It’s literally 2016 but worse somehow.

One source close to the Harris campaign tells Rolling Stone they reached out to several staffers in and around the campaign to voice concerns about the candidate embracing Dick and Liz Cheney.

“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” says the source, speaking about Dick Cheney. They say a Harris staffer responded that it was not the staff’s role to challenge the campaign’s decisions.

A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney — and making the campaign’s closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris — was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020. The strategist says they also attempted to have big donors and battleground state party chairs convey the same argument to the Harris campaign.

Another Democratic operative close to Harrisworld says they sent memos and data to Harris campaign staffers underscoring how, among other things, Republican voters, believe it or not, vote Republican — and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states. “We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” says the operative.

  • ceenote@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    I recall reading early on that DNC campaign advisers were recommending against continuing with the “weird” rhetoric, and the article mentioned some specific people who had worked on the 2016 campaign. It floored me that those people still had jobs. I guess they got their way eventually. I now have no expectation that they won’t be doing the same shit in 2028.

    DNC Leadership would rather lose with a neoliberal candidate than win with a progressive one.

    • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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      13 days ago

      It was all Hillary people. Why the DNC keeps hiring hillary and her people? Well Hillary owns the DNC. It’s a private corporation that has private share-holders and their product is ballot access for the Democratic party.

      If you want to run as a democrat for almost any office in the entire country you have to go through the DNC.

    • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
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      12 days ago

      “DNC Leadership would rather lose with a neoliberal candidate than win with a progressive one.”

      I think I had this exact revelation during or right after the 2020 primaries and it has deeply impacted my approach to voting ever since.

        • UsernameHere@lemmy.world
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          13 days ago

          Tell that to OP for their comment:

          DNC Leadership would rather lose with a neoliberal candidate than win with a progressive one.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        13 days ago

        Yes. The lesson here is you can’t win without progressives, and if you try they will punish you.

        You seem to be trying to imply that progressives aren’t important, but the reality is exactly the fucking opposite.

        • UsernameHere@lemmy.world
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          13 days ago

          Polls made it clear voters were motivated by inflation and immigration. Everyone I know voted. No one I know irl felt democrats didn’t go far enough left.

          That is a talking point being repeated a lot on lemmy.ml though. Which is telling considering its reputation.

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            12 days ago

            Polls made it clear voters were motivated by inflation and immigration.

            Well no shit, when those are only things in the multiple-choice response anywhere close to what voters are really feeling, of course that’s what they’re gonna measure!

            But you have to read between the lines, interpret and understand what the data is telling you. Why are they worried about immigration? Why are they worried about inflation? The answer is because they’re economically insecure, falling behind while the rich get richer, and seeing the inequity do nothing but expand day by day. They fucking want leftist economic reforms because those are the things that would actually help fix their problems, but they’re never gonna be allowed to express it on a goddamed survey made by neoliberals who are more interested in huffing their own confirmation bias to pimp themselves to their corporate donors than actually helping the citizenry!

            • UsernameHere@lemmy.world
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              12 days ago

              Who said there was multiple choice questions? Read between the lines? What are you rambling about?

              • grue@lemmy.world
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                12 days ago

                You said:

                Polls made it clear

                If you don’t know that polls are almost always multiple-choice, you have no business trying to cite them.

                • UsernameHere@lemmy.world
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                  12 days ago

                  almost always

                  So you acknowledge that they aren’t alway multiple choice but in the same comment you pretend that I have no business citing polls that aren’t multiple choice because it makes you wrong. Got it.

          • njm1314@lemmy.world
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            12 days ago

            I mean I didn’t think they went far enough left. I still voted for them, but certainly I wasn’t enthused. I don’t know who would be.

            • UsernameHere@lemmy.world
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              12 days ago

              I haven’t met anyone with that sentiment irl. Everyone I know either wanted Kamala to win or felt Biden and Kamala was radical left extremist and his progressive policies were the cause of inflation.

              The polls reflect that.

              This narrative that democrats didn’t go far enough left is something I’ve only seen on lemmy.

      • Mobilityfuture@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        It’s not about”progressives” it’s about the average Joe voter who (in some ways rightly) couldn’t see a difference enough to make voting (an unnecessarily difficult chore) worthwhile.

        The second problem, is that there is no collective class consciousness. At best there is maybe a collective unconscious feeling. Progressives often ascribe a much greater awareness than is warranted to the proletariat. Ironically after likely doing no organizing other than debating each other in closed left wing YouTube and Reddit threads.