Clicked on this thread for insightful discussion/debate, I’m just reading people talk about how trump was not a good candidate, and how kamala campaigned incorrectly and so on so forth
As a Brit looking in from the outside, it’s hard for me to understand how choices have been made in this election, but if I were to attempt a charitable take, did Trump win because he tunes in to some sort of low level anger/resentment/frustration felt by a chunk of the population?
Whereas the Democrats, more polished perhaps as they are, have failed to make that connection sufficiently?
And that connection - or whatever it is that the population picks up on from Trump, outweighs the “obvious flaws” that his detractors may point towards?
Ie they don’t vote for him because of his hyperbole and “questionable” behaviour, they vote for him in spite of that - for other reasons.
I can see the Democrats didn’t help matters by pushing Biden to run when he clearly shouldn’t have, though perhaps it was the lesser of two evils at the time (from their point of view) given his proven record of being able to actually beat Trump.
Happy to be corrected if this is a bad or naive analysis!!
Maybe 10% of voters have opinions on policy, platforms, parties.
The remainder vote based on identity and some vibes. Their ability to link politicians with their actual policies is worse than a coin toss.
Democracy for Realists [2016] https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Realists-Elections-Responsi...
Us political hobbyists second guessing campaign strategies and decisions is mostly pointless.
Because final results more or less match the generic ballot. True, in close contests, there's some roshambo over individual states (cuz electoral college). Which is how Trump won 2016.
What happened with Harris v Trump? GOP party (self) identification is up (3% since 2020). Harris didn't pull Biden numbers. Pretty simple.
The real (campaign) questions, IMHO are:
Determine if Dem turnout (GOTV) in 2020 was the anomaly and 2024 is the actual norm.
Understand Latinos flipping from Dem to GOP.
Can a Democrat be the first (elected) female POTUS?
Now that Democrats are the minority party for the foreseeable future, what's the plan?