Lots of people got support. Bernie Sanders won two of the first three primaries and tied Buttigieg in the other, while Biden struggled to get his support out of the single digits. It was probably inevitable that the party establishment was going to unite behind someone to stop Bernie, but until the Clyburn endorsement there was no particular reason to think it was likely to be Biden.
To be fair to Harris, she aborted her campaign in 2020 along with the other moderates when it became clear that had they not done so in unison, then Sanders would win the primary and face certain defeat in November.
If I had to offer advice to her or any other Democrat in 2028, it would be do not spell out any specific policies. Every time you do so you invite people to pick it apart. If you say “I’m going to help the farmers” the corn farmers will say “do you mean corn farmers?” If you then say “I’m going to help corn farmers as well as other farmers”, then they’ll say “what species of corn?” The people don’t want to hear specifics, they want platitudes and they want you to say that you’re going to solve all of their problems and it won’t cost anyone anything. Tell them there there is such a thing as a free lunch and we’re going to eat it.
No, Harris aborted her campaign in 2019, months before any actual primary votes had been cast, because she was attracting no support.
And from my POV, it sounds like you’re urging candidates to run exactly the sort of platitudinous, nonspecific campaign that Harris did run, which is generally a bad idea, and suicidal if you happen to be the incumbent VP in a very unpopular administration. You can’t name an issue on which her position wasn’t essentially “I’ll just keep on doing pretty much what the guy with the 40% approval rating is doing”.
Bernie is a massive poisoned well that the Republicans would just love the Democrats to run.
Hid Bernie Hijack
Bernie was his own thing, as we all know, with a bit of a cult following like Trump. Buttigieg had no chance of winning either the primary or the general, nor will he ever win either in the future (I like him as a person and as a presence in the Democratic party, but I don’t want a McKinsey wonk as president, nor do I think he can win).
Inevitable and necessary. I don’t think Harris looked particularly bad, but she also didn’t seem like a winner–just like everyone else but Bernie/Biden.
Do not turn this into a Bernie Thread. We know he’s not running in 2028.
The hijack appears to be building. Drop Bernie.
While I’m at it, no roll-back to 2016 and HRC either.
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Kamala proved to be a great fundraiser and had a good ground game. But it seemed to me in the last couple weeks she was throwing policies willy-nilly to see if something would stick. Massive credits for home buyers, going after retailers for price gouging, tax breaks for this that and the other… it just didn’t seem to have an impact. I agree, she should have put some space between her and Biden. An easy one would be student loan forgiveness- ENORMOUSLY unpopular with blue collar voters. I happen to agree that it would be good policy, else we’re going to have middle class kids forced to choose between forgoing their dreams and a lifefime of debt. Good policy, in my opinion but terrible politics. Give Harris credit for having loyalty to a good and decent man, but it cost her the election. In 2028 she will be free from the constraint of running as Biden’s VP. If she runs, she has my vote depending on her Democratic opposition.
Nah there’s a balance on policy specifics that the dems vaulted. They used to spend way too much time on specifics but they jumped to empty slogans. Voters may not understand what caps on Cadillac health plans are supposed to do but they know that “build back better” is a meaningless buzzword. People who don’t know stuff are susceptible to pithy slogans like “medicare for all who want it” that clearly mean something more than slogans designed to offend no one by being meaningless to everyone.
Sorry, didn’t intend to hijack.
I think your characterization of her campaign is mostly correct with the addition of the important point, “I’m not the evil/insane/incompetent guy.” It was a rational campaign strategy that didn’t happen to work. But it almost did, and, in a better world with a better electorate, it easily would have worked.
But no, I don’t recommend that strategy for either the 2028 primary or general. Nor do I think that Harris would try to replay it.
This is not true. Harris didnt run a bad campaign, it was inflation.
I have never heard of him, and the preemptive frontrunner- besides Harris is Newsom.
If it wasnt for inflation, she likely would have won- by a small margin.
Cite?
Basically it is republicans who are against it.
So after all of the teeth-gnashing over how We Must Nominate A Woman, we’re going to get someone who is both a white male and even more identified with the toxic “California Democrat” brand than Harris was? He’ll be lucky to win Maryland. I sure hope the primary voters and party kingmakers are not really so detached from reality as to be pushing Newsom.
Josh Stein is the incumbent Attorney General of North Carolina who just won the race to become North Carolina’s governor in January. He won in a state that is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans where every election is a tight race for swing voters, and where 40% of voters are nonwhite. He won by a huge margin even though Trump also won NC - about 10% of the people who voted for Trump in North Carolina also checked “Josh Stein, Democrat” on the same ballot at the same time (Jewish name and all!). This is the future of the Democratic Party, not Gavin Newson and the images of fentanyl zombies shitting on the streets in San Francisco that will be on TV 24/7 if he is the nominee.
Your cite only provides breakdown by party and personal experience with student debt. It shows that college-educated Democrats really liked the idea, while other Democrats (i e the working class ones) were fairly lukewarm. In general, almost everyone supports SOME debt relief, for subsets of debtors deemed “deserving”, but almost nobody supports a complete blanket amnesty, BLD is exaggerating the extent of its unpopularity, but it’s fair to say it wasn’t winning the Democrats any votes they didn’t already have.
(OTOH, Biden is smarter than many “establishment” Democrats in realizing that you actually do need to occasionally do things that only your base wants, or someday you’ll realize you don’t have a base anymore)
How well does he do when he’s not running against Mark Robinson?
In 2020 he won the Attorney General’s race against Republican Jim O’Neill, also in a year when North Carolina voted for Trump for president. About 3% of voters were Trump/Stein in that year.
Of course Mark Robinson is a crazy person and a terrible candidate, but so is Donald Trump so I think the person who lost to the crazy, terrible candidate needs to be held minimally accountable for that (i.e. not considered for nomination again) and the one who managed to get voters to act rationally and reject the crazy, terrible candidate should be emulated or at least looked at for suggestions.
Student loan forgiveness is one that I would have been happy to see Kamala drop, but I assume there had to be some calculus around how many blue collar voters this policy would pick up vs. how many college educated young people would be lost.
Can we not? I hate the bastard, but at this point he’s run for President three times, won twice, and increased his vote total each time. I personally can’t imagine why anyone would ever consider voting for him, but it’s no longer reasonably possible to deny that he’s actually good at politics.
That’s exactly what she did in 2019 and did again in 2024. Rather bizarre policy proposals that were just fodder for jokes. You had her odd policy for black entrepreneurs in 2019 that also seemed to show she didn’t understand what a Pell grant is. Kamala Harris’ ‘Oddly Specific’ Idea for Helping Black Entrepreneurs Falls Flat
And then in 2024, you had stuff like “protecting crypto for black men.” In outreach to Black men, Harris to vow to legalize weed, protect crypto : NPR
I think it’s a bit of a red herring talking about too many policies or whatever. Most people couldn’t even name one.
As I say, her response to the question of “Name one or two specific things you’d do to help with the cost of living” (paraphrased) went viral, shared millions of times and was the punchline of Republican jokes. Except…the version that went viral stopped immediately prior to the point where Kamala actually went into the policy proposals.