- Ninjas, but they’re invisible, so we don’t talk about them.
Which is what happens with Inflation. The President does not have a magic wand to fix inflation.
We have discussed this ad nauseum, and IMHO this is not true.
None of which the Dems could do anything about. The voters voted trump and a GOP congress in.
Indeed they did.
And this messaging is exactly what the miss was. “What am I supposed to do, I’m only the President.” Technically true, perhaps, but it was inadequate to the moment, and Biden got creamed as a result.
A felon is President, Biden is not, the results speak for themselves.
Which happened because the Dems didn’t lead. They assumed that the horrors of the Trump admin would be enough to keep it from coming back, they assumed it was better to just let sleeping dogs lie, and now the lying sleeping dog is back in the White House.
There’s just no way you can look at the outcome of 2021 and conclude that the Dems got it right. There are plenty of excuses as to why they didn’t, but the job of a political party is to gain power, and Dems failed in the worst possible way at the worst possible moment.
Whatever you think their formula was, it simply didn’t work. It’s indisputable, and there’s nothing to say about it except excuses.
Sure, trump lied his ass off. That is not the Democratic way.
No, it happened due to inflation.
Yeah. What Americans want for leaders are evil people (out of a combination of malice and a cultural conviction that evil is superior, I think), but then the consequences of voting for evil people smacks them in the face and they bounce back for an election cycle before going back to the same awful people who screwed them over last time. The one thing they don’t do is learn from their mistakes.
I don’t know about voters in general. But the title of this thread says it.
I think that swing voters want distinctive (if still moderate) candidates. This goes against the idea of there being a formula.
American politics is at root about anti-black racism sadly.
When the civil war broke out, the democrats were the party of slavery and the republicans were the party of black civil rights. As a result southern whites were overwhelmingly democrats for 100 years. This coalition of southern democrats and democrats in other states gave the democratic party control over congress and allowed massive reforms under FDR and LBJ.
Both FDR and LBJ had 65-70% of congressional seats be democratic, which made it easier for them to pass their economic agendas.
Then the civil rights movement happened, and southern whites realized the democratic party was the party of civil rights for black people, and the republican party was the party for the oppression of black people. So the south shifted and now the south is overwhelmingly republican. Not only that, but white resentment over race has also caught on in rural areas all over the US, not just the south.
Southern whites will always vote for whatever party is authoritarian and anti-civil rights and anti-human rights. But sadly that has spread out of the south and is affected large numbers of whites all over the country.
So now politics is mostly deadlocked because the people that want to enforce social hierarchies and the people that support social egalitarianism are about equal.
Obama getting elected revved this into overdrive because it was obvious that Obama was far more competent and intelligent than 99.9% of the people that hated him. This upended the entire narrative that blacks are mistreated because they deserve it. All the whites who feel they are innately more deserving of status, wealth, mates, etc due to their white skin realized they had to compete with highly competent black people now.
So white supremacists looked for the most vile, disgusting, worthless white man they could find and held him up to say ‘no matter how stupid, evil, vile, worthless and disgusting you are, being white and being a man makes you superior’. Which is how we got Trump. Trump is an effort to reinstate white supremacy and patriarchy by showing that white skin and male genitals make you superior to all POC and women, and that the more of a failure you are as a white man, the better, because that just proves a complete failure as a white man is better than a highly competent woman or POC. If Trump were moral, competent and intelligent he wouldn’t be nearly as appealing to his cult followers. Trump being a total failure is a feature, not a bug. It proves that merit is less important than being part of the in-group.
I don’t know when it’ll end. I’m ‘hoping’ that as the boomers and older Gen X die of old age, society will start to calm down again. But I predict a lot of authoritarianism in US politics for the next couple decades.
Maybe by the 2040s things will calm down as a lot of older people who want to enforce white supremacy and patriarchy die off and are replaced with younger voters. But with Gen Z supporting patriarchy now due to red pill, who knows.
Who knows. Maybe the best we can hope for is a nation of authoritarian push and pull for the next 20-30 years, until most of the boomers and Gen X are dead, and then we can go back to sane politics again.
Yes, I’ve felt that for some time. A lot of Trump’s appeal to his follows is as an act of spite against women and non-whites in general, and Obama/Hillary/Harris specifically. A way of rubbing it in their collective faces that the worst possible white male is more “worthy” than them.
A lot? I see no real way to falsify that claim. Or maybe I should agree. It has to be true that there are a lot like that. Hundreds. Thousands. I suppose millions. But I would also consider:
Don Davis: This Is How I Won A Trump District
Other non-white Democrats from Trumpy House districts include Gabe Vasquez, Adriano Espaillat, and Nellie Pou. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez looks completely white to me, but her father immigrated from Mexico.
Said it before, will keep saying it: been hearing that the younger generation is our hope since people older than I were the younger generation. Yet here we are. The demographic extinction of the reactionaries is not something to count on. It does not even need redpill, the children of people who hold any set of values majoritarily grow up to follow in their parents’ footsteps. (I suppose short-term we may see a reversion to “OK, maybe that was too much, let’s back off a bit and try and be civil about it” which will mean that again we just set it aside in the back burner for a while.)
Obama, Biden, Geo HW Bush, Carter, JFK, Ike, I can go on. In fact we have had only two “evil” presidents and I now kinda miss Nixon.
Not true.
Not even close. Slavery wasnt even an issue for the North until the Emancipation Proclamation, and then only secondary. And Lincoln was the very first Republican President. The 1860 election had two Democratic Candidates (this is part of why Abe won)- Breckinridge (Kinda Pro-Slavery, but a “states-righter”) and Douglas- generally anti-slavery but open to a compromise. Even the Republican party didnt want to abolish slavery- they wanted to contain it-
Without using the term “containment”, the Republican Party in the mid-1850s proposed a system of containing slavery. Historian James Oakes explains the strategy:
The federal government would surround the south with free states, free territories, and free waters, building what they called a ‘cordon of freedom’ around slavery, hemming it in until the system’s internal weaknesses forced the slave states one by one to abandon slavery.[17]
Not to mention, many anti-slavery and liberal states- California for example- elected a number of Democratic governors before the weird criss/cross making the Dems the pro-civil Rights and the GOP with the “southern strategy” .
Obama won Florida and Virginia with white voters. Biden won Virginia. Clinton won Georgia.
Not only are your facts wrong, but your post here has a lot of bigoted stuff.
Dont worry, I falsified several of his claims, as did you. Good work.
Yeah I know. But part of me hopes that as people who aren’t as bigoted age into the electorate, that patriarchy and anti-black racism won’t be as appealing to win elections.
But sadly I’m sure you’re right. anti-black racism has been a major factor in politics since the Bacon rebellion of 1676, and its not going to magically go away in 20 years.
Other forms of prejudice come and go, but anti-black prejudice was intentionally built into our culture to keep the working class divided and to justify slavery.
That’s the heart of the issue. When Democrats lose, is it because moderates stayed home because the candidate was too progressive, or is it because progressives stay home because the candidate wasn’t progressive enough? My hypothesis is that it’s more likely that progressives stay home during years of Democratic losses when they were the incumbents (1994, 2000, 2010, 2016, 2024), than the other way around. Why do I suspect that? Because the results produced by those Democratic administrations (slow progress forward, in a 1.5 steps forward 1 step back manner) during the lead up to each of those elections were results that moderates would be happy about, but that progressives would be upset about.
Or at least that they’d be “meh” about, but OTOH got the right wing riled up and motivated behind the “OMG they are taking over” message (1994, 2010).
Mostly both, but also indy voters can and have been lured into the GOP side by propaganda and lies.
This is exactly the right take.
A lot of liberals I knew spent the 2010’s waiting for the elder generations to die off, figuring it would be all downhill from there purely on demographics. People are utterly shocked that, by their lights, “Generation X has turned out to be a disappointment.” Bewildered, they wonder if it’s the leaded gasoline era.
What this told me is that liberals simply don’t know many people from religious households. The apple rarely falls far from the tree. There’s a siege mentality in these homes and communities, and that kind of dynamic is hard to beat as far as raising entrenched radicals.
The documentary Jesus Camp (2006) adds a lot of perspective on how things were progressing even 20 years ago. Anyone confused about generational political alignment would do well to watch this one.
It’s an understandable assumption to have made, even if it turned out to be incorrect. Mostly because it did happen that way back in the day. The WWII generation was more liberal than the one prior, the boomers more liberal than the WWII generation, and Gen X more so than the boomers. If that wasn’t the case we wouldn’t have made all the progress we did on social issues from roughly the end of WWII up until Trump won the first time.
The Dems think they need to pander to the most right wing people that aren’t outright psychopaths.
They think that they need to run people like Clinton (either one), Biden, Harris. Meanwhile every single poll shows Americans consistently support way more progressive policies. The Dem. Party is hijacker’s by their corporate side.
This planned failure lets the d. leadership, collect ridiculous amounts of money without ever sticking their necks out or actually doing anything. Warren c.s. have found a very comfortable and lucrative niche and couldn’t be more happy with the status quo.
The only polls that really matters are the various Democratic primaries. In those polls, the progressive Democrats (assuming you mean people like AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Graham Platner, or Bernie Sanders if he were a Democrat) rarely win. That’s why Democrats think they need to run a Clinton, Biden, Harris, etc.
Dem primaries are rigged.
The people running them like being in charge. When you dismiss “super delegates” and other skulduggery you see a completely different picture. That party would win elections, instead of wallowing in donor money and losing elections (plural!) to the most incompetent, unlikable man you can imagine.