Trump. And those around him. It’s not like they’re even trying to hide it anymore.
I’m in fair agreement with this.
Harris comes across as professional but nothing more.
First, these circumstances are to be avoided. Had Biden actually died Harris could have at least shown something. But he didn’t, so Harris was left with the cleanup job.
That being said, she did as little to add any sort of constituency as possible. She basically got the base and eroded everything on the edges, did everything worse than Biden. That’s not going to cut it. Hillary was a better candidate than Harris. Harris will be a footnote.
I like my odds of surviving the next four years and being able to feed my kids a lot better then they were a week ago.
For example… ?
Meanwhile, in real life everything is going to get much worse, more expensive, and much more dangerous. Of course when your kids go hungry as the economy crashes I’m sure you’ll blame the Democrats anyway.
We’ll see.
I wish you good fortune sir.
No one but the worst people alive is going to have good fortune for the foreseeable future.
Ironically “Sideshow Bob Roberts” came up in queue. I had no idea Quimby was a Dem. Though it makes sense with the accent.
Trump increased quotas for agricultural workers and targeted them to countries that asylum seekers were coming from, to launder them in and keep his asylum numbers low.
He rejected e-Verify.
It’s hard to say whether he was protecting his own businesses or just saying one thing to his voters and another to agg CEOs for the sake of not losing support when all the food at the supermarkets disappears, but there’s currently no reason to think that he’s more serious this time around.
US citizens would love to take on dairy jobs if only they paid a bit more (that was dripping with sarcasm). And, I’m sure no one would complain about milk going up in price a bit to cover those increased salary costs, right? Oh wait, that seems to be the single largest complaint that drove people to Trump. Trump, the next president that ran on the platform of deporting millions which will cause milk to go up in price.
True, an inspirational TED talk with a dose of reproductive rights tossed in. Okay, I agree with that, but it’s not the only issue out there.
imo JRE Experience
I think Magiver above got it right, so I will just add a few things to that.
Harris and Democrats in general were trounced in the election. Ergo, neither Harris nor any other Democrat could have won in the original timeline. Yes, there are things about the Harris campaign that I would tweak, but based on the actual voting results, it was clear that she was never in striking distance. Not even close.
To fix the situation, you would have to go back to the beginning of the Biden administration and do things differently. I think Biden was a decent but by no means visionary president in terms of domestic policy, but has their been a worse communicator among presidents in the modern era? He wasn’t just terrible; he wasn’t present at all, never holding a single press conference until after the debate debacle. He never communicated an agenda after he was elected, and he never tried to promote his accomplishments. Finally, he was unaware of or actively tried to hide his decline, completely sabotaging our chances in 2024.
So, to fix things and have a chance in 2024, Biden would need to:
- Communicate a political agenda, deliver on it, and sell those accomplishments constantly.
- Realize that Democrats will be campaigning against Trump again, and take countermeasures from the beginning.
- State from the beginning that you will not be running in 2024, and build that fact into your ongoing communications.
- Groom a successor specifically to defeat Trump. Get buy-in across the Democratic party so that they can sail through the primary and start their campaign strong.
Biden created an absolutely fucked situation, but, to be fair, the Democratic party as a whole let this happen. Total incompetence.
I think Harris ran as good a race as she could. I don’t think anyone could have done better.
I think Desi Lydic got it right (start at about 4:00).
I thought this article on Trump’s strategy was solid. It contains the answer to the question posed.
That was a really good video. Especially the first half.
(When I clicked on it, I saw “TDS” and assumed “Trump Derangement Syndrome” lol. [I’ve never seen The Daily Show.])
I think many of us underestimated how hard this election was always going to be.
Factors largely out of the Harris campaign’s control:
The Electoral College is rigged.
Inflation has been high. A lot of Americans vote solely on that issue. It’s a stupid and lazy strategy, and I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a campaign to persuade the people who use it to adopt a more nuanced position.
Incumbent parties are losing all over the world this year.
Illegal immigration has been high. There’s no realistic short-term strategy that will stop that without being grossly inhumane. The party committed to reality and humanity is always going to be at a disadvantage there.
A large minority of voters are simply unpersuadable because they get their information entirely from fascist propaganda outlets.
Voters who strongly support either side of the Gaza war were always going to have problems with the Democrats.
Elon fucking Musk.
Surviving assassination attempts makes you more sympathetic.
Donald Trump is really, really good at being a lying con man.
Joe Biden tried to run for re-election.
Maybe misogyny is more of a thing than we wanted to believe? It’s still a very small sample size, but now the only two woman candidates in history have significantly underperformed their polls.
Having said all that, I think the campaign failed to adequately or seriously address the pocketbook concerns of working class voters. Which is frustrating because the Biden administration’s record on those issues is actually quite defensible, much better than Obama’s. They should have leaned much harder into explaining to voters how the American Rescue Act has, and will continue to, strengthen the economy in ways that help those at the bottom, particularly those in depressed rural areas. The best answer to racist populism is economic populism.
In retrospect, I don’t think anything about the campaign could have been significantly better to the point of winning the election. There’s probably a thousand things to nitpick, but none that would have tipped the scales.
The election was lost on what didn’t happen the last four years, and what didn’t happen was…any consequences for the people who orchestrated crimes and such during the Trump administration, up to and including Trump himself.
What didn’t happen was any sort of meaningful action against the billionaires that are consuming the wealth of this country like locusts.
What didn’t happen was breaking up the monopolistic practices of companies that have been responsible for the ‘inflation’ and raising the prices of everything, thus making things more expensive for the taxpayer.
And it’s important to note I’m looking at things that didn’t require changing any existing laws, so they didn’t need the Senate or House, just vigorous, active use of the executive branch and its powers. That’s why I’m not mentioning things like fixing the Supreme Court, since that would require passing a bill to alter its makeup.
Biden campaigned on ‘return to normal’ and followed through with that. But what he, and the Democratic Party forgot, is that ‘return to normal’ is not what the American people wanted. Sixteen years ago they wanted Hope and Change, so they elected Obama, and got very little, (and don’t tell me ‘the economy’ was good - ‘the economy’ as measured by all the statistics and numbers and everything else thrown at us basically boils down to ‘how well-off are rich people, and is their wealth growing?’ - the one major thing we did get with Obama was Obamacare, which while helpful was unfortunately too watered down to actually fix the problem straight up) so after eight years of that, they elected Trump because they no longer had much Hope left but still wanted Change. Sure, after the clusterfuck that was his first presidency, and with the horrible mishandling of COVID, Biden managed to win a victory, but the issues that resulted in Trump being elected have still gone unaddressed.
Because ultimately, ‘immigration’ isn’t a concern the people care about. They say it is because that’s what they’ve been told is a problem, but the real concern is they can’t afford the shit they want because their job (if they have one, or several) doesn’t pay enough. They can’t spend time with their family and friends because they don’t get enough time that isn’t demanded by their job. They have no job security because their employer could fire them at any time. Their stress is through the roof because their employers demand they do the work of three people, because it costs less and brings more profit to demand one person do more and more work than it does to hire three people.
And while the Biden administration couldn’t do things directly about these problems, it could have done a lot better. Much of the price problem is because of monopolies, and the executive branch definitely has the authority to do something about that, directly. The executive branch is also in charge of prosecution, and the whole ‘justice moves slowly’ is not an acceptable excuse, because as the saying goes, ‘justice delayed is justice denied’. A bunch of the Jan. 6 individuals got sentenced, but did we see the people who instigated and organized it in prison? Is Trump in prison? No. He should’ve been charged by the end of 2020, and there should have been so many charges against him in so many courts that his schedule for the next two decades should’ve consisted of court appearances without the slightest bit of time to go campaigning or riling people up (I’m exaggerating, but only a little).
I am confident that if the last four years had been a string of megacorporations being broken up (especially the grocery store and food conglomerates, which are some of the major causes of rising prices for the average person), rich assholes going to prison or otherwise actually facing consequences (and not just one or two sacrificial lambs for performative reasons) and criminals like Trump and his allies being actually jailed and imprisoned, Democrats would have won with just as big a sweep as the Republicans just did, or even more.
As a sidenote, I feel incredibly bad for Joe Biden. He did something brave by stepping down. He didn’t allow his hubris to demand that it be him and no one else that try to push on. It seemed like the best option at the time. It also seemed like it turned out really well. And yet now, and until the day he dies, I am sure he will look back on this and wonder if it was the right move, because maybe if he had just managed to get a little more energized and put on a better campaign for these last few months, he would have won. Maybe he really was the right guy for the job. I don’t think he would’ve won either, and he probably doesn’t, but…there’ll always be that nagging doubt. Maybe Biden could’ve done it.
One side embraced anti-war politicians and one side embraced literal war criminals and praised them for their “Moral core”
The choice was easy,
Excellent assessment.