This is a really good insight. Attitudes towards trans people can probably be boiled down to three basic categories: “Trans people are valid” (generally a left position) “Trans people are insane/against god” (generally a right position) and “It’s none of my business, let them do what they want.” To this middle group, changing your gender is an indulgence, and letting prisoners do it isn’t health care, it’s giving them something special that they want, but don’t actually need. They’re not necessarily anti-trans rights in other contexts - if people want to spend their own money on this “indulgence” then that’s their business. But this came across to them as coddling criminals, not a necessary medical intervention.
(emphasis added)
That’s the point you’re missing, or skirting over. The environment we have is a stacked deck. Talking about how we can change the message while ignoring that is pointless.
Harris could have been the second coming and most people would not have heard it. We see this again and again in the survey responses / polling; a plurality of people believed false myths and were unaware of what Harris actually said.
We have to do something to address that, otherwise we will indeed repeat this over and over.
And obviously when people talk about it being impossible to win they don’t mean every district everywhere. Surely you are aware that in modern politics there is something like 30-35% of voters that are solid red, the same that are solid blue and the fight is merely over the middle?
No, it’s not “pointless” to try to win when the number of Democrats currently in Congress or governor’s houses alone is 300 people. Josh Stein won in North Carolina on the same ballot that Trump won. The same voters who were brainwashed by the “stacked deck” voted for the Democrat in a Southern state. Are you not at all interested in asking why that happened and if ti can be duplicated? More importantly, are the people paid by the Democratic Party and the Harris campaign not interested?
Well this is certainly pointless. I’m done here.
WITHDRAWN: Too much risk of being called out as off-topic, although I did tie it to Harris 
…Harris lost the election.
The Democrats lost the House, the Senate, the Presidency and the Supremes for a generation.
Individual victories don’t tell us what you think. You may as well point to Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib for takeaways on what strategy to adopt.
I think if you were to listen to what the people paid by the Dems and the Harris campaign have to say, they think they did everything correctly, and that staying silent on trans issues and yelling “fund the police” was absolutely the right thing to do. They ran the exact campaign that it looks like you wanted them to run. And it was a disaster.
Part of this discussion has to look at the personality of the candidate themselves. It’s like an actor in a movie. You can’t just plug in any actor into the role and get the same results. Some actors fall flat in the role, while others excel. Get the combination right, and the movie makes millions. Get it wrong, and the movie is a huge flop. It’s the same with campaigns and politicians. Other than being a woman of non-white heritage, she was a pretty generic Democratic candidate. You could have plugged in any other generic candidate and have gotten pretty much the same results. The main thing about her that was enticing was that she was a woman. That made it interesting because it was different. But other than that, it’s hard to point to things that really make her stand out from the crowd of typical Democratic politicians.
If she came to town to give a speech now, I wouldn’t have any interest in going. But I would be excited to see politicians like AOC, Sanders, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Raskin, and Warren. They seem like they have their own point of view, can talk in depth on a variety of topics, tackle issues head on, etc. They are inherently interesting in a way that Harris isn’t (for me, anyway). The 2028 candidate needs to be someone who people find so interesting that they can fill an auditorium even when they aren’t the President or the presidential candidate.
I’m guessing that many of us faced the decision in the 2020 primaries of whether to vote for the person we liked the most or the person who we thought had the best chance of winning. My vote for Biden was the latter. I liked some of the other candidates better and thought they’d do a better job. But the stakes were too high to risk a Republican victory, so I voted for the person I thought would have the best chance of actually winning the election.
I think if you were to listen to what the people paid by the Dems and the Harris campaign have to say, they think they did everything correctly, and that staying silent on trans issues and yelling “fund the police” was absolutely the right thing to do. They ran the exact campaign that it looks like you wanted them to run. And it was a disaster.
Well, if you’re really interested, [here is a long interview with Harris’ top staffers.(https://crooked.com/podcast/exclusive-the-harris-campaign-on-what-went-wrong/).
But you’ve pretty much guessed the TL;DR already. There’s an infuriating lack of willingness to accept any responsibility for the loss. Particularly galling is that they keep complaining about how they only had 107 days to campaign, when two of them had previously been Biden campaign staffers and had personally created that situation by trying to prop up the old man long after there was any hope of saving his campaign. WRT to the trans stuff specifically, they insist their internal polling said that, despite the Trump campaign’s obsession with it, it wasn’t an issue that swing voters were concerned with.
It was doomed to fail, no matter who ran, or how they ran. trump lied again, the voter forget he lied before, and they believed him. Inflation was the big #1 issue they voted trump. Yes, Biden had inflation down, but still they looked at the price of eggs. Economics is hard. People really do think the President can “fix” inflation.
It was NOT Harris’s fault, nor anyone on Harris’s campaign. The voters overwhelmingly said they voted trump due to inflation, and to a lesser extent the border.
Harris should run again, but she should not be given the Nomination automatically or anything. Let her run a tough primary, vs Newsome, etc.
Hid post objectifying a politician
Having said that, I think that as a woman she isn’t particularly enticing at all. She has zero sex appeal. She is not attractive nor does she try to be. She is not a woman that guys are fantasizing about (although I am sure there is a very small percentage of people of “unusually specific” tastes who do like her in that way). Hillary had this exact same problem. They both have this energy of an aunt you see once a year at Christmas who gives you an ugly sweater and a lecture about not wasting your potential. I think the problem is not so much that America won’t elect a woman. It’s that America won’t elect a pantsuit-wearing post-menopausal woman who does not inspire lust. Kamala Harris four years hence will never overcome this. America wants the step-aunt who shows up in a leather skirt and a low-cut sweater, swears a lot (but in a cool way) and gives you a bag of weed (or if Republican, a bottle of booze) for Christmas. If that sounds gross and tacky, well… look at who America just elected.
Oh, this will end well.
Warning: Misogyny against politicians is not allowed on this board. Opinions on the appearance of those in professions where they don’t make their living on their looks are not allowed.
Do not do this again.
Also closing this thread until tomorrow, it is problematic.
This topic was automatically opened after 8 hours.
I’d love to see Gretchen Whitmer run. I think it’s on her mind, too. I feel she’d outshine Kamala on most fronts, but especially for appealing to the working-class crowd. She’s fantastic at public speaking, and has been fantastic for Michigan.
If she does throw her hat into the 2028 primaries, I think she’ll be hard to top, especially if people contrast her style to Kamala’s. She’s got the charm and charisma Kamala lacked.
I agree that she has strong potential. I used to think of her as not so great a speaker, but she was doing a lot better in 2024. She could be a contender.
I’m sure you meant no disrespect, but earlier you referred to the “Democrat party”. That’s a phrase Republicans often use as a slur. That’s a phrase I would avoid.
Back to the main question, looking back it was a doomed campaign from the start. In spite of the fact that presidents have jack shit to do with inflation (unless they do something stupid like tariffs or get rid of migrant labor), the people were so aghast at the inflation of 2020-2021 (mild as it was) that they were determined to punish the party in the White House.
Can she win in 2028? I don’t know. Having to win a primary will help her. I think she has a chance to win, my governor Whitmer could win, Shapiro would be a good bet as well. The best chance that Harris or any Democrat could have would be if this next administration proves to be as disastrous as it seems to be ready to be.
It’s the same Kamala who got zero support in the 2020 primaries. If the fact that she’s also proven to be an incompetent campaigner who couldn’t even keep it close with Trump in a real election makes Democratic primary voters like her more, then a lot of people in the party are deluded, not just her advisers.
To repeat from the other thread: Whitmer and Shapiro are realistic candidates. So are Katie Hobbs and John Fetterman. Josh Stein has to be the pre-emptive frontrunner - he completely blew out his opponent in North Carolina, a state that looks a lot like America demographically and where the same voters he won over picked Trump, so he had an uphill battle to fight. It really comes down to: If Democrats care about “someone with normal Democratic voter beliefs who can win meaningful elections” then it’s Stein followed by the other four names, with Harris somewhere between “let’s try Hillary again” and “let’s nominate a guy named Acne Fart-Hitler and see if we can get zero votes at all” on the “all-time worst ideas” list.
You’re being unnecessarily provocative outside the Pit, and you’re also just wrong. I’m not a big Harris fan, but she wasn’t Mike Dukakis or anything. She got 48% of the popular vote and came within two points of Trump in all the Blue Wall States; by any reasonable standard, that should count as “keeping it close”.
Who really got support but Biden, though?
It’s also tough to pander to the base and be a strong contender in the primary. You know, the whole “pivot” thing. It can easily be the case that the best primary candidate is not the best general candidate, and vice versa.
Too harsh, IMO. She was thrust into a difficult situation and hit the ground running pretty well, IMO. She didn’t lose by all that much, either, and she showed the ability to rake in a ton of money.
Biden was on track to lose. Anyone else thrust into the same situation as Kamala would have lost and probably have done much worse. Had Biden not won and there been a real primary, maybe someone could have beaten Trump (and maybe Kamala could have won the primary and beaten Trump), but maybe not.