In which sense? It could go either way.
There is a difference between “Who do the Democrats like the best?” and “Which Democrat will have the best chance of winning the election?” I can totally understand how someone can love Harris as a candidate and really want her to win. She seems like a genuinely nice person, a hard worker, and would selflessly work hard to make life better for Americans. However, I don’t think she has enough of whatever magic it takes to win an American election in the current climate. It’s like we’re in reality show. The sane people keep getting voted off and the clowns are making it to the end. A successful Democratic presidential candidate will need to be able to successfully navigate the current wacko political climate. That won’t be by spouting off generic, committee-created, focus-group tweaked prepared statements. They’ll have to do things like spontaneously go on a show like Joe Rogan and be able to make a positive impact with his audience. That doesn’t mean to capitulate to whatever racist/sexist/bigoted/whatever-phobia beliefs of the audience. Rather, the candidate and their policies should be so compelling that the audience will vote for them because they believe their lives will be better with the Democratic candidate than the Republican. The candidate will need to be able win over a wide swath of voters with their personality, wit, charm, confidence, etc. I just don’t see that with Harris.
Previous to the actual election, I thought that Buttigieg would have done very well. But all the post-loss hair-rending about how Harris “shouldn’t have been so divisive” leads me to believe that the divisiveness against Harris which other people had started would have worked in a similar fashion against Buttigieg. Talk the vilest trash about him, then use any sort of pushback at all from anyone, even unconnected to the campaign, as evidence that Pete himself should “ditch the culture war” and “stop being so divisive”.
So I also don’t know who else it should have been.
I think it’s absolutely stupid and reductionist to think the only lesson Democrats need to learn from this loss is “stop nominating women and minorities”.
WRT to Kamala specifically, I thought she did just an OK job as a candidate, and wouldn’t be very enthusiastic about giving her another shot, though I’d be happy to hear her pitch if she wants to enter the primaries.
I think the major strategic failure of her campaign was her failure to deal with her position as the VP of a very unpopular President. She needed to dramatically throw Biden under the bus by championing some bold and progressive policies that clearly went beyond what Biden was willing to do.* OR, if she wasn’t willing to do that, she needed to go all in on defending Biden’s record and embracing his legacy. Instead, she just kind of avoided mentioning the elephant in the room.
*She did kind of try that in the last couple weeks of the campaign, coming out for a federal $15 minimum wage and legalizing pot, but it was too little too late. If she’d spent the whole summer hammering on “Kamala will put more money in your pocket and let you buy weed with it”, instead of “Liz Cheney supports Kamala!”, I think we would have seen a better result.
The idea of “giving moderate Republicans permission to defect” had some logic to it, but it turned out every Republican who was interested in doing that had already done so in 2016 and 2020. It’s another thing that needs to be learned from and not repeated in 2028.
Running any more campaigns with people who can’t be separated from disastrously unpopular ideas (e.g. “defund the police” or “free trans surgery for prisoners” or “you have to vote for the candidate that national voters have consistently rejected because she checks the right boxes or you’re a bigot”) would be exactly equivalent to banking 2028 on Liz Cheney’s endorsement again in terms of learning nothing.
If the Democrats want to run a white male to the left of Harris like Mark Pocan or Chris Murphy and watch that person lose to Nikki Haley in a probable landslide, maybe we can get past the “people won’t vote for an XYZ” excuse and get a real candidate in 2032. Or they can choose not to keep indulging the excuses and the ID politics crazy train and get serious about winning elections with the electorate that exists.
Except the Democrats can’t do that since the Republicans just make things up.
Also, there’s no good reason to oppose giving prisoners access to sex reassignment surgery. If we think this is a medically necessary surgery that can save lives (which we do), and we think that prisoners are entitled to medical care (which we do), what’s the argument against it?
Fascists will always find unpopular and marginalized groups to blame society’s problems on; we can’t beat them by capitulating to them, because once the trans people have been eradicated, they’ll just move on to some other group, and sooner or later it will be our turn.
Which again illustrates my problem with the Harris campaign; Trump was hammering her hard on the trans issue, and she never really responded. She should have forcefully defended trans people against those attacks. Or she could have thrown the trans community under the bus, which would have been ethically deplorable but at least would have had a better chance of working than Plan C, which was “just pretend it’s not happening”.
Same question as for everyone else making this excuse - why did Obama, and Biden, and Fetterman, and 17 Democratic governor and Senate candidates running in 2024, including Josh Stein who won North Carolina from the same voters on the same ballot that voted for Trump for president, not magically lose to the unbeatable Fox News/Joe Rogan machine? If Kamala Harris and her billion dollars of campaign spending couldn’t defeat that messaging but hundreds of other Democrats consistently can, what is the variable that suggests what the controllable problem is?
“Because it’s going to lead to Eric and Ivanka and Don Jr taking turns as president until 2068” should be good enough.
The problem is, though, then we’re making arguments we don’t actually agree with just for the sake of winning elections, and voters can see right through that shit.
Well… Democrats do, anyway.
There’s no way most Democrats actually support maximalist positions like “free trans surgery for prisoners.” Part of the reason it became such a football was because of its status as a trendy capture of the messaging by an extreme of an extreme and Harris going along with it when she was trying to win against other Democrats in California, when obviously she doesn’t care about this to begin with any more than Betty Swingvoter in Georgia does.
The tendency of Democrats to shoot themselves in the foot by chasing the symbolic whims of the most left-wing 23-year-olds while becoming more and more the party of practical impotence is really summed up here:
One grim irony about the political cost of this promise is that, of course, the federal government that only got seven electric vehicle charging stations built in two years has performed zero transgender surgeries on detained migrants. That’s the Democrats in a nutshell: the party that promises trans surgeries for illegal immigrants but doesn’t deliver them.
So, if you believe the “human rights/save lives” theory of trans surgery, Democrats succeeded in making no one’s life better and fulfilling no one’s human rights, but did manage to frame their empty pledges to do so in such a way that it turned off millions of voters and handed the country to Trump for another four years. Is that Joe Rogan’s fault too or is that something they can control?
OK, explain it to me like I’m six. Why, other than capitulating to bigotry*, would we not want to support free sex changes for prisoners? Is it because we don’t think transgenderism is a “real” medical condition, or because we don’t think prisoners deserve access to medical care?
And I think it’s funny that your Politifact link about this supposedly “extreme” and “maximalist” position is headlined “Harris’ support for prisoner access to transgender surgery aligns with federal law and court rulings”.
*which, again, I’m not claiming is always the wrong thing to do.
Not sure if this is correct. Carter and Clinton were both governors, so they were no more “unknown” than any other governor, and mostly governors and senators are the ones who get nominated. Obama was a senator as well and was seen as a rising star after his speech at the DNC in 2004. Military men used to be seen as potential candidates too, but there hasn’t been one of those since Ike.
Donald Trump is obviously the biggest exception to all of the above in US history, but the next Democratic candidate will be, in all likelihood, a current governor or senator (less likely to be one that wins in 2026, but Obama didn’t finish his term) with a typical level of fame for that office.
Personally, I don’t see any rising Democratic stars currently aiming for the firmament, so in that sense (and that may have been your main sense), I agree with you. AOC might be one, but I think she will still seem too young to most people for the job in 2028.
OTOH, I don’t see any rising Republican stars either, MAGA or otherwise.
100% correct IMHO. Trump was not a bad candidate in 2016 or 2024. He was different. Totally different, and that’s why people voted for him both times (plus, his cult had developed by 2024). He’s a historical outlier, and it’s really hard to compare him to anyone else or use typical political logic when assessing his chances retroactively.
I also don’t think a generic white male Democratic candidate would have beaten Trump in 2016. Tim Kaine?! No way. We had our generic white guy in 2024, and he would have lost even worse than Kamala did, IMHO, even had the disastrous debate not happened. I think it’s plausible, however, that another Democrat, or even Kamala herself, could have won had Biden not run again.
The OP is for it, it seems as though everyone else is against it, but I say: maybe.
Well, some posters said that it’s fine for her to run, and they would support her if she were to win the primary. I concur with that, but then the questions for me become, Is it a good idea for her to run at all? and, If she were to win the primary, could she win in the general? And that’s where the maybe comes in.
We are facing an extremely unpredictable four years, to say the least. Almost anything could happen, and what happens will define the 2028 election. There are, however, some things I don’t think will happen, and one of them is Trump successfully implementing fascist rule (or something adjacent) and having a strong successor lined up. OTOH, I think it is extremely likely that Trump will die or will have to resign for health reasons, and JD Vance will become president before the next election.
Then there is the question of both sides’ respective benches. I don’t see stars on either side. Maybe Whitmer for the Democrats. The GOP is a joke, and without Trump, they are nothing.
OTOH, Harris is at least a pretty good, normal candidate who has been through the trenches once. If there is no other strong Democrat in 2027 and it seems likely that JD Vance will be the candidate (or there is no other strong GOP candidate) and the Trump/Vance regime hasn’t been particularly popular or successful, then I don’t see any reason why Harris shouldn’t run or couldn’t win if she did.
I don’t think such a scenario is unlikely, but, with respect to Trump 2.0, I am expecting the unexpected in all dimensions, so it’s hard to say.
…the Biden and Harris administration most definitely did not run on a campaign of “defund the police.” They ran on a campaign of “fund the police.” They gave the police billions of dollars.
And Harris did not run on a campaign of “free trans surgery for prisoners”. That was based on a statement during the 2019 primary.
These are talking points. Not reality. The truth is Harris ran the very campaign you wanted her to run and that the Democrat strategists said she should run.
And it failed.
So perhaps it time to start to entertain the idea that everything the Democrat strategists were thinking was wrong. Because you can be so pro-police to the point that they killed more people in 2023 than in any time in history and STILL the “defund the police” narrative will stick.
So you may as well go all in on “defund the police” because its the right thing to do. The NYPD is literally a criminal enterprise with the resources of a private army and the LASD is made up of gangs. Go all in on defending trans rights because if the Democrats don’t, nobody else will.
Perhaps the Democrats need to stop letting the Republicans set the narrative and instead give people something to vote for. Because despite what many people here have argued: this is what I really think was the problem with the Democrat strategy.
They stood for nothing.
They forgot what elections are all about. And when you’ve got one side with near total control of the media/social media ecosystem, you’ve got to go big, you’ve got to go bold, to break through the noise. Imagining that pro-trans-rights stances were the problem here when they went out of their way not to talk about it says everything about how successful MAGA propaganda was. They used an answer to a question from five years ago to successfully reframe the narrative. You aren’t going to be able to combat that by buying into the narrative. You reject the narrative and set your own agenda.
Again, I don’t even know what you’re trying to suggest with this (rhetorical?) question. Is the suggestion that until every senator and representative is Republican we cannot point out any of the strategies that were effectively employed by MAGA and RW media?
It means that the job of people crafting the Democratic campaign for president is to craft a campaign that wins the election in the environment we have, rather than to:
1: “point out strategies” used by other people
2: make excuses for losing and collect checks for doing so every 4 years, or
3: say things that are obviously untrue e.g. “it’s impossible for any Democrat to win in this environment so this wasn’t our fault” when hundreds of Democrats not named Kamala Harris did in fact manage to win
You can “point out” whatever you wish to “point out” and no one is disputing your right to do so, but “pointing out strategies” and $3.50 will get you a cup of coffee and a Trump victory.
Because (to them) prison is punishment but changing your gender is a reward. Republicans believe trans people are magic. All you have to do is say “I identify as” and you get all kinds of special rewards. You get to join the girls team of any sport and win all the medals for example. That’s how they think it works. They think it is a magical ticket to getting anything you want out of life because you’re now part of the group of people protected by equally magical wokeness.
To bring it back to prisoners, it stands to reason that if Republicans think women get special lower standards in sports, etc they would also get correspondingly lower standards in prison too. “Real” men have to serve out their full sentences but if you can convince the prison authorities you are a woman you can walk out of there like Joe did in Idiocracy.