She could have tried to run in a less racist and pig-ignorant country.
“Have you tried not being a black woman?”
Agreed with the above. I’m not sure how much it would have helped sway those voters (especially as they were probably motivated by the fears that Trump stoked), but it felt to me like something that was missing.
James Carville continues to be right: “It’s the economy, stupid.” But an important caveat to that: it’s microeconomics that’s important – i.e., how does the voter feel about their own/their family’s personal economic situation? Talking about “unemployment is low,” “GDP is up,” etc. is macroeconomics, and if good news on that front doesn’t jibe with “I’m struggling to make ends meet,” it not only falls on deaf ears, but it can feel condescending.
Not only that, but it can make many voters even angrier. If a voter is struggling to make ends meet and is still earning only $13/hour, telling him about how millions of middle-to-upper-class Americans are now buying houses and how house-buying is a sign of a hot economy is just going to piss him off further.
It is absolutely condescending, and I think Democrats severely underestimate how much of Trump’s support comes specifically from voters (especially male ones) that are so fucking tired of being condescended to and told how wrong they are about everything.
The same is true with things like tariffs, or NAFTA, or any number of policies that might be good for the economy writ-large but don’t do shit for the factory worker that gets laid off.
One of Trump’s biggest emotional connections with voters is that he doesn’t make them feel like he’s better than them. He might say that he is (richer, more powerful, smarter) but he doesn’t make them feel it. He demands nothing of them, and promises to fight for them in exchange for nothing but their vote.
Yes. Millions of Americans bought into the 'these people you resent and fear are the problem and I will get rid of them’ promise made by the right. (I won’t just say ‘by Trump’ because the entire GOP has rebranded itself as the party of scapegoating, grievance, and resentment.)
I don’t think anyone has yet discovered a workable counter to that sales pitch. ‘Don’t be racist’ definitely doesn’t work. ‘They are playing you’ doesn’t work because they’ve been told by the right that they’re the Most Righteous and Worthy and Smart and Valuable and they’re not willing to accept that they’re being conned. (A universal human weakness.)
The Harris campaign hoped that they could offer something in place of the delicious assurances of superiority the GOP was offering, and that something was Opportunity. But millions preferred the flattery.
Yeah. They crave hierarchy because they believe they’ll be put at the top of the hierarchy.
And no facts will dissuade them of this tragically false belief.
I would disagree that this is a skill possessed by Trump. Instead, I think it’s his basic and profound insecurity. His fans know that he genuinely needs them. None of the Trump-wanabees—not DeSantis, not Cruz, not Vance, not Mike Johnson—have this trait. They want support but they don’t need it in that deep, cratered-personality way that Donald does.
So, yeah: this emotional defect works as an asset to Trump. But the idea that he deserves credit for it: no.
I haven’t read the entire thread.
I’ve been thinking this morning about Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, where the Supreme Court effectively said that the Courts no longer needed to default to an assumption that Federal Agencies have a clue what they’re talking about.
As the institutions that constitute our democracy fall to the plodding, intentional, and corrosive efforts of the Right Wing/MAGA movement, Loper plays an ever greater role.
Every sort of threat that you hear about from the left – every alarm bell about what we should be worried about in the world and from the right – is supported by the vast majority of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).
Every sort of existential threat that we hear about from the right comes solely from political operatives and politically-oriented think tanks. Chief among them are RW media, RW influencers, and no end of social media inputs – both foreign and domestic – that ‘flood the zone’ with the kind of toxic bullshit that every single MAGA that each of us knows … spews, both verbatim and ad nauseum.
We get information. They get propaganda. It’s nowhere near that black and white, but I’d argue it’s fundamentally the case.
How I’ve phrased it before is this:
Perhaps nothing better explains the appeal of Trump than the work of three people:
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Doctors David Dunning and Justin Kruger (Google them), and
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(Alberto) Brandolini’s law: “Brandolini’s law, also known as the [think cow excrement] asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states the following: The amount of energy needed to refute [think cow excrement again] is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
No different from the other innumerable victims of demagogues throughout history.
[END]
What can we do?
- Within the confines of the First Amendment, figure out what guardrails could reasonably exist that might combat mis/disinformation
- Give our children a world class education – beginning with countering the RW narrative that “a world class education” is “liberal indoctrination.” The rest of the world doesn’t believe that. Neither did the US until quite recently
- Figure out how to dial back Citizens United and McCutcheon, and start pushing hard for stricter lobbying and campaign finance reforms.
I have long said that the RW data analysts did their homework. They defined the largest block(s) of ‘gettable’ voters, did a massive amount of demographic/psychographic research on them, determined what kind of horror show of demagoguery it would take to get them, and then put together a vast team of amoral political operatives and the soulless, narcissistic, pliable front man to be the (orange) face of the movement.
I don’t think Harris really had anywhere near enough time to find a bigger bloc – certainly not enough time to truly mine a ‘broad coalition’ of substantially smaller, disparate voting blocs – and get them to coalesce behind her – what I think she tried to do, admirably.
I think her campaign did amazingly well, but – just like they say in Divorce Law: when one party is an asshole, the asshole usually wins.
We can’t attack supply (Trump). For the future, we have to attack demand (his supporters).
I think it will be unimaginably difficult.
Overall I would give Harris around 6/10 and that was my view before the results too. She did some big things well, her first couple of weeks generated some real enthusiasm and raised her approval numbers. She was solid prepared for the debate and won comfortably.
OTOH she doesn’t have a deep grasp of the range of policy issues facing a President and often sounded unsure and callow, ending up with some word salad that became a meme. Of course Trump knows much less than her but he has the great gift of being able to bullshit confidently in a way that she simply cannot.
She also struggled to articulate a vision especially on economic issues other than platitudes like the “opportunity economy”.Probably as a result of her mediocre performance at interviews, her team tried to protect her and reduce her exposure. On balance this was a mistake and she would have benefited doing more interviews and podcasts which would have improved her skills and confidence and just allowed her to get her message out especially to groups like young men.
Beyond that the Democrats have just lost the plot on illegal immigration where they have thrown all caution to the winds If the Biden administration had just matched the policies and messaging of Obama on the issue, Harris would have been in much better shape. Obama used to be called the “deporter in chief” by immigration activists but that is what helped him win re-election comfortably. The Biden administration on the other hand has been overly conciliatory to those same activists at a considerable cost to their re-election campaign.
I also can’t help but think of the time when pro-Palestine protesters heckled her at a rally and Harris’ response was simply: “Keep talking like that and you’re going to get Trump elected.”
Well, okay then.
All of the above.
“Them” being a majority of Americans, of course.
Both parties are minorities, so no.
Trump got more than 51% of the vote this time around, so yes. I guess I should say, a majority of voters.
I think the Democratic position on immigration is perfectly fine. The main issue is our overwhelmed asylum system; we need to fund it so we can process asylum seekers faster and deport the ones who abused the backlog to stay in the country without a solid case that they deserve asylum; and in fact, the Democrats tried to get a bill passed that would have addressed this issue, but Trump stopped them.
The issue was that we were too afraid to actually communicate that position properly, and instead focused on accusing Trump’s position of being racist.
Policy was totally fine; messaging was fucked.
Could Shapiro have helped her win PA? Wasn’t he one of the top picks? Not sure if it would have made enough of a difference.
I agree that perceptions of the way she became the nominee hurt her, but at that point it was the least bad option from a shitty set. A primary so close to the election would have been disastrous, and keeping Biden aboard was not going to work either.
I think it’s more important that you have to be good at campaigning and resonate with someone in order to win a large-field primary. Harris never passed that trial by fire.
It seems like she ran a competent campaign although matbe there was an Obama that would have come out of a real primary. I also personally think we got Biden in 2020 in spite of fhe age issue because the roster of democratic hopefuls is aggressively mediocre.
She may have had some stain as a result of Biden picking her for vp after promising to choose a black woman.
Yea, I agree. I think the way this went down was as good as it could get.
It was bungled when you had Biden decide to run again (which was not the impression he gave when ran in 2020), then drop so late. I don’t even care about the perception really of a switch, but it just doesn’t allow the process to play out and best ideas and/or candidates to emerge. Even if Harris was the candidate that would have made it through a real primary, her ideas would have been different, or certainly more refined and framed to what voters actually wanted.
I suppose, in the moment, it was difficult for Biden to consider not running again, though. The one person on the planet who has beaten Trump.
She spent too much time talking about what Trump would do, much of which most voters knew were not Trump’s plans at all (Project 2025, national abortion ban, 20% sales tax, …) instead of what she would do.
She needed to talk about some specific plans that most Americans could get behind instead of vague platitudes. Some of the specific things she did promise were targeted at too small of a group to buy enough votes, such as $25,000 mortgage assistance to first time home buyers whose siblings or parents never owned a home or $50,000 tax credit to black owned small businesses.
Demonstrating an ability to talk about and understand issues would have given voters more confidence in her ability to manage as president. The brief interviews she did grant and lack of press conferences did not instill confidence, especially her inability or unwillingness to answer the questions she was asked. Her avoidance of taking a side on many issues made her appear too indecisive to lead. She wouldn’t even say how she voted on California’s Prop 36 (related to being more tough on crime), which was supported over 70% of California voters.
IMO, the breadth of her loss isn’t on an “if only she’d chosen a different VP” scale.
Like others, my perspective is that she ran an impressive campaign given the circumstances that she found herself in, but voters don’t grade on a curve. I think we (myself included) really underestimated how much of a liability the compressed timeframe was. We were bamboozled by the polls and the gob smacking amount of money she was raising, but she and the Democratic Party really needed those additional months of going through a process of vetting different candidates, testing and refining different messaging, and setting up an operation from the ground floor specifically tailored to the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.