WoodScientist

It is a party issue. The reason Democrats couldn't effectively run on the issue of democracy is that they THEMSELVES did not treat Trump as a threat to democracy. Actions speak louder than words. Democrats called Trump a fascist and a threat to democracy. But they didn't even start an investigation of him til two years into the Biden term. That man should have been arrested day one, hauled in front of a military tribunal, charged with treason, and dealt with accordingly. Any SCOTUS justices that tried to prevent this should have been charged as accessories after the fact and similarly tried as enemies of the republic.

THAT is the rational response to a former president that tried to overthrow the government. Trump should have been six feet under before Biden finished his first 100 days. That is the kind of urgency that is needed when a true existential threat is present. Look what happens when a random citizen tries to walk into the White House carrying a rifle. Do you think they weigh the political calculus of dealing with the person and how to respond to them without angering voters? No, they do what is necessary, then and there. That is what you do in an emergency.

What kind of existential threat do you just ignore for two years and then slow-walk? If China were invading Hawaii, would we move with that kind of sloth? No, an existential threat requires immediate action. By giving so much deference to Trump, Biden made extremely clear that he didn't believe Trump to be an existential threat to democracy. Entirely because of his actions, any later campaign pleas about the threat of Trump fell of deaf ears. If the president of the United States won't take something seriously as a threat to democracy, why would anyone expect voters to?

Well, feel free to keep calling for a recount. And I'm free to tell you why there isn't a snowball's chance in hell of it happening.

No, big turnout is still synonymous with a progressive candidate win.

Again, you're living in the past. Back during the era of Obama, it was Democrats who were drawing out the infrequent voters. When turnout was high, Democrats did well. Now, it's Republicans who are relying on the infrequent voters. The modern Democrats are very dependent on college-educated voters and other groups that turn out more reliably than Trump's base.

And how Bernie or some other progressive would win is completely irrelevant here. We're talking about how Kamala, a centrist Democrat, performed in an election. What happened 20 years ago is irrelevant. In the recent Trump elections - 2016, 2020, 2024, it is centrist Democrats like her who were hurt by higher turnout.

However, that being said, there’s literally a laundry list of election interference issues that should trigger a recount. And that includes speech by Trump himself that is suspect. Like he’s literally working with Elon Musk and Putin and you don’t think they may have done some bullshit? Lol. How gullible. You realize Putin has decades of experience rigging elections and using propaganda, and Musk owns Twitter?

Trump made a vague remark about having some plan in the House, a plan that they'll never need. Do I doubt that Trump would willingly steal an election? No. But the point is that, as everyone has been trying to tell you, there is no reasonable way to pull off what you're suggesting.

You are naive and clearly trapped in an info bubble. The simple fact is that far more people voted for Trump than did Harris. And this result isn't in any way surprising. It's the kind of scenario any Poli Sci 101 text would tell you could easily lose an incumbent an election.

If it were a close race at all, you would have a point. But we don't do big national recounts just for shits and giggles. We don't do them because you think someone's vibe makes them a cheater. We do it when a plot is actually plausible. And the advantage Trump received is completely consistent with national polling, general economic sentiments, and Trump's own past poll performance. There is simply no reason other than cope to hang onto the idea that Trump cheated his way to this win.

Seriously. How tone-deaf do you have to be? It's condescending and treats people like children.

The inflation is actually something that could have been addressed with the proper messaging. They could have said, during the heart of it, "yes, I know inflation is bad. And we're doing everything we can to fight it. But realize that this is happening because of the stimulus efforts we made during the pandemic. We printed a bunch of money and used that to keep everyone afloat while everything shut down. The alternative was that we would face a wave of defaults, foreclosures, and evictions not seen since the 1930s. We avoided that economic disaster. But in turn we have some higher prices now. We will be doing everything we can to crack down on any corporate profiteering..." And then they could have proceeded to make public examples of any company that engaged in price-gouging. They could have just flat-out told the American people, "sorry, but we're going to have some higher prices. We are not gods, and this is the only tool in our toolkit we have for dealing with something the magnitude of what we faced in the pandemic." If they had done that, just laid it out all honestly and on the table, I think they would have won this election.

Instead they just papered over it. First inflation was "transitory." Then they just repeated "inflation adjusted wages" until they were blue in the face. Inflation numbers don't really reflect the lived experience of most people. I recall getting shouted down several times on r/economics for daring to point out the flaws in how we measure inflation, how different groups experienced different inflation rates, and how the methadologies really have been hacked over the decades to keep rates low.

The blame still stops at the leading Democrats.

Consider this. How could so many people vote for someone who is such a clear threat to democracy?

Simple. Because despite everything they said, his opponents never actually treated him as a threat to democracy.

Biden appointed a Republican to run the Department of Justice, and that Republican sat on his hands, refusing to do any investigation of Trump until he was forced to do so by House investigative committees. It took TWO YEARS before an investigation even began. This delay allowed Trump to eventually run out the clock.

Trump should have been in chains on the day Biden took office. He should have faced trial in a military tribunal. Any attempt by SCOTUS to protect him should have been declared "a coup from the bench" and seen those justices charged as accomplices after the fact.

THAT is how you need to handle an actual threat to democracy. Trump should have been put on trial, through whatever means necessary. Hell, ideally he should have received a capital sentence for his crimes against the republic. He betrayed his country. He is guilty of treason. The man should have hanged for his crimes.

But that wasn't how Biden treated it. Trump was an EPOCHAL THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, but not enough to risk angering conservative white voters in suburban Philadelphia. He was THE NEXT INCARNATION OF HITLER, but not so Hitlerian as to justify any kind of dubious legal maneuvers that a fascist like Trump would have no problem pulling off.

Biden and co have been shouting that Trump is a threat do democracy for the better part of a decade at this point. But they never actually treated him like one. Actions speak louder than words. Democrats said Trump was a threat to democracy, but they never actually treated him like one. The Democrats, through their actions, made it clear that they didn't think Trump was a real threat to democracy, so the voters acted accordingly.

If Democrats were actually serious about the threat, Trump would have been tried by military tribunal, sentenced, and been locked away or put in the ground two years ago.

It's not weird if you realize that we're no longer in the era of big turnout being synonymous with Democratic win. And rallies are a poor indicator of voter sentiment. How many rallies for Kamala did you personally go to? Rallies are a vestigial remnant from another political era, when people primarily heard about candidates from local in-person gatherings. Yes, Kamala was able to get better rally turnout this time around than Trump, but rally-goers are a weird political rounding error. It just turns out that Kamala's weirdos were a bit more fired up this time around than Trump's weirdos.

We just came out of an era of inflation that America hasn't seen in decades. More people are rent-burdened than ever before, and the amount of people accessing foodbanks is higher than it has been in generations. Liberals papered over this harsh reality with wonky discussions of median inflation-adjusted wages, and they shouted down any critique of how limited main inflation figures actually are at measuring economic well-being. Or worse, they pointed at the stock market. Democrats have also held the White House for 12 of the last 16 years.

Globally, centrist neoliberal parties like the Democrats have been eviscerated in nation after nation, election after election. The neoliberal economic model has failed to deliver the widespread prosperity it promised, and the inequality it has enabled has reached crushing levels. People are demanding change, and currently, they can only find that change, any change really, on the part of right-wing populists like Trump. Neoliberals are genetically incapable of standing up to the wealthy and powerful corporate interests.

Finally, while Trump is a fascist, it was incredibly difficult for voters to take that claim seriously. You can point out that he tried to overthrow the government. But then the average voter will just ask you, "well why isn't he in prison?" Biden put a Republican, Merrick Garland, in charge of his DOJ. And Garland sat on any investigation or indictment of Trump for two years, allowing Trump to run out the clock. Garland made it impossible for Democrats to effectively run on the "Trump is a fascist" line, simply because the Biden administration didn't treat him as a threat to democracy. He should have been arrested and sent off to face a military tribunal the day Biden was sworn in. But because Biden didn't treat him as a serious threat, the voters didn't consider him a serious threat either.

In short, there are plenty of reasons why Trump won and Kamala lost, and they have nothing to do with voter fraud. Kamala offered no real solutions to struggling Americans. Trump has a simple, if monstrous, solution that actually WILL help people with rental costs. He's promising to deport 20 million people and thus free up housing supply. It's a monstrous and cruel solution, but it is at least a short-term solution. Yes, Trump absolutely meets any standard textbook definition of a fascist, but Kamala was not able to win on that. If your party is in power, you cannot run arguing your opponent is a threat to democracy. As if they are, the voters will ask why you haven't put them behind bars already.

What people miss about Fascism is that it actually does, at least in the short term, help working-class people. If Trump manages to actually deport 20 million illegal immigrants? That will, in the short term, actually lower the cost of rent. Longer term, you have to start having conversations about the supply of housing and the labor to build and maintain that housing. But in the short term, kicking 5-10% of the population out of the country will actually improve the budgets of millions of rent-burdened households. As long as you personally aren't on the right's current extermination list, you actually benefit from conservative crimes against humanity.

People are hurting. The amounts of people rent-burdened and accessing food banks are at levels not seen in generations. And the Democrats offered NOTHING of substance to help these people. Kamala offered grants to help cities amend their zoning codes...which might bear fruit 20 years from now. Kamala offered first-time homeowner assistance, but it was a neo-liberals wet dream of a policy, filled with provisos and qualifiers to make sure only just the most-deserving people qualify. She should have been out there campaigning for a huge social housing project - direct federal construction of millions of homes, coupled with a jobs-training program to quickly train thousands of new high school graduates how to be framers, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.

She should have also come down like the wrath of god upon landlords. She was literally running against a slimy and corrupt landlord, yet she never once made that a center focus of her campaign. She should have been promising to lock up and throw away the key of any landlord, big or small, that used software like realpage. She shouldn't have had a stump speech where she didn't call for the complete breakup of Walmart and Amazon.

Those were things she actually could have done to tell people she was actually going to do something about just one issue, the cost of housing. But of course that didn't happen.

You're getting into conspiracy theory here. Trump did better than expected everywhere. Blue states. Red States. Blue cities. Red cities. Didn't matter. There was a shift almost everywhere. And this is across a nation that uses radically different voting machines, forms of voting, voting machine providers, etc. It doesn't make sense that the could all be rigged so perfectly. It's insanity.

Yes, you can count "just in case," but that way lies madness.

I voted for Harris. But in the first-past-the-post system, all that matters for a party is victory. That is how you judge the success of party officials. There is a whole class of extremely well-paid Democratic party officials whose ENTIRE JOB is to figure out how to select a candidate and sell them to the American people. That is literally their entire job.

The average voters is low-information, doesn't pay attention, and assumes both sides frequently lie. (And they're not wrong about the lying.) You can truthfully call the other side fascist, but the other side will simply say you're the fascist, and low-information voters can't tell the difference.

Voters have always been low-information. This isn't anything new. The entire reason we have primaries is that it forces candidates to actually try their hand at mass appeal and to take the temperature of the electorate. Democratic leaders kept Biden in far too long, til it was too late to hold a proper primary.

You can blame it on those who don't vote, but the truth is that most people pay attention to politics only tangentially. If you, as a political operator, didn't find a way to reach these voters, you have failed.

Does the blame ultimately fall on those who didn't vote for Biden? Sure. But the same is true of those who didn't vote for Walter Mondale. It doesn't mean Harris isn't just as big a failure as Mondale.

I dunno. I find the word "decadence" ridiculous. It's flexible to the point of uselessness. People refer to the "decadence" of the Romans to mean everything from their extreme wealth gap to the decline of citizens soldiers. Hell, half the time people use "decadence" just as a way of disguising that they're simply blaming the fall of Rome in the existence of gay people.