2024 Election POST MORTEM

Me or them? Im not sure what this means?

lol wapo, nice little dig on the front page

The saying is “short sighted”, not “short sided”.

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Also the willingness and ability to lie with far greater conviction and persuasiveness via social media to an audience poised to gobble it up like starved piranha.

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Thanks

One of the sites for which I edit articles requires me to also create the lead image for the post. They gave me templates so I don’t have to create everything from scratch. One of the templates uses a Trump/Biden image. I think I’m going to have to replace that so I don’t have to look at the motherfucker’s face any more than I have to.

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Well, I successfully made it through election night without checking any media. Really glad to have avoided that.

Now wtf

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Looking back I dont think Biden could have made the situation meaningfully better (although I would strongly argue we dont need to send weapons) - but they definitely could have controlled the messaging better. Like, even when it was beyond a reasonable doubt what was happening, the party was still voicing that anything other than full throated support for israel was supporting terrorists and/or anti semitic. It’s just completely baffling to me. To me, it had to make some type of a difference, but I agree with all the other stuff too.

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Yeah and really he only lost in 2020 because people were pissed off about Covid, and as much of a piece of shit Trump is, you can argue that it was just as unreasonable as a sole reason to boot him as inflation was for voters to ditch Democrats this time around. The fact is, the electorate is just very reactive and quick to punish the party in office for whatever they’re pissed about.

Yesterday around this time we were all wondering if this was the end of trump and maga, but instead its the end of the democratic party as we know it. And by that I mean its probably a good thing right? They aren’t winning, they had to win this, and they didn’t. So if the party/democracy does survive, in order to win they’ll need to be something else.

And by that I’m saying: we no longer have to earnestly listen to:

  • Joe Biden
  • Nancy Pelosi/Hakeem Jefferies
  • Any Clinton
  • Any Obama
  • Any Cheney (or anyone close to these people, kinzinger, etc)

We will never have to pay attention to these people again, they won’t be on TV we will watch, they won’t speak at conventions, well, maybe star trek conventions. That generation of the “party” is done.

I don’t know what will emerge if anything but its not going to be “latinx” AOC either friends. Pete 2028 is my guess.

Again, all this depends on the people in charge allowing for free and fair elections in 2026/2028. But why would they?

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Please DM me the video.

While I like Pete a lot and he’d run a hell of a campaign, it’s clear he’d get killed. Black/Latino population is hugely anti-gay and they’d lose even more of that vote than they did this cycle. Hate to say it, but it needs to be white cis straight dudes for the foreseeable future.

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They should never be running a non straight white guy ever ever again.

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It was the gold standard of polling. LOL.

I don’t think it was unreasonable. He not only did a horrendous job at navigating the country through the pandemic, he intentionally made things worse. He didn’t do shit about it early on because he didn’t want the stock market to go down and didn’t want to look bad because an election was coming up.

His press conferences were all about him when they weren’t about insane ideas. He wanted to rush through a vaccine so he could take credit for it. He didn’t want to wear masks and made fun of people, including Biden, for doing so.

He never expressed any sympathy for anyone if he wasn’t reading what someone wrote for him. Everything was all about him - “I like the numbers where they are,” “look at all this PPE I got shipped,” etc. He fucked it all up and did much of it on purpose. It was absolutely a reason to vote him out, on top of everything else.

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I definitely don’t want to dismiss this. The dem struggle to both turn out leftists while not losing appeal to conventional dems and mainstream swing voters is going to continue and not unique to this election. I don’t want to just blame leftists for being fickle voters either. They have the right to make the decision they do and it’s important that these tradeoffs are understood. It doesn’t help when external things like the war in Israel come to the forefront and make the democratic party’s failing to address the genocide a central focus.

I do think the right candidate can walk this tightrope, but I also agree that the last 3 main dem candidates didn’t do this well at all. It’s definitely something I would be thinking hard about if I were a dem strategist.

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All that stuff is absolutely true–however I’m once again giving zero credit to the average voter for having any nuanced look at how he handled things. Most people were just like “I’m pissed about being stuck at home and having to wear masks and there being no TP on the shelves and I want to punish someone for it.”

I think you can run a cool black guy who talks white (Obama).

edit: Way early but I think Colin Allred and Raphael Warnock might be candidates who check this box in 2028.

Time is a huge factor. 4 years have passed. People memory hole a lot of stuff. Heck, even the COVID stuff maybe have been memory-holed if we were back to normal by November. But because it was still impacting a lot of shit, people could recall him talking about injecting bleach.

Biden should have hammered the “Bibi knew Oct 7 was coming and didn’t do anything to stop it” button. But agreed, the entire situation was yet another headwind. I don’t think it was decisive though.

The biggest problem in terms of messaging is dems just adopt a milquetoast version of the Republican position on everything because they’re fucking cowards. On every issue. But the broader problems run much deeper than that (social media, love for fascism, economy, etc).

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