@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

@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

@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?

@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.

@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

@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