Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations, would create a huge and lasting political win across a broad section of the electorate.
She was running on an abstract, classical centrist non-program of "we've done great under Biden and we're going to keep doing the same". That is the exact opposite of what GP was suggesting.
>prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds.
Nothing about what you mentioned at all. Nor did I ever claim Kamala ran on what you said. The fact that you and the commenter have different ideas of what rational policies are and assume politicians should be running on that platform is part of the bias. You assume that most people want the same thing as you but most people don’t. The majority actually enjoy social issues.
> Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations
So I interpreted the first part in a more revolutionary direction, though you may be right that they were thinking a different direction than I was.
It's what Obama ran on, and it worked for him. The fact that he achieved very little there is a different issue.
Kamala's 2-month long campaign wasn't very convincing.
Harris would have had to kick the lunatic fringe to the curb but didn’t have the will to do so.
One of them is that there really is an infrastructure to communicate what the Republican party stands for that which is connected to the party on an everyday basis. The absence of the Democratic party that potential supporters are complaining about right now is structural. Baudrillard might say "The Democratic Party doesn't exist"
Secondly the left has to work a lot harder for the right because the left's slogan is "another world is possible" which is a constructive project (you have to prove it, you have to build it) and the right's slogan is "there is no alternative". It's not fair but it's the way it is.
The lunatic fringe of the left also has envy for the lunatic fringe of the right. If somebody says "there are only two genders" they don't really need to justify it or explain it any more than saying that my dad believed that and his mom believed that and... People who say the opposite today expect to be to be a fait accompli and manifestly true because they said it and who could dare disagree with them and punish anyone who says otherwise but that's just a position that would be easy for their enemies to defend but impossible for them -- but they circle their wagons and form some tiny world in which it is true. The attack on JK Rowling for instance shows that they've got Kiwi Farms envy, that they think the highest form of activism is the methods of their enemies. Thus it's not so clear that the lunatic left is really left at all, it's certainly not "inclusive".
What made them think that?
There's no winning everyone, that's for sure.
I have no idea how movement Democrats convince themselves to make up a platform for Harris, often from whole cloth, although usually from some vague, unenforceable statement or general platitude repeated at a few speeches. Instead they blame people for attaching policies to her; either conservatives attaching policies that she articulated clearly in past statements and campaigns, or Democrats attaching Biden's policies to her (which, nonetheless, were all perfect and he was the greatest president in a generation.)
People asked her point blank whether she still had policies that she articulated in the past. She refused to answer, and would just give some memorized speech (that someone else obviously wrote.) People asked her whether any of Biden's policies were wrong. She said none that she could recall, like a person carefully lying on the witness stand. She relied on media surrogates to make up policies that she could possibly have, and spent a lot of her campaign denying that things that her surrogates said could be her policies were her policies.
The only thing we knew for sure about Harris is that Israel, crypto, and big tech were in. We could get that from Trump.
Harris lost because she wasn't willing to alienate a single donor, and would never be.
Which, though definitely suboptimal, would have been a pretty reasonable alternative to her opponent’s plan to self-cannibalize the government, threaten the sovereignty of long-standing allies, and chaotically disrupt world trade.
Republicans haven't?
Also you're misreading my point, campaigning on these things isn't a panacea, but delivering on them just might be.
She had less charisma than Hilary. Probably even less than Al Gore or Zuckeberg before his new software update was installed. And she had a history of bending the knee to the progressives.
No one cared. One of the better things a president has done for the country in quite a while, and no one cared, and no one remembers.
If the Democrats have a fight between an abundance agenda and populist leftists who are really inclusive like Bernie Sanders I think that will be great.
[1] Clinton was always as far to the right as she could get away with, probably to compensate for being a woman, but paid the price for her mindless hawkish in 2008 when she lost the primaries to Barack Obama
Whites didn’t shift at all from 2016 to 2024. Latino moderates shifted 23 points to the right, and Asian moderates shifted 11 points to the right.
It’s hard to explain how inflation would cause a racially unbalanced shift like that. The 2016 election was a pretty neutral baseline—the economy was fine and had been for years. So if inflation was the cause, why didn’t white voters shift right compared to 2016? It doesn’t make sense that inflation would only cause hispanics and asians to shift right.
Likewise, if race was the reason, why didn’t white voters shift right, compared to 2016 when the candidate was a white woman? And why did black conservatives (a bloc about the same size as black liberals) shift 8 points to the right?
The bigger signal here is racial depolarization. Historically, moderate to conservative minorities tend to vote Democrat anyway, which leaves them as disproportionately the more conservative wing of the party. What you saw from 2016 to 2024 was significant racial depolarization—moderate to conservative blacks, hispanics, and asians voting more their ideology and less their race.
I feel like the "voting against their best interests" trope exists because people don't realize that conservative minorities vote as far right as the GOP will let them. Because they're conservative.
Hillary wasn't super popular, but what really killed her was being forced on us from the political Democratic establishment.
Biden only won because Trump is such a turd for many.
It's been since Obama that the Democrats actually had a candidate that people liked. I do not understand this strategy.
Republicans winning is a better outcome for them than progressives unseating them in the party.
My perception was that she ran on "more of the same but also different... nevermind, look at all these celebrities telling you to vote for me!" and something vague about protecting women's rights.
It's almost like you need more than a couple months to run a serious presidential campaign. Despite being the VP for 4 years, most people didn't know what to expect from her. Almost nobody was enthusiastic about her and she had no real momentum. That's obviously what killed her campaign.
There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign.
Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit.
I know her actual platform was more detailed than that, but it doesn't matter what I know. The point is it was not communicated effectively. Go out on the streets and ask the common folk what her platform was. Aside from "I don't know", the answers you'll get will be all over the place - mostly just generic DNC talking points. The average liberal/moderate/independent voter was not excited about Harris.
Do you honestly think most voters are researching candidates? Honestly? Of course they aren't. They expect it to be spoon fed to them.
> There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign.
Good luck insisting voters should RTFM. Professionals don't even RTFM most of the time.
> Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit.
Trump lost in 2020, so I'm not sure why this is relevant. But regardless his platform was the same as it was in 2016 and 2024 - "Make America great again," "drain the swamp," these are household phrases. And just as Trump's platform resonated better with voters in 2016 and 2024, Biden's "return to normalcy" platform resonated in 2020 amidst the pandemic. There's more to these platforms than a catchy slogan, but that's the part people remember. It's effective marketing.
Look man, I want the Democrats to put forth a strong candidate and an effective campaign but this whole "blaming the voter" thing is not going to get them there. It's just going to continue alienating the people they need most.
I'm so sick of people saying "I have curated an information diet that explicitly excludes anything from a democrat or a liberal or anyone who is even kind of empathetic to their causes and beliefs, but I'm angry that I didn't hear about all the things democrats claimed they were offering" as if they didn't fucking do this to themselves?
Like, at any point, google "Harris platform" and it would have been first link. Ballotpedia has been around for a decade and makes this utterly trivial, even in local elections.
Americans ignore anything a democrat says, while taking blatant lies from a second trump admin at face value. What the actual fuck is the democrat party supposed to do about that? They have no editorial control over Fox News, and certainly don't have any power in Musk's Twitter
"The democrats didn't do good outreach" say people who consistently turn off and ignore any media that even repeats a democrat campaign promise, and have scientifically demonstrated that they will INHERENTLY distrust anything coming from someone with a (D).
I did. I also knew what she campaigned on during her brief presidential campaign in 2020. I also know her Senate record. I also know what she did as AG and DA. Harris' problem is that her platform was inconsistent with past actions. I'm all for politicians having a change of heart, but they have to be able to articulate what they believed before, what made them reconsider, and how they got to their new position. She failed spectacularly in that task which made her look inauthentic and the GOP seized on that weakness.
Her platform ended up looking like the output of a focus group with the express intent of winning votes rather than having any real policy positions. GP's "more of the same but also different... nevermind, look at all these celebrities telling you to vote for me!" is pretty spot on.
But
>most people didn't know what to expect from her.
How do you know most people didn't and what was Trump's plan?
Unless your policies go out of their way to exclude the groups they hate, you aren’t going to get their support.
How are they supposed to wrangle corporate power, when that is exactly where their power comes from?
"Social issues" are a godsend for oligarchs because they allow for effort to be spent on issues that don't challenge corporate power. They provide a sink for democratic efforts that ultimately don't move the needle for most of their voters. It gives a pathway for "positive" change that doesn't threaten corporate power. It insidiously disempowers the people who would be most likely to wrestle with corporate power. Most of all it provides the illusion of opposition and therefore the illusion that I have representation because I have someone who has the appearance of representing my values (like empathy), but none of the substance of it.
Democrats have a choice. (1) don't threaten corporate power and focus on ultimately pro-corporate social issues that are ultimately dis-empowering (2) threaten corporate power/land owner power/Israel power and immediately have their campaign financing removed and their challengers funded.
Even if you believe that democrats are focusing on issues that meaningfully change people's lives, like build back better or CHIPS, they are doing it without challenging corporate power. Which is why no matter which regime is in power, it feels like democracy is in decline.
Then you get sad, because you realize there is no way to get actual representation for the issues you care about other than to run yourself, but if you ran explicitly to challenge those in power, those in power would fund your opposition. So then you realize that it's hard to get into power without expressing loyalty to those who grant power, and then you have a cogent explanation for why things are the way they are.
Pitchforks don't work without a supporting institution, and the Intelligence state, corporate and governmental, is very very capable of preventing free association by people who might wish to supplant an illegitimate government with a new one.
No it will work until the economy is properly destructed and we are defeated when our war machine is incapable of production, we become incapable of importing necessary goods, or the nuclear taboo is broken causing entire industries to disappear in the a flash.
If we are lucky some brave military officers will uphold their oath to the constitution before it's too late, but that seems unlikely. Pitchforks were for the last 5 months. Historically speaking if there aren't pitchforks in the next month it's over and we are on the fascism train until catastrophe.
Why would expect this in a capitalist country?
There is a strong legacy of checking corporate power.
Unfortunately now that almost all media is oligarch owned it's hard to understand corporate abuses of power because both politicians and "journalists" are on the oligarch's payroll, quite literally.
For a practical example, see Bernie.
He was giving a speech to some super privileged college kids not too long ago when one of them asked something like "why should we work against a system that benefits us" and he said change likely isn't going to come from the government/rich kids so he's working on organizing unions because that's where meaningful change will come from.
Solidarity/Collective bargaining is how you challenge power.
I chuckled at this since Trump himself and entire squad of people he has surrounded himself with are the literal definition of "elites" and "corporate power."
So democrats find themselves abandoned and powerless at the most important time to have power -- the ability to do something when someone does something you don't like and says "what are you going to do about it?"
The worst part is how much this parallels 1930's German history.
It's not that they're getting 'tangled up', it's that reactionary activists (whose ultimate goal is repealing the Civil Rights Act entirely) use strawman social issues as a wedge and the press is led around by the nose parroting these controversies that are brazenly ginned up.
Liberal politicians don't really have a great strategy for this because the majority of media (and I'm talking about the real media: influencers with more following than all legacy media combined) is right-wing these days.
Progressives end up barely treading water while reactionaries run circles around them, and then are blamed when reactionaries make everything worse.
This is analogous to the hyper-religious wing of the republican party. They also like to get involved and volunteer, but they demand a certain stance on social issues, too.
There are some fringe issues supported by some democrats, but the real base of the party is black voters and their civil rights are the real target. Conservatives still haven't forgotten about being forced to end segregation in schools, nor have they giving up on trying to re-segregate.
The number one civil right that American conservatives are after is your reproductive freedom. Number two is your right to access [medicine/drugs/foods] you choose.
They openly oppose black civil rights; that's what the war on “Woke"/”DEI” is about, its what the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act protections (also through the courts, but gets less attention than dismantling of abortion rights) is about, and there are many other aspects of it.
There could theoretically be anti-DEI political party that is pro-equality, republicans are not that.
I’m.not sure why owlnly having any understanding of the issues through the propaganda of your chosen media diet makes you a better commentator in your mind, but let me assure you that it is only in your mind.
Adherents like Ibram Kendi argue that the only solution to historical racism is present day racism (Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019), p. 19). In other words, the "woke" believe in applying institutionalised racism and other forms of discrimination to realise a world in which outcomes are perceived to be equal. As this method and goal are antithetical to Enlightenment and democratic principles, there is a large contingent of people who oppose woke ideology.
This is wildly wrong; for starters, “woke” predates critical theory; for another, there is no such thing as “Critical Social Justice”, which is just mashing together two terms right-wingers don’t like and misrepresent.
The word "woke" only attached to critical theory long after both had come about.
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. The term acquired political connotations by the 1970s and gained further popularity in the 2010s with the hashtag #staywoke. Over time, woke came to be used to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and denial of LGBTQ rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.
So I encourage people to do their own research and make their own decisions from first, rather than second or third-hand principles.
Yet "tangled up in social issues" remains a popular misconception. Why?
Do you think declaring their preferred pronouns helped liberal politicians? Who did it ultimately help? Probably the Trump campaign.
Also, "defund the police" is easily the stupidest political slogan ever. It's bewildering. Did no one think "Reform the police" was a winner? And yet liberal politicians lapped it up.
https://www.businessinsider.com/which-democrats-voted-agains...
"[We] made record investments in public safety, putting more police officers on the beat; today, violent crime is at its lowest in 50 years"
"Democrats provided funding for communities to hire more police."
"since day one, President Biden has been working to make sure police officers have the tools they need to protect their communities, including more police officers on the street. We need to fund the police"
"Democrats passed and President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, with the largest ever federal investment infighting and preventing crime, reducing violence, and investing in public safety. That funding enabled cities and states to invest more than $14 billion in public safety and violence prevention, putting more police officers on the beat for accountable community policing."
https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...
Why is it that when looking for examples of what some are doing wrong, you're casting back over 5 years to an activist slogan that even then was treated as a poor expression rather than "lapped it up"?
It's almost like what you're here to do is actually reinforce the unproductive association rather than point the direction to a better way.
You want to talk about what's "bewildering"? What's bewildering is that your apparent confidence (or deliberately mislead?) confusing very online cheer-squad discourse from some corners over stated positions of most officeholders or candidates.
One could charitably assume that it's because you have some acquaintances or media follows who represent themselves or others as you've described and you've accidentally made parasocial promotion into an unfortunate wider partisan caricature. One could also warily assume you're an operative who is here to actively reinforce the associations you were ostensibly fighting against. Perhaps uncharitable, but hardly implausible these days.
The majority of liberal politicians are classic liberals who spend their campaign and policy time as you said you wanted, and it seems you haven't noticed.
"pronoun" doesn't appear in that 2024 D platform document. Also can't find it in a CBS news summary [1] of the Harris campaign. You know what does show up, though? Housing issues. Actual working class tax cut proposals. Child tax credits (pretty pro birth, very pro parent).
And those are what I think about when I think about liberal officeholders and candidates. Because that's what I see them talking about when I follow them and what's discussed in the media coverage I follow.
Where are you directing your attention?
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-platform-policy-p...
I'd say stated policy positions don't matter period. Nobody reads policy documents, it's all vibes.
Sounds like one answer to my question about why people don't recognize it when Democratic politicians do prioritize "housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds."
Have they (notably and visibly in the public consciousness) managed to get results regarding such issues such as housing in areas where they are uncontested?
As an outsider looking in i'd say if i had to imagine a democrat voting area i'd imagine an urbanised area, more progressive but also consistently more expensive.
Is this just "People are stupid and easily manipulated by the media. That's just how it is"?
It’s not a “misconception.” Democrats choose to spend their political capital changing the status quo on social issues. For example, Americans overwhelmingly oppose affirmative action: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans...
Affirmative action was banned in California in 1996. Which party tried to repeal the ban in 2020? Republicans didn’t pass a law to ban affirmative action even more!
> Americans who had heard the phrase affirmative action in the Center’s December survey were asked whether they saw it as a good or a bad thing. Among those who had ever heard the term, 36% said affirmative action is a good thing, 29% said it is a bad thing and a third weren’t sure.
> By comparison, Gallup has asked U.S. adults whether they “generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities.” In 2021, the last time Gallup asked this question, a 62% majority of Americans favored such programs.
> Public attitudes about affirmative action can also vary depending on the specific context in which it is being discussed, such as in higher education or the workplace.
> A larger share of Americans disapprove than approve of higher education institutions taking race and ethnicity into account when admitting students, according to several recent Center surveys.
> In that survey, 74% of U.S. adults said that, when making decisions about hiring and promotions, companies and organizations should take only a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity. Around a quarter (24%) said companies and organizations should take a person’s race and ethnicity into account – in addition to qualifications – to increase diversity.
The unpopular approach of considering race is what Democrats have pushed recently. E.g. Prop 16:
> A "yes" vote supported this constitutional amendment to repeal Proposition 209 (1996), which stated that the government and public institutions cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.
And I didn’t cherry pick anything. I quoted the portions of the article that said support depends on context, and then the paragraph discussing the college context and the employment context. The article itself happens to specify a percentage in text for one but not the other.
Then I mentioned Prop 16 as a concrete example of a Democrat-supported policy. But you can’t compare that number to the 74% because Prop 16 was a vote by a very liberal state, while the Pew poll is nationwide.
Note that the questions for both admissions and employment specify diversity as the goal. For example, the options for the employment question are:
> Only take a person's qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity
> Take a person's race and ethnicity into account, in addition to qualifications, in order to increase diversity
People support the end of increased diversity, but oppose race conscious admissions and hiring as a means to that end. That’s entirely consistent.
> That’s not a conflicting opinion. People support diversity, but oppose the principal approach to achieving diversity.
That is a conflict! You are describing a conflict! I don’t see how the discussion proceeds from here.
You see a similar pattern on many issues. E.g. people support balancing the federal budget. But most would say that they oppose cutting entitlement spending to balance the budget. That is, people’s specific opposition to cutting entitlement spending outweighs their general support for balancing the budget. In practice it just means that people’s preference in favor of the general issue is weakly held, while their opposition on the specific issue is strongly held.
But people answering polls don’t necessarily know that. Which is why you need to look at polls that are worded more specifically.
I am a pretty liberal person, but watching a white male candidate pass the interview but not get a job explicitly because he was a white male (because the only slots left were for "diverse" candidates) even makes me uncomfortable. That's a lived experience. I watched it in real life.
Jon Stewart has had two guests that he pushed back on that were both right while Stewart was wrong.
The first guest was on his Apple TV show, and he said something to the effect of "there's more of us [who disagree with reparations]," and Jon Stewart spoke over him and generally denied his opinions as rational. Current events show that that wasn't something to ignore.
The second was a guest talking about how these "social issues" are bad democratic strategy. Social programs are popular when they help the disadvantaged, but not popular when they help a particular group (which I think is in some way related to "intersectionality"?). Jon Stewart became emotional focusing on the injustice rather than pragmatically solving the problem.
I think that is where democrats often run foul of average voters.. they see very wealthy democrats pushing something. It won't hurt the wealthy democrats, but it could hurt them. Average non-wealthy people don't want to be punished for the sins of past wealthy people who happened to have the same skin color as them.
He is the populist voice of the educated left and I find lots of echo's in my own social circles/education.
Stewart is coming around and waking up to the idea that "woke" policies were rejected, and the democrats need re-framing/a reckoning. IMHO, he is largely the voice of democratic reckoning. Biden wasn't kicked out until Stewart's public evisceration and declaration that the emperor, in fact, has no clothes. He at least adapts with increasing information.
I just finished watching his interview with Ezra Klien, and as an on/off viewer of the TDS from back in his anti-war rants from 2003 or so (still in HS so kind of fuzzy on dates) to today I have seen a noticeable difference; he has finally realized that it's not that 'fraud, waste, abuse' in government doesn't occur on both sides of the isles (that much is probably always clear) it's that the two-party paradigm have in fact insidiously profited in their own specific ways from their respective MOs, and political theater aside are entirely complicit with it as it maintains the status quo.
Anything that deviates from the norm (eg Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul) is to be brandished too extreme, or unelectable and a loss to the other isle is a better result as it is something that detracts from the business as usual approach in modern US politics. The faces/names might change, but the tactics are the same, denying access to RNC/DNC platforms removing or outright denying delegates etc... it's all been done on both sides.
Just look at the face of the man melt when he hears how the Rural Broadband Bill process purposely rendered itself moot, and perhaps made the cluster** of DOGE become an inevitability--the obvious profiteer in chief Musk being the only one to really 'win' because of his innate and impeccable ability to award himself and his corps Govt contracts while championing and branding himself the best CEO the private sector has to offer.
Not only that, watch the interview with Maria Ressa when he realizes that the same Zuck that got Obama elected and then cozied up to Trump when he needed to has been the cause and reason why extremes of political fascism in the Philippines has risen, via Cambridge Analytica, and is part of the same agenda that has been playing out in US elections since 2016.
I don't know what to say about the TDS Host alumni, I reserve judgment on their POVs at this point, but I was a big fan of John Oliver since his days on The Bugle but if/when both him and Jon get together on a stand-up tour like he did with Chappele targeted at their primary demographic I think they can exert their collective influence to their hard-liner leftist audience to see that in actuality the Left-Right paradigm is in actuality a very parasitic symbiosis where the host (The US populace and perhaps World at large) will always suffer if it is the only form of governance we can either fathom or implement.
It's clear that resources and technology aren't the limiting factor in solving a large amount of Humanity's problems, it's that entrenched power (and those who benefit from it) refuse to relinquish any of it and will sooner destroy itself, and us with it, before it ever corrects itself.
It’s pretty shocking that this extremely fringe issue is the only thing you can find to support the narrative that dems are “spearheading” radical social change.
Whats actually happening is that conservative fear monger about random various minority groups, as they have for all of time, and then enact policies intended to harm them. The dems have no choice but to respond.
You would think that conservatives continuing this playbook for, well, ever, would cause people to stop and say “wait… are the conservatives really the ones stirring up the culture war?” But no, somehow it hasn’t. Somehow, we’re all still living under the delusion that conservatives just maintain the status quo and oppose radical change, and not that they’re the ones creating the need for opposing action.
Kamala Harris: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/14/harris-forgivable-loans-lega...
Biden’s SBA: https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/court-rules-biden-admin-di...
Biden’s USDA: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/white-farmers-chall...
Obama’s FAA: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jan/30/faa-diversi...
Also, politicians are on the hook for their reaction to what the private sector is doing. The cached blurb for Google’s equal opportunity web page still says this: “Google is proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.” Google got rid of the “affirmative action” part recently. Democrat politicians supported these programs. Republicans promised to end them.
In my state - WA - there's a prohibition on affirmative action written into the constitution (originally passed in a referendum in the 90s). Democrats have been talking of repealing or otherwise constraining it for ages, and in 2019, it culminated in another referendum:
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1000,_Affirmat...
You can see who supported it in the linked article. It was an indirect initiative so it went to the legislature first, which voted it in as law along party lines. A veto referendum was then held, in which it was repealed:
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Referendum_88,_Vote_on_I-...
Again, you can look at the article for details on who supported and opposed it.
I can assure you that many people do remember this whole brouhaha and the names associated with it, at least the most prominent ones (like the Dem governor).
I was a CA voter in 2020. The focus I saw from candidates and citizens alike were things like democracy, rule of law, housing costs/policy, and police reform. Prop 16 was a footnote, not a focus, which is probably one of the reasons it lost (alongside the fact that its language made it difficult to tell if it was allowing for civil protections or tearing them down).
And democratic domestic policy focus since has been pretty clear: economic stimulus, infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, and various kinds of working class relief. Pretty standard "promote the general welfare" stuff, sometimes joined with efforts to protect "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (even for people who look or love differently). That's what you'd expect from classic liberals who still believe in enlightenment values and ideals. Or even just anyone who wants those things for themselves and realizes that to guarantee it to anyone, you have to support it for everyone.
This was definitely all over the 2024 democratic platform.
The problem isn't that people don't like the policy and values they'd get from the Democratic Party and its candidates. It's that they're increasingly mislead about what the difference is. As evidenced by the polling on relative policy popularity last fall:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/22/trump-har...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/tru...
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50802-harris-vs-t...
At the end of the day, the Biden administration built way more DEI departments than EV chargers. And Democrats own that.
Huh. That sounds like validation of my original point that the Democratic Party has been "prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds", so dkjaudyeqooe's suggestion that candidates/officeholders should do that seems ... idempotent at best.
Maybe people should pay attention to what candidates campaign on and the policy they enact instead of going off vibes and trigger phrases.
Certainly that would give candidates and officeholders more electoral incentives to produce policy that serves voters.
And voters are correct to connect the employment practices they are seeing to Democrat policies. Democrats have interpreted civil rights laws to allow particular practices with respect to black and hispanic applicants that would be deemed illegal if applied to white applicants.
And of course, voters are entitled to weight platform points based on likelihood of achievement. They might put more weight on a “footnote” if they think the candidate will actually make that happen, and less weight on promises they think won’t transpire. Democrats who voted for DEI have gotten what they voted for. But the ones that voted for high speed rail in California have not.
Where I am in Canada, we typically do not prioritize canvassing neighbourhoods with more renters as they usually don’t vote.
I imagine that tenant rights and rent control transform many renters into essentially homeowners for purposes beyond the asset itself. They also aren’t impacted by prices.
Unless you have some sort of government that plans for “long term”, good luck. On the bright side, decreasing birth rates around the world will solve this problem by itself, if people can wait long enough.
It’s the same in Japan. Tokyo house prices are going YoY because of foreign investments and growing population, but all other prefectures not so much (excluding special zones where they are building big semiconductor factories).
Despite how big a problem healthcare is in the US, most voters fear any change that may put their current health coverage at risk. Most people under 65 have (or feel like they have) decent-to-good health insurance through an employer-sponsored plan and don't necessarily see a big benefit to throwing that away. People over 65 are fiercely protective of their Medicare benefits and tend to worry that Medicare for All is going to make their healthcare worse. (Judging by the amount of "shocked Pikachu face" we see lately from Trump voters who expected him to fix the economy, there's a critical group of swing voters who seem unwilling or unable to accurately judge candidates based on their policies vs. their vibes.)
I don't agree with those people. I'd love to see our healthcare system dramatically overhauled. But between the polarization and risk aversion of American voters, "a quality National Health Service" has not proven to be a winning platform so far and is unlikely to be in the future.
I’ve heard it frequently claimed, but where has a progressive Dem won where a moderate didn’t?
They seem to lose badly. The Sanders people were all in on Paula Jean Swearengin in WV and even tried to primary Manchin with her.
WV has all the supposed demographics Sanders appeals to. White working class people mired in poverty.
She was the worst performing Democratic nominee in West Virginia history.
You would be floored by how many Obama 2008 voters are now Trump voters. Obama beat Clinton in the 2008 primaries and people believed he did it by running to left of her. People thought he was going to burn for-profit health care to the ground and deliver a single payer system, and that he'd throw the bankers who triggered the 2008 crisis in prison.
The disappointment when he governed like it was a third Clinton term did major damage to the party, and it let Trump pick up the populist mantle.
Populism, however, is like candy. You can add it to something wholesome, like Sanders does, and get virtuous results. Or you can add it to antifreeze, like the Musk/Trump regime, and get what we're getting.
Obama voters who voted for Trump didn’t vote for better healthcare. They voted to hurt healthcare insurance workers. They then voted to hurt someone else with Trump.
As they first seemingly voted for universal healthcare and then voted for abolishing what public healthcare the USA had. That’s not consistent with caring about it as an issue at all.
I can accept that politically, the Dems may need an enemy. Shared hating of someone is a potent bonding agent.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/17/trump-aoc-vo...
I'm not american but i remember looking into this because of all the drivel and distinctly remember polling finding bernie was actually more popular in notable swing states than his dem counterpart but actually a bit less popular in states that were going to vote dem regardless.
If bernie would take more undecided voters and republicans over to his side where it actually mattered I think it's not conclusive that he would have win but no far stretch to say he would have had a better shot at winning.
What's worse is that they'll inevitably be attacked by those same centrist incumbents while they do run: Jeremy Corbyn was a great example of this. One of his fiercest critics is now a minister for health, another was made a Lord, others are now safely pickled in think tanks which will tide them over nicely until they can return to the fold.
The only way to fix this is to do as the right have done across Europe: to accept that it'll be a very long haul indeed until your people get power, and to start insurgent, radical parties. This sidesteps the big incumbent parties as a filter, and makes it clear who one's friends are. That's what needs to happen in the US on the left, but the odds of it paying off in anything less than decades are staggeringly low.
I don't agree with you here. On the right of the Socialists, you have Macron's party. These two parties vote together on some things but disagree on others.
Also the fact that the socialist were part of the downfall of the previous French government is telling that they are not on the same side and their respective electorate are very different.
So to say that the socialists are hostages of their right leaning members is not correct. All the right leaning socialists have already jumped ship to Macron's party a long time ago.
Obama wasn't elected with a super-majority. He had 58 votes, but Al Franken's race was contested, then Robert Byrd got sick, then Ted Kennedy died.
He did have one briefly for about 20 working days the Senate was in session about 9 months after he took office.
The republicans STILL claim to have "A concept of a plan" when it comes to healthcare. The one time they claimed to have an actual bill, it wasted 10% of it's text to strip government healthcare from people who win the lottery, like that's fucking worth it.
But they STILL get elected, because the same electorate who didn't want to lose their healthcare to goons killing it for profits for some reason go right back to them just a few years later, despite republican politicians lying TO THEIR FACES about it from day one.
Meanwhile, Democrats can come in with an entire presentation and plan and stats and graphs and all sorts of things and the electorate doesn't care because Fox News didn't tell them to vote for it.
But you know who is easily offended? The people who pretend to be offended by the term "happy holidays" every year. The people who pretend that a child seeing a gay person is somehow going to groom them. The people who pretend that seeing a black person in a starring movie role is really upsetting them. The people who pretend that mentioning that trans people exist is causing some sort of societal collapse.
And I am saying "pretend" very deliberately, because I genuinely do not think that anyone is actually offended by the term "happy holidays". I think that literally every single person who says they are is actively lying.
It's utterly ridiculous. I am pretty left learning, at least by American standard, and I am generally speaking pretty hard to actually "offend". I will generally discuss basically any topic no matter how taboo, I make jokes that most people would consider offensive, I say curse words, and I don't pretend to get offended when a conservative says something really dumb.
In this very forum, some asinine person supported Trump administration axing the free tax submission programme of the IRS on the basis of them owning shares in the tax software companies.
But as other commenters are pointing out, many liberals are already trying this, but conservatives misrepresent them as being focused on social issues (and misrepresent their opinions on such issues) anyways.
IMO, here are the problems liberals face and solutions to regain popularity:
- Liberal politicians may say the correct things, but what matters is what they do, and specifically how it's perceived. As vice-president, Harris did practically nothing, and the overall perception of the economy under Biden is negative. Meanwhile, Trump is doing almost exactly what he said, even small things like pardoning Ross Ulbricht. Fortunately, you don't need to be the party in power, or even elected, to have well-perceived actions; I believe community-building is the best and easiest way for liberals to regain appeal.
- Liberal politicians may say the correct things, but they don't open themselves up to criticism enough. Liberals (and conservatives, and corporations) have learned to say almost nothing for fear of misspeaking, but this is backfiring; they get attacked for policies they don't state because they don't explicitly denounce those policies, and the policies they do state get misrepresented because they don't clarify or broadcast the clarifications enough. Harris should've went on Joe Rogan's podcast and should've agreed to a debate in Fox News; she would've been judged for her responses, but by not going, she was judged for imagined responses*. Meanwhile, Trump agreed to the debates on CNN and ABC, and he posts and speaks much more often and unscripted (so it's him posting and speaking).
- Wrt. social issues (trans, woke. etc.): "live and let live", and ask for clarification, particularly examples. This area is where people imagine and misrepresent others' opinions the most; so when a liberal politician is asked their opinion on XYZ, they should answer unambiguously, even if it makes them look bad, then debate and clarify. I really think the overarching policy should be "live and let live", and finding ways to accomplish that with minimal federal intervention; because I believe (and hope) it's something most people would agree on**, and because "getting X done" is strictly easier than "getting Y to do X".
One thing that must be said, because the above problems and solutions have been discussed before, but this has been discussed less: these also apply to "the far left", perhaps the same or more than they apply to conservatives. Many people get attacked by the far left who are completely on their side (recent example: ProtonVPN); many others get attacked who I believe are on their side, but must clarify their policies.
In summary: people choose the worst interpretations of their political opponents' speech; if they oppose you, they'll choose the worst interpretation of your speech. However, if you don't speak, your opposers will choose an even worse interpretation of your silence. The ways to remove bad interpretations are: clarify, and far more significantly, act in a way that disproves them. Also, if your general actions benefit people, they'll gradually stop opposing you, so they'll start choosing better interpretations; the same speech is more or less controversial when it's spoken from different people,
* If someone asks you a question and you don't respond, they're not going to forget the whole scenario, they're going to imagine your response based on their existing perception of you. Even if truthfully answering the question lowers their perception of you, if lying or not answering lowers it more, it's the correct choice.
** At minimum, I believe most people would allow any group happiness, if it didn't affect them, said group wasn't hurting another group, and doing so meant they themselves were better off. If most people believe liberal politicians will help their quality-of-life more than conservatives, I don't think they care about social issues; but vice versa is also true, most people won't protect victim's rights if they believe they must non-negligibly sacrifice QOL to do so.
You have far right and then many far right enablers who will always blame the democrats and left for what conservatives do. Then you have comparatively less few pro-democracy moderate and small far left.
Oh. Wait.