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How the fuck do we fix this?

The primary issue is twofold:

1. Heavily biased information and restrictive media diets
2. Democrat Inaction

If you try viewing even a tiny amount of right leaning content on a fresh social media account on any platform, you'll see the type of content that gets perpetuated. People simply become indoctrinated by content recommendations that are practically incapable of showing the other side, not to mention that most mainstream media is entirely corporately captured.

The fact that the Democrats were slow to release official policy for Harris's campaign, indeterminate on Gaza, and had (or really, still have) a very "this is fine, you're just overreacting, but sure we'll fix a few things" attitude towards political messaging, only helped Republicans, because it led a lot of people to just vote for the party that promised the most, and that was the Republicans. All the wars would be over, things would be cheaper, all the "bad" people wouldn't be here anymore, etc.

To a normal person with very little media literacy, those promises sound downright amazing.

I personally think we fix this by at least starting with messaging, since that's what actually leads most people to make a decision on who to vote for. There were literally people deciding on election night who they wanted to vote for, so messaging is highly important.

The left needs to speak to the immediately visible, material needs of the working people directly. While it's important to fight against the right on culture war issues to prevent the ceding of ground on things like civil rights and discrimination, I think a lot of left leaning messaging focuses too heavily on that, and as a result, it can seem to right-inclined people that the left has no economic policy. That needs to change.

See: Bernie Sanders, and how he very consistently addresses specific economic issues people face, and has broader support on the right compared to any democratic congressperson. Hell, even JD Vance said Bernie was one of the people he least disliked on the left, and Bernie's further left than the Democrats. Populist, economic disparity focused, anti-billionaire, pro-worker sentiment is how you change ordinary people's minds in the current media economy.

As an individual, the most you'll likely be able to do in this respect is going to be volunteering for phone banking efforts, donating money to left leaning charities focused on reducing economic inequality, and generally bringing these kinds of talking points up in general political discussion with others.

There's something else that's commonly overlooked though, and that's local policy. Think of a city's "town hall" type meetings that accept public comment. How many people in that city are actually regularly attending a town hall meeting? Think of how few people it really is during a particularly contentious proposal. Now imagine what it's like when it comes to something like "housing and urban development: reducing the rate of homelessness - meeting no. 57" Almost nobody. Get yourself and a few friends down to your local relevant policy meetings, make even a little noise, and the amount of change you can make as a result can be drastic compared to the actual % of the city's population you make up.

Pushing for things like ranked-choice voting in local elections can also be very viable, since it's proven that tends to push voters further left, on average, and it also adds some extra competition that can spur a party like the Democrats into actual meaningful action.