Looks like Harris did lose by about 79,000 votes in Michigan.

Comparatively, about 44,500 went to Stein.

We don’t ultimately know how the uncommitted movement voted. If they were a monolith throughout, we’d expect 100k for Stein. If some abstained and some voted for Harris or Trump, that would’ve split the movement.

If all of Stein’s voters went to Harris, however, that wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Harris would have still been short ~34,400. So if you wanted to make the argument that the uncommitted movement was a voting block, then the entire ~44k block voting for Harris wouldn’t have changed the outcome.

Overall I don’t see Michigan outcomes changing my argument. If Dems were more persuasive, even if they lied about Gaza, they could have sweeped the nation. And even if the uncommitteds chose the lesser of two evils, Kamala still lost all other swing states. You can’t chock the outcomes of those states up to the uncommitteds, because the largest organizational presence was in Michigan.

Thank you for voicing this opinion in this thread, and bringing the receipts.

Wasn’t the uncommitted movement some 100,000 people strong?

Didn’t Harris lose by millions?

How would have the uncommitteds saved the election if their numbers represented a fraction of what Democrats needed?

Could a more likely explanation of this deplorable outcome be that Democrats did this to themselves by not rallying up their base enough to bring more people out to vote?

Stop blaming the American people.

One angle that might explain the lack of media coverage on a win for the working class against the interest of capital owners is that the media itself, at least the mainstream slice of it, is owned by the capitalist class.

MSM will cover things if they think it’ll bring in more ratings. You see it with how many news outlets are treating the upcoming Trump administration. For Cons, they’re banking on a viewer base that’ll be more interested in Trump coverage. For Dems, they’re banking on a viewer base that’ll be more hateful and agree of Trump coverage.

So when you have wins for the working class that Biden’s administration directly helped with, and when you have a media industry that just won’t cover it out of their own self-interest, you have to wonder if the administration will spend Americans’ on advertising or just keep it and move on.

One might say that the best time to do that advertising is during an election campaign though. And that begs the question as to why Biden nor Harris brought this up in their campaigns.

Might it be that those groups are also subject to the capitalist class?

Truly spoken.

Lot of pro-status-quo sentiment on Lemmy. The election is over too so bots might not be as high, a potential indicator of actual sentiment of Lemmings.

Have to keep pushing this else nothing ever changes

I’ll agree with you on the 2020 voting laws carrying forward (although I haven’t looked into the state laws, especially the red ones to see if those have been repealed yet because that’s what tends to happen).

Also agreed on the DNC’s and Harris’ messaging. I also blame Biden because if we wanted to prepare to fight against Trump in the election where he was his most popular, the Dems would have ran an actual primary.

Definitely agreed too on the general sentiment of Americans supporting leftist policies. We see this with Bashear in Kentucky, and recently the middle wage and abortion policies in Missouri. Although you might be able to balance that by Florida’s outcome with their referendums as well as California.

Ultimately it comes down to messaging and optics. Democrats need to figure out a way to package progressive policy in a way that capture the imaginations and hopes of their base while at the same time not scaring those towards the center into believing those same policies are socialist or communist.

I have to admit that I haven’t delved into the exit polls and analyzed which social groups migrated right or not.

But one thing that’s different about the 2024 election compared to 2020 is that COVID wasn’t happening to the same degree. There were a ton more mail-in ballots 2020 due to social distancing, which helped both parties as a bump in votes.

Why use 2020 as a data point though? Why not 2016? Why not 2012 and 2008? Might those elections be slightly different because a 1-in-100-year pandemic wasn’t happening?

If you compare those numbers, does the Dems’ numbers compare to those elections?

I want to say someone on Lemmy already posted the numbers recently in one of these posts. From what I recall, Dems’ votes returned close to pre-COVID levels albeit a degree lower, yet Reps’ votes were above pre-COVID levels. Why?

Might the explanation be the societal shift towards the right?

And how can you not see the national shift to the right in how the Democrats speak to rallies and voters? We are considerably more right-wing as a country than ever in the recent decades. This election was a Republican primary with how Kamala ran on pre-Trump conservative values and policies.

Maybe apathy exists on the Left because it is increasingly the case that Democrats don’t represent them anymore.

You would, but millions of Americans wouldn’t. Those Americans act out of self-interest, and the economy was the biggest pain point with most voters this past election.

Instead of catering to the middle class, what Dems’ base has been historically, Harris campaigned to business owners with tax incentives/breaks.

Democrats failed. Hell, Harris could have even lied just as Obama did to get Democrats and moderates to believe that she represents them. But she didn’t!

Who said Lefts didn’t vote for Harris?

Are you manufacturing this? Where are the exit polls?

Might a better reason for why Fascism won with this election be that Democrats, including Biden, Harris, the DNC, and the consulting class, failed to campaign to their own base, and even more than their base since most Americans, Dems and Reps, approve of progressive policies?

Projection man

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.

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.

And the rich.

When fully capable adults do stupid things, like campaigning to a voting base as grotesque as Trump’s, I blame them for doing it.

Democrats, or at least those in their establishment bubble either on TV, on podcasts, at the DNC, or on the congressional floor, will believe anything they want to that’ll pass on blame and hold to a superiority complex that they’re never wrong. Power corrupts and all that.

Inspiration is absolutely required when you outside of the representative Democracy have lost hope in the economy, society, or planet. Apathy is much more destructive than idiocy, even when the latter is in favor of fascism. Apathy is what lets fascism and idiocracy prosper. There needs to be a counterforce should we keep the alternative at bay.

Democrats did not take Trump’s potential to do the above seriously enough, either in his rhetoric to espouse fascism or cast mis- and disinformation. And now we have to deal with their failure.

Doesn’t matter.

Self-interest matters. What politicians will do for voters matters. That day old potato salad may be better than Trump, but it’s not at all inspiring.

If Democrats really took fascism as a threat, they would have activated Tim Walz and his views and pushed as fast and as hard as they could with the time they had to make the most progressive campaign since Obama’s.

But they went after the base who would have voted for a fascist anyways.

This is Democrats’ own doing. Sorry.

True, but I love how the first we blame for this outcome are the American people.

I blame Kamala Harris and her botching her campaign. She had amazing momentum at the start, then slowly threw it all away, instead politicking to small businesses and Republicans instead of workers and their own base: Democrats.

Thank you for bringing attention to the incompetence of Kamala’s campaign. She and her campaign at one point even had to silence Tim Walz for his believes because they went against the platform.

Then the race after Republicans by uniting with the Cheneys just cucked them so hard.

Tim Walz was the key to this campaign’s victory. And Kamala dropped the ball.

Edit: If Kamala loses, and it looks like she might, I’m blaming her and her campaign. She could have swooned the beliefs of America if she had ran on something better.

Her political skills are trash.

Kamala gained the most approved points after Biden gave her the race.

Since then, her approval rating has plummeted compared to her early numbers, and I think this is because Kamala doesn’t really know what to believe.

You can see it with Tim Walz. There was a lot of momentum when Kamala took up the mantle, and that momentum was carried through once the Walz pick came out. Then, around the DNC, the campaign’s tone shifted, crawling back to the ethos of the Biden administration. I think this is because Kamala couldn’t decide to break away from Biden or not, and because she waited so long, she was around a lot of the same people in the Biden administration, and those people influenced her platform. You can also see this with marijuana and how she changed sides in her time between being DA and senator. Also, how she didn’t really have a solid platform to begin with, which should have been established right when Walz was picked.

I’m not here to call her out as a flip flopper. I’m pointing to how she could have steamrolled this election, but chose not to. It saddened me so much when the campaign had silence Tim for his views and policies when those views and policies were the key to victory.

I mean, you’re right.

The fact that one of the major tauted policies of Harris’ campaign was a border wall, something that Trump exclusively brought to the table in 2016, is just one example of our government racheting more and more conservative over time. Democrats used to at least advocate for America being a land of immigrants.

Really hope Harris doesn’t run in 2028 if she wins 2024. We need a Democratic primary where Americans can choose those in the party who represent more progressive values than the establishment.

The Harris Administration is actively trying to silence Walz’s beliefs.

It’s ironic because it’s Walz himself that has ignited support for Harris.

So frustrating as a progressive

What do we mean by effective?

One might say that the effectiveness of reddit is its niche communities that allow each and every user to find somewhere they feel like they belong. Not only this, the complexity of niches gives rise to interesting information that bubbles to the surface and front page of the platform where more users have exposure. One might contribute this to the quantity of users on reddit’s platform, and also the discoverability of the platform itself.

Personally, I think Lemmy is decently effective now aside from the saturation in political and tech news and memes. I think things will get better as for-profit companies squeeze more and more people out of their platforms, and people look to alternatives rather than dropping their digital consumption habits.

I do think discoverability is still a downfall of Lemmy, from both internal and external views. I want to better find /communities from inside the platform and via a search engine should my use and value of Lemmy increase. Wonder how development has gone on this front.

Ultimately, the FOSS nature of Lemmy is one of its greatest strengths. It can improve over time, ripping features from the big players without the destiny of being killed eventually if not profitable. I think this characteristic alone gives rise to the potential of Lemmy to be very effective over time.