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.
From what I understand, Hillary basically took over this campaign from behind the scenes.
Wait, seriously? She’s a fucking disease
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.
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
I was excited when Biden dropped out and Harris got this huge surge as the new young, not actively deteriorating candidate, then more excited when she announced Tim Walz and got a mid western, blue collar surge, and cautiously optimistic when everyone was briefly focusing on how anti-democratic and un-American Project 2025 was, but then started getting worried when all I saw running up to the election was stories about abortion rights and women voting against their husbands and celebrity endorsements.
It feels like Obama successfully ran a campaign of Hope and Change, and since then Democrats repeatedly campaign on maintaining the status quo and just not letting it slide too much further. And while it’s possible to win an election on the basis of ‘I’m at least somewhat competent’, it might not be in the US when so much of the population sees how fundamentally broken wealth inequality is at baseline.
Not discounting anything you wrote here, but it still entertains me when people call the 60 year old Kamala Harris young.
Fuck I would not have guessed that. She looks 10-20 years younger than that
Especially when next to Walz who is, I think, a year younger.
In contrast to Biden and Trump she looks 40.
started getting worried when all I saw running up to the election was stories about abortion rights and women voting against their husbands and celebrity endorsements.
That surge when she started was all her campaign. The news and dis/info sources were all caught flat-footed.
They cast around for a few weeks testing what stories would “drive engagement”. Scandals? No. VP pick, like - Who’s it gonna be? No. Did she take any of the demented rapist’s baiting? Nope. Dang.
At the end, they settled on those, and that’s why it seemed different. They (corporate news, mostly) had finally wrested a narrative out of the campaign the campaign didn’t disagree with.
It was thin, a little schlocky, but either true or based on the campaigns ads, so - that got stamped on the campaign, and that’s why you remember that specific set of themes.
They tried everything except giving Dem voters what they want…
Literally Covid. People thoght they were going to die.
I actually don’t think so. Like I speak with Republicans that are very dismissive of covid still, despite having family members die to it. If people were bothered by his covid response, they would continue to be bothered by the fact Trump shit the covid response. Instead it seems voters think everything was fine during his term (completely uninformed or unaware of the fact that he was impeached twice, raped women, a good friend and neighbor of Epstein, and tried to overthrow the government)
The apathy maybe comes from how Harris was hand picked (because it was so last minute that Biden dropped off) vs us having an actual primary with several democrats.
Republicans aren’t the ones who didn’t turn out, idk what this has to do with what they think about Trumps covid response. If you want to know why 10 million more democratic voters turned out last time covids gonna play a large factor.
So covid but not fascist plundering and terrorism. Huh.
Stupid fuckers.
And BLM was already out on the streets.
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.
Actually they’re not wrong, wages were not increased to keep up with inflation so stopping it alone wasn’t enough.
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.
Well, we kind of need deflation to happen because the alternative is rising wages and that’s not fucking happening.
We live in a nation of people that are a mix of uneducated and propagandized. If the party messaging doesn’t take that into account, that fault lies with them in addition to the voters.
It’s not enough that the rate of inflation is slowing. The problem is that wages aren’t going up to match inflation. When people are working two jobs and still living paycheck to paycheck, do you think it means anything to them to tell them that “um ackshually, inflation is down 0.4% from last year!”?
This kind of disconnect is exactly why we aren’t reaching voters.
California voted to not raise minimum wage, too.
Also they kept prison slave labor.
Come on now don’t bring up that in one of the “left most” and most populous state in the union that people are actually pretty non leftist, it might contradict some of their feel based arguments.
America is not full of progressives. I don’t know why people here can never be convinced otherwise.
America is not full of progressives.
No it is not and I’ll toss another example on there -
Gay marriage was only legalized nation wide by a bunch of unelected judges, and the second most-recent Democratic president “evolved” on the issue less than a decade ago.
US postures as the world’s defender of LGBT rights when it’s “bringing democracy” places, but it’s not great at doing that internally.
America is a country that lies to itself. It claims we need to make female super heroes flat chested to combat sexism, but then turn around and laugh at the idea of a female president so hard they’re willing to give Hitler a second chance.
Wages have outpaced inflation recently. Things have generally been heading in the right direction since the pandemic but it came too late and the masses are mostly ignorant or misinformed so the data is irrelevant to them. Its about how people feel as you point out, there’s not a rational argument against feelings, people feel how they feel. One side has become very good at taping into those feelings, the other side is talking about data and no one gives a shit unless the data validates what they feel.
Don’t lie to me.
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.
Because we did vote for Biden and he was useless at preventing the spread of fascism in states, and then Harris’s responses to how she would handle any of it was effectively "I will do nothing. The Democrats made the left apathetic to the electoral system by refusing to appeal to them and instead the democrats focused on trying to sway republicans and moved further right. The Democrats did the worst thing they could have done and made people apathetic and hopeless.
Useless at preventing fascism… So decided to sit it out and give DT another go. Bold strategy. Let’s see how it works out.
Like playing Russian roulette with five live rounds.
Da, comrade
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
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.
I honestly expected him to just pardon Trump to “Let the nation heal”
And if it had been a magical third Obama term, I’m sure that’s exactly what would have happened.
That would have been the wrong lesson from Watergate.
It wasnt commies, it was the working class cope harder.
The lesson for Democrats is surely that after years and years of telling anyone they could find that had concerns about society “oh you must be a literal Nazi, cope harder la la la la whoop whoop air high fives and fist bumps that’s roiiight ma BOI!” at some point these people are going to turn around and say “well ok then, I just won’t vote for you because you have nothing to offer me”.
I’m not saying the Republican party has done this any better, but surely insulting potential voters en masse and refusing to understand their concerns isn’t a sensible way to win elections. I didn’t work for Hilary either, and it hasn’t worked for Harris.
Yeah, the disconnect you also felt here when you said that Biden is clearly suffering dementia was crazy. People just deluded themselves and gaslit like crazy instead of acknowledging that Bidens mental health was not up for another 4 years of presidency. And this topic alone dragged on for months, until Biden failed the candidate debate so badly, even the billionaire donors got cold feet. But again it was the billionaire donors who pushed for Biden to drop out, not the concerns of the normal people. The DNC has effectively immunized against the voices of the people. And with all the talk about Trump bringing the end to Democracy, the Reps held proper primaries every cycle.
Biden was running on massive infrastructure investment, student loan forgiveness, ending the war in Afghanistan, child tax credit and a $2000 cheque in the mail . Harris may have had those in her platform as well but she wasn’t mentioning it or Bidens wins on these at all, her campaign was “I’m not trump” and we learned from Hillary that’s not enough.
Biden campaign was “build back better” a motto for change much like another democrat who actually won. Harris’ campaign was “were not going back” which implies no change and relies on you thinking the trump years were horrible enough to justify the current status quo, and apparently the only thing Americans remember about the trump years was the economy was “better” and wanted to go back.
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
A California lawyer trying to win a centrist campaign is like Tiger Woods trying to win a World Series ring. Harris wasn’t the right person to run a centrist campaign. But, if she had run a progressive campaign from July, she would have won the popular vote and still lost the election. She wouldn’t have gotten past a primary.
Elizabeth Warren would have been a better progressive choice. Mark Kelly could have run a progressive or a centrist campaign.
Gods, I’d have loved seeing an astronaut in the big chair.
You cannot put a woman or a minority on the ticket and expect Right Wingers to care.
Back in 2015 when it was either Trump or Ben Carson for nomination, I knew it would be Trump. Simply because I knew once the debates started and Boomers were actually looking at Ben Carson instead of just reading newspaper articles about him, they’d abandon him for being the wrong color…
And I was right
Too many people will simply never submit to Female Rule.
It’s why I knew Nikki Hailey wasn’t going to get the 2024 nomination despite Trump being the most idiotic and easily beatable choice (and if Kamela ran a progressive campaign and actually had time to make her campaign)
American Men simply do not respect women.
The funny thing is I have been aware of this lack of memory for awhile but it has just gotten worse. I used to be amazed at the number of folks who could not seem to remember what things were like a decade ago but now thats been cut to about a year or so.
The cycle of political crisis generation and complacency has gone down from 8 years to 4 in the last forty years. People grew complacent over Clinton’s two terms and then allowed GWB to happen, same with Obama and Trump, now we’re putting Democrats in there to clean up after even worse crises than before, and putting Republicans back there after the last mess isn’t even fully cleaned up.
A lot of folks actually were better off back then due to the stimulus checks…
Yeah, getting less than one month’s living expenses over a period of 18 months of un or underemployment really had me living large!
I’m not discounting that, but if you were disabled or on a fixed income then that one month’s living expenses might be the biggest windfall you’ve had in decades.
Biden’s years were the best of my life, I had stability for once…
That was nice, can’t wait to fucking get laid off.
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.
The man staged a coup when he lost then we voted him in 4 years later. He called my state and tried to overgrow our results and 4 years later Georgia voted him in.
Indeed. We elected someone who shits all over democracy. Idiots abound
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.
The turnout was really high, the democrats main plan for this election was catering to the “moderate republicans” which backfired spectacularly (a smaller % of registered republicans voted for democrats than in 2020), left-wing was pretty much abandoned in the campaign… It’s a horror all around, and the democratic party only have themselves to blame for this blunder instead of trying to point fingers at literally everything (so far I’ve seen blame thrown on LGBTQ+, Biden, Kamala’s aides, left wing voters, etc).
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.
Step into a campaign to take over for a failing candidate who is unpopular and too old to realistically run, then make sure that everyone is certain that your policies will be exactly the same as the unpopular guy, then surprised pikachu
From talking to people who sat this out, it seems Biden ending the rail union strike was a huge factor, and the cost of groceries was a close second. They wanted to vote against him in the primaries and were denied that opportunity.
Kamala was guilty by association.
Well, that and the fact she did not address these issues in her messaging. Or if she did the message didn’t reach them. “She said things aren’t so bad, but I can’t afford groceries. She won’t fix anything.”
He made sure the strike succeeded, and ended the strike as well. It’s a pure optics fail, which does not contradict your point at all, but does make it more poignant.
As for the groceries: that’s a genuine failure of Biden’s administration. He kept going for student loans but he should have gone for the grocers raising egg and dairy prices - no Republican court in the world would have survived the fallout from blocking that.
Crazy because Biden actually came back after that and won a contract for railworkers, including paid sick leave that was so influential around the time Congress passed the contact the first time around.
Other than that though, I agree. Too little too late for Democrats. There were so many wins under Biden’s administration, and none of it was ever messaged to the American people.
