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Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy this - Harris had a big bump in the polls as soon as she entered the race and I think she could have won if she had offered voters anything. This bullshit that American's won't vote for a woman is just an excuse not to run women and to deflect blame towards a culture war issue and away from the fact that the democrats don't actually have popular policies.

I voted for Harris, I even canvased for her, but I think its a sexist oversimplification to suggest she lost because she is a woman. She lost because her campaign was lame.

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> I think she could have won if she had offered voters anything.

But she did offer voters lots of things if you spent 30 seconds listening to her and stepped out of the faux news and Twitter echo chambers.

And basically every last bit of it would’ve helped the average American. She just didn’t lie and claim she had a magic wand to fix price gouging her first week in office.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/kamala-harris...

*And to be clear, it’s rather interesting that both Kamala and Hillary were blamed for “not having a platform” which seems to be the go-to for people who refuse to vote for a woman but can’t actually attack them on their platform. Just claim they don't have one or didn’t do a good enough job explaining it!

Politicians should not preemptively give in to political resistance and tell their voters they can't solve their problems because its "unrealistic." You'd think we would have figured this out in the Clinton campaign. Politicians should have a set of goals they fight for rabidly and when political resistance manifests they should point their fingers at it and say "Those assholes over there kept me from forgiving student loans."

Democrats who believe in "realistic" political campaigns are why awful people keep winning.

I thought you said she didn’t have a platform?

Now you’re criticizing her for “giving in to political resistance” - and by that you mean not getting up on stage and just knowingly and blatantly lying to the American public by claiming she would single handedly drop the price of groceries and gasoline in her first week in office while also ending the war in Ukraine?

I think you’re both moving the goal posts and claiming that the rest of us are looking for a presidential candidate that has no moral compass. I’m good.

Like I said, I canvassed for and voted for Harris, but when I think of her campaign, all I can think of is "wiping the debt of Pell Grant recipients who start successful businesses that benefit disadvantaged communities."

This is the lamest bullshit policy which almost seems calculated to alienate voters who it doesn't put to sleep.

Please don't act like democratic politicians are losing because they have a moral compass. Ridiculous.

> She just didn’t lie and claim she had a magic wand to fix price gouging her first week in office.

This is part of Trumps genius and preys on many American's ignorance. Ask random people on the street if they understand the inflation rate for example. Most issues are complex and require nuance and complex fixes. Trump distills them down to simple problems when they are not, and lies with impunity that there are simple solutions. People believe him because it's too much work to believe anything else.

She’s known to own firearms. I wonder what would happen if one of these Democrat candidates released a video like “A girl and her Glock: Kamala goes John Wick”.

Similarly, AOC should visit the south, eat some grits, volunteer with some Black churches, and do a little skeet shooting with some good ole boys.

The Zohran model is to not pretend to be someone different, and exclusively focus on what you believe the core problem to be with a few clearly definable solutions (and no slogans).

I dunno if that would move the needle. Maybe?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/186248/quarter-voters-say-candi...

But I don't think that one performative step would help, it would require like decades of change on the platform of the Democratic party.

So you're confirming that EVERYTHING about politics in the US is just... spectacle? a show?

Ideas and modeling no longer matters? What matters is that you're doing a TikTok eating a southern specialty?

It's not like the dems did either of those things.

Spectacles actually matter too. You need to know which one to perform and that requires certain understanding of your audience

It shouldn't. We should have a society where we treat politics with more deference. But for that, we would need to have long-form content, actual balanced debates on public television, and fight the "attention-span economy" of social networks...

It would be perceived as pandering bullshit from either of them.

What the democrats need is an aggressive economic policy that actually will manifestly improve regular people's lives. If they cannot articulate such a thing and credibly convince the voter that they will fucking fight for it, they will never win.

I don’t care about the US anymore but it seems to me it’s always up to the Democrats to be responsible, while Republicans can literally end democracy and turn the country into a pay to play kleptocracy where you can even be intimate with children without consequences or backlash.

> If they cannot articulate such a thing and credibly convince the voter that they will fucking fight for it, they will never win.

People say this but Democrats lost by like 1% in 2024. If that had gone the other way by 1%, people would be talking about what political geniuses they are (as has happened in the past). Winning in this environment just means playing long enough that the noise goes your way eventually, and then everyone talks about what a political mastermind you are. Or if it goes against you then you're forever lost in the political wilderness. Until the next election when it eventually, randomly goes your way again.

She can articulate the policy at the shooting range while eating some grits. And drinking some Keystone Light. That is when they will be receptive to the ideas.

That won't do anything.

No one at a gun range is changing their vote.

Both parties already know which voters change their votes depending on the situation. The data's already told strategists in both parties that the hotspots are, generally speaking, a few counties in a few states in the midwest, Pennsylvania, and more and more Arizona. So they don't really need to do more than pay lip service to any others. Because the data's already told them that the others won't change their votes in any case.

But the democrats are right wing as well…

I will confirm what the person you replied to said. I have had white collar colleagues and blue collar truck drivers (one who is a family member) say the same thing, that they wouldn’t vote for a women. You severely underestimate racism and misogyny in the US electorate imho.

I did not bother canvassing or donating to the Harris campaign for this reason, for the same reason I did not help pro vaccine non profits during the pandemic trying to convince antivaxxers. You aren’t changing someone’s belief system and mental model on timelines that matter for election outcomes. Mamdani was able to win NYC because young people and women turned out in force and ranked choice voting. The electoral college overweights rural, lower education parts of the country in US voting influence.

Based on the above, it will be a long time before enough of the US electorate has turned over before you can run a women presidential candidate imho. 78% of farmers voted for him, and still support him, even as he destroys their way of life, for example. Progress occurs one funeral at a time (Planck).

I recommend the recently released book “The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us” by Ryan P Burge (ISBN13 9781587436697) as a contributor to understanding this topic, as well as “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (ISBN13 9780062390851).

Edit: This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46681760 touches on this as well.

> that the democrats don't actually have popular policies.

Democrat policies polled better than Republican policies at the last election.

Its more accurate to say that leftist policies polled well, which they always do. I think the main issue is that people don't really trust democrats to do anything they say they want to do.

Hilary and Kamala also polled well... Pretty sure all these polls prove is that polls are not reliable.

Remember that one guy who promised to close guantanamo prison?

Nobody trusts the polls now. They have been comically wrong for a while.

You know what’s interesting though is I think that a Republican woman would be unbeatable. Many Democrats would be salivating at the historical opportunity.

Identity politics is not the way.

A Republican candidate could be a Muslim, a women, or trans, but that's not a good reason to vote for them. It should be about what they stand for. Voting for a Kristi Noem would be terrible, for example.

Similarly, the Democratic Party, if they're to win, should not depend on the opposition failing or on identity, but instead on solid ideas and the ability to communicate it well. Kamala wasn't that.

I think you're right in the sense that people, when given some kind of muscular policy or attitude, don't really care about gender per se.

Only when nothing else is on the line will they say "I won't vote for a woman."

Most likely the first Republican female president will be a former Democrat.

Haley would have been that person.

That would have required the Republican Party to not have been infested and eaten out from the inside by the Trump party.

>You know what’s interesting though is I think that a Republican woman would be unbeatable

Not anymore.

Three more years to climb out of the dumpster fire though. Then, maybe?

But right now? No.

In this moment, the political reality in the US is that Democrats would have to lose. Republicans, male or female, can't really win without that help. Especially in light of MAGA.

I would have thought Wisconsin would have been a wake up call for Republicans. But it hasn't happened yet.

So far both of these parties are sleepwalking into disaster and the world outside the US will pay a portion of that cost. Which is sad.

A woman would never win the Republican primary as long as MAGA dominates the right.

And Democrats aren't so broadly driven by identity politics that a Republican candidate merely being a woman would attract significant Democratic defectors. She would still have to be somewhat inspiring/charismatic, fairly centrist, and probably pro-choice.

Even in the peak-"woke" Democratic primary of 2020, all the women lost to two old white men.

> Harris had a big bump in the polls as soon as she entered the race

The election was always going to be 50/50 come election day no matter who the candidates were. The consternation about polling over the summer was especially frustrating for this reason, because 50/50 is exactly how it played out despite whatever temporary polling boosts she got. If she hadn't replaced Biden, his poor polling also would have reverted to the 50/50 by November.

Harris was shitcanned post haste when she actually primaried, so the party already knew she was non-viable. She got put in as VP as the best token non-white woman from a large population state they could shove in there and then Democrats got caught with their pants down because they hid Biden's physical state past the point they could have an actual primary to vet the proper candidate.

The fact Biden said he wouldn't back out then suddenly did at the 11th hour made the whole thing far more bizarre and was a massive erosion of confidence in any semblance of a plan for the presidency by the Democratic Party. I ended up voting for a 3rd party because both campaigns were run so horribly to the point I couldn't even imagine either side managing a mayor's office let alone the country.

A third-party vote is a vote for Trump.

Most of us vote in states where it doesn’t matter if you make a statement with your ballot.

This kind of purity test is why the left cant win right now. Anyone who does a wrong-think is shitcanned and othered.

Im gonna put a theory out that I havent seen here yet, a lot of people voted for Trump because they got dunked on by leftist Twitter, told they were racist/fascist/whatever for having an opinion like "communism is bad", and now comes a guy who wont back down and who legit makes them cry liberal tears. Ever been pissed off at someone with no recourse? Of course they want that kind of satisfaction.

That's not a purity test, it's just math.

Curious how it was a vote for trump and not harris. If harris had won, would a 3rd party vote have been for harris?

Because if that is true, you're re-writing the rules of your "personal voter math" to fit your narrative, and if it isn't true, your "personal voter math" === your opinion, which isn't really useful.

They edited the post, it used to say OP was a fascist for voting third party.

The risk those people took is radicalizing people like me, who were previously on their side for whom Trump was an absolute red line. Now Trump is charging them extra taxes, and when he falls their reputation will be dumped even further into the gutter - hope the temporary satisfaction was worth the costs.

I dont 100% understand what you're saying, who got the temporary satisfaction? The leftists doing online dunks, or the trump voting moderates who just dont like the way the left does discourse? Its unclear to me from your post.

The Trump voting moderates. Their lives will now be permanently worse, both from the immediate effect of Trump's policies and the backlash from Trump opposing moderates who didn't and don't care about online dunks.

I think that's wrong. The Democrat platform offered a lot.

It's just that if in front of you, you have a weirdo who gives some stupid "with me, everything is free, and there's no problem" line, that is provable completely bullshit, but that your population is too uneducated (or too in a cult) to understand, then this happens...

What did you want Democrat to do? Give the same lies that GOP does? then what's the endgame?

But... Mamdani offered free childcare and affordable housing and won. It's not that far from feee everything.

I wouldn't read too much into Mamdani's success bearing in mind the other candidates represented scandal or the party that had no chance in New York...

No, it's not "free everything", he said it clearly: it's going to be paid with taxes on the richest.

The orange idiot is pretending that it is "free everything"

Mamdani might be the reason the next mayor of NYC is trump 2.0...

I hope I'm wrong.

The Democrats ran a campaign that managed to lose to a liar and a felon. They couldn’t have been more out of touch if they had immigrated from Antarctica.

She lost for the same reason Hillary lost. She came across as Marie Antoinette. Oblivious to the anger of the working class. Touting how great the economy was going and ignoring the resentment felt by those who believed the “liberal elite” betrayed them.

Frankly, bullshit. This was not about working class in the slightest. Working class as such supported and voted for democrats. The thing is, women are working class too, not just men. And farmers are frequently effectively rich owners - in unstable business bu owning a lot.

This was about all thosw isms and hierarchies we pretended dont exisr anymore.

From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/democrats-...

“As we move into the endgame of the 2022 election, the Democrats face a familiar problem. America’s historical party of the working class keeps losing working-class support.”

“This year, Democrats have chosen to run a campaign focused on three things: abortion rights, gun control, and safeguarding democracy—issues with strong appeal to socially liberal, college-educated voters. But these issues have much less appeal to working-class voters.”

“They are instead focused on the economy, inflation, and crime, and they are skeptical of the Democratic Party’s performance in all three realms.”

>From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/democrats-...

You conveniently left out that the author (Ruy Teixeira[0]) of the piece you quoted is a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank that authored the Project 2025 roadmap.

Should we ask Stalin to critique US Cold War policies? Or maybe ask Xi Xinping to publicly assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of Taiwan's defense posture too?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruy_Teixeira

False analogy. The Atlantic is a Democratic mouth piece and they posted his message because we Democrats will keep losing if we don’t wake up. Here is an article from another author with a similar message.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/democra...

Quote: The February 18 focus group, in a state that saw deep Democratic erosion last year and will elect a new governor this fall, was the first stop of a new $4.5 million research project centered on working-class voters in 20 states that could hold the key to Democratic revival. American Bridge 21st Century, an independent group that spent about $100 million in 2024 trying to defeat Trump, has decided to invest now in figuring out what went wrong, how Trump’s second term is being received, and how to win back voters who used to be Democratic mainstays but now find themselves in the Republican column.

> Working class as such supported and voted for democrats.

I live in coastal CA, and a healthy majority of my “working class” friends are Trump supporters.

The ones in the trades, who are relatively high earners, are all Trump supporters.

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