Are you fucking kidding? Because Biden 2020 was a progressive platform and Harris 2024 was a centrist one. They weren’t even remotely similar. Biden may be a centrist, but he’s very pro-labor, and he could see how important the progressive base was that election, so he literally sat down with Sanders and hammered out a platform that they could get behind. And while I’ve got a lot of problems with Joe Biden, he actually was very committed to that platform. He really wanted BBB to get through and he kept trying to find ways to abolish student debt.
Harris, on the other hand, had a handful of disparate, vaguely left policy positions, like the first-time homebuyer’s credit and legalizing pot, but her campaign was mainly centered on economic opportunity for the middle class. She also committed wholeheartedly to the most right-wing polices of the Biden administration, like arming Israel and cracking down on the border. But worst of all, she made bipartisanship and Republican consensus a huge part of her campaign, promising to add Republicans to her cabinet , campaigning with Liz Cheney, and even praising Dick Fucking Cheney.
TL;DR, Biden campaigned like Obama in 2008, Harris Campaigned like Hillary in 2016. And the results were the same.
Do you even remember 2020? Nobody fucking wanted Biden. He was never progressive. He was literally mocked for telling donors “Nothing will fundamentally change.” People turned out because of how much they hated Trump.
That actually occurred in 2019, not 2020. After Bernie nearly stomped him in the primary, he made a hard pivot to the left in 2020. As I said, he’s a centrist, but he actually does have a strong history of pro-union activism, which made him a fairly credible (though imperfect) messenger for a populous platform.
I bet a lot of people saw this as Hillary all over again
I sure did. I was genuinely hopeful when Biden stepped down, and when they announced Walz, I actually got excited. Then they started to try and reach moderate Republicans more and more, and I slowly realized they were doing it again. I felt like I was going insane watching them repeat the strategy that caused them to lose to the same guy in 2016.
The meme demanded, pjwestin delivered.
I do what I can. If the question had been asked in good faith, I might have even been nice about it.
Don’t forget that Biden was the first president to walk a picket line. No other president had ever done that in America’s history. That single action won over the UAW.
Then, Biden fought back against the railroad corporations and won a contract for workers that includes PTO and other basic labor necessities.
Then, Biden reduced fentanyl overdoses, something that no president has done in like 30-40 years.
Couple this with BBB and IRA, you have a much more progressive president than what people give water to it.
Well, I don’t want to give him too much credit. Biden is and always has been a centrist. He has a mixed history on Civil Rights (cause he’s 120 years old), he has a pretty pro-bank history, he’s supported some anti-consumer stuff (like the anti-bankruptcy laws), and he even helped put Clarence Thomas on the bench. And that’s not even touching on his administration, where Gaza and the border will probably be his lasting legacy. But, two things that he’s always been pretty consistent on were unions and infrastructure, and he read the room in 2020 and leaned heavily into those things.
Oh I agree. He likely made all of those concessions because 1) he wanted to rally the base following the 2020 primaries, and 2) to stick it to the establishment Dems. Seems like Biden has grown to be quite the grumpy old man to those in the party.
I agree with you in Gaza and the border. Biden has shown no backbone to Netanyahu, and his administration introduced a border bill that echoed a lot of Trump’s sentiments.
On the whole, it’s hard to make the call on whether Biden or Harris would have been better to run against Trump, but all that matters now is that we continue the message that establishment Democrats got us here by chasing centrism instead of progress. We need to root out a lot of people who actually do the politicking in the party because if those people aren’t out, we’re doomed to make the same mistakes.
Hasan Piker put it well the other day. If this were a game of sports, underperformers would be benched pretty aggressively. If this were a job, underperformers would be put on a performance plan (hopefully) or fired straight up.
There are people consulting Democrats that have failed time and again since 2016, hell even 2008. They need OUT.
all that matters now is that we continue the message that establishment Democrats got us here by chasing centrism instead of progress. We need to root out a lot of people who actually do the politicking in the party because if those people aren’t out, we’re doomed to make the same mistakes.
100% this. On Monday, I’m calling my state and federal representatives and telling them DNC chair Jamie Harrison needs to go. Then I’m gonna start looking for movements that will primary anyone who still thinks incrementalism and centrism are a path forward. From now on, Medicare for All and UBI need to be the bare minimum standard for anyone that wants a D in front of their name.
I mean, Harris and the Dems didn’t even try, like seriously. Getting Beyonce and all the other celebrities our fellow moronic Americans already see as members of the illuminati is not trying, it’s literally the opposite
I mean, they spent $50m+ in fuckin Ohio! We lost fuckin Georgia while they were jerking off Cheney’s and trying to convince white folks in the suburbs not to be who they are
It’s legit insane to see the party straightup abandon working class demographics. Then again, this is the same party that now literally spends millions of dollars each primary on getting votes for Republican politicians
They tried everything except giving Dem voters what they want…
Which is what exactly? So many captain hindsights here.
How about some actual progressive policy? Not sure how people like you manage to play ignorance for this long.
You’re being hard headed if you want everyone you argue with in the comments to list exactly what they were looking for. How about you go into chat gpt and ask "what are some progressive policies that Democratic voters want that aren’t being reflected by the DNC and you’ll get exactly what you’re facetiously asking us
Let me be more clear: the votes aren’t there. You would like to believe that you as a progressive who is frustrated with Dems for not being progressive enough is a large enough constituency. I would like that to be the case as well. Unfortunately, almost all progressives voted on Kamala (and on HRC before that), and it’s just not enough.
Everyone is still pissed about inflation, and her answer to what she would do better was ‘nothing’.
Everything else is just noise around the edges.
Because people pissed at inflation are fucking stupid. Inflation is down. They aren’t pissed at greedy corporations, which have been the problem the entire fucking time.
You know you’ve heard people say inflation hasn’t stopped because prices are still high. Like they’re going to magically get better prices when inflation stops.
Yeah it’s stupid, welcome to America.
Seen hundreds of lemmy comments arguing exactly that.
The sad thing is that there are a thousand ways to attack prices, or even just give sound bites that the public can run with. But almost all of them would upset neoliberal billionaires, so they can never be spoken.
They think it’ll be like gas prices. They go up, but the “right guy” will make them come back down, ignoring the fact that that only happens with commodities like oil. Once a company raises prices, they rarely bring them back down. Tha6s called deflation, and it’s not good.
People who rent got hit twice as hard by inflation, I know I’m paying a significantly higher portion of my paycheck in rent vs 4 years ago.
The raw material cost increases which provide the cover/excuse for price gouging are the result of two different things the Harris/Biden admin participated in and had no real path towards solving.
One is the fact that the vast majority of ocean shipping is going around Africa rather than the red sea, due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza that the Biden admin has been bypassing Congress to continue arming.
Two is the cutting off of Russian oil, which resulted in ballooning costs in Europe.
Like it or not, Harris did not provide any answers on these two fronts that looked anything like a change in policy.
Easy to say inflation is down while others are feeling it with their wallet. Biden did nothing to fight price gouging
He made an attempt. If you expect overnight results, make sure you do a shit ton of shrooms so you can live in a different reality.
Enjoy Trump’s tariffs because that is somehow his answer to inflation.
I voted for Kamala, I’m under no illusion that Trump will motherfuck the economy just like he did in his previous administration. But the idiots that voted for him have the memory of a goldfish. They will still find a way to blame democrats and minorities…that’s when the real fun will begin.
Because fixing inflation means jacking up interest rates and cutting government spending. And no-one wants that.
People are too stupid to understand inflation and too stupid to understand how it’s combated.
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Obviously, the main reason for record turnout in 2020 was COVID.
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Biden actually has decent political instincts and has actually won elections before. Kamala didn’t even have to pass a primary and bombed out of the one she did participate in in 2020. She was “untested” to put it mildly.
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The economic situation was different.
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Regardless of to what degree he was responsible, under Biden the US got entangled in foreign conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine.
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It’s not that there are 10 million commies that liked Biden but not Harris, it’s that us commies believe that you can win over the working class by appealing to material interests.
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Biden didn’t campaign with fucking Dick Cheney
Relevant user name
Biden actually has decent political instincts and has actually won elections before. Kamala didn’t even have to pass a primary and bombed out of the one she did participate in in 2020. She was “untested” to put it mildly
I believe democrats called bernie Sanders “unelectable” so I feel it’s fair to use that term in this circumstance.
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It ain’t “the commies”.
And he won by an incredibly tiny margin in a handful of states to win, literally no one was “set on fire” for Biden
Progressive policy is popular with the politically disengaged as well as others who are politically engaged
When the ones who are engaged try to warn people someone is a bad candidate and isn’t left enough to motivate the politically disengaged, we magically go back to Salem and you all start blaming us for being able to see the logical conclusion of your dumbass plans.
Run another candidate in 2028 that’s significantly to the right of the Dem voter base and the same shit will happen again.
That’s not a threat, it’s basic logic.
It might not be the candidate you want, but isn’t stopping republican more important than you getting exactly what you want?
Obama ran a progressive campaign and was charismatic…
Why not try that again since moderates over retirement age keeps failing?
Kamala might be like three years younger than Obama now, but he entered the White house 16 years ago
Have you seen the numbers of people who think they were better off 4 years ago?
People think they were better off during the height of COVID deaths. Our attention span is 27 seconds. We’re idiots
Also, Harris doesn’t have a penis and somehow that’s supposed to matter
Old white man, old white man, if he can’t do it, no one can!
Yeah I wouldn’t discount sexism, or racism - I do think it’s hard for Democrats to win elections here unless people are in the middle of a conservative administration, they just don’t remember how bad it is, it’s like people who remember their time in school fondly once it’s over.
But in general, it’s also true that women have to be near perfect, to be promoted over a man. And same thing with race. Like they can’t just be the better choice it has to be a blowout. Now to a sensible person, she met that bar and flew past it, but we aren’t all sensible and people are stupidly nostalgic for times that were objectively worse.
You’d love for it to be about sex or race. Then the voters have.to change, not the democrats.
Sorry buddy… the democrats have to change. Alot. And they have to do away with First-past-the-post voting in the blue states they control. Get more people represented, more political parties on solving this problem. The democrats have demonstrated multiple times they are incapable of doing this by themselves.
I’m not a Democrat. Yes I’d like them to be progressive instead of drifting ever rightward. It sucks to have two totalitarian parties here. But if you think racism and sexism is dead in America you are blind.
The government isn’t a machine, it’s us. People.
A lot of people probably were better off. Not working or working remotely. Possibly getting 600/week in unemployment, it may even have been an effective raise. We now know the panic around covid was largely just that.
No. No we don’t.
Look, the Democrats have to own this loss, for once, like they should have last time. It is clearly insufficient to try and frighten democratic supporters with a probability of fascism which we’ve never experienced before. It is clearly insufficient to abandon the working class as they have for so long. We should never fund or promote far right candidates in primaries. The media should not provide free coverage for outrage candidates to drive viewershop. It is clearly a mistake to try and court conservative voters, because hardly any have ever crossed over. It was certainly a mistake for Biden to run again, and then to drop out so late, far too late to have a primary.
Maybe the fact she is a minority woman turned people off. I don’t know. It’s a stupid reason not to run women, but that possibility exists.
But it damn sure isn’t the only reason we lost.
Covid and Trumps handling of it.
But energy was high in the anti Trump camp anyway with BLM protests.So saying the Dems need to move more right is the opposite of the right lesson. Just look at political donations to Bernie… from across the US. There are no moderate republicans, they all stayed with trump, there is a huge untapped electorate in the US that wants something else, and I’d argue it is more left social democrats and what they bring… But the capital class will never allow it in the US. The moment you talk wealth distribution, even MSNBC and such call you communist.
Edit: oh and Biden should have taken action on Trumps fascism on day 1. Chuck him in jail pending trial and get it over with. Everyone except a small part of his base distanced themselves from him, the time was in the first 100 days of taking office, but they did NOTHING… they might as well have stormed the capitol themselves by now.
What got people to vote for Biden but not Harris? A dire need. Not voting for Biden meant that Trump stayed in office. Even though the stakes were the same, too many people sat on the couch thinking it was going to happen again and they didn’t have to go.
Covid is the reason democrats won in 2020, but they assumed they won because they’re geniuses. Instead of trying to appeal to voters, they just tried to tell people to vote against trump. Turns out that isn’t enough to motivate people when there isn’t a pandemic raging on that is making people’s lives miserable. Democrats really need to get their act together because 2028 won’t be against trump, so the “anyone but trump” strategy will be even more useless and all that time spent kissing the asses of ghouls like dick cheney just tells people that republicans are okay to vote for.
Biden won by a really thin margin in swing states, the book Lucky went into detail about how close of a call it was, but he interpreted it as some huge popular win because of the high vote totals.
He flipped a couple of historically red states - Arizona and Georgia - for the first time in decades.
Should be noted that Dems still did reasonably well in these states and in downballot races. Same with the Midwest. Dem senators and governors won seats in states Harris lost.
Really makes you think.
The pandemic of 2024 is corporate profiteering. A great example is Kroger admitting they raised prices higher than inflation for profit.
People generally blame the current administration for that. They are the one that kept trotting out stock market numbers and unemployment numbers, and acting like things are fine.
If they wouldnt even acknowledge the problem, how are they going to attract voters?
Thats not even bringing up gaza, but I dont think either candidate will change that situation in any way. The current administration is signaling they think this is a great opportunity to shake up the middle east for the benefit of western countries, cause colonialism can’t ever die I guess.
All trump ever said was end it, that it should be over already. Thats just as vague as kamala saying she will do everything in her power to end the war. They both could be implying to carpet bomb gaza, but we won’t know until we know right?
Neither candidate talked about why we should allow israel to lobby in our politics either.
True, but also the republicans won’t have a trump to vote for.
Ok. First. Those votes were not, like, commies or something. Communists broadly (but not universally ) have no faith in electoral politics beyond the ability to demonstrate how useless electoral politics are for the kinds of change they see as required. The missing votes are likely non-explicitly-ideological Americans, and the disenfranchised left wing of the Democrat coalition, who are not revolutionary socialists - they are better described as social democrats. And why so many of them voted for Biden was, at least in significant part three things that you’re pretending don’t exist with this meme.
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Tremendous dislike of Trump… which is actually still true, but he was not currently the president during this election. Trump had just spent the last few months massively fucking up the pandemic response very publicly and got covid immediately prior to the election, which made him look stupid and incompetent.
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Because of COVID policies, voting had literally never been easier. Shit loads of people voted early because it was universally available. Led to highest turnout ever.
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A competitive democratic primary process meant that we had a candidate selection process people could believe in to some degree. Brenie and Biden ran, and Biden won. Bernie voters saw that, looked at the situation and said “This is tolerable because we had a real process, and we can accept Biden as a stop gap under the conditions of Trump needing to be removed, and Biden being a 1 term President”. It wasn’t 2016, where a significant portion of potential Democrat voters saw the DNC’s treatment of Bernie as unfair, and it wasn’t 2024 where Biden decided to run with no true Primary after the deal was “single term president”, then abruptly dropped out (good idea, shoulda done it 2 years earlier) and effectively appointed his successor by decree.
2020 was an anomaly, and as is true of 2020 in most data sets, using it as a comparison point requires many many qualifications, but Trump gained 40000 votes, Harris lost 10 million. Trump did not perform better, Harris lost voter enthusiasm, which hasn’t actually been on the Democrat’s side in presidential elections (which have more non-explicitly-ideological voters) since, like, Obama. It’s not even necessarily that she needed to be “more left”. It’s that she needed to reflect the public’s distrust of the political status quo and promise material gain for working people explicitly at the expense of someone else (Trump chose , for instance, immigrants and the democrats as the bad guys, but Harris could have chosen, say, rich fuckers like Musk) . She needed to be ready to rip up the floor boards, and she wasn’t even ready to say she’d break from fucking Biden (who is broadly unpopular) on policy.
I really, really wish y’all democrats would stop trying to purge your own party of any dissent, because y’all coming out of this with the right lesson will be the difference between a brief period of Republican control, or several elections cycles of Democrats being unviable as a party.
True. Thank you. It’s frustrating seeing the DNC shoot itself in the fucking foot to watch people on Lemmy start swinging on anyone but the people who made and executed the failure of a campaign strategy.
I really, really wish y’all democrats would stop trying to purge your own party of any dissent, because y’all coming out of this with the right lesson will be the difference between a brief period of Republican control, or several elections cycles of Democrats being unviable as a party.
a brief period of Republican control, or several elections cycles of Democrats being unviable as a party.
a brief period of Republican control
y’all don’t get it do you. It hasn’t sunk in yet.
Don’t worry, you’ll get there. Probably in about six months.
Say it then. We’re in the period of time where we must critically evaluate the failures of the political machine that delivered this. I’m trying my level best to provide detailed, informative assessment of what I’m seeing without resorting to vitriol or anger, both online and in real life. If you have additional details, provide them. This is the time for vigorous debate, and reassessment, and I see the Democrats as much more of allies than the Republicans, so if you, or any other liberal can get past the phase where you’re upset with the leftists who have broadly provided critical support for the Democratic coalliton, I welcome your input.
y’all don’t get it do you. It hasn’t sunk in yet.
Don’t worry, you’ll get there. Probably in about six months
Blue conservatives jerking themselves off over what trump will do to the people they dislike is so fucking god damn cringe.
Fuck First-past-the-post voting for making me have to be “allies” with you.
If you actually read Project 2025, I doubt you would feel the same way.
I find people using the word “cringe” as an adjective embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for you.
Fuck First-past-the-post voting for making me have to be “allies” with you.
You know what the problem with socialists like you is? You went AWOL on us while we had the fascists on the ropes. Why in God’s name you would make an enemy out of both the fascists and the Democrats, I have no idea. But you guys did it, now we’re all done.
So don’t worry, the feeling is mutual. I really don’t think that we’re gonna have to worry about that after the next six months though.
Be sure to stock up on your Victory Gin and have a double plus good time before they open the “re-education camps”.
It’s funny that even with this much of a massive loss, you diehard democrats find a way to blame leftists. If such a massive margin of loss is the result of leftists, then that would mean leftists are too big of a group to ignore, but ignore is all you and the rest of the democratic party strategists did during the election so that you could instead curry favor with war criminals like dick cheney and telling people that their concerns of genocide don’t matter. Turns out democrats are more scared of leftists gaining any power than they are of project 2025.
Oh I get it now. You’re saying that “there won’t be a next election”. Careful with the self fufulling prophecies. If you don’t want to succumb to that, I recommend getting involved locally. Whoever you trust electorally will need your help now to build a bulwark for 2026, and getting your hands dirty will help you get over the pessimism.
Get out and vote! Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vote-four-years/
no amount of getting involved will stop it from happening.
first major protest will likely be a bloodbath.
would love to be wrong, but I doubt it.
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It wasnt commies, it was the working class cope harder.
Like 9-10 million votes are yet to be counted.
In every swing state except PA. There was record breaking ballots cast. In PA it was close to the record. She lost the election because bad policies not people not showing up. People changed their mind in the 6 swings states. Idk why or what for but this election wasn’t lost because of 10 million people not voting it was lost by my calculations 275,092 votes in 4 states.
I’ll wait until the count is over to check if she earned more votes in the 6 swing states than biden in 2020. But lots more votes to count again like 10 million yet to be counted almost all in states that are pretty much decided so they didn’t make a difference anyway
These people would rather just bitch about leftists than face the reality that they haven’t had a serious, competitive primary in almost two decades and have fully committed to elite control of the primary process. It’s peak moderate head-in-sand burying: “we don’t need to reform anything, we just need to vote harder and yell even more about anyone criticizing us.” I voted for Harris and think it was dumb not to, but at this point anyone insisting that the main problem was people not voting hard enough is a fucking idiot and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
The problem as I see it and right now we need to wait for more information is they went to the right and thought they could pick up Republicans there is a report that says all the registered Republicans voted republican (don’t know accuracy) except 6% in 2020 and 5%2024. So they picked up no one when they should have went full leftists revolutionary change. They didn’t when despite having the most amount of money so they don’t even need to court the gazillionaires if they are just going to lose.
People posting this type of stuff have to know that we have a an electoral college where swing states have a disproportionate influence on the outcome. Voter turnout was up in all of those states.
But didn’t he also win the popular vote this time?
Who cares, right? The meme suggests that people sat home this time. If they would have only come out, Harris would have won. But that’s simply not true. Harris got more votes than Biden in 4 of the 7 swing states, about the same in 2 snd one is still being counted. Voter turnout out there was up as well. People didn’t stay home where it mattered. Just more voted for Trump.
This discussion would be entirely irrelevant if we had a more representative electoral system.
People could be free to vote how they wish, secure in the knowledge their vote would still be counted against the republicans.
The people not voting are disenfranchised by the two party system. Change how we vote and allow competition into the electoral process. Multiple political parties should be free to compete.
More people represented and involved in the political process
More people voting means more votes for democrats
More chances to defeat the republicans
More people on the debate stage calling out bullshit (and you could have still hold one even if one party decides to not participate)
And last but not least, shouldn’t we want the most representative voting system possible? Shouldn’t we be concerned when our working class brothers/sisters/so on are under represented to the point that they dont vote?
Still not convinced First-past-the-post voting is the problem? Republicans in Florida passed legislation protecting it. Republicans in alaska are trying to repeal Ranked choice voting because voters used it to pick a more moderate conservative (the alternative was Sarah palin).
Isn’t the republicans liking and wanting something not the most ultragigagigantic red flag that ever existed?
Democrats have proven they can no longer go it alone. They had their chance. Time to swallow your pride and arrogance and let others participate. This fight isn’t about the democratic party. It’s about survival.
The United States of America is more important then the Democratic Party.
