I think this can’t be repeated enough literally EVERYONE hates inflation. White people, black people, Hispanic people, eskimoes, Australians, Italians are all unified in their hate of inflation.
Now I won’t make the argument that the Biden administration is solely to blame for the rise in inflation but what I will say is like it or not inflation played a HUGE role… and this can’t be understated.
~Harris voter
They also cared about economic issues, and their gut feeling that things were bad for them (somewhat true) and that the Democrats had done nothing to help them (untrue). The Republicans relied on pure emotion, and that’s a hard one to shake. I genuinely don’t know how to fight their raw “we’re the moral good folk battling evil” storyline.
As I said upthread (or it might have been another thread); it may be that Democrats’ fate was sealed just from this. Inflation was largely caused by a worldwide supply shock. The Biden administration got inflation down to target levels, more or less, which is all they could do. That and help keep conditions such that salaries beat inflation.
But it may be that the only thing that they could have done to get a second term was restore prices back to their prepandemic levels, which is simply not an option for a host of reasons.
You told the truth about what people didn’t show up to vote for. You’re ignoring the truth about why they didn’t show up. That’s called making excuses and nothing to be proud of.
The solution is the Democrats should lie more, or the Republicans should lie less.
Which would you prefer?
Did you read that post?
Czarcasm whines that I was blaming the victim, and I said that running on a platform of being victims was a bad move.
I never said that the Democrats ran a campaign around being victims.
The nugget of truth there is that our asylum system is completely broken. They should have run much harder on fixing that so we can grant asylum to those who qualify and deport those who don’t. Hit that message, not “Trump’s deportation plan is racist”.
That wasn’t nearly as big an issue as inflation or immigration. Neither is the FEMA thing.
By having a clear and affirmative plan for the border and for the economy and running on that rather than how bad a guy Trump is.
Look, if every voter thought exactly the way that I do, the most effective strategy would have been to explain the false elector plot in excruciating detail, and it would be a 50 state land slide. But that’s not our electorate, and you have to win the electorate you have, not the one you wish you had.
…by the numbers:
57% of white people voted for Trump.
13% of Black people voted for Trump.
The OP: “I pit Black people.”
Don’t you think you should be pitting “traitorous white people?”
I’d just call them self destructive fools and bigots, not bother with race.
I think the difference is Trump is blaming black people (more broadly people of color) and not white people so, a black person voting for Trump is betraying their fellow black people. Trump will not be a president who works to ease the burden on black people/PoC. Likely he will do the opposite.
If you are a WASP male then you are golden.
@Whack-a-Mole @gyrate @Babale : Let me try to take some of the heat off this conversation (who knew things would get so heated with such a benign thread title?). I don’t think the areas of disagreement are that big so let me try to summarize the small distinction that I think is here
#3 is the flaw in the reasoning.
They did not say everything was good now. They said things were better now. Americans didn’t feel that way per #1 & #2.
…and white people voting for Trump are betraying their fellow white people.
You got Trump because of white people. If we are going to make it about race, lets not make it about Black men. Because Black people aren’t the problem here. There will always be a statistical handful of people that will vote against their interests.
The problem is white supremacy.
Ok, fair enough. But of course that would be an accurate statement, and as long as they were not smug or condescending about it (and I’ve seen no evidence of this) I don’t think this is the root of the problem or “flaw in the reasoning” (I wouldn’t phrase it as a flaw anyway; the 6 points are largely separate).
A party looking to be re-elected has to show that they have done good things, and they have.
Agreed there.
Not exactly.
I didn’t say that Democrats were condescending or that they kept saying that everything was good.
The Kamala Campaign’s main message on inflation was, “We know you’re hurting but this is the recovery from COVID; Biden’s policies have worked to make our recovery much smoother than other countries’, for example across Europe; and Kamala will do more of the same, plus some tax cuts for lower income Americans and minor tax breaks for first time homeowners or people starting a small business”.
The way that this comes across to Average Joe is, unfortunately, as Actually, the economy is doing well. And Average Joe doesn’t feel like the economy is doing well. Maybe he’s an idiot; maybe if he was actually strapped for cash he wouldn’t have a DoorDash subscription; but at the end of the day, every time Average Joe goes to the grocery store, he is upset at how much it costs him. And Kamala’s messaging just didn’t resonate with him.
Pretty much.
When it comes to immigration, I agree - Democrats had good policy that would have addressed the asylum issue. But the messaging was so milquetoast, because the Democrats are too afraid to say “we need the funding to process the backlog of asylum seekers and deport the ones who don’t qualify” out loud - even though it’s the actual policy they’re pushing - because they’re so worried about the fringe part of their base that would be alienated by a statement like that, that they sacrifice communicating in a way that 80% of the electorate understands.
No, this being the most critical thing is what I’ve said all along. I’m not sure if you’re counting me in those “others who believe it is of secondary importance”, but I don’t think that.
Well, because of this exchange earlier:
This is a thing I am disagreeing about.
Democrats, certainly compared to Republicans, were the party talking about real issues, and I don’t recall any of them saying the voters were dumb children (Yes, there’s Biden’s gaffe but that wasn’t about telling people they didn’t understand something).
Pretty much the only issue that Republicans talked about that was real was immigration, and even that should be a winning issue for Dems, given the bill that Trump blocked, and that Biden’s executive orders have managed to get border crossings back below the Trump level anyway. It didn’t matter because most people don’t know these facts.
I wish this were an ordinary, grown-up race where the party with the best answers to the real problems got elected. That’s not what this election was.
Right, but our messaging on immigration was fucked.
Rather than emphasizing the message “yes, immigration is a problem; the root cause is our overwhelmed asylum system, which has lead to 2 million unprocessed cases; we want to process these cases and deport people who don’t qualify for asylum” the message that was emphasized is “Trump is racist for wanting to deport 15 million people”.
The underlying policy is the same, but the message is completely different.
That makes it way too easy for Republicans to paint us as being for an open border.
No, apparently they vote for the side that declares that if elected these problems will just go away on their own.
That’s another way of saying they voted for change. Not much thinking about what that change will be, but that’s the way people are. If life seems bad they may try anything different.
Alas, in the current environment, anything that could be spun as recognizing the other side has a point about one thing, is as good as conceding they are right on everything.
In the current environment actual single issues are less important than the perception of what zeitgeist, what worldview, what philosophy the other side is perceived as hewing to. The Right sees the Democrats as the party of the technocratic nanny state, determined to stamp out freedom as we traditionally knew it. The Right’s response would be something like “well yeah, the Bolsheviks supported housing for the masses too”.