I agree with this. What happened in Minneapolis was a symptom of a major crisis. It needs to be addressed for the good of the nation, and in addition, it’s a visceral thing, something people can see and understand. It gets people on both a practical and an emotional level.
The economy is also a major weakness for the Republicans, but the massive and blatant erosion of civil rights is what I think is their biggest weakness. And I also agree that it’s the biggest real threat.
This is something that the DNC can rally people with during the elections, at least this year.
Democrats work to fund child care, provide free or low cost tuition to certain schools. Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which was actually a climate change act, encouraging green energy, solar and wind construction, etc. They work to provide healthcare for the young (CHIP, maybe?).
Clinton (in this century!) proposed all kinds of training programs for people left behind in coal country and other places hit hard by changing technology and energy.
They are champions for the young, champions for the folks left behind by the changing economy, champions for the environment, champions for people who need healthcare (that’s everyone), and so on and so forth.
But, wait! I think Harris once said she would maybe allow a transwoman to use the women’s bathroom! Those Democrats, it’s only about identity politics for them. Why don’t they focus on real issues?
And yet, they kept talking like that and did get trump elected. Feel about it however you want but her prediction was accurate. (As indeed, were most of her predictions about trump.)
No. Her prediction doesn’t exist in a vacuum. She is not someone on the sidelines.
A significant portion of her intended base told her that an issue was important to them. And rather than take their concerns to heart, she chose to accuse them of helping her opposition. This move is entirely an own-goal.
Those speaking up about the Gazan genocide did not cost her the election, because, if she had actually given them anything to think she’d actually work on it, she could have won.
A significant portion of the Democratic loss was underestimating how important this one issue was. And I say that even though I genuinely think Republicans fanned the flames. And that those who support the Palestinians should have voted for her.
You cannot absolve her from blame. She failed at a very, very basic part of her job.
I agree it wasn’t easy. But they didn’t even seem to try to thread that needle in their messaging.
Even among Jewish Americans support for the Palestinians was above the halfway point. The majority of those who would possibly vote Democratic were on the pro-Palestinian side.
There was room to work here, and they chose to double down on the status quo messaging, And this was not a “defend the status quo” election.
Harris gave them the opportunity to pivot on some issues, yet they chose not to. They chose to find commonality with Republicans and ignore their own base.
That’s the fundamental problem with the Democratic Party. They are bad at their job in a way the Republicans aren’t. I’d go so far as to say that barring 1) having an extremely charismatic candidate for POTUS like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, or 2) extreme anti-incumbent sentiment when the incumbent is a Republican, that Democrats don’t win national elections. As best as I can tell, the last time they did win a national election when neither of those two applied was back when LBJ won in 1964. And maybe 1 did apply. I wasn’t born yet back then so I couldn’t say for sure that it didn’t.
ETA. It’s like the old saying about “I’m not a member of an organized political party, I’m a Democrat”. There’s quite a bit of truth to that.
I along with many people get frustrated with democrats that plan everything they say and avoid saying anything off the cuff that might become controversial.
Unfortunately, this is the reason they do this. There’s no way she planned to say this, she spent the entire rest of her campaign avoiding controversy. She was genuinely frustrated that people despite their legitimate concerns about her and Biden’s Israel policy were threatening to do something extremely stupid about them.
Come to think of it, has there been any time when the DNC or RNC ever took an election autopsy to heart? They seem to read it, go “huh,” then carry on with the next election like their last time. And if they win the next election, it’s not because of internal reform, but because of things like the economy, anti-incumbent sentiment, etc.
The only example I can think of of a major change was the Democrats going with Bill Clinton and his winning “third way” in 1992 after the 1988 loss to Bush Sr, but I don’t know if that was an actual autopsy-led reform or just Clinton somehow seizing the moment like Obama in 2008.
Their autopsy said they needed to move left on immigration to get Hispanic votes. Some of the establishment candidates moved in that direction in the 2016 primary. They obviously couldn’t get the primary voters on board with this, and it’s a big part of why Trump has been more effective in especially the rust belt since then.
They didn’t challenge it (at least not effectively) because the Democrats don’t communicate as well as Republicans. It’s the difference between these two scenarios.
Dr. Republican. We’re going to do this operation because it needs to be done, this is the result you can expect, and this is what you need to do after the surgery.
Dr. Democrat. We’re going to operate, which means that we’ll start with Step A, then move on to Step B, then Step C1 expect if we find D, in which case we’ll instead move on to Step C2, and if both C1 and C2 can’t be done, then we’ll try C3 instead. Then we’ll do Step E because everyone knows that Step E is the standard of care, which is what we must always go for. And after the surgery we need to monitor for F, G, and H, and if we find F we need to I, and if we find G but not H we need to do J, and so on.
Maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but I didn’t get that at all. Mostly it seemed to me like what I mentioned above. Harris laying out details of her plan to accomplish this, details of her plan to accomplish that, details on how to accomplish the other thing, and why it had to be those specific details and not some other ones. Inflation? It’s because of economic factors A, B, and C, and if we just do D, E, and F, we can gradually bring it under control, which we will know we’ll have achieved by monitoring for indicators G, H, and I. The price of a dozen eggs? That has nothing to do with “real” inflation according to the economic experts, and anyone who tells you otherwise must not know what they’re talking about* and so on. And the same for every other issue.
And that’s the problem. Rather than just saying, in plain language, “we’re for trans people using the bathroom of their gender” or even “let’s just move on to unisex bathrooms for all public places”, they get bogged down in details. The same goes for all those other topics you mentioned. No “healthcare for all”, or “free quality public K-12 education for all, paid for by tax increases on the wealthy if necessary”, and so on. Instead Democrats get bogged down in a public dissection of the details on how to achieve those goals.
Because rather than a simple straightforward explanation of “this is what we’re for, and this is what we’re against” the way the Republicans do, they seem to think the best way to campaign is to argue about the details of any given specific plan.
*. I remember that particular one very well. Lot’s of people on the Democratic side talking about how the price of a dozen eggs doesn’t really matter, because eggs don’t belong in the basket of goods that “real economists” use when measuring inflation.
Bogged down in details in discussion, bogged down in details on execution. Rural broadband, for example, is a good idea and really the 21st century equivalent of rural electrification. So Democrats passed and Biden signed a bill to do this. Job done, right? Nope. Not a single connection made that could be pointed to in the 2024 election.
There’s some truth to this, but part of the problem they can’t communicate as well (or at least as efficiently) as Republicans, because their coalitions are totally different in nature. The Republicans just have to worry about balancing the interests of their (mostly working-class white, rural, religious) base and their (rich, not rural and not necessarily religious, but also mostly white) donors. The first group is culturally inclined not to question or challenge authority too much, and the second group tolerates pandering to the base because they know their daughters will always be able to get an abortion. There are a few libertarian types who occasionally do get pissed off and vote third party, but that’s about it for dissent within the ranks.
Democrats are trying to communicate with a whole bunch of different subgroups (young people; very poor people; old-school union workers; upper-middle-class professionals; people who could have been upper-middle-class professionals but chose academia / the arts / nonprofit work instead; unmarried women; black / Hispanic / other PoC voters; LGBTQ+ voters; members of various religious minorities including atheists / agnostics, etc.) There’s some overlap between these groups, of course, but many of them have competing interests, and even when they don’t, their preferred communication styles and media are totally different. (I suspect the reason why you see Democrats doing the Step A thing is that part of their coalition prefers it – specifically, the I-have-more-education-than-money part – and, unfortunately, those are precisely the people who are most able and willing to take a job as a Democratic communications director.)
It’s a mess. The best practice at the local level is to recruit candidates who are a good fit for the district and good at communicating with the specific demographics who live there, but I’m not sure there is a good solution at the national level. (Although hiring a lot more people who didn’t go to elite colleges would be a start; as would framing policy arguments in terms of “this is what we need to do to ensure fairness for all” rather than “this is going to benefit this particular subgroup.”)
I think you are giving the Republicans too much credit here. Here’s my version of your scenario:
Dr. Republican: Holy shit! That dirty [ethnic slur] is over there raping your daughter! Take this Power Pill and we’ll go over there together and save her!
[Patient takes pill and falls unconscious. Dr. Republican steals patient’s kidney.]
Yeah, it’s hard to argue that the democrats should speak more like republicans when the republican message is “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the dogs.”
Exactly. The people want an explanation of what the Democrats will do, and how that will help them. They don’t want an accounting, climate science, economics, ecology, etc. lecture. They want a “this is what we stand for, and this is how you will benefit when we get it done” attitude, with a side of “these are the people who are getting in the way of us getting it done, and this is how we’re going to get them out of the way”.