Well, finally. Like I said, that should have happened months ago.
Anyway, I can hold two non-contradictory thoughts in my head:
We’ve got two choices, the difference between them is vast, and for me the choice is easy.
At the risk of nitpicking, can you give an example? I can’t recall a single instance of ever hearing a Democratic candidate say, “Fuck black people (or gays, or women, or union workers, or undocumented migrants,) now that we said that, will you please vote for us, rural white voters?”
There will be no shortage of people to blame if democracy ends next Jan. 20. My principal culprits.
1- The people. Americans are as a whole pretty stupid. People don’t inform themselves intelligently, they go to biased media or google until they find a crackpot that agrees with what they already think. They go to TikTok and consume news spat out by the Chinese Communist Party or go to Facebook and see pages that algorithms have been set up to fuel their existing biases. They have a double standard where Democrats are expected to give their policy positions, but Republicans can run on hating the same people that they do. They have this naive childish belief that the president has control over gas prices and inflation and are quite willing to end democracy if gas prices go up. They think that every government dollar spent makes Baby Jesus cry and that tax cuts for the wealthy will trickle down to them- next time. They idolize the corporate suits that gut their benefits as “job creators”. They think that if Alfred seems too old to run the Batcave it would make sense to put The Joker in charge. They “do their own research” by going to google and finding something that tells them what they want to hear. They repost demonstrably false posts on Facebook because hey, if it smears a Democrat, they’re reposting it. They know the Republican candidate is criminally insane but say “well, the Democrat doesn’t agree with every single thing that I believe so I’ve got to vote third party.” They think that the party that has been working for more than 80 years to kill Social Security is going to keep the Democrats from ending it.
2- The mainstream media. DJT has been the biggest moneymaker in their history, so they are trying not to kill the cash cow. Biden won’t give them the access they think they should have? Harp on his age. Endlessly. Republicans lack a plan to improve anything? Don’t mention that, cover their performance art as if it was news. DJT says something outrageous? Find something to nitpick about Biden. Bothsidesism is the rule for mainstream media- if a Republican is caught murdering a priest then you must give equal coverage to a Democrat picked up for jaywalking.
3- Social Media. They make money by putting ads in front of eyeballs so getting clicks is more important than responsible moderation. Facebook’s algorithms show people posts that will piss them off and share with others that share their views. This vicious circle makes people loathe the opposition and consider them as enemies. The moderation is weak at best, complicit in the scheme at work. Truth truly doesn’t matter any more. Rinse and repeat for TikTok.
4- Republicans. They have abandoned their role as the loyal opposition when not in power and have become dictatorial when in power. Their only guiding principle is getting power and keeping it, no matter what those pesky voters think. Democrat in office when a Supreme Court justice dies? If Republicans control the Senate, no fucking way the appointment goes through. Got a big problem that needs fixing? Can’t think about fixing it unless a Republican is in the White House. Forget supporting the Constitution and defending liberty around the world- think only of what’s best for your party’s nominee.
50 posts were split to a new topic: SyncoSmalls trocking thread
I see myself using this quote often in the future.
That’s pretty much my view, but you expressed it in better words than I could.
Blaming is only useful, or meaningful, if it’s about things that could be changed or improved. So if the DNC ran a bad campaign, then assigning blame is useful because it leads to improvement for the next time around.
But voters are always going to be ignorant, biased, or wrong. That will never change.
Just on LGBT stuff? Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (which went back on Clinton’s campaign promise to allow gay people to serve in the military) and DOMA (which banned ssm at the federal level, and was signed by Clinton) are pretty big ones. Even Obama was publicly opposed to ssm until his second term.
The part I find the most mind-boggling is Democrats who say “We need to run Biden because Trump is the R nominee.” That’s like saying, “Our enemy is coming at us with a gun so we need to wear a cotton T-shirt instead of a Kevlar vest.”
I mean it’s correctly assigning blame. That in and of itself is “good” IMO (whatever that means). If course it’s not a smart election strategy for the Dems, but no one is asking that.
At the end of day the question was “Who’s to blame if Biden loses?” The answer to that is very simple: the people who didn’t vote for Biden.
If you don’t vote for Biden and he loses the election you are to blame.
Yeah, they definitely should have run someone that had beaten Trump in the election before, no doubt about that.
I have to respectfully disagree. We all have analogies here (thunderstorms at a picnic, blades of grass at a football game) and here’s mine, FWIW:
An election is a hiring process in which the electorate chooses someone to manage their affairs. We have to stop this talk of “our leader”. He/she is not our leader. They are our employee, or our staff. When hiring someone we have to look past the glossy brochures and the cool personalities vs the bland personalities and look at track records and factual evidence and performance data. And, unfortunately, a significant portion of the hiring committee has been making really bad, really stupid, and really toxic choices.
Sure, but what good does that do other than give mental satisfaction?
Or, put another way around, how does that lead to Democratic improvement for the 2028 campaign (assuming Biden loses in 2024?) Voters are going to be just as ignorant, lazy or wrong in 2028 as they are this year.
It’s like a farmer blaming a drought for the ruin of his crops (in a region known for dryness) rather than implementing measures that would ensure adequate water supply to his crops.
No blame for Democrats that don’t vote?
And why should Republicans do anything to help a Democrat win? That’s like blaming the Chiefs for the 49ers not winning the Super Bowl.
They fall under the general category of stupid voters. BTW, I have to give attribution for the Alfred-Joker line to Jimmy Kimmel.
I take back all the nice things I said about you. 
First off, it is going to be Biden vs. Trump.
And, as others in this thread have pointed out, there’s no such thing as a protest vote. Joe Biden and the DNC don’t get notified that Saint_Cad voted for Kamala, and even if they did they wouldn’t care. Of course, your non-vote for Biden could help Trump win Colorado (your home state, right?), and then you’d have really showed them.
Seriously, after all the positives you shared about Biden, you still don’t think he’s worth voting for over Trump? Or am I just being whooshed here?
None of the is relevant to the OP. Again the question is who’s to blame and there is a very obvious answer to that: the people who don’t vote for Biden. Failing to recognize that does help the Dems get elected in 2028, or the price of ham hocks, or anything else.
No it’s like a farmer blaming the ruin of his crops on the people who burnt all his crops. There might be other people he could complain to, and indirect reasons his crops were burnt (you didn’t pay the danegeld, etc) but ultimately the people to blame are the people who burnt his crops
What about a black man running for office in 1890? What about a woman running for office in 1956? This is where the “blades of grass” analogy fails. If you agree in the “blades of grass” analogy you simply think these two candidates are “unqualified” because they can’t win a popular vote. Because the voters are just a reflection of reality, and it’s the fault of the candidates, not the voters.
Tyranny of the majority. There is no particular reason a majority is right or even moral. By the blades of grass reasoning, it was right that slavery wasn’t ended until after the Civil War, because the leaders weren’t persuasive enough. The public bore no responsibility whatsoever.
Here’s what I think about voting. I have sometimes abstained from voting for minor offices because I don’t know the differences between the two candidates. But really, if I had done my homework, maybe taken five minutes to determine the differences, I could have made an informed decision. That I did not is a poor reflection on my part. We really don’t have all that many elections, and if it’s just laziness on our part that we don’t know the candidates, we are not being responsible citizens.
I genuinely believe that people can be irresponsible citizens and do a poor job as voters.
But I don’t agree with that analogy. I was just giving it as an example from upthread.
As the poster who introduced the “blades of grass” analogy, I must split hairs with you here. I said they shouldn’t be blamed, not that they were right.
The problem is, what does it mean to “run a bad campaign”? It feels like people are saying, “If they lose, they must have run a bad campaign”, which seems like a tautology to me.
Sure, if Biden went on national TV and kicked a puppy while signing legislation cancelling Social Security, we could point to that as the problem. But what is the specific problem with his campaign, that you can point to right now?
The only thing I can see is people saying he’s “not getting his message out”, but what more could he do to get his message out? He’s visiting places and talking about the improvements he’s made, and the news just aren’t covering that. Should he force them to cover his campaign stops? Should he start pulling stunts so they put that on the news? Would a stunt actually get more people to hear the substantive things he says later, or would the stunts become the whole of the story? Should he be paying for wall-to-wall advertisements? What does he do when half the population skips ads?
At some point, if people don’t want to engage with his message, there’s nothing he can do about that. You can’t have a discussion with someone who sticks their fingers in their ears and yells “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”