I had a long shot candidate, but Tina has decided to run for a second term as governor.
Everybody did. That’s how audience targeting works.
Maybe that’s what we need - a candidate different people with different views can all project their desires on. Someone who makes people think, “They’re so awesome - they HAVE to believe what I believe!” Obama was like that; so is Trump.
Him being a black President did a lot of work to bring those things about, and there’s not much he could have done about them.
Oh my God.
Midterms usually go badly for the incumbent party.
In Bill Clinton’s first midterm, the Democrats lost a net eight Senate seats and fifty-four in the House.
The populist surge isn’t just in the U.S. It is also in Britain, France, Italy, and Germany. Or is Obama to blame for the Brexit madness?
What the Obama presidency proves, when it comes to who to nominate, is that a good candidate, with the identity of a historically discriminated against group, has an excellent chance of winning.
The Democrats have a deep presidential bench with the majority of good potential candidates happening to be other than white Christian heterosexual non-Hispanic males. Don’t let that scare us.
IMO the most important characteristic for the next Democratic candidate is charisma and messaging skill. Obama didn’t win in a landslide because of his position on issues - he won because of his immense charisma and messaging skill.
IMO, the current crop that have demonstrated high level charisma and messaging skills are AOC (my preference), Buttigieg, and (blech) Newsom. There may be others - and that’s what the primary will be about.
Measuring charisma is a mystery to me.
As for messaging skill, Admiral Stockdate was objectively weak there. But when it comes to almost all other national candidates, there is a suspicious correlation between what seems to the listener (including me) smart messaging and the messages we agree with.
Sarah Palin had fans who thought she was the cat’s meow, but most of us would give her a bit of credit for Obama’s win. Her message and style was just before its time.
Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer both seem plenty articulate when I hear them. But their polling is horrendous. The political problem isn’t that they need more biting, or more humane, messages, but that Nigel Farage resonates in what is either a nativist moment (what I hope) or a nativist era (what I fear).
We need a candidate with a history of winning purple state elections. If that’s the metric for charisma, I’m for it.
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Can you link even one time where Kamala’s campaign said or implied this?
I have my fair share of criticism for the way Kamala campaigned, but this just isn’t true. Harris minimized her ethnic background and her gender throughout her campaign.
That much is true. Democrats need to run for something, not against Trump.
To some extent you did. Harris did a good job of campaigning to the Democratic base. She did an impressive job getting everyone on board. She reenthused voters who saw Biden wasn’t up for it.
That doesn’t mean she ran a good campaign though. She failed to get her message to the youth, to the struggling masses, to the politically indifferent. She was unable to find (and really didn’t try all that much) a way to reach these people and focused almost exclusively on traditional get out the vote methods. She wasn’t able to make these voters feel like their concerns were heard. She wasn’t able to articulate a vision of how she would improve these peoples lives. This isn’t all her fault, she was put in difficult spot, but nothing she has done then or since makes me thing she has a solution to these problems.
Democrats didn’t lost to Trump because Trump was really popular. They lost because the Democrats were even more unpopular.
It’s well established in political science that voters tend to view minority and/or female candidates as being more liberal than they actually are. Progressives being super enthusiastic about Obama is one obvious example of that phenomenon.
Except that what was probably the most objective system for ranking the liberalness of U.S. Senators rated Obama as more liberal (the word back then for progressive) than most of his Democratic caucus colleagues:
Look at the facts in in this link, not the headline:
I’m a center-left moderate. Before Trump, I’d say I was a centrist. So I’d love to be able to say that Obama won because he was a centrist. I can’t. As McCain might have claimed, he’s a good liberal family man.
However, I agree with you on this:
Oh absolutely. I recall back in the Obama years some commenters on the lib side saying as a positive thing “oh someone so intelligent MUST be a closet atheist!” (See: Ok, I'm sold, Barack Obama is a Christian ).
It’s not like Trump was or is very policy-heavy now.
I think I disagree with the bolded based on a boutique interpretation of “really popular”. Having 1/3 of the electorate as a firm floor of unwavering support is good enough to count as “really popular” IMHO.
Had something befallen Trump in, say, summer 2023 that prevented him from running for President in 2024 … I believe (can’t prove, of course) that Kamala Harris would’ve beaten a generic “not really popular” Republican candidate – even one prostrating himself before Trump at every turn. The Democrats “magically” wouldn’t have been “more unpopular”.
Remove Trump from the equation, and all priors informing why Trump won suddenly collapse.
So 10th or 16th out of about 50 is certainly left of center, but not far left. It’s even arguably “center-left”, for a broad definition of “center”. But some people expected him to be Bernie Sanders (I mean, some people who thought that was a good thing), and there was no real evidence to support that.
I agree that Trump is a unique figure, and it’s likely that Harris could have beaten Generic Republican.
OTOH, if Biden had announced in summer 2023 that he wasn’t running for re-election, it’s likely that the primary process would have produced a Democratic candidate who could have beaten Trump. I don’t want to let the Democrats off the hook for their massive self-own in failing to dump Biden until it was too late to nominate anyone other than a candidate whose only primary campaign was a spectacular failure.
The challenge is that voting bases have shifted and the Democrats have not found a platform with universal appeal. No longer are the parties cleanly split by age, race, and economic strata. Now they are split by social issues (culture wars), ‘level playing field’ vs. ‘survival of the fittest’, and ‘rule of law’ vs. ‘a supreme executive’. Some rich white people that would have transitioned to voting Republican are voting Democrat because when it comes to running the government – thee the more conservative party. Meanwhile some young people are voting Republican because they got theirs and are afraid of what it will mean to share.
Add in a healthy chunk of people on both sides that want to be entertained (e.g. Trump’s stupid captions on presidential portraits and Newson’s stupid response).
I think the Democratic candidate needs a platform and message that combines:
- A return to the rule of law and norms in order to re-establish stability in the US
- and with stability, eliminate the economic uncertainty about jobs and prices
- and with stability and certainty, we can provide more opportunities for the underserved and help level the playing field
Health insurance would be the ideal thing to eliminate uncertainty about, but I don’t think ACA or Universal Healthcare would do it. So I guess we’re left with jobs and grocery prices.
I agree with all the others that any candidate, for either party, needs a message that is interpretable enough that their voting base can project their desires onto it. It’s the only way to win in an evenly divided race.
Its an interesting hypothetical. Trump has some unique strengths and weaknesses, so it is hard to tell exactly what would have happened. I think I disagree though. I think Harris would have lost by at least as much with a generic republican. Reelection campaigns, which this basically was, tend to go based on the popularity of the incumbent, and Harris/Biden were not popular. The coalition might have been a little different, Trump is particularly strong at bringing out the rural vote, but I think the Democrats would have had many of the same problems with the youth and minority votes.
Good post. I think the Harris campaign focused too much on “return to the rule of law”. Which is difficult for me to say, since, like most people here, I think disrespect for the rule of law should absolutely disqualify a candidate, and it’s very frightening to see that most voters don’t care that much about it.
(edited to add: This was meant as a reply to CaveMike)Perhaps a better way to put is it that the Harris campaign spent a lot of time bashing Trump’s authoritarianism, and also talked about economic uncertainty, but failed to clearly draw a narrative line connecting those.
The third paragraph, I think, is the crucial one. There are a lot of upper middle-class Democrats and independents who are sincerely revolted by Trump’s racism, authoritarianism, and general loathsomeness, but who aren’t really enthusiastic about redistributing wealth from themselves toward the underserved. At some point in the near future, the Democrats will need to decide if they’re really economic populists or not, and I think that’s a lot of what the 2028 primary will be about.
Did they? or was it just MAGA bigots?
No experience
Right.
There are no such platforms.