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Comment by orochimaaru | Hacker News Reader

The democrats lost it on immigration enforcement (or lack thereof) and not knowing when to step aside for a new face.

All they had to do was two things after trump’s first term debacle: - keep to trump’s remain in Mexico policy - have a fair primary (or stick to the person picked in the fair primary)

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Democrats lost, in part, by giving in to the republican narrative around immigration. They gave up on arguing that immigration can be good, and started accepting the republican framing of it as a problem to be solved. This strategy is doomed from the start, since republicans will always be willing to go harder on anti-immigration rhetoric and action than the democrats will.

According to Gallup [1], only 47% of US Americans thought that immigration should decrease in 2020. That number had held more or less steady since at least 2000. But it grew steadily over Biden's term, reaching 88% in 2024. This, I believe, is a reflection of how the democrats shifted their rhetoric to be "tough on immigration". And it handed Trump a populace that was primed to be more susceptible than ever to his much more aggressive immigration rhetoric.

Of course, this is just a small part of a much bigger picture, but I don't exactly think it helped.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigratio...

It's important to put this in the global context that every country in the free world shifted rightward post pandemic.

Even if the Democrats had run a perfect campaign they might not have won. And they probably came closer than many peer groups in other nations

Lack of immigration enforcement is nonsense. Enforcement ramped up under Obama and hasn't gone down since. We americans are just very dumb and buy into obviously bullshit stories about brown people stealing and eating cats.

The border controls were removed under Biden leading to a lot of illegal immigrants. Obama enforced but never stopped the flow. Trump had stopped the flow with remain in Mexico.

Domestic enforcement is 1/2 the problem. Controlling your border is the other half.

I’m baffled that you can look at the Democrats’ decades of running to the right on immigration and still blame their losses on not doing that enough. This is a perfect example of why ceding any ground to right-wing talking points is a mistake. Obama deported more people than any president before him and it never mattered because reality was never the point.

We have a gestapo kidnapping members of our community in the streets and the xenophobic propaganda still has you believing the most vulnerable and underpaid people in our society were ever a serious problem.

Im baffled that you can look at the polling numbers about the migrant fiascos in dem cities and come to any conclusion other than that it was one of the biggest political fuck ups this century. Republicans played urban dems like a fiddle calling their bluff on sanctuary city talk. The bussing programs made republicans look like problem solvers and dems look like the classic progressive trope of all bark no answers. Dems didnt need to close the borders or even slow down immigration, but they did need a real answer that isnt "this isnt a real problem" and they came up with nothing.

The migrants were a serious problem for democrats and youre still denying that.

Why is deep-red-rural America so concerned about the 'migrant fiasco' in the dem cities that they don't live in?

1. Theyre racist and xenophobic so they dont like migrants

2. They feel discriminated against by urban people so they dont like them either

3. Combine those two and its easy to see how they can revel in the suffering caused by the situation. Politics is about narratives and this one spread like wildfire because dems had no counter narrative. End of the day cities are dominated by democratic politics so its easy for republican narrative makers to point at cities that are failing to deal with a crisis and turn that into a reason to not vote for dems.

4. Everyone loves a good told you so. The problem for democrats with this one was that it was so incredibly visible. Made for very good TV on fox news

We can blame democrats but there's also some real dysfunction in the US in terms of lack of education/critical thinking and relic ideas (guns, religion, white supremacism) that still lingers on. Trump did win the popular vote.

Trump did not win the popular vote this time around. Check your sources.

Trump did win the popular vote with a plurality at 49.8% to Harris’s 48.3%.

I will let people downvote you (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...) because I can't

Guns are a part of the constitution. Those aren’t going anywhere. Unless someone wants to work towards an amendment - which means you need the president, 2/3 of Congress and senate and 2/3 of the states to agree.

> Guns are a part of the constitution. Those aren’t going anywhere.

So is due process, but that went out the window last year. It turns out that the constitution doesn't mean shit if the executive doesn't want to follow it.

You're pretending amendments don't exist but the right to have weapons is itself an amendment (:

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