I stand by my statement. At no point did I say every Democrat did or did not do something, since I couldn’t see all of them. I asked about those who did not stand or applaud.
Answered already, it is just an issue with their conciences, but not a big one as the truly reprehensible acts of Trump and the right-wing blogosphere cheering the defunding of medical research and control of diseases, it includes cancer too. So, forgive me if I can’t be concerned much for a stunt from the bloviator in chief when real damage is being done to our health institutions by that same bloviator.
Of course voters tally positives and negatives. She lost because the tallies led too many people to not vote at all. The ones who willingly stayed home seem to be the type that would be more easily swayed by social media posts about not reacting to a kid with cancer.
Yes. The Republicans may have looked like a-holes. But in that moment they at least looked like a-holes who were united in their victory.
So the Democrats stayed in their seats and waved “resist” cards. So what? To me it didn’t project that they wielded any power.
I don’t really have many alternative ideas. Maybe they should have just wore matching “Resist” pins and politely and unenthusiastically clapped when appropriate.
Maybe they should have all handcuffed themselves to Al Green? But even all the Democrats don’t agree on his action.
I don’t know really. Usually the SotU address is a boring speech by the President to the American people. So I’m not really sure what can or should be accomplished at such an event.
Well…won the election for starters (definitively for at least two of them).
The attitude of the original post in this thread is the same dishonest, both-sides crap that the media has been peddling for the last few decades – that it doesn’t matter what Republicans do, but Democrats must be absolutely perfect in every scenario and all the time, or else only Democrats are to blame for bad things that happen.
It’s entirely bullshit. SOTU theatrics are irrelevant. We’re not in this situation because of mistakes some Democrats make. We’re in this situation because a plurality of Americans wanted what Trump was selling, and the media helped Trump make that case for the last 5 years.
Thank you. That’s my view. We can’t strategize our way out of this. Unfortunately, our country is not what he had hoped. We’re basically living in occupied land, and it will take some time to turn around (perhaps).
Oh yeah, it has happened- when Biden was president, the GOP stayed seated and some heckled.
Yep. Political theater.
Right. The MAGAs are bigoted, violent liars.
Yep. Voters didnt understand how economics or inflation works, so they believed the con man. Amd there was xenophobia and bigotry at play also. Right Wing Populists do that- they lie and make promises they CAN NOT keep… And the voters believe them- generally until next election, anyway.
The Dem’s 2024 GOTV operation was solid, superior to the Republican GOTV. Brookings:
Trump’s gains in each of the seven swing states was smaller than the national figure, although his pickup in Arizona and Nevada nearly matched his nationwide improvement.
There are 3 facts to bear in mind about the 2024 election. 1) The swing to Trump was weaker in swing states, 2) the demographic swing was largest among Latinos (who still majority voted for Biden, but by a much smaller margin), 3) the final popular vote for Trump was 49.9% to 48.4%, just short of a majority and an historically mild margin vs the opposing party.
I don’t mean just patent “Get Out The Vote” efforts; I mean actually making voters aware, engaged, and enthused about how their platform and policies will help those voters and giving confidence that their candidate will actually do what they say. This, of course, assumes that Democrats actually endorse and follow through on proposals that do help voters, which may have been true once upon a time but too many times the majority of Democrats end up advancing and supporting policies that benefit their big money and corporate benefactors rather than their constituent populations.
This kind of organizing is hard work because it means not only having volunteers who are well-informed and articulate about the matters that their candidate’s electorate is concerned about, but that the candidate actually has to do more than show up at pressers and rallies; they actually have to engage with civil and local business leaders, local union reps and public officials, and build consensus among people who don’t always vote in blocks or that obviously fit together along ideological lines. It’s what Stacey Abrams is really good at (much to the ire of the DNCC), and how Katie Porter managed to get elected going up against an incumbent in a firmly Republican district. It also means that the candidate can’t just spend all day hobnobbing with wealthy donors and may have to run an uphill campaign from a financing standpoint but it also means building a solid network of word-of-mouth support versus just blasting attack ads and plastering name signs on every flat surface and open yard.
Trump and the GOP won in part because people are disaffected even though what Biden was doing was objectively improving the economic and national security of the country, even if it wasn’t ‘curing’ inflation or fixing the lives of struggling Americans, and Harris (and Democrats in general) should have been able to draft on that. Unfortunately, they drafted a little too hard on how good the stock market and inflation indexes were doing, and not enough on how they were going to help the lives of people who don’t invest in the market and understand inflation from the practical standpoint of how much of their paycheck that never seems to increase is going to put food on the table and gas in their car tank. If you aren’t talking in those terms, you aren’t talking to those voters.
Of course, Republicans also had the advantage of running heavily on the manufactured ‘culture wars’ outrage, which hits at a level below reason even though it has virtually no impact on most people except those who are marginalized by it. They’ve sold it as the reason that people aren’t doing better, and the fault of “Political Correctness”/DEI/Marxists/‘Antifa’ instead of how they’ve sold out their constituents for campaign funding. Democrats can’t compete in that game unless they are going to turn MSNBC into a complete propaganda machine which can spread lies and conspiranoia comparable to Fox News, which is a ‘cure’ worse than the disease. Instead, they need to make voters think about their choices at a basic level of bettering their actual lives versus attacking a phantom menace. When Katie Porter is talking about how much it costs to buy and repair a dishwaster or Liz Warren is grilling some pharma executive over how much of the price of insulin is actually in the manufacture versus various forms of egregious profiteering, they are highlighting the hypocrisy not in an abstract fashion but in a way that is literally taking money out of the pockets of her constituents in a way that anyone should be upset about.
As one of the “old women” on the Board, I found this statement rather misogynistic. I’m not the only one who did. Let’s refrain from indulging in cheap, easy casual misogyny, please.