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Oh yeah, but no surprised Pikachu face when the Democrats use the exact same strategy that cost them the election in 2016 and lose doing it in 2024, right? That was really good and smart, huh?
This, Harris wouldn't even lie about helping poor and marginalized people for fear of alienating that oh so coveted moderate Republican demographic.
Yeah.... that was.... an odd choice they keep making.
Yep.
However you are 100% right here. Courting R was possibly the worst thing they could have done. I refuse to believe that the outcome would have been worse had they instead embraced progressive domestic policies AND ALSO taken a tougher stance on Israels Gaza genocide.
I'm not even engaging with the Genocide-Joe commenters on this particular issue anymore, they think they changed something for the better today but god knows what. I felt and continue to feel that they threw out the baby with the bathwater. I don't think the Gaza issue did this though. I think it was the immediate rebranding as Republican-lite that Kamala tried, beginning roughly 30 seconds after she announced her candidacy. It earned her nothing with the R vote, and alienated Democrats at multiple points on the spectrum.
And Democrat leadership can go fuck themselves for never having the courage to move left and stand by it.
Tbf I'd argue that the candidate switcheroo wasn't exactly part of the 2016 playbook
Listen, the dems have to seig heil in all their ads to entice white moderate centrist suburban women in 2028.
Now shut up and vote for 99% hitler, do you want Trump to win his third term?
How much closer did you get to progressivism this election?
Zero, and that's why the dems lost. Progressive policy is popular, republican policy from 2016 is not.
The dems are fucked until they do the things that get their base energized and going to the polls instead of triangulating themselves 2 inches to the left of the republican candidate to try to get the 2-5% of republicans who prefer diet-fascism to fascism.
How many progressive candidates gained seats in this election?
Seats were lost because the presidential election is what brings people out to vote. ~15% of the electorate stayed home because they saw a choice between the 2016 republican and a dem with the 2016 republican platform. The down-ballot races suffered as well as a result.
I've heard that progressive policies are quite popular and get people to the polls.
Yes, it's a shame the democrats ran on building a wall to keep immigrants out and tax cuts for small businesses.
Equally a shame that so many to the left of the Dems felt that their faces could use a little spiting and went straight to work on their noses.
Regardless of what wagon we arrived in, we're all here now. And we're quite short on options that will improve our circumstances.
See you're doing it again, every time you shift the blame away from the people who decide the things that determine whether or not people vote, you convince the dems they can do it again.
This is exclusively the fault of the democrats. You can't change the reality that running on policy your base doesn't like, and then telling them "fuck you gonna do, help trump win?" decreases turnout.
The only reason they pushed Biden out was that they saw they had zero chance at victory if they didn't change.
Uh huh, there I go again? This suddenly shifted from a reasonable conversation to bad faith rhetoric. This is collectively the fault of everyone who made piss poor, ineffectual efforts to stop it as a unified bloc. That encompasses a lot of folks. But as long as you have the specter of "they did it, not me" then I guess it's easier to avoid speculation as to why we all can't win.
I'm as guilty of that by saying that aligning with the larger contingent was the best way through, I suppose. But failing to even make a reasonable effort was beyond the pale. I didn't want the outcome we got, but far too many leftists and progressives seemed comfortable with flirting with disaster.
Did you envision a worse outcome than the one we got? Because, for me, it was the most unfavorable situation. Working backward from that, it seemed self-evident that the clear path to avoiding it was to throw in with the only other viable option.
Anything else, any more complex assessment of the choice that was given to us, invited in division. The fascist platform was "fuck you" and everyone to the left of that was more concerned with the etymology of the phrase or the moral implications of flipping someone off than firing back with "no, fuck YOU" and sorting out the details once we found out whether or not there were enough of us who didn't want to be fucked.
We literally cannot all win, we have mutually exclusive interests. When you appeal to racists, you lose anyone who is or cares for immigrants. When you appeal to the capitalist class, you throw out the workers.
After throwing out the entire base to go after "moderate republicans", 5% of Democrat voters were registered republicans. That's down from 6% in 2020.
That remains to be seen. Currently we're at the part where dems call black people, latinos, and the left racist, homophobic misogynists for not having higher turnout, and ignore white men and women who voted Trump. The outcome I envision will be the dems internalizing that and doing the same thing again in 2026 and 2028, preventing any electoral solution to the rise of fascism.
Leftists had no power to affect the outcome of the election. When they tell you that what the dems are doing is a losing strategy, they're not saying they, personally, are going to cause the dems to lose, they're observing that what the dems are doing will cause them to lose.