I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
You give them something real to vote for. Give them a reason to turn out. And there’s a reliable way to do that. Hard policy. Universal Healthcare. Free education. Raising wages. Stuff that actually improves people’s living conditions in their daily lives.
Because believe it or not, The World’s Most Powerful Military and genocide do not excite any democrats that aren’t members of the DNC Services Corp.
Everyone is so focused on the genocide angle, but governments left and right throughout the world who were in power during the post COVID inflation spike got the boot. Most economist with froth at the mouth about “deflationary spirals” wherein people who have been waiting 15 years to buy a new pair of pants will wait a couple more years to buy it when prices start going down and thus cause an economic downturn. However, the general public believed that “getting inflation under control” meant going back to the original prices, something the (independent of Biden) federal reserve would never let happen because deflation = bad. Once the inflation spike occurred, Biden could have had 0% inflation from Nov 2022 to the election, and people still would have voted him out due to prices being too high.
Y’know what this thread has made me realize? All the dumb memes of “the left fighting the left” are bullshit. I can respectfully debate other people on the left with me. I can change their minds about some things, they can change my mind on some things, we can come to compromises. I don’t agree with the communist 100%, but I agree with them at least 70-80%, and would happily work alongside them to accomplish that 70-80%.
You know who loves infighting though? Centrists who have deluded themselves into thinking they are leftists. You can find comment after comment in this thread from right-leaning centrists, gleefully demanding that they were “right all along” and how everything is our fault for just not being as smart as them. There is no political group that loves infighting as much as them, even more than the fascists. They want to spend the next four years trying to find out all the ways they can assign blame to the left, instead of organizing and doing anything.
They can’t answer since they were bots
Democracy is being dismantled as we speak. Agency by agency, loyalist by loyalist, executive order by executive order. And instead of building community, helping each other and organizing with those around you, I see people, who supposedly care about democracy, about human rights, about those they accuse; and what are they doing? They are blaming people who are powerless and desparing. Thereby further dividing the populace and making the takeover easier for the fascists in power. Be careful: You are telling on yourselves and your values. And we can see you.
I find it funny how everyone blames everyone except for the Republicans who voted for Trump.
I advocated for voting for Harris, and did so when the time came. I also don’t think this blame game gets us anywhere, and I’m already a little sick of talking about it.
I’m also done defending the Democratic Party as a whole. Individuals, yes, but not the party. I’m realizing through this that I have a certain reflexive need to correct misinformation about Democrats, but I’m clamping down on it.
We had a choice between voting in a system that allows us some power to dissent and have a voice versus… this. The frustrating thing is this situation was just as advertised in Project 25, and then some.
We did not have an ideal choice, but we still had one. Now, here we find ourselves.
Whenever I look in the mirror, it reminds me of how others are to blame
The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
Give them something to vote for. You can write articles of many paragraphs to analyze the course of the election, but in the end it boils down to this: The DNC pissed off too many of their voters and offered nothing in return.
Exactly this! You can’t just “lesser of two evils” your way through life as you slide towards hell. “Lesser of two evils” isn’t a choice, it’s a hostage situation.
I had some vote blue no matter who nitwit yelling at me the other day about this. i asked them what are we supposed to do when 2028 is Mitt Romney (D) vs Trump ®. They said you vote Romney.
People who voter shame others when both parties have crossed their personal morals are the reason the Democats don’t ever run on anything substative. They have forgotten they have to earn votes. They’re not owed.
And they have forgotten that when they lose, real people suffer deeply for it. The democrats sin of apathy is often worse than the republican sin of cruelty. At least the republicans are honest about how they want to screw over the country.
Here is Chomsky explaining why yes, that is the more logical choice
https://chomsky.info/an-eight-point-brief-for-lev-lesser-evil-voting/
I had some nitwit self-described Chomsky-anarchist the other day who sounded a lot like you, went real quite after I shared that.
Choosing the bigger evil ain’t the way out of it though. Unless you are an accelerationist that believes things have to get worse before it can get better.
You can’t get out of a hostage situation by making out with either of the two bank robbers.
no one is making out, but you if it’s life or death you would listen to their demands until help arrives/opportunities arise.
This ‘logic’ (and metaphors are not logic) is why help isn’t coming.
then are people actually punching the robbers themselves?
The reality right now is the bigger robbers are now taking things even more brazenly.
By not voting, you are telling both robbers “both of you are free to do whatever you want”
God I hate the stupidity of blue MAGA.
I did vote. You don’t know me.
Your stupidity, and the reason you can justifiably be called blue MAGA, is that you don’t understand what the primary responsibility of the politician is, and instead blame the political parties failures on the voters. Because the Democratic Party can never fail. They can only be failed, right?
There is one group that can and should be blamed for identifying, and then happily handing power over to fascists. Hint: it isn’t the voters.
Blaming the voters is some Stockholm syndrome level bullshit to protect the campaign consultants and other unelected assholes that got rich off of this loss. That is who you are protecting.
The lesser of the two evils didn’t go after the bigger evil, offered nothing, said the economy was doing great as people suffered higher rent and groceries, and then wondered why people listened to the lying devil saying that they would fix their problems.
They don’t want to offer solutions, they want votes.
Yeah. No matter how I look at it, this seems to be the only real solution that would have helped.
Gaza was bombed into a parking lot under the Biden admin. Harris was going to continue Biden’s policies. Liberals are just mad because now the policies Trump is implementing affects them. They never cared about Palestinians.
They gleefully wanted blood on the ground, they’re just upset it’s not them doing it. Now they can pretend to care again.
Give them something to vote for.
This. We saw the energy and joy when Biden dropped out, and it was reflected by Harris almost matching Obama’s small donor numbers. Hope. Change. They were simple campaign slogans, but people coming out of the Bush era wanted to believe, and had a candidate to believe in.
It’s a damning indictment that my most genuine electoral engagement, in my entire adult life, was voting “Uncommitted” in the 2024 Democratic primary. That was my most enthusiastic, “I 100% support this” vote ever, because almost every other time has been against something/one, or accepting lesser. From ballot initiatives, Senate races, down to the local comptroller chair.
Contrast that to my vote for Kamala in the general afterwards. It’s so unbelievably hollow to say “our democracy is strong” when the choice is always ‘well they’re better than them’.
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I was, I think pretty obviously, talking about their 2024 election platform here.
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The DNC platform was free medicine, money out of politics, and taxing the rich.
If they could have resurrected a Unicorn live on stage and it could have magically cured cancer in the radius as thanks: people would still be shitting on them all over the internet.
The DNC platform was free medicine, money out of politics, and taxing the rich.
Money out of politics? From the DNC? Do you seriously believe this? When was the last time Hardis talked about this in her campaign?
They voted on campaign finance caps and limitations in 1995 and 2002 which passed and was sued by Citizens United in 2007 when 5 republican leaning SCOTUS judges struck it down as unconstitutional, and the DNC tried to pass more campaign finance laws recently with HR 1 For the People Act in 2019 and 2021 and again as Freedom to Vote Act in 2021 and 2023.
So yes, the DNC have actively attempted to pass campaign finances for over 20 years. That’s a core part of their platform.
Admittedly I didn’t know that, but also where was any of that in their 2024 platform? When was the last time Harris included getting money out of politics in her campaign speeches?
I think they focused too much on emotions and cowboys in their advertisements as well, but it’s not like they never stated their intentions. People just don’t talk about this stuff in social media, these days, and thats sadly exactly where most people hear about politics in general.
The reason I’m asking is that the Harris campaign progressively dropped or watered down its promises throughout the campaign. For example the wealth tax promise started out good (I don’t remember how much) and ended up as an unfulfilled Biden-era promise. Statements or promises from the early part of the campaign, let alone from before the campaign, don’t reflect the choice voters had at the ballot box. One example would be the DNC going from rejecting the border wall to promising to build it.
The US Tax Laws dont expire until 2026.
Trump and the GOP wrote the last round in his previous term and we gave him the power to write this next round as well.
The fact is despite all of the great bills passed under Biden and all the great things the regulatory bodies did by going after big businesses, we gave them a neutered congress that couldnt even pick a senate majority without VP Tiebreaker, much less clear the 60 votes needed to bypass filibuster.
The Democratic platform is really quite leftwing. It contains things like increasing the minimum wage, getting money out of politics etc etc. The problem is in how they run campaigns. The role of consultants is far too big, and this lets the GOP set the agenda.
Example: The GOP talks about the border constantly->media reports on the border-> voters in focus groups report caring deeply about the border->Dems campaign on the border (arguably their weakest point).
If Kamala had campaigned heavily on healthcare (say expanding Medicare), she could have shifted part of the focus away from the border and towards healthcare (the GOPs weakest point), which shifts the momentum.
The same happened with many other topics. The campaign talked about the economy (whatever that means, but somehow voters associate this with GOP), rather than raising minimum wages or building homes (a strength of Dems). Climate change was never even mentioned throughout the campaign.
Dems have to find a way to lead the conversation, rather than follow a conversation set by the GOP or they will never win.
The DNC platform in general has a lot of leftwing policy yes. However, they’re very… noncommittal about it. The party leadership is a bunch of geriatric centrists who only pass some progressive policy among an ocean of status quo centrism. However, that part alone is… fine. It’s not good, but not really a big problem. The big problem is how they sideline their leftwing platform whenever there’s an opportunity where they think they can do that without being flayed by voters, such as in this election. I’ll paste my reply to the other guy here.
The reason I’m asking is that the Harris campaign progressively dropped or watered down its promises throughout the campaign. For example the wealth tax promise started out good (I don’t remember how much) and ended up as an unfulfilled Biden-era promise. Statements or promises from the early part of the campaign, let alone from before the campaign, don’t reflect the choice voters had at the ballot box. One example would be the DNC going from rejecting the border wall to promising to build it.
Part of this is bad campaigning, yes, but it’s also undeniable that they actively attempted to shift to the right in this election. They didn’t campaign on progressive economic policy because, if they did, they’d find themselves obliged to make good on at least some of those promises, which would piss off their donors. I mean remember the “nothing really comes to mind comment”? Talking about the wrong things is one thing, but when asked about the right things the Democrats gave very wrong answers.
I think they offered more than most people see on social media. Their messaging isn’t great and I’ve seen a lot more left-leaning youtube channels talk about them but not outside of that.
Then again, I’m also not American so I don’t know.
Lastly, the non-voters are as much to blame in my opinion. If you didn’t know you should have voted, that’s on you.
Giving subisidies to green energy companies and improving the GDP doesn’t tangibly improve people’s lives in 4 years and that’s what people wanted.
It also takes longer than 4 years to rebound everyone out of the spiral Trump left the nation in. I think messaging around realistic goals and checkpoints could go a very long way to allowing people to understand no President is going to save everyone in a single term, or probably in 2 terms, especially if they have a crater to climb out of just to start at zero. Real change is a long term goal, it would take multiple administrations working towards a goal.
Americans are not educated enough to understand any of that.
They’re hurting finantially, so they get mad and vote out the incumbent.
Democrats push policy like the avg american went to their ivy league schools.
It’s not even really that, it’s just that home loans of like 10,000 to people who have made rent for the past 2 years and have a salary of over 80,000 but not over 200,000 and own a small business and own at least 2 cats but not over 3 cats and have a birthmark in the shape of a strawberry, isn’t very enticing or hopeful policy. Neither is campaigning with liz cheney when like 200,000 people are being killed with US bombs.
That’s sorta the problem with the Harris/Walz campaign, and why I’m thinking this was malice rather than stupidity. Their policy on their website and a lot of the early rhetoric was very progressive, which led to Harris getting the highest single day of donations and the largest number of small donations the DNC has ever seen.
After the money had poured in from all us poors, including my $20, the campaign started shifting its message further and further rightward to appeal to more and more corporate donors, all the while still asking progressives for more money. Eventually, the speeches being given stopped matching the previously posted policy platform at all, and we started to get the absolute insane shit like Obama telling black men to fall in line.
I think they offered more than most people see on social media.
The problem is that they made big promises in the early Harris campaign, then continuously abandoned them and watered them down until the campaign became a shadow of its former self. Equally problematic is that they continued to shift to the right and adopt policies that are unpopular with their base. I mean remember the border wall? And of course let’s not ignore the elephant in the room that was Gaza.
“DNC gave me nothing in return so I’ll let the US slide out of democracy”
Smart. Those pissed off voters? Fuck them.
Okay I’m getting sick of the whole “the dems failed us” bullshit.
WE failed. WE let this happen. WE had the choice between an obvious dictator or continued democracy.
You can shift the blame all you want but at the end of the day it was an obvious choice. You can come up with any other excuse you want. If you didn’t vote for Harris you are to blame. Period. End of fucking story.
Edit: The dems should’ve been able to run a wet paper bag against Trump and win. The fuck is wrong with people to not see that?
Ultimately yes, its the fault of the voters (and non voters) who let their emotions cloud their judgement. Thats true whether you like it or not. Especially if Gaza was your main issue; if you saw both candidates and thought Trump was better for the situation, you need to seriously look inward and consider your reasoning abilities.
That being said, the opposition party does not get off the hook so easily here. The fact that Trump could win despite everything he said is a total and utter failure. Their strategy is bad, and they refuse to acknoledge it because to do so means that they need to upend their internal heirarchy. They have buried their heads in the sand when it comes to accepting the playing field of politics right now, and quite frankly as a party they look incredibly weak.
In other words, to not acknoledge that the election was theirs to lose is also denying reality
How do you change voter behavior?
You don’t. If you want someone to vote for you, you need to provide something that they want. The point of democracy is not to change the people to fit what the rulers want, it’s to change the rules to what the people want. If you can’t do that, the people don’t want you.
It’s also to appeal to candidates , which doesn’t get talked about enough in the case of Gaza
Joe and Kamala did nothing to appeal to those voters, going so far as to cancel a Palestinian speaker at the DNC who agreed to have her entire speech vetted
so why arent we pointing the finger at them?
If you can’t do that, the people don’t want you.
If you can’t do that, it’s not democracy. It’s a charade to pacify to public and manufacture legitimacy for the current regime.
I keep ruminating on this argument, and it gives me deeply split feelings.
On one hand I keep thinking, voters need to grow up. Voting is how the populace gets to engage in self governance, i.e. politics, and as the aphorism goes, Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. Things that are easy aren’t solved by politics, and the voters need to accept that you’re often not going to get what you want and in governance you often have to settle for choosing the thing you hate the least.
On the other hand, I keep thinking I’m making the classic leftist mistake of demanding everyone should do what I think is right, because I am right, and then being frustrated when my rightness isn’t blindingly obvious to everyone.
Like the lady says, It’s like rain on your wedding day…
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: You don’t run for office with the electorate you want, you run for office with the electorate you have.
Well that’s a lie, with voter suppression and gerrymandering you can have your dream electorate!
Well then, our troubles are deeper than we know.
On the right as long as you talk a good game on lowering taxes they’ll put aside any and all espoused convictions. See how quiet the Libertarians got when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Turns out any time I spent debating the preeminence of personal liberty and the NAP was a big fat waste of my time. Alas.
On the left we have an electorate that “…would rather be right than president,” and it turns out they get to be neither.
Most Americans align closer with progressives than any other group when it comes to policy. But messaging has been coopted by the Republicans to make people instinctively hate “socialism” because of the Red Scare Propaganda.
But Democrats block progressive policy because it makes their donors angry.
So really there’s nobody willing to represent the majority
I’ve become pretty skeptical we know where the majority is. The question determines the outcome of the survey. The measuring stick is flawed and error bars are many times larger than the difference being measured. Frankly, the thing being measured has more dimensions than are being measured.
And it’s worth remembering how the party got here. The left and labor coalition failed to beat Nixon twice, Ford’s losing had little to do with the left, and it utterly fell apart against Reagan. The Democrats only started to get traction at the national level by going to the center, using the DLC playbook. I’m as angry about the abandonment of labor by the Democratic party as anyone, but the reason for it is not a mystery. By the same token if the left doesn’t build the structure for a more left leaning Democratic party to operate no one should expect the party to move.
The hard thing is, I don’t know what that structure looks like, but it’s not enough to be “correct”.
YOU’RE skeptical.
Stop projecting because you are too lazy to go learn about the world around you.
I’ve read it. Many times from many outlets reporting on more than one survey. The first time I found it comforting.
However it’s not hard to find conflicting data. Methodology determines outcomes of these surveys, every time.
Today I’m less comforted. But ultimately, for what it’s worth, I don’t think we’re that far apart.
Saving. That survey is hard to find if you don’t search the right terms.
And yet they would not turn out to nominate Bernie… Talk about lazy.
Americans are impoverished and uneducated, Democrats are not, but they should be fucking smart enough to know you can’t use big words or complicated ideas with poor, distrqcted, and uneducated people.
You force through policies that put money in their pockets, that tangibly improve their lives, or you piss them off even more and give them a minority to attack as a distraction from your lack of policy.
The Republicans understand this.
This is how you appeal to the impoverished and uneducated, and that will be the majority of the American voting population until a couple decades after we offer free education
Despite all the emotions in this comment section, this is still my conclusion as well.
This push to demonize the strawman protest voters is an ongoing propaganda campaign to cause poor people to infight.
Portraying abstaining, third party, and trump voters in the same group is pretty lazy, if not intentional.
The electoral college exists: Every person I knew in swing states voted Harris in exchange for someone in CA or WA voting Claudia de la Cruz or otherwise.
But I guess even Harris voters can be made into Trump supporters with enough effort at this stage.
