This. A thousand times this. Was she a generational political operative? YES.
Her problem (as I see it) is that she never understood the negativity against her from the right (artfully aimed at the middle) and made NO attempt to counter it. She just dismissed it and thereby lost the election.
Frankly, for someone who had spent that much time under the microscope to have a FUCKING SECRET EMAIL SERVER smacks of arrogance or incompetence. Take your pick.
Agree.
And by perform, I partly mean how they seemed to do in Democratic primary debates.
But I also mean how they do in polls against the frontrunning GOP nominee(s). Such polls wouldn’t be meaningful right now because Vance has so much greater name recognition than any of the Democrats. But the more they all campaign and debate, the less of a factor that would be.
Suppose, on the eve of Super Tuesday, Raphael Warnock and AOC are running, per polling averages, five points ahead of Vance and Rubio. And Andy Beshear and Mark Kelly are at the same time running five points behind Vance and Rubio. IMHO it would be crazy to then say Beshear and Kelly are more electable because of being white males.
In the scenario just given, I might argue there that low info general election voters, when they learn more about AOC’s policy proposals, will turn against her. But I won’t argue that she’s going to lose because of gender and ethnicity. Because gender and ethnicity are what voters notice first about a candidate, that’s what polls will factor in the quickest.
Back on track as to Frontrunners-
Polls all over the place- Newsom loses to Vance, Newsom beats Vance- AOC loses to Vance, AOC beats Vance, and so forth.
Situation is very fluid. According to their National Polling Average, Harris seems to have the best chance. Yes, I know it is early.
For the Dem Nomination-
Harris seems on top here also.
I’ve said before that Harris is on top because of greater name recognition. But, the longer we go with Harris being far ahead for the Democratic nomination, the more likely it is to mean something.
To me, it would be unthinkable to nominate someone who lost the presidency before when it is so important to stop MAGA. But a lot of Democrats – maybe not ones on the internet – are probably thinking that since Trump did it, it is doable.
The farther out we are, the more sensible it is to go by logical thinking rather than polls. If we go another twelve months with Harris on top of the polls, I’ll have to concede that Democrats are serious about her.
Jefferson lost then won, also Jackson, Nixon, LBJ and even trump.
Amanda Hunter sums it up: “When people say it shouldn’t be a woman this time, because a woman lost last time, well, men have been losing the presidency for hundreds of years.”…Yet, no one questions the “electability” of men. Why? We don’t lump male candidates into one group in the same way we do with women candidates. Men who run for president aren’t automatically compared to every other man who’s ever run, yet it happens to women all the time.
I reluctantly concur. Mind you, Harris is a good Candidate, but so is Newsom, and several others.
I would vote for any of them over Vance. And Vance is way ahead over Rubio.
I disagree. Harris is NOT a good candidate and it has nothing to do with her gender or race. She’s just not a good campaigner and does not build a good campaign organization around her (and then listen to them). If Biden had announced he was a one-term president in time for a full Dem primary cycle, she would not have been the nominee in 2024.
Of course, Democratic politicians will not campaign on that.
But rank and file Democrats open themselves to your caricature when they say the average American is unwilling to vote for a woman or minority or gay candidate.
Then there’s the twisting to see Obama as some one-time exception due have alleging having something like one in a million charisma – something almost impossible to define. Did Nixon have charisma? Eisenhower? GW Bush?
There’s a tendency that after the White House is in one party’s control for eight years, a certain number of voters want to give the other side a chance. That is a big reason Obama won and Hillary Clinton lost.
A black woman was just nominated to run in November for the governor of Minnesota. She’ll probably lose because Minnesota slightly leans Democratic. But Republicans will have no trouble voting for her. I’ll bet most openly racist white voters will vote for her. That’s how it works nowadays.
Let’s see how the presidential candidates do in the debates.
Yes. Any Democrat would have won in 2008, which is part of why the primary was so brutally fought. Republican policies were deeply disliked at the time and were blamed for the housing crisis, recession, and increasingly unpopular Iraq War.
If Obama’s “charisma” was so great at convincing people to follow policies they didn’t like, then we wouldn’t have had the massive Republican landslide in the Congressional elections of 2010 (a backlash to voters learning the reality of what the so-called “Affordable Care Act” was actually about to do to their health care costs) or Trump in 2016 (a rebuke of essentially the entire Obama era).
“We need to find a real slick talker with some tall thick hair who can swindle the voters into voting for things they don’t like” isn’t going to work. I don’t know if it ever worked, but in the current information economy, it’s 1000% dead in the water and the people still pushing it are delusional.
At some point the reality has to be confronted: Trump won because voters preferred what he was selling, not because they were hypnotized or because someone at Fox News turned the Racism Switch on in 2016 and 2024 but forgot to flip it in 2020. If they were factually or morally wrong about what Trump is doing in office or whether those things are good, then you have to change their minds by arguing it. There is no magic bean where you get to bypass that stage by pretending “charisma” is still a thing in politics.
WaPo today.
Sizing up the 2028 Democratic presidential contenders
There’s a long list, but some are getting more traction than others.
August 13, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
The Democratic field for president is still wide open and unsettled. The very early list includes former presidential candidates, governors, senators, House members and celebrities. While no one on this list has officially declared, some candidates have been more open than others about wanting to run.
Ahead of November’s midterm elections, the field is starting to take shape as a major debate roils the party: Is the surging progressive movement helping or hurting Democrats’ chances to take back the White House in two years?
Some Democrats argue it’s time to embrace bold, progressive policies to boost their party’s popularity among working-class voters. Others think centrists will stand out.
…
Reeeeally long article. Covers everyone who could possibly be a candidate, from the obvious to the far-out to the person we haven’t heard of yet.
That was one of the few sensible political things she did. You know why the Republicans were so upset by that? Because they (with the Russians’ help) had already hacked the official one, but her private server had better security, and they couldn’t crack it. And if she had had the political sense to harp on that fact, she might have won.
Do you have a cite for that?
He may or he may not, but I will vouch for what he’s said. It comports exactly with what I was reading on various reputable news sites at the time.
I’ll just mention that it’s gotten very hard to find cites for older factual information. The Trump regime has been very effective at scouring the internet and deleting such information that doesn’t agree with the version of “history” they want promulgated to the general public.
I don’t know about that; a quick Google search turned this up:
Obviously what the Guardian publishes is outside of Trump’s control.
I was referring to information available in the USA. I’ve noticed lots of material I used to be able to find and cite from US sources is now gone.
Let’s not go down this rabbit hole, though. It’s not germane to the topic at hand.
Yeah, I noticed that. If something big hits the news for a week or so, and I try to search for something similar, but not the same- and quite older, I only get hits for the new thing.
Her big mistake was putting her personal email on the same server as her government email. That put her in a difficult position when they subpoenaed her email. She rightly didn’t want the Republicans seeing her personal email, so to prevent that, she spent a bunch of time scrubbing her personal messages from what she handed over. That made it look like she was hiding some terrible secrets.
The Republicans had been investigating Bill and Hillary ever since he was governor of Arkansas. Remember Whitewater? Because of that, it was pretty stupid of her to commingle her work and private email. If she’d kept them separate, she could have turned over her official government communications quickly and with no complications.
Hillary’s explanation for mixing her emails was that she didn’t want to have to carry two devices. Really? As secretary of state, she had a staff to help her with things like this. And she wouldn’t have needed two devices, anyway. One can easily use two different email accounts from the same device. It’s not like she was carrying the server with her wherever she went,
Moderating:
Ok, I’ll say it as a moderator and not a poster: This is far off topic. Please return to the subject at hand, which is frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. Relitigating what Hillary Clinton did right or not right has nothing to do with this.
I remember in the lead-up to 2020 we* spent about 2 years going in circles trying to convince ourselves some flavor of the week was going to be the nominee as Biden’s age and weak/underfunded primary campaign seemed to leave a lane open.
None of it mattered. By super Tuesday we learned what we have learned over and over. Any Democratic VP will walk away with the nomination.
I don’t think Harris had any significant missteps in 2024 and I think the primary voters will probably reward her for being a good soldier and barnstorming the swing states well enough to save 4 senate seats.
I think Ossoff and Kelly are both very compelling alternates who will be in the veepstakes with Buttigeig. But unless something huge and unforeseen happens (like a major health problem) I think Harris is absolutely going to be the nominee again.
*’we’ meaning us sickos who watch politics the way Will Shatner watched the monster on the wing
How’s Al Gore been looking lately?
Believing that the absolute trainwreck of a Harris campaign “had no significant missteps” is absolutely astonishing. They did everything wrong, which can be listed here in minute detail. In the big picture, she got handed a billion dollars in funding and an incumbency advantage and managed to lose by a large margin to Donald Trump. What more needs to be said?
It’s particularly galling that the message from the people who want to lose again with a proven loser seems to be “we need to find a slick-talking great campaigner with charisma, so therefore let’s stick with Box Wine Kamala and her inability to form a coherent sentence.” What on Earth are we doing here?