I think if all the non-voters put this much fervor and conviction into voting in primaries (all primaries, I'm not just assuming all non-voters would show up to vote left) we'd be much better off as a nation.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Oh I’m not fucking torn on it.
I think you should leave. You failed to rise to the occasion. You listened to your dipshit consultants and the party establishment and AIPAC and other moneyed interests instead of the people. There is no strike two. It’s one and done. Get the fuck out, Harris.
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Walz and AOC are the candidates worth talking about right now, because they're the ones showing leadership.
Go away, Kamala. And Biden, along with plenty of others.
If she's not going out now, fighting and making the case against and rallying the troops against Trump and fascism now, I'm not interested in her.
She was offering tax credits and small down payments to a population where 70% of people are paycheck to paycheck. While telling them everything is great.
She NEVER cared about the people
She's done nothing to help the people who supported her after her flop. I think she's cooked unless she comes back out of the grave in 4 years going "I'm actually cool now, right?!"
A move we call “The Hillary”
I'm voting Walz, he was the only other reason i was voting harris besides preventing the dictator.
Stay the fuck home. You’ve had your shot and failed.
No. She wasn't a good candidate ANY time she ran.
💯
She ran a terrible campaign. She COULD have won. She made material decisions around who to listen to and how to campaign that prevented it.
They ran a "flawless" campaign, they says
Queen Latifa basically never endorses anyone.
Just run a white dude. Sucks to say but that's where our imbecilic nation lays. A white dude that isn't 100 ffs
Bullshit, rejecting Hillary and Kamala does not mean women can't win.
Voters rejected Biden during a primary so hard he dropped out despite him and the DNC assuring everyone it was over and literally no one still in it
Does that mean an old white neoliberal can't win?
Policy might not matter. But rhetoric does. And it will have been 20 years next presidential elections since Dems ran one with popular rhetoric
Why not try that again?
Voters rejected Biden during a primary so hard he dropped out
No they didn't. The primaries were over and he won them. He dropped out like 6 weeks after the primaries were over, and he won them (second place was Uncommitted with 4.25% of the votes). Credible candidates just generally don't contest an incumbent president, and contested conventions generally don't produce a winning nominee.
jfc christ exactly.
How is it that some of you take perpetually the wrong lessons from electoral politics (not you @givesomefucks@lemmy.world, the person you are responding to).
Where are you getting these pudding headed takes?
SHE RAN WITH LIZ FUCKING CHENEY PEOPLE!!
The war criminals nepo daughter.
The name TWO GENERATIONS of voters learned to blame for the dysfunction which was Iraq and Afghanistan. A name Democratic voters were litterally conditioned to hate.
Liz Cheney, an incumbent who lost her primary with 27% of the vote. Thats who Harris decided to run with.
Just..
Just notice how technocratic and neoliberal the original take is. The idea behind it, is that you just need to line up the perfect set of identities and qualifications, and then, then they'll win. Its the exact worm-brained thinking that gave us Hillary Clinton. That's the way to win elections. When they fucking blow it because the person has because thats not how fucking elections work, they have an easy fucking way to wash their hands by blaming sexism.
Guys: What was her fucking platform? Can anyone in this room tell me what the FUCK Harris was actually running on? Like other than "I want to be President", what the fuck was she proposing in 2024?
And then she ran HARD to the right. She fucking ran to the right of fucking Biden for ffs.
And like, I don't think we should be (necessarily) talking about Harris either, but not because of her identity or race, but because she ran a dog shit fucking campaign and threw what should have been a fucking lay up with how deeply unpopular Trump is. And she blew it because she listened to people who give advice like OP. I think when you blow an election like she did, any one, you just gotta go away from electoralism, like (thankfully) Hillary did.
But don't stop giving us ladies to run. Run Warren again. Run AOC. Run Porter. But jesus christ stop pretending that voters base their entire fucking vote on the identity of the candidate as an excuse to run dogshit neoliberal campaigns.
Liz Cheney, an incumbent who lost her primary with 27% of the vote.
Just to put that in context, she lost her primary because she dared to side with both the public and the Democratic party in opposition to the insurrection. She lost her primary because MAGA hates her. I'm not defending the choice to bring her up on stage on the campaign trail, but I don't think this particular fact really helps your argument.
I mean. It drives it home completely. Its the whole point practically. She was deeply unpopular with Republicans. So what did bringing her, and the other Republicans that the campaign chose to platform, into the tent; what did the campaign get for it?
What it shows is the level of understanding of electoralism and the electorate campaign had. Time and space are limited. Politics is a transactional game. Who does the campaign decide to platform and how? Who do they get for surrogates? What is it they are trying to gain when they do the things they do. Who is a thing working on, or at least, who is it intended to work on?
Liz Cheney. An A+ scoring "pro-life", anti-abortion Republican was who Harris thought was one of the most important figures to dedicate substantial amounts of campaign time to. At a time when women had just seen the literal physical rights to their own body stripped away from them.
So who was "being got" by platforming Cheney?
Like I get it. You think platforming her says this thing over here. And maybe it does, it also says this thing over here. I'm putting it out there as "one more baffling and catastrophic decision", which was a baffling and catastrophic decision at the time it was being made, and that is the rub. Harris is not a victim of circumstance. She had a 1.5 billion dollar warchest at her disposal. She spent it platforming a failed republican politician from one of the most hated political dynasties of all time.
If you can just break down further why you think the Cheney example doesn't support, I'm interested. I have my suspicions as to why you think that, but I want to hear what you have to say first. I'm going to write my answer in a spoiler tag below, but please don't click until you respond (or do, whatever).
spoiler
I think OP is making the same assumption that the Democrats, old school Republicans and most American political "wisdom" makes about the unimodality of political identity. Specifically, its the concept that voters exist along a single dimension of variation. Its why so much political strategy is built around going after "centrist" voters; however, I reject this alleged political wisdom because as a theory, it hasn't predicted voter behavior. While voters might exist on a spectrum in high dimensional space, when we dimensionally reduce that we don't end up with a smooth or continuous function, but rather a more discrete pattern emerges. There are modalities of high concentrations of voters at certain spaces [christian, gun, Texas], [lgbt, skiing, California], etc.., more like a graph model,
My argument is that the reduction of political identity to a single dimension sets you up to be unable to predict voter patterns and behavior. The thinking that voters exist primarily in one dimension is an artifact of old ways of thinking, which leads you to targeting the "center of mass" of a distribution, when actually, the distribution is multi-modal and not zero centered.
She was deeply unpopular with Republicans
Deeply unpopular with MAGA Republicans. In the wake of the insurrection there was a real chance to pull the Republican party out of MAGA voters' hands and they blew it.
So what did bringing her, and the other Republicans that the campaign chose to platform, into the tent; what did the campaign get for it?
I think they wanted to show that it was ok for Republican-leaning voters to abandon Trump and that they (the Harris campaign) welcomed Republicans shifting left (serving on the select committee and supporting Trump's impeachment was certainly a shift left for an otherwise pro-MAGA politician). They clearly didn't get anything for it.
You think platforming her says this thing over here.
No the Harris/Walz campaign thought that.
If you can just break down further why you think the Cheney example doesn’t support, I’m interested.
I don't disagree with your overall point about platforming Cheney or the Harris campaign shifting right. I just think Cheney lost her primary because she was perceived by the MAGA voters to have shifted left on policy.
You think platforming her says this thing over here.
No the Harris/Walz campaign thought that.
No but like, you have an interpretation of what platforming her says or means. I do too. The campaign also does. So does everyone who reads it as a news headline. I wasn't specific on what that thing was, just that, we all interpret it as saying "something".
An unbelievably true take.
Kamala Harris toned down her attacks on big business, she made no plans to improve America’s health care system other than vague promises to cancel debt, touted the endorsement of war criminal Dick Cheney who wanted to invade seven countries in five years and whom was partially responsible for the deaths of over a million, spent half as much time focusing on the most important issues during her campaign compared to Trump, and touted a Fortune 500 investment banking company‘s endorsement for her economic plans which made her look like an out of touch elitist especially when said company can only be described as a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money".
All Harris brought to the table was “freedom” meanwhile Trump came out with populist rhetoric and people seemed to like Trump’s rhetoric more considering that they have long since become disillusioned with the Status Quo.
stop pretending that voters base their entire fucking vote on the identity of the candidate as an excuse to run dogshit neoliberal campaigns.
Preach.
Fat lot of good it'll likely do, but still.
If a woman loses even 1-2% of the vote simply due to Misogyny, they're at a massive disadvantage. If you don't think Misogyny exists in the "independent" voters or even in the solidly democratic voters, you're not paying attention to reality and pretending the world is better than it actually is.
you’re not paying attention to reality
You are not the arbiter of what reality is. Representative Zooey Zephyr flipped 27 Republican votes in an extremely conservative state with the power of rhetoric. So don't tell me that people cant be convinced to vote differently. Sure sexism exist. Yes mysogeny exists. Yes, absolutely, there are structural disadvantages to being a woman running for any elected position. But like.. Thats not what 2024 was. Its an intentional blindness to the deep failings the Harris campaign and Harris the candidate.
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She could win if she'd get more in line with Porter policies. And keep them.
How about Buttigieg?
White straight dude. Who isn't 100.
Secretary Mayor Pete would kill it but he could never get elected.
Do you want President Gavin Newsom, then?
Probably, look at the state of how Democrats are courting more republicans and giving every demand and cabinet pick to the Republicans.
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No. What's going on, have you been hanging out with Hillary? Don't do more damage.
How about some electoral reform so we can vote outside the 2 party system without a spoiler effect.
How about a god damned primary?
Is this a purity test to far? I guess i just feel entitled to democracy, what can i say.
I'm pretty sure there will be primaries... People just have to fucking vote in them for once.
No party has a vested interest in bleeding political power to another. You have to take control of the Democratic party first
No party has a vested interest in bleeding political power to another.
And yet democrats keep capitulating to republicans.
Hot take: Walz/Harris might have won, but Harris/Walz just never stood a chance.
for leader of the peoples of the earth or of the space colonies ?
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