus.
I know it has been mentioned before, but I really think people are not acknowledging the global election meta impact. Incumbents got molly whopped and mostly because of inflation.
https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1854485866548195735
Maybe it couldāve been overcome by extra strategy, Main Character charisma, or Tim Walz punching former-and-future President in the dick during a debate, but I donāt see it happening.
I joined WAAF - Unstuck Politics Forum again and weāre more than happy to have you!
Agree with this. Harris ran a good campaign as evidenced by her outperformance in swing states compared to national trends. It just wasnāt happening this year due to a variety of circumstances largely out of democrats control
A subset of democrats consisting of older, mostly well off white men (not only here) are deriding minority voting blocs for ānot voting the ārightā wayā and that they ādont know whatās good for emā and even hoping they suffer disastrous consequences for it is not exactly what Iād call cringe, but it is certainly something. Iāll leave that as an exercise to the reader as to what it may look like from the outside.
This is why I didnāt lose a ton of sleep over it once I saw the pattern of the results. Democrats were just fucked royally this cycle, and I feel like the absolute ceiling if they had run the perfect campaign was to hold the House by a few votes, salvage like one extra Senate seat, and maybe taken Wisconsin or something while losing the other swing states by a bit more painfully small margin.
That said, thereās still about a million lessons for the party to learn for next time, so I hope theyāre not telling themselves the above and just assuming itāll all flip back their way when people are pissed at Trump in four years.
I donāt think itās unreasonable to give people some grace. We are rightly freaking out a bit, now that fascism is at the front door.
Reasonable people, rich and poor alike, are rapidly gaining understanding that even the most generous timeline is going to see a big reduction in personal freedom.
Do you have a quote on that? Iād never heard it, and this is the only thing I could find from a quick google:
āIām not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if Iām at 40%ā support in the polls, Trump told Republicans in Washington at an event billed as opposing antisemitism. āIf Iām at 40, think of it, that means 60% are voting for Kamala (Harris), who, in particular, is a bad Democrat. The Democrats are bad to Israel, very bad.ā
But even if this is interpreted as a direct attack on Jewish people, heās still only directing it at a group that represents something like 3% of the voting population, not literally everyone voting for Harris.
I mean, the quote is the difference between saying, people that vote for Trump are low info morons, and āI canāt believe people would vote for Trump, heās bad for them, very bad.ā Seems clear to me that those two messages would land differently.
I dont really disagree just still kind of shocked at how quickly and viciously it came out, especially on twitter, and from a lot of people from whom I did not expect it - and I was already extremely cynical