Sad as it is we have to acknowledge democrats as a party were in denial of the obvious decline in the physical condition (and mental acuity ?) of Biden till the debate disaster. In hindsight the signs were obvious and some of us just kept on saying he is sharp as a tack…it was so sad seeing him be the butt of internet jokes and memes.
All this was an albatross on kamala and Biden pulling out so late (literally forced out by his own party) obviously didn’t help matters.
I thought the republicans were lying calling the initial polls showing kamala in a huge lead as “sugar high” but it seems they were right and I was wrong.
Did that bill address Democratic Party concerns more than those of the GOP? Sure. Would the administration have compromised? Yes.
Congressional moderates, on both sides, worked on compromise comprehensive immigration bills almost continuously over the past four years. The GOP did not want to allow the Biden-Harris administration compromise successes, as Mitch McConnell famously made clear: :
I guess Harris could have attacked Biden for supposedly not pushing immigration reform more, but it would have been unfair to her own administration, and I do not think swing voters would have bought it.
This is so bizarre a misreading of this thread that I have to wonder what’s behind it. Can you provide examples to support your claim that “many of you knew there were problems with Harris”—?
Agree…she was caught between a rock and a hard place.
The Biden-Harris administration lost the narrative on immigration and border control once Abbot started bussing immigrants in to blue cities (I agree it was a “cruel” tactic but very effective from a republican pov).
Now the reality of what the border states faced with uncontrolled immigration was brought right in to the “sanctuary” cities and states and before long they were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and the infrastructure and budget was just not there to handle such large numbers.
Ofcourse the republicans did play up the horrrible crimes committed by a few of the illegal immigrants and it only swayed a few more independents.
For the first time ever there was a plurality of voter support as per multiple polls to deport illegal immigrants…that indicates how severe the border/illegal immigrants issue was for the democrats. The democrat senate candidates who outpolled Kamala in the swing states distanced themselves from her/Biden on this issue(probably due to her past rhetoric and the perceived failure of the Biden admn on border control) and in fact a few kept her at arms length away from their campaign.
My view is that there’s nothing Harris could have done differently. She ran an almost flawless campaign that had some of the same vibes of competence, creativity, and humour as Obama in 2008. The denunciations of Trump during the DNC by some of those who knew him best should have been devastating. Yet somehow none of it worked.
The outcome of this election was both surprising and shocking, and was not an indictment of Harris but an indictment of the ignorati that turned out to be a majority of American voters. If there’s a winning strategy against willful ignorance I don’t know what it is.
Not flawless but she did run a good campaign in the limited time she had. I had doubts about the tactic of courting Liz Cheney and making her give campaign speeches in rallies ( it was not just a simple endorsement).
The Cheneys are hated in the trump era gop and I doubt if she swayed any of the moderate republicans to support Kamala. The reverse could have been true too in that she (Liz Cheney) turned off a few potential moderates and independents though I don’t have any supporting data/cites to prove it. It’s just my gut feeling…and a few tweets I saw saying that seeing Liz Cheney with Kamala made them sit out the election or vote Jill Stein rather than vote Kamala or Trump.
Yep this. She ran a very good campaign against a very flawed candidate, and in a fair world she would have won. But as I’ve said in other threads, the RW owns the media (yes, despite the talking point that continues to claim the opposite is true), both online and offline, and inflation has hit incumbents hard around the world
Disagree on this though.
As pointed out, the Biden administration tried to push immigration reform from the literal day 1. Then after accepting that the GOP would never let them pass anything basically capitulated on an extremely conservative bill that was draconian on the border and had no path to citizenship. This was more than a year before the election btw. Then, when Trump blocked that bill for personal political gain, Biden used executive orders to successfully curb border crossings.
This should have been a positive for the administration, if voters knew everything I just said. But they either didn’t, or, if they were in the MAGA cult, were in “la la la, can’t hear you” mode.
Poll after poll say that bipartisanship is popular. I do not know how you address that, in a campaign without highlighting figures from the other party who support you.
Of course your base is not going to like this. But small tent is a losing strategy.
Im just curious…is it the same on the other side too ? I mean wrt former democrats like RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard changing affliation to the other side. Did they pull any democrat voters over to the gop side ?
Re last post, of course that quote is not actual, but intended as a paraphrase. And except maybe for the word biological (Trump ran large numbers of ads explicitly saying he is against against “they/them”), I do not think it is an accurate paraphrase.
Trump’s tent only excluded people who are not a pure this or that. Literally, “they/them” was just an attack on the non-binary. The biggest example to me, of Trump appealing to an unfortunate human trait, where some of us prefer purity, is his false claim that Harris is only recently Black. That lie alluded to the fact that, unless you are very good with facial recognition, Kamala Harris is hard to racially classify at first glance.
Would Trump have gotten even more votes if he appealed to a bigger tent? I’d think yes. The election was close.