I suspect voters like this are why Harris lost the popular vote; she did much worse than Biden in the big deep blue States like CA and NY, but not so much in swing States.
Let me ask this then. Who would you consider a better Democratic presidential candidate Harris or Gore? (Assuming you were old enough to be politically active in 2020.) (Damn am I old. Laugh.)
I would argue that Harris was more charismatic than Gore. How could she not, Gore has the charisma of a wet paper towel. Also, overall I liked her speeches. I liked her smile and her appearance on SNL was pretty funny.
I liked Gore’s policy positions more because to be blunt he actually had some. Or at least was willing to campaign on them.
I guess overall, I THINK I prefer Gore as a candidate but I can certainly be argued out of that position because I can recognize that I am a policy nerd, which would obviously bias me towards him and I already know that what I like isn’t necessarily what the rest of America wants in a presidential candidate.
“2000,” I am guessing you meant. Time flies. 
I would pretty much agree with your assessment. I wouldn’t call Harris extraordinarily charismatic relative to the expected baseline for national politicians, but Gore was certainly well below average in that regard.
Facepalm!
Yes, Thanks for the correction.
Gore faced the same problem as Clinton in 2016 and Harris in 2024. He ran a “play it safe” campaign designed to win Democratic voters, when he should have been running an aggressive campaign designed to turn out voters who are de facto anti-Republicans rather than Democrats. I suppose in one sense he gets extra points, because he didn’t have any recent prior examples to look back on. Clinton and Harris didn’t have that excuse, having Gore as a recent example. Yet they made the same mistakes Gore did.
Yeah. A problem with the “below average” accusation for Kamala is that other Democratic candidates have consistently made those same mistakes. Where are these “average” candidates that ran a better campaign than hers?
The sample size is small, but I think Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter, and maybe Harry Truman would be the best examples of “average” from the past 100 years.
This seems to ignore the context of the time.
A lot of de facto Democrat voters in Florida at the time thought Gore had the state locked up and could safely vote third party. I’ve even met a few who regretted that decision. They were perfectly ok voting for Gore if they thought the state was not safe.
And this seems to track many of the points in the thread. Had he won, there wouldn’t be a thread about campaign mistakes. It’s a (not so) hidden assumption that there had to be a path to electoral success and there had to have been significant failures to get there. But is that true? One can run a good campaign and lose or run a bad campaign and win. But we, as human beings, seem to never consider the latter when it occurs but endlessly debate the former in search of “the” mistake that must be there if we could only find it.
That is the point. Those voters, whether in Florida in 2000 or in MI, PA, and WI in 2016 and 2024, should have known better. The candidates should have known that to be the case and ran more aggressive campaigns rather than playing it safe. Campaigns focused on making it obvious to those voters that yes, their vote does (would have) mattered rather than a campaign focused on making sure that the old reliables remained old reliables.
ETA: Maybe Harris (and Gore and Hillary Clinton), just didn’t have it in them to try that approach. It might be that, to again use a sports analogy, that someone like Obama, Bill Clinton, and JFK, had the arm strength to throw that Hail Mary pass, while Harris didn’t (as opposed to having the strength but lacking the guts to try it). I’m not sure which one of those two is the case, but either way, her results put her in the below average category.
But again, that seems to be blaming the loser rather than an actual evaluation based on the realities on the ground.
What if a few thousand voters had voted differently in one or two states? Effectively, that means little difference in a campaign but could have swung the election. Would they have still been poor campaigners if the same strategy came out differently?
Is the result all that matters? Does the “how” not matter? The critique that the campaigns should have made the voters aware seems only to focus on the end result. Sure, the result matters but the “why" and the “how” have to matter, whether the result was a win or a loss. Otherwise, it’s a facile analysis that finds post-hoc rationales for the result rather than true analysis.
In a near coin flip, a win means they did the right thing and a loss means they did not? Reality is rarely so kind.
They “why” and “how” is that they knew they were running to follow up an incumbent Democratic POTUS. They should have known (at least Hillary Clinton and Harris, but probably Gore as well) that voters who care more about voting against a Republican rather than for a Democrat were thus more likely to stay home in 2000, 2016, and 2024. Given that, it should have been obvious to them that they should have ran aggressive campaigns focused on those low turnout voters rather than the play it safe strategy that they used.
Well, since Gore likely really won, only lost do tue a GOP backed “hanging chad” issue, I dont thing Gore made many big mistakes.
He failed to distinguish himself as someone other than a more boring / less charismatic version of Bill Clinton. He had several places where he could have done so (throwing Janet Reno under the bus for her handling of the Elian Gonzalez situation would have been a good start). Harris made the same mistake WRT Joe Biden.
Well, those people were idiots. And whatever mistakes the Gore campaign might have made, failing to warn voters loudly and frequently about the dangers of voting third party was definitely not one of them in my recollection.
That is my recollection as well. I suspect given the larger defections to 3rd parties that Gore suffered from that Gore would have been better off tacking to the Left like Flik suggested above and that Harris would have been better off tacking to the right but that is obviously not provable.
I can more easily understand Gore’s mistake as at least Bill Clinton was extremely popular making it harder to differentiate himself. Given where Biden was polling it should have been more obvious to Harris that she needed to differentiate herself.
What do you base that on?
The percentage of “likely voters” prior to recent elections who indicate in polls that they are “undecided,” and don’t have strong opinions either way, about the candidates.
At this juncture in this country’s political culture, if someone is planning to vote in a presidential election, but is still “undecided” in the weeks leading up to the election, they are almost undoubtedly unengaged, ignoring the news, not seeking out information, etc. That’s literally the definition of a “low-information voter.”
Note that I am not saying that there are no “engaged” voters who are truly swing voters anymore, but I strongly suspect that they are lower in numbers than the disengaged voters I described above.
The fact that she did so poorly in 2020 tells you about how democratic voters felt about her. I don’t know if the 2024 primary was skipped to avoid a progressive insurgent like Sanders, or because Bidens ego was so gigantic he wouldn’t step down like he promised. Probably both.
Harris is a highly competent person, and so was Hillary Clinton. The bar to be better than Trump is on the floor.
I really have no idea who a good democratic candidate in 2024 would’ve been though. But a real primary would’ve been better.
Independents now comprise the largest block of voters, and plenty of swing voters ARE engaged but find both parties distasteful. When you have to choose between two less-than-desirable options, it’s not unusual to wait until the last possible minute before making your choice.