Harris only received five percent of Republican votes — less than the six percent Joe Biden won in 2020 when he beat Trump, as well as the seven percent won by Hillary Clinton in 2016 when she lost to him. While Harris won independents and moderates, she did so by smaller margins than Biden did in 2020.
Meanwhile, Harris lost households earning under $100,000, while Democratic turnout collapsed. Votes are still being counted, but Harris is on pace to underperform Biden’s 2020 totals by millions of votes.
To be honest Harris wasted time and effort sucking up to the infinitesimally small number of non-MAGA GOPers. Time that would have been better spent emphasizing her pro worker policies.
Yea courting Republicans was a bad move IMHO. But she’s a establishment dem. So go figure.
According to conservatives on reddit, she is “far left, even more extreme than Bernie” and that’s why she lost.
How so… she is a far right democrat. Pro big oil and corporations and heavy handed on many issues from her time as DA.
If anything she is to far right for most dems.
I think the real problem is that we live amongst a sea of imbeciles.
Dang, how did that work out? Oh? Alot like 2016 you say?
Bipartisanship is dead.
No one wants to work with people that they view as inherently evil, corrupt, and a threat to democracy.
The way political cooperation, negotiation and compromise are viewed as acts of unforgivable weakness in the US sets up a climate where functional democracy appears impossible. The US seems destined to lurch from one impulse to another with half the country thinking each is a colossal mistake and an affront to their way of life.
No, I do not mean this as any kind of “both sides” argument. The fact there are only sides to determining how a society governs itself, the winners and the losers, is the point.
We have a two party system which is inherently hyper polarizing as it paints everything as being black and white. It is an unbelievably stupid and undemocratic system, and unfortunately, nothing will ever improve until we replace our broken two party system with a modern multiparty democracy
and unfortunately, nothing will ever improve until we replace our broken two party system with a modern multiparty democracy
… and you’ll still have plenty of opportunities to fuck that up
The best way to do that is with some sort of ranked preference voting system. The sooner first past the post is replaced with a ranked choice system, the better.
Honestly when was the last time we even had it. Clinton’s first term?
Well at least when it wasn’t just dems caving to republicans
This is similar to how someone will slowly abandon their old friends to be relevant with the “cool” kids who will never see you as part of their group no matter what, and your old friends end up making new friends leaving you alone. If this doesn’t work in real life, I don’t get how this could work in politics.
The Democratic party has to stop treating us like the old friend they visit every so often just to get something out of us while forming closer relationships with others who have no business being their friend.
The new friends in this instance are very rich and they entice the Democrats to leave their old friends with lots of money. But the old friends is where they get their power. The Democrat party loves money.
This is so true and I’m saying this a white guy who has only felt the economic impact of their failures. I was a radical leftist when I was 15, now I’m 40. The only thing democrats have ever offered is damage control, they can’t blame the voters for being apathetic.
Are you telling me enthusiastically embracing the support of the Cheney’s lowered democratic turnout!?! Whoda thunk?!?! Hopefully that’s the end of the neoliberals
Yes. When you abandon the left, they don’t vote for you. This is what Clinton did too
The funny thing is that Harris had a lot of progressive policies. She didn’t tout them for some reason. Which I suspect was to get GOPers on board. Have a look here and wonder why she didn’t talk more about them: https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/kamala-harris-2024-campaign-promises-here-are-her/
Because most of them were worth less than the bits than they were stored on. She never would have gotten them through congress. She just put them there. 🤷 You’ll note the things she could have done unilaterally like end shipments to israel and commit to keeping kahn she flat out refused to do/support.
They have clearly internalized the pervasive trope that leftists will vote for them, because they have no other choice, so the only thing that matters to convince is the right. Looks like they calculated wrong.
Obama got people excited about healthcare reform. Biden got people excited about student debt relief. Clinton tried to get people excited about a female president and Harris centered her campaign around running against Trump.
Social programs get people excited.
Student debt was not a campaign platform he ran on, it was something he did during his presidency.
He did run on Green New Deal and the original proposal that later became the $2 trillion Infrastructure investment/bill/plan.
But to your point, yes he ran on platforms that people got excited. Both of those platforms were new economic opportunities for people in a time when people when much of the labor class was jobless from COVID.
Biden got people excited about student debt relief.
This is not why Biden got elected. Trump so badly mishandled Covid that everyone left of center demanded change.
everyone left of center demanded change.
I think you mean “everyone left of FASCISM” because liberals are center-right at best. Center left is Social Democracy (Bernie Sanders and AOC)
The failure to realize Covid is the only reason Biden won cost the Democrats. In the swing states 2024 Trump beats 2020 Biden by vote count.
agreed. Biden won because people voted against Trump. Every other time Biden ran, and there were many, he couldnt even win his home state. He was and is a joke of a politician, and his legacy is a Trump win becaus he was so unpopular.
“Never underestimate Joe Bidens ability to fuck everything up” –Barrack Obama.
I don’t think you can point to one specific thing that got Biden elected. Covid mismanagement was a huge part of it, but student debt relief and other progressive proposals that Bernie pushed the campaign into played a big part as well. Even with Covid, I think there’s a good chance that Biden would have lost if he’d run the same kind of centrist campaign that Harris and Clinton ran.
My take on this is that the DNC has never understood that to win the presidency in the last 20 years you need to be a fire brand.
I think this stared in 2008 with Obama who won I believe because he fired up the base with great speeches about hope and change. It didn’t really happen, BUT the man knew how to give a speech. That got people inspired to do something and they voted.
Bernie was another fire brand - told it like it was and it appealed to a large population.
trump won using the same idea, but just the opposite of hope and change yet it worked. It tapped into a visceral and deep frustration that this country has left them behind.
The modern view of the American president to the population is less of a wonky politician and more of a cheerleader for big ideas, even if those ideas are abhorrent and exceedingly horrifying.
Harris just wasn’t the person to pull this off, she was too wonky and it felt like the entire campaign was playing the old card of “we are not trump” Instead if they really wanted to win they would have found ( 2 years ago) a feisty out spoken progressive leaning firebrand that would have inspired people to vote for something better.
The only reason that (bland) Biden won was because of how badly trump fucked up the Covid response.
I think when she was announced as the candidate, she fired up the base just fine. She was different.
Then she spent the rest of the campaign reassuring people that nothing would change, pissing away that enthusiasm.
One of the frustrations I had was her solution to the housing problem was to just build more houses and give out some money. Sure great, but what I wanted to hear, and I think many other also wanted to hear, was her talking about corporate hording of housing and what she would do about that situation. But she just ignored it completely and so did Biden.
I think instead if she came out swinging against corporate greed, even if she actually did nothing about it, would have given her more votes.
My one hope out of this is that the massive swing to the right will be countered with more vocal progressives.
There are plenty of houses. Repossess then from Blackrock and sell them at normal rates
She didn’t even really have a plan to build more houses, just some subsidies that wouldn’t put a dent in the problem. She should have proposed something ambitious that people could get excited about. The crazy thing is Biden had some big ambitious policies that he actudlly enacted like the Inflation Reduction Act that dwarf anything Kamala campaigned on. It’s the opposite of a winning approach that sells the stars and delivers the moon.
Building houses and giving out money WOULD have helped the housing problem. WTF?
I didn’t say it wouldn’t have helped. That wasn’t the point of the comment.
What I was getting at was that if she wanted to motivate voters, especially more progressive voters, then she needed to go bigger than “build some houses and hand out some money.”
What they wanted to hear from their candidate was a bolder and stronger solution like outlawing corporations from owning thousands of homes. Take a firm stand on corporate greed and corporate inflation. But she never talked about that.
Exactly. “I’m not trump” barely got Biden in when trump was the incumbent with covid running rampant. It didn’t work for Clinton in 2016 and unsurprisingly it didn’t work for Harris in 2024. The level of incompetence at the DNC really makes me think the actual goal is to prevent our politics/country from shifting to the left at any cost.
Which is really weird because her professed policies WOULD have changed things. https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/kamala-harris-2024-campaign-promises-here-are-her/
I don’t get why it’s hard to comprehend. By becoming (even) more conservative, more “R”, they betrayed (even more of) their base. Why would timid Republicans want to vote for traitors pandering to them?
Shit I was saying when Biden was still running and I got crucified for it.
As you shift to the right you leave your base behind, ignoring a growing, left swinging faction within the party is going to lead to outcomes like this. Working class people all have the same problems, and one party says they’ll do something about it. They’re lying, people who are generally smarter and paying attention know they’re lying, but that’s not most people.
The other party has had a chance, and failed to do anything to alleviate the concerns of the working class. Regardless of the circumstances, or their actual ability to affect change. And they spent the entire election cycle trying to curry votes from a dedicated base instead of getting voters excited about something.
Swing left, swing hard. Become the unhinged leftist the other side is already accusing you of being.
I was called a Russian asset in 2020 for saying this and even more in 2024.
It sucks so much to be so right about something so horrible.
There’s people saying anyone saying dems need to move left are just spreading Russian propaganda
Yep, surely if we get elections in 2028 (unlikely) we need to run a KKK member as a Democrat! You have to vote for him, Trump’s 3rd term will unleash a nuke on Africa.
Please ignore they both want to nuke Africa.
Its a two party system, why would anyone think being a bit more like the other guy be a good idea?
Why would someone pick knockoff awful when the name brand is right there?
Democrats would prefer to lose than become more progressive because the rich and powerful still benefit from Republicans winning or Democrats winning as long as Democrats are still centre-right wing.
As soon as Democrats move left the elites start to lose so Democrats don’t.
Not only that, if she’s not targeting Democrats they won’t feel motivated to vote for her. Yes, yes, fascism was the other option. But people are not smart, and I say that as a people.
And we won’t have another election again, so these democratic voters who stayed home have denied themselves any other opportunities to right this ship.
It was the stupidest of ideas. Republicans were never going to vote for her in any numbers. She was all about gun control, she personally owned the 12 million border crossings, she had all those defund the police sound bites from her earlier years, and she couldn’t effectively separate herself from the difficult economy for middle and low earners - while failing to communicate that she even cared about the common man’s plight or would try to help it. Even her proposed tax plan raised taxes on lower middle class, at least the charts I saw (including here on Lemmy). And Republicans have seen four years of Trump and think all the Nazi and “all Republicans are racist” talk is literally the stupidest thing on the earth. Abortion was all Dems really had, and although lots of Republicans are pro-choice, Trump had promised to veto a national abortion ban (for whatever that’s worth).
I remember when Democrats were for the working people. They need to stop being "We’re not the Nazis"and start telling us who they are. But I don’t think they want to tell us who they are. They’re no longer the party of the working man, they’re the party of corporate interest and global governance, and they’re also almost as authoritarian as the right. Maybe the collapse of the Democrat party will result in the birth of an actual socialist party in the US. We’ve seen major party changes in the past. Will it happen again, soon?
It was the stupidest of ideas. Republicans were never going to vote for her in any numbers
It is what the donor (capital) class wanted. Liberals are capitalists which means they serve the capital class first and foremost.
“I remember when Democrats were for the working people?”
What was the Great Depression like?
Lmao, for real though, FDR was the last President that prioritized the working class over the capital class. And in turn capitalists tried to overthrow the government or have him killed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
FDR was the last President that prioritized the working class over the capital class
And he only did all that to head off a socialist revolution.
she tried to win over moderates, not republicans.
I’d say it worked judging by the 70 million votes or so she got.
The real problem seems to be dem voter turnout instead, for whatever collection of reasons that is. I would argue it’s mostly voters being stupid, but that’s just me lol.
I’d say it worked
The election results say otherwise.
losing sure, but biden had historically high voter turnout, probably as a result of the mail in voting over covid.
This turn out is pretty high as well we’re looking at about 71 million votes right now. For an “unpopular candidate” this is pretty clearly, good turnout.
Today we learned, there are no moderates
there are moderates, politically, the problem is that the political environment is so heavily galvanized they don’t really show up clearly.
Most conservative moderates are either going to vote trump (in which case they aren’t that much of a moderate) or they’re not, and they’re going to vote for dems, (which is more moderate)
The problem at hand is that moderates just don’t get any political attention, even though they’re like 30-40% of the voter base, if not more.
Kamalas campaign thought they could win without offending any megadonors, despite seeing what a bit of honesty did for them right after biden was replaced.
Ive never seen such obvious virtue signaling, I’m not sure kamala even believed her own words.
I can wait for the book about how Kamala and Walz felt about the Democrat machine and the turn they did to Republicans weeks after the strong start they had.
Here’s a fun little tip if you’re ever able to try this again.
MLK Jr. never appealed to the white man, he never tried to win over whitey nor tone down his message so that he didn’t alienate his opressors, and he never tried to get the Klan on his side.
Notice how we don’t have segregation anymore? It’s because if Dr. King did these things, he’d have been luaghed at.
And instead he was shot at, not for the race stuff, but when he started talking about the class divide in general.
The same with RFK. Both he and MLK were murdered ONLY after they started to militate against economic injustice.
It was both. The fbi really hated the race stuff.
The militancy of Malcolm X’s message played a big part in that. Powerful whites were scared of Malcolm so they decided to work with MLK
I highly suspect this is because there was no Democratic Primary. I’ve heard the old tired excuse “they typically run the incumbent as the democratic candidate”. But this is simply asinine, it’s crazy. They waited until less than 6 months from election day to randomly put Harris in the running. This is one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen happen. There was no chance for Democrats to vote at all!
Les than 6mo? I don’t even want the election cycle THAT long.
For some stupid reason the presidential election cycle is about 18 months, so 6 months is fast even if it should be plenty.
