It's the Democratic Party's fault this election is anything but a landslide btw
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It's the Democratic Party's fault this election is anything but a landslide btw
I don't want to hear anyone blaming the minority of the week or whatever. The Dems knew what they were doing, made their policy decisions, and are acting :surprised_pikachu: about the consequences in low youth turnout.
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@noracodes idk, it’s the Republican Party’s fault this was even close
if Nikki Haley had been the nominee, the race would have been called by now
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@noracodes i think it’s folly to take a race that there was no way in hell the democratic incumbent could have won, swap that guy out for a different person, and then expect that person to suddenly win in a landslide
there are things which i wish had been done differently for moral and ethical reasons, but there is no magical silver bullet to four years of death, trauma, and increasing conflict on a global scale
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@u2764 Oh, absolutely. They should either have been pumping Harris up since inauguration day, or have found someone else to promote. Waiting it out and coasting along on Biden was a mistake.
I've been saying this, including in letters to the Dems that represent me, since 2021. I know they don't listen to shit like that but that doesn't make it acceptable for them to completely fumble a ball they keep telling us is so important
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@noracodes my point is that i’m not sure there was ever any hope of them succeeding. no incumbent party is doing well in any election in any capitalist democracy right now. the criminalization of abortion has allowed democrats to tread water better than most but it is likely the headwinds this time were just too strong.
the people to blame for these election results are putin and netanyahu, if you want to blame someone, far more than they are any person in the democratic party right now. the idea that the sitting party would maintain the presidency amid two escalating wars by foreign autocrats is far-fetched in principle. not to mention everything else that has gone down these past four years.
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@noracodes we wanted biden to stop shipping arms to the state of israel, but we didn’t want that because we thought it would improve his election chances, right? we wanted that regardless of its impact on the election, right? we wanted that even if it meant he would certainly lose?
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I agree with both of you ... they way I look at it, it was an extremely difficult situation for all the reasons you talk about (and more, including the multi-year institutional failure of Democrats to build a counter to the fascist propaganda machine -- which got substantially stronger this iteration). Harris had a limited amount of time to change things and a lot of constraints. A key strategy her campaign took (appealing to moderate Republicans) hadn't worked before. I can see why they thought it would work better this time (abortion, pro-Democracy anti-Trump feelings) but it wound up not working this time either. Still, there's no guarantee that different strategies would have worked better from an electoral perspective.
In terms of stop shipping arms to do Israel (or having a speaker from Uncommitted at the DNC): we wanted him to do it because it was the right thing. And, I at least think it would have had a positive impact on the election ... but who knows.
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@jdp23 @noracodes personally i think that the resounding failure of the democratic party in my lifetime hasn’t been that they cared too little about what would win elections, but that they cared too much. from bush thru to the present, you have republicans taking power, setting the country back a decade, losing big, and then it not mattering because they’re back in power four to eight years later
i’m not convinced that the presidency won’t flip-flop at a regular cadence regardless of what you do. but the democrats never do anything with the time they’re allotted
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@jdp23 @noracodes i think we need to come to grips with the fact that the right thing to do isn’t necessarily the electable thing, especially with regards to covid and the war on palestine. and so making our arguments about electability or “we would have won the election if only they had shared all my beliefs” is getting mad about the wrong thing. we should be getting mad that biden didn’t show more spine, knowing that he was probably only in the seat for one term
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@u2764 @jdp23 I don't think we really disagree here? Like, it's bad to fund genocide because genocide is bad, but *also*, the usual excuse of "well we have to do the bad thing for the election" doesn't apply; even the Dems' own justifications fail here. That's why I brought it up in my post attempting to preempt the use of those justifications.
