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I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
Wow, I haven't had Philip DeFranco on my mind in a minute, bro. I grew out of him quite fast. He was talking a load of gossip and I just wasn't interested anymore. Must be 10 years since I watched a video.
I just don't understand people railing at the non voters and the people who voted for Trump. It seems as backward as a rocket scientist raging at drag and wind breaking their rocket. "How dare the wind do this! Don't they know this will progress humanity!?!"
It's your job to build a rocket that can withstand the air at those speeds. The air is always a problem you have to deal with, and no, you can't shame the air into doing what you want.
Genuinely the democratic campaign seemed more like they were pushing a trolley problem than a future. So why is everyone so shocked it failed?
The air and the drag are entities without a brain.
So are trump voters and non-voters.
I think you're getting your roles all mixed up with your analogy. The anger you reference is at fellow voters. It isn't the average voter's job to build a better rocket. And the wind is not alterable but voter decisions are. The anger is at the decision makers who chose the rocket that was less capable of dealing with the harsh wind or chose to not pick a rocket at all, knowing that would result in the lesser rocket being picked.
Okay I'm getting sick of the whole "the dems failed us" bullshit.
WE failed. WE let this happen. WE had the choice between an obvious dictator or continued democracy.
You can shift the blame all you want but at the end of the day it was an obvious choice. You can come up with any other excuse you want. If you didn't vote for Harris you are to blame. Period. End of fucking story.
Edit: The dems should've been able to run a wet paper bag against Trump and win. The fuck is wrong with people to not see that?
The dems should've been able to run a wet paper bag against Trump and win. The fuck is wrong with people to not see that?
Everyone sees it, thus our point that the Dems are to blame because they didn't fucking win. You guys trying to absolve them of their sins act like the reality of voting is that everyone will vote perfectly logically for the lesser evil when that has never been how voting works
While I can understand your perspective, it's one of those unfortunate cases where ideology clashes with reality.
Yes, Trump never planned on following through on actually helping people. He lied, and people bought it. And yet it's no ones fault Harris's that she decided to tell people "things won't change if you vote for me".
A nation of voters isn't made up of individuals who you can convince, it's a crowd of people following certain dynamics, just like any other large grouping of things. You can either accept that and work with this fact to steer the crowd, or you can ignore this fact and lose because you're trying to go against the flow. And in the end, the only people who had any meaningful control was Harris' campaign.
Imagine you're a shepherd, and your flock is running towards the edge of a cliff. Sure, you can plant your feet and say "they shouldn't run off the cliff", but the only end result will be losing all your sheep.
I respect your argument, but I still refute it.
There was a saying someone shared recently: Give them the third best option. Because the second best comes too late and the best never comes at all. Essentially, do not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
I agree that Kamala should have developed more of a campaign around frustrated white young men, and working class America. That was a mistake, but I also think it was an easy mistake to make when scrambling to take over from Biden’s campaign.
If we go 4 years from now, 8 years, 30 years, I think every candidate we see will be imperfect and will make mistakes. The only time we’ll ever see a perfect candidate is when they lie about their accomplishments and overstate themselves. Americans need to be able to spot those flaws themselves, and that will not change in any election cycle. I should not get into the White House by promising every working American a trillion dollars.
I'm not asking for a perfect candidate, not sure where you got that from.
My whole point is that Harris' positions got her some number of voters. We now know that this number was too small, and we also now know that they knew this fact.
Harris could have changed her positions to get more voters, but she didn't. How is this not completely her fault?
Again, I'm not asking her to be some perfect politician. I'm asking her to look at the polling results (which we know she had) and to adapt her campaign based on those, which she didn't do.
It is not completely her fault because voters have agency and accountability.
The larger the group, the more predictable those behaviors are. It's everybody's fault, but she's a single person who could've changed the outcome unilaterally.
Yet each individual voter had almost no impact, while she had an incredibly large one.
I have never respected this circular logic. You could use this argument to make any position a "bad one" as long as biases, foolishness or gullibility on the part of the listener override any convincing points. At some point, it is possible for recipients of a message to be bad listeners, and for voters to be irresponsible in their naivety towards a candidate.
Okay, but we're not talking about any random position, we're talking about "nothing will change with me" being a terrible position if you want to get elected by people who aren't doing so well.
At some point, the senders of the messages have to accept blame. Otherwise things will never get better, as the least shitty option will get ever shittier.
Did you forget noone chose kamala? Twice in a row the democrats have taken popular choice away to put in their best corporate sponsor. We have had better choices every time and the democrats say fuck you anyways.
She didnt scramble to take over the campaign, she killed it out of the gate before moneyed hands got ahold of her and restricted what she could say and how. She showed us a good campaign and then threw it away. You remember that too right?
Nobody is looking for a perfect candidate, just one that actually wants to help the american people instead of use the government as a global pyramid scheme.
It's pretty clear to me though, that the scramble with her campaign was far less to do with pushing ahead the party's corporate interests, and more a mistake of realizing age and perceived senility were affecting their chances with Biden, and being too afraid for buildup time to get another primary. I have no idea what you're citing around corporate interests, I've already agreed that she wasn't pushing a strong message.
The other problem is how you phrase your last paragraph, because you're highlighting the specific problem you'd like fixed, when voters all across America all had different issues they wanted prioritized, and many opposed each other on. Palestine, trans rights, government waste, federal aid vs education vs full employment, etc etc. It isn't so easy to pick and push one message that will uniformly win you votes. It's also easy for people like me to come under the belief that people felt life under Biden was fine and that the country was steadily getting better, and that change from that path would've been bad. It is very easy for that to be more of a communication problem of a rushed campaign, rather than insisting corporate corruption. Again: Basic mistakes. Mistakes not nearly so bad as "I grab treasury dept and gut the government"
I share your sentiment. If you had any sort of idea, even the faintest inkling of trump, literally a corpse should have been elected, I think many of the electorate don't know anything about their politicians, and just vote a certain way "cause that's how we've always done it". The last election, elected a dictatorial fascist, and the alternative was to pinch your nose and apply pressure for Kamala to go left.
Based on the top level comments here - yeah, they still think that Harris is exactly the same as Trump, and have zero regrets.
The genocide(and poor national level performance) was the last straw for many people who have been lifelong democrat voters. After 30+ years of seeing dems bring ferocity and strategy and boldness to primaries only to sit in office, renege and fail on many of those promises even in times when they have a supermajority. Then to see only a few dems actually screaming on the floors of congress. As well biden refusing to use the bully pulpit.
I don't believe any of them wanted this outcome. I do believe they felt their vote was only going to promote a regime that would continue the trend of genocide and protecting wall street over the needs of desparate citizens. Billions to kill and profit then pennies to the people.
I believe the fault lies entirely on the DNC and not the voters who saw no benefit in promoting the party over the other.
It's wrong, a dem in power is worlds better, but i understand seeing it as pointless in the moment. There is no good answer, only a less wrong one...
To answer the question, pass useful legislation and don't promote genocide. Legislation like universal healthcare, constitutional abortion(and other women's healthcare), raising minimum wage, universal pre-k, Union support, decriminalize drugs(esp. Weed), and to reverse inflation to name only just a tiny few..
TLDR: 30yrs of "lesser of two evils" kills voter motivation. Blame the party not the people.
This was NOT the time to do this. This election was about the end of fucking democracy in the face of fascism and these abstainers wanted to pull teenage shit and fucking ended the country as we know it.
Now Gaza is getting wiped out because these abstainers couldn't abstract what a p2025 theocracy was going to do?
People were screaming about this for months. THIS election was an existential fight right now at home, and they chose to pull idealist teenage shit.
THIS election was an existential fight right now at home
Like they said, longtime Dems have been hearing this for at least the last few elections, if not longer than that. This messaging doesn't work anymore, it's crying wolf to many people
And now the wolf came.
The danger was real, unlike the dangers Republicans scream about. Why didn't anybody tell THEM they're crying wolf?
I mean, I place more of the blame for "ending the country" on the fascists and the people who enthusiastically put them into power, but if you want to blame the handful of people who abstained then you do you I guess
"We offered nothing and lost to a liar who said they would get something if he came back into office. Why did we lose?"
"We said everything was going great when the public was facing hardships and being targeted by systemic and economic inequality, and the dude lied and said he'd solve it. Why did we lose?"
"The last guy was unpopular and didn't push back on Trump to get him jail. And then we said we'd do nothing different as Americans are facing homeless and their bodily autonomy being ripped away from them. How did we lose?"
"We courted Republicans who openly hate our voter base, alienated them by saying we don't need you, and Republicans are too brainwashed to vote for anyone but Republicans. Why did we lose?"
"We let the campaign be run by the same people who already lost against Trump in 2016. Why did we lose?"
Clearly, the dems need to be lying more.
No, I'm serious, they need to actually start hitting back in kind if they want to preserve even a sliver of the country. This moral high road shit sounds great but boy, does not seem to work in practice.
But they don't even need lies to make Republicans look bad. They just need to push harder