The democrats haven’t held a legitimate primary since 2008!
In 2008 it was a genuine competition between Obama, Hillary, and a handful of other lesser known politicians. Obama won the general in a landslide.
In 2012 Obama ran unopposed. Obama won the general.
In 2016 the democrats rigged the primary against sanders for Hillary, and to absolutely no one’s surprise who was paying attention, Hillary lost the general. Why? she didn’t genuinely win the primary. Shocking!
In 2020, refusing to learn mistakes from 2016, the democrats once again screwed over bernie and didn’t run a legitimate primary - rigged it so that all the candidates except no-path-to-win Warren exited the race to split the progressive vote away from bernie. Joe biden won by the skin of his teeth, and he would of lost if it weren’t for the country reacting to trumps handling of covid.
In 2024, once again refusing to learn the democrats didn’t even bother with a primary, ran an old demented geezer as a presidential candidate, realized that wasn’t going to work, and then anointed unelected Kamala Harris who didn’t even need to compete in a primary.
And they’re shocked they lost?! These people make way too much money to be this stupid.
I can’t stop thinking about how in 2016, my conservative grandmother watched the primary debates and told me she actually thought Bernie made a lot of good points.
And then she went on to vote for Donald Trump in November.
This, I think, is the disconnect the DNC keeps failing to recognize.
We just keep nominating milquetoast centrists whose message is little more than “maintain the status quo”, when nobody is happy with the status quo.
But we have to run centrist candidates, they say, or else we’ll lose all the voters in the center!
If that’s how it works, then why is the GOP winning by doing the exact opposite?
In a world where rent keeps going up but wages stay the same, people are scared and frustrated, and they don’t feel like their frustrations are heard.
Along comes a smooth-talking con man who tells them, “I know you’re angry at the world, and I’m going to give you a scapegoat to blame it on. It’s the immigrants’ fault. It’s trans people’s fault. It’s the woke left’s fault. It’s whatever target I tell you to hate next’s fault. And if you elect me, I will stick it to these people in order to Make America Great Again!”
Meanwhile, the best we can do is “Vote for me because everything that other guy said is horrifying.” That’s it. That’s the only real sales pitch we have for Harris. But no matter how terrible the other guy is, it reflects horribly on us that we can’t even talk about our own candidate’s merits at all.
We need to run a candidate who can say, “I too know you’re angry at the world. And I’m here to offer real solutions, not snake oil, and more importantly, not the status quo either.”
The difference between the right and left here is that the right actually likes their guy. And if not even we like our candidates, why should voters?
Alas, we learned nothing in 2016 and I suspect the DNC will continue to learn nothing now.
Every Republican family member except one that I’ve asked about Bernie has said more or less the following:
I like him, I like that he’s not Dem/Repub, he’s got the country’s best interest at heart, etc.
Then it’s usually followed by how he’d never get a chance, and then it revolves back to why Dems suck and repubs rule, or at best, “they’re both the same.”
You are 100% right: people want change, they want progress, and regardless of how shitty he is, Trump got things done that his base wanted.
Clinton, then Biden, and now Harris, promise marginal improvements to the status quo while dismissing large swaths of their electorate that don’t fall in line.
If they ran progressive candidates with progressive policies, they’d pull voters from all over. But they wont, hence, fascism.
I mostly agree. I do think that a lot of folks on the left liked our candidate, though, and that a lot in the right disliked Trump but sucked it up and voted for him because they thought they “had” to. Harris’ likeability rating is way higher than Trump’s in the polls.
I don’t think any of this would have been an issue if Bernie was the Dem candidate in 2016.
I think the problem is that plenty of people might like Harris, but not so much that turnout for her matched Biden. The people who like Trump love him, and they turned out in the same numbers as 2020 basically. He didn’t need to meaningfully grow his base if people weren’t motivated to show up for his opponent.
It’s definitely a demonstration that having the most palatable candidate doesn’t matter. It might if voting were compulsory, but it isn’t.
Dems are the greatest ally the GOP could ask for. Lost to Trump at his weakest, literally doing a Nazi rally. Being spineless doesn’t get you wins. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar won re-election by comfortable margins and the rest of the party are fighting for their lives in these states. Some Red States still voted to protect abortion rights and just choose not to vote for Harris.
Even if Jill Stein voters had picked Harris she still would have lost. There is no-one to blame but Harris and embracing people like Dick Cheney anrd The Blue No Matter who crowd themselves. You let Republicans unapologetically be themselves but your’re whole brand of politics makes any group who works with you expendable and centers a chance for that 1-2 GOP voters joining. I hope it was worth it.
It’s past time everyone realized the people running the DNC just don’t really care if a republican wins.
The only danger to their careers or quality of life is if a progressive wave takes over the party, because they won’t keep pro-corporate people in leadership positions.
And they legally control the primary, so they never have to give up power.
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People keep using the office of president as a battleground for single issues,
Yeah, like when Obama ran on healthcare and flipped all those red states…
What “single issue” has any of the subsequent Dem candidates ran on besides “my name isn’t trump”?
We can’t just keep running these “moderate” candidates and keep acting surprised when Dem voters reject them. Biden barely pulled it off, and both Hillary and Kamala failed miserably.
Neoliberalism is not a valid strategy
Now, it’s possible you meant single issue voters, but I just didn’t think anyone would make that claim and try to blame 5-10 different groups with separate “single issues”.
But who knows, a neoloberal just lost the presidential election, were about to see crazy level of mental gymnastics about how the party needs to move even further right.
The electorate swung solidly right, giving Trump the popular vote. Much as I’d like a more left-wing administration in the US, the evidence does not support the theory that a left leaning campaign would have helped. The US apparently wants an authoritarian government, and it got it.
This is not just the US either - globally we are shifting rapidly to authoritarian regimes. In my own UK where the center left (at best) Labour won the election, but only because the right wing parties were split by FPTP. The Tories elected a far right leader last week and got derided for it, but for them, it’s absolutely the right move, and the next election will likely deliver a far right Tory or Tory/Reform coalition. For reference, Labour got less votes than the previous election that they lost in a land slide.
Same where I currently live, Germany, and my fiancé’s France.
Dark times are ahead. Prepare for the worst.
I don’t know if sentiment swung or if Dems just didn’t show up.
Biden had over 80 million votes in '20. Trump had like 74. Trump got less total votes this year than in '20. Only problem was like 15 million Dems didn’t show up.
If there is one thing you can count on from a Democrat “voter”, it’s for them to not actually vote.
That’s bullshit. Obama won in 2008 with record turnout. Take the loss and learn from it instead of blaming voters for refusing to vote for a candidate who didn’t earn it.
My view: yes, the Dems could have some better, but they still put up a legitimately good candidate. The GOP put up a pile of orange dog shit… And the dog shit won. How is it the Dems fault that more than half the population enjoys dog shit?
For the Dems to win, they need to run a fucking perfect campaign and the GOP doesn’t. Why? Because media fragmentation and propaganda. The bulk of the population doesn’t want to be informed. How is that the Dems fault? How did the Democratic party reach those voters that don’t give a shit about truth?
This isn’t a failure of the Democratic party, this is a failure of our society.
I think Harris and Walz were good candidates but their pitch was simply unappealing. The average american has been hurting bad the last 4 years. Harris’ pitch was to maintain the degrading status-quo while trump promised to do SOMETHING. Whether or not that something is successful doesn’t matter, people are sick of slowly getting crushed by costs of living.
And so they chose to vote for the candidate who will only make COL worse. Pathetic.
Once again smug liberals blaming voters for voting wrong instead of blaming their party for running shitty untested candidates.
Can’t both be true?
And for the record, I’m not smug, I’m furious.
No, at the end of the day it’s the political parties responsibility to run electable candidates. Not even having a primary makes it so they ran someone untested. And lost.
Harris is objectively better than Trump by any measure. If the voters were educated on their respective platforms instead of voting out of hate they’d have voted Harris.
You’re delusional. The voters didn’t buy it and at the end of the day you need to accept defeat and run better candidates and the only way to do that is with fair competitive primaries, something the DNC has neglected since 2008!
The left needs to stop making the perfect be the enemy of the good, or we will never get anywhere.
You can try to change tens of millions of potential voters minds so they vote for worse candidates than they want…
Or we can convince the double digit number of wealthy and connected people running the dnc that what they keep shoving down our throats isn’t what voters want.
Which do you think is easier?
And as a bonus:
Which one results in a better America?
Is what we’re doing right now getting anywhere?
Good fucking luck with that. Too many people view their spotless moral record as being more important than outcomes or improving lives (/not actively making things worse).
Misanthropy is the only real outcome to this sort of behavior.
“Spotless moral record”
BRO WE ARE FUNDING A FUCKING GENOCIDE WHILE WE HAVE RECORD HOMELESSNESS, DEATHS OF DESPAIR, WORSENING CLIMATE CHANGE, LACK OF HEALTHCARE, ILLITERACY, WOMEN DYING IN CHILDBIRTH AT RATES NOT SEEN IN THE FIRST WORLD.
But go off smug
liberalfascist.And instead of doing something even remotely helpful, they let the genocide harder guy win.
But go off, accelerationist, go ahead and tell me how this makes things better. And keep using the word fascist, maybe someday you’ll learn the meaning.
Everyone that screams accelerationist seems to be ok with the incrementalism that turned Democrats into full fledged right wing fascists.
Exactly! They’re courting dick fucking Cheney rather than listen at all to their base, and have the fucking nerve to chastise us for voting wrong?! fuck these shit ass liberals!
They had some insane idea that they were pushing their politicians left, when in reality they were getting pulled to the right.
The billionaires, who already owned the whole thing, did not want it. We got what we got. This downfall started long before 2008.
You act like they’d have “lost” if Kamala won…
They win either way, just different amounts.
Meanwhile the average American always loses, just different amounts.
It doesn’t have to be like this, we don’t need to run shitty conservative Dems that billionaires like, because then we won’t need to spend a billion on ads that don’t even change anyone’s minds.
We ran a Dem candidate that wants a border wall, doesn’t want universal healthcare, and is pro-genocide…
Because that’s what the billionaires wanted. And because we listed to donors over voters, we lost an election
C’mon. Like any politician, she had to try and be electable if she were to accomplish anything. How can it be that this is not obvious?
she had to try and be electable if she were to accomplish anything. How can it be that this is not obvious?
And my point is that “electable” for a Dem candidate isn’t what she was doing.
That would be matching her platform to what Dem voters wanted. Instead she based policy on “all voters” which includes the 40-50% who will never vote D under any circumstance. And in that process she lost votes from voters who will never vote R under any circumstances.
If she was trying to be electable, it just shows how important it is we clear house at the DNC and run a fair primary in 2028.
Because the same people have been running the show since 2016, and they’re 2-1 against fucking trump.
They clearly aren’t up to the task
Another pretty fucking important thing to point out is that total voter turnout dropped by like 18 fucking million. The centrist bullshit just made a lot of people further to the left feel like it wasn’t even worth it to show up.
Got a serious question re genocide angle, how is trump well known for being anti-genocide?
He’s obviously not…
But if the entire existence of American politics hasn’t been enough to show you that “lesser of two evils” is a losing strategy, I’m not sure how I’m gonna manage it.
Taking the Dem party to the right doesn’t work, we just keep doing it because the DNC only cares about donations raised. They cater the party to billionaires and not voters.
