Democrats need to understand: Americans think they're worse

Mostly because they didn't live up to their values in the past at all. Underperforming despite plenty of opportunity and lacking integrity is just too much. Blaming it on an opposition is weak and translates into lack of power, lack of strategy, and lack of volition.

Republicans had it way too easy, actually. It's the same with The Right in Germany. They are being auto-promoted by actors like von der Leyen, who blind specific population segments like moms and women who are trying to make it while negatively impacting any orbit they are assigned to and shoving tons of money to consultancies and the likes.

Exit polls aren't perfect, but some of the exit polls showed that people liked Kamala Harris a smidge better, but thought that Trump would be significantly better on the economy. This "Republicans are better on the economy" is a tale as old as time, and seemed to break through despite Musk saying things like their plan is to crash the economy.

If Trump had won in 2020 and the economy was in the state it is now, I think it's very likely the democrat would have won. So much of our politics is circumstance, and if "Americans thought Democrats were worse" why did Biden get 7 million more votes than Trump in 2020. The #MeToo movement, BLM and most peak woke stuff happened during Trump's presidency and yet the country still chose the Democrats. Like most analysis of data, most of the takes over the next few weeks and months will be wrong.

I think in a sense a lot of what's happening is more of a spiritual argument than a political one. Who do people perceive will be more "normal" and "stable". Given the voices at the top of the Republican party, the next four years is bound for some overreactions, and Democrats will be perceived as the normal ones again.

This is not to say I don't think the Democrats have soul searching to do. I do think there are some gender alignments happening in Gen-Z an Gen-Alpha that need to be looked at, and the culture is constantly changing. The election of 2028 will be so much different than the election of 2024. But I think catastrophizing like this is also more click bait than anything tangible about "who is worse"

And then what? What are they supposed to do with that realization?

Was Kamala Harris supposed to say, "I too hate everything Joe Biden did for the economy, and I'm going to do the opposite of that"? That doesn't sound like a winning strategy.

Or perhaps "Here's a bunch of programs that I'd like to introduce, including even more student loan forgiveness, especially if you give me a Congress who can work with me?" She did do that. Nobody believes it.

Trump promised a few incoherent ideas, and I doubt anybody really gave a moment's thought to whether it's really a good idea to jack up tariffs. All he really needed to be was "not the same as the last guy", despite not having done so great as the previous guy.

The fact was that Joe Biden got saddled with an economy that people didn't like. There was little he could do about that, and nothing Harris said would change it.

Meanwhile, the next guy will inherit the fundamentally sound economy we've got going. Maybe he'll manage to actively screw it up, though it's really going to mostly succeed or fail based on external events. (Like Ukraine, the loss of Russian fossil fuels, a pandemic, etc. affected the economy for the past four years. Or maybe there'll be an AI boom comparable to the one Clinton got undeserved credit for in the 90s.)

So great, you all think you're worse off. There is absolutely no amount of "messaging" that's going to change that, and no set of programs you're suddenly going to believe will fix your problems if they haven't already.

And we get what we get. I've got every reason to think it's going to be terrible, and in four years they'll be looking for The Other Other Guy to save them from the bad decisions they made four years ago.

In a democracy the government can‘t be smarter than the average person. If it is, it will be kicked out, because nobody likes to be teached.

For 40 years there has been a demonization of liberalism. Liberals are seen as the enemy. Liberals seek to destroy America and other such sentiments are common by consumers of right wing media. There are similar sentiments by liberals of conservatives.

If the true enemy is the opposing ideology then the vileness of the candidate of your ideology is overlooked by many people. It’s not a good state of affairs for so many people to view an entire ideology as evil and the enemy.

Donald Trump is a piece of shit. So is Bill Clinton. AOC is a good person. So is Mitt Romney.

Well, it's because working Americans are worse off, anybody who didn't recognize this a long time ago is surely not the least bit up-to-date by now.

And the reason for financial distress is primarily a result of having no choice to elect anything but Democrats & Republicans, where both parties have proven to be financially reckless enough to compromise the wealth of a Nation. In a compounding way. That you may have to do the math to understand.

Now this is The Economist and they're trying as hard as they can to criticize Trump, including reminders of his well-recognized low-class behavior. Although it's well-deserved criticism, I wasn't going to pile it on, but there's still deceptive influence here that just adds to the ridiculously exaggerated hype when it comes to Trump's competency:

>With his sophisticated grasp of new and legacy media and his instinct for the basic needs and fears of many Americans,

Give me a break. Trump's closest professional associates have confirmed beyond doubt that he doesn't have a sophisticated grasp of very many things at all. Especially things like this that some people give him undue credit for. All he really did is appeal to an idolizing fanbase that grows by absorbing those who were less sophisticated than traditional Republicans used to be in general, and stoking them with additional fears that he can be praised over his exaggerated hatred for. That surely is very many Americans but it's strictly on the basis of the degree of idolization he can "feel" firsthand, nothing more sophisticated than that.

>Biden ... was ... no longer up to the demands of presidential communication that Mr Trump understands so well.

From what people see in the media, Biden may be bumbling, but there is a very wide consensus that most of what Trump displays is completely non-Presidential. Every President before him set a bar which he has never been able to come close to reaching.

>“Can you believe he endorsed me?” Mr Trump chortled at a rally in North Carolina on November 3rd, gloating over how Mr McConnell eventually fell into line. Mr Trump felt no obligation to reciprocate. “Hopefully we get rid of Mitch McConnell pretty soon,” he said.

I would say the odds are not zero that one day Trump may be saying this about Elon Musk :\