Republican endorsements, running to the right on foreign policy, an unambitious agenda of incremental change less important than how bad the other guy is. Where have we seen this before?
  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    1 month ago

    I don’t know why this is being downvoted. There seems to be a wierd group think around that criticising the Democrat campaign means you support Trump or something?

    The article is well written and it’s certainly not pro Trump. Instead it’s taking a position that the campaign is making misteps that Clinton also made, which might let Trump win.

    It opens with a very good point - Democrats seem to believe they ran a good campaign in 2016 and should have won. There seems to be a lack of introspection even now about why they lost and what they should be doing to win over voters.

    I think the Harris campaign is better than the 2016 campaign but I do agree there are some worrying elements. A clear one is the uninspired and vague policies - the campaign is running mostly on personality and the idea that Trump is dangerous. That did not work for Clinton, although Harris certain ly has much more personality and likability. It is a risky strategy to retry.

    My worry is that they saw the big victory Labour had in the UK and are drawing the wrong conclusions. Labour won because the Incumbent Tories were very unpopular, and they so were very cautious about policies - they kept their mouth shut and let the Tories implode. But that has been tried with Trump before and he is not the incumbent. Also Labour are not popular here - they have not managed to break through, they have merely benefited from the Tories collapse in our first past the post system. Trump has not collapsed.

    If they’re emulating a UK strategy of letting Trump lose rather than actively trying to win then ti’s very dangerous and risky. We have a parliamentary democracy which does not transfer to the electoral college voting system. They should not base anything around UK labours success. It’s a mirage.

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
    84·
    1 month ago

    Something lost on blue maga from the article:

    But tell a lie incessantly enough, and you start to believe it. And you can’t help but feel that Democrats really do believe that they ran a great campaign that would and should have won, if only it hadn’t been for the dastardly villains who pulled the rug out. This year, they seem determined to prove that thesis.

    And here’s why trump has a real chance at winning from the article

    So much for that. For weeks now, it’s been clear the Harris campaign has decided that it’s going to rerun the Clinton 2016 strategy on the off chance that that year really was a fluke, and that Trump really is so hated that Americans will have no choice but to vote for his opponent. It didn’t work in 2016, but this time . . What does that look like in practice? It looks like dropping the “negative” label of weird and performing civil disagreement instead. It looks like giving up on exciting the party’s progressive flank — actively thumbing your nose at them, in fact — and explicitly pivoting to trying to win over Republicans instead. It looks like rolling out white papers and policy positions that few will read, while rarely talking publicly about what you would actually do when given the chance at a public forum.

    • return2ozma@lemmy.worldOP
      56·
      1 month ago

      The downvotes show many didn’t read the article. Oof…

      Okay, Democrats would say, but what about some of Harris’s policy announcements? Like her housing platform, for instance, which pledges to build three million homes and to give first-time homebuyers a grant of up to $25,000? Or what about her recent announcement that she would expand Medicare to cover home care services, vision, and hearing? Doesn’t that point to a different, more progressive policy–based direction than Clinton’s 2016 run, even if she barely talks about it?

      The answer to which is, not really, because this platform is actually a major step backward from the Biden years. It’s true the sitting president often seemed reluctant to run forcefully on the populist agenda he had taken up as a way to make nice with Bernie Sanders voters, but that agenda was fairly ambitious: among other things, it featured universal pre-K, free community college (for two years), childcare subsidies, paid leave, Medicare expansion, and a more generous child tax credit. Everything but the last two are now out in Harris’s day one agenda.

      Even her Medicare expansion is something of a step back from previous Democratic standard-bearers’ ambitions: Biden had promised to expand Medicare to dental, too, and lower its eligibility age to sixty, while even Clinton had offered to let people over fifty buy into the program (something her husband, nearly twenty years earlier, proposed).

      • eldavi@lemmy.ml
        21·
        1 month ago

        We had social media for a few decades now and I think I should be clear that people don’t read especially normies like .worlders