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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.