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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

And why did they lose?

They ignored economic problems for a majority of the population similar to the republicans for 20 years and focused on projects(wars) and culture war topics that are big mostly for the wealthy elite offspring of the ever shrinking middle class. They are by definition unable to act, all they want, left,right,center, is to conserve longer,slow down the decay.

Propaganda, mostly. Conservatives have gained control of most Media outlets, and have been using them to launder consent. It's incredible that we've given Democrats absolutely no power, they can do literally nothing, and yet they're still somehow to blame for what Republicans are doing.

Which ones?

Democrats received more money than Republicans from big tech and media for a very long time, including the most recent presidential election. Are big media stupid for donating more to their enemies than who they purportedly support?

Your other option is admitting that Democrats had previously owned the media and doing precisely the thing you're accusing Conservatives of doing. You definitely cannot claim they did not seeing the checks written out to DNC and other PACs alongside the board seats from previous administrations.

I doubt it was propaganda. If you look at the polls, the most important issues have been the economy, the immigration and the violent crime. All 3 of which have been absolutely disastrous for the Biden/Harris administration.

And people voted accordingly, and correctly.

Biden's approval rating is 39%, disapproval at 58%.

https://www.cnn.com/polling/approval-rating-poll-of-polls

Polling on particular issues can be shifted by propaganda, so this isn’t a particularly strong argument against the idea.

Although, I’m not sure what propaganda really means in this context anyway, I mean, “the economy” is a pretty abstract thing so people engage with it mostly through reporting of various sorts. The decision of what aspects of the economy to focus on could be seen as propaganda.

The admin plays in a global economy which is ridiculously complex, so there’s always room for it to be doing as well as possible when my guy is in charge, underperform expectations when the bad guy is in charge.

When we speak about these 3 issues, there's no need for any propaganda.

Violent crime is out of control.

Illegal immigration is out of control.

Purchasing power of the population went down a lot, while average salaries haven't grown (or dropped significantly in some areas).

The fact you can't recognize how propaganda can distort the reality of the issues you are listing above, makes one question if you actually understand what propaganda is, or have any interest in understanding reality.

I won't ever claim it's a simple picture, but there's enough peer-reviewed information out on the web to elaborate on your 3 rather unspecific talking points. We can hold your hand if it's too scary to google each of your issues above, I do have empathy that changing ones belief system is scary, but the alternative is delusion.

>Violent crime is out of control.

Hilarious because it is in fact down: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...

You've been propagandized, my friend

Your own source says that violent victimizations is up YoY, and crime reporting is down YoY

that is a dishonest interpretation of the data, the overall _trend_ is "U.S. violent and property crime rates have plunged since 1990s, regardless of data source"

Why should crime ever go up, if other countries show that the floor of crime rate is even lower through policy and enforcement changes? It is always valid to blame the government for high crime relative to other nations with lower crime.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/democrats-have-a-new-leader-but...

Good read on that topic

I was thinking of a theory that from evolutionary instinct people want to be king of their castle, secure against the enemy tribes and having a happy family - prince meets his princess has kids etc. The Democrat woke principles go against that rather - the rival tribes will take your job because you're the wrong skin color or a bunch crossed over the open border, your prince and princess stuff is outdated because male and female is replaced by gender fluidity and trans etc.

I don't have a strong opinion personally but I don't think it's a vote winner. The dems probably should have gone with a popular mainstream candidate like Shapiro say rather the the pro woke, most left voting in the senate Kamala.

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