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Comment by jredwards | Hacker News Reader

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>The real problem is the electorate.

How does this argument even make sense to someone with half a brain?

Agree. Take the 50-ish million people who cast their vote to Harris/Walz and are eligible (over 35, natural-born, resident for more than 14 years) to be president.

Either one of two things is true:

1. That was the most likely to win ticket possible and the DNC had zero-point-zero chance to win the election.

2. Among those 50 million people is another ticket and/or different platform & messaging that would have resulted in a win for the DNC.

If #1 is true, the problem isn't with the electorate (other than they disagree with the DNC). If #2 is true, the problem also isn't with the electorate.

Exactly, it’s essentially saying “the problem with democracy is the people”.

The problem with democracy is that it's so easy for a demagogue to come to power by pitting the people against each other. The problem with OUR democracy is that this issue is supercharged by our inability to control the outsized influenced wielded by powerful/wealthy parties, foreign and domestic.

If the corpse was male.

This is the reality:

Dnc pushed Hilary Clinton, a woman, and lost badly.

Dnc pushed a walking male corpse, Biden, and won easily.

Dnc pushed a black woman, and lost badly.

Imagine how dumb the average person is. Half of them are even dumber than that. Less than half voted for Donald Trump!

-George Carlin

> The real problem is the electorate

This is similar to a company blaming customers for not buying from them and preferring their competitors' products. The game doesn't work that way.

It's not a game. If my competitor is putting heroin in their product, is it not fair to point out that the consumers are making poor choices? What would you have me do, add meth to my product?

Yes, if the competitors product was a mass immolation machine known for both working as intended and causing wildfires.

That pesky electorate. Clinging to their religion and guns. A basket of deplorables. Garbage.

I, for one, will be celebrating with my fellow gun-clinging deplorable garbage people.

This is an interesting statement. To follow it, if the problem is the electorate, how do you think you fix that if the electorate is the one who gets to choose.

Do you think it would be better if we used some other system than democracy, so that the electorate don't get a say?

> how do you think you fix that if the electorate is the one who gets to choose

Education. Democracy relies on a well-educated populace

I think the country could use some better guard rails on how campaigns are run and some improvements to how the voting process works. The problem is that the American electorate is experience a constant barrage of targeted misinformation and has long since given up on trying to determine what's real.

Democracy is when you vote for the appointed candidate. Fascism is when the electorate decides the election.

> a bloated corpse should have beaten Donald Trump.

That’s the attitude that got us a second Trump term. DNC did not take this threat seriously, and here we are.

They took it seriously enough to change candidates. But again: why is a "just okay" candidate from the Democratic Party not better than a "threat to the free world" candidate from the Republican Party? The double-standard is absurd.

I thought Hillary failing was a clear indictment that America is not ready for a woman to be president. I hate that it’s true, but too much of the American heartland is conservative and plenty of them vote against their own interest (see: abortion contention). To then go ahead with a woman of color, and then have celebrity endorsements that don’t do anything to increase voter turnout shows how out of touch with reality the DNC really is. What a shame, and it doesn’t help that Kamala never had mass appeal. Pete Buttegieg would have been a far better bet, personally speaking.

You think America's not ready for a woman, but it's ready for a gay man?

My understanding from talking to people in states like Indiana and Texas, a good chunk of them don't believe in a woman's ability to lead. If the DNC really wanted to progressive then a gay man is a safer bet than a woman of color just because of how many people in this country are racist / sexist. The safest bet would have been a straight white man that's charismatic and likeable but there's nobody. Gavin Newsom wouldn't have stood a chance either. The party is in dire straits when it comes to representing America.

There was a talking head comment last night.

"The Harris campaign told us today that they are 'nauseatingly confident'. I don't know that I've ever heard nausea as a positive thing."

The DNC are too much in their own bubble.

Yeah, it's bizarre to watch the DNC on the one hand claim that Donald Trump is a once-in-a-lifetime threat to democracy and freedom and on the other hand fail to offer anything to "undecided" voters that might get them to vote Democrat.

My takeaway is that I don't think they actually believe Donald Trump is uniquely bad - it's just messaging.

The only thing worse would be twice-in-a-lifetime ;)

> Kamala was a perfectly good candidate.

You were literally just proven empirically incorrect. Demand better from your party or this will just keep happening, stop compromising.

I'm an independent, but who's going to demand better from the Republican party? Why are Democrats being held to such an incredibly high standard when the standard for the Republican party could not be more obscene?

The DNC doesn't truly provide the means for their party members to actually participate in selecting candidates to the same degree the Republicans do, and therefore they place some kind of party ideal over the democratic participation of their party members. Superdelegates, not holding a caucus primary this time, conspiring against Bernie, all that stuff. It produces manufactured candidates that don't have a real relationship to party members, not an extension of the zeitgeist. They shove square pegs into round holes and wonder why it doesn't fit.

Honestly, anyone who thinks Kamala is perfect at anything other than working the party machine for self-promotion is probably a little too invested to see things clearly.

IMHO "just another politician" would have been a hugely better outcome than Trump.

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