Too complicated for 90% of voters to comprehend.
They saw: Democrat president made my groceries more expensive
They heard: Democrat replacement will do things around the same as they used to be. Republican guy is going to do things VERY differently.
And the herd mentality took over past that point
You can’t honestly think this is true. People didn’t switch—at least not any significant percentage. I think it was a 1% swing. People stayed home.
The democrats don’t own the votes of people. They swung for the neocons. Leaving the people who’d been arrested for sitting in their schools for not liking a fuckin genocide to sacrifice their values. Again. It’s always on those of us that want better to sacrifice our values to keep the wolves from the door. While the Democratic Party opens the back door for them when they hold the keys anyway.
They are doing the same thing over and over, shutting out even a middle of the road progressive like sanders. And then they expect to hold onto voters who want real change? They can’t promise more and more of the same and then expect people to get excited. This is 100% on them.
People stayed home.
Abstaining is a vote unto itself, and partisans of both flavors are wont to ignore that voting doesn’t materially affect the lives of the poor and middle class. No matter who they elect things get worse, so when faced with the choice of missing a badly-needed day’s pay and voting, they choose to get paid.
I mean, this is true, but in most states you have the option to vote early, vote by mail. We can’t ignore the middle part of your statement: capitalism is getting more and more hostile and no one is offering us a solution. Just giving us differently colored badges to pin to our lapel while telling us the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Give us someone who is actually speaking to us and our needs and we’d have turnout like they wouldn’t believe. But both parties actively suppress anyone trying to do so. Which has been on display my entire life, but has definitely come into much sharper focus in the past 12 years.
No matter who they elect things get worse
“Whether I get a minor laceration or I lose my arm, I’m still going to bleed”
If you’re working 2-3 jobs and upwards of 100 hours a week, none of it will matter to you. All you know is you have to struggle to live and no one we elect will change it.
And this sense of superiority and refusal to understand or empathize is why hundreds of millions don’t listen to you.
Lol, you don’t know me, or that I’ve literally been there.
And this sense of superiority and refusal to understand or empathize is why hundreds of millions don’t listen to you.
Pot and kettle friend.
Do you even know what that life is like? Working yourself to the bone to feed your family and still staring down the barrel of an election that you tangentially know will harm you in some way?
I’ve done 80hr weeks for years, and it fucking sucks. Check your assumptions, because this sense of superiority is why I ignore people like you. I’ve been there, but I still made the time when I had to with shit like absentee voting. Not everyone has that ability, but don’t pretend like that takes away their agency, even if they have little energy to put to it
I’m not judging you. (And I should have made that more clear. I apologize.)
I’m judging the sentiment, and until Democrats learn to actually speak to workers, they’re going to lose elections.
Sorry, no. 15 million+ people that voted in '20 did not stay home because of Palestine. Jill Stein was the candidate I heard of most from the “Genocide Joe” crowd, and I don’t think she reach 1% in any battleground state. America does not care about the plight of Palestine. Sad truth.
Yeah, the people I know and spoke to all just said “I didn’t even vote, I couldn’t stomach it.” And the people who didn’t vote because they were put off by the choices don’t really get reliably surveyed—if anything we might find out a small sample size’s opinions months down the road, but more leftist circles are so disillusioned from being asked to plug their ears, hold their nose and vote for neoliberalism with a heavy splash of neocon garnish thrown in that they don’t engage. We can’t keep ignoring that segment of people. Some of them went to vote third party, but when you’re talking about a 4% difference, a lot desperately needs to be said of anyone left of Bernie madoff being written off as “extreme left.”
Yeah. Any party that gets desperate enough to court actual progressives will get a big boost.
That said, courting racists also seems to be pretty effective.
I choose to believe in a world where the second option is getting less viable while the first is becoming more viable, with time. But that’s just a matter of faith (with at least a little bit of evidence from history).
The MAGA Alt-media and then add Fox is super prolific if not mainstream at this point. They’ve gaslighted so effective that both Black males and Hispanics is shifting toward the GOP. The left would need to equal that push.
I hated reading this, because it sure seems like it’s the truth.
The simple fact is a LOT of Americans don’t have the time to do real research. They are entirely reliant on media to break down the complex issues into small chunks. And we know that no longer exists.
Do we expect someone that has to work 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet now and an hour or two helping their children with homework, to also spend hours researching current events and political stances beyond what they can get in 30 or 60 minutes from the TV before they have to go to bed and do it all over tomorrow?
Worse than that, millions don’t even rely on media. They just hear about it from some barely-informed coworker, friend, or family member. Everyone is blaming the democrats’ messaging and policies, when huge numbers of people are just going by vibes, tribalism, and whatever they hear at church.
The uphill battle here was to fight the pervasive lie that it’s Biden’s fault that everything is expensive and trump knows how to fix it, but you can’t use explanations longer than five words and you can only reach the information-seeking population who mostly already agree with you.
Republicans spent the last 50 years or more pushing religious participation and conflating their ideologies with religious beliefs. They can’t be defeated without a similarly insidious strategy. We are truly post-information, and the merits of the candidate are virtually irrelevant.
It’s exactly why there is nothing but fear and hate blasting across every digital and analog service known to humankind. The United States has literally saturated itself, through it’s own volition, in whatever the peddlers were selling. They became the ultimate consumer. When you are literally breathing in the propaganda, cortisol cranked to 11 and the only option on the menu is all or nothing politics this is what ya get.
~75 million chose the devil they don’t know and the DNC needs to reflect on that. Or die. Their choice. The rest of us probably won’t even get that choice.
They chose the devil they very much know.
??? It is literally impossible for any voter to not know the devil they chose. No, over 70 million voters actively chose to elect perhaps the most incompetent and transparently stupid president in history back into office, but with a well known and well documented playbook this time around on how literally entry metric of American life, from domestic policy to foreign policy, will be made worse to the sole benefit of big corporate actors and 1%ers. A whole bunch of others were too apathetic to be concerned by this.
Voters ultimately made their choice. A lot of folks are going to die as a result, but unfortunately it won’t be limited to just the idiots that actually chose this.
His first term was a bungle. They had two years of a majority and couldn’t even finish the blueprints for a wall. I really don’t think the GOP was prepared. They are now.
And obviously the unengaged 50% of the country didn’t care or pay attention.
And that republican guy told them he’s going to ramp up inflation. (tariffs, mass deportation) and raise their income taxes (the vast majority of his voters are not 1%). And they still voted for him.
But they won’t understand that. It’s all about feeling instead of logic. Honestly think the deck was stacked against the incumbent this year, just as it was in '20 because of COVID and '08 because of the financial crisis. As the saying goes “It’s the economy, stupid!”
There was no incumbent in 2008 unless you are aggregating to the party level.
It’s even worse than that. They consume media that actively misinforms and lies about the democrats.
I was helping my uncle with his computer a few years ago and got a glimpse of his email inbox with emails about how Hillary Clinton is so evil. And my aunt gets all her news from a website hosted by the same company that hosts trump’s social media website.
Things can not get better as long as we allow these propagandists to operate.
Don’t forget immigrants and black cities are scary.
Democrats are now hallucinating Harris supporting a ceasefire in Gaza
Harris Doesn’t Support Arms Embargo on Israel, a Top Adviser Says
At her Michigan Rally two days ago she vowed to do all she can to end the war in Gaza. Granted it was way too little too late. No idea why she waited until a day before the election to say the thing everybody has been wanting her to say since the beginning.
Harris actively banished Gaza from her campaign. She did not allow Palestine at the DNC. She promised to keep sending weapons to Israel. Her position was extremely clear.
Vague lip service two days before the election means nothing.
The writing really was on the wall, unfortunately
It’s not a war, it’s a genocide. The UN is able to call it a genocide. The Hague is able to call it a genocide. The fact that Harris refused to acknowledge it as a genocide meant that nothing further would actually be done.
Because she saw that she was gonna lose. Or thought it would fly under the radar to not piss off more but somehow convince others that she meant it?
The Democrats seemed to have thought the election a game that could be won with clever tactics and moves the whole time instead of meeting the challenge head on. Truly a shit show of poor party management.
Harris wasn’t pro ceasfire in Gaza, please stop gaslighting people.
Biden was pro two state solution and ceasefire… So is Kamala lmfao.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/27/1208694837/two-state-solution-israeli-palestinian-conflict
Cool, I can say I have billions of dollars, and that makes it true then. Look at the actions, not what they say.
It’s not their platform was weak. It’s that they are weak. They hold their tongue while their opponents are jerking off in their face. They mind their Ps & Qs while someone holds a gun to a child’s head somewhere in America. They govern “responsibly” while half the government is on fire. There is no sense of urgency, there is no sense of reality, there is no sense they actually give a fuck.
It’s easy to stand up there at the podium and wane intellectual about filling the sky with stars and ask us all to “keep fighting” but where was your fight? How did you lose to this with everything on the line?
Why would we fight for a bunch of fish to be thrown on land so we can sit there and watch them flop around drowning in a political environment that is killing them?
I might go one further and say “Look, you need to take my platform seriously!” isn’t a winning message when the last guy lied about his platform. Biden took office promising a bunch of BernieBro shit - debt forgiveness, climate change reform, prosecution of corrupt officials from the prior administration, voting reform - and then failed to deliver. Obama ran into the same shit after 2008, tanking his majorities in 2010 and then pulling through despite a negative approval rating in 2012, because he did not deliver the goods.
How did you lose to this with everything on the line?
Its easy to forget that conservatives (particularly the heavy hitters) also have a ton of shit on the line. You’ll notice Wall Street loves a full GOP House/Senate/Presidency and the market is surging. Crypto is surging. Elon Musk and the Winklevoss Twins and the Murdochs and even Bezos are bullish on the next four years. These people had vast fortunes on the line and they acted like it. They turned the country against the Democrats by hook and by crook, through their mass media and their industrial stoogies.
The Democrats needed their old allies in the labor movement to push back. They needed teachers and university students. They needed the urban professional class. But after Biden sold out the rail unions and failed to support service sector or aerospace or even the fucking Postal Service? After he flubbed debt forgiveness for college grads? After he let state governments (in Red and Blue states alike) run roughshod over public education? Who was left?
Dems immolated their own base, chasing the traditionally conservative upper middle class white homeowners. Schumer promised that every blue collar voter who went to Trump would be replaced by two suburban moms. Oops.
They don’t give a damn shit. It’s all smiles, jokes and smirks nowadays.
I think mama Kamala would’ve had a way better chance of win if she just offered a simple public apology for force-labouring so many poor people before shifting policies 180°. Instead they do that yesterday, then the exact opposite today and a big laugh in your face.
Maybe if Trump starts executing them, and shit becomes win or die for them like it is for a lot of people, then maybe they’ll start thinking about how to win at all costs (like listening to what people actually want) instead of “we want to win, but only as long as it doesn’t adversely affect our donor daddies”
No, they need to be replaced. They’re complicit.
Yes, the lesser evil lost to the greater one again, and they and their diehard supporters insist on learning nothing.
Removed by mod
Right back at you like always Viking_Hippie lol.
People forget that nationwide elections are ordinarily determined by infrequent voters to begin with.
It wasn’t high-propensity voters voting for trump, third party, or abstaining, it was ordinary non-political americans who didn’t see a point in voting for a status-quo center-right candidate.
People have been screaming at democrats since at least 2008 that they need more progressive, more radical policies, and they’ve repeatedly avoided addressing those concerns. Trump ran in 2016 as a moderate. He came out on the left of fucking hillary clinton on the war in Iraq and interventionism. She lost to trump because he maneuvered to the left of her, and democrats still have not fucking learned.
Democrats need to let go of their moderate progenitors and re-build their base from the bottom left. They’re leaving millions of voters on the table because they keep hamstringing themselves on a bygone era of popular neoliberalism, and there’s nobody left to blame now but the party itself.
She lost to trump because he maneuvered to the left of her
Nobody voted for Trump because he was “more left than Hillary”. That’s not why anyone voted for him.
i believe what he meant was that “trump won despite being on left of hillary” which goes against the dnc propaganda at that time that sanders was not electable because america will never vote for leftist views. add that hillary was stupid (or corrupt) enough to not give anything to her voter base while trump did. shows how out of touch dnc had become.
Your opinion is valid but, with no offense intended, i wasn’t talking to you
I personally know many who wanted the US out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and trusted Trump over Hillary to do it. I know no-one who openly wanted the same and voted for her. I myself voted third-party the last two elections before this year, and Biden has only escalated our entanglements in middle-eastern conflics.
Jesus, just look at Biden’s rhetoric on Israel and Iran. Its downright bizarely pro-war, pro-genocide(in its failure to remotely acknowlege such is happening), and absolutely tone-deaf to what voters want.
The fact that you yourself have now said what you’ve said on the topic proves the opposite of your claims. You know no conservatives today, and you mock the notion that anyone is against the war more than you point out any reason anyone should have voted for Harris over Trump.
Muslims were a DNC lock-in vote till now, and absolutely no-one failed to warn them that was changing.
They absolutely were compelled by his opposition to international conflict and intervention - which was a huge part of Clinton’s legacy as SoS.
People didn’t turn out much more than they changed their vote.
Drag will amend drag’s question.
You seriously thought a fascist dictatorship was an alternative not worth preventing?
Your point’s ok, but your habit of speaking about yourself in the third person is really grating and it comes across as snobby.
No, it sounds like regression to a toddler’s inability to use pronouns.
Drag isn’t talking about dragself in third person.
🙄 Proceeds to talk in some weird third-person adjacent way of referring to themselves. Shut up dude.
It’s just a gimmick account with a silly style to amuse themself, who gives a shit? Just ignore it and move on…
No, drag is using first person pronouns.
If you were, you’d have written “am not” instead of “isn’t”.
Leave drag alone
I’m saying, don’t hallucinate an alternate reality.
I showed up to vote. But not enough others were excited to do so.
Straight up Reddit tier cope from liberals this last week. If you wanted to win don’t turn away 15 million people from your base to pander to a bunch of MAGA voters who were always picking trump regardless. Absolute fucking morons.
Drag agrees that Harris’s campaign sucked, and Harris is to blame. Drag also thinks America voted for a fascist, and America is to blame. The great thing about blame is that two people can both be 100% at fault.
Found Bob Dole’s Lemmy account!
A pimp named Slickback
A Pimp Named Slickback is more progressive than too many people on both sides, and basically all of the DNC itself. Fuck all that “homies before hoes” non-sense. The corpos and military-industrial complex are homies, btw.
Harris is a fascist, you lib
“vote for a ceasefire” is the ceasefire in the room with us now? Because I’m not surprised people DIDNT vote for someone who was the fucking president but refused to pressure to end a war because it could be used as leverage in an election campaign.
Do you think Kamala Harris was the president, or do you think people are upset that voters didn’t vote for Joe Biden?
I’m pretty sure she vowed to not be silent on Gaza, and then didn’t really bring it up until 2? days before the election? Even if she said somewhere about ceasefire she clearly didn’t mean it.
The president and I are working around the clock every day to get that ceasefire deal done
- Kamala Harris
now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done.
- Kamala Harris
We’re not going to stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and in the region including Arab leaders
- Kamala Harris
it is time for this war to end and end in a way where Israel is secure, all the hostages are released, the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can exercise their right to freedom, dignity and self-determination.
- Kamala Harris
Their platform was weak.
They ran an old man with brain damage for most of the campaign.
His replacement spent two months of campaign time telling poverty wage workers to be joyful and didn’t even put a platform on their website until a few weeks before the election. Watching that felt very tone deaf and condescending.
The other meme they repeated was how weird Trump and Vance are, as if they didn’t already objectively know the voters don’t care about that.
They didn’t run a good campaign.
Well I’m glad we dodged having an old man with brain damage in the White House… ooh wait.
Fair point.
No matter who we elected we were getting a useful idiot for the rich, but that’s partisanship for you.
Goalposts
2 days before election Harris announced legalized marijuana and 1 day before that she mentuoned she would be ok looking into Gaza more.
Her “first time homebuyers” aid was actually only for first generational homebuyers mainly immigrants and who had rented from a corporate owned apartment complex for 2 years.
Her business aid plan was for people who already had a business operating in specific cities and areas for “black men and others” to get loans. emphasis on “others” being her’s not mine.
It was a campaign of protecting status quo first, not people. While telling them they didn’t realize how good they had it.
Weak is an understatement.
I don’t think old man with brain damage is much of a counter. That is what got elected.
You’re not wrong.
The difference is their brain-damaged guy behaved as he always does, where Biden clearly did not.
this voting system is stupid as f@%k though: as a voter, you should be able to sort your candidates as per your preference, not chose pick one and only one
check this out : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method?wprov=sfla1
Yeah but this election really wasn’t the time to pick this fight.
Average. Liberals would have you believe it’s never the time.
Honestly, I don’t care at this point. We’re already past mitigating the worst effects of climate change, and we just elected a climate change denier. Climate change is not linear. It’s exponential. Nothing matters anymore. We just don’t know it yet.
focus locally we don’t need these fucks. focus your local elections.
RCV
Eh.
We’ve had it since 1919 in Australia, yet we still have the same two parties right and righter.
RCV alone is not the answer.
You’re right. Most people will still vote for the primary candidates, but in an election like this past one where we could have had Harris and a white man on the Dem ticket, RCV could have swung the vote blue.
And no, alone it will not fix the problems, but it’s a key change. Yall have around 20% of offices held by third party or independent. US has none or close to none.
That’s because Australia has a system like the US electoral college, but even more granular.
Democrats lost worse on 2024 than Republicans did 2020. We judge Republicans for supporting their party after Trump effectively commandeered it but we don’t hold ourselves to the same standard when the Democratic party has been shown to be an absolute and abject failure. Maybe it’s time we look in the mirror. We gave Democrats three chances, 2016, 2020, and 2024 and they failed to deliver every time. We need to hold ourselves to the same standards we hold Republicans and start thinking about alternatives.
Yes, good thinking. The democrats are losing the vote, so we shouldn’t vote for them. And while we’re at it, we can continue the beatings until morale improves!
You’re right, if we stop voting Democrat we might have a fascist come into power with control of all three branches of government…oh wait, fuck
… maybe we can vote democrat and stop it for a second time? …wait, wait fuck
… well maybe we can keep voting democrat to stop it happening for a third time I guess?
Democrat supporters are fucking deluded at this point.
Can’t wait to hear about the alternatives you want to vote for.
The people are tired of the Dems presenting them with weak bullshit solutions to their very real problems and being told to get on board because the alternative is worse. The cost of living in America is drowning the middle class and the Dems keep throwing us water wings.
I don’t agree that Trump’s policies are the answer but I can understand desperate people looking anywhere for some relief.
Drag thinks that not having a fascist dictator who wants to holocaust all the trans people is a strong solution to a very real problem. Drag got excited about the idea of the USA continuing to be a somewhat-democracy where drag’s trans friends are allowed to live. Drag was excited about driving Putin out of Ukraine, and drag was very happy to vote for the West Bank not to blow up. Drag thinks all those “desperate people” seem not to care very much about queer people, ukrainians, or palestinians. And if they were only in it for themselves, maybe they could have gotten excited about Harris’ plan to help first home buyers. Drag has been seeing memes for a decade about how Millenials will never buy houses, and drag feels that pain. Harris had a plan. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was a plan. It seems the voters didn’t just lack empathy, but also lacked self-interest.
It wasn’t a great plan
You’re entitled to be mad at the voters for forsaking their fellow citizens as well as the citizens of Ukraine and Palestine. But that doesn’t change the fact that, “not a great plan” wasn’t good enough for voters to turn out for the Democrats. Voters are inevitably going to vote for whatever they perceive as being in their own self interests. It’s up to the political parties to align with what the voters want and the Democrats have continuously failed to do that.
Yes, the DNC are just as much at fault as the people who voted for a fascist dictatorship.
Me: About to buy my first home.
Also me: Trump is going to be president??? Fuuuuuuck. May as well just light this big pile of money on fire!
Aw hell…doesn’t matter anyways. Pennies don’t melt…
Not only pennies do melt, they are more valuable once molten. It’s just illegal to do it.
…well shit. I spent my teenage years selling weed. I didn’t know I could make money burning things!
Ones from 1982 and earlier are much more valuable when melted down.
Also me: Trump is going to be president??? Fuuuuuuck. May as well just light this big pile of money on fire!
Invest in prison stocks. Watch them go to the moon.
