Vincent Oriedo, a biotechnology scientist, had just such a question. What lessons have been learned, he asked, from Harris’s defeat in this vital swing county in a crucial battleground state that voted for Joe Biden four years ago, and how are the Democrats applying them?
“They did not answer the question,” he said.
“It tells me that they haven’t learned the lessons and they have their inner state of denial. I’ve been paying careful attention to the influencers within the Democratic party. Their discussions have centred around, ‘If only we messaged better, if only we had a better candidate, if only we did all these superficial things.’ There is really a lack of understanding that they are losing their base, losing constituencies they are taking for granted.”
“We have set ourselves up for generational loss because we keep promoting from within leaders that that do not criticise the moneyed interests. They refuse to take a hard look at what Americans actually believe and meet those needs.”
Well, I’m not in denial. This country is full of fucking idiots. The next Democratic presidential candidate should be a celebrity that promises to achieve world peace and full gay space communism. Apparently empty promises and celebrity are what win elections.
Next? I’m sorry, but democracy continues to be dismantled. The train has left the station. Trump already had 4 years of training and now with direct support from Musk… Hate fear and more hate mongering…and Trump is using it… So are accusations of election meddling etc… fuck why hasn’t there been that accusation even from Democrats? That’s it… Its game over.
All those highly secured nuclear secrets or files in the restroom at the golf club… anyone who steals something like that… also steals/cheats in the election. But not 1 accusation… Republicans as well as Democrats don’t want democracy anymore. A convicted highly criminal traitor to the country and enemy of the state becomes president without riots etc… The Democrats who are now just pointing at the Republicans with “I told you so” but not doing a riot or anything else are just as hostile to democracy.
What you been smoking, my friend?
I think you may have missed the point a bit. It’s exactly these ‘empty promises’ which have been the democrats issue over the past 30 years.
They get elected on messages like ‘make the economy work work everyday americans’ and then once in office they prioritize the status quo and making sure that nothing major changes. This benefits the wealth and damages everyday people, many of whom voted for them in the hopes that the democrats would improve their situation.
As awful as much of their platform is, the Republicans have proven that they aren’t scared to break things and make big changes. This appeals to many voters who feel let down by empty promises.
Democrats say good things for the people. Democrats win = Republicans just block everything and embarrass Democrats for it. Republican voters also go without understanding… The main thing is against the “enemy” (i.e. against America…)
Of course the Republicans only build shit and destroy America besides blocking everything good that would benefit the American citizen (you). But it was the Democrats… who accept a democratic election and after defeat. NOT block everything from Republicans. How deluded can you be.
Name one of those empty promises and let’s review how they were voted on in congress. If the Democrats voted against it then your comment has merit, if Republicans blocked it your comment has no merit
You don’t get to just blame the opposition for making sure nothing got done. Especially when the other party manages to succeed when they have power.
What are you even talking about? I do get to blame the Congress members who vote for or against something. That is your civic duty. What do you do, check boxes for funsies?
The failure of Democrats is their own. Giving them a pass because of Republicans is lazy. There’s always opposition.
So yeah, for funsies
In a 2-party system why should Dems even bother trying to change themselves or how the party operates? I mean they are (or used to be anyway) guaranteed to be voted in again at some point in the future.
As for the last election imo they just didn’t look far enough ahead to see the danger of Trump 2.0. They dilly dallied around with dumb shit, only paying attention to billionaires, completely ignored Americans’ views on Isreal, showed almost zero interest in reigning in food/housing conglomerates’ profits, etc.
Trump got massive gains in several key demographics that are key to long term party success. Most notably Hispanics, which are closing in on the predominant demographic. The wins for men and non college educated people are also a problem, they aren’t as important, but you can’t afford to lose such large demographics by such a large margin.
While no Republicans have really shown to be able to maintain the a fervent base like Trump’s, it’s extremely risky to just trust that people will flock back to the Democrats in a future Trumpless election. A more palatable republican with 75% of Trump’s base could easily see a Reagan level landslide victory.
Along this vein, something I don’t see people talking about is that if the current Gaza ceasefire holds Trump will (justifiably or not) take credit for it and at least Michigan will become a solid red state not unlike Florida. Maybe Arizona too if that one popp is to be believed.
Politically supporting Palestine is a terrible move for either party outside the Dearborn area in Michigan. There isn’t a relevant mass of people that actually care, Lemmy is a massive echo chamber of a minority position on this.
Politically supporting Palestine is a terrible move for either party outside the Dearborn area in Michigan. There isn’t a relevant mass of people that actually care
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We just had tons of exit polls. Foreign policy was a primary issue for around 5% of voters. Support for Israel was considered not enough or about right by a significant majority 60%+. You can pick whatever news source you like, the results are within a few points of each other.
And you don’t see the glaring obvious problem with relying on EXIT POLLS, when the primary cause Kamala lost was because a substantial portion of Biden’s voter base simply stayed home?
You’d rather rely on feels and a mythical silent majority?
The only lesson to be learnt from this is that forgiving debts, pardoning marijuana offences, wanting fair elections, etc don’t work.
The only lesson they could learn from this is that they weren’t conservative enough.
Fuck that lesson.
They don’t learn the lesson, because they don’t want to. And your examples imo show the problem.
forgiving debts, pardoning marinuana offences
These are not solutions, they are bandaids that like a drug keep you dependent on politicians repeating them again and again. Which of course is nice when your only goal is to get relected, but longterm that magic wears off.
The majority of the US voting population ignores the long term.
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Biden rescheduled marijuna and Kamala promised to completely legalize it. Making medicine free requires 60 senate votes.
People turned down the solutions even after receiving the bandaids.
The people who aren’t learning are voters.
Biden promised it on his first campaign trail… and did almost nothing to that end.
The Parsons for cannabis that actually mattered happened after the election. And the “starting to consider maybe pushing the fda to maybe consider it” came 3.5 years after election.
Cannabis was rescheduled under Biden and he pardoned thousands of offenders, Idk if anybody has crunched the numbers yet but he’s probably pardoned the most people of any potus LINK.
Cannabis is NOT rescheduled. It is still a schedule I drug.
The consideration, to maybe reschedule started about 8 months ago.
The pardons before the election only impacted about 50 people, and didn’t include expungement.
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Legalizing Marijuana was Harris’s October surprise. If that’s their idea of a winning bullet for this fucked up nation that’s pretty sad.
They have also been legalizing marijuana and pressured the DEA to reschedule it, those are lasting solutions.
Democrats also support tuition free college, but haven’t been able to get the bill passed yet. Student loan forgiveness can be passed with executive orders, but tuition free college would require a bill passed by Congress.
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If that’s the lesson Democrats take from this then they deserve to keep losing.
The only lesson they could learn from this is that they weren’t conservative enough.
I don’t think this is even remotely the lesson.
The right wingers already go on social media spouting that “the libs” are socialist, sure, but that’s just because it’s what their media tells them.
The lesson should be that propaganda wins elections, not logical answers. You have to appeal to quick witty replies with even more quick witty replies. You have to use loads of smoke and mirrors to promise outcomes without any tangible methodologies.
The democrats should promise to fund the military… and then use the military funding for humanitarian ends like we did with covid vaccines. The line item looks great to dummy middle america voters to say “wow the democrats want a strong military” even though the spending really is to build homes for the poor or provide subsidized healthcare through federal military pop up hospitals (with contracted civilian doctors.)
You have to literally provide handouts about a year out from election time to subsidize a topic like gas prices leading up to the election. The day the elections are over you can remove all of those things and start replenishing it… so release that strategic reserve big time. Focus on extra subsidies in places where you can actually win the vote, so fuck deep red and deep blue. Hate to say it… the battleground is all that matters.
If you want to appeal to the common voter it can’t be by pushing for educational values or refunds for people with degrees. It has to be refunds for people with high grocery bills, high utility costs. Hell, remove the SALT deduction entirely in the name of “small government” because that’s one thing even lower class republicans think would be a bad move to raise… but this is still way too detailed for the ignorant voting masses to grasp… so you should probably say you are going to lower taxes rather than say you’re upping it for billionaires. The latter is always assumed even though it never actually happens.
Bring out all the news about how republicans are actually raising taxes. How they actually result in higher gas costs, higher housing costs, higher grocery costs. Why the fuck “Tariffs” weren’t brought out as MASSIVE tax increases for the common working person is bewildering to me! Dumpy loves tariffs but describe it in simple terms as a tax - IMPORT TAX - and suddenly it will be very unpopular. “Dumpy says tariffs are good!!!” but the news is plastered with “import taxes called tariffs”… why are they raising taxes again? for common hard working people? “You mean i’m gonna have to pay more money at the grocery store AND the pump???”
Campaigning on city values isn’t working because the battleground states aren’t uber dense. You have to appeal to the rural people with promises that can be delivered in the short term and that will cost them in the long term, because they are HORRIBLE at gauging long term impact. They can only remember what just happened and what is happening now. Dumpy is promising that the future will be great, why are you promising that things are gonna be tough? Things are tough right now for most people, why are you saying that the economy is great? I know by many metrics we are succeeding but the complexity of economics goes over almost everyone’s head. Instead you should have been campaigning on the fact that dumpy lowered taxes on the rich and that the rich didn’t fulfill their end of the bargain and are stealing all the money from the hard working middle americans.
No die hard blue state is going to vote red so it’s time to abandon intelligent values for dummy propaganda. Let’s fucking go.
Oh and on the sidelines talk about the real policy you want to implement akin to project2025 which actually has the real DNC agenda, just like how P2025 is the GOP agenda.
Say you will lower taxes for the working and middle class. Everyone knows what that means.
Hear me out, what if they try running an even more genocidal candidate.
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You’re overestimating the power of foreign propaganda. Harris lost because she refused to break with Biden on Gaza, offered a middle-class economic policy instead of working-class economic populism, and spent the campaign pursuing moderate Republicans as her base abandoned her. Foreign influence campaigns certainly played a part, but they’re not magic; they didn’t force the Democrats to run an out of touch, centrist campaign, and they didn’t create the economic crises facing the working class. If the Democrats had run a campaign that credibly addressed the issues of their base, no amount of foreign propaganda would have kept them from winning.
In a capitalist society, the role of government should be to protect citizens from corporations.
If nobody is willing to do that, what use are they?
The government is a tool of the capitalist class in a capitalist society. Democracy was originally for the capitalists and their allies and now is a hedge against revolution.
Democracy means “rule by the people as equals”.
It doesn’t mean " western power".
To be against democracy as an ideology or concept is to be against having humans rights: to be able to decide how you will live and die and for what purpose the fruits of your labor is used.
I don’t know how anything you wrote is relevant to what I wrote.
You said:
Democracy was originally for the capitalists and their allies and now is a hedge against revolution.
Democracy isn’t a compromise with the rich. It is complete ownership by the people.
Democracy in its idealized form, of which I am a proponent of, is that, assuming you mean ownership of the means of production. In popular use, what many countries have is considered a democracy. To be pedantic, we elect representatives to the government by democratic means in most capitalist countries. We call this democracy. I think we should have the former, but I’m not interested in wasting my little social good will on pedantry and definitions with the average person.
That’s fair, it was pedantry.
So do we live in a democracy, banjo? Is there any correlation at all between what government does and what the people want?
The current leaders recieved the majority of votes. The candidates all also won their respective primaries.
The problem lies with the voters (and campaign finance, but thats a partisan issue as well, meaning voters also chose that problem).
The USSR had votes. So does Russia and North Korea. Have votes does not equal having democracy.
Democracy: control of an organization or group by the majority of its members.
Theres very close to zero correlation between what laws pass in the US government and what citizens want to pass. So-- its not a democracy at all is it.
Three things are needed for this to work: labor, capital, and
governmentauthorized violence.The first got destroyed, and the second used the third to get bigger than ever.
So we went from a tricycle to a penny farthing and now we’re falling over.
That’s not how capitalism works… capitalists uses the state to secure, and concentrate power in their hands…
Neoliberalism is done, it’s fucked. The liberals wanted and thought they could pull another Bernie and people would just go with it, fuck that.
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Reading comprehension is hard, but I believe you can get there someday.
The left is fucked overall, they have splintered and hate each other more than they hate trump. Meanwhile the right is united.
This election in particular, the American left has become toxic. If you’re even slightly left or right of any other leftist and you may as well be a nazi to them. No leftist was left enough for the other leftists. “No, I’m the true left, and fuck the rest of you, you’re fascists!” Was basically what every leftists was yelling at each other while not voting, and allowing trump to win. If you’re left and you stood aside and didn’t vote, fuck you.
The left doesnt exist in America my dude. Read what the other commenters that replied to you said, I agree with them. There is neoliberalism and fascism. Thats why Bernie was and is still popular.
Run on healthcare, stopping the genocide, run on raising wages, and anything really to help workers and people and you win easily.
Bullshit. Run on healthcare and ending genocide in Palestine. Those two issue alone would catapult a candidate into office. The Left has a lot of unfortunate infighting. That doesn’t mean we would reject a good candidate over small differences.
Neoliberals will say the most racist things and then act like you have a moral imperative to never criticize their policies.
I think it’s just a vocal minority that is overrepresented online causing the issues, but I promise that’s why most of my extended family votes for Trump.
There was no leftist candidate running for POTUS…
If liberals could learn they wouldn’t be liberals.
There needs to be a culture change in how Democrats and progressivea raise their children politically.
Conservatives raise their children to vote, every time. Local, state, national. Every time. They actually show up on election day and they vote even when they have to hold their noses and they don’t like their candidate. Democrats find some excuse as to why their candidate is not worthy their vote and many stay home because they are mad about something in their own party.
That’s how Republicans can win again and again even when they are a minority of the population.
The Democrat aristocracy do not care about winning.
They only care about marketing the disaster of their losses so that they can launder billions of dollars in “vote blue” spam campaigns.
All those donations are going somewhere - to “consultancy firms”. To “ad agencies”. And then they get to enjoy kickbacks from this mutual relationship.
THEY DON’T NEED TO WIN TO RAKE IN BILLIONS.
and so they don’t even try.
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Left vs right or democrat vs republican — that framing is a distraction in this political reality. The war is between the 99% and the 1%. It’s the working class vs the billionaire class. Your republican neighbor may be a MAGA religious crazy, voting against his financial interests, but he’s been successfully manipulated by a corrupt party controlled by billionaires. Your other neighbor may ‘vote blue no matter who’, ignoring or ignorant to the fact that most democrats at the state and federal level are also influenced or bought by corporate interests and the 1%. These neighbors are clearly not the same, but they are both supporting the interests and agenda of a billionaire class that is oppressing them.
That is not to say that republicans or religious extremism are not threats — they very much are — but they have been allowed to gain power due to a broken and corrupt system of government.
The system is broken because unlimited money gets funneled into politics. It’s destroyed our checks and balances, as well as the incentive structure for our judges and our representatives — most of whom no longer have a primary interest in representing the 99% of us. We are being taxed, robbed, poisoned, oppressed and enslaved by our own government, without even proper representation to show for it.
We cannot expect that our elected representatives will act in our best interests; they require our constant input and scrutiny of their actions. Either we as a people become more involved with politics at all levels of government, or we start a revolution. The problem of corruption in all levels of our government will not be solved by the corrupted. A continuation and increase of wealth inequality will destroy this country.
The corporate-backed fascist MAGA-America regime starts tomorrow, but we are not powerless. The 99% has power. We must come together, organize, educate, exercise empathy and patience with one another, and take action; we can take back control. We have to.
Nothing will happen until there is a major crisis of some kind. Life is way too easy for most people. Occupy was a failure for this reason. You need Great Depression style suffering or better yet early 20th century labor conditions in order to get any ball rolling. Great Society was nothing really.
Every breakdown and postmortem i see make it pretty clear:
If you paid close attention and were well-informed, you voted for Kamala.
If you believe things aren’t true or didn’t pay close attention, you voted for Trump as a sort of totem for wealth and success, not because of a specific policy of his you like. He just represents making lots of money to you.
Any grappling with what went wrong or improvements needed within the DNC first needs to reckon with the reality that people aren’t seeing left-wing messaging and are instead exposed to a fake version of leftism pushed constantly by right-wing actors on social media.
I think a lot of people have problems with the Democratic Party being bought by the billionaires as well …and supporting genocidal regimes.
I voted for Harris but you boiled it down to a few lines and missed a lot of reasons why I think a significant amount of Americans didn’t vote at all.
I voted for Harris, but I think that they’re missing the point. They needed to win over more people with their candidate. You still have to be popular and you don’t have a divine mandate because your opposition is intolerable.
I am a demographic Dems claim to champion, but I haven’t ever seen that support materialize. Somehow they never help me. I vote Dem because I like Rep less. I get not liking Dem as a party. I don’t like them either. This is very prevalent within my communities. It drives voter apathy and pushes moderates to the right. They’re viewed as incompetent in addition to being just bought and paid for as Reps.
They haven’t had a genuine primary in decades. They haven’t tried to connect with small-midsize cities in decades. They’ve completely failed to communicate with their average voters and that is THEIR job to do that. The last minimum wage increase was signed into law by Bush and then Dems sat on their thumbs for three terms. I do not accept “I tried.” I need a party that can win those battles. I’ve tried engaging with my local Democrats, but I get boilerplate responses. I’m fairly sure they’re all chatbots at this point.
And most importantly, it’s hard to root for a perpetual loser. Even when they win they still lose and can’t do anything. It’s never their fault. They just never do anything. I need someone intelligent enough to win. Dems don’t provide that.
They’ll get my vote until anyone else who isn’t a Rep/Fascist has a chance of winning and not a moment longer. It’s so wholly undemocratic that I have to choice between a Kleptocrat or a Fascist.
Nobody cares about genocide, man. Nobody is even talking about it anymore. Trump wasn’t the “ANTI-GeNoCIdE” candidate, and anyone with half a brain knew that ensuring Trump’s candidacy was not going to stop GENOCIDAL REGIMES.
Now we have President Pump n Dump promoting a shitcoin for his inauguration, because the SCOTUS wrote Trump a blank check for corruption. Anyone idiot enough to believe Trump was gonna stop genocide should go long on his memecoin.
You’re missing the point. No one thought Trump was the “anti-genocide” candidate. The people who DO care about Palestine knew that Biden was arming and facilitating genocide, and they heard Harris when she promised more of the same. Trump also supporting the genocide clearly wasn’t enough to get lots of those people to vote against him. You can call them stupid, or short-sighted, or whatever names you want, but the reality is that it’s not enough to point at the GOP and say that they’re also pro-genocide.
No, you are missing the point. With the democrats, you had a chance of a better outcome. You have sympathetic representatives.
With the republicans, you will have better luck trying to convince a brick wall. Your logic is so faulty it’s bordering on trolling. Good luck with the Trump administration.
Everyone complains about poor Democratic messaging but when are we going to admit that as long as Republicans own all major media platforms, any messaging by Democrats is going to be distorted into nonsense by the media?
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Left wing messaging is all focused on logic and targeted to the well-informed. They have no emotional message for the poorly educated, and that’s a stupid mistake. I thought these were supposed to be the smart people? Zero EQ.
the key breakdown here is: people concerned for the health of the country either voted for trump or kamala. Everybody else didn’t vote because they either don’t care, or would rather bitch about other things for no particular reason.
It truly is the biggest shitpost of the century.
We also need to consider that a massive swathe of the electorate is ignorant and for that includes a lot of people who have college degrees.
There are Democratic Party people and aligned people who are realistic about why they lost and who they lost. They have contacts within the Party. Hopefully they’ll be listened to.
We’ll probably get a sense of what if any changes we will see in the upcoming special elections to fill House seats Trump is looting for his Cabinet. Then I believe Florida law requires an election pretty soon to replace Rubio, so that will be a national race we can watch.
Presumably whoever DeSantis appoints will have a pretty big advantage, but we should watch the message and the votes. It will be too early to be a full reaction against Trump, so we can learn a lot about what resonates with voters.
After the Democrats recently scoffed AOC for house oversight committee I severely doubt there will be any lessons learned. Depending on how poor Trump does in the coming years the Democrats might just sell out as hard as they can thinking their 2028 election is guaranteed.
If most voters were tuned in to politics to the point they cared about the outcome of a party committee ranking member vote, we wouldn’t be in the 2nd Trump administration, and MAGA probably wouldn’t exist.
The Oversight leadership vote is the product of the bad 2024 messaging and bad outreach.
That’s why I mentioned upcoming elections: they will show us what the Democrats learned about messaging to voters they need to win.
It does not matter how tuned in the average voter is. What matters is that the Democrats already demonstrated they will not change. They would rather have some old fossil in charge than AOC who might try to change anything.
There is no need to wait until 2028 it is obvious the Democrats will run an even worse campaign. Try to get even more corporate donors and appeal to more right wing voters.
