And it was because the public demanded the rail workers should get paid sick days after the administration shut down the strike. Showing that the Biden Administration had to walk back unpopular anti-union activities because of public outcry as evidence of Biden’s pro-union behavior is not a very strong argument.

Biden has been the most pro working class president since FDR.

That Biden is the high water mark was an alarm bell. Just ask the rail workers.

There is a lot of “invisible” work that party orgs do. If you want to see why big names and attention alone don’t work, look at the Green Party. They have name recognition, ballot access and even get a bit of the vote each presidential election. What they’re missing is the “ground game” that gives the presence in nearly every race in every precinct, and the local engagement to actually win an appreciable chunk of elections every year (not just the presidential years).

As a fellow old fuck, surely you must remember Obama publicly opposing gay marriage to win voters, no? And, surely, of like me, you’ve been voting in primaries and “off-year” elections for decades like I have, you must remember the various progressives running for the Dem nomination only to have people like John Kerry and Al Gore be the “exciting, energetic” candidates. Sure, we can point to Clinton, but his strategy involved being conservative enough to pull in Reagan Dems and middle class Republicans, as well as the usual Democratic mainstays. You know, the play the Dems keep running while not having someone with Bill’s “good ole boy” personality to pull it off.

And, yeah, it’s been a breath of fresh air seeing unions do as well as they have recently, after being pounded into the dirt for decades. And, yeah, the economy is doing better, but people still struggle to pay for groceries and housing. Do you remember when George Bush couldn’t answer what the price of milk was, and how hard he got beat up over that? Did you vote in '92? I was too young, but I still remember hearing about the price of milk everywhere for a long stretch there.

I dunno, I’m just kind of tired of voting Blue election after election while getting told the issues that are important to me just can’t be done right now, because we need to appeal enough to Republicans again. Having to fight tooth and nail to get whatever issues some ground, be it civil rights, the environment or social services, and then see it up on the chopping block the moment Dems need to “compromise” with Republicans to not tear up a different right. And we still lose, or win just enough to not have enough of a majority to get anything done. The closest I’ve seen to Dems doing well while I’ve been able to vote? When they embraced the possibility of change and getting things done with Obama’s Hope campaign.

And, again, this is coming from someone who has voted for Harris, votes in primaries and off-year elections, who has done phone banking for the Dems, been involved in local orgs, has advocated to disillusioned voters to get out to the polls to vote because of how awful the alternative for not voting is.

But, you tell me: how successful was the Dem’s strategy this cycle? Did they manage to pick up votes on their right flank? What was the gain in conservative Dem voters vs. the loss in progressives? How does the gap compare to previous elections? What sort of voters did their appeal to “the middle” yield? I’m something of a numbers wonk at the end of the day and tend to be more receptive to the analysis instead of what I see as knee-jerk scapegoating, so tell me what went well this time around.

Weird, seems like it’s been the repeated denial of progressive issues while courting further and further right that has cost the Democrats the four of the past seven elections, no matter how much we beg for the slightest crumb of civil rights.

I remember how much we had to fight Democrats to get Gay Marriage and LGBT rights in general, and have seen how far they have fled from unions and healthcare. And I say this as someone who has actually done phone banking for the Dems, and has been telling people who are personally invested in what happens to people in Palestine that Harris is the best option on the ballot.

But, yeah, I guess individual voters are the best people to blame, and complaining that people cared enough about an issue to get out and do political action are the problem, and we should smugly congratulate ourselves that they should have just shut up and got with the program, their friends and family members be damned.

Well, what’s important is that Harris never listened to people who care about Palestinians. Surely, we will all be better off that the Harris campaign decided to hew closely to Biden’s policies, court Republicans for her cabinet and chase suburban Trump voters. Clearly, this is entirely the fault of individual voters, and we all agree that the campaign, corporate media organizations and monied interests bear no responsibility for this whatsoever.

I holding my finger over the button as long as possible in the hope that the button that the “spotless prosecutorial record” will suddenly add the “stop abetting a genocide” portion we’ve been asking for since before they changed out the previous button, but I guess I’ll be going for the option that isn’t currently telling me how my existence is threatening to them and hope that they’ll follow through on valuing human life this time around.

If you look back at panel 2, there’s a potential third one to research

Then you must be quite frustrated that Israel disagrees.

Netanyahu says Israel will cut Gaza off from Egypt, taking control of Palestinian enclave’s remaining border

Israel seized control of the Rafah border crossing. The impact could be devastating

And Egypt’s borders were not completely open. In part, because they did were not aiding Israel doing a forced displacement of Palestinian citizens. As a reminder, the forcible removal of a people, in whole or in part, is one of the kinds of genocide. Perhaps you might want to consider why you’re advocating for the forced displacement of an entire people. Why Egypt has not fully opened its Gaza border for fleeing Palestinians

Palestine’s border crossings are controlled by Israel. Early on, Israel stopped allowing border crossing. To the point that a major international concern was the inability for any aid trucks to enter. Additionally, movement within the West Bank has been heavily restricted by Israel’s checkpoints. And Israel has for a very long time actively denied Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes if they do leave. If it is difficult to understand why this sort of forced movement and controlled borders is an issue, I encourage you to read up on the Trail of Tears and South African Apartheid.

Movement and Access in the West Bank | August 2023 West Bank movement restrictions make life harder for residents and aid organisations

You mean the ones they bombed the following day? They followed evacuation orders. An Israeli airstrike killed them the next day.

Okay? And by the end of the following year, the UAW had struck and used their explicit statement that they were not yet committed to endorsing a candidate for president that Biden came down to the picket lines himself to picket in support of the UAW, which helped them get landmark contract deals.

UAW says they might not endorse Biden Biden goes to the picket line UAW gets historic deals

The UAW struck after the railroad strike. And got Biden to personally come down to ask the what he could do to secure their vote. Both happened while Biden was in office. What are you even saying about why the railroad strike failed?

Who else is looking forward to–regardless of the outcome of this election–being told throughout 2025 that it is of vital importance that we get in line with the Democratic party above all else so that we can ensure that the Republican candidate does not win the 2030 election?

If you can’t see daylight between the parties, and hold that they are identical rather than one being markedly less awful than the other (note: less awful, they still have are awful in their way), then you are as annoying as the people who were screaming back in 2021 that anyone who wasn’t voting Biden in 2024 is a monster (please, tell me again how criticizing Biden is the worst thing I can do to keep Trump out of office). Y’all are catastrophizing so hard that you’ve forgotten how to build political power, and are relying on big orgs to do it for you.

Eh, First Past the Post is party suppression, tbh. When the math pushes us towards two parties, a third party is always at the cost of some other party that is nominally “on the same side”.

Perhaps they should have left Western style Manifest Destiny in the past.

This seems to be conflating 0.333...3 with 0.333... One is infinitesimally close to 1/3, the other is a decimal representation of 1/3. Indeed, if 1-0.999... resulted in anything other than 0, that would necessarily be a number with more significant digits than 0.999... which would mean that the ... failed to be an infinite repetition.