Politics & Stuff

[Fernando 6,455]

As with what @cosmicwayhas been saying lately now I'm also starting to doubt about last elections. 

That indeed Trump won the election and he was stolen. Because the amount he got voted for was totally against all the analysts and what not. 

So now I am questioning the elections of 2020 if indeed was stolen from Trump. 

[cosmicway 1,323]

50 minutes ago, Fernando said:

As with what @cosmicwayhas been saying lately now I'm also starting to doubt about last elections. 

That indeed Trump won the election and he was stolen. Because the amount he got voted for was totally against all the analysts and what not. 

So now I am questioning the elections of 2020 if indeed was stolen from Trump. 

I said it is apparent Harris had a big turnout problem.
Vesper said no because the total count is incomplete but it is 95% complete and I accept a downward correction.
Harris did not lose 12 million voters that did not go to Trump, i,e. what comes out without the correction, but 8-9 million.
That again is huge and reverses the result.
The theory those 2020 votes were not real but were pumped in is strange to me.
It necessitates USA is a Maduro-Ahmadinejad country - and that it happened right under the eyes of Donald Trump who was president.

Edited November 10 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,784]

3 hours ago, cosmicway said:

I said it is apparent Harris had a big turnout problem.
Vesper said no because the total count

I only said that the 12m less votes than Biden would not end up being accurate

I never said she didn't have a turnout problem

the Dems had a huge one

[Vesper 28,784]

3 hours ago, Fernando said:

As with what @cosmicwayhas been saying lately now I'm also starting to doubt about last elections. 

That indeed Trump won the election and he was stolen. Because the amount he got voted for was totally against all the analysts and what not. 

So now I am questioning the elections of 2020 if indeed was stolen from Trump. 

the 2020 elections was NOT stolen

ffs, that is the Big Lie

it is not backed up AT ALL by any substantative evidence whatsoever

its just pure bullshit

literally

you might as well say the earth is flat

 

 

[cosmicway 1,323]

20 minutes ago, Vesper said:

I only said that the 12m less votes than Biden would not end up being accurate

I never said she didn't have a turnout problem

the Dems had a huge one

The question is why.
It can't be immigrants.
Because I hear about this Mexico story the exact same things from the time I was in nursery school - therefore the dems did n't bother big time.
It can be Trump's "money exists" tale but also the dislike of overwokism.

Edited November 10 by cosmicway

[Fulham Broadway 16,837]

 

[Vesper 28,784]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

 

everyone in this forum should watch this

[Vesper 28,784]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

 

notice the Tel-Aviv Maccabi zionist RWers with a Trump flag as well:

[Vesper 28,784]

 

 

[KEVINAA 92]

BREAKING: ALERT!! PUTIN Declares War On Trump!!!

Lee Wheelbarger has worked with USA army military training and teaching soldiers battlefield training and technology weapons.

 

all videos and content in the Livestream of Putin vs Trump.

Edited November 11 by KEVINAA

[Vesper 28,784]

How Kamala Harris — and Joe Biden — lost to Donald Trump and left Democrats in shambles

The Democratic Party now finds itself grappling with how it lost so definitively, and how it so thoroughly misunderstood the American electorate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/09/harris-biden-trump-election-defeat/

When President Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, he surrounded himself with an insular circle of longtime aides, often prompting complaints about his operation being a black box. He refused to meet with his pollsters, and many on his campaign saw ads at the same time the public did — when they first ran.

“There was somewhere between never and hardly ever any real strategy conversation,” said one person familiar with the dynamic.

When Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden in July, the dynamic flipped. Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon insisted on having a larger role in the messaging process, and over several weeks in the late fall convened three “step back” messaging Zooms to strategize about how to negatively define former president Donald Trump. But the process, which included several dozen campaign officials, was unwieldy and struggled to alight on a message. Aides just fired ideas into the void — “You’d have someone say, ‘What about ‘Too Risky For Too Long?’” recounted one — and O’Malley Dillon and other senior advisers rejected the pollsters’ push for a single word: “Dangerous.”

Finally, the group settled on what they privately called the “Three U’s” or the “Triple U’s” — “Unhinged, unstable and unchecked.”Follow

Yet regardless of who was at the top of the ticket and who was running the show, it was the voter who got lost in the process. The American people had been crystal clear for months, as voters in other countries had in the face of post-covid inflation.

By a steep margin, Americans did not approve of Biden’s presidency. By an even steeper margin they thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. They were demanding a new direction that Democrats never figured out how to offer.

“The ‘Three U’s’ — no one in the campaign was able to remember it,” said one campaign aide. “How the hell is a voter supposed to remember it?”

A Harris campaign aide declined to comment on this portrait of her defeat.

Following Harris’s loss Tuesday — in which Trump made gains with nearly every single demographic group, leaving him poised to potentially win all seven battleground states and the popular vote — the Democratic Party now finds itself grappling with how it lost so definitively, and how it so thoroughly misunderstood the American electorate.

Democrats expect the party, donors and outside groups will eventually conduct autopsy reports to understand just how the race went awry. Donna Brazile, a Harris ally and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said “the next step for the Democrats is deep introspection,” adding that there needs to be a process to figure out what went wrong before the party decides on next steps and who should lead it.

“You don’t jump from one horse to another when you are riding on a donkey,” she said.

But a consensus has already emerged that the party failed to understand the average voter and their concerns — and focused too much on Trump, according to interviews with more than two dozen campaign aides, advisers, strategists and others, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid opinions about the party’s loss.

Like with any losing campaign, the finger-pointing and gripes have already begun to leak into public view. Many Democrats view the original sin as Biden’s decision to run for a second term, as well as his and his insular inner circle’s outright dismissal of anyone who raised alarms about his dwindling political prospects.

“Joe Biden is reason one, two and three why we lost,” a Harris aide said, noting that he was “totally underwater” in the polls when Harris replaced him at the top of the ticket.

Trump aides began to joke in the final weeks of the race that Biden was their best surrogate, as he briefly put on a Trump hat at one event less than 24 hours after Harris was viewed as the winner of the debate, later called for Trump to be “locked up … politically” and derisively referred to Trump supporters as “garbage” on a Zoom on the same evening Harris delivered her closing speech. “The guy was incredible,” a Trump adviser said.

Some Biden loyalists, meanwhile, fault the Obama-era technocrats, who they say first sniped at Biden from the outside — hobbling his candidacy — only to join the Harris campaign and cast themselves as saviors, armed with good data but a poor understanding of American anger in this moment. And others still have cast some blame on O’Malley Dillon, who they argue was a micromanager and whose team failed to win over voters on issues they cared about most, like immigration and the economy.

Some Harris allies were also alarmed when O’Malley Dillon appeared to try to engage on transition efforts. A campaign aide disputed that, arguing O’Malley Dillon only discussed necessary coordination between the campaign and transition teams.

Another group has begun to question a key assumption of many party strategists during the Biden years — that the central force in American politics was the backlash to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and the rejection of MAGA politics.

“It’s very simple: If you try to win elections by talking to the elites of this country, you’re going to get your ass kicked — there are not enough Beyonces, Oprahs or Hollywood elites to elect anyone,” said Chris Kofinis, former chief of staff to Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-West Virginia). “Trump is not the disease. He is the symptom. The disease is political, cultural, and economic elites who keep telling the public what they should think, feel and believe — and guess what they told them on Tuesday: Go to hell.”

More broadly, many Democrats view their defeat — with Trump making inroads with Latinos, first-time voters, and lower- and middle-income households, according to preliminary exit polls — not just as a series of tactical campaign blunders, but as evidence of a shattered party with a brand in shambles.

Two days after the election, OpenLabs, a Democratic data firm, produced a “first look” analysis of the results, obtained by The Washington Post. They found the biggest swings away from Harris were in areas with larger populations of Asian American and Hispanic voters. They also found that counties with bigger shares of Muslim and Jewish voters also swung toward Trump. Two Trump advisers said they could not believe that they were able, for example, to beat Harris in Dearborn, Michigan.

“Obviously this is a major reckoning for the Democratic Party in terms of, particularly as it relates to young men, Black and Hispanic voters and rural voters,” said Jef Pollock, a Biden and Harris campaign pollster. “If the economy were perceived by voters as swimming, things might be different. But for now, it’s clear these voters I’m talking about — particularly young men, Black men, Hispanic men, and rural White voters — do not see the Democrats as addressing their everyday needs, and that’s something we need to think about holistically.”

Pollock added: “That is not a Kamala Harris thing. That is a larger thing.”

Adam Jentleson, a Democratic strategist who served as chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania), similarly criticized the Democratic Party for having prioritized “coalition management” — essentially kowtowing to far-left interest groups — over “the smart and effective practice of politics for many, many years.”

The challenge of inflation, Jentleson said, became insurmountable in an environment where large swaths of the country had come to believe that Democrats “are preoccupied with the narrow interests of college-educated elite activists more than everyday working people.”

Trump and Harris aides alike, for instance, agree that comments Harris made during the 2020 Democratic primaries — where, in the words of one Harris aide, Democrats competed for the party’s progressive base by saying “absolutely bananas stuff” — came back to haunt her as her party’s nominee four years later. Specifically, they point to her support for using tax dollars to provide gender-affirming surgeries for federal prisoners and detained immigrants, which provided the Trump campaign with one of its most devastating lines of attack against her. Trump advisers could not believe how well the ad tested.

“Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you,” intoned the narrator on the Trump campaign’s ad that tested best.

Though voters in focus groups said they were not specifically going to base their vote on that issue, it helped perpetuate the Trump campaign message that she was “dangerously liberal,” as well as out of touch with the average American.

At one point, as Harris readied for her debate with Trump, her team prepared an answer on the question of transgender athletes in women’s sports, intended to cast her as more middle-of-the-road on the issue, according to one person familiar with the plan. But the moderators never asked her about the topic, and she did not choose to bring it up on her own in another forum.

In addition to the broader headwinds — including inheriting a campaign built for an unpopular incumbent just over 100 days before Election Day — the Harris campaign also made some tactical blunders, according to aides and outside strategists.

Chief among them, some argue, was the decision to elevate former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who was ousted from her party after she became a vocal Trump critic, as a top surrogate for the vice president’s campaign.

In late October, Harris and Cheney did a joint tour of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan as part of an effort to win over Republican-leaning and independent voters, particularly women. But some aides and many Democrats outside the campaign argued the voters who found Cheney’s message appealing were already going to vote for Harris — she did very little, if anything, to move undecided voters.

The campaign also seized on highly critical comments from some of Trump’s former top aides, specifically John F. Kelly, his former chief of staff, who called Trump a fascist. Some worried that backfired, particularly when Harris said during a CNN town hall that she agreed with Kelly’s assessment.

Aides say it would have been better for her to separate herself from the characterization and encourage voters to listen to the people who knew Trump best. Instead, the headlines from her CNN appearance focused on her calling Trump a fascist, and in turn, her effort to paint Trump as “unhinged, unstable and unchecked” became overtaken by the fascist label.

In a similar vein, Democrats, including former president Barack Obama, had reservations about Harris’s decision to deliver her closing argument speech from the Ellipse, where Trump spoke just before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Aides were adamant the speech was not centered on Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 — and in her remarks, Harris sought to connect concerns about Trump’s behavior to people’s everyday lives — but the Jan. 6 symbolism carried the day.

The election results, Democrats concede, demonstrate the voters were willing to overlook Trump’s character — and the Democratic Party suffered because they focused too much on bashing Trump, and not on how they would improve voters’ lives.

In other moments, Harris’s campaign found itself caught flat-footed. When she visited the southern border in late September, for instance, she and her aides had no idea that the same afternoon a top official at ICE would release damaging immigration numbers to a Republican congressman. Her team was shocked when the numbers emerged as she was in transit to the border, advisers said.

More broadly, some aides attributed the shift away from Harris in reliably blue states like New York, New Jersey and Illinois as a repudiation of the party’s handling of immigration. Many of those states have seen an influx of migrants, some bused by Republican governors, and Democrats in major cities have struggled to respond.

When some of the major unions did not endorse Harris, it was a red flag, advisers said, not because the unions endorsements on their face would matter that much — but that leadership clearly knew their members were inclined to vote for Trump in large margins. Several advisers said the campaign did not do enough to address those concerns.

In the final weeks of the race, the campaign realized they were hemorrhaging Black and Latino voters, an adviser said, partially driving Harris’s media schedule and economic plans that were meant to cater to those groups. “But it was too little, too late,” this person said.

Another concern in hindsight was the campaign’s decision to spend heavily on celebrity concerts in the final stretch of the campaign, while still failing to achieve their intended goal of demonstrating widespread enthusiasm for Harris across the nation and turning out more pro-Harris voters to the polls.

In some ways, the scale of the wave that returned Trump to office was so striking that Harris advisers and other Democrats argue that no gaffe by the vice president, or strategic decision by the campaign, would have ultimately changed the outcome.

Democratic donors spent more on this presidential election than ever before — likely around $2 billion. They built a campaign with massive financial advantages, a much bigger volunteer footprint, many more ads and a smaller battleground than any election in recent decades. And the campaign had an impact: A Cook Political Report analysis found a three-point swing to Trump across the battlegrounds between 2020 and 2024; across the other 43 states, the swing was nearly seven points.

“My main takeaway from all the post-election analysis is that hindsight is not 20/2o,” said Geoff Garin, a Biden and Harris pollster. “The defining realities for this election were dissatisfaction with the economy and disapproval of President Biden and they created enormous headwinds for Vice President Harris to fight through … Harris had 107 days to introduce herself to a huge swath of the electorate and to litigate a multipart case for her election. No one in the history of American politics has been able to do that.”

Once Harris took over, some aides wanted her to create distance from Biden — believing she could not win unless she drew sharp contrasts with the unpopular president.

One of Harris’s biggest mistakes, advisers said, was an answer she gave on “The View,” a popular morning talk show. When asked if she had any disagreements with Biden, she said she could not think of any, immediately sparking joy among Trump’s advisers.

Furthermore, she was not interested in moving away from Biden, the people said, describing weeks of conversations about the idea that went nowhere. If she was critical, would she seem inauthentic? Would voters believe it? And if she was going to create distance, where? These were all questions the campaign grappled with — and never answered.

In marketing terms, moreover, the Democrats turned out to have a brand problem that could not be overcome by repositioning the product.

“We did okay on the product marketing. We moved the needle in those battleground states but the brand problems persist when people think the country is on the wrong track and are feeling the headwinds of inflation,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who worked for Future Forward, the largest Democratic-leaning super PAC, and other groups. “The best field goal kicker in the world can’t get through the uprights if they are kicking from their own 20-yard line.”

[Vesper 28,784]

The voter shift that should alarm Democrats most

Data shows the urban liberal bubble is on the verge of bursting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/10/voter-shift-trump-cities/

Donald Trump won more votes than he had before almost everywhere in the United States. Voters shifted right in rural areas, in suburbs and even in New York City. But it’s the urban areas that should unnerve Democrats most. These places are led by liberal mayors and city councils. They are diverse, and they are economically powerful.

Take a look at America’s 50 biggest local economies (as measured by GDP in 2022). In 2020, Trump won only one of them. In 2024, he took nine and made significant gains in nearly all of them. He flipped Miami, Phoenix (Maricopa County), Orange County, Calif. (near Los Angeles) and Nassau County, N.Y., on Long Island. It was the best showing in urban areas for a Republican since 2004. His gains reversed an urban shift toward Democrats that had seemed locked in since the Obama years.

To put this another way: Vice President Kamala Harris won 459 counties that account for 62 percent of U.S. economy, but that was a big drop from Biden’s 70 percent in 2020, and worse even than Hillary Clinton’s 64 percent in 2016.

While Trump is known for his appeal in left-behind parts of America, in this election, voters in the wealthiest places made the biggest shift toward Republicans.

Democrats lost 3.7 percent of American voters overall compared with 2020, and they lost 4.2 percent of those who live in areas where the median household income is over $105,000. These include urban and suburban places such as San Francisco, San Jose (Santa Clara County) in California, Seattle (King County) in Washington, and Long Island in New York.Follow

What happened? In large part, the shift reflects how much voters hate inflation. Across all income groups, they registered their frustration with the economy under President Joe Biden.

However, said John Lettieri, president of the Economic Innovation Group, “The places that shifted the hardest to Trump were the largest, most expensive places.”

Lettieri’s team was early to identify how, during the pandemic, people with young children left cities in a “family flight” for larger homes with yards in the suburbs, where their money went further. In this election, the city-dwellers who stayed behind voiced their frustration at the ballot box.

The pandemic hurt high-cost urban areas in other ways, too. Long lockdown periods made it especially difficult to bounce back. Some cities experienced crime spikes. And although violent crime has fallen back to pre-pandemic levels in most places, unease persists. This has influenced mayoral elections, too. San Francisco just elected a new mayor, and North Miami’s mayoral race is going to a runoff.

Urban areas with large non-White populations seem to have felt the most frustration. Much has been written about how Hispanic men were drawn to Trump in this election. But in cities, there’s more to it than that. The data suggests that urban, non-White, working-class people have been turning away from Democrats and increasingly voting Republican for the past few election cycles.

As the chart below shows, major metropolitan counties with a large share of non-White voters shifted more toward Trump than more heavily White urban areas did.

The correlation between a county’s non-White voting population and its shift toward Trump isn’t nearly as strong in suburban or rural areas.

Democrats will spend months thinking about what all of this means. Globally, incumbents faced a backlash during the worldwide inflation spike. This suggests that small changes in policy or campaigning would not have made much difference in the U.S. election. But as Democrats look forward, they confront an urgent need to reconnect with working-class voters. A good place to start would be in urban areas.

Mayors and city councils would be wise to focus their attention on the cost of housing. This has long been a top concern in New York City, and now it worries the entire country. Local leaders can influence how many homes are built in their communities by adjusting zoning rules and building codes. Local “build, build, build” agendas won’t solve Democrats’ problem entirely, but they are a good place to start.

If Democrats can’t again appeal to non-White and working-class voters in cities, this election may signal the start of a long deterioration in the party’s voter base.

The county vote counts for the 2024 presidential elections are based on results reported as of Nov. 8 by the Associated Press. A handful of counties are still counting votes as of Sunday.

Edited November 11 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,784]

Democrats face a reckoning and a long rebuilding. There is no quick fix.

Donald Trump’s commanding victory left Democrats adrift. They must first understand why they lost before figuring out how to rebuild.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/10/how-democrats-rebuild-after-defeat/

The question was asked countless times over the past few years: What is the future of the Republican Party? That question was answered on Tuesday by the voters. The party’s future is its present: President-elect Donald Trump. The pertinent question now is what is the future of the Democratic Party?

Defeat has launched a reckoning for Democrats. Ahead of Tuesday, many Democrats could not fathom that Trump could prevail, let alone win the popular vote, as he appears to be headed for while many ballots have yet to be counted. The search for answers has begun.

Start with some fundamentals. This was a tough environment for the incumbent party. President Joe Biden’s approval rating on Election Day was 40 percent positive and 59 percent negative, according to network exit polls. Even in an era when politicians have uniformly low approval ratings, that 59 percent negative judgment was an anchor that weighted down Vice President Kamala Harris.

On Election Day, 68 percent of voters said the economy was either “not so good” or “poor,” according to exit polls. Democrats wanted voters to focus on low unemployment, sustained if modest growth and a stock market that continued to expand everyone’s retirement accounts. Voters had another view: 46 percent said their family’s finances were worse today than four years ago while 24 percent said they were better; 75 percent said inflation had caused a moderate or severe hardship on them or their families.

Overall, voters were in a sour mood. In the exit polls, 73 percent said they were either dissatisfied or angry. This was an environment in which voters were calling for change — as they have in every election since 2006, except for 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected. Of the 28 percent of the electorate who said finding the candidate who could bring needed change was their priority, Trump won them by nearly 3 to 1.

Given all that, it’s not so surprising that the party that held the White House and the Senate was driven out of power. Amid all the internecine finger-pointing about what Harris and her campaign could or should have done differently, and those questions are legitimate, it’s important to remember how much fundamentals affect the outcome of elections.

In the midterm elections two years from now, if Trump fails to deliver on the broad promises of his campaign, if the economy falters, if a Trumpian Republican Party without overwhelming strength in Congress proves incapable of governing effectively, Democrats could believe they are truly on the rebound. If history is any guide, and in the Trump era that’s not always a safe assumption, Democrats are likely to make gains in Congress in 2026.

Beyond the climate that burdened Harris, however, last week’s election highlighted the challenges Democrats have to confront to wrest power back. Trump has accelerated a realignment of the American electorate based on education, which has been the most significant fault line in politics since his first campaign in 2016. In 2024, it proved to be more significant than the gender gap, which drew huge attention but turned out not to be any larger than recent norms.

Colleagues at The Washington Post offered insight into this with an article analyzing the electorate that put Trump in the White House for a second time. The conclusion: The Trump coalition in 2024 was more diverse, younger and more working-class than the coalition that voted for him previously.

Voters without college degrees supported Trump by a margin of 14 percentage points, the most for any Republican since 1984. In that year, Ronald Reagan won them by 19 percentage points en route to a landslide victory by winning 59 percent of the popular vote and carrying 49 states. Trump managed to attract these working-class voters though his popular vote percentage currently stands at about 51 percent.

Trump’s coalition remains overwhelmingly White in its makeup, but one reason he has expanded his coalition is the shift in support among Latinos, particularly Latino men. Nationally, Trump carried Latino men by 54 percent to 44 percent. His support grew by 19 percentage points from 2020. In Texas and in Florida, he won Latino men with 64 percent of the votes.

Increasingly it appears that the Hispanic vote will be up for grabs, rather than solidly Democratic. That’s a huge change that Democrats cannot ignore. And it speaks to the broader decline in support among working-class voters generally.

Political parties are not static institutions. They are organic, capable of adapting and responding to setbacks. What this requires is not playing the blame game internally or looking for scapegoats or criticizing those for voting the other way. It requires sober analysis, a sound theory of the way back and a leader who can distill that into a winning campaign.

The most effective presidential candidates are often those who can define or redefine their party, as Trump and Obama did, rather than simply being defined by the party. Harris, because she entered so late in the election cycle, because she was the vice president and because she had not independently carved out an identity when she ran in the 2020 campaign, was defined by her party at a time when there was dissatisfaction with its leadership.

In some ways, the Democrats have faced worse moments. Republicans scored three huge presidential victories in 1980, 1984 and 1988, winning a total of 1,437 electoral votes to 173 for the Democrats. By 1992, voters were turning out an incumbent Republican president, George H.W. Bush, and handing the presidency to Bill Clinton, a Democrat. By 1996, Clinton was winning voters without college educations by 14 percentage points — an almost complete reversal of Reagan’s strength from 12 years earlier.

Clinton was part of a larger effort to assess the party’s problems, with deep research by pollster Stanley Greenberg into why working-class voters in Macomb County, Michigan, were defecting and with much of the intellectual thinking and testing run through a centrist group known as the Democratic Leadership Council.

It was left to Clinton, however, to synthesize all this into a compelling package, one that sought to de-emphasize the party’s most significant vulnerabilities, though not abandoning them wholesale, and finding new policies and ideas designed to change the image of the party in ways that would bring voters back.

The losses Democrats suffered on Tuesday were not of the numerical magnitude of the Republican victories in the 1980s. Harris lost Wisconsin by less than a percentage point, Michigan by less than 2 points, Pennsylvania by 3 points. Trump’s electoral college majority, after he was projected Saturday to have won in Arizona, the last state to be called, is 312, smaller than both of Obama’s totals in 2008 and 2012.

But that doesn’t mean the Democrats’ problems are not severe. In an era when there are few swing states, when most are either solidly blue or solidly red, winning working-class voters — whether Whites in places like those three Northern states or Latinos in the Southwest — is critical. And at the same time, Democrats must energize Black voters in the cities and suburban voters as well.

Today there are competing ideas about what the party must do to win back more working-class voters. For some on the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) being the leading proponent, that means a more robust and populist economic program. Sanders lost that fight to Biden in the 2020 primaries, but the party’s progressive wing remains robust. For others, however, it means hewing even more to center-left policies, a recognition that many voters judged Harris as too far left for their tastes.

Trump and his campaign seized on immigration. They lied about Haitian migrants eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. Democrats were understandably outraged. But they underestimated broader concerns of voters about what had been a surge of undocumented immigrants coming into the country. When Republican governors sent busloads of migrants to northern cities, Democratic officeholders had to plead with the White House to help them deal with the strain on resources.

The Trump campaign also exploited the Democrats’ embrace of identity politics and specifically for transgender rights with an ad attacking Harris for advocating for gender-affirming care for prison inmates paid for by taxpayers. The tagline on the ad said, “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.” The Democrats can’t afford to be judged as too woke by too many voters, lest they leave themselves vulnerable to just this kind of attack.

Clinton’s New Democrat formulation is a thing of the past. Some of the policies from that era have been rejected, especially some of the tough-on-crime measures that resulted in massive incarcerations of Black men. What worked then is not a prescription for what will work now.

The country has changed, and the Democratic Party has changed. The Democratic Party is centered more than ever in big urban centers and has lost touch with too many voters in rural areas. Its coalition is more diverse and more difficult to unite. It has lost some of its economic identity while identity politics of a different kind have taken on more significance.

What is most valuable to remember as Democrats begin this period of self-reflection is that what took place many years ago was an intellectual exercise with a political objective. The product was also something that did not enjoy immediate acceptance. Clinton had to formulate it and then test it in the real world of politics against opposition from others in the party, in a competition of ideas before he could take it to the country as a whole.

Too often in these moments, political parties look for an easy fix — a new message or a charismatic messenger. Those are necessary but not sufficient. The problems Democrats now confront are complicated and years in the making. Listening is the first step — understanding why many people were willing or even wanted to vote for Trump, given his obvious flaws — and building from what they learn. Only after that can they begin to regain the trust needed to be able to compete in places where they have been left behind.

Edited November 11 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,784]

10 hours ago, cosmicway said:

The question is why.
It can't be immigrants.
Because I hear about this Mexico story the exact same things from the time I was in nursery school - therefore the dems did n't bother big time.
It can be Trump's "money exists" tale but also the dislike of overwokism.

 

There are a tonne of reasons I will lay out over the next month

BUT

let's start with 3 big ones:

1. The Democrats never should have publically embraced and campaigned with hard RW neocons (the so-called Never-Trumper Republicans). That dismayed vast swathes of the Dem's base and at the same time yielded few R's to switch over to the Dems to replace the lost Dem base voters. Same for Biden's zionist boot-licking (in actual deeds, not his hollow words).

2. The RW is VASTLY better at social media, podcasts, and old school talk radio (plus Fox News). Social media is a pox, and AI is now making it far worse. Some their messaging depressed LW turnout, as the constant droning that America is fucked (how ironic) led many casual Dem voters to develop a feeling of hopelessness and also fear (of voting) via intimidation. Plus it also vaused a shedload of traditional Dem voters to swith to supporting the Repubs (which also lowered Dem vot toatals of course).

3. Because of the 2 centre-RW Democratic Senators (the POS's Joe Manchin of WV and Kyrsten Sinema of AZ) refusing to carve out a filibuster exception for 2 massively vital voting rights acts back in 2022, the Rethugs (at every level, from precinct up to statewide level) purged and voter supressed the hell out of millions of Dem voters nationwide via a myriad number of malign ways.

[robsblubot 3,502]

12 hours ago, cosmicway said:

The question is why.
It can't be immigrants.
Because I hear about this Mexico story the exact same things from the time I was in nursery school - therefore the dems did n't bother big time.
It can be Trump's "money exists" tale but also the dislike of overwokism.

I will partially disagree with Vesper above. Agreed regarding the social media aspect, which is undeniable and isn't a new problem.

I wrote long time ago on this thread, that Harris wasn't a very good candidate. I confess that I expected Jan 6 to have a much bigger, or ANY!, effect in this election, but the GOP and Trump managed to completely control the narrative this time around--see point above.

Migrants from South America are difficult to handle by dems: they tend to be very religious (GOP advantage) and are used to have a "strong man" as leader/president (current favors GOP). They don't like open borders, because they are afraid that the next batch of illegals (or not) will take *their job* or at least lower wages (abundant supply).

Woke is a complicated term because it is a good thing, an idea about inclusion. Then there is the various forms of *implementing it* which is what are IMO incredibly unpopular. GOPs most effective ads, usually during NFL games, were about ID politics. DeSantis has become very popular in FL just going after ID politics and little else.

For this reason, I'm not very optimistic about midterms in 26, unless the Trump administration itself becomes very unpopular--a possibility too.

 

[Vesper 28,784]

46 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

I will partially disagree with Vesper above.

What exactly are you disagreeing with me about?

I in no way remotely listed all of the many reasons why Trump won.

I just put out 3 reasons for a depressed Democratic turnout, and those 3 are not the only ones.

If you disagree with those 3 reasons for depressed turnout, then please do elaborate as to why.

 

 

[Vesper 28,784]

Trump Wins The White House. Again. - Jonathan Pie

lol

'real life Bond villain Elon Musk beavering away on X spreading a flurry of slurry across the Gooniverse and Jeff Bezos crouched in a fellating position ready to receive the Royal orange cock of the tax dodging multi-millionaire'

 

great comment:

Edited November 11 by Vesper

[robsblubot 3,502]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

What exactly are you disagreeing with me about?

I in no way remotely listed all of the many reasons why Trump won.

I just put out 3 reasons for a depressed Democratic turnout, and those 3 are not the only ones.

If you disagree with those 3 reasons for depressed turnout, then please do elaborate as to why.

 

 

For example, I don’t buy #1. It’s Harris they did not feel exited about no one else.

Obama could kiss Liz one the stage and the crowds would still go out and vote for him.

we also need to to factor in the similar message in Congress.