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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

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I agree that the Democratic party has fumbled the ball (over and over) and deserves a lot of blame for where we are now, but all of the trans talk in 2024 was driven entirely by the right.

The Democratic party wasn't talking about trans people in 2024 (if anything the Democratic campaign was conspicuously avoiding the conversation entirely). The trans "debate" that people remember from that time period was driven entirely by right-wing ads and social media.

Obviously this is a pretty successful strategy considering how many people falsely remember who was actually talking about this.

2024 Democratic platform [1] word counts:

  men:         4
  woman/women: 86
  gay:         3
  transgender: 8

They slit their own throats by ignoring half of the voting population.

[1] https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...

Of the three references to men I found, one was counting Trump's judicial appointments and the others were "our brave men and women of the armed forces". No acknowledgement of the college enrollment gap nor illegal competition in several predominately-male fields having driven wages way down.

They talked about it because they knew the median voter disagreed with the Democrats.

But cares about something that has zero effect on them? Trans? How many of them know a single trans person?

Like somehow that's a huge thing for Trump voters but a crashing economy is not?

Lots of people know trans people (by which I mean people that have decided to take some visible action to transition) by now - the people in the boonies and flyover states have access to the same internet as everyone else, so a lot of people outside the most progressive cities have transitioned. You have to remember that trans had been at the front of the culture for 10 years (since Caitlyn Jenner) by the time of the 2024 election.

The stocks didn't really go down yet and their media sources are distraction agents.

Crashing the economy? In the past year the S&P 500 rose 14%, unemployment is at 4.4%, and inflation is around 2.7%. There are many things to criticize Trump for but the economy has not actually crashed.

The S&P 500 rose 1.04% in EUR terms only. That's basically nothing.

Of the 14% in USD terms 13% evaporated because he crashed the dollar compared to all other currencies (EUR, GBP, CHF, AUD, whatever)

Trump ran on an explicit promise to bring down grocery prices on day 1.

Grocery prices have continued to climb.

Absolutely nothing he has done could remotely be said to be aimed at bringing them down.

He has also instituted massive attacks on the power of labor, and on the offices that report on things like the unemployment rate.

"The economy" is not just the stock market; unemployment numbers literally cannot be trusted coming from Trump's BLS; and an inflation of 2.7% is, in fact, fairly high (it's 35% higher than the "target" rate of 2%).

Yes, and also pushing identity politics down voters’ throats, selecting an inept candidate without a primary, their desperate attempts to buy votes with debt forgiveness, and opening the border, which escalated to a full-blown crisis leading into election season.

If we extrapolate Trump’s health today compared to where he was at just a year or two ago, I think Republicans will face the same dilemma the Democrats did soon. It will be interesting to see how they handle it.

No, it's because Obama disillusioned the left, and Biden just hammered it home. Those who thought the Democrats could actually represent the "big tent" have all been disappointed over and over again by sheepdogging and ignoring popular issues with bipartisan support in favor of corporate interests with only an occasional performative nod towards liberal ideals. That's why the right showed up to vote and the left stayed home.

Biden was by far the most effective and most progressive Democratic president of the post-WWII era.

What "hammered home" the disillusionment was not Biden's actions*, but rather the media narrative built around him, particularly by the newspaper most identified with the Democratic Party: the New York Times. They were angry that he didn't give them deference early on, and that, combined with the desire of their wealthy Republican owner to push his politics, led to the constant drumbeat of stories about Biden's supposed "cognitive decline", when he's still much sharper than Trump.

ETA: ...not to mention totally ignoring all his very real accomplishments, like forgiving the student debt of millions of people (yes, despite not getting as many as he wanted, he really did achieve that) and the infrastructure bill.

* His inaction, particularly on prosecuting Trump, was a separate matter.

No amount of writing could ever outweigh that debate performance he had. He should have declined to run and let a primary winner enter the race with some momentum.

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