I saw so many takes and got into some arguments on Lemmy this week with people claiming that Harris lost because she abandoned the left and changed her campaign at the last minute to be basically a Republican.
No one could provide any concrete evidence of what she did and how though. I'm guessing they either were victims of or were actively distributing this propaganda.
I'll admit I'm using it loosely here because it's fun
Oh yeah my bad it's wasaay better for your friends to just say "wow sounds like you're doomed to be broken, good luck with that".
This is just a mentally unwell person lashing out at those around them trying to help. Jokes and memes like this are more harmful than helpful.
Yes because I don't expect every friend of mine to be a licensed psychiatrist capable of diagnosing and prescribing medication. Heck, even a lot of medications use that exact same qualified language in their advertising because the human body and mind are incredibly complicated and inconsistent things.
It's like when I get a cold and my mom tells me to keep my fluids up. It helps and shows she cares even if it's nowhere near as good as antibiotics. And yes of course I already know to stay hydrated. Just like I know how the weather has been and I remember the story she tells me 4 times a year of that time my older sister broke the neighbor's window with a basketball.
Lashing out in anger at those trying to reach out and help you isn't going to make you feel better even if their advice isn't perfect.
I can at least understand that line of thinking. He spent a lot of his first term golfing. He didn't build the border wall or repeal the ACA or do a lot of what he promised his supporters he would.
Still not an excuse. He did incredible damage in his first term and I expect this one to be worse.
And he's not even saying he's going to do Project 2025 but I expect him to.
Say the line Bart!
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
I keep seeing that claimed everywhere. I'll admit that I make an effort NOT to consume political ads (or ads in general really) but I don't remember anything right-leaning from Harris outside of supporting the status quo for Israel and Palestine.
I did hear ads on the radio in stores supporting making billionaires pay their fair share and lowering taxes for the working class. Ads attacking Trump for giving tax breaks to billionaires and wanting to cut Medicare and social security benefits. Ads supporting pro-choice and attacking Republicans for wanting to ban abortion. It's possible that there were ads for different demographics, but the same radio station was also airing right-wing ads with incredible amounts of transphobia- dead naming and misgendering individuals and claiming they were criminals coming for your children.
It's entirely possible I missed something because there's just way too much election content for one person to read, but I really have no clue where the narrative of the right turn is coming from.
I did see recently some ads from right-wing PAC's that were shown in different swing states- some portraying Harris as an enemy of Israel in predominantly Jewish areas (I know Judaism =/= Zionism but if you were trying to direct ads to Zionists that's probably the closest you can get) and others portraying Harris as a genocidal supporter of Israel in areas with higher Palestinian populations.
Something that always surprises me is just how effective such dumb advertising is to the average person. I'm not even claiming to be some superhuman immune to propaganda, but political ads always seem particularly low-effort yet seem to control the outcomes of elections.
I remember in the weeks following the announcement that Biden would step down and endorse Harris people dug into her voting record and revealed that she was one of the furthest left-leaning members of the Senate, up there with Sanders and Warren.
Now that she's lost the election all of a sudden so-called "progressives" are claiming she lost because she was basically a Republican.
The GOP's strategy was clearly to promote voter apathy and drive down turnout for people more likely to vote Harris, and it worked. Trump finally won the popular vote- and he did so with about 6 million fewer votes than what Biden got in 2020.
Far too many progressive, and maybe even moderate Dems and independents, really believed all the nonsense. "Both sides are the same", "you're vote doesn't matter", "there's no way Trump can win", "Bidenomics is totally what caused the global inflation and we are just going to ignore that post-pandemic inflation in the US was the lowest of any developed economy", "she's a cop", etc. Heck, maybe there is even some misogynist or racism on the left that may have hurt Harris. And now instead of just trying to dig out way out of decades of neoliberalism we're just escalating to fascism.
I blame everyone. The GOP and Trump of course. The billionaires (the loud ones like Musk and Bezos, but also the quieter ones like Thiel and the Walton family). Russia of course. The spineless politicians and government officials who refused to put Trump behind bars. The DNC for the shenanigans they've been pulling with primaries for the past several elections and for planning to run a walking corpse in 2024 instead of setting up a real successor to Biden. All of the people who voted for Trump and the other Republicans. All of the left-leaning folk who didn't turn out for Harris. The decades of the GOP undermining democracy (really starting with pardoning Nixon, the whole Regan administration, the hanging chads in 2000, Mitch McConnell taking over the courts, etc).
The only comfort I have is that I know I did my part and voted.
As a senator, Harris was ranked the "most liberal" voting record for her tenure.
Now I'll admit I don't know the exact methodology used and I don't love the word "liberal". And of course in a global context that would certainly not be considered "left".
But, in a US context, to say that Harris was "never anywhere close to the left" is simply falling for GOP propaganda. She may not be Bernie or AOC but she was not as far off as the GOP would have you believe.